{"id":1712,"date":"2008-12-17T14:41:49","date_gmt":"2008-12-17T21:41:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/?p=1712"},"modified":"2008-12-17T19:44:25","modified_gmt":"2008-12-18T02:44:25","slug":"revolutionary-road-sam-mendes-2008-usauk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/?p=1712","title":{"rendered":"Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes, 2008): USA \/ UK"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Byron Potau<\/a>.\u00a0 Viewed at The Riviera Theatre, Santa Barbara, CA.<\/p>\n

\"\"Considering the names involved Revolutionary Road<\/a><\/em> has to be this season\u2019s biggest disappointment.\u00a0 It is bewildering the praise this film has gotten thus far since it fails on so many levels.\u00a0 It makes me wonder if any of these people who praise the film have actually seen it.\u00a0 Even without the high expectations this film is a total dud.<\/p>\n

Frank and April Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) are the quintessential 1950\u2019s married couple.\u00a0 They have two kids, a beautiful home, and a stable, placid life in Connecticut.\u00a0 April, however, is suffocating in this stability and Frank has essentially becomes his father, working at the same company he did without any hope of doing or becoming anything special.\u00a0 When April decides that they can move to Paris where she will support Frank while he finds what he wants to do with his life this seems to be the answer to all their problems.\u00a0 Their marriage is rekindled and their friends are baffled by their spontaneity until Frank, having been offered a promotion at work, starts to get cold feet.<\/p>\n

The film is full of phony characters and the actors make it worse by overcompensating.\u00a0 Di Caprio hasn\u2019t been this miscast since Gangs of New York.\u00a0 He is completely unconvincing as he struggles through some very trite dialogue.\u00a0 Poor Kate Winslet does what she can, spouting ridiculously banal lines like \u201cyou\u2019re the most interesting person I\u2019ve ever met.\u201d\u00a0 It is a credit to her that she can keep you from rolling your eyes more often than not.\u00a0 I cannot say the same for Kathy Bates whose \u201ctoodle oos\u201d couldn\u2019t be more grating on the nerves.\u00a0 Sam Mendes direction is the very essence of indecision.\u00a0 He seems to have forgotten he is directing a film, not a play.\u00a0 It is bad enough the actors have to work their way through the kind of dialogue that sticks in their throats, but in most of the scenes his camera setups are stationary, distant, and completely uninvolving.\u00a0 Film editing can often be taken for granted until you see what bad editing can do to a film.\u00a0 There are many of the scenes that seem to linger on a second or two too long.\u00a0 I often found myself expecting someone to finally yell \u201ccut!\u201d\u00a0 Quite simply, this is a bad film and one that should be avoided.\u00a0 Hopefully, the buzz will die away and people can see this film for the trite mediocrity it really is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Byron Potau.\u00a0 Viewed at The Riviera Theatre, Santa Barbara, CA. Considering the names involved Revolutionary Road has to be this season\u2019s biggest disappointment.\u00a0 It is bewildering the praise this film has gotten thus far since it fails on so many levels.\u00a0 It makes me wonder if any of these people who praise the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema-society","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}