I find Cinema rarely the form of art its theoreticians pretend it to be. Well for sure, it's a form of entertainment designed to suck a few coins out of the pockets of the bored Saturday night passers by on the boulevards. Video art - not art-house cinema - became a form of using moving pictures in the process of creation of fine visual arts, with some cool results. Art-house cinema has in the meantime remained mostly a weak form of literature to me. Defended by bitter critics who could not make it in literature or film making. Nobody can dispute that none of the great cinema talent compare to the great novelists and poets of the history of literature. Unfortunately cinema, because it's easy to watch a movie, has the favours of the wider audience. Literature tries desperately these days to mimic film story-telling to capture some of the cash- know the feeling seems like reading a screenplay when turning the pages of the best selling paperbacks these days - Here Mike Newell tries to transpose a fine piece of literature into a series of shots and a bunch of extras in costumes. The result is excellent, unexpectedly. Owing to a great sense of directing and editing. Owing to the superb performance of Javier Bardem - charisma is his middle name this man, cut in the cloth of the Marlon Brandos and the Paul Newmans -Owing to a superb illustration for the screen of Garcia Marquez brilliant concept of eternal return, of the myths of everyday life created from the coincidences, absurd and meaningful, of our odd lives. Shakira's voice adds to the magic. The aging of the actors in unevenly mastered and sometimes annoying, notably in the first half of the film. The budget isn't huge but the result is unmissable. Cinema has a lot to do with talent. Newell has tuns of it.
Review of Love in the Time of Cholera
