So, I'm pimping this a little bit because......I'm in it. Ok, I was only an extra. But, I should have some fun screentime and the film looks really quite good. HBO has released quite a few trailers and behind the scenes featurettes on it that have me really excited for it.

Cool what scene are you in?

A bunch in the Hotel Florida, on the train but mostly as a tank driver that takes Kidman to the hotel.

I love Kidman so I'll likely check it out on DVD/Blu-ray.

I'm the little one on the right.

I'm excited to watch it tonight.

Perhaps HBO should have divided it into two 80-minute parts, though, similar to Living in the Material World last year. One almost three-hour sit might be tough for many viewers, particularly if the pace is deliberate.

Review: http://www.worldofkj.com/article.php?i=734

Stray observations:

- The last scene is just bad. A bad idea badly presented.
- WTF was Robert Duvall up to in his cameo? Bizarre.
- The first sex scene is certainly...interesting. I almost feel it was gaudily effective, even if it was hard not to laugh at its, shall we say, explosive qualities.
- Clive Owen deserves an Emmy, Golden Globe, etc. Dude nailed it, even if the movie has issues.

So um, this was pretty terrible.

The first half in Spain was actually kind of good and the interplay between Owen and Kidman when they meet, flirt and get together is enjoyable. Then it becomes incredibly repetitive and boring, piling on hilarious sex scene after hilarious sex scene (quite a banner year for Kidman in this dept it seems) with fighting between Hemingway and Gellhorn. Worse though is that for being a famed war correspondent, Gellhorn is rarely, if ever, even seen writing. She's always pent up, teary, the antithesis of Hemingway who spews out pages into the trash with nothing but a stream of consciousness.

I think if the film had only been about the chunk of their lives in Spain it would have been a much better film.

By also having Kidman play Gellhorn as an 80-year old giving an interview to a David Frost-like personality and cutting 30 years out of Hemingway's life to his eventual suicide as the film's ending it felt cheap.

I liked me though.

Agreed. OR they should have returned to the drawing board and conceived a three-part picture. The film's structure is so strange. It spends so much time in Spain: big war scenes, an ensemble of colorful peripheral characters, etc. The Spain scenes truly are a film unto themselves. Then it spends its last hour rushing (lurching) through a greatest-hits of later events. See Hemingway turn into Hunter S. Thompson! See Kidman being glamorous in wartorn Finland! The abrupt cut to an old Hemingway eating pureed food and then committing suicide definitely felt exploitative and cheap. Next to the corny scene of an elderly Gellhorn throwing on the ol' knapsack and heading to the war zone with a spring her step, it felt as if they were forcing this perception of Hemingway as the loser in the game of life and her as the winner.

It feels prudish to say this, but there's also way too much sex in this movie, lol. It feels as if Nicole is doing her best porn-star "OH GOD! OH YES! OH! OH!" faux-orgasm every five minutes. But they seriously could have cut two, three, maybe four sex scenes and included more interesting character moments.

And then there is the bit where they dissolve from her face to the decayed face of a concentration-camp corpse. Jeepers creepers.

Yeah the Holocast image was.....amazing lol.

I also really hated how old Gellhorn is all "sex is lame and just to control men" yet she fucks Hemingway constantly and lustfully throughout.