bcrumpacker SPOILER ALERT The thin story is a close copy of The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, all the way through. Just change bubble to leather suit, and add motorcycle.The good: Cheryl Pollak is very pretty and sparkly, as always. The Yugoslavian coastal scenery is carefully filmed and looks great. Brad takes off his shirt, if you like that sort of thing.The bad: Cheryl Pollak sings. Twice! Her idiot friends. Brad Pitt's untrained voice. The motorcycle "race" on the beach. Brad conceals his true identity from Cheryl for no real reason. The weird: When we first see Brad Pitt's face at the 35 minute mark, he is dressed like James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause: jeans, white tee shirt and red jacket. The R rating for showing one topless girl for a few seconds. The Adriatic coast is famous for its nude beaches, so what's the big deal? Brad plays with a dolphin, which would normally violate the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Brad's spaced out mom in a wheelchair shows up at the end for no reason. And most importantly, why does Brad kill himself right after sleeping with his true love? Most guys come back for more.Bottom line: a lightweight romance, sprinkled with eye candy and oddball choices. Gave it a 5 because I like Cheryl in almost anything.

Sonofamoviegeek This movie is so bad that IMDb eliminated the "goofs" section. For example, the movie is supposed to take place in Mexico but it took my wife 5 seconds to recognize that it was shot in Yugoslavia. It took me a little longer but I believed her when the first "Mexican" spoke in a Slavic accent so thick I smelled borscht in the room.Another goof is when the father goes to pray in a church and does it in front of an Orthodox icon. Mexicans are mostly Catholic and Catholics have statues, not icons in their churches. Brad Pitt removes his head gear and doesn't have a sign of "helmet head". And how about those moles on Cheryl Pollack's neck that appear and disappear depending on whether the makeup girl showed up for work.I could go on but, in summary, the acting is wooden, the story is mediocre and Cheryl Pollack's singing is terrible. Nine years to release a movie and it didn't get better with age.

Kim Chi King I saw this movie on TB while I was in Irkutsk, Russia. It was pretty damn cold out so I didn't feel too bad about wasting 2 hours watching this unintentionally hilarious movie. The opening scene foretold the fromagerie to be expected from the rest of the film. The mysterious biker, dressed head to toe in black leather drives his motorcycle down a lonely country road. There's a dead dog and her dead litter of puppies in the ditch (I think) but there is one puppy that has survived. The tough biker, who must be really tough to be wearing head to toe black leather in what looks to be a baking summer day in (at the time) Yugoslavia, shows what a kind hearted freak he is and picks up the remaining puppy and takes it home in his jacket. Aww. The leathery biker has a soul! He likes puppies! Who is that masked dog-loving man? So then (through dubbed Russian voices, because it was probably a pirated copy being shown on the Bolshoi TB Channel Dva) I heard this familiar, yet very young voice speaking through the leather zipper that was the biker's mouth. Oh, who is that? I wondered. And then, just when I was ready to turn the TB off and go look at Russian orthodox cathedrals, in the shadows the masked biker begins to take off his mask. I say to my travel companions "this better be good", and then suddenly we get a glimpse of a very young Brad Pitt. I nearly fell on the floor I laughed so hard. Really, that's as good as the story got. The rest is just kind of forgettable and a little bit embarrassing, although the scenery in this film was beautiful. Watch it for a good laugh and to marvel at how young Mr. Pitt used to sound. Preferably without Russian dubbing over top.

Pepper Anne Filmed in and around Yugoslavia, Dark Side of the Sun is quite a nice little film. Brad Pitt plays Rick, a young man born with a serious skin condition which forces him to shield himself from any sort of lighting. He lives in the dark and travels in the daytime in a 'Blackout New' kind of leather face mask. At home, he can only remove the protection so long as he remains in absolute darkness. Rick is tired of this, and humors his father who travels with him around the world in search of medical specialists that may be able to provide his son a cure. But Rick soon decides that enough is enough, and decides that he doesn't care about the consequences, if in fact the potential extent of damage done by his exposure to the sun is even a reality, given how rare his disease is. He gets rid of the mask and get's to experience so many things in a different way, even interacting with people he may not have before. Rick experiences a rejuvination.In doing so, he meets a young American actress who was staying with a group that was performing in the town square festivities. And he falls in love with her. But she adores Rick as a friend, while she is keen on the 'dark masked rider' she happened to meet at a party one evening. And that is who she is in love with, not knowing that Rick is the same person. Rick plays something of a double life, like Cyrano de Bergnac style, but as one person. Rick doesn't tellt he girl that he and the masked rider are the same person. He just seems to enjoy her company and, I suppose, doesn't want her to feel pity for him and ruin everything if she were to know that his exposure to the sun would mean imminent death. He doesn't want to spoil how great he feels about everything. Dark Side of the Sun turned out to be a very good movie, though it is a sad story. There is some minor flaws in the film. As one viewer previously mentioned, if they were to get rid of the leather suit to "live again", they wouldn't put it on just to play a double life to charm a girl. I would definitely agree. He didn't seem to detest the suit much so long as he could be with the girl. But I would think that his convictions for "living again" would be so strong (as they are throughout the movie) that he wouldn't even want to lie to the girl. But like I said, it was probably also a matter of his not wanting her to consistingly look upon him with guilt or pity. Also, for a young man who spent so much time in a full leather mask, I would expect that he would not only be pale and thin, but probably have very thin hair or little hair at all. It is very uncharacteristic of Brad Pitt films nowadays, but in this, as young Rick, he's a natural about it. Everyone else is good, too. And the setting, what little you get to see of Yugoslavia, is gorgeous. It seemed like it would have been better, however, had it been a foreign picture, and you even get this impression from the beginning with the folk music introduction and relatively old looking titles. But, it's definitely worth seeing.