Showtimes for all movies in the area. Click here!

By Cole Smithey

‘Love in the Time of Cholera’

Movie Trailer

The famed 1985 magical realist novel of Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez gets an ambitious but off-key cinematic adaptation that trips up except in the casting of Javier Bardem as its romantically enthusiastic protagonist. British director Mike Newell (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”) works from a script by Ronald Harwood (“The Pianist”) to tell the epochal story of Florentino Ariza, a young poet living in turn-of-the-century Cartagena, Columbia who falls hopelessly in love with a girl named Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). Fermina’s protective father (John Leguizamo) facilitates her rushed marriage to Dr. Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt), a European-educated aristocrat, thereby dooming Ariza to swear a lasting love that waits busily for the doctor’s death in order to reclaim his true love. But when the momentous event finally occurs some 51 years later, Fermina takes torrential offense at Ariza’s vulgar attempt at cashing in on his vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love. “Don’t show your face again for the years of life that are left to you; I hope there are very few of them.” Fermina’s hostile rebuke sets off the film’s flashback progression that eventually makes some sense of its grotesque title.

The current tendency toward magical realist films demonstrates a deeper reach for escapism than common film genres present. Movies like “The Martian Child,” “Lars and the Real Girl,” “Wristcutters: A Love Story,” “Slipstream,” “The Darjeeling Limited,” “Atonement,” and even Todd Haynes ode to Bob Dylan “I’m Not There” all share magical realist themes that go beyond their geographical and cultural context toward a universal element of inexplicable imagination.

It’s not a far reach to conjecture that our current geo-political and ecological predicaments have cornered some filmmakers into searching for unequivocal truths to supplement a reality strained by devastation and doom. A significant element of magical realist texts is the responsibility they put on the reader or viewer to decode the material. “Love in the Time of Cholera” makes its first demand for ciphering via a juxtaposed title that pits a subjective emotional experience against a haunting plague-interject any kind of war against humanity.

Although Ariza and Fermina are in love, the capitalist demand for greed decrees that she must marry a cad who will eventually cheat on her. An important irony lies in Ariza’s incessant substitution of heartbreak that causes him to seek sexual refuge at every opportunity for the 50 years that he waits for Fermina. The assertion that Ariza makes to Fermina’s papa that “There is no greater glory than to die for love” mutates into keeping count of his carnal conquests (well over 600 before he attempts to reunite with Fermina). The fidelity that he swears finds more devotion to his own transcendent stamina.

Mostly, there are bawdy laughs to be had over Ariza’s slapstick sexual connections that occur in alleys, parlors and on boats. The character’s visible need to be loved proves to be a powerful aphrodisiac for attracting female partners, but the filmmakers miss the mark on keeping an suitable tone the way Spike Jonze did with “Being John Malkovich,” a near-perfect example of a magical realist film. The winky-wink casting of actors like Bratt, Leguizamo and Liev Schreiber in secondary roles distracts from the story’s momentum and takes the viewer out of the movie regardless of the quality of their performances.  

The film works best when Ariza exerts his poetic skill to write love poems for inarticulate lovers as a side business. He’s most fulfilled when enticing romantic commitment between others with rhymes that hit you with the full force of Marquez’s inflamed writing style. If you want to get the woof and warp of “Love in the Time of Cholera,” you’ll have to read the book. That said, Bardem’s intoxicating performance is reason enough to see the movie. CV

‘Stephen King’s The Mist’

Movie Trailer

It took director Frank Darabont writing a better ending for Stephen King’s 1980 novella before he could tackle making the best legitimate horror movie to come out in years. A father and young son become stranded in a populated strip mall grocery store in Maine where a deadly mist enshrouds the area as part of a terrible storm. Hidden in the thick fog are gigantic insects and prehistoric creatures that ensnare the store’s inhabitants in a grip of fear that brings out their worst and best qualities. Marcia Gay Harden is magnificent as a Christian fanatic, and Thomas Jane gives the best performance of his career in a low-budget, retro horror movie that is equal parts satire, suspense and surprise. “Stephen King’s The Mist” is a reminder of what a really great horror movie is all about.

Darabont, whose filmic adaptations of King stories (“The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile”) carry strong stamps of approval, is so in tune with King’s sense of timing, nuance and character development that it feels like he’s getting away way with something from the outset. Because Darabont and King are collaborating writers whose history together goes back to Darabont’s first feature (“The Woman in the Room”) there is a joyful effortlessness that comes across in this collaboration like silk being drawn off a greased spool.

First, we get a charge of inside humor when the opening scene reveals family guy David Drayton (Jane) painting movie poster artwork that is as cheesy as it is enticing. The fierce storm outside has no patience for David’s pastime, and lets him know it by sending a giant tree through the room’s large picture window that shatters our momentary self-satisfaction. Drayton is a man whose concern for property comes as a distant second to the safety of his family. There’s some discussion of the loss of the tree that his grandfather planted, and we instantly know that David is the kind of person we would all like to think we are well intentioned and balanced. It’s an empathy that will steadily increase during the film’s onslaught of irrational physical danger and cult-mentality. And it’s an investment of hope and belief that will be challenged to its core by the end.

Drayton and his 9-year-old son Billy (Nathan Gamble) give their disagreeable neighbor (Andre Braugher) a ride to the town market to pick up supplies before the thick mist descends. But the dense vapor is too quick. A visit to the grocery store’s loading dock gives Drayton and a few local men a sample of what the fog hides when giant barbed tentacles attack them before they can shut the roll-up door. Cynicism, fear and stupidity collide in a volatile mix as the group of store-trapped citizens struggles to make sense of the bizarre events escalating around them.

Darabont could never have gotten funding from a Hollywood studio to make the movie with the shock ending that it has, and so he bucked the system and did it for “seventeen and change” a dauntingly small budget that dictated a muscular approach to the material. The low budget production constraints form a direct link to films like Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” Don Siegel’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” and “Dawn of the Dead.” As with those films, there’s a raw excitement and intensity from the cast and crew that counterbalances King’s meaty source material.

Audiences will take away different measures of meaning from King’s deeply satirical story and its military-inflected dimension. It’s a movie that crosses eras and puts society into a crucible of primal existence. No matter how civilized we may think we are, human tendencies for dealing with the unknown under stressful conditions whether from outside invaders or from the people next to us is remarkably predictable. But what happens inside the mind of an individual beyond the groupthink is something else entirely. You’ll have to see the movie to see that. CV

Comment on this story | Return to top