morrison-dylan-fan Talking to a friend recently about films she was keen on taking a look at,I got told about an interesting-sounding Costume Drama starring Robert Pattinson.With having recently been impressed by Pattinson's performance in the gritty Post-Apocalypse film The Rover,I decided that it was the perfect time to uncover The History of a Scoundrel.The plot:Paris 1890-Penniless since he left the battle field, soldier Georges Duroy is happy to run into his wealthy old friend Charles Forestier.Sad to see how poor his friend has become,Forestier decides to invite Duroy to stay with him and his wife Mrs. Madeleine Forestier.Taken by Duroy's charms,Madeleine introduces Duroy to her friends Clotilde de Marelle & Virginie Rousset.Learning that Charles now edits a newspaper,Duroy decides to take advantage of Madeleine and her pals attraction to him,as Duroy sets his sights on leaving his penniless life behind.View on the film:Whilst some of the dialogue sounds far too modern for late 1800s Paris, Rachel Bennette's adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's novel,does well at painting a cruel atmosphere,thanks to Bennette showing the desire for power to be the fuel behind all of Georges Duroy's relationships.Taking a slightly anthology style approach to each of Duroy's liaisons, Bennette is disappointingly unable to give the relationships any feeling of depth,due to Bennette giving the characters an outline which is only skin deep,which also causes Duroy's rise to power to feel rather abrupt,and not reaching the dark dramatic notes that the film desires.Transferring from the stage to the cinema, directors Nick Ormerod & Declan Donnellan superbly use deep rich blues to show the riches that Duroy is gathering for himself,which are haunted by a dark charcoal blacks,which are slowly draped over the film,as Duroy discovers the lies behind his riches.Along with the strong blues & blacks,the directors also give the movie an elegant sheen of light greens and yellows,which make the surprisingly graphic sex scenes sparkle.Surrounded by a dazzling array of girls, (all of whom look stunning,esp when naked!) Robert Pattinson (who makes sure that it is not all one-sided,by also appearing naked in the film) gives a very good performance as Georges Duroy,thanks to Pattinson showing Duroy's swagger to be one that hides a fear over returning to the bottom of the ladder.Giving Duroy a major bed/step up to power, Uma Thurman gives a wonderful performance as Madeleine Forestier,with Thurman bringing a dominating sass out of Forestier,as Duroy discovers that he has become a scoundrel of history.

dierregi Being uninterested in Pattinson as a vampire, teenage heart-throb, I thought myself unbiased and ready to appreciate his acting skills. Unfortunately, this movie did not reveal any. Pattinson plays Georges Duroy, a penniless ex-NCO, who seduces and manipulates rich women despite a complete lack of wit or endowments. Besides not showing any of the charisma required by the part, Pattinson's rough features add further hindrance. The role would have suited an actor of refined handsomeness, to make the contrast with Georges personality even more striking. What we get instead is Pattinson's boxer nose, coupled with a flat delivery of his lines. It makes it hard to believe that so many women would find him irresistible.The story follows Duroy meeting in a brothel Forestier, a former comrade. For reasons impossible to understand, Forestier invites him to dinner and ends up offering Georges a job. During this dinner Georges meets three women willing to be manipulated like puppets, despite the fact that they all seem smarter than Georges. The first is Clotilde is a rich, dizzy married woman, who just wants to be Georges lover at all costs. For their first sexual encounter, Georges invites her to his squalid abode and Clotilde decides to rent an expensive love nest to continue their relationship.Madeleine is Forestier's wife, played by Thurman. She is an independent, clever woman who ends up marrying Georges, although she has absolutely no reason whatsoever to do so. Their relation is completely inexplicable.Mme Rousset, played by Scott Thomas, is a middle aged married woman who loses her head for the completely charm-free Georges. The seduction scene that involves the two of them is cringe-inducing.Finally, a fourth woman also falls for Georges, making the whole movie a sequel of sexual encounters strangely lacking any passion. Not bad for a boy who would hardly get a second glance, but incredibly tedious as a movie plot

Fabrice Arfi 3 days down the line and I'm still thinking about Bel Ami with Robert Pattinson. Unlike what you might have heard, it wasn't bad because of Robert Pattinson. Although it might seem incongruous to have him as the lead, he does, overall, an all right job and it is easy to forget that many of the female characters that he seduces throughout the film are, on occasions over twice his age. The issue doesn't necessarily lie, either, with the inevitable cuts made to the original plot line in order to produce a usable script. Indeed, the book needs to be concentrated in order to fit a 1"30' format and so things have to be somewhat truncated, concentrated and, on occasions, selected out of the the original work. The same way, some details will unavoidably be removed while others exaggerated and the characters will be simplified. Also, on occasions, the plot line of a book can be used as little more than a general framework on which a whole new piece is build. This was done with Great Expectations with Gwyneth Paltrow, and resulted in an OK flick. It was also done with Apocalypse Now and resulted in what is largely regarded as a masterpiece. Part of the disappointment, with Bel Ami is that the original piece is already extremely condensed and highly cinematic. The plot line is extremely linear and has few complexities. This is partly what makes it a classic. It's short, straight to the point, on occasions quite harshly so, unforgiving and might even change how you view what it means to be human. Bel Ami is a dark, unforgiving piece where humanity is seen as little more than a troupe of baboons, whose entire lives revolve around a game of bullying, violence, backstabbing and the constant rise and fall of a dominant Alpha Male.It talks of corruption and the interaction between the press and the political class and how the media control our lives by dispensing and retaining information, spreading rumours and, occasionally, fabricating fake information. As a matter of fact, Bel Ami himself ends up being ordered to take part in a proper western style show down by his publisher after being exposed as having fabricated false info.If you can't make a movie with that, then you probably shouldn't be making movies at all...So, once you have removed these elements from the original scripts, you are left little more than the characters, or at least some of them, and a lose plot line, although the characters become unavoidably flimsy, once they have lost their basic motivations and so the plot line starts making no sense at all. The only ones that comes out more or less unscathed are, as expected, Christina Ricci and Kristin Scott-Thomas, but they probably could be reading the phone book and still be interesting. Everyone else is struggling.What results is occasionally excellent actors saying their lines without a clue about what's going on in a low budget, half arsed Victorian reconstruction... Otherwise, the movie fails largely because of the editing. About halfway through, scenes suddenly start becoming shorter, jumping from one situation to the next in a totally disjointed way. For instance, nothing has been said of Suzanne's character or her relationship with Bel Ami. Also, unless you've read the novel, I wonder if anyone would understand why she suddenly appears in Bel Ami's coach or that he's kidnapping her... How to explain, then, that her father insists on their getting married on the spot?Other major irritants include the powder coated cast aluminium Ikea garden table used in every single scene at the Follies Bergeres; Forestier played by a bloke easily in his fifties, although purportedly a private under 26 years old Pattinson a few of years prior to the beginning of the movie; Their friendship turned into deep animosity by the scriptwriters, which make it impossible to account for Bel Ami visiting him on his deathbed; Bel Ami's small business owners family turned into illiterate peasants who rely in the curé to write weekly letters (hard to imagine Bel Ami or his family as keen church goers...) or his life of utter squalor which makes no sense at all for an office worker in a railway company... And, last but not least, the name of media mogul Walter changed to Rousset in order to remove any suggestion of his Jewish origins... There was a time when Hollywood producers insisted on ethnic and religious minorities characters in order to help viewers of different backgrounds feel included. Doing the opposite is offensive.

Gordon-11 This film tells the story of a poor soldier's rise to the upper class in Paris.Robert Pattinson plays a poor soldier who uses his charm to seduce women in upper class circles. His stone cold face suits the plot well, and his unscrupulous manner in which he played with the women's hearts is revolting and almost spine chilling. His character is so unlikable, that it makes me have a negative effect on the film. Fortunately, the leading ladies all have great performances, Christina Ricci consistently charms, while Kristin Scott Thomas shines in the one scene where she was treated in an appalling way."Bel Ami" is am engaging adaptation of a classical story, and I enjoyed it because these three leading ladies are all my favorite actresses.