Winter's Tale (2014)

Thanks for the memories!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

And I think it is grossly misleading for anyone to approach it with that expectation. Scorsese apparently thought the book was unfilmable (but I once thought that about LotR) and it would certainly require a mini-series to do it justice. So what the director has done is take the essence of the love story and made it into a film. There were also some differences between the book and film that I don't think detract from either. Accept that premise and I think one can enjoy it in its own right. Nevertheless, I was disappointed that we got so little of Beverly and Peter actually together that a lot of the sheer joy and beauty of the relationship in the book was lost. That may explain why people who haven't read the book weren't so invested in the characters, while those that had felt a bit disappointed. For all that, I enjoyed the film and will keep it in my collection.

I love fantasy, unlike my family. But to mix it in with an every day life scenario, it has to be done right. In the case of Pan's Labyrinth, the beautiful combination of the real war-torn world and the fantasy world worked spot on throughout the whole film.In this movie, the gaps of the fantasy world aren't really filled out properly. It presents itself as a world where demons and angels are fighting some kind of war. But the rules aren't very clear. This is made evident by the fact that the book is incredibly long and covers too much ground for it to be made in a film (Martin Scorsese himself deemed it unfilmable) The other, albeit much milder, problem I have with the movie is Will Smith as Lucifer. Now don't get me wrong, I LOVE Will Smith, but this just doesn't work. To play the devil, an actor has to have two things: Irresistible charm and the ability to terrify the wits out of you. Smith definitely has the first, but not so much the second. It unfortunately ends up being too sickly sweet and clichèd for my liking.

The film incorporates ancient beliefs about life. We are all connected by light. We turn into stars when we die. There is one miracle in all of us.The gods/angels/demons intervene.In our tale Peter (Colin Farrell) is a thief in NYC. He leaves the dark side run by a demon Pearly (Russell Crowe) and joins the good side. Pearly works for Lucifer (Will Smith) and is after Peter who meanwhile falls in love with a pretty redhead (Jessica Brown Findlay) who is about to die from TB. Peter literally lifts her off her feet and rides off on a magical white horse. This leaves me really skeptical: Did a guy really write this? This is a slow developing story. It has several good scenes and a number of snooze scenes. I would leave out the narration which assumes the audience are idiots and work whatever ideas it gives us into the Lucifer dialog.This is a soft PG-13.

I'm another person who saw the movie and did not read the book or never heard of it. In fact, I don't even know if it was translated to my mother tongue. But I liked the movie. He has an implicit idea that love is a magical feeling that overcomes barriers. We can find it in literature and almost all poetry, where impossible lovers abound, with more or less tragic consequences. So the idea of ​​this film is not new, but almost always works well in movies. Therefore, I think the script is good, although its far from being brilliant.The major flaw of the script is that those, who don't know anything about the movie and start watching it, will thing, in the first minutes, which is seeing a period drama. These audiences will feel very confused at the sudden revelation of fantastic elements, something that they probably would not be waiting because the film was not immediately clear about that. I felt it the first time I saw, and I just really enjoyed it in the second time I saw it.The main roles are embodied by Colin Farrell (as the good guy, Peter Lake), Jessica Brown Findlay (in the role of the young, rich and sick Beverly Penn) and Russell Crowe (as the evil Perly Soames). Will Smith also makes a small but important role, as the Judge, in a clear reference to the Devil. About the actors work, I think it was regular. The biggest applause goes to Crowe, who did a convincing job as a villain. Jessica Findlay never seemed me passionate enough, her character is almost as cold as the ice of winter scenery. She looked like a rich girl who want to escape her gilded cage and enjoy an adventure. Farrell, in turn, despite seemed more passionate, failed in interpretation. It seemed too kind to be a thief in search of redemption through love, and his acting was theatrical and inauthentic.Anyway, the film is quite reasonable. Far from brilliance, it entertains the audience and bring us a beautiful love story in a fantasy film that, in a counter to gender itself, dispenses with most of the special effects to privilege the story. Not everything is good in this movie, but it's not necessarily a bad film.