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Primary ColorsRating:
Release Date: 04 March, 2003 Retail Price: $9.99 OUR Price: $8.99 You SAVE: $1.00! Cast: Complete Cast (18 total) |
Primary Colors Reviews
Deeply Flawed
This movie has some great moments that give one hope for what it could have been. Emma Thompson in particular shines in her role as the candidate's wife. However a terribly hokey script full of over-the-top metaphors about the moon and wild boars, characters who are too underwritten to win the empathy of the audience, a running time that's 45 minutes longer than it needs to be and a really, really, REALLY bad score (Seriously the worst I've heard in a major studio release film -- it sounds like a ten-year-old's piano recital or something.) sink this movie into the bottom of the commercial stratosphere.
Most disappointing of all are the two characters the audience is supposed to have the most empathy for. There's Libby, played by Kathy Bates, whose character trajectory is unbelievably manipulative. Sadly I can't be more specific about this without spoiling a major plot "twist" -- suffice it to say that filmmakers try to manipulate you into feeling something for both her and her cause -- not through good writing, but through an action that it made little sense for her to take. Then there's Henry Burton, the campaign manager through whose eyes we see all of this. His innocence and idealism are supposed to be challenged over and over again but the screenplay never presents him with any real moral delimmas. Instead he gets just a lot of sad music playing over soft-focus close-ups, a completely unresolved subplot with his girlfriend, a background involving him being the grandson of a civil rights leader that is never delved into and a character that is never fully developed. When the credits roll, we still have no idea who he is and what it is he stands for -- and the same can be said of this entire movie.
The DVD has no extras to speak of, just production notes and a trailer that make it hardly worth having a DVD instead of a video. Characters in this movie talk a lot about the importance of making history. The true events it's based on did, in fact, make history. (The fact that this film is actually a fictionalization of the Clintons is no secret.) But at this point, I think it's safe to say that this is one aspect of the Clinton administration even Democrats don't want to revist, so there's little hope of nostalgia ever saving this movie from the only spot in history it has managed to earn: the ash heaps.
In twenty years, it'll be forgotten...
A horrible actor imitating a horrible president... How appropriate! This film is about as relevant as jokes about Nixon. I don't know what this thing's selling for used, but it can't be much. My suggestion would be to watch "Tales of the City" or "Torch Song Trilogy: instead.
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