Yees! I am so excited, its a new Merchant Ivory movie. This was 130 mins of pure pleasure catching up on some much needed sleepy time.

Merchant Ivory have been doing staid, dull lifeless costume drama for so long now that it appears that even they are bored with the genre as they serve us up a lifeless corpse with this movie.

Merchant Ivory are stuck in the past, not just with their subject matter but also in technique and execution too. Have they ever attempted to do anything other than what they do every single movie? Now I'm not saying they should go away and do action movies, but was the past as boring as they make it out to be? I'm pretty certain it wasn't. Why can't they try and vary the subject matter a little and try and freshen things up.

Buy this poster!

Best way to illustrate it is by comparing them against say Martin Scorsese, he pretty much made the bulk of his career out of the mafia, but at least he varied his movies approaching the subject matter differently each time, Goodfellas being a much different movie from Casino.

But the same really cannot be said for a Merchant Ivory movie, the tone is the same, it is shot pretty similar to the rest, the characters act the same way.

Oh yeah Uma Thurman and Nick Nolte star in it, and they too seem to have been taken in by the idea that if you dress up in a victorian costume, that it is all you need to act great. Err no.

The story, you ask, oh yeah its an adulterous quartet.

Anything else is utterly irrelevant as it was just so darn lifeless.

Deadly dull

Tall Guy