Review of In Love and War

Introduction

A Romantic movie.
Oh.

I knew I was going to have a problem with this when it arrived on my doormat. I`ve had it lying around for about three weeks now and have managed to ignore most of the veiled references to it`s lack of review posted on reviewer admin forums but it was getting trickier to overlook emails from the head honchos saying "For God`s sake watch this movie", or words to that effect. Obviously one of the downsides of being a reviewer is that you`re not always going to get movies you would choose to review, so in attempt to be professional (in an amateur sense) I sat down and watched it this afternoon.
Sadly it didn`t surprise me. I`m not a Mills and Boon man and I really struggled to be objective. The film relates a part of the biography of Ernest Hemmingway, set during the first world war in Northern Italy, so in essence the material held some interest for me - the problem is that it relates specifically to the love affair Hemmingway had with a Red Cross nurse - and I don`t like love stories.
As a precaution I persuaded my wife to watch it with me in the hope that this would prevent me from dismissing it as a "Chick Flick", but when she started browsing through a home shopping catalogue after 20 minutes it didn`t help much. This film is BORING. The pace is too slow, that`s all there is to it.
The cast is pretty respectable, Sandra Bullock headlines as the nurse (Agnes Von Kurowsky) and Chris O`Donnell playes Hemmingway. They both do a perfectly competent job and Richard Attenborough performs his usually near-flawless tricks in direction - they just don`t have an interesting plot to back it up.

To get a kick from this your either a die-hard Hemmingway fan or historian or an incurable romantic, neither of which I am, I`m afraid.

Video

Cinematography is excellent - the scenery of the Italian countryside is probably breathtakingly gorgeous, but as you nearly always see it being ruined by A) Mortars or B)Corpses it`s a bit hard to tell.
Special effects are limted to making Sandra Bullock`s makeup stay perfect during a 36 hour stint of shelling and emergency operations - they probably had an "icky hands" double for her.
It`s presentedin Letterbox 2.35 but it could have been anything, to be honest.
Transfer quality is excellent and much fun can be had (well, relatively much fun) still framing the loss of an arm to a mortar every now and then.

Audio

The soundtrack is presented in Dolby Pro-Logic and suitable, God that`s dull, mood music of the orchestral variety drones on above the shellings whenever the two main characters look at each other.

Features

Included on the disc is the theatrical trailer (watch this - it`s quicker than the whole movie and you`ll still have chance to go out and rent something else), and a "Making of" section which presumabley features Richard Attenborough saying "Well, we took Hemmingway`s diaries and biography, read "A farewell to arms", realised it was all very dull, got some actors together and filmed it.

Conclusion

Just not for me I`m afraid.
If romance is your thing then this is an extremely well put together one - the cast is strong and the direction and production are outstanding.
Fortunately I`d just painted the dining room when I watched it, and I could just see one of the walls drying from where I sat in the lounge.