"Cold Mountain" film review

[marlin teat]

Re: "Cold Mountain" film review

How many times have you stood reading a roadside marker and thought "this would make a great book"? Anyway, here is a link to an article describing how Frazier got his idea for the book:

http://www.salon.com/july97/colddiary970709.html

[Bill Cross]

Re: "Cold Mountain" film review

I felt like Frazier was writing a modern story in a period setting, to appeal to a modern audience

Shocking. Sorta reminds me of that whippersnapper Will Shakespeare having the nerve to write about Julius Caesar speaking in iambic pentameter! Oh, the humanity of these writers taking liberties with history. ;)

[Fiddlebum]

Re: "Cold Mountain" film review

Well, I know writers do that, Bill, and some people are good at it. I just didn't like Frazier's style - I found it highly impersonal. And I thought the description of the woman's exposed breast as she was nursing was simply thrown in there for the 20th century T&A crowd... "gee, we better have some boobs in this book somewhere..." Your mileage may vary, of course, but that's just how it struck me.

Inman singlehandedly fighting off the band of Yankees to save the woman's pig sounded like something out of an Indiana Jones movie.

And don't even get me started on the ending. Talk about betrayal!

The reasons I think The Black Flower is a better book are many. Howard Bahr has a way with words that few writers have. He doesn't just tell a story, he crafts it with genuine emotion. The characters all seem very real to me, as if I know them personally. I'm right smack in the middle of the story. I'm standing there on the Columbia Pike knee-deep in dead and wounded soldiers. I can see that pile of severed limbs in the yard at Carnton. I can see Jack Bishop's watch, and Bushrod's St. Michael medal, and Anna's yellow dress. And Old Hundred the Marvelous Dog. And the mysterious horsemen.

I could go on, but I'd be here all day, and it's getting close to lunchtime.

With Cold Mountain, I felt like I was on top of the mountain, watching the action with a pair of binoculars, and the people were still as tiny as ants. I tried really hard to connect with this book, and I couldn't. And yes, I read it BEFORE I read The Black Flower. It just didn't grab me, y'all, that's the long and short of it.

I'm sure the movie will be entertaining enough, and as I said, I'll rent it when it comes out on DVD.

Cheers---

Kim Caudell

[FWL]

Re: Where's Stobrod?

Carl I agree with you completely, I just finished reading it again and they are characters I'd like to see on the silver screen.

Kind of depressing the book but very well written

Frank Lilley
28th Mass Co K

[Mike Ventura]

Cold Mountain, Romania

Cold Mountain, Romania?
Folks in western North Carolina expect a flock of visitors inspired by Civil War tal

By MARK BIXLER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Bita Honarvar / AJC

WAYNESVILLE, N.C. -- The real Cold Mountain rises 6,030 feet above sea level here in western North Carolina, a rugged peak clad in mountain laurel and huckleberries and, in winter, towering, leafless trees.

Its Hollywood double is in Romania.

The movie "Cold Mountain" opens nationwide today amid critical acclaim and high hopes from a studio that gambled more than $80 million on the production. Set mainly in the Blue Ridge Mountains of the 1860s but filmed in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, "Cold Mountain" recounts the pilgrimage of a wounded Confederate deserter who slogs across North Carolina toward the promise of a lover waiting in the hills.

The movie's debut stirs a blend of contradictions among those who live near the real mountain.

People like Frank Sorrells, a 75-year-old retired teacher who farms 33 acres at the base of Cold Mountain, do not understand why a movie set in Cold Mountain, N.C., was filmed in the Romanian province of Transylvania.

"It don't seem right," he says.

Key players in North Carolina's burgeoning moviemaking industry say they worked for five years with the film's director, Anthony Minghella, and his crew, scouting locations around the mountains. Seventy-eight feature films and television shows were filmed in the Tarheel state in 2002, generating $231 million in revenue, and the industry has grown so quickly that various estimates rank North Carolina third in revenue from film production, behind California and New York.

Having "Cold Mountain" filmed in the state would have provided a big boost, says Bill Arnold, the state's film commissioner. Actors, camera operators and crew members would have spent money in local hotels and restaurants. Producers might have hired local carpenters and hairstylists.

Siting cuts both ways

Arnold says contacts at the movie's production company, Miramax, told him they chose Romania mainly because it costs much less to film in Eastern Europe than western North Carolina.

Also, Arnold says, rural Romania shows fewer signs of modern life, such as telephone poles, power lines and paved roads, and it boasts guaranteed snowfall -- a must for the movie's climactic scenes. A few inches of snow blanketed Cold Mountain last week, but snow is inconsistent and unpredictable in North Carolina's mountains.

As for wounded pride, the film commissioner acknowledges that it stings to see a story that is set in the southern Appalachians -- a story with a North Carolina peak in its very title -- filmed overseas. Yet Arnold tempers his indignation, noting that roughly 95 percent of 600 feature films and countless television shows made in North Carolina since 1980 were set somewhere else.

He ticks off examples: Directors shot "Last of the Mohicans" in western North Carolina even though the story is set in upstate New York and Canada. Hollywood filmed "Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood" in Wilmington, even though it is set in a rural parish in Louisiana. The TV show "Dawson's Creek," set in Massachusetts, also was filmed in Wilmington.

Movie a draw for area

Though some disgruntled locals talk of boycotting the movie, business owners near the real Cold Mountain figure only savvy moviegoers will realize or care that the mountains on film are not actually in North Carolina. There is no town of Cold Mountain, but the movie could lure tourists to places like nearby Waynesville the way "Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil" drew visitors to Savannah and "Fried Green Tomatoes" brought fame to Juliette, 50 miles south of Atlanta.

Before the 1997 publication of the novel "Cold Mountain," by North Carolina native Charles Frazier, only bear hunters and hard-core hikers cared much about the mountain. The book, which won a National Book Award and spent more than 30 weeks on the New York Times best seller list, generated a modest increase in tourism, but businesses expect more as a result of the movie, starring Oscar contenders Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger and Jude Law.

Already it has drawn Bill Park, a 51-year-old agricultural economics professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and his son, Daniel, 21, a student at Clemson University.

They drove Monday from Knoxville to Waynesville, followed N.C. 276 south for a few miles, turned onto a winding two-lane mountain road and stopped at last after the pavement ended just beyond the entrance to the Daniel Boone Scout Camp.

To the left loomed the trail up Cold Mountain, in the Shining Rock Wilderness Area of Pisgah National Forest, roughly 25 miles southwest of Asheville.

Rangers warn against ascending Cold Mountain without a map and compass. It's a steep and strenuous 10.4-mile round-trip hike on an unmarked trail of mud, rocks and gnarled tree roots. The sound of a rushing creek fades as the trail climbs until the only sounds are those of the wind and the brittle, fallen leaves crackling underfoot.

Bill Park says he read the book a few years ago and that he and his son came to Cold Mountain with their 5-month-old golden retriever, Savannah, after seeing trailers for the movie.

"I was wondering if it would be crowded because of the movie," Daniel says.

It wasn't, but that may change.

Dale Carroll, chief executive officer of an economic development organization called Advantage West North Carolina, says a representative of the group plans to go to travel industry shows in England and Scotland in the next two months. She will market the North Carolina mountains to Europeans who saw "Cold Mountain."

Roger and Judy Winge, who left metro Atlanta in 1998 to open a 1920s-themed bed-and-breakfast in Waynesville called October Hill, say they plan to offer a "Cold Mountain" package providing guests a picnic basket, a copy of the novel and directions to the mountain.

"To have a movie of this magnitude could put this area on the map," Judy Winge says.

But someone close to the real history behind the movie has little use for all the hype.

Like Frazier, Ted Darrell Inman is descended from the Confederate soldier, William Pinkney Inman, who inspired the main character in "Cold Mountain." A gruff amateur historian, he has spent a lifetime documenting the Inman family.

Ted Darrell Inman says he has gleaned a few things about his great-great uncle from the historical record: He was 5 feet 7 inches tall, weighed about 160 lbs, had dark hair and did, in fact, desert from the Confederate army during the Civil War. Twice.

'Nothing but the facts'

Inman lives down from the Inman Chapel Church, started in 1902 by one of William Pinkney Inman's brothers. It has 13 wooden pews and a framed picture of its founder on one wall.

Not far away is a cemetery where Ted Darrell Inman says his ancestor lies in an unmarked grave next to his father.

He points to a patch of grass.

"Pinkney Inman's buried right here, according to the preacher," he says.

He wants the world to know that Inman was a real person and that his descendants "are real people -- educated, hard-working mountain people. We're not a bunch of hicks."

He is emphatic.

"The Inman family has been serving the public, from bootlegging to preaching, for more than a hundred years," he says.

He has not read the novel and does not plan to see the movie. The "Frazier boy," as he calls the novel's author, may care for made-up stories, but not him.

"My mind don't have room for history and fiction combined," he says. "I'm not interested in nothing but the facts."

[Dingus]

Romanian location

Call me selfish, but being Romanian on my father's side - his father left Dolovo, Austria-Hungary (now Serbia), as a child before WW I - I'll be watching the film because of the location ;)

[LWhite64]

Seen it

Folks,
Just got back from seeing Cold Mountain, and I liked it. Now this isnt perfect, i dont think we will ever get a perfect period piece, but I enjoyed this and I really liked some of the characters. Rene is great as Ruby, seems that she was made for the part. The film did good on portraying the homefront in the Appalachains, the terror of the Home Guard harkened back to the thread we had going a while back about the ugly Guerilla war that occured here in the Mountains. The Battle of the Crater was pretty good as well, just a little to short to really get a grasp on things. I was impressed with all of the little things that were thrown in, the ink stains on Ada's fingers for example. Anyway, I recommend it. I would also recommend the Soundtrack. Also for any Chickamauga buffs out there, the character played by Natalie Portman was very similar to the Widow Glenn that lived on the field, a young girl widowed and raising a family in a little cabin.

[westernprivate]

Re: "Cold Mountain" film review

As someone who was born and raised in the area that most of the story takes place, I was pleased with what I saw tonight. The depection of the homeguard was very much in line with what I had read in college and what I was told by grandparents. The landscape seemed to be very much like Western North Carolina, although I believe a large portion of this was filmed in Romania. (correct me if I am wrong) I found the chracters to be somewhat in line with the book, face it all screenplays butcher the novel they are based upon. I also was happy to see the lack of such obvious inaccuracies such as 300 pound starveing Confederates in sutler row outfits. While not perfect, as nothing is no matter what you are talkin about, I thought it to be the best movie with a WBTS background I have ever seen. I was moved to see the battle of the crater, partly because it was a decent recreation of what some of my grandfathers went through.

Beau Blackwell

[Eric Burke]

Re: "Cold Mountain" film review

Lots of sex, blood, and ... ink. But all around, the Crater scene was the fairly well done. The rocky mountain snow-covered peaks in the background kind of made you wonder about the "Appalachian Mountains", and I think the Home Guard was a bit overdone (reminded me alot more of Einstatzgruppen). Overall though, good movie. I reccommend it.

[SCTiger]

Re: "Cold Mountain" film review

OK It was Christmas, I had $8 and I went. Except for one obvious western saddle on one of the home guard and the really bad rank insignia. I can't complain too much Actually saw some NC sunburst buttons and black trimmed sack coats wow! Someone did their homework. The music was great but, unfamiliar to me. No renditions of the "Bonie Blue Flag" or the "Battle Hymn of the Republic", which are too typecasted to ever use again.

So the Inman deserts once his friends die. I guess there was one Native-American fighting at Petersburg. Was the home guard always that vicious?
Awols were so common in the Confederate Army, I have read accounts of soldiers coming and going with impunity.

What I liked:

The gritty feel and the drab appearence of the town with it's streets of mud.

Renee', Renee',Renee', upstaged Kidman at evey turn! Awsesome.
When she killed the rooster I could hear people gasp in shock. (2000 guys die at the Crater but lets get shocked for the rooster) :).

The dialogue was great, bet we will hear CM quotes for the next two years.

Starving Yankees, raping and pillaging? How did that happen? Really? I thought the Union Army was this freedom loving force that reintroduced civilization to the South. Wow now I am shocked!

Everyone looked hungry.

Yes they did have sex in the 1800's. Unbelievable! One aspect I have never reenacted in the field! Period underwear isn't the sexiest, so I am watching Renee' undress and I am thinking, " I wonder if CJ Daley made those?" Sick I tell you! I am just warped! I will have to watch this again and again on DVD. At one point I was almost sure that Renee and Nicole were going to latch on to each other. Admit you thought so too! If that had happened, it would have been THE GREATEST CIVIL WAR PICTURE EVER!" It would have stomped "Lord of the Rings" into the ground and grossed the equivalent of the entire GNP of Europe.


The goat lady in the gypsy wagon, shades of Josey Wales, same lady?
The one that gave out the "potusses" (sic?)? Very Cool.

The other deserter with the saw, he could have endured some more. Too bad.

Dislikes:

Too many mumbled words, not enough background on characters.

Heavy on tears, not enough action at spots.

How many times does Jude Law change clothes and hats?

Preachy and moralistic lip service toward slavery, again the only issue. Yankees sometimes fought for the CSA and vice versa, tell that story!

Romanian mountains look nothing like North Carolina.

Now do I recommend the film, Yes.

It gives an actual feel to the gloom and desperation of war. You can feel the pain of the war, especially of Natalie Portman's "widow." That was really a heart wrenching seen of the vacant bedside. Ouch!

Not for youngsters under 17, the "R" rating ain't for war violence.
There is enough of a Gladiator factor to keep the movie from appearing on the Oxygen channel as a "chick-flick." So I can recommend it to other guys.

The Movie Critic Mess

[Secede1863]

Re: "Cold Mountain" film review

This Film looks more of like a love story than a Civil War story.
I haven't read the book but I prosume it is too.
As for the Uniforms;
I watched a show on MTV about the movie ( It was an hour long )
The uniforms donot look like the most authentic but like I said I think it is mainly suppose to be a love film not a Civil War film so they don't need to have the best uniforms and equimpment, PLUS they aren't real reenactors, they are un-employed people from Translavania so of course they wont have the best "stuff". The film company made the Uniforms on a rush to get it done and made.

.....I'm not going to see it, I think I've seen Enough Already.

Andrew Stebbins

[LWhite64]

Re: "Cold Mountain" film review

Well as to the uniforms, they werent bad, a North Carolina Regiment wearing North Carolina Depots(Early War when marching out of Cold Mountain, and late war at Petersburg), what appeared to be P. Tait Artillery Jackets on the Heavies, and US issue Cav Jackets on Fed Raiders. The main complaint was the way too many of the soldiers wore their caps.

[bAcK88]

Re: "Cold Mountain" film review

Here's an article that appeared last Sunday in the paper

Makers Of Civil War Drama Turn To Local Scholar, Artist, Collector
Giving History A Role In ‘Cold Mountain’

December 21, 2003
By OWEN McNALLY, Special to The Courant

Although Don Troiani was a pivotal behind-the-scenes historical adviser for "Cold Mountain," the celebrated military history painter from Connecticut never set foot on the set during the film's shooting in Romania.

Nor did the Southbury resident ever catch a glimpse of glamorous superstar Nicole Kidman, heroine of the tragic saga set in the Civil War. Nor, for all his scholarly advice, did this consultant for PBS history documentaries and author of several acclaimed books on Civil War military gear and garb get even a taste of silver-screen celebrityhood.

That's because Troiani, whose paintings and painstaking scholarship have made him a household name among Civil War buffs, did his research and consulting at home as a historical adviser in absentia.

For six months, the 53-year-old Civil War savant advised the filmmakers from his spacious country home, where he lives with his wife, Donna O'Brien, who loves her husband but thinks history is a bore.

Thanks to the Internet, faxes, phones and FedEx, Troiani did his "Cold Mountain" work at home while tending to his booming art career.

Working with the script as the basis for his critiques, Troiani forwarded his suggestions, often illustrating his points with photos, sketches and documentation. He was continuously the target of fusillades of phoned, faxed and e-mailed questions about historical authenticity of costumes and props.

"I worked with the script, which they revised lots of times. I didn't read the book, because I can't read historical novels. I hit the first mistake, and that's it!" Troiani says as he relaxes in his elegant living room.

"I was originally hired by costumers to do research and advise them on re-creating uniforms for the Civil War period. I worked for them for a month or two and was answering tons of questions from many other departments until they took me on as a consultant for uniforms and equipment for the entire film."

Troiani served as a point man for authenticating a broad range of objects including regimental battle flags, uniforms, gunpowder barrels and fortifications, right down to the proper fork and firearm.

Generally, communication worked well, even if his phone rang at all hours of the day and night. It was sometimes difficult, he adds, because the various film-production departments were fiercely independent fiefdoms that didn't like to communicate with one another. And not all of his movie contacts in Romania and Rome spoke fluent English.

"The set designers were all Italians. They were the same guys who did `Gangs of New York.' Because `Cold Mountain' was an international project, you were dealing with Americans, English, Italians and some Romanians.

"I would explain everything several times and then have to send them diagrams."

"Once I couldn't explain to them how the Confederates would actually camp out. So I brought a couple of models out to my house and dressed them in period uniforms. We went out in my yard and built little brush shelters and tent-type shelters that Rebel soldiers used back then. I took digital photographs of my model soldiers making the shelters and sent those on."

Troiani loves to work at home, a luxury he can afford because he lives in a historical researcher's dream house.

His sprawling, handsome three-story digs are a combination high-tech home-research center and traditional library stocked with thousands of military reference books and documents.

Not far from his books, papers and filing cabinets, he has an art studio, where he paints his meticulously researched battle scenes. Before putting brush to canvas, he likes to know virtually every inch of a battlefield's terrain as it was, and exactly what the light and weather were like on that fateful day.

Troiani's pride and joy seems to be the museum-like space he has stocked with a dazzling array of uniforms from the Civil War, the War of 1812 and the Revolutionary War.

Looking like a Smithsonian showcase, the roomy quarters are jammed with martial flags, banners, sabers, guns, drums and brass instruments that look more lethal than the ancient firearms.

Among the curiosities is a crude wooden grave marker that was shipped home in the coffin of a Confederate soldier killed in battle.

Such makeshift markers, Troiani explains, were used when fallen soldiers were temporarily buried on the battlefield. Later, the dead were exhumed and shipped home in a pine box, with the marker tucked in alongside.

Name it and Troiani, a voracious hunter/gatherer of military memorabilia, probably has it. His collectibles range from rudimentary eating utensils to a 2,000-pound brass field cannon.

No historic detail is too small or too big to tend to, he says, whether it's the shape of a fork or the design of a fort.

Especially, he says, in a historically rooted film like "Cold Mountain," which wanted to create a vivid sense of what daily life was really like for people in the 1860s.

"For example," he says, "when I read the scene in the script where Confederates are making breakfast, I forwarded information on what they would be cooking.

"I sent real recipes of the time and how the food would be cooked, along with images of the utensils that would be used and how the soldiers would actually hold them."

A historical film consultant's job, he says, is to try to prevent anachronisms and distortions from cropping up on the screen.

Troiani and Brian Pohanka, another noted film consultant, for example, vetoed a cavalry charge that the script had called for. Their objection? No such charge ever occurred at this battle. It was scrubbed.

In its place, the two watchdogs suggested a gory, shockingly surreal scenario that actually happened - Union soldiers at the bottom of a giant crater being slaughtered by Confederates like fish in a barrel.

At the actual battle, Rebel soldiers gathered up muskets armed with bayonets they found lying around the crater top and hurled them down like javelins into the hapless soldiers below. The Confederates also used portable mortars to rain death on the heads of the Yankees in the crater - another historically correct detail Troiani and Pohanka added.

In a much less dramatic blow for historic truth-in-packaging, Troiani trumped the anachronistic use of white tinware that the props department had purchased in Europe for the hospital scenes.

"That kind of material didn't come in until 1900, not the 1860s," Troiani says.

No matter how carefully vetted, historical movies don't ever score a 100 in history, says Troiani, who is noted in the art and collecting world for his painstaking research. (A Troiani historical painting typically takes more than four years of arduous research and fastidious brushwork that give them a virtually photographic look. His larger historical paintings go for up to $60,000.)

Even "Cold Mountain" has mistakes, says Troiani who recently saw a rough-cut screening at a private New York theater. One film functionary at the screening told him that flaws detected on the screen might still be fixed.

"A few little mistakes crept in when different departments wouldn't listen," Troiani says.

"The horse wranglers, for example, wouldn't listen for anything. So all the saddles are modern dude-ranch saddles, not the right period stuff. But you only see them for a second.

"On the whole, though, `Cold Mountain' is one of the most accurate films of this type that I've seen. Having worked on film projects before, I have to say that these filmmakers listened, were polite and worked hard at getting a lot of things right. Anthony Minghella, the director and writer, is a real perfectionist."

How would Troiani rank "Cold Mountain" for accuracy on a scale of zero to 10?

"I'd give it about an eight. But with me, most history films would only get a two or a three," he adds.

"`Gone With the Wind,' a Civil War classic, I would give only a two for historical accuracy. Its offenses? The costumes and hairstyles.

"Even in `Cold Mountain,'" he adds, "Nicole Kidman is wearing an 1890s hairstyle. Almost all women at that time wore their hair slicked back with a center part and a little bun right at the back of the neck. They all wore it that way, from the poorest to the wealthiest women."

"Similarly in `Gods and Generals,' another Civil War movie, the women wear modern dos. Modern actresses don't like that period style because it looks too severe."

"I think `Glory' was better than most Civil War movies, and would give it a 6˝ for accuracy. But even there they changed a lot of things around. The black soldier who carries the flag, for example, is killed in the movie. But in real life he survived and won the Medal of Honor.

"Or in `Gettysburg,' in the very first scene you see this fat, 300-pound Confederate soldier waddle up on the screen. That's inaccurate.

"If you look at period photographs, you don't see anybody who's that overweight. They're all sunken-cheeked, scrawny little guys, who have been marching 20 miles a day with all their heavy equipment, wearing hot woolen uniforms and eating pork and hardtack biscuits.

"You've got to get people who look like the people of the period. You know that 300-pounder never could have marched all the way from Virginia to Gettysburg. The great thing about the Romanian Army extras used in `Cold Mountain' is that they were all as thin as rails, which gives them an authentic look for Civil War soldiers."

As a professional anachronism hunter, Troiani casts a cold eye on the belief that historical movies portray the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

"Most people have to understand that when you go to the movies, you're not going to see any history. You're going to see fantasy.

"Take the Revolutionary War movie, `The Patriot,' for example. It was rotten every way that an historical film could possibly be rotten, right from the costumes, which were fantasy garbage, to the way the battles were staged and the dialogue used. The houses were, in most cases, 19th-century houses in an 18th-century drama."

Occasionally, historical films show some strengths, he acknowledges.

"`Dangerous Liaisons' was pretty good as far as the costumes and the dialogue went. But most historical films like this are made in Europe, not here.

"American Hollywood producers have very little interest in getting anything historically right. They don't know anything, and they assume the public doesn't know anything. That's just the way it is.

"I think that what `Cold Mountain' does historically is to give you a good feel for the period."

Movies with the live, humanizing aura of "Cold Mountain," he says, can generate broad public interest in history, maybe even give the often-maligned discipline a shot in the arm.

"Movies are the biggest influence there is on getting people interested in history. Next is TV, then books a distant third. If it's a good movie, not a ridiculous movie, it's a positive thing. "

"Glory" and "Gettysburg," he says, were positive forces that made many people interested in the Civil War.

"Even a movie like `Gladiator,'" he says, "increased interest in history. All of a sudden you started to see history magazines featuring articles on gladiators, and toy-soldier makers manufacturing gladiators and Roman figures."

One unwelcome side effect of Hollywood's power to shape our collective historical consciousness, he says, is that many people take what they see on the screen as the truth about the past.

Troiani has even encountered seemingly educated people, including directors and producers, whose standard of historical truth is limited to what they've learned from such entertaining fonts of historical inaccuracy as "Gone With the Wind."

"Producers are always reminded of something they've seen in a film, which they believe in as gospel truth even if it is pure film fakery," Troiani says.

"I've been asked, `Can't we make it like it was in this film, or that film?' What they don't realize is that historical truth is actually better than anything they could make up."

Overall, working on "Cold Mountain" was the kind of challenge that a workaholic/perfectionist like Troiani loves. He would gladly do it all over again, he says, despite all of those late-night phone calls.

"I'm hoping that when Steven Spielberg makes a Civil War film that he's going to say to his staff, `Let's get those history guys who did `Cold Mountain.'"

Bill Backus

[Dale Beasley]

Re: "Cold Mountain" film review

My wife and I saw the Movie last night....thought it was good...may even go back........

[GWilson]

Re: "Cold Mountain" film review

I also saw the movie and thought it was pretty good. It was different from what I expected. I haven't read the book yet, but I thought it was going to be one big two and a half to three hour love/romance movie ( I girlfriend wanted to see it). I'm might go see it again. I was wondering if the movie was any different from the book. Thanks.