Reviews

The filmmakers try to paint the influence of the Mondovis and Robert Parker as a travesty on par with the German occupation of France and the reign of Fascism. But they never find a victim in this film. We hear wine makers, critics and distributors bemoan that while the wine industry grows it becomes increasingly homogeneous. But the film never makes a case that this has resulted in the loss of any good wine or exploitation of any person or culture other than naive Wine Spectator readers with lots of cash. If they want to pay hundreds of dollars for a dull wine, so be it.

If this were a film about the diamond trade, where the DeBeers corporation's market domination results in human suffering, the muckraking style might have been appropriate. But as it is it just comes off as anti-American, anti-modernization and anti-capitalist. Had the filmmakers been around in the 1870s they most likely would have protested the grafting of American vines in the effort to save French wine.

There is no reason why this film needed to be three and a half hours long. You could trim the last hour of the film that is just a never-ending farewell that could have been completed in about 15 minutes. There are also plenty of dramatic pauses and sluggish scenes that should be on the editing room floor. Even the battle scenes are redundant. Didn't we basically see the assault on Gondor in the second installment? How many times do we need to see an overwhelming numbers of Orcs being inexplicably defeated by a depleted band of humans? Everyone who thinks that this is great epic film making needs to go back and take another look at films like Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Spartacus or even Gone with the Wind. These films use their long formats to build characters and emotion whereas The Return of the King just piles on the battles and speeches and teary-eyed goodbyes to no overall effect (plus some were kind enough to include an intermission). It's as if Jackson believed that a film has too be bloated and long in order to be important. This is an epic waste of time.

A hilarious skewering of pompous French intellectuals. Godard does a masterful job of presenting this satire without even the slightest wink. The (several) scenes of the tortured artist leafing through a book of empty pages was a laugh riot! I can't wait for the American version!