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Your Learning Zone - Cold Mountain
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List Price: $14.99
Our Price: $5.50
Your Save: $ 9.49 ( 63% )
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Manufacturer: Miramax Home Entertainment
Starring: Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, Eileen Atkins, Brendan Gleeson
Directed By: Anthony Minghella
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 0786936242331
Format: Color
Label: Miramax Home Entertainment
Manufacturer: Miramax Home Entertainment
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Miramax Home Entertainment
Release Date: 2004-06-29
Running Time: 154
Studio: Miramax Home Entertainment
Theatrical Release Date: 2003-12-25
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Miscasted on all fronts
Comment: If you are looking for the same kind of otherworldly feeling in this movie as was found in Charles Frazier's magnificent novel you will be surely disappointed. This film was totally miscast in every respect. First of all in Frazier's novel the southern appalachian mountains of North Carolina were as important a character in the book as the human characters were. So what do the producers do? They film it in Romania in a location that only bears a slight resemblance to one of the most beautiful mountain ranges on earth. For those of us who intimately know the landscape of The Great Smokie mountains such as myself, this is the first great disappointment. There currently exists about 40% virgin wilderness that still appears much like it was back in the civil war time of the novel. But they chose Romania instead where there is not a mountain laurel , tulip poplar or rhododendron bush in sight. Do we feel like we are in the southern appalachians... NO! Then there are the actors. Nicole Kidman is so wrong for the part of Ada I could cry.Her southern accent is weak at best and she reeks hollywood. Think Cate Blanchette instead. Jude Law with his pretty boy face falls flate on it as Inman. I would have rather seen an actor like Damien Lewis of Band of Brothers cast instead. His slim continence and the thousand yard stare that he perfected in that powerful WW2 epic would have fit nicely with the horrors Inman had witnessed from Sparksburg to the nightmare of the Petersburg crater. And lastly there is Renee Zellweger as the mountain girl Ruby. Her inept performance is pure comic characature and the final nail in the coffin of this poorly realized film. If you want to see a movie that actually captures the atmosphere and gritty feeling of civil war times in America, I would suggest the low budget gem Pharoah's Army. Oh what a director such as Terrence Malick might have done with this material. We'll never know now.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Terrible!
Comment: This movie was not that good. In the first place, it was excessively voilent. I know this movie takes place during the civil war and it was a voilent time, but I find it particulary unbearable because of several scenes. I also was disgusted by the sexual suggestions and scenes. I couldn't even sit through it, it was so bad.
It might have had a good love story, I mean a man forsaking his soldier days and risking his own life by being a deserter to return to the love of his life, that basis was fine. I'm a Civil War romance lover, I don't mind that. However, all the junk crammed in this film made it immpossible to watch.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Zellweger is the Redeeming Factor in This Otherwise Trite Film
Comment: Take the plot from Moulin Rouge, move it from Paris to the Civil War South, tweak it a bit here and there, and you get the film version of Cold Mountain. Placing an overrated Australian actress and a British pretty boy in the lead roles of a film meant to be about the American South during the Civil War is beyond offensive.
Were there no American actors available to take on these parts? Not surprisingly, neither Kidman nor Law could effectively nail the accents, which made an already trite, poorly executed love story even more painful to withstand. As is frequently the case with Nicole Kidman, you get a self-conscious, contrived performance rather than a reliable and convincing portrayel of a definitive character with true dimension. As is also frequently the case with her movies, the casting agents deftly placed a reliable supporting actress in the film to counteract her obvious weakness. Renee Zellweger single handedly carried the movie and made it watchable. For this reason, I awarded the film two stars. Her performance makes watching this otherwise
poorly casted film worthwhile.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Wet Week
Comment: This was visually OK but overlong and not remarkable. As an australian I should be prejudiced but have to say Nicole Kidman overrated. I own this movie but would not sit through it again. One to ten, ten being best, give this one four.
Customer Rating:
Summary: common people overwhelmed by war
Comment: I loved the book and found the movie just as good, which is unusual. The Battle of the Crater [not in the book] is especially good--awful, really. Confederate armies on the verge of defeat are blown to Hell by an underground mine. Well-fed, well-trained Union soldiers advance into the breech only to be mowed down by the famished, desperate and shell-shocked survivors. Courage beyond the bounds of courage. The battle ends with mutilated Federal corpses piled up like cord wood...it's not a cinematic invention...it happened just this way.
The rest of film is excellent, too, but certainly far from perfect. The home guards, chasing down disgruntled soldiers and run away slaves, are just too evil for words. As a matter of fact, they are just too evil for reality. Slaves were valuable and deserting soldiers could still serve in the collapsing Confederate armies. Wholesale murder wasn't in the cards. At the same time, a film needs villains but sometimes villainy is more effective if handled more delicately...with more subtlety.
Still the film worked for me, especially the enormous tragedy of women--impoverished, grief-stricken women--waiting for men who would never return...waiting for men who would never again plough a field or make love to them again. Multiply Ada by hundreds of thousands and we start to get a feel for the unfathomable tragedy that was the American Civil War. 620,000 men never came home...more than all the other American wars put together. The South was especially devastated...most of her military aged men were dead or crippled while, simultaneously, the Federal Government exacted full revenge on the flattened South.
Hey! It "unified" the nation or was the nation's disunion just internalized? By the way, I'm a Southernor and wasn't disturbed by "fake" accents. It's been going on long before "Gone with the Wind."
Ron Braithwaite, author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico
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Editorial Reviews:
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Freely adapted from Charles Frazier's beloved bestseller, Cold Mountain boasts an impeccable pedigree as a respectable Civil War love story, offering everything you'd want from a romantic epic except a resonant emotional core. Everything in this sweeping, Odyssean journey depends on believing in the instant love that ignites during a very brief encounter between genteel, city-bred preacher's daughter Ada (Nicole Kidman) and Confederate soldier Inman (Jude Law), who deserts the battlefield to return, weary and wounded, to Ada's inherited farm in the rural town of Cold Mountain, North Carolina. In an epic (but dramatically tenuous) case of absence making hearts grow fonder, Inman endures a treacherous hike fraught with danger (and populated by supporting players including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, and others) while the struggling, inexperienced Ada is aided by the high-spirited Ruby (Renée Zellweger), forming a powerful farming partnership that transforms Ada into a strong, lovelorn survivor. The film's episodic structure slightly weakens its emotional impact, and it's fairly obvious that director Anthony Minghella is striving to repeat the prestigious romanticism of his Oscar®-winning hit The English Patient. For the most part it works, especially in the dynamic performances of Zellweger and Kidman, and the explosive 1864 battle of Petersburg, Virginia, is recreated with violent, percussive intensity. Those who admired Frazier's novel may regret some of the changes made in Minghella's adaptation (the ending is particularly altered), but Cold Mountain remains a high-class example of grand, old-fashioned filmmaking, boosted by star power of the highest order. --Jeff Shannon
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