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©2002-2024
Kevin Michael Vance
Writer - Portland, Oregon
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Title: Cold Mountain
Director: Anthony Minghella
Year: 2003
Reviewed: July 04, 2004
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Birthday Cake-Second Highest Rating |
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I just got through seeing Cold Mountain, and I gotta tell ya'... I wasn't impressed. I give the film a BIRTHDAY CAKE REVIEW.
Now, before I continue with this review, I should mention that the two other people who watched the film with me liked it. Therefore, I could be wrong. In which case, see it for yourself and make up your own mind.
Cold Mountain was not a horrible movie. It was acted relatively well (mainly by the efforts of Brendan Gleason and Rene Zellweger), but it wasn't great. Both Jude Law's and Nicole Kidman's performances left me wanting… wanting more passion, more blood, more sorrow. Some of the scenery was gorgeous, albeit quite obviously not North Carolina (the majority of the film was… well, "filmed" in, of all places, Romania). However, I could not shake the fact that to me, at the least, none of it seemed realistic. The romance between Law's and Kidman's character was devoid of any real heart or emotion. It appeared as if Kidman was too worried about being beautiful to actually get into the character. The odyssey-like journey Law's character undergoes felt like a wanna-be fantasy story, and in a strange way, there was a character straight out of Lucas' first three Star Wars films. The old woman was Yoda! The sex was ridiculous and contrived, and it all had the stinking air of a Judith Krantz novel, as if this was not how people actually acted or fornicated, but rather, this is how some novelist or director wished people acted and fornicated. The horror was hackneyed at best. Complete with an asinine, sneering albino, the epitome of mindless evil; a southerner more akin to Gollum or Harry Potter's Lucius Malfoy than any actual, well-rounded character. At one point Zellweger's character actually called someone an ass hole. Now, granted, I am no historian, but even if they did say ass hole during the days of the American Civil War, it still sounded ridiculous on screen.
Overall, this move was forced, pretentious, and boring. Trying desperately to be something, it was not, an epic story, told on a grand yet intimate level, like Gladiator or Brave Heart.
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