Fortunes of War
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Movie Reviews of Fortunes of War
Movie Review: How do you turn on the Subtitles?
Summary: 3 Stars
This DVD was hard to work with on my (new) DVD player. Please, someone, how do you turn on the subtitles? I've tried everything I know several times. The box says "closed captioned" and I really need that feature to hear properly.Movie Review: More of a Chick Flick
Summary: 3 Stars
Very little action....more of an understated British
saga of the war.
Movie Review: A Bit of a Disappointment
Summary: 2 Stars
A big novel's length is always a challenge to a film adaptation of the work. When six novels are involved, as is the case here (from Olivia Manning's The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy), the task of adapting the work means most of it gets left behind. How to produce a script that retains some of the novel's uniqueness and flavor but is still coherent to viewers unfamiliar with the novel? Various solutions come to mind. For example, Volker Schlöndorff wisely bit off only the first third of Günter Grass's masterpiece, The Tin Drum, and created a film that at times exceeds its source material in power and impact. And against all odds, the young Ray Bradbury managed to extract key scenes and language from Moby Dick to come up with a script which, when coupled with a decent director (John Huston) and good casting choices (I'm thinking here of Orson Welles as Father Mapple), made a pretty decent movie.
Sadly, with Fortunes of War, casting works against the film. Where Guy Pringle is a big bear of a man in the novels, Branagh's sensitive Guy just isn't the same character. And where Harriet Pringle is a small and at times frail woman in the novels, Thompson's Harriet is, well, Emma Thompson. This is not a small matter. The novels' point of view is that of Harriet and what we get there is a detailed, personal, even intimate view of the Pringles' marriage. If you read these novels all in a rush, you almost become Harriet Pringle for a time, immersed in the details of her marriage, seeing the world through her eyes. There's a toughness to Harriet, but also vulnerability, something that Guy often misses as he plunges into one project after another. Little of this comes through in the film.
Of course something will get lost in the translation from the literary to the filmic - this is a challenge all film adaptations have to face. But in this film, the mismatch of the lead actors and the characters they play is simply too much to overcome.
Movie Review: Disappointing screenplay & performances
Summary: 2 Stars
With apologies to all those who love this series, I bought this DVD based on the reviews here, but my wife and I found this series disappointing. The screenplay dragged the story out unnecessarily with inconsequential details and scenes while failing to provide essential details that would have helped understand some of the events. Although we wanted to see how the story ended, we couldn't wait for it to end. A voice over (from the author's viewpoint) would have helped.
For all their famed talent, Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh disappointed also. Several other actors provided more interesting and effective performances. Thompson performed as if she suffered somnabulism in all but a handful of scenes. She seemed bored with the whole thing. It was hard to believe that her character could be so detached as the German army approached and invaded each of the cities where they resided. Branagh's performance was acting, not natural, until the scene near the end in which he breaks down in the hospital. Perhaps the person he portrayed was just that artificial, but it's hard to believe that he was. Branagh's method of acting is much more suited to a quasi-comedic role, like that of Gilderoy in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
We like to be drawn into a story, so that we care what happens to the characters. We had a very hard time caring for these people, who pretty much bored us.
Movie Review: Thompson the terrible
Summary: 2 Stars
Why do I dislike Emma Thompson so much as an actress? Aha, I know why -- she can't act. She can read lines and make gestures, but never makes me believe for a second that she's who she's pretending to be. She ruins everything she touches. I have to admit I couldn't watch this in its entirety, purely because of her. For those who haven't seen the show, just look at her picture on the box; she looks like a woman wearing a hat that belongs somewhere, anywhere, else. It's like a pimple on cheese. Apart from her, it was OK, but I don't like Branagh either, another actor afflicted with an unhealthy dose of self-consciousness in his acting, which is fatal.