Well now that I'm sufficiently mad about Beowulf...the movies I guess I should vent my frustration about Love in the Time of Cholera...the movie. How could they try and convert this book, one of the most beautifully written I have ever had the pleasure to read, into a hollywood love story? The previews make it seem like a sappy, typical hollywood date film with just a tinge of art film thrown in to make it slightly less offensive. From the reviews I've read, I've heard it's shallow, unintelligent, lackluster, not very well acted, written with some skill at best, and a general distortion, but in the very negative sense, of the book. For example, one of the main characters, Dr. Juvenal Urbino, is apparently some smarmy, pompous idiot in the movie. He's anything but that in the book but his character was changed so drastically so that audiences would root for the other main character, Florentino Ariza, in his quest to win Urbino's wife. I'm not against converting books into film per se. I am against converting Garcia Marquez's books. The language, the magical realism, the seamless back and forth flow of time, none of this can truly be captured on film in a way even remotely comparable to the book and, as a result, no film translation would, in my opinion, do any of his books justice. I can point to this as a prime example. It's such a shame that hollywood seems to find in necessary to fuck up so many beautiful things. The only positive side of this movie that I can see is that more people will probably read the book (albeit an edition with the movie poster as its cover- I hate those fucking copies) and thus experience it the way it was meant to be experienced: in print.