Python Hyena A Thousand Acres (1997): Dir: Jacelyn Moorehouse / Cast: Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jason Robards, Colin Firth: Drama regarding physical reference of structure and also the spanning of lives. A father leaves land to his three daughters in his will. His youngest daughter is an attorney who believes that he is making a mistake. His middle daughter remembers nights with incest and the desire for vengeance. The oldest cannot recollect these memories. When their father decides to take his land back, revenge becomes an option. Fine setup is reduced to predictable and unnecessary depression. Subplots dealing with incest, cancer and land settlements are poorly handled. Director Jacelyn Moorehouse does the best, and what works is the quality of the performances. While the resolution is hardly pleasant, it deals with a problem facing many households. Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer are at total odds yet supportive of one another, while Jennifer Jason Leigh is viewed as gullible when she defends her father. Jason Robards plays their cranky ill unpleasant father responsible for much heartache. Colin Firth plays a potential romantic element sighted by a couple of the women for a little crazy action. It is never fun to watch two daughters at odd with a parent as seen here but their pain is real or denied. Themes warrant reflection and understanding. Score: 7 / 10

halaphoto As much of this movie was filmed in my local area with a few miles of where I live I was very excited to see it when it came out. The cast all did a terrific job and I find no fault with any of their performances. The movie started out really great but soon slipped into a dreary and depressing darkness of a rather sick plot that just seemed to get more depressing as it went along. I guess the book that it was based on was supposed to be pretty good, but can truly say I have no interest in reading it if it is anything at all like the flick. Iwas very happy to leave the theater, and had/have no desire ever to see the movie again even though many of the place sets were local and familiar. Not even that is worth watching this very well acted, but bad movie.

Spleen The story is derived from "King Lear"; the setting is a farm in Iowa. Here's a test for this kind of thing: if you find yourself asking, "Why did so-and-so do such-and-such," and the answer is, "because that's what happened in 'King Lear'," you know that the film has failed. Well, that IS what happens here. The father figure in this story isn't living his own life, he's mimicking a fictional one. But there's more wrong with the film than this.Jocelyn Moorhouse is ambitious - far more ambitious than I think she realises. She's trying to take the King Lear story and completely change the setting. This is a task in itself. The likeliest result is that the transplanted story will die, and nobody will quite be able to work out why (although there are enough successful transplants, like "West Side Story", to make it worth trying). But she's ALSO attempting a revisionist retelling. In the version of "King Lear" she wishes to create, Reagan and Goneril command our sympathy, and Cordelia is a villain. This is a task in itself, too.Succeeding at either task is hard; succeeding at both at once is impossible. In fact, succeeding at one while so much as attempting the other, is impossible. If we are to look on the very same events from a different moral perspective then the events must BE the very same events - which means there can be no tampering with setting. If the story is to be transplanted, alive, into a different setting, its moral heart must keep beating the whole while - which means there can be no tampering with ethical perspective. Moorhouse was bound to fail in not just one but in both of her endeavours. And so she did. ...Naturally, it's possible to attempt both tasks, fail at both tasks, yet by some fluke hit upon a work of art that's good for independent reasons. I mention this because I haven't read Jane Smiley's novel, which, for all I know, IS good for independent reasons. But the film isn't. If there was nothing else wrong with it, there would still be no getting around the fact that it's just so thoroughly, excruciatingly DULL. The very fields of corn are even more boring than they would be in real life - which needn't be the case, since off the top of my head I can think of four films ("The Wizard of Oz", "North by Northwest", "The Straight Story", "Kikujiro") in which the cornfields aren't boring at all.

tedg Spoilers herein.This is a not incompetent soap opera. And Michelle is uncharacteristically competent. But it is an antiLear -- don't be fooled by the superficial similarity of three daughters and a will.The play has Lear as an innocent pawn of his own vision. The play is about vision and naming, and demons manipulating reality through the audience. It is immensely sophisticated.This drek is merely a play about a bad man. Nothing sophisticated at all.