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Reviews
Deeply (2000)
Deeply drowns in the shallows
This is an astonishingly stupid movie.
Though the cinematography is grand, the rest stinks: acting, accents, plot, editing, you name it.
We're supposed to accept that a "CURSE" (woooooo, are you scared yet?) was cast on a Nova Scotian island by a drowning Viking couple! causing all the fish to leave every 50 years (FISH! Are you paying attention, fish?) causing hard times for the fish-killing islanders until the "first born" of the fishing season every half century takes a lover who is lost and lamented. You can hardly imagine a stupider myth to hang a movie on.
Unless you intercut TWO stories of the previous mythbuster and the current one, illustrating uncanny parallels and playing it all out with no surprises.
Just about everything in this mess of a film is unmotivated, implausible, unbelievable, inexplicable.
The character Celia (Lynn Redgrave) is a writer whose mythic tale touching on these events a publisher has just rejected -- we can see why! That's the only honest touch.
A Beautiful Mind (2001)
A Beautiful Mindlessness
I enjoyed this movie and agree with most of the comments I have read. However, I do have a strong reservation.
Ron Howard has chosen a story with an all-too-familiar plot: misunderstood outsider succeeds famously. And with a typical Hollywood-Academy-Award treatment, he focuses on charm and action rather than portray anything that might challenge us to think and understand. Exactly what was it that Nash produced which led to the Nobel Prize? We have no clue. Instead we're treated to clever dialog, wild action scenes, guns, and car chases, emotional trauma, and occasional, eccentric mathematical scribbling on windows which is supposed to convey profundity. The reason Nash's biography is more interesting than most is the influential theories he developed. Emptying the piece of this intellectual content insults our intelligence and undermines the deep significance of the story.
Innocence (2000)
Guilt
An amazing percentage of movies are motivated by infidelity. This one I felt was better than most, and unusual in that it somewhat seriously portrayed love among the elderly. Unfortunately, the overall treatment is superficial. John, the cuckolded husband is (as usual) made a joke, so his real pain is never conveyed. His wife Claire is convincingly torn between her duty as a lifetime companion and the thrill of renewing a youthful romance with Andreas who is hopelessly miscast. There is virtually nothing attractive about this older lover. He has no charisma and consequently there is no chemistry between the two. He is a poor actor and his interactions seem forced and perfunctory. It isn't believable that Claire would be so re-enamored with him. Worst of all Claire takes no responsibility for her flat marriage. For decades, she apparently has not spoken a word of discontent or sought any improvement in the relationship. Then she blames everything on John. Overall this is merely surfaces, nothing probative. And technically, there are annoying repetitious flashbacks...over and over -- okay, we get the point, give it a rest.