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Reviews
Supervivientes de los Andes (1976)
Just bad exploitation
This just isn't a good movie.
You're hardly given a chance to distinguish the characters, which would be a necessary part of being able to identify with them and feel for and with them. The fact that all the names are changed doesn't help.
Instead there are gory pictures and mumbled dialogue. The scenes are often so short it's impossible to feel any kind of suspense. You get the feeling of snapshots of a story.
I can excuse bad effects, I can adjust my expectations to budget and era. But in this case they just heighten the lack of storytelling. What substance that film could have had is sacrificed for shock effects. The styrofoam snow just doesn't help.
There are a few good things. The recreation of the fuselage is surprisingly accurate for example.
The worst parts? The music and the narrator.
The music would suit an adventure or horror film, but not a story like this. The narration is a nightmare. The tone is condescending, even cruel, sometimes even giving blame to survivors. For example yes, there was a hotel nearby that was closed up for winter, but the survivors couldn't have known that. With the (wrong) information they had going west seemed to be the only sensible decision.
If you want to watch a good retelling of what happened in that winter in the andes, go for the 1993 film. While it too makes some minor changes to the events, it draws you in and makes you feel with the survivors. It depicts their friendship, the tragedy and the hope of this extraordinary story of survival. This movie doesn't.
Lady Chatterley's Lover (2022)
Okay-ish
If you haven't read the book this might be a nice story. If you have, you're missing most of it. Not because a story has to be abridged or characters have to be interpreted by actors. In this case, you're missing the essence, the main character.
This Mellors is a cute guy, but there is nothing of the earthy roughness that is so integral for this character and that Sean Bean in 1993 portrayed so brilliantly and so spot on. Here we only have tenderness, there is no development.
There is no talk between those two, and while this is okay for the affair part of the story, it doesn't explain why Conny and Oliver fall in love. And we're missing out on the most famous part of the story, the dirty talk that was so essential (and so shocking when the book first was published). This also means that Conny lacks her development.
The actors are fine. I loved Joely Richardson's return to the story as Mrs. Bolton. The score is great, but at times doesn't seem to belong to this movie. The house, the landscape, both are beautiful. Emma Corrin is not a bad Conny, but she doesn't give me the bright young things vibe of late 20s aristocracy, that mixture between old fashioned and modern. Maybe that's what lowers the stakes. Both Mellors and Connie feel too modern.
Clifford only exists as a one-dimensional grump as soon as the affair takes off, and while I thought James Norton's Clifford was a bit too much on the sympathetic side, this time they went for the other extreme.
The major plot points are there, but for me this lacks feeling. Oliver and Conny are believable when they're in love, but not as lovers. There is no spark and the first sex scene came out of nowhere.
There are far worse adaptations of classic books out there, but that doesn't make this a good one. It's just okay.
A final word on a point I've read here more then once: the body shaming Emma Corrin is the target of here is abhorrent.