"It's about this wonderful poet John Keats who I studied in high school"
Now just to elaborate this movie is more specifically a dramatic interpretation of the final three years of John Keats' life and focuses primarily on his romance with some sappy, pathetic, unlikable wench. At one point later on in this movie there is a line of dialogue that really sums up my feelings regarding this movie. The line is "I have failed John Keats" and that's exactly what the movie feels like it's done. I was one of four people who watched this movie in this particular sitting and despite our often different tastes regarding film and television there was a universal disapproval of this film. Even my mum, who loves John Keats as a poet and who is awefully fond of the kind of bonnet drama's that frequent the ABC of a Sunday night couldn't say anything but bad things about this movie. To put it in terms my fans will appreciate, it is the worst film I have seen since Kicking the Dog *GASP!*-Mum
So what makes this movie bad? Well almost every problem with the film is directly linked to Keats' love interest. In the opening scenes she seems like your typical Austen heroin AKA flirtatiously hostile living with her family waiting to marry for love rather than wealth. Which is fine really, nothing new but a tried a true character that will suit the movies need for a love interest. But oh no, she turns out to be something else entirely. What she really is is a pseudo-stalking, overdramatic bitch whose mood sways annoyingly and suddenly between hopelessly devoted, mopey and pathetic and then to angry and sulky. She, as well as the movie itself, overdramatise everything. There were points in the movie where something absolutely trivial was happening yet the music seemed to br prompting us to feel sad or sympathetic. I was confused and wondered at times whether I was missing something. I eventually reached the conclusion that the person who wrote the musical score must've realised early on what a pile of undercooked toss this movie is and so decided to try their hardest to inject emotional music into as many places in a hope that the audience will be so moved by the score that they could be showing Yu-Gi-Oh and they'd still be touched. This was extremely misguided.
The problem is that this movie is attempting to be both a great romance and a tradgedy, much like Cold Mountain and like Cold Mountain it fails to stir the appropriate emotions in the viewer. But while Cold Mountain fell a little flat, Bright Star was more like a pathetic primary school kid jumping up and down trying to reach their lunch that a bully is holding up out of reach, just before getting punched in the guts and thrown in the mud. Both the characters are unsympathetic and have as much chemistry between them as a chemical reaction between noble gases (this one's for you chemistry nerds!). The girl is not only pathetic and annoying but also self involved and at times unfair and mean to her younger (and dare I say more likable) siblings. If you are anything at all like me, my mother, my father or my girlfriend you will fail to be enticed by this movie despite its' constant efforts to wring every drop of drama from every single scene.
