THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2005 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): **
THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE, an art house pretender, is nothing more than another film on the level of a TV disease movie of the week. Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Jack, a dying member of an almost dead commune he helped found back in 1967. Jack, sometimes aided by his teenage daughter Rose (Camilla Belle), is an ecoterrorist with good intentions. An outstanding steward of the environment -- we know this because he recycles and has a rotary phone -- Jack wants to stop progress, in the form of new housing, from coming to the island on which he lives.
Beau Bridges plays Marty Rance, the island's new developer, who isn't even angry when Jack destroys one of his houses. Marty can always rebuild it, which he explains calmly and kindly to Jack. The script manages to make this developer, with his ridiculously altruistic heart, be ipso facto evil because he represents suburban sprawl.
THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE's writer and director, Rebecca Miller, who did such a fine job in PERSONAL VELOCITY: THREE PORTRAITS, isn't able to develop any convincing or compelling characters in this quirky drama. From the beginning, it's clear that the movie will be one long march to death, so why does Miller have to take so long before she finally puts Jack and us out of our collective misery?
THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE runs 1:51. It is rated R for "language, sexual content and some drug material" and would be acceptable for teenagers.
The film opens in limited release in the United States on Friday, March 25, 2005.
Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com
Want free reviews and weekly movie and video recommendations via Email?
Just send me a letter with the word "subscribe" in the subject line.
========== X-RAMR-ID: 39610 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1371561 X-RT-TitleID: 10002642 X-RT-SourceID: 703 X-RT-AuthorID: 1271 X-RT-RatingText: 2/4
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