Tom Joad went out and scored 60 cans of Canned Creme Corn. He is an evil bastard, there would surely be many a homeless person cursing that Joad fella for Creme Corn. This film is not worth the creamed corn we gave to see it! I despised this film. I loathed it. Then later I laughed my ass off about the film, and still later I felt bad for the film.
I promise. First off, I have not read the book. I think having read the book might have helped with my understanding of what I can only call a hopeless mess. I hope not. I loved the first thirty minutes of this movie. I thought it perfectly captured the tone and the profound sense of sadness that it was seeking, but then The film suddenly became what I call a Blaxploitation film. I have a film called ABBY on 16mm. It literally has many hallmarks of the genre.
In one key sequence we have a full frontally naked pregnant wild possessed black woman howling and contorting her jaw while an insane Oprah starts charging with a knife to kill Jason Robards who is dressed like Col Sanders through a crowd of older hymn singing and cross bearing women. And it took foooooor-ever to get going. The audience I saw it with began laughing. This was meant, I think, to be a key dramatic payoff, but for me, and at least at this screening, it was pure exploitation.
When you tie this together with scenes of standing female full flow urination. The bastard got off on a technicality and fled the North Texas county fearing a lynch mob. I hold it to be one of the most repugnant acts of a semi-human being. But this scene just seemed to look and feel exploitive. Jonathan Demme, while a talented director, simply wasn't the right choice for that type of material; he wasn't avant-garde enough to make Morrison cinematic.
Oprah suffers from over exposure - she's everywhere, television, magazine covers, etc. Who wants to go pay to see her in a movie when she's free everywhere else? A couple of years before she made the movie, Oprah's talk show did an episode about the meat industry, and Oprah said, "I will never eat another hamburger again.
Some farmer's association publicly criticized Oprah and sued her. There were racial overtones to the scenario because all the farmers were white. Oprah won the court case. She would later declare that during that trial, she WAS Sethe. And so that's why she cast herself in the lead role of the film. Conveniently, the hardest scenes were performed by another actress who played "Young Sethe".
It was yet another actress, though, who won most of the accolades: Kimberly Elise. Oprah came off as wooden and as I don't think she's a great actress; her performance in The Color Purple was a fluke. This was also around the time she declared her talk show too good for the topics featured by Ricki Lake and Jerry Springer Then she launched all that "Live your best life" crap, and she was pimping her marathon trainer and weight loss guru Bob Greene.
This is when she became insufferable. R16, No, I never got to that subject with Melvin; it was really just a business call. My impression was that he was never very bright. The information he gave me turned out to be inaccurate. But he tried to be a realtor all the way to the end of his life. I didn't want him to be my real estate agent. I did end up buying a house, not through him, but I live only 15 miles from the spot he claimed to have picked up Howard Hughes at. It's also near the Cottontail Ranch, a now-defunct brothel that Hughes was rumored to be a regular visitor of.
And the airstrip is still there. I liked the film quite a lot. Needless to say, the book was better. As usual with mega-celebrities, expectations made it hard for the film to be given fair critiques.
I audited a graduate level class when I was an undergrad. The entire class was on the novel Beloved. Taught by Toni Morrison. I campaigned hard to her to let me audit it. I am glad I did because she left for Princeton the next semester. This was supposed to be Oprah's big moment as an actress; to show off her acting chops, but instead, it showed her limitations as an actress.
She is a decent actress, but she's not great. The other thing is this film came out in Here in Toronto, new, bigger multiplexes emerged in light of Titanic. Beloved was plunked into these same multiplexes and audiences just weren't interested. It was too weird, too depressing. It was basically an art house film playing in multiplexes only because it had Oprah and Jonathan Demme's names attached. Having said that, there is much to admire about this film.
It reminds me a little of Heaven's Gate. It ultimately fails, but the film has its merits. The actress who played the younger version of Oprah's character was very good.
In fact, the entire supporting cast was excellent and outshone Oprah. The cinematography was striking and evocative. And the score by Rachel Portman was beautiful and haunting and remains underrated.
It should have been nominated for an Oscar. I liked the movie. It can't hold a candle to the novel, but, as others have posted, Morrison's hybrid of magical realism and novels of consciousness don't translate so well to a dramatic or visual medium--you need the words.
Same with Virginia Woolf, James Joyce though Huston made a fine film of The Dead and William Faulkner the only really good film adaptations of his novels are The Reivers, one of his least characteristic novels, and Intruder in the Dust, a pretty traditional murder mystery, albeit centered on race.
The movie was OK and well-acted. Thandie Newton and Kimberly Elise were fantastic and I'm glad their careers took off despite the film not doing well. It's a tough book to translate to film and it was a mistake to make it too literal a narrative. A director like Guillermo del Toro might have done a better job weaving in some of the fantastical elements of the story and bringing to life Morrison's writing style. Another book of hers I'd love to see made into a film is Song of Solomon.
Done right, that would be an amazing movie. I'm surprised no one has filmed The Bluest Eye--it is, in general, a traditionally written narrative and would have been a great opportunity for Qwhatever Wallis right off of Beasts. A self-hating Black child raped and impregnated by her father and who gives birth to a stillborn is pretty heavy even for the most ambitious filmmaker.
I can't say anything bad about the acting in any aspects - to sum it up as a whole, the acting here is just flat-out amazing. Along with the wonderful acting, the directing is great also.
Academy Award winner Jonathan Demme who also directed the award winning crime-suspense masterpiece "The Silence of the Lambs" handles the story well and keeps things consistently absorbing and ultimately haunting. Very nice cinematography is present too, and there are tons of symbolic images throughout the film that are placed nicely in the mix, along with a lot of shots of nature and wildlife.
Don't let the average user rating scare you off from this film, because it really deserves much better than that. I guess this is one of those "love it or hate it" movies, but I thought it was an unforgettable movie.
This movie features a very disturbing story and standout performances, especially from Thandie Newton. It is not for the faint of heart, the squeamish, or those who only watch movies for glamor and escapism. Some of the scenes should've been edited out or shot less graphically. While I admired the power of this film I have no desire to see it again. SKG-2 3 February Though I am disappointed when good smart films do poorly and dumb films do well at the box office, I think people who are wringing their hands over the box office failure of this movie are forgetting one thing; this was a very difficult novel, and the filmmakers made the admirable decision not to water it down for the screen, so it's a difficult movie too.
However, it's worthwhile for those who can stick to it, once you get past the clumsy beginning. I rarely watch Oprah's show, so I wasn't thinking about that while watching her, and I thought she was quite good.
Danny Glover was well matched with her, and Kimberly Elise was good as well. However, for me the best performance came from Thandie Newton as Beloved. It's very difficult to play convincingly a child unformed in personality and soul trapped in an adult's body, but she does it extremely well. I went into this movie with an open mind.
I knew it was a so-called "chick" movie. But I watched Steel Magnolias. I knew it was 3 hours long. But I sat through the director's cut version of Dune. On TV. With commericals. I was prepared.
Shaking and frightened, I stumbled to my car. Until now I have been unable to summon the courage and strength to describe the horror known as "Beloved". It seems very obvious that luckiest ones were John Demme, the editors, and other cast members of this film. This is because they obviously did not watch the finished movie before releasing it!! If they had, they would have either edited the heck out of it, or completely reshot most of it!
This movie is not just long and boring; there are many parts that don't even make any sense. While many parts of the movie are quite good, and the film itself was very well made from the costumes down to the lighting , the plot goes from Touchy-feely to Social Commentary to Freddy Krueger-ish.
If John Demme would have just taken the good parts of this movie, made some sense of the plot, and toned down the bizarr-o parts, this movie could have been 1, times better. I can only recommend this movie to die-hard fans of Oprah, or those with a lot of time and a good fast forward button. By the way, this is hardly your sterotypical "chick" movie. There is nudity, sex, rape, violence, and freaky stuff. So if you like to watch Oprah while having tea and crumpets with your knitting club, perhaps you should just stick to "Steel Magnolias".
CriticsVoiceVideo 17 March This is one bizarre movie. I'm still not sure what the message is. It runs three hours but feels more like three days. Not worth it. I give it a three for good acting and production design. Beloved is saved by fine performances from a fine cast but this good movie could have been a great movie. There is no doubt about it. Oprah Winfrey can act and in Beloved she displays a range unlike anything I have seen her in including The Color Purple.
Where Beloved falls down is in its writing and its preoccupation with the super natural. If you haven't read the book, it will take more than one 3 hour viewing to understand what is going on in the first half of the film.
The score is excellent and cinamatography is exceptional. It is certainly worth seeing but be prepared to be confused at times. One of the scariest movies I've ever seen!
Spoilers ahead!!! This movie really disturbed me. Oprah is awesome as Sethe, an escaped slave, who has to come to grip with a violent past, and an aweful, desperate act of her own-she kills one of her own children to save her from a life of slavery. It also focuses on her daughter, played by Kimberly Elise, and how she has to deal with her mother sliding away into madness.
Danny Glover plays Paul D Garner, an old friend of Sethe's who comes back into her life at a critical time. Thandie Newton plays Beloved, a strange young woman who wanders into their lives and turns everything upside down!
Is this young woman Sethe's deceased daughter? This movie is thought-provoking, brutal and complete wonderful! It's one of the best ghost stories I've ever seen and is also a great coming of age tale!
I never read "Beloved", but with all the lavish praise heaped upon the novel I can only guess how badly he botched this up. One of my favorite director's should assume full blame for this travesty of a film. It is such a long and meandering mess. Obnoxious characters other than the 2 leads , ridiculous motivation, I mean nothing rang true. When the title character is on screen, it is the cinematic equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. Hokey, annoying, the list goes on. Jonathan Demme has made some of the greatest films of the last twenty years.
Oh well, can't wait for "Hannibal". This is how not to make a book based on a novel. The world of books work in a different way than film. There's an use of imagination and wordplay in literature hardly translatable to film. It doesn't mean you can't make a film that translates the feel of a novel. It means that each medium have advantages and disadvantages you got to learn how to exploit. In Beloved, the attempt was to emulate the book as if you were reading it right at the spot.
It doesn't work for a film. The result is one of the most incredibly tedious things ever put on celluloid. There's an air of arrogance in the way the film is being told. As if they don't really care if you get what it's all about or not. The highlights of the story are so few and far between, it doesn't really matter anyway. It seems like this film was made only for the enjoyment of Oprah and her fans. Mainstream audiences should avoid this movie like the plague.
Beloved is a three hour long torture-piece! This movie deals with slavery and of course incorporates a love story and other ridiculous elements to make you want to wish you were never born so you'd never have to endure such garbage.
The acting was good, but the story line was unbearably stupid. There were plenty of unnecessarily disgusting scenes that made me want to never eat again, and this movie was just plain boring. If you're interested in seeing movies about slavery that don't include elements of fantasy, but contain elements of truth, don't see this.
Exquisitely acted! I saw this movie about a year ago and thought it was pretty good. I'd understood why many people would not love it after watching this. I understand it's pretty difficult to follow and rather disturbing. But as you know, it's based on a book written by Toni Morrison, who is a wonderful writer. Toni Morrison's books are quite hard to understand; so is this movie, but I think they're worthwhile.
I thought it would get many academy awards, but unfortunately it didn't. The costumes were fascinating and very fitted to the movie; nevertheless I keep wondering why it didn't get any academy awards. At least it got an academy award nomination for best costume design, which was very well deserved. This made me follow this movie without disliking it. I know people say it's rather disturbing, long and slow.
Perhaps they're somewhat right; however I think it's still worth watching, though it's longer than usual. The performances in "Beloved" are quite excellent; all the actors in this movie play their roles so real that you'd think they're really going through the drama in life itself.
You'll think this not just a movie; you'll think it's completely real. Have a look at Beloved's character; she behaves childishly and has strange ways. Her nudes at the end were quite artistic; this is what makes this movie so real. I think it would have been a lot better if it had been better directed. I think the direction was somewhat weak, maybe that's one of the reasons it's very difficult to follow and understand, but this is still a very interesting and brilliant movie, which makes me think a lot.
This is not an excellent movie, but it's worth watching though. Amazed DannyBoy 20 March I read Beloved in an intro English course and it took me a long while to get used to Toni Morrison's writing style. She once said in an interview that she wrote the book to be disorienting, in some ways to re-enact the feeling of the slave diaspora. I thought the book heart-wrenching, at times gut-wrenching, and vivid. The character of Paul D never made much sense, seeming like a man waiting for something to happen, but Sethe burned off the page.
What I remember most is Baby Suggs' speech at the rock, which the film has divided into three segments. I projected Beloved for the college theater and I have to say it was long and arduous, especially if you haven't read the novel. I read a lot of comments talking about the ghost in Beloved, but the ghost is more of a catalyst for looking into the characters than the star of the film.
I admired the time put in most. It just seemed like Demme and Tak Fujimoto, and the lighting designer as well, gave the actors the time they needed to act and sink into things: unlike traditional MTV-editing, some scenes were comprised of only one shot, usually tracking, as Paul D and Sethe in the cornfield.
The score was brilliant; Portman really found a grace in stillness and the trembling African voice and the flute. It was bare but riveting at the same time. People have said that the film went for too much shock value. That's possible- did we need the close-up of the dead child at the breast?
But then again when we read it in the book, don't we think of it? Don't we for a split second see that image in our heads? I for one thought of much more graphic things when Morrison discussed Paul D and Beloved's night in the shed.
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