Sunday 2 January 2011

(Not so) Old Movie Madness - The Edge of Love (2008)



I'd been looking forward to this for a while, I'm now not sure why.  Set during WW2 the film centres around Dylan Thomas and the two women in his life, his wife Caitlin and his boyhood crush Vera and the tensions between them.

Dylan is shown as a pompous, egotist - pretty accurate in my experience of artists I must say - and comes across as thoroughly unpleasant.  The two female leads are also vile, both are entranced by the cliched doomed romance of penniless alcoholic poet almost to the point of their destruction.  Yawn.

Caitlin (played by an actually pretty good Sienna Miller) is an empty woman emotionally self-harming by welcoming her husbands former love into their lives in some bizarre menage-a-trois and then hating herself for it.  She sleeps around to try and make herself feel better but flies into jealous rages if Dylan even looks at another woman.



Vera (Keira Knightley in yet another period drama) is a frigid souled ice queen who marries a man she doesn't love and seems to be oblivious to the pain she is causing by interfering in her friends marriage.

And look at her weird mouth.






The whole thing comes to a head when Vera's husband (Cillian Murphy, all blue eyes and shell shock) comes home and the stress of living amongst these horrors sends him mad.  For some reason he has a grenade - sadly it didn't blow them all up. 

Dylan takes him to court and despite clearly being a tad off kilter they let him off, I can only imagine because they hope he has another grenade and will do it properly next time.  The couples part - staying with their respective spouses and destined I expect to torture each other for evermore.

The only, ONLY, good thing about this film was the clothing.  Some great coats at the court scenes and in general lots of lovely knitwear.   You can see this in the pictures below though, so please don't bother watching this unless you want to come out of it feeling cheated and depressed.




11 comments:

  1. This film was absolutely ridiculous.

    One of the reasons for that is, I don't like Keira Knightley very much.

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  2. I watched Pride & Prejudice with Keira Shitely in it and spent the whole film mesmerised by her scary teeth.

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  3. I never watched the movie..hmmm i would like to watch it just to see the clothes. LOL hahaha

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  4. Thanks for saving me watching this one, it does sound truely awful. I can just enjoy looking at the stills.

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  5. My love of the period has had me sitting through some real rubbish but this one topped them all, truly terrible, it dose have lovely knitwear in it though!

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  6. I did not like this film either although I thought Sienna Miller was rather good - to my surprise , that is, which only shows how prejudiced one can be.
    As for Keira, I was disappointed with her general performance in this film (beyond some admittedly scary/bizarre faces she sometimes pulls), but I wouldn't go as far as calling her Shitley. She needs to have a better control of her facial expressions. She wasn't all that bad in the Duchess or Atonement.

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  7. I've heard alot of pap reviews about this movie - so I shall save my eye time! Thanks :)

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  8. This movie too soooo long, at least it was eye candy! I hated Dylan with a passion >:(

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  9. I glad I'm not alone in hating this. :-)

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  10. I agree it was terrible, partly because I dislike Keira Knightley so much, especially the bits with her singing!

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  11. So glad I read this post! This movie has been sitting in my Netflix queue forever while I decide if I'm up to it, as it seems rather depressing. Now I know that I'm decidedly NOT! Thanks Snoodlebug!

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