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List Price: $26.97 | | Label: Starz / Anchor Bay
Salesrank: 34482
Released: February 10, 2009 |
| Our Price: $5.26 |
| Used Price: $0.01 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
A story of one woman's spiritual, emotional and creative transformation. One morning, "mouse-Burger" Melody, "Mel" Wilder is diagnosed with a terminal illness, fired from her thankless job and abandoned by her boyfriend. With nothing left to lose, given 2 months to live, she spends her entire life's savings renting an empty palatial loft in the Village. Thinking she'll never have to pay the piper, she lives off her credit cards, fills the loft with the fanciest products, sensually engages both the parcel delivery man and a pizza delivery girl and teaches herself to play the electric guitar she's craved since childhood. These life affirming experiences transform her irrevocably.
Description of The Guitar:
Actress Amy Redford's directorial debut, The Guitar, pivots on a potentially risible concept made palatable by a charismatic cast: an attractive woman discovers she's dying, maxes out her credit cards, and indulges her every materialistic and sexual whim (and yes, Amy is Robert Redford's daughter). But what sounds like an art-house version of The Bucket List offers its own unique charms--at least for those who don't take it too literally. Moments after Melody Wilder (Saffron Burrows) finds out she has inoperable throat cancer, she loses her job and her boyfriend, leaving her alone and broke in New York City (Janeane Garofolo gives her the bad medical news). So, she abandons her basement apartment and moves into a cavernous loft, where she orders fancy outfits and furnishings, throws the refuse out the windows, and dines on take-out while dreaming of the red Stratocaster she coveted as a girl. Soon Mel’s life revolves around her new stuff and the kindly individuals who deliver it to her: the married Roscoe (Isaach de Bankolé) and engaged Cookie (Paz de la Huerta). All the while, the willowy Burrows, much like Ali McGraw in Love Story, makes listless and pale seem more glamorous than sad, but just as tragedy gives way to fantasy, Mel returns to reality once her credit runs out. As a how-to guide for the terminally ill, The Guitar won't win many points, but as a metaphor for spiritual emptiness, it gets the job done. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
The Guitar Reviews:
Strange 
2009-08-20 - I thought this movie was strange...I like indie films usually and get a kick out of watching some that are a little out there, but this one just didn't have much substance for a subject matter that carries a lot of weight. You know how some films try to be really deep and heady, but aren't? I thought this was one of those. No, we don't know how we will react when facing our own mortality, but this character's actions just didn't make for entertaining drama. Three stars is actually generous now that I think about it....I'll go 2.5.
Freedom 
2009-08-14 - I enjoyed this movie. I felt the whole premise is about what would happen if you were truly free to do what you wanted to do (albeit for a short time), to allow yourself to go back and be the person you wanted to be before life locked you into your situation, to not worry about what anyone thinks. The path of the character made perfect sense to me. Saffron Burroughs did a fine job of acting, and of course she's quite beautiful as well. In many ways the movie was all about healing and restoration, both of the body and the spirit. It could have been more intense or interestingly "out there" perhaps, but overall I liked it for what it is.
Saffron Burrows gives a nice performance but can't save a ridiculous script 
2009-08-05 - Melody Wilder is having a bad day. First, she finds out that she has one to two months to live. (Apparently, she had been "feeling crappy," saw a doctor and was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. No treatment is offered to slow the progress, or to make her more comfortable. Just "take the day to arrange your affairs and then come back to see a counselor." Yeah, right.
Stunned, Melody makes her way back to her office. She arrives at her cubicle only to be "downsized" by her boss in front of everyone. He hands her a check for 4 weeks severance, shrugs and walks off. Yeah, right.
Distraught, she calls her "boyfriend" who reluctantly agrees to meet with her. Before she can say anything, he's trotting out believable, original lines like "I'm feeling trapped. Not me...my lifeforce" and "my therapist thinks I need to get in touch with my inner child." So she gets dumped unceremoniously by a guy who only speaks in cliches. Yeah, right.
Melody has nothing in her life, so she contemplates suicide. By happenstance, she sees a half page ad in the New York Times advertising the gorgeous, beautiful, spacious loft with a river view...but it's only available for two months rental. So, yeah, right...I guess I'd spend that kind of money advertising to rent a space I only had for two months. Anyway, Melody leaves everything she has except the clothes on her back, empties her accounts, and proceeds to move into this gorgeous loft (and it IS) and starts to furnish it to her liking using her huge pile of credit cards.
Finally, the movie seems to get something right. If you were all alone and about to die, it might be a VERY viable choice to just max out your credit cards and indulge. Although I must say that the choices for indulgence that Melody makes aren't the ones I would make...but to each his/her own. She confines herself entirely to her apartment (in fact, she even tosses her few clothes out the window, and until she gets new ones, struts around quite naked.)
Eventually, Melody makes friends with her pizza delivery girl and her UPS man. In fact, they all become more than friends...although it is nearly impossible to see what draws these people together other than pure hedonism. But its all scripted in such a way as to make it all an implausible dream.
Melody also remembers how as a young girl she yearned to own this lovely red electric guitar...so she finally treats herself, and spends hours on end trying to learn the instrument. These scenes, though mostly dramatically inert, do generate some emotion...the idea of connecting to music in a way that you almost feel inside your body.
Saffron Burrows is Melody, and she does a very nice job. Were the role mishandled, the movie would have been completely unwatchable. As it is, Burrows dives deep into her character and we frequently see real emotion on her face. It's the kind of performance that will make casting directors take note of her skills, and perhaps land her some roles worthy of whatever talent she has.
In THE GUITAR, however, the script writer almost utterly lets her down. The final section of the film is utterly, completely ludicrous in a way that almost made me groan. Jeanneane Garfalo, as the doctor (in a cameo that is totally jarring) is forced to utter one of the most outrageously stupid medical explanations I've ever heard in a movie. The movie, when it was all said and done, was mostly just a big slap to my intelligence and to my understanding of how humans really behave.
If you want to see Saffron Burrows take a big step as an actress (or want to see this frighteningly skinny actress nude for long stretches), this movie might be for you. Otherwise, avoid it!
Opulence 
2009-07-01 - I did not connect with this film. Saffron Burrows who was great in Circle of Friends and had her first role in "In the Name of the Father," does her best to stay afloat in the film. She's particularly interesting as a guitarist thundering next to a wall of amps. Her character Melody Wilder has about the worst day possible when Dr. Murray played by Janeane Garofalo tells her she has a very short time to live. She walks out of her apartment with the shirt on her back and rents a lush penthouse. Running up huge amounts of credit card debt she believes she will die before having to pay back, she begins an affair with the delivery man Roscoe played by Isaach de Bankole. From the Ivory Coast, de Bankole has starred in the great Ghost Dog - The Way of the Samurai with Forrest Whitaker and in "Casino Royale," the James Bond film. Roscoe's relationship to Melody is one of desire and tenderness. However, he is married. Melody also has a relationship with Cookie, the pizza delivery woman. Cookie is played by Paz de la Herta who was in the film Fierce People. When Roscoe walks in on the two girls making love, he reacts with a smile and joins them. Amy Redford directed this for her first feature; and actually does fairly well with it. My problem is that the material was depressing, the character reacted by drenching herself in opulence with credit card fraud and then has casual sex on top of it. I found myself continually turning off the film and then forcing myself to sit through another five or ten minutes of it. It took me two months and at least eight viewings to complete the whole thing. It was excruciatingly depressing. Taxi!
Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, Banana phone!
2009-06-23 - Mel Wilder (Saffron Burrows) just had the worst day of her life. Diagnosed with cancer, fired, and dumped by her spineless, pansy of a boyfriend, her life is in chaos. After a short bout with depression about her predicament, most notably the two months she has been given to live, Mel decides to go crazy and flip her life upside down. Eschewing her possessions, it becomes a race against time as she rents a pricy loft downtown and begins a quest to max out every credit card she has with ridiculously pricy and ostentatious purchases - essentially a bucket list for women.
Along the way Mel experiments with food, life, sexuality, and most importantly music. Interspersed with dream-life flashbacks of a young Mel nearly drooling at the site of a red guitar in the window of a music store below her family's apartment, the plot moves toward an association between her spiritual awakening through music. As she nears her presumed end, it's the music that she savors the most; it's the music and the guitar that she holds on to the longest.
The acting from Wilder is superb. Considering the fact that she carries nearly the entire movie, her troubled expressions and quivering voice exude sorrow. When the purchases begin, however, her mood begins to change, and her metamorphosis begins. The concept is also interesting; told from the perspective of someone who is literally dying, it's difficult to comprehend what one would do (tip: Stay far away from me if I'm in this situation. The results will be more like a horror movie than a drama.) The biggest problem with the movie is its slow pacing. It's unbearably boring at times, with extended scenes of Wilder just reading off credit card numbers while on a banana-shaped phone. As she orders from catalog after catalog, it ends up being a QVC addict's wet dream. The supporting actors are average at best, if not a bit amateur. Aside from the incessant shopping spree and the supporting acting, however, is the problem with the lackluster ending. It's an incomplete resolution or final outcome, and we're shown neither her understanding of the life changing metamorphosis, nor of her true rebirth/second chance at life.
Some will love this movie, and I can understand that completely. Even though it's not my cup o' tea, I've already recommended it to a co-worker.
