♥
+ 2nd Worst Movie of the Year
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| Co-star Gwyneth Palthrow floats around nude with a catty look in her eyes on this lusty poster for Alfonso Cuarón's Great Expectations |
The son of a poor fisherman in Florida, Finn, already as a boy falls for the girl he meets at a strange older woman's mansion, and his adoration is of course undiminished as he returns to her as a young man, - though the girl has become a difficult young lady.
Great Expectations is written by Mitch Glazer (Scrooged (1988)), adapting the same-titled 1860-1861 novel by Charles Dickens (The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)), and directed by great Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón (Sólo con Tu Pareja (1991)).
It is an unrecognizable version of Dickens' deep and funny masterpiece, which moves the story up to present-day America and changes names and story to suit its purpose. It begins with somewhat gross French-kissing between the two overly pretty children; then we meet them several years later, and Ethan Hawke (Waterland (1992)) and Gwyneth Palthrow (Iron Man (2008)) are mannered and insufferable as their adult versions. They have very little to do, and we never get near to their characters, who share a romance that is everything but enticing. The element about Hawke's dorky Finn's scribblings later becoming highly sought after art is especially laughable and gravel in the face of all actual Dickens fans caught in this film's web of nonsense. Robert De Niro (Goodfellas (1990)) is the crude escaped convict, whom the boy helps for about half a day, - and is thereby fatefully connected to for the remainder of his life ...
Great Expectations feels as though made by a filmmaker possibly more interested in the starry production and achieving something remotely similar to Richard Linklater's original, successful romance Before Sunrise (1995) (also with Hawke) than in the actual adaptation of Dickens at hand. Emmanuel Lubezki's (The Cat in the Hat (2003)) handsome photography is wasted in this awfully shapeless blunder.
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Watch a trailer for the film here
Cost: 25 mil. $
Box office: 55.4 mil. $
= Flop (returned 2.21 times its cost)
[Great Expectations was released 30 January (North America) and runs 111 minutes. Cuarón talked Hawke into taking the part. Shooting took place from July - October 1996 in New York and Florida. Cuarón later called his time doing the film a "horrible experience" that he'd done "for the wrong reasons" and "shouldn't have done." The film opened #2 (behind Titanic) to a 9.5 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent one more weekend in the top 5 (#5) and grossed 26.4 mil. $ (47.7 % of the total gross. Roger Ebert gave the film a 3/4 star review, translating to 3 notches over this one. Cuarón returned with Y Tu Mamá También (2001). Hawke returned in The Newton Boys (1998); Palthrow in A Perfect Murder (1998); De Niro in Ronin (1998); and Anne Bancroft (Honeymoon in Vegas (1992)) with a voice performance in Antz (1998), in Deep in My Heart (1999, TV movie) and theatrically in Up at the Villa (2000). Great Expectations is rotten at 37 % with a 5.50/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Great Expectations?
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