KingofCarrotFlowers

As you might not know Eça de Queiroz is one of Portugal's most rightfully celebrated writers. He was witty, he spared no one in his critics and must now be rolling in his tomb. And that's not due to this movie being bad, which it is, but as a result of the treatment dispensed to one of his masterworks "O Crime do Padre Amaro". It's treated like cheap, throwaway trash.

When it was publicized that this was to be a "modern and urban" take on the book I feared for the worst, normally modern in these contexts means taking the liberty to take the p**** when doing an adaptation, to half arse it in the shoddiest possible way. And so the moral and social dilemma of a priest having a secret,forbidden affair are substituted by extra-long passages of people dealing drugs and singing hip-hop for no particular or pertinent reason to the plot. It's just there like it might very well not have been.

Oh and there's lots of sex so you can at least be counting on that when you put this on. Remember how every movie in the 80's, no matter the genre or the tone always found a way to sneak in some nudity? If it was a thriller and they had no need for it they simply found a way that when they were capturing a felon he "happened" to be in bed with a woman that would prance around screaming (naked of course) when the cops barged in. Ahem, gratuitous is the word I think. Not that there's anything wrong with nude scenes but here they make the creators of this movie look desperate simply because there's nothing else to the movie, it's totally devoid of what do you call it dramatic content.

A fascinating study on mental illness above all else, "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" offers a disturbingly piercing and complex glimpse into one's mind and of what exactly constitutes a psychological disease. Everyone knows about Nicholson's charismatic turn as McMurphy, the supposedly sanest person in the asylum but there's so much more here if one digs beneath the surface and straight into the secondary characters. Where Brad Dourif excels as the impossibly sensitive and introverted youth unable to take a stand on anything. Besides him we get all sorts of disturbed conditions ranging from people who frequent the asylum as refuge from their lives to others who are utterly unable to deal with the world in the most basic of ways. So while taking this as the saga of one man while he struggles to remain sane is affecting enough, couple it with the myriad shades of humanity that surround and interact with him and the end result is a thoroughly envolving experience.

Beautifully shot and packed with a wickedly grim sense of humour this is one of the finest westerns this side of John Huston. Starring a stony faced don't-laugh-don't-blink Clint Eastwood and a crafty, weasely Eli Wallach it covers most of the genre's typical themes, albeit in a more gonzoid fashion, ranging from public hangings to duels and back.

Sergio Leone goes to great lengths to create just the right atmosphere, filming even the smallest rolling tumbleweed if it improved on his vision. Consequently this an epic of epic length, which is bound to put some people off.

However, the huge amounts of iconic moments, the sweeping Morricone soundtrack and the sheer wide-eyed sense of adventure it oozes turns it into a great slice of cinema.