I love British period costume dramas.
This one though. Just not good.
I have watched MANY many many movies based on this genre of novels. This movie is based on the book by E.M. Forster. It has a crazy cast....Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Helena Bonham Carter (her first film), and Daniel Day Lewis. All of those names are associated with really famous and popular films. If this had not been something chosen for this movie challenge, we probably would have just turned it off. That's how very uninteresting it was. The only way it was bearable was because it was interesting to see some of those famous actors and actresses in their early years.
It's about a girl and her older cousin chaperone in Italy. They have requested "A Room with a View" and it turns out they didn't get one. Two other travelers offer to switch rooms, which is apparently very brazen of them, the cousin in insulted, but they end up swapping to get the nicer rooms. (After the vicar says there's nothing wrong with accepting the offer ha).
The young girl falls in love with the younger man, they tour around the countryside with an author (Judi Dench), scandalous encounter, blah blah really; I can't remember what all happens.
When she goes home later we find her engaged to this guy, a very snobby and fancy man.
He's kind of funny to watch.
The young man and his father (the room swappers) end up moving to the same town and he's friends with her brother. There's an OUT OF THE BLUE and unexpected scene of the boys playing around and "bathing" in the pond, the ladies run up on them and it's all scandalous.
This film is based on a 1908 novel and is unrated, I had no idea about this scene, but it can be pretty shocking. It kind of goes on for a while too.
All and all, nothing exciting ever happens, Corey dozed off snoring, and I have seen many movies do this idea (the prohibitive nature of society and norms or whatever during this time period) and do it much better.
I read some of the reviews on IMDb and people seem to think that if you don't love this movie then you must be shallow, uneducated about history, and have no appreciation for character study.
I strongly disagree. I am not shallow, I do understand the historical time period, and I love the development of characters. This did not do any of these things justice.
The main heroine falls in love with a guy over a chance dinner. Their story is not believable. They've barely had a conversation before she is in turmoil and trying to avoid him, but it's not clear to me why she felt she needed to deny or avoid him. Just for the sake of making a movie?
The getting engaged to the ridiculous suitor is unbelievable as well. There is no explanation as to how they met or her feelings about it or why she was even interested or needing to engaged at that point. There's a lot said contrasting her passion in playing the piano with her boring life. That idea could've been developed more and made for some actual character development. As it is, I'm not sure how 2 hrs was filled with so little actually happening.
I give it a 3 out of 10.
The 3 stars are for having people who were later really famous, haha. They were fun to watch, just for fun. But I could have turned it off after seeing them a few times.
Seems as though I am 0/2 on movie picks. We are four movies into our challenge. We have 16 movies left, and 26 days to finish by the start of school in August. We are going to stop pulling them from a cup and start planning them out based on the length of the movie, streaming vs dvd etc so we can make our goal.
No comments:
Post a Comment