2024 the best of me film plot review

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(as of Dec 05, 2024 11:19:08 UTC - Details)

France released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada: LANGUAGES: English ( Dolby Digital 5.1 ), French ( Dolby Digital 5.1 ), French ( Subtitles ), Italian ( Subtitles ), WIDESCREEN, SPECIAL FEATURES: Commentary, Scene Access, SYNOPSIS: Port and Kit Moresby (John Malkovich and Debra Winger) are American artists and self-styled 'travelers' (as opposed to tourists) exploring Saharan Africa. Their 10-year marriage is strained enough to be threatened by the presence of their boorish companion, Tunner (Campbell Scott), who has designs on Kit. The couple's restlessness, along with a kind of fascination with their own estrangement, keeps them moving further away from civilization and from infidelity. Port grows ill, however, and Kit finds herself alone in the desert, cut off from everything she knows. Director Bernardo Bertolucci and director of photography Vittorio Storaro fabulously capture the forbidding beauty of the Saharan locations, as well as Malkovich's brooding self-assurance and Winger's artless sexuality. The color schemes of red and blue serve the story of lovers who live on different emotional planes. Paul Bowles, the expatriate author whose semiautobiographical novel is the basis for the film, comments on the action as a narrator and one-man chorus. He warns Kit, and the viewer, that life is far more finite than one habitually imagines, and that the chance to put things right will not wait forever.
SCREENED/AWARDED AT: BAFTA Awards, Golden Globes, ...The Sheltering Sky
MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ Unrated (Not Rated)
Package Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.48 x 5.31 x 0.55 inches; 3.39 ounces
Director ‏ : ‎ Bernardo Bertolucci
Media Format ‏ : ‎ Import, Widescreen, PAL
Run time ‏ : ‎ 137 minutes
Actors ‏ : ‎ Debra Winger, John Malkovich, Campbell Scott, Timothy Spall, Philippe Morier-Genoud
Subtitles: ‏ : ‎ French
Producers ‏ : ‎ The Sheltering Sky
Language ‏ : ‎ English (Dolby Digital 2.0), French (Dolby Digital 2.0)
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000FTGVNQ
Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ France
Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1
Reviewer: Mark Nadja
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Don't gimme shelter...
Review: This is a terrific book by a writer who is not nearly as celebrated as he should be--and I mean Nobel Prize worthy. It's not true that a book grips you--when it's as good as "The Sheltering Sky," it's you that grips the book. That's what I literally found myself doing for big batches of pages at a time; the tension that Bowles creates is that intense. You take the story personally; like you're reading a letter about people you know.If you haven't read this book, read it. If you've seen a movie based upon it, forget you ever saw it and read the book.Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to ramble on a bit. You can stop reading here if you haven't got the time; I'm not really going to say anything more important than I've already said.For instance. In the brief (2-page) preface of the edition of "The Sheltering Sky" that I read, Paul Bowles gives away what is the novel's most shocking turn--why, I can't imagine. Did he think everyone had seen the movie already (one with Debra Winger, apparently; thank God I missed it)? Did he think the novel was already so well-known that it was like revealing that the Greeks came out on top in "the Iliad" or that Ivan Illych dies in "the Death of Ivan Ilych"? Or was it just that he was 87 or so at the time and, like many 87 year-old people, figured he earned the right to do whatever the heck he felt like regardless of propriety?Well, whatever made him do it, I wish he hadn't--it was like watching a blonde in a shower scene in a Friday the 13th movie (any of them)--you know what's coming, the question is when--and how.That said, "the Sheltering Sky" is a fierce and uncompromising book that peels back a bit of what "shelters" us from the cold indifference of the cosmos. A husband and wife--Port and Kit--are on an extended and aimless tour of North Africa, traveling from one desert town to another in the company of their mutual friend, Tunner. Their marriage is on the rocks and the presence of Tunner, a man clearly not averse to pinch-hitting, isn't helping matters. Meanwhile, the relentless and pitiless desert is, if not a stage set in hell, then a room in Purgatory very close by.The food's bad, the heat oppressive, the insects voracious, diseases innumerable and nasty, the natives inscrutable, hostile, devious, or all three--why would anyone voluntarily come here?Why indeed?Kit and Port. It takes some time, I found, to get beyond these silly names. A little too precious, in an F. Scott Fitzgeraldy way. What's Port short for, anyway? Porter? Porthole?Well, you get the sense that Port--a rather misanthropic character, is attempting to shed his life of illusions--civilization, humanity, religion, science--all the shelters we hide under--and traveling towards some naked unadorned truth he hopes to find in the most stripped-down place there is on earth: the Sahara.In this alien, inhospitable, virtually anti-human place, he'll get a glimpse of what he's looking for and it'll be every bit as terrifying as that butcher knife that emerges from the plastic shower curtain. Because even if you're expecting it, just like death, when it comes it's shocking all the same.Paul Bowles is a great writer--easily one of the best American writers of the 20th century--perhaps because he removed himself from America altogether in mind and body. He writes with the concern for the deep philosophical concerns that usually seem to be the province of Europeans, especially the French. In his confrontations with the desert, Bowles, through his characters, confronts more than merely the social concerns--the "shelters," if you will--of any particular class, race, or nation--but portrays the individual in extremis beyond all these...at the very edge of the abyss.

Reviewer: H. Williams
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A terrific modernist book, full of despicable Americans, wandering aimlessly in Africa until things go very, very bad
Review: In February 2018, the book discussion group at the LGBT Center in NYC had a good group to discuss "The Sheltering Sky" by Paul Bowles.This was a very interesting discussion. A few readers didn't care for the book, a number of readers didn't like it at first but then loved it - something clicked and it became a terrific novel, and some of it just liked it from the beginning. The most common complaints were about the style, which Bowles is famous for in "The Sheltering Sky," which some found flat and off-putting.This is a huge, meandering novel that takes a while to figure out what's going on, and then the discovery is that not much happens or, actually, a lot happens but it's largely indirect and unexplained actions that cure to a devastating double ending."The Sheltering Sky" revolves around three central characters. Port is the rich traveler (never a tourist) who heads deeper and deeper into Africa, but so unplanned and apathetic about his travels that he never gets his shots that are essential to survival in the savage environment. Kit is Port's wife who does whatever she needs to do at the moment and survives wherever she lands. She apparently goes completely crazy at the end of the novel, but she's always a little unstable. Tunner is their handsome friend who tags along, who's in love with the (mostly) unavailable Kit.Minor characters include the creepy and thieving Eric Lyle, who is tortured by his horrible and abusive xenophobic mother (what the hell is she doing as a travel writer in Africa?). Captain Broussard is a French puritan who heads an outpost where disaster strikes for Kit and the deathly ill Port. And Belqassim is the handsome Arab sheik who takes Kit in (much to Kit's initial pleasure) but then imprisons her (much to her eventual unhappiness).Let's face it, all the non-African characters are unlikable or despicable. None of them has any redeeming features (although I find Tunner naively charming and completely dedicated to Kit in the best possible way even though I think he might be unintentionally dangerous and ultimately unhelpful, especially to Kit). This might be an aspect of modernism to present completely modern characters without redeeming attributes who we love to hate.The style is definitely high modernism. The language is flat and straightforward with few flourishes. Everything is described as "filthy" and "violent." Bowles never ascribes much motivation to his characters. You have to discern that they left America because they're rich and listless but finally examples of "the ugly American" abroad (not as bad as Mrs. Lyle, but equally clueless in many ways). They travel without direction. There's definitely a feeling of existentialism about the novel, although there's also an element of gothic thriller about it, too.Port takes a long time to die, but the writing during his illness and during his death is among the best Bowles presents. The novel is pervaded with a sinister or ominous sense of disaster, waiting for an explosion that never quite comes. This ending is both small and deeply moving.

Reviewer: Touria Merzaya
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Schönes Buch, Lieferung war gut und kann ich nur empfehlen

Reviewer: Christian G.
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Très satisfait. Merci !

Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: One of the great novels. Only just got round to reading it. Read the last 200 pages in one sitting - left completely breathless. I gather there’s a listless film adaptation - am going to swerve this (how could they translate such unique prose onto the screen?). Ostensibly about a ‘codependent' couple touring North Africa in the aftermath of the Second World War, and their respective descents into physical and 'mental illness’ (albeit the latter is far more nuanced, even using such current parlance feels crude when analysing such a modernist novel). The prose are flawless. There is no fat, it is both stark and surreal, lyrical and economic - there are moments it subtly morphs into hallucinatory dreamscapes, but never strays far from the squalid tangibles of their surroundings, capturing alienation in its purest form. It achieves the rare feat of capturing the liminal space between the self and pitiless reality - few novels do so as successfully. It is so gorgeously tacticle and sad and euphoric. And early on it is punctuated with brilliantly ominous foreshadowings of what is to come in the third and final section, where it soars into even more narratively riveting and emotionally wrenching territory. When the woman disappeares into the desert, and what she experiences, is some of the most affecting writing i’ve read. The ending is extraordinary. Just a stunningly original novel of earth-shattering beauty.

Reviewer: Little Chandler
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: otimo

Reviewer: CARFER
Rating: 1.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Pensaba q llevaria el libro escrito para seguirlo. Pero son solo CDs...No me convence y no lo hubiera comprado de haberlo sabido.