While the film is handsome to look at and has its fair share of realism, it also gets plenty sappy along the way.
Audio:
The sound is available via either Dolby Digital 5.1 or DTS 5.1. In DD 5.1 the front-channel stereo spread is quite wide, and the rear or side channels are well utilized in carefully assigned surround, with good directionality. The noise of war is all-enveloping, as it should be, but the more subtle impressions of massed voices, choirs, thunder, and rain are also effective. Add to the mix a strong, deep bass, wide dynamics, and a powerful transient impact, and you get an impressive workout for your audio system.
Extras:
The special features contain just about what you would expect from a two-disc set. Disc one includes the widescreen presentation of the film, with its Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 soundtracks; an audio commentary with director Anthony Minghella and film editor Walter Murch; twenty-eight scene selections; English and French spoken languages; and English and French subtitles, with English captions for the hearing impaired.
Disc two is given over to the bulk of the extras, including several documentaries and specials on the film. The main item is a seventy-four minute documentary, "Climbing Cold Mountain," that goes behind the scenes with the production, the sets (filmed in Romania), the battles, the casting, etc. After that is a twenty-nine minute making-of special, "A Journey to Cold Mountain," which repeats a lot of the material from the first documentary in essentially an extended promotional format. Next, there's yet another special, a ninety-two minute concert feature, "Words and Music of Cold Mountain," with the participation of Ms. Kidman, the director, Sting, the film's musicians, and others reading from the novel and singing the film's songs. All of these tributes seemed to me more than a little self-reverential, as though the movie were already a cinematic legend of the highest order rather than a high-class potboiler. Then, there are eleven deleted scenes; followed by three storyboard comparisons; and a brief, four-minute selection called "Sacred Harp History," a look at the historical book from which most of the film's authentic folk tunes come. The second disc concludes with Sneak Peeks at ten other Buena Vista titles, a trailer for "Cold Mountain" among them.
A four-page booklet insert provides a guide to the chapter titles and bonus materials. Unlike the booklets Disney provides for kids, adults will have no trouble following this one.
Closing Salvos from Yunda Eddie Feng:
Anthony Minghella's 1996 film "The English Patient" received great notices from journalist critics and filmmaking circles. The film also won nine Oscars, making it Miramax's biggest winner (to date) at the annual Hollywood beauty contest. Minghella's next film, 1999's "The Talented Mr. Ripley", grossed approximately $81 million at the North American box office (less than the $78 million collected by "The English Patient" when you consider inflation), though it was not as successful as its predecessor when it came to collecting awards. Therefore, I suppose that it makes some sort of sense that Minghella made "The English Patient" all over again for his next big motion picture project.
"Cold Mountain", set during the American Civil War, relates the stories of Inman (Jude Law, "The Talented Mr. Ripley") and Ada (Nicole Kidman, "The Hours"). He wants to get back to North Carolina from Virginia after receiving several letters from Ada that describe her loneliness and suffering. She, being the lady-like daughter of a deceased preacher, is on the brink of starvation since she is unable to eke a living from her lands. Ruby (Renee Zellweger, "Chicago"), a tough tomboy, arrives on Ada's farm to help her survive hard times. The two women fight off dangerous men, and everyone meets "colorful" characters straight out of the Cliché Handbook.
I know that "Cold Mountain" is based on Charles Frazier's award-winning novel, but the movie is basically an inferior re-make of "The English Patient". Both movies spend a great deal of time following a man's journey on foot towards meeting the love of his life. Inman, like Almasy in "The English Patient", disregards the macro-level implications of war in favor of personal considerations. There are some shots in "Cold Mountain" that are near-exact copies of the compositions found in the 1996 film, and Ada is a composite of Katharine and Hana from "The English Patient" in terms of her mechanical function within the plot. (Ada is both the lover and the memory-carrier in relation to Inman.) For good measure, we even get a piano as a calling-card for love. Perhaps it's as my film professor, Dr. Warren Buckland, said to me--that the filmmakers were re-using their techniques just as writers often use the same sentence structures to perfect their craft. That does not automatically make "Cold Mountain" a lesser effort than "The English Patient", though the end result is still much less effective than one might reasonably anticipate.
For the most part, the film's casting betrays any effectiveness that the story generates. Jude Law does not make much of an impression as the film's hero. Several cameos distracted me since I was too busy thinking about the actors' names rather than focusing on the movie itself. I was appalled by the horrible faux-Southern accents, and the humor was not well-integrated into the drama. Renee Zellweger hails from Texas, but her accent is actually the worst of the bunch. The thing is, Zellweger is fairly funny in the movie (she plays a caricature), but her humorous take on the character does not belong in "Cold Mountain".
Like Steven Spielberg, Minghella has assembled a team of filmmakers that works with him on every movie. However, while the team deserves to be commended for its efforts on both "The English Patient" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (the latter's faults arose from Minghella's writing and directing), it shares the blame with Minghella for the problems from which "Cold Mountain" suffers. Ann Roth's costumes escape my scathing words since there's nothing obviously wrong with them. Gabriel Yared's score for "The English Patient" is the only thing by him that I like, so we can dispense with any criticism of his music for this movie (more of the usual elevator muzak that one ignores). John Seale's cinematography was surprisingly rote and undistinguished. Seale re-uses his framings and angles from "The English Patient" without achieving anything noteworthy. The worst offender on the Minghella team is probably editor Walter Murch, a winner of several Oscars.
The movie is disappointingly lumpy. Walter Murch is a genius when it comes to sound designing and film editing, but for "Cold Mountain", he seems content with chucking blobs of isolated incidents onto the screen, hoping that they'll stick together as some sort of a whole. At more than 2.5 hours, the movie is a host to several scenes/threads that should've been dropped, including the sequences with a weird medicine woman, with Natalie Portman as a war widow, with Philip Seymour Hoffman as a disgraceful minister, with Inman being caught and chained to other war deserters by the Confederate army, with Ruby's romance with a traveling minstrel, etc. Most of the scenes that I would've removed from the film take place during Inman's travels. My sister tells me that Inman finds himself in various weird encounters in the novel, but as with "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers", faithfulness to either the spirit or the text of a source book means nothing if the adaptation to the film medium does not succeed on cinematic terms. Minghella and Co. made a movie that feels as if it had been shitted out in links.
One of two good things going for the movie is its depiction of the American Civil War era that puts to shame the romantic vision of the South perpetrated by "Gone With the Wind". As someone who tires of hearing about how "great" "Gone With the Wind" is, I was quite pleased to see the film's war sequences disabuse viewers of the notion that the Civil War only served to destroy the South's genteel nature. The other good thing is Nicole Kidman. Her Southern American accent is shaky like just about everyone else's (she sounds like the Australian that she is even though she managed a decent generic American accent for "Eyes Wide Shut"), but her acting is otherwise emotionally affecting. Also, it can only help that Kidman looks stunningly beautiful, fetchingly cute, heartbreakingly despondent, or ravishingly stylish (check out her black ensemble during the film's climax) when need be. Kidman really is her generation's Grace Kelly.
On DVD Town's ten-scale, I rate "Cold Mountain" a "5" out of "10".
The sound is available via either Dolby Digital 5.1 or DTS 5.1. In DD 5.1 the front-channel stereo spread is quite wide, and the rear or side channels are well utilized in carefully assigned surround, with good directionality. The noise of war is all-enveloping, as it should be, but the more subtle impressions of massed voices, choirs, thunder, and rain are also effective. Add to the mix a strong, deep bass, wide dynamics, and a powerful transient impact, and you get an impressive workout for your audio system.
Extras:
The special features contain just about what you would expect from a two-disc set. Disc one includes the widescreen presentation of the film, with its Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 soundtracks; an audio commentary with director Anthony Minghella and film editor Walter Murch; twenty-eight scene selections; English and French spoken languages; and English and French subtitles, with English captions for the hearing impaired.
Disc two is given over to the bulk of the extras, including several documentaries and specials on the film. The main item is a seventy-four minute documentary, "Climbing Cold Mountain," that goes behind the scenes with the production, the sets (filmed in Romania), the battles, the casting, etc. After that is a twenty-nine minute making-of special, "A Journey to Cold Mountain," which repeats a lot of the material from the first documentary in essentially an extended promotional format. Next, there's yet another special, a ninety-two minute concert feature, "Words and Music of Cold Mountain," with the participation of Ms. Kidman, the director, Sting, the film's musicians, and others reading from the novel and singing the film's songs. All of these tributes seemed to me more than a little self-reverential, as though the movie were already a cinematic legend of the highest order rather than a high-class potboiler. Then, there are eleven deleted scenes; followed by three storyboard comparisons; and a brief, four-minute selection called "Sacred Harp History," a look at the historical book from which most of the film's authentic folk tunes come. The second disc concludes with Sneak Peeks at ten other Buena Vista titles, a trailer for "Cold Mountain" among them.
A four-page booklet insert provides a guide to the chapter titles and bonus materials. Unlike the booklets Disney provides for kids, adults will have no trouble following this one.
Closing Salvos from Yunda Eddie Feng:
Anthony Minghella's 1996 film "The English Patient" received great notices from journalist critics and filmmaking circles. The film also won nine Oscars, making it Miramax's biggest winner (to date) at the annual Hollywood beauty contest. Minghella's next film, 1999's "The Talented Mr. Ripley", grossed approximately $81 million at the North American box office (less than the $78 million collected by "The English Patient" when you consider inflation), though it was not as successful as its predecessor when it came to collecting awards. Therefore, I suppose that it makes some sort of sense that Minghella made "The English Patient" all over again for his next big motion picture project.
"Cold Mountain", set during the American Civil War, relates the stories of Inman (Jude Law, "The Talented Mr. Ripley") and Ada (Nicole Kidman, "The Hours"). He wants to get back to North Carolina from Virginia after receiving several letters from Ada that describe her loneliness and suffering. She, being the lady-like daughter of a deceased preacher, is on the brink of starvation since she is unable to eke a living from her lands. Ruby (Renee Zellweger, "Chicago"), a tough tomboy, arrives on Ada's farm to help her survive hard times. The two women fight off dangerous men, and everyone meets "colorful" characters straight out of the Cliché Handbook.
I know that "Cold Mountain" is based on Charles Frazier's award-winning novel, but the movie is basically an inferior re-make of "The English Patient". Both movies spend a great deal of time following a man's journey on foot towards meeting the love of his life. Inman, like Almasy in "The English Patient", disregards the macro-level implications of war in favor of personal considerations. There are some shots in "Cold Mountain" that are near-exact copies of the compositions found in the 1996 film, and Ada is a composite of Katharine and Hana from "The English Patient" in terms of her mechanical function within the plot. (Ada is both the lover and the memory-carrier in relation to Inman.) For good measure, we even get a piano as a calling-card for love. Perhaps it's as my film professor, Dr. Warren Buckland, said to me--that the filmmakers were re-using their techniques just as writers often use the same sentence structures to perfect their craft. That does not automatically make "Cold Mountain" a lesser effort than "The English Patient", though the end result is still much less effective than one might reasonably anticipate.
For the most part, the film's casting betrays any effectiveness that the story generates. Jude Law does not make much of an impression as the film's hero. Several cameos distracted me since I was too busy thinking about the actors' names rather than focusing on the movie itself. I was appalled by the horrible faux-Southern accents, and the humor was not well-integrated into the drama. Renee Zellweger hails from Texas, but her accent is actually the worst of the bunch. The thing is, Zellweger is fairly funny in the movie (she plays a caricature), but her humorous take on the character does not belong in "Cold Mountain".
Like Steven Spielberg, Minghella has assembled a team of filmmakers that works with him on every movie. However, while the team deserves to be commended for its efforts on both "The English Patient" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (the latter's faults arose from Minghella's writing and directing), it shares the blame with Minghella for the problems from which "Cold Mountain" suffers. Ann Roth's costumes escape my scathing words since there's nothing obviously wrong with them. Gabriel Yared's score for "The English Patient" is the only thing by him that I like, so we can dispense with any criticism of his music for this movie (more of the usual elevator muzak that one ignores). John Seale's cinematography was surprisingly rote and undistinguished. Seale re-uses his framings and angles from "The English Patient" without achieving anything noteworthy. The worst offender on the Minghella team is probably editor Walter Murch, a winner of several Oscars.
The movie is disappointingly lumpy. Walter Murch is a genius when it comes to sound designing and film editing, but for "Cold Mountain", he seems content with chucking blobs of isolated incidents onto the screen, hoping that they'll stick together as some sort of a whole. At more than 2.5 hours, the movie is a host to several scenes/threads that should've been dropped, including the sequences with a weird medicine woman, with Natalie Portman as a war widow, with Philip Seymour Hoffman as a disgraceful minister, with Inman being caught and chained to other war deserters by the Confederate army, with Ruby's romance with a traveling minstrel, etc. Most of the scenes that I would've removed from the film take place during Inman's travels. My sister tells me that Inman finds himself in various weird encounters in the novel, but as with "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers", faithfulness to either the spirit or the text of a source book means nothing if the adaptation to the film medium does not succeed on cinematic terms. Minghella and Co. made a movie that feels as if it had been shitted out in links.
One of two good things going for the movie is its depiction of the American Civil War era that puts to shame the romantic vision of the South perpetrated by "Gone With the Wind". As someone who tires of hearing about how "great" "Gone With the Wind" is, I was quite pleased to see the film's war sequences disabuse viewers of the notion that the Civil War only served to destroy the South's genteel nature. The other good thing is Nicole Kidman. Her Southern American accent is shaky like just about everyone else's (she sounds like the Australian that she is even though she managed a decent generic American accent for "Eyes Wide Shut"), but her acting is otherwise emotionally affecting. Also, it can only help that Kidman looks stunningly beautiful, fetchingly cute, heartbreakingly despondent, or ravishingly stylish (check out her black ensemble during the film's climax) when need be. Kidman really is her generation's Grace Kelly.
On DVD Town's ten-scale, I rate "Cold Mountain" a "5" out of "10".
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