Cold Mountain

Hmmm...let's see...an appropriate way to open the blog...ummm...AHA! I've got it! Gratuitous sex scene!

There! If you haven't already seen Cold Mountain I pretty much summed it up in that there sentence above this one. All you need to do is imagine that the um-ing and ah-ing go for about 2 hours before the "climax" so to speak and you've experienced it. But you know what? I'll bet you want more than that so I'll cater to your needs and deliver a more rich critique.

Anyway so the year is...whatever year the American Civil War was happening...and Jude Law realises he's made a big mistake. You see instead of having sex with Nicole Kidman he decided what he really ought to do is run off to die in a pointless war. Jude decides that the best way to remedy this mistake is to desert his fellow soldiers and make a long journey home to Cold Mountain. Sounds simple enough if a bit long but then it turns out that this is actually frowned upon by the army and so Jude spends a considerable amount of time being hunted and landing every single person he meets along the way in a gargantuan arseload of trouble. Jeez Jude, she'd wanna be a demon in the sack after all this trouble.

Anyway so the movie switches between the channels and often finds itself following the life of Nicole Kidman as well. Ol' Nicky spends a good while moping about the place and being generally pathetic and helpless as her farm and her home fall into chaos. Renee Zellweger is sent up there to help snap Nicole out of her mopey My Chemical Romance phase and teach her how to be a tough independant woman that Beyonce could be proud of (please note, Beyonce is not in this movie, even if she did have one of the best videos of all time).

So anyway, the movie switches between these two plot threads as different events of increasing dramatic tension happen to both parties before finally they meet up. Renee is sort of hot and cold with the return of Jude because she's just one of those hoes before bros kinda woman but *spoiler warning* he is killed off pretty soon anyway so all tensions are resolved (look, I know that wasn't a very good spoiler warning but in all seriousness if you didn't see that coming then you have several hundred years of drama/romance tradgedies to catch up on). Lucky for everbody right before dying Jude manages to "hit that" in a sex scene that I can really only compare to the one Bioware shoehorned into Mass Effect. If a sex scene in a movie reminds me of one I saw in a game then something has definately gone wrong. But anyway, moving on. So Nicole is all sad and shit because she's been waiting around for a while and only got one ride in before her man meat died but luckily for her they breeze over her grieving and cut straight to three years later where Nicole is shown living an idealic life with Renee, all the friends that they met during the course of the movie and Nicole's daughter. Yep, that's right, they only had sex once and it just so happened to be at the perfect time for conception. But whatever, you can debate the believability of that one amoungst youselves.

So I guess that's about all I have to say. The movie wasn't really bad or anything but I doubt I'll ever feel the need to watch it again. You can tell Cold Mountain really wants to be up there with all the other great romances but it just doesn't make you care enough. I mean there's even a scene where Nicole and Renee are both reading and discussing Wuthering Heights, a much better developed romantic plot. But there's some parts they did pretty well. Having Jack White (of the White Stripes) play a part as a member of a bluegrass band was a pretty good move, even if he didn't get enough screen time. That and they had this slimey bastard of a bad guy with blonde hair and a cocky, youthful smugness about him who you just couldn't wait to see die. So that's Cold Mountain. It's long, it's forgettable but it does have some nice music for a few moments in there.