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"THE HOURS" ~ The story of how the novel "Mrs. Dalloway" affects three generations of women, all of whom, in one way or another, have had to deal with suicide in their lives.
Misdirected and spewed forth for Paramount by a director named Stephen Daldry this extremely overrated motionless motion picture was viewed at the 2003 Berlin film festival. The morning press screening of "The Hours" (with Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf) in the Big Hall helped me catch up on some sleep lost the night before. Crashingly expensive BORE and the Kidman role could have been pulled off by any halfway decent high-school actress. Not that Nicole was bad, just that the role is zilch – Anybody can play a zombie with a false nose. But the other parts of the film (it's a three part movie) were even worse. The Ed Harris/Meryl Streep segment could have been excised totally without missing a beat. Who wants to watch Ed Harris dying of leprosy on screen as they claim it's really AIDS, and who cares if he left Streep years before for a gay boyfriend? – and now she's living in a lezzy affaire with another woman whom she kisses repeatedly on the mouth.
The only one of the three parallel stories that held my interest at all was the LA segment with Julianne Moore, but only because of her – because for my money Moore is the best actress in Hollywood –the new Bette Davis! But the overall story line with three extremely dull people building their private lives around the depressing suicide centered Woolf novel "Mrs. Dalloway" was one long embarrassing bore straining painfully for meaning while falling flat on its face. For me the film was over when Kidman (as Virginia Woolf) went under without so much as a blug-blug in the first three minutes of the pre-titles sequence where she commits suicide by calmly walking into a local lake. This picture should have jumped into the lake before it was released. The fact that it swept up multiple Oscars including a Best Actress for Ms.. Kidman he following February is proof positive of the meaningless of the annual Let's all pat ourselves on the back Ritual known as The Academy Awards. I cannot help but agree with the assessment of another IMDb reviewer who called it the Usual Feminist Garbage and said: "This was so awful it's a shoo-in for Best Picture". Amen.
Bottom Line: Crashingly Expensive Bore with a bashingly bad nose-job
"THE HOURS" ~ The story of how the novel "Mrs. Dalloway" affects three generations of women, all of whom, in one way or another, have had to deal with suicide in their lives.
Misdirected and spewed forth for Paramount by a director named Stephen Daldry this extremely overrated motionless motion picture was viewed at the 2003 Berlin film festival. The morning press screening of "The Hours" (with Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf) in the Big Hall helped me catch up on some sleep lost the night before. Crashingly expensive BORE and the Kidman role could have been pulled off by any halfway decent high-school actress. Not that Nicole was bad, just that the role is zilch – Anybody can play a zombie with a false nose. But the other parts of the film (it's a three part movie) were even worse. The Ed Harris/Meryl Streep segment could have been excised totally without missing a beat. Who wants to watch Ed Harris dying of leprosy on screen as they claim it's really AIDS, and who cares if he left Streep years before for a gay boyfriend? – and now she's living in a lezzy affaire with another woman whom she kisses repeatedly on the mouth.
The only one of the three parallel stories that held my interest at all was the LA segment with Julianne Moore, but only because of her – because for my money Moore is the best actress in Hollywood –the new Bette Davis! But the overall story line with three extremely dull people building their private lives around the depressing suicide centered Woolf novel "Mrs. Dalloway" was one long embarrassing bore straining painfully for meaning while falling flat on its face. For me the film was over when Kidman (as Virginia Woolf) went under without so much as a blug-blug in the first three minutes of the pre-titles sequence where she commits suicide by calmly walking into a local lake. This picture should have jumped into the lake before it was released. The fact that it swept up multiple Oscars including a Best Actress for Ms.. Kidman he following February is proof positive of the meaningless of the annual Let's all pat ourselves on the back Ritual known as The Academy Awards. I cannot help but agree with the assessment of another IMDb reviewer who called it the Usual Feminist Garbage and said: "This was so awful it's a shoo-in for Best Picture". Amen.
Bottom Line: Crashingly Expensive Bore with a bashingly bad nose-job