Don Quixote

I would like to thank James Franco and Luiz Guzman for their participation in a great film. These A-list actors giving their time to participate in what will soon become a classic. This film captured the myth of Don Quixote. Beautiful and sad, I enjoyed the movie immensely. It recognized the depth of the human spirit. Inspirational, I wanted to take up my lance and right all the wrongs in the world. Thank you everyone who helped make this film possible.

I've never read the book so I had no expectations going into this.

I found it was quite funny and I really liked the characters.

After watching a slew of utter garbage movies where the main characters were so unlikable that I was rooting for the bad guys (I'm looking at you Dead Draw and Skyline), it was quite refreshing to find myself drawn into this story, waiting to see what would happen next, and laughing the whole way.

Unfortunately, this movie does not do the book justice.

The acting is quite awful. I could not even make it through half the movie.

The movie does convey the nonsensical motives of Don Quixote.

But, this is obviously a subjective review. You must decide for yourself.

This version of Don Quixote, though it carries the subtitle of the novel itself, is based more on the musical "The Man of La Mancha" than on the novel. I admit that no film of the usual length could ever capture the richness and complexity of even Part 1 of the novel (Part 2 being ignored by most interpreters). A mini-series would be required to attempt to do justice to the novel. But the plot line here really aligns more with the musical than the book.

One thing that drove me crazy from the start: The letter "o" in the word "Don" is, throughout, pronounced like the "o" in the first syllable of "Donald", rather than like the "o" in phone. "Don" in Spanish is a title (like "Sir"), not a name. They could at least have pronounced it properly and not thereby announced the American origins of the film linguistically.

Very good cameos, yet so far from the original, and so choppy as to lose any semblance of accuracy. Superfluous scenes of Sancho and his wife in bed...