SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Dreadfully Boring

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Beloved school teacher Jane Neal (Bronwen Mantel) takes an arrow through the chest in the first scene. The murder mystery in the small community of Three Pines gives us lots of suspects and twists in what appears to be an old fashion mystery.This is a made for TV film made in the part of Quebec where a community of poets, artists, and gays all speak English and nothing as vulgar as French. Once I got over that part, I noticed the characters were rather bland. They had good lines and roles, by the acting and directing was second rate. The guy I had pegged for the killer, wasn't it...but I was close. The clues lead us everywhere like a good mystery.The film had potential. Worth a view for fans of TV mysteries.

How can a movie be so terribly miscast? Not one character even remotely resembled the characters in the books. How could Ms. Penny allow such a travesty? Maybe she should influence a movie like J.K. Rowling, who most certainly can give her a lesson on influence casting and bringing characters to life. Why does a movie like that need to look as it was just made for the Lifetime channel? I was truly hoping for getting to know the book characters, however they were just pretty people (except for Ruth Zardo, who was the only one I would say OK) speaking to stiff and to flat. There was no life in any of them. Nathaniel Parker, I really liked in the Inspector Linley series, is just not a French Canadian inspector. This would have (with the right cast) been better as a mini series, where all the quirkiness of the Three Pines Characters could be better flushed out.

I've been eagerly awaiting the release of this in the US, and I was certainly not disappointed by the result. I'm a huge fan of mysteries, both in books and film, so I've sampled a wide array of material, some great, some terrible. Given that experience, I really don't know why some other reviewers didn't enjoy it.I absolutely love Louise Penny's novels, and it was great to see the characters brought to life so believably (particularly by Nathaniel Parker, who's one of my favorites). Like many others, I would certainly have enjoyed to see more scenes involving characters like Ruth and Myrna, but I understand that only so much could be fit into one TV movie, and so some sacrifices had to be made. Also, it's worth noting that some of these characters really began to develop more in the ensuing novels anyway, so there's still time.What I would respectfully ask of everyone who didn't enjoy this film is to reserve full judgement in hopes that a sequel or two can be made, giving the writers and actors more time to fully draw out the depths of the story. After all, many shows have improved significantly after the pilot episode, and I see no reason why that couldn't be the case here. All in all, I consider this a very successful adaptation of a great novel, and I sincerely hope we'll see more from this cast and crew in the world of Three Pines!

I wanted to like this movie, having read all of Louise Penney's atmospheric, intelligent, introspective books featuring Armand Gamache. How disappointing to find that all that has been reduced to soap opera standards. There is in the movie none of the sensitivity, insight, philosophizing that makes the books so compelling. The cast is impossibly good looking, with that plastic, every-hair-in-place, perfect make-up at all times look so common to made-for-TV movies. The characters, instead of being complex and unpredictable, are stilted, their utterances short, too fast, emotionless--a sign of poor direction and/or poor acting. The use of that husky, almost-whisper voice (who talks like that?) also betrays the cookie-cutter approach to this movie. Scenes are very short, pushing the plot ahead in only the barest, least thought-provoking manner. It's a shame to see Penney's deeply thoughtful works reduced to such shallowness. It was peculiar, as well, to see what Penney describes as the surreal, provocative artwork of murder-victim Jane,(thus killing off a main and recurring character in the books) represented as poorly-rendered American Primitive. Have the producers/director no loyalty to the books at all? If Penney is one of the executive producers, as referred to in other reviews, I cannot imagine that she feels the movie faithfully represents her literary work. I doubt, too, that she had much to say about it.