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The Sleeping DictionaryRating:
Release Date: 18 February, 2003 Retail Price: $26.98 OUR Price: $10.47 You SAVE: $16.51! Cast: Complete Cast (10 total) |
The Sleeping Dictionary Reviews
Are you all kidding?
Who decided to cast Jessica Alba for this film? For those of you who admire her accent, you're way off! My mother was born in Malaysia, and there's a lot more to the accent than just broken English. Not to mention she looks nothing like the part. Did the casting director say, "Jessica's part-Mexican, ethnic enough -- she can play a Southeast Asian!" JA may be beautiful, but the interchanging is downright insulting, like lumping all the brown people together. Of all the "Asian" women in the trailer, it's so plain to see she's not! Were Asian women not attractive enough for the lead role? Are there not enough of them for a casting call, the most populous race? Actors can only "become" someone different to a degree. After watching the trailer, I was so disgusted I couldn't even give the movie a chance. It would only rile me up. Skip this movie, and ditch all its claims of cultural sensitivity!
I liked it despite myself.
The Sleeping Dictionary (Guy Jenkin, 2003)
I have to admit, I rented this for the sole purpose of seeing Jessica Alba naked (well, okay, Jessica Alba's body double naked). The fact that it had a surprisingly high-powered cast I found out later. And despite itself, the movie managed to keep me interested, so it wasn't that bad.
The time: the 1930s. The place: Borneo, the English bit. John Truscott (Ella Enchanted's Hugh Dancy) is fresh out of school and ready to civilize the barbarians. The local guv'nor (Bob Hoskins) and his wife (Little Voice's Brenda Blethyn) try to keep Truscott stiff-upper-lip British while acclimatizing him to the local customs, the oddest of them being that an Englishman's language tutor is also his bedmate-- the "sleeping dictionary" of the title. Of course, said sleeping dictionaries are to be used and left so the stiff upper etc. can go back to society and marry a proper English girl. More fool Truscott, then, for his SD is Selima (Jessica Alba), who is, well, devastatingly hot. Needless to say, his upper lip wilts relatively quickly (all the blood must have rushed off somewhere else)-- just in time to find out that the guv'nor is setting Truscott up with his daughter Cecil (Red Dragon's Emily Mortimer), whom guv desperately hopes he'll marry to keep her out of the clutches of Neville (Max's Noah Taylor), whom no one likes.
It's all got that vaguely superior "but, fatha, the natives are people just like us!" feel to it that aspires to equality and yet still retains a distinct, though faint, odor of racism-- lily-white chap learns to love the natives despite their barbaric ways and all that nonsense. Still, for mildly offensive formula filmmaking, it's at least watchable, and Truscott's stubborn refusal to let go of his naivete comes off both stupid and, in its way, charming. The characters are two-dimensional, for the most part (Hoskins' character is predictable, but at least slightly thicker than the rest of the cardboard cutouts). You could pull up the English colonials and drop in thirties superheroes, and they wouldn't really seem out of place.
Despite all this, and despite my best efforts, I found myself-- not liking it, really, but not hating it, either. I probably wouldn't watch it again, but I don't feel like demanding my money back. (Good thing, as the library doesn't charge me anything to borrow movies.) ** ½
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