A Festa de Todos os Santos

"Feast of All Saints?" Where...? When...?

Was the Feast of All Saints storyline and theme edited out?

What a waste of a wonderful title! There is never anything in the story that has the remotest connection to the "Feast of All Saints." Nor is there anything in the story about "All Souls Day" which the term is referencing. Why bother to use this title if you never intend to including any kind of storyline or theme about "All Souls Day" or the "Feast of All Saints"?

Embarrassly Bad Script & Amateur Writing

How did they attract such great talent to this clunker? The writing is so amateur--characters that have known each other all their life go into big long speeches about their life history for the sake of the audience. Not at all the way people talk to each other.

What was the Director Thinking?

The directing is equally bad! The forced and overly deliberate style feels amateurish. In one scene, a character is yelling "Take your hands off of me" and NO ONE is touching him! The most badly directed scene however, is the incredibly over-the-top battle scene at the beginning of the film.

Excessive Gore in a Very Fake, Silly Battle Scene

There are so many dead people in the most fake battle scene. It looks like a Saturday Night Live skit!! You can see extras waiting for their cues to walk across camera. Everyone plays their death scene like 4th grade boys--exaggerating every little gasp and twitch. The blood on battle victims is so excessive and carelessly applied it looks like someone used a ketchup dispenser and just squirted straight lines of red on the costumes.

This whole battle scene comes off as the spoof of a really cheesy war movie. You almost expect someone like Will Ferrell and Mike Myers to ride up on a horse and deliver the punchline.

Who in Real Life Would Ever Behave this Way?!

The most ridiculous bit of writing, directing and casting is actually the focus of the scene:

A little girl is standing under the dead body of her hanging father--who is terribly mutilated, and literally dripping blood form his gaping wounds. Even a totally idiot would know he is dead! Yet she is--very monotonously--repeating over and over "Daddy, daddy..." while looking at someone off-screen. She delivered it with about as much believability and passion as you could expect from an non-actor kid that had been repeating the line for the cameras all day.

Even if the poor kid had any acting skills, the scene is completely unbelievable. The little girl wouldn't even BE in the middle of the battlefield after hours of carnage--surrounded by hundreds of dead bodies, while she calmly stands there!! Natural instincts would had the kid screaming and terrified, running AWAY from the bloody carnage!

Are we Suppose to be Horrified or Laugh...?!

One particularly goofy detail, that gives the scene an SNL satire tone, is the father hanging, with a huge hook through his mouth and cheek. He looks like a fish on a hook! The unintentionally funny details, make the whole scene come across as fake and silly.

In Fantasy La-La-Land, Mothers and Daughters are the Same Age!

Another funny detail, is that you see a central character--the little girl's mother--at the end of the scene and in the next scene, that occurs 20+ years later, she looks exactly the same! She is still young and beautiful, and now the same age as her daughter!

I almost turned the movie off right there because the direction and writing were obviously awful--but I tried to stick it out because I wanted to see the Louisiana settings and I like all the actors. I don't know what these fine actors were thinking when they accepted these roles!

Who was the Targeted Audience?

The excessive amount of blood and badly acted violence in the opening scene are weirdly out of place with the soap opera storytelling tone that follows. It is also a strange way to start a movie that, for the rest of the time, seems targeted to romance novel reading females. Weird inconsistency in tone!

The story and the show were good, but it was really depressing and I hate depressing movies. Ri'Chard is great. He really put on a top notch performance, and the girl who played his sister was really awesome and gorgeous. Seriously, I thought she was Carmen Electra until I saw the IMDb profile. I can't say anything bad about Peter Galleghar. He's one of my favorite actors. I love Anne Rice. I'm currently reading the Vampire Chronicles, but I'm glad I saw the movie before reading the book. This is a little too"real" for me. I prefer Lestat and Louis's witty little tiffs to the struggles of slaves. Eartha Kitt was so creepy and after her character did what she did The movie was ruined for me; I could barely stand to watch the rest of the show. (sorry for the ambiguity, but I don't want to give anything away) Sorry, but it's just not my type of show.

I know that originally, this film was NOT a box office hit, but in light of recent Hollywood releases (most of which have been decidedly formula-ridden, plot less, pointless, "save-the-blonde-chick-no-matter-what" drivel), Feast of All Saints, certainly in this sorry context deserves a second opinion. The film--like the book--loses anchoring in some of the historical background, but it depicts a uniquely American dilemma set against the uniquely horrific American institution of human enslavement, and some of its tragic (and funny, and touching) consequences.

And worthy of singling out is the youthful Robert Ri'chard, cast as the leading figure, Marcel, whose idealistic enthusiasm is truly universal as he sets out in the beginning of his 'coming of age,' only to be cruelly disappointed at what turns out to become his true education in the ways of the Southern plantation world of Louisiana, at the apex of the antebellum period. When I saw the previews featuring the (dreaded) blond-haired Ri'chard, I expected a buffoon, a fop, a caricature--I was pleasantly surprised.

Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, the late Ben Vereen, Pam Grier, Victoria Rowell and even Jasmine Guy lend vivid imagery and formidable skill as actors in the backdrop tapestry of placage, voodoo, Creole "aristocracy," and Haitian revolt woven into this tale of human passion, hate, love, family, and racial perplexity in a society which is supposedly gone and yet somehow is still with us.

We tend to forget that the master/slave context of the past centuries lead to more than well-tended estates, powered by large groups of enslaved people, and a lot of money for the white owners. It lead to a group of people caught in the middle - the offspring resulting from slave owners interferring with their female slaves.

Some of these children just became more slaves, and others were free...but free and coloured, which back then meant anything but, relative to the lot of their sires.

A class formed around these offspring - the gens de couleur libre or free people of colour - and that class was able, to a certain extent, to own property, raise themselves from downtrodden to educated, and to attain a comparative dignity. That is to say, they weren't slaves, but they were still exploited to a certain extent.

Often, the women lived as mistresses to the white plantation masters and men of wealth, set up in their own houses, with allowances, schooling paid for for their children, and a kind of gentility, dependent on the respectability they chose to impose on their families. In essence, they were prostituting themselves to ensure their own prosperity, and relative independence from labour - an arrangement called plaçage.

Feast of All Saints is a beautifully written story about the children of one such woman, the result of just such an arrangement with a local gentleman, and the people who touched on their lives, in both a negative and a positive way. The tale was an eye-opener for me, a New Zealander, with no real conception of the black/white lines, let alone that grey area in the middle where the gens de couleur libre trod gingerly.

The characters are very three dimensional, and have been well-rendered in this adaption of the novel, by Anne Rice. The parts are well-cast, the costumes are wonderful, and the brutal way the lines are drawn out, with the blurred areas made all the more distinct by the conflicts the protagonists go through. The gens de couleur libre could not marry the whites, the slaves could not help themselves, and the whites, even the sympathetic ones, couldn't bear to face the economic reality of doing right by the people they depended on.

I recommend this story, both the novel and the miniseries, to everyone, unreservedly. If you can't handle the truth you'll cringe and cower through some parts, as one injustice after another is meted out on those of colour, both by their white oppressors, and by their own people. Bear in mind though that this is nothing more than reality, and this tale is an absorbing way to learn about it.

I know it may sound callous, but this miniseries both entertained me and enthralled me, despite the sour taste I found in my mouth at what went on, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Watch it. If not read up on the period, because there's a lesson to be learned from it all.

This movie was so badly written, directed and acted that it beggars belief. It should be remade with a better script, director and casting service. The worst problem is the acting. You have Jennifer Beals on the one hand who is polished, professional and totally believable, and on the other hand, Ri'chard, who is woefully miscast and just jarring in this particular piece. Peter Gallagher and Jenny Levine are just awful as the slave owning (and keeping) couple, although both normally do fine work. The actors (and director) should not have attempted to do accents at all--they are inconsistent and unbelievable. Much better to have concentrated on doing a good job in actual English. The casting is ludicrous. Why have children of an "African" merchant (thus less socially desirable to the gens de couleur society ) been cast with very pale skinned actors, while the supposedly socially desirable Marcel, has pronounced African features, including an obviously dyed blond "fro"? It's as if the casting directors cannot be bothered to read the script they are casting and to chose appropriate actors from a large pool of extremely talented and physically diverse actors of color. It's just so weird! This could be a great movie and should be re-made, but with people who respect the material and can choose appropriate and skilled actors. There are plenty of good actors out there, and it would be fun to see how Jennifer Beals, Daniel Sunjata and Gloria Reuben would do with an appropriate cast, good script and decent direction.