Atonement by Joe Wright

We should have walked out on this one -- as soon as we were overwhelmed by it's heavy handed combination of guilt, sexuality, class, and artsiness. But doesn't hope spring eternal ? (and we so badly wanted to have an evenings entertainment -- having waited several months for something like an adult movie to arrive at our local cinema)

(I am now swearing an oath -- to never again buy tickets to a movie set in an upper class mansion with a sexy working class maintenance man who wants to be a doctor)

Nothing made sense -- and isn't that Aristotle's first rule for a good tragedy ?

And -- there was no character development --- i.e. the two lovers were just as unreal as a 12 year old novelist would make them.

Perhaps that's the point of the movie --- that this is a precocious 12 year old's vision of the world -- with horrible sex and horrible death and adults who are incomprehensible -- but who can sit through 120 minutes of that ?


And I can't believe the film got so many positive reviews!

Except for A. O. Scott in the New York Times -- whose opinions I will now be looking for.

He wrote that "The film, after a tantalizing start, sputters to a halt in a welter of grandiose imagery and hurtling montage." -- although I would hardly agree that the stiffling sense of boredom and repressed sexuality in the beginning scenes was all that tantalizing.

I can't believe the film maker really expected his audience to care about the two lovers -- especially whether they would ever get together again ( or even whether they would live or die)

And I can't believe that he cared either -- so there's just something monumentally cynical about the entire project.