ON CIRCUIT: Love in the Time of Cholera, One Missed Call and Step Up 2 the Streets.
Love in the Time of Cholera
Plodding adaptation of the modern classic novel of the same name, starring Javier Bardem, Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Benjamin Bratt. The story revolves around star-crossed childhood sweethearts, Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, who are separated in early adulthood, and Ariza’s continued enamourment with Daza. For those who have read the novel, the Hollywood adaptation reads superficially like the textured and subtly layered Gabriel García Márquez novel.
Ariza is clearly obsessed, but the correlation between love and cholera is sorely missed. In the book you knew he was ‘diseased” — here he’s more of an antagonist. Daza is decidedly more enslaved in her marriage to Juvenal Urbino as well, making the goal of ‘liberating” her acceptable. On the whole one feels there’s a pull between a creative team who wanted to stick to the original story and the ‘money draw”. A telling example is the bumping up of America Vicuna’s age from 14 to 20 in order to make her sexuality palatable. For those who haven’t, read the novel instead. — Warren Foster
One Missed Call
Like The Ring and Dark Water, an American reworking of a Japanese horror movie, in this case Takashi Miike’s 2004 haunting, stylish spellbinder. It centres on a series of young people who die off one by one after receiving terrifying phone calls from two days in the future. What really unnerves them is that the phone calls come from themselves. As soon as one dies, the next person in their cellphone’s memory receives the fatal call. As is usually the case in this genre, the ghosts of creepy little girls dominate the proceedings.
The American remake (about 30 minutes shorter than the original) lacks the brooding quality, resoluteness and overall cinematic excellence of the Japanese original, and is fatally marred by Ed Burns’s jarring presence as a dedicated police officer determined to get to the bottom of the murders, despite not being very smart. — Joe Queenan