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Cold Mountain
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by Miramax Home Entertainment
Sales Rank: 7926
Price: $14.99
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Freely adapted from Charles Frazier's beloved bestseller, <I>Cold Mountain</I> 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 <I>very</I> 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 <I>The English Patient</I>. 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 <I>Cold Mountain</I> remains a high-class example of grand, old-fashioned filmmaking, boosted by star power of the highest order. <I>--Jeff Shannon</I>
Viewer Reviews
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.
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Cold Mountain
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