PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com
"We Put the SIN in Cinema"
© Copyright 2004 Planet Sick-Boy. All Rights Reserved.
Admittedly, Vanity Fair is not my cup of tea, but I still approached my
screening with a relatively open mind. It didn't help. Now I want to cave
in Reese Witherspoon's head with a rock, and dig up William Makepeace
Thackeray's corpse so I can drop it into that stuff that killed Robert
Patrick in Terminator 2. It's not that I hate all period films, or
anything. Just the ones that are pointless, full of bad acting, and feel
like they're five hours long. I do, however, have an apparent dislike for
anything cranked out by director Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding). The thought
of her being in the running for a Harry Potter film makes me want drink
Clorox. Believe me, you'll feel the same way after sitting through hour
after boring hour of Fair, and then wondering what the hell is happening
when the Britney Spears video temporarily takes over the film.
Thackeray's novel, adapted here by a trio of screenwriters (including
Gosford Park's Julian Fellows) follows the life of a dullard named Rebecca
Sharp (Witherspoon, Legally Blonde 2). Though she has no money and even
less social standing, Rebecca manages to hook up with a string of
increasingly rich people and lives fairly high on the hog before it all
comes crashing down in Fair's final reel. In that way, Fair is a little
like The House of Mirth. More so, when you think about both pictures being
headed by amber-haired actresses who are in way over their heads. Mirth
didn't have the Britney video, though.
Personally, I would have rather seen a film about the Crawley family, into
which Rebecca eventually marries. They're kind of like a 19th century
version of the Bluths from Arrested Development, complete with a crazy aunt
played by Cold Mountain's Eileen Atkins, who represents the only redeeming
quality of Fair. Aside from her, we're talking about a film way more
concerned about costumes than things like story, acting and.oh, yeah -
emotion. Extremely disappointing considering the cast, which includes
Romola Garai, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Gabriel Byrne, Jim Broadbent, Bob
Hoskins and Rhys Ifans.
========== X-RAMR-ID: 38543 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1313458 X-RT-TitleID: 1135805 X-RT-SourceID: 595 X-RT-AuthorID: 1146 X-RT-RatingText: 4/10
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews