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jdoyle30000
Reviews
The Work and the Glory (2004)
Hackneyed and Uninteresting
I couldn't finish it. I rarely bail on a movie, but I bailed on this one. The acting was poor, but it didn't matter because the characters were stereotypical and not at all nuanced. The villainous canal riff-raff were painted as comically evil. The plot and dialog were trite.
I don't mind a movie with sentiment or religious elements, but this seemed like pure propaganda to me. I felt like I had been tricked into watching what I had hoped would have been an interesting historical dramatization of life in New York's "Burned Over District" in the first half of the nineteenth century.
In short, if you are a Mormon yourself and not too discriminating about what makes a good movie, you might like it. I don't think anyone else will.
The Peacock Spring (1996)
Interesting film with a cop-out ending
I found this movie to be interesting and well-acted. The characters were well-rounded and showed development over time (although the character of the younger sister Hal was a bit neglected). I don't know if it is realistic or not, but the exploration of relationships in post-colonial India is a good topic for film. I enjoyed the film up to the very end when a "convenient" miscarriage deflated the plot by solving a huge problem for Una and depriving the viewer of a chance to see how her relationship with her family might really have played out. What could have been a really complex exploration of race, sex, class, and colonialism lost a whole dimension that it should have had. I haven't read the book; I assume the film just follows the novel. It left me feeling like somebody just got tired of working it all out and decided to end the plot the easy way.