If you love the book, avoid this movie
Added 2/21/2010
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's works must be among the most difficult to adapt to a movie. The lyrical and mystical nature of his writing is practically impossible to show on screen.
So when starting with disadvantages the director needs to be on his A-game. He lost it riight at the onset when he decided to make it in english. It would have been betteroff made in spanish. If it was made in english, why the stupid accent ? The book translation doesn't come with accents. Why in teh movie? Reminded of last year's disaster "Memoirs of a Geisha".
In short, if you love the book , you will HATE the movie.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Love in Spite of Cholera...
Added 1/8/2010
Several love stories going on throughout this film makes for an interesting core for this film. Unfortunatly, the passions are rather low-key and more excitement among the lovers would have added a lot to the film's flow.
For me, the most noted love story was the one between the camera operators, the director and the beautiful outdoor scenery (including gardens) and the perfectly staged interiors. I lived in Columbia for a short time during the mid-70's and the atmosphere the Art Director created was flawless.
The Actors all delivered good performances. The production was professionally executed, but I don't see any BIG awards going to this film.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
GREAT MOVIE - MUST SEE
Added 12/9/2009
This is definitely a "date" movie, not for children. You must see this movie, it will make you laugh, cry, and just feel good. Great settings, beautiful costuming, one of a kind.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Superb Movie Adaptation
Added 12/4/2009
Love in a Time of Cholera / B0011FLH14
A long-time fan of Gabriel Marquez's deeply symbolic novel of love in all its many and varied forms, I was deeply surprised at the lukewarm reception this powerful film has received. I wonder, perhaps, if there is a reason why so many great novels shall never make it to the silver screen - so much content simply has to be cut to fit a coherent movie into a shortened time block, that inevitably fans will be upset that some favorite scene or character was not included. And yet I felt that this movie adaptation superbly captured the feel and story of Marquez's masterpiece.
A particular word must be said about the casting, which is quite wonderful. All the actors play their roles exceptionally well, especially the roles of Fermina and Florentino. Florentino does a gracious job with the difficult and demanding role - equal parts 'devoted' lover (devoted in his heart, but never with his body), clever seducer, and yet suffering from an intensely broken heart. Fermina, too, has the unenviable task of remaining sympathetic whilst playing a distant and aloof lady who breaks one lover's heart and marries another whom she does not, initially, care much for. The struggle of the two lovers, as they cope to live their lives buffeted by the deep passions within their relationship is quite realistic, and never feels forced for the sake of plot or pacing.
Moral guardians will, of course, take umbrage at the level of nudity in this movie - and often 'unsexy' nudity at that! Yet that is the world that Marquez attempted to portray - a *real* world, where people have sex naked, and their bodies are not all oiled statues of unreal, air-brushed beauty. Nor does the director shy away from Marquez's insistence that aged romance is as passionate and valid as youthful ones - and aged nudity is on display respectfully, not as something automatically disgusting or inherently titillating as Fermina's daughter would suggest. Humanity is portrayed here, and humor, as well - as when Florentino is interrupted at his place of business and his visitor assures the lady to have no qualms about continuing in his absense, as he has not glimpsed the lady's face! Or the heartwarming, illiterate couple who woos one another through Florentino's love letter writing services.
At the end of the day, no movie can hope to fully encapsulate an epic novel of this length and complexity, but I feel that this movie comes as close as possible and hits the mark beautifully, and for that I am grateful.
~ Ana Mardoll
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
'Gabo' Casts an Irreversible Spell in 'Cholera'
Added 10/12/2009
Part epistolary romance, part case study of a furtive and nerdy Casanova, Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera) reveals a male protagonist's optimistic and cynical perspectives of love. Portrayed with eloquence, charm and emotional complexity by Javier Bardem - who comes from a long line of thespians in Spain - Florentino Ariza surveys love's progression as an incurable disease. Hence, the cleverness of the film's title, for cholera during the periods depicted in Love in the Time of Cholera brought death quickly whereas love festers indefinitely.
In one of the most poignant moments of the 2007 film, a middle-aged Florentino utters to his dementia-ravaged mother: "You confuse cholera with love." Florentino's longing for the beautiful Fermina Daza was so intense, that his mother believed cholera to be the blame for his frequent bouts of vomiting and melancholia. That Gabriel García Márquez, author of the 1985 novel El amor en los tiempos del cólera, upon which the epic film is based, likens love to a terminal disease is an apt comparison. Such a romantic concept reverberated (with no small debt to John Barry's sweeping score) throughout Jeannot Szwarc's 1980 film Somewhere in Time, adapted unfaithfully from the 1975 novel Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson. In Somewhere in Time, a playwright (portrayed by Christopher Reeve) is described as having "died of love" after obsessing over a photo portrait of Belle Epoque actress Elise McKenna (portrayed by Jane Seymour) and willing himself back to her time in order to meet and fall in love with her.
In both films - Love in the Time of Cholera and Somewhere in Time - the viewer is challenged to redefine time beyond a cold, scientific certainty and to explore the interrelatedness of memories, emotions and metaphysics. Without relying on the special effects that action, sci-fi and horror flicks have conditioned our minds to accept as a requisite for magical occurrences, "Gabo" - as García Márquez is affectionately known in Latin America - asks us only to open the four chambers of our hearts, figuratively speaking. He implores us to feel the love (Lion King reference unintentional) that makes life worth living despite the social and economic chaos that often surrounds and threatens to desensitize us.
Love is the unseen but omniscient character in Love in the Time of Cholera, Somewhere in Time and another period film: Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) from director Alfonso Arau and adapted from the same-titled novel by Laura Esquivel. Esquivel's story is enchanting because it shouts from the rooftops that love holds the power to heal the wounded hearts of distanced lovers - whether the pair is separated by geography, disapproving parents, envious third parties, or any combination thereof. In fact, in Como agua para chocolate, when forbidden lovers Tita (Lumi Cavazos) and Pedro (Marco Leonardi) finally come together, Marco's voice booms: "TE AMO!" What follows in the barn is a literal combustion. Well, the fact that Tita had swallowed nearly an entire box of matches prior to their consummation was an eerie clue.
Another dose of "magical realism" - an artistic technique first recognized in American visual art of the mid-20th century and later employed in progressive literature by Latin American writers in the '60s and '70s - that transferred well from Esquivel's story to Arau's picture was the series of haunting sequences which result from Tita psychologically battling her destiny. Tita's fate may have been to become a spinster, but with Pedro's sensual aid she finds her way. As the youngest daughter, she is fated to take care of her widowed mother, Mamá Elena (Regina Torné), until her death. But when Tita reciprocates Pedro's flirtation to the point of infusing eroticism into the scrumptious dishes that she prepares for the family (which expands after her sister Rosaura's marriage to Pedro), a curse about which Mamá Elena warned is cast.
Speaking of Como agua para chocolate, much in the way Pedro professes "amor" from the top of his lungs in that torrid barn scene mentioned earlier in this review, hoodlum-Romeo Antone a/k/a "Tony" (Richard Beymer) in West Side Story painfully shouts his beloved's name, "MARIA!" on an urban street. In the first half of West Side Story, however, Tony envisions only love's promise, not its sometimes tragic consequences. The agonizing truth of the controversial affair between Tony and María (Natalie Wood) comes across as brutally honest as an admission in a long-avoided confessional booth when the youths perform "Somewhere." And María's divinity, in Tony's eyes, rings as true as a cathedral bell when his dubbed voice sings the ballad "María": "The most beautiful sound I've ever heard, María, María, María ... Say it loud and there's music playing. Say it soft and it's almost like praying."
Holiness takes a holiday in the motives of Florentino, however. Though he frequently refers to Fermina as his "crowned goddess" to anyone willing to listen, he indulges in "mucho" carnality throughout Love in the Time of Cholera. He is deliberate in going about a purely sexual catharsis in order to alleviate emotional pain caused by Fermina's rejection. When he first spoke of his love for her, Fermina felt honored, but after a while, enough is enough!
The rape of Florentino (in his 20s, presumably) is presented by director Mike Newell and screenwriter Ronald Harwood as a misogynistic justification for Florentino's debauchery. After Florentino beds down (with desks, walls and leafy forests sometimes replacing mattresses as props) more than 600 women well into his 70s, he loses the viewers' sympathy with the abruptness of a Victrola's needle skidding across a vinyl record.
A second chance at love often requires much suffering on the part of the one whom love was denied. In that sense of murky optimism, Love in the Time of Cholera elevates love to the most sublime affliction. "Gabo" probably would agree with that diagnosis.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
