Good Book. Bad Film!

Love In The Time Cholera is a major disappointment. After months and months of pestering the local DVD boys for the film, a copy finally landed in my hands to my utter dismay.

Caveat emptor... I had high expectations of this film for I believe any filmmaker who attempts at this book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez must be cock sure that he or she must be able to do a real kick ass job. In this case, Mike Nevell failed miserably.

Watching this film feels like a very badly written Cliff Notes... I assume that the filmmaker merely read the book and ticked off all the key scenes that he wants to include in the film...

Doctor Juvenal Urbino pulling down Fermina's Daza top to check for cholera... check
Florentino Ariza renewing his vows to Fermina Daza after Juvenal Urbino's death... check
Juvenal Urbino explaining the function of the penis to Fermina Daza... check
Florentino getting it on with the stranger in the boat... check
Florentino getting it on with the widow Nazaret... check
Florentino getting it on with Olympia and painting 'this is mine' with an arrow pointing to vagina on belly, only to have her husband see it later in the night and killing her... check
Et-cetera... check

The art direction is also unforgivable... somehow it looks like a closed set... like the kind you see in hongkong tv period dramas and is far from the Cortegena that I imagined while reading the book.

And the music... God, have mercy on me... tacky classical latin guitar music peppered throughout the film with Shakira shrieking now and then. Truly unforgivable. The music makes the film look like some afternoon telenovella.

Fuck... I am so pissed off... months of anticipation that led only to this.

Please... please don't ever try to adapt 'One Hundred Years Of Solitude' into a film...