O Último Desejo

With all the potential for a good movie in its gorgeous settings, cast, and cinematography, this film's lacklustre script, leaden pace, and wooden performances produced only a major disappointment. With decent direction, editing, and musical score, this could have been a good movie, perhaps a dark version of Blake Edward's '10', instead of a weepy version of Ron Howard's 'Splash'.

The only reason to watch this is for the Hot Diane Lane! Whoa. Other than that its pretty stale. No wonder i had to dig to find this movie. Good of been alot better.

The main character is an ex-rock star. He stopped singing when his brother died in an accident - probably a suicide. He feels guilty. One day, on the beach, he finds a vase. A female genie comes out of it and offers him three wishes. The only thing he can wish is that his brother come back. But that's impossible.

The whole movie is built around the theme of being able to live again when someone near you has died. The message is profound and interesting, but the theme is not really new, and I can't say that it is renewed or made poignant in this static film.

However, one must say that the Charles Finch knows how to catch beautiful images : throughout the film, he shoots many great natural scenes and numerous extraordinary tight frames (Christopher Lambert is downright photogenic), also playing with the fabulous light of Italy.

I've seen soap operas more intelligent than this movie. Bad characters, bad story and bad acting. It would be a love story between a man and a mermaid. Really awful.

I kind of liked it. It's a nice movie about a guy who's really depressed about losing his friend (I thought it was his brother?), and gets a newly minted genie who's everything he or any other nice guy could have asked for in a girlfriend, to get him out of his blues and set him on the path toward life and love again. Diane Lane is gorgeous, very buxom, and very sweet, loving, and innocently childlike--very different from the role she had just done in THE BIG TOWN. Lambert is convincing as a rock star turned depressed beach bum, slowly coming back to life again, but with all his "jerky" neurotic defenses, which ALMOST screw everything up for the two of them.

The scene with her being created by the magic pot (no, contrary to another review that used to be on the IMDb, she couldn't have lived there for thousands of years, because, unlike Jeannie's bottle, it's got nothing to cover it up, and it's been on the ocean floor for a long time, so she would have drowned), slowly forming out of smoke, is really erotic--as is Lane's and Lambert's love scenes together (this makes it a cut above "I Dream of Jeannie,"--the second night she's with him, she asks him "Is it time to make love" with her yet? And they do! And it's great!) Now, let's talk about the BAD NEWS. The BAD NEWS is that the movie was made during a time when popular music--especially, theme music for movies--had reached a new and all time LOW! Cheesy, stupid, sleazy-sentimental disco-beaten TRASH, most of which I was very glad I had a remote control Fast Forward button to skip through--along with most of the supporting actors' "acting" (Bleecch!) They can't do anything about the bad acting of the bit actors, but. . If they ever make a DVD out of this (and I certainly hope they do!), I hope they will reedit it and at least create a whole new musical score, this time purely made up of classical and folk acoustic Italian guitar music. Yes, I know it was made in 1989, but we can't we just pretend it was made in 1969--a year after Zefferelli's ROMEO AND JULIET, who wonderful score was Nino Rota? If only they could have cloned that Man, and kept Him alive for the next couple of centuries! And made it mandatory that every romantic musical would have to let Him do the composing!