... bewildering that they were completely allowed to happen by the people involved In this movie. .
1. Expansive epic novels that span time, history, characters, mystical allegories are very hard to adapt into successful movies even in the best of hands and budgets. Love In The Time of Cholera (the movie) already suffered badly despite being much better directed, acted, scripted and presumably a bigger budget. Nothing was learned from that.
2. As already pointed out by others, the whole enterprise appears to be a visual audio book, and not a movie with a plot arc and relatable characters. Scripting a movie requires very different skills and experience from authoring a book - eg. The movie needs focus and flow and substantial book parts need to be removed, others properly adapted to give the movie its own life - clearly letting an accomplished book author like Salman Rushdie adapting his own book into a movie is a very very bad idea ... yup ... audiobook w visuals.
3. The excellent narrative elements of the book are mostly lost in translation (and Salman's lacklustre movie narration doesn't make up for it) and the entire movie appears as a series of strung together cliched melodramatic Bollywood scenes that has no focus, no meaningful central arc, no strongly identifiable characters.
4. There are hardly any guides for viewers who have little or no idea of the historical context so irony, historical impact, relevance are all lost to many viewers.
5. Below par acting, some bordering on bad caricature, coupled w cliched pretentious dialogues put another big damper on the already wet sausage. The scenes involving the midnight children also came across as cringey school plays.
Read the novel and the movie that is then projected in your head is a much much superior one.
1. Expansive epic novels that span time, history, characters, mystical allegories are very hard to adapt into successful movies even in the best of hands and budgets. Love In The Time of Cholera (the movie) already suffered badly despite being much better directed, acted, scripted and presumably a bigger budget. Nothing was learned from that.
2. As already pointed out by others, the whole enterprise appears to be a visual audio book, and not a movie with a plot arc and relatable characters. Scripting a movie requires very different skills and experience from authoring a book - eg. The movie needs focus and flow and substantial book parts need to be removed, others properly adapted to give the movie its own life - clearly letting an accomplished book author like Salman Rushdie adapting his own book into a movie is a very very bad idea ... yup ... audiobook w visuals.
3. The excellent narrative elements of the book are mostly lost in translation (and Salman's lacklustre movie narration doesn't make up for it) and the entire movie appears as a series of strung together cliched melodramatic Bollywood scenes that has no focus, no meaningful central arc, no strongly identifiable characters.
4. There are hardly any guides for viewers who have little or no idea of the historical context so irony, historical impact, relevance are all lost to many viewers.
5. Below par acting, some bordering on bad caricature, coupled w cliched pretentious dialogues put another big damper on the already wet sausage. The scenes involving the midnight children also came across as cringey school plays.
Read the novel and the movie that is then projected in your head is a much much superior one.