3/31/08

Atonement


This was just okay and neither of us would want to watch it again, always the real test of a good movie.

I now understand why so many people struggle with the book, if it jumps around and has imagined sequences like the movie, it must be really hard to follow. Having said that the locations and sets were either beautiful or impressive. The acting was good, although I found Keira Knightley's speaking voice rather irritating!

I am glad we got to see it but was not overly impressed and am not sure why it got so many Oscar nominations. But then having seen some of the other nominee's, we think this was just a poor year for really great movies.

We gave it a Netflix rating of 'Liked It' but if they'd had a 'Just ok' it would have got that instead.

8 comments:

Stacy at Exceedingly Mundane said...

I never read the book, for the reasons you mentioned, I had not heard great things about it. Same with the movie. I keep pushing it down in my Netflix queue. A good friend of ours came over last week to watch "Kite Runner with us" and had just seen Atonement. He said much the same thing, he gave it a 3 at Netflix, but that was pushing it for him.

Great review, love to hear what you think about movies and books. And isn't Netflix great to have?! :)

Julie said...

Sad...I actually loved this, but then, I loved the book, but I am an English major...I sort of love every book...

Unknown said...

Julie, I really expected to love it too, as I usually love period drama's both in print and on screen!

fishwithoutbicycle said...

I've seen the trailer to this and was too put off by Keira Knightley's accent to rent it. I haven't read Atonement, but I've struggled with Ian McEwan's books in the past.

Nan said...

I had no interest in reading the book or seeing the movie from reading about the story. I saw some wonderful movies this year, but they were the "small" films. If you go to my sidebar (under - if you're looking for something specific) and click movies, I wrote about a few I saw at our little local theatre. I just loved several of them.

Mary (Bookfan) said...

I really liked the book. The film, not so much. My DD (English major) agreed with me. I don't know how anyone could make a whole lot of sense out of the movie without reading the book first. I'm glad to see I'm not alone in my thoughts about the film version. I kept wondering what I was missing.

Pam said...

i tried to read that book at least three times and just couldn't get through it. my sister-in-law's family loved it thought. am glad to hear i wasn't alone. I would like to see the movie at some point, but will wait for it to come on cox pay-per-view. thanks for the heads up! i guess we are more hot fuzz people than atonement people anyway ....

Pam said...

hi guys! we watched this movie last night and i must admit, i enjoyed it very very much. of course, am a sucker for stories about lost love, etc. we thought the first part was extremely slow, but thinking about it later, it needed to have a lot of importance for the rest of the story to make sense. i wondered how much of it was meant to be real or imagined. very intriguing. keira's accent was a little affected, sort of like kristen scott thomas in The English Patient (another movie i loved), but it didn't distract me. i think the male lead (McAvoy)was the young boy in Shakespeare in Love, but could be wrong. Anyway, enjoyed it much more than expected, so a nice surprise.