Home / Scene / ?The Words? fails to live up to hype
Preston Barta / Intern
OPINION
There are no words to express how atrocious ?The Words? really is. At the film?s core there is a grand story based on an iconic writer?s legend, but it is buried beneath 50 feet of rigmarole.
?The Words,? a layered romantic drama, features an all-star cast, including Bradley Cooper, Dennis Quaid, Jeremy Irons, Zoe Saldana, J.K. Simmons, Ben Barnes and Olivia Wilde.
At first glance, the plot and cast have all the makings of a great movie. The story of Rory Jansen (Cooper) is incredibly appealing but unravels into tatters with each of the many aforementioned layers and every line of dialogue.
The film begins with Clay Hammond (Quaid), a novelist who is speaking about his new book at a seminar. The book is about Jansen and how he stole the words of another writer.
The next nested story is about Jansen himself as he stumbles upon a manuscript in a briefcase that he and his wife (Saldana) purchased at a Parisian shop. After he publishes this work as his own with wild success, Jansen then faces the harsh price that he must pay for stealing another man?s work.
The final nested story comes about when the true writer of this so-called ?great novel? surfaces. ?The Old Man?, as he is called, played by the phenomenal Jeremy Irons (Scar, ?The Lion King?), finds Jansen in a park one day and tells him the story of how he came to write the novel along with how he came to lose it.
The origin of this film was one of the great legends of Ernest Hemingway, who was said to have lost nearly all his works prior to the 1920s due to his first wife Hadley leaving a briefcase of his on a train.
If the screenwriters had focused on this story before jam-packing it with useless nonsense, they might have had a decent movie on their hands.
Instead, they outfoxed themselves with cleverness and, to top it off, slathered the script in some of the worst dialogue ever spoken on the silver screen.
So a possibly more accurate criticism might just be that the movie needed different and better screenwriters.
The only respectable things about the film were the lovely musical score by an underrated Marcelo Zarvos and the actors? performances, when they weren?t hamstrung by the dialogue.
?The Words? played at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and it should have stayed there. Do not waste your time seeing this. It is two hours that you won?t ever get back.
Source: http://www.ntdaily.com/?p=68059
josh turner barnaby barnaby the cabin in the woods the cabin in the woods trace adkins the darkest hour
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.