FUN IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA!

[Dave Monroe]

FUN IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA!
10.16.07
By Jeremy Smith
Contributing sources: Hollywood Elsewhere

http://chud.com/nextraimages/loveinthetimeoflequizamo.jpg

If Love in the Time of Cholera is fated to be one of this year's worst
films, then its long, leaden stomp toward wretched artlessness began
when some moron hired a hack to film the words of a poet.

It's not screenwriter Ronald Harwood to whom I object; he did a fine
job with The Pianist, and wrote a very nice play called The Dresser
(which was brilliantly performed onscreen by Albert Finney and Tom
Courtenay in 1983; for theater snobs, it's a modest gem of a movie).
Though he's not the most ecstatic writer, there's at least a touch of
the artist in his grim British bones.

Mike Newell on the other hand...

There's a reason Gabriel Garcia Marquez's went unfilmed for nineteen
years, and it's not just because the title is a little off-putting
when emblazoned across a marquee. As Thomas Pynchon noted in his 1988
New York Times rave for Marquez's novel, "It is a daring step for any
writer to decide to work in love's vernacular, to take it, with all
its folly, imprecision and lapses in taste, at all seriously - that
is, as well worth those higher forms of play that we value in
fiction." In other words, if you're a point-and-shoot guy saddled with
a workmanlike screenplay, the probability is very high that you will
reduce Marquez's prose to cheap schmaltz.

Ladies and gentlemen: "This holiday season, comes the greatest love
story ever told!"

Honestly, this looks like one of those misleading parody trailers that
were all the rage for a hot second (like the one that sold The Shining
as a light-hearted domestic drama). Then, after a while, you realize
that this is what's been done to one of the greatest novels of the
twentieth century, and you begin to seethe. And it's not just the
absurd cheeriness of the voiceover that's objectionable; it's John
Leguizamo's cartoonish cruelty, the inappropriately gooey music (some
of which is apparently from Thomas Newman's score for Angels in
America), and the final, "You've Gotta Be Shittin' Me" insult, "Songs
by Shakira".

While you're at it New Line, why don't you hire Brett Ratner and Jeff
Nathanson to direct and adapt Dreiser's An American Tragedy featuring
"Songs by Biz Markie". Actually... yes, why don't you do that?

I'm having a hard time keeping an open mind on this movie, but if it's
better than I anticipate, I'll compose a 4,000 word prose rhapsody in
its honor when it opens on November 16th.

http://www.chud.com/index.php?type=news&id=12186

Love in the Time of Cholera (2007)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0484740/

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Jn8kht2GVsM

THE HEART'S ETERNAL VOW
By THOMAS PYNCHON
Published: April 10, 1988

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA By Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Translated by
Edith Grossman. 348 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $18.95.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-cholera.html