The Winter Guest

Bomb Rating: 

It's simple: if a play was meant to be a film, it wouldn't have been a play in the first place.

For a split second this film got some bonus points from me because there's a scene where Emma Thompson is taking a bath and the director, Alan Rickman, is kind enough to make sure the camera catches some totally unnecessary nipplege. However, at the same time it also reveals something horrifying: Emma hasn't shaved her pits. Emma Thompson has hairy pits!

This whole female faux pas emanates from the fact that this in-your-face artistic film is based on a play, which demonstrates a remarkable lack of common sense on the part of everybody involved. It's simple: if a play was meant to be a film, it wouldn't have been a play in the first place. People who go around turning plays into films aren't smart enough to find their own stories, so they've got to go butcher the medium of cinema to deal with their personal inadequacies.

Rickman is obviously one of these guys. Not satisfied with acting, he's now taken to directing and chosen this nothing little tale of a mother (Phyllida Law) and her daughter (Emma Thompson), and their unfolding relationship during a cold day in Scotland. The entirety of the film consists mostly of them whining at each other and some other scenes with three different pairs of characters.

But back to the pits, which are the most obvious of metaphors for this film's problems. I don't want to see Emma's hairy pits. In fact, I don't want to even know they're there. There's no argument in the world that can convince me that the price of realism in cinema is hairy pits. I'll bet everything I own there were no hairy pits in the stage play, which demonstrates just exactly what kind of price we have to pay for some of these adaptations.

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