A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

I was forced to watch this movie tonight for a class in Spanish Lit. I like the Marquez story that the movie is based on, so although I wondered how the filmmakers would turn a 7-page story into a full-length film, I hoped for the best. Unfortunately for me and a roomful of groaning students, the movie basically ignores the winged title character, and instead elaborates a few details into painfully awkward sub-plots. For example, much of the movie is about a traveling carnival, with at least three fairly hard-core sex scenes (one in the form of the lowest of low-budget 80's music videos). Maybe Marquez just didn't see potential in focusing on the carnival; he only spent half of a paragraph describing it, instead of an hour of film. This was the real problem with the film: the filmmakers hacked each interesting detail to death, instead of allowing the audience to enjoy the incongruities of the story. The small details that were charming in the story (like the girl who turned into a spider for disobeying her parents) are so thoroughly mutated that I found myself wishing Marquez had been a supremely dull author, so as not to inspire this misguided piece of trash. The actors seemed nervously aware of how awful their movie was, save a smiling boy of four or five, who was young and naive enough not to be ashamed by the movie.

The special effects were laughable--anything related to flying was filmed at an angle up towards the flier, whose unseen feet we just assumed not to be touching the ground. And if you still have any doubts, in one scene of the couple putting their child to bed, they actually used a life-sized doll instead of a baby. Q.E.D.