Mrs. Plant rented it from Netflix.
Boy, did the enging of that movie fellate with great allacrity.
Ending, dammit.
Only as much as the beginning and the middle.
What didn’t you like about it? (I thought it was great.)
I was glad it stuck to the book’s ending. I would have been pissed if it didn’t.
I was asleep for the middle, but yeah, it was comparable to the beginning.
-Lil
I wanted to like it…yet didn’t. I was hoping for an exciting period-piece war/love story epic on the order of Braveheart, Last of the Mohicans or Legends of the Fall. Instead, it barely rated a Rob Roy (without the kick-ass ending).
I liked it one one level because of its depiction of Civil War torn USA. Most Civil War films portray the war as armies of gentlemen squaring off against each other with a lot of HUZAAAA!!!s and STEADY LADS!! and “I fear I shall never see my sweat Virginia again for these Yankee oppressahs are blah blah blah”. On the other hand, like all Civil War films it portrays a lot of HUZAAAA!!!s and STEADY LADS!! and “I fear I shall never see my sweat Virginia again for these Yankee oppressahs are blah blah blah”. My Lord they were sure articulate and poetic for a people with an average fifth grade education.
Mostly, there was just too much going on. Too many characters coming in and out of the story with no apparent point. Too many stories going on at once. The love connection seemed tenuous at best. I’d spend my time thinking about Nicole Kidman too if she was the last girl I met before going off to fight with a bunch of smelly bearded Confederate soldiers.
And the ending really sucked too.
The movie was pretty good if you read the book first. At least then you’d know what Inman was thinking and feeling, how jaded he was about the war and life in general. They didn’t do a good job of communicating that in the movie, and it was central to the story. Read the book.
I thought the movie was an epic that never quite got there, but the extras on the DVD (especially the concert) were actually much better than the movie itself. (My main fault with the movie is that the villains [the Home Guard] were way too Snidely Whiplash, and I never quite understood why Reverend Veasey was on the chain gang when he wasn’t a deserter. (As memory serves, he’s a combination of two characters from the book.)
Odd seeing Brendan Gleeson as Stobrod and thinking “this is going to be Madeye Moody” in Harry Potter & tGoF. He was also Menelaus in Troy- hugely talented fellow.
He’ll always be Frank to me. 
As a remake of the Odyssey (or is the Iliad? I get them mixed up) I felt it was pretty lame.
The thing I still recall from seeing the film, as my effort to block the memory is going quite well, is the stupid bit with Natalie Portman. Well the end of the bit with her to be more precise. There were THREE horses left by the now dead Yankees. THREE! THREE HORSES! Does Inman take one of them to oh, maybe shave an hour or three off the movie? NO! Do you really think Ms. Portman is in any condition to take care of three horses? I assure you she is not.
The whole thing just depressed the hell out of me. It didn’t help that I saw it on Christmas night. And I couldn’t stand the parts with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character.