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Captain Corelli's Mandolin | Year: 2001 Classification: Drama Directed: - John Madden Actors/Actresses: - Penélope Cruz - Nicolas Cage Beautiful Story, Music, and Scenery--A Triple Treat Movie Captain Antonio Corelli (Nicolas Cage) epitomizes the best qualities of Italian men---in love with life, women, and music. His arrival on a small Greek island and falling in love at first sight with Pelagia (Penelope Cruz) is a beautiful love story with World War II's bloody battles as a backdrop. Cage performs superbly as the invader who makes friends with the enemy and is later startled by the ruthlessness of his German allies. Penelope Cruz is also outstanding as the highly-educated daughter of the village doctor (John Hurt) who is engaged to her intellectual inferior Mandras (Christian Bale.) The passion between Corelli and Pelagia is fraught with tension that erupts in a beautifully-directed love scene. Despite the great love story, it is perhaps the character of Mandras who is most compelling as his feelings for Pelagia are revealed and his actions toward Corelli round out his mysterious nature. I have never read the book, but would love to do so now in order to see a fuller development of the intriguing Mandras. Also notable among a cast of fine performances are those of Irene Pappas as the spirited mother of Mandras who realizes what is happening between Pelagia and Corelli, as well as David Morrissey as the German captain who battles personal feelings with his unquestionable support for Hitler. The music and singing in this movie is excellent. To borrow one of my favorite lines from the movie: Heil, Hitler, Heil Puccini! Listening to the Italian soldiers singing "Santa Lucia" and other great works from the Italian masters was alone worth the cost of admission. Add Corelli's beautiful playing of his mandolin and the idyllic setting of the Greek island of Cephalonia and you have a movie I highly recommend seeing. Unsatisfying OK, I am biased. I read Louis deBernières' book when it was fashionable among Greek Americans. I have visited Kefalonia for years - my father's family originated there. I had exacting expectations for the movie. It did not satisfy me in any way, except that the island looked great (always summer) and the broad-brush treatment of history didn't skew the facts (only obscure them). That said, Nicholas Cage should be sent to vocal training classes. His Italian "accent" was unbelievably bad, and nearly eclipsed his poor acting. The Corelli character was written as a very quirky, intellectual and decidedly unsoldierly soldier. Cage came across as a buffoon. It would be easy to mistake the inept portrayal of the Italians onscreen as real ineptness in the actual war; but this is a film review. For a novel that spans multiple characters and many years, two hours is too little to cover everything. So it's the screenwriter's job to clarify and enhance those parts of the story that will entertain and inform the viewer. I didn't get any of that, and I know more than the casual viewer in this case. Even so, the movie comes across as a tepid love story set amid war. War is presented as a harmless occupation, where people don't actually exhibit the effects of deprivation, never suffer from the cold and disease and the villages are filled with dancing and music. Oh, yes, Penelope Cruz doing a suggestive dance in front of the Italian and German soldiers (and in front of the Greek mothers and fathers in 1941) is entirely plausible... in Hollywood. Films like "Mediterraneo," "Cinema Paradiso" and "Il Postino," all showed the themes of war, romance, postwar life, etc. with more subtlety and less obvious string-tugging. "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" would have been a superb (though less commercially viable) film had it eUrlLarge>http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00000ICR7.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg Buy Captain Corelli's Mandolin at Amazon.com Buy posters at Allposters.com Jamster - the latest ringtones for your phone!  Search with Walhello on the Internet on Captain Corelli's Mandolin Search with the Priority Search Engine on Captain Corelli's Mandolin This page in other languages: Suomeksi | Nederlands | Deutsch
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