Wanderings and … wonderings.

I was expecting a great-looking movie and this was a beauty; Anthony Minghella was always good at that. Brutal battle scenes were a joy to watch, though that’s not a term one would normally identify with carnage. It works as tragic melodrama, some of the naturalistic dialogue almost quotable, and it does capture the precariousness of passing through a ravaged country where law and order is an arbitrary notion. 

I didn’t really see the point to it other than a smug shot at Oscar glory, and there’s nothing to distinguish it from a dozen other sweeping yarns. 

And the accents were insulting; I would have said Kidman’s Southern belle shtick, especially, was the nadir until Renée Zellweger turned up, embarrassing herself and everyone else with her mugging antics. I spent the remainder of the motion picture praying that she bit the dust. But sadly, she did not succumb. 

Daft film, but at least the supporting cast is epic – Ray Winstone, Brendan Gleeson, Donald Sutherland, and the always hypnotic Philip Seymour Hoffman. 

It’s far better than The English Patient (1996), but it’s no The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), which is this lad’s Everest.

And it’s time to watch that masterpiece again.