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This movie reminded me a bit of “Hard Candy” (with Ellen Page)as an exploration of an explosive and little examined area of sexuality. In this case, it’s a young woman who engages in self-mutilation, AKA “cutting”. Like “Hard Candy”– which dealt with sexual predation– “Downloading Nancy” has a claustrophobic feel, with most of the action taking place indoors in dull locations, and a small cast of only 4 or 5 characters interacting intensely.

“Downloading Nancy” doesn’t immediately tip its hand as to whether it will treat sado-masochism either erotically or honestly, but thankfully this is not a film for voyeurs. It gives you plenty to think about.

In the end I think it suffers from a lack of style. There isn’t really much here that is visually interesting. Bello’s performance far outshines that of Rufus Sewell or Jason Patric, who come off rather flatly. Bello’s exchanges with Amy Brenneman are good, but not central to the plot.

I’d call this movie a brave attempt, in regards to the territory it explores. But as a movie about a young woman with a death wish, it is much less watchable than that old chestnut, “Looking for Mr. Goodbar”, with an electrifying performance from then-newcomer Diane Keaton.

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Nancy wants to die. After suffering horrific childhood abuse, and being stuck in a loveless marriage for 15 years, she can only really feel alive when she’s in physical pain. To cope, she cuts herself, but her fantasy is to find a sexual sadist willing to take her life for her. Enter Louis, who she meets on the internet, and who is willing to serve as her sexual dominant and eventual murderer.

Louis is the yan to Nancy’s yin. He deals with psychic pain by inflicting physical pain. His demeanor is calm and controlled, as opposed to Nancy’s histrionics. They’re soul mates. They understand each other. And ultimately, when Louis acts, it’s out of love.

What makes the film is really Maria Bello’s powerhouse performance. Nancy is not an easy character to like – she’s a person who’s so determined to die that she’s lost any desire to maintain any kind of dignity. She can be harsh, abusive, cruel … and yet the actress makes her pain so real that it’s hard to fault her for anything she does. She is somehow able to make this disturbed, ruined woman both relatable and even lovable.

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A Tortured Soul

Amos Lassen

Be on the lookout for Strand Releasing’s, “Downloading Nancy” and decide for yourself what you think about this film. I found it to be totally engrossing. Nancy (Maria Bello) is a housewife who is sick of her life and wants it to be over. Instead of killing herself, she hires a stranger from the Internet to do so but fate takes a strange turn when she meets the person she hired (Jason Patric) and they fall in love. Nancy realizes that love and murder just do not go together.

The plot is quite simple but it is nevertheless extraordinary. The new lover makes Nancy’s husband explain why his wife is so unhappy and we learn that Nancy had been sexually abused as a child. Her marriage is ice cold, dead. She becomes involved in a cycle of destruction and we feel a cloud of darkness over this movie. Nancy enjoys pain that is self inflicted. Bello as Nancy is spectacular. She seems to glow with defeat; she never smiles and when she does she does so desperately.

This is not an easy movie to watch as it shows us a woman who is consumed by pain and because the film is so well made we are constantly aware of that. Here is a movie about empathy but it is hard to empathize with so much pain. I find myself still thinking about the movie long after I saw it. Some may feel that the movie is too dark but it is that darkness that makes it so compelling I am sure that many will not agree with me on this but I do feel that this is an exceptional look at pain. Perhaps this is because pan is so painful and we prefer to look the other way.

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Here enters Louis Farley (Jason Patric), a man with two children he hasn’t seen in years, although he remembers their ages as four and seven. After communicating for some time via e-mail, Nancy agrees to meet Louis at a bus station in Baltimore. They then engage in days of violent sexual acts at his house, which is covered floor to ceiling with video cassettes stacked on shelves. Nancy wants this. It’s the only way she knows how to cope with her feelings. She actually feels something when a cigarette is shoved into her flesh and a broken shard of glass traces her body. And Louis is more than happy to give Nancy what she wants. At least, he is at first; what seemed so perfect and orderly on a computer screen eventually becomes far too real for him. Why? Because he knows her. He understands her. He loves her.

Left behind is Nancy’s hopeless husband, Albert (Rufus Sewell), who could never satisfy his wife even if she didn’t want to be abused. His life is made up of plastic-covered furniture and a basement converted into a mini putting green, with the walls painted to look like a sprawling golf course. Frequent shots of his shoeless feet suggest a need to maintain cleanliness, or the very least some semblance of order. When it becomes clear that Nancy has been gone for too long, he makes no effort find her. He doesn’t even call the police to file a missing person report. And yet, when Louis pays him a visit, Albert angrily, violently demands to know where his wife is. It has nothing to do with love; he just wants things to go back to the way they used to be. It’s predictable. It’s orderly. It’s comforting routine.

Intertwined with this are periodic flashbacks to Nancy’s therapy sessions with Carol (Amy Brenneman), who seems genuinely baffled by Nancy and her irrational state of mind. Carol takes a lot of notes and spouts generic statements about how Nancy feels, which is to say that she’s well-meaning but unqualified. Indeed, Nancy doesn’t want to be helped in that way. What does it say that she’s willing to end her life only if someone does it for her? If she’s so unhappy, why can’t she just kill herself? Could she, perhaps, be deluding herself into thinking that guiding her own murder is somehow different and more acceptable than suicide? This is never addressed in the film, but the fact that she pursues Louis so fervently brings up a number of fascinating questions.

This movie, apparently based on true events, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. It also greatly divided audiences, a number of guests having left the screening room before the film ended. In the few weeks since opening in limited release, it has earned a 19% approval rating at Rottentomatoes.com, the general consensus being that it’s well-made but far too unsettling to sit through. From the din of almost unanimous hatred comes a single voice, my voice, boldly asserting that “Downloading Nancy” is one of the year’s best films. I agree that it’s an unpleasant story about unpleasant characters in an unpleasant situation, but blast it all, it convinced me. I could easily invest in what I was watching. I actually felt something for the characters even though I didn’t always understand them. I witnessed Nancy’s downward spiral and had a reaction to it, which is exactly what was supposed to happen.

Bello’s performance in particular reveals a side few actors have the nerve to reveal. We see not a role being played but a full emotional and physical experience, a raw portrayal of a mentally broken woman well past the point of repair. To play this character requires bravery and skill, and by allowing herself to be so psychologically vulnerable, Bello proves that she has them both. She completely inhabits Nancy. She makes her real. She persuades you to see things from her perspective, skewed though it may be. The tagline on the poster proclaims that “Downloading Nancy” is, “The most controversial film you will see this year,” and I wholeheartedly agree–not everyone will appreciate a story about a woman that wants to be killed. But consider this: How can you kill someone when they’re already dead?

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I have no doubt that if you opt for the full version it is worth the money, as long as you know how to use the program and all its features. I couldn’t afford the whole boat, and didn’t think I needed it anyway, so I opted for this version. That’s when I discovered a disappointment. Not only do you not get the full complement of Office products, you don’t even get a full version of the components per se. For the life of me I can’t remember ever being told in the sales pitch that this would be a pared-down version of Word and wouldn’t even contain all the fonts offered in the full version.

I had been using the 2007 Beta version and then the Trial version when that expired, and had done some work using the Broadway font, only to find out later that that particular font isn’t even offered in this stripped-down version. Now if I want to match the font I started with I need to go buy it separately for about 20 bucks. Dirty trick.

Another problem was that I needed tech support to get it to work properly since I had previous versions installed on the puter and they left a couple of files that the developers should have thought to remove when installing the new version but didn’t.

In short it’s a pretty nifty program all in all, but it’s still Microsoft, and has its foibles and bugs. Be aware that there is a learning curve to get through, but it can be satisfying once you get the hang of it.

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The main difference you’ll find between this 07 version and the Microsoft Office 03 is that all the programs now have the “ribbon” instead of being menu-driven. The ribbon is a much more visual representation of all the features you can use. All the different tasks are grouped into ribbons; which are divided up into different tabs you can click on. For example, if you clicked on the “Insert” tab in Word you would find tasks such as “inserting” a header or “inserting” a table. What this means is that instead of being hidden in menus and submenus, most features now can be found simply by being in the right tab. This allows you to find some useful features that you might otherwise not have known existed.

Everything from Microsoft 03 is there, it just might take awhile to get used to the new layout of things. There are also a lot of cool new features added in this version, such as easily being able to write complex math equations in Word (it was such a pain in Word 03) and being provided with an easy format to create a bibliography in APA, MLA, Chicago style etc.

Perhaps the only drawback of Office 07 is that it’s such a drastic change from Office 03 that it will take awhile to get used to. After years of knowing all the complex menus you’ll have to learn where everything is all over again, which can be frustrating for vetrans of Office 03. However, if you just give it some time, you’ll fall in love with just how well everything is set up and appreciate the new visual style this version implements.

Pros:

* The new visual style allows easy access to all the various features

* You can still save files in Office 97-03 format (Example .doc)

Cons:

* You must relearn where everything is because of the Ribbon

* Not all websites/ programs recognize the new 07 files

Final Recommendation: Buy it, get used to it, and love it!

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I have used Office since 1994 for just simple letters and spreadsheets until the last year, where I started becoming a heavy user of some really odd features, like non-standard line spacing, different headers within the same document, embedded Excel sheets in a Word doc, embedding images in headers and footers, charting, tables, etc. I was worried if all these newly discovered features that I just learned would suddenly disappear in the changing ribbon that everyone was talking about.

Despite using weird features, or maybe because of it, I am a little more tolerant of looking up how to do things. But I didn’t want to relearn everything, and I haven’t had to. The default blank document has tabs for Home, Insert, Page Layout, References, etc, which really are not much different than the categories in the classic drop-down menus. Once clicking on these tabs, you are offered the same choices as before…charts, insert picture, bookmarks, wordart, etc., and a few new ones, like references, balloons and highlighting, footnotes, and more. It IS a different layout, but to this point, I don’t think it ever took me more than 10 seconds to find something.

I’m surprised no one is talking about the ability to save documents in .pdf (what was once exclusive to Adobe). I know other software has allowed this for sometime, but the ability to make a document that will launch in Adobe Reader with all the functionality of Word or Excel is something I’ve been waiting for. In 2 years, we’ll all wonder how we did without it. This is important to me because once in .pdf, the formatting is locked in, and won’t change depending on how it’s previewed or printed.

Another thing that is important is the new, modern looking charts and tables. This isn’t just the ‘pretty’ factor, but more effective to understanding lots of data more easily. Office 2000/2002/2003 just looked old and unimpressive. It’s true that Microsoft is just catching up to Apple, Adobe and others, but they’ve at least done it. Equally important is the ability to instantly see changes to formatting before you’ve committed it to the whole document. I’ve probably wasted a month’s time over the course of the last year reformatting documents to do it a better way. If only I authored them in 2007, which was available a year ago, I would have saved so much time.

One reviewer said his Home/Student version “did not have all the features as the full version”. I’ve tried to investigate this, and as far as I can tell, Home/Student’s versions of Word/Excel/Powerpoint are no different than any other version.

I don’t want to get too personal here, but all the reviewers who are angry that their saved homework or important business document was saved in .docx and therefore was not readable by anyone else really are just wanting to be victims. Office 2007 makes it abundantly clear that you will be saving in .docx, and if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. It tells you how and where to save it as a compatible .doc file (or .xls, etc.) and whether you want this as your default setting. I’m sorry, but if you’re a student and you ignore all those messages, I think you’re going to have more problems in school than using this version of Office.

The Grammar check seems to be improved, catching problems that my Office 2002 did not. Hot keys like Ctrl K for hyperlinks or Ctrl C to copy all still work. I’m not sure if they removed others as some reviewers have said, but so far it has not affected me. The concept of Add-Ins (plugins) is a little bit annoying, as to get certain features like the ability to save .pdf requires you go online and install the add-in. Then again, this gives Microsoft the ability to add features from time to time (hopefully they’ll use it that way – I think a big reason for add-ins is to give Microsoft a way of periodically checking your software to ensure it’s legal). I also like the always-on word count, something that Amazon probably wishes I would use in my reviews.

I’m at day 7 and counting, and I don’t feel much reason to ever open my Office 2002 again.

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With Office 2007, Microsoft offers the “ribbon”, a new and more intuitive way to access features that we used to find in the menus. While the features are basically the same, they are now grouped together according to when and how you would normally use them. These groupings are accessed by clicking on tabs, which are organized in the order you’d use them. The best way to get a better understanding of this change is to check out the screenshots, or download a free trial version of Office from Microsoft. While Office 2007 was released at the same time as Vista, you do not need Vista in order to run it. The program ran fine on my Windows XP laptop, which only had 512 MB of RAM, and it runs even better on my Vista laptop with 2 GB of RAM.

As for which version of Office to buy, this is the third time I’ve opted for the Home and Student version (which has had other names in previous releases, but is still being sold for $149). I need Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and this is the most cost-effective way to get those programs. I was disappointed that Microsoft dropped Outlook from the Home and Student version. In order to continue to use Outlook, I installed Outlook 2003 and haven’t had any problems.

Instead of Outlook, you get OneNote, a program that uses notebooks and tabs to save and organize all sorts of files and documents. I haven’t had much time to play with OneNote yet, but the more I use it, the more impressed I am with it. It looks like one of those programs that you can personalize to meet your own needs and not have to fight with it to get it to do what you want.

This is a significant upgrade and should allow all users, new and experienced, to work more efficiently and quickly.