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List Price: $14.99 | | Label: Miramax Home Entertainment
Salesrank: 2590
Released: June 29, 2004 |
| Our Price: $5.94 |
| Used Price: $1.83 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
A Confederate soldier struggles to return home to his beloved, while she struggles to survive the ravages of war.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 25-JAN-2005
Media Type: DVD
Description of Cold Mountain (Two-Disc Collector's Edition):
Freely adapted from Charles Frazier's beloved bestseller, Cold Mountain boasts an impeccable pedigree as a respectable Civil War love story, offering everything you'd want from a romantic epic except a resonant emotional core. Everything in this sweeping, Odyssean journey depends on believing in the instant love that ignites during a very brief encounter between genteel, city-bred preacher's daughter Ada (Nicole Kidman) and Confederate soldier Inman (Jude Law), who deserts the battlefield to return, weary and wounded, to Ada's inherited farm in the rural town of Cold Mountain, North Carolina. In an epic (but dramatically tenuous) case of absence making hearts grow fonder, Inman endures a treacherous hike fraught with danger (and populated by supporting players including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, and others) while the struggling, inexperienced Ada is aided by the high-spirited Ruby (Renée Zellweger), forming a powerful farming partnership that transforms Ada into a strong, lovelorn survivor. The film's episodic structure slightly weakens its emotional impact, and it's fairly obvious that director Anthony Minghella is striving to repeat the prestigious romanticism of his Oscar®-winning hit The English Patient. For the most part it works, especially in the dynamic performances of Zellweger and Kidman, and the explosive 1864 battle of Petersburg, Virginia, is recreated with violent, percussive intensity. Those who admired Frazier's novel may regret some of the changes made in Minghella's adaptation (the ending is particularly altered), but Cold Mountain remains a high-class example of grand, old-fashioned filmmaking, boosted by star power of the highest order. --Jeff Shannon
Cold Mountain (Two-Disc Collector's Edition) Reviews:
Zellweger is the Redeeming Factor in This Otherwise Trite Film 
2008-06-23 - Take the plot from Moulin Rouge, move it from Paris to the Civil War South, tweak it a bit here and there, and you get the film version of Cold Mountain. Placing an overrated Australian actress and a British pretty boy in the lead roles of a film meant to be about the American South during the Civil War is beyond offensive.
Were there no American actors available to take on these parts? Not surprisingly, neither Kidman nor Law could effectively nail the accents, which made an already trite, poorly executed love story even more painful to withstand. As is frequently the case with Nicole Kidman, you get a self-conscious, contrived performance rather than a reliable and convincing portrayel of a definitive character with true dimension. As is also frequently the case with her movies, the casting agents deftly placed a reliable supporting actress in the film to counteract her obvious weakness. Renee Zellweger single handedly carried the movie and made it watchable. For this reason, I awarded the film two stars. Her performance makes watching this otherwise
poorly casted film worthwhile.
Wet Week
2008-06-18 - This was visually OK but overlong and not remarkable. As an australian I should be prejudiced but have to say Nicole Kidman overrated. I own this movie but would not sit through it again. One to ten, ten being best, give this one four.
common people overwhelmed by war 
2008-06-06 - I loved the book and found the movie just as good, which is unusual. The Battle of the Crater [not in the book] is especially good--awful, really. Confederate armies on the verge of defeat are blown to Hell by an underground mine. Well-fed, well-trained Union soldiers advance into the breech only to be mowed down by the famished, desperate and shell-shocked survivors. Courage beyond the bounds of courage. The battle ends with mutilated Federal corpses piled up like cord wood...it's not a cinematic invention...it happened just this way.
The rest of film is excellent, too, but certainly far from perfect. The home guards, chasing down disgruntled soldiers and run away slaves, are just too evil for words. As a matter of fact, they are just too evil for reality. Slaves were valuable and deserting soldiers could still serve in the collapsing Confederate armies. Wholesale murder wasn't in the cards. At the same time, a film needs villains but sometimes villainy is more effective if handled more delicately...with more subtlety.
Still the film worked for me, especially the enormous tragedy of women--impoverished, grief-stricken women--waiting for men who would never return...waiting for men who would never again plough a field or make love to them again. Multiply Ada by hundreds of thousands and we start to get a feel for the unfathomable tragedy that was the American Civil War. 620,000 men never came home...more than all the other American wars put together. The South was especially devastated...most of her military aged men were dead or crippled while, simultaneously, the Federal Government exacted full revenge on the flattened South.
Hey! It "unified" the nation or was the nation's disunion just internalized? By the way, I'm a Southernor and wasn't disturbed by "fake" accents. It's been going on long before "Gone with the Wind."
Ron Braithwaite, author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico
Highly Recommended
2008-05-02 - This film is excellent. I was very impressed with the story line and greatly appreciated the characterizations by Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger. If you are interested in the Civil War era, this is an appropriate film and will hold your interest.
Good and long. 
2008-04-13 - Good, (and very long), civil war era drama. One of the few movies that focuses on home life during the war, rather than the war itself. Some over dramatic scenes, (including a chicken attack of all things), takes the movie out of the "great movie" category, but it's still a very good story, with fantastic cinematography and surround sound. Worth a look, if you've got the time of course.
