Sickly Sweet (Sweet November (DVD))

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Product:	Sweet November (DVD)
Date:	22/07/01 (5 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Um...Charlize Theron has nice teeth.

Disadvantages: Boring, Wooden acting, specially from Reeves, Terrible story line.

Last week, two cinema tickets slid through my letter box, with no explanation. If they had used this opportunity for a bit of free promotional advertising, I may have been writing a review about a competition website. Instead, I will tell you about the film we went to see using these tickets.

Sweet November is actually a remake of a 1968 film of the same name. I have not seen the original, but I expect it must have been a reasonable movie at the very least, in order for it to be remade. So a week later I am still utterly confused as to how this year's "Sweet November" winded up being the biggest pile of pants I have had the misfortune to waste one hundred and nineteen minutes of my precious lifetime on.

Four times times I was on the verge of getting up and walking out. Twenty seven times I looked at my watch, and eighteen times I was poked in the side for snoring too loud.

Nelson Moss (Keanu Reeves) plays an emotionally challenged workaholic, whose life is altered dramatically when he inadvertently causes Sara Deever (Charlize Theron) to fail her written driving test.

Sara spends the next couple of days following Nelson around looking like the picture of health and youthful charm, and persuading Nelson to spend a month with her so she can "help him". The sparks of romance were invisible throughout. Which is hardly surprising, really - if Nelson was an even half-realistic character, he would have called the cops straight away and had them arrest the crazy loony girl who hijacked his car to rescue a dog then badgered him to be her "November" beau under threat of being accused of attacking her.

About an hour and a half later, the story begins. It's as if the floodgates have been opened and someone's figured out that there's only another half hour to go. Quick! Make up guy! Make her look like she's about to snuff it! Thus Sara goes from glowing cosmetic-ad-girl to something ou
t of the last scene of "Beaches" in two scenes flat. Aside from direction, and scene editing, the camera editing is reminiscent of an episode of "You've Been Framed," the acting slightly worse.

As Sara teaches Nelson how to have fun, all sorts of things are left unexplained and unexplainable. Her "calendar guy" dating style, her driving test, her business, her van, which jumped scene to scene without her ever driving it, and the dodgy man who picked up the dog and drove off into the distance, only to have cute little rat-dog inexplicably reappear a couple of days later.

The requisite gay man downstairs was obviously brought in before anyone or anything else in the film. I can just see Mr Director thinking, "We'd better have a bit of humour...I've got a feeling this film's really gonna stink."

The ending was just about the only redeeming factor in this film - at least we are spared any more sentimentality and grey make-up. Actually, they probably ran out.

If you do happen to receive two cinema tickets through the post, and the only film showing is "Sweet November", do yourself a favour, and use them to make a couple of paper fortune tellers. You'll have better fun, I promise.

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