quick question: have you seen the movie? It would make discussing it a lot easier, and many of the problems you’re having with my review would get instantly cleared up. I’m never looking to not like a movie, but if it’s as bad as this one, there’s not much I can do.

There seem to be a few misunderstandings here, too. I never attack Newell for his nationality, but his mediocrity. Yes, the language is a problem because the accents take me out of the story, and so does the lousy make-up. I’ve seen enough movies to know that actors can be made to age with make-up, or they can be played by older actors. This movie took the make-up route, and it’s not working.

I also never said the novel isn’t well structured; I’m saying that Garcia Marquez tells the byzantine developments, especially of Florintine’s conquests, with extraordinary language, but Newell didn’t find a cinematic equivalent, so we’re left with a “cheesy sex comedy” — which the book isn’t.

Anyway, it seems to me that you’re intentionally misreading much of what I’m saying, perhaps because you’ve already decided you’ll like the movie. If you’d like to defend Love in the Time of Cholera on its own terms, please don’t hesitate.

It’s obvious you came into the theater wanting to hate British Mike Newell for directing an adaptation of Colombian Garcia Marquez’s novel. No one criticized Cuaron for directing GREAT EXPECTATIONS just because he was a Mexican directing a British classic.

In your first paragraph you take a shot at the director, then romanticize the book by putting it on an unobtainable pedestal.

Then you go on to give a synopsis of the story and critcism for the film not being in Spanish. You even say “Garcia Marquez fills the intervening years with outrageous and obsessively detailed anecdotes and labyrinthine detours rendered in extraordinary language.” Are you kidding me? Are you saying his novel does not have an intellegent structure but it is just well written anecdotes and detours?

Next you criticize the director for using make-up to age the actors instead of hiring several pairs of actors to convey the 50 year aging process they go through, as if this is the first time it’s ever been done in a film. Have you ever seen a movie? Do you know that movies have stars and those stars usually continue as the lead actors from beginning to end? Then you say the film is not as rueful or bawdy as GGM’s novel. I think his novel is funny and human, not some cheesy sex comedy like it seems you’re asking this film to be. This may be why you think the Newell plays the dramatic moments for laughs and relies on the score for emotion. And I’m sure you’re just pissed that Catalina Sandino Moreno is not the star of the film so you are criticizing her aging as well.

Instead of taking lazy, misinformed shots at the director based on prejudice against the film going in, maybe you should watch the film with fresh eyes, open to its intelligent design. Not going in wanting a Rocky Horror Picture Show. In reading your bio I expected you to be a thoughtful critic. Your new assignment should be to write a review of the film that criticizes it critically – not with an opening line of “words fail me.” Because if that’s the case, what are you doing writing a review in the first place?