Word: ward
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...free, tickets are required for such events as the rock concert in Princes Street Gardens, which will have a floodlighted Edinburgh Castle as its backdrop. Though the Scottish city can be cold in late December, wool sweaters, drams of single-malt whisky and drafts of Guinness will no doubt ward off the chill...
...torment, enters. The actor who challenged Death to a game of chess in The Seventh Seal appears as a Tracker to guide Robin Williams in his journey through hell. The casting of Von Sydow is uncannily perfect, suitably dramatic and humorous at once. Unfortunately, except for Von Sydow, Vincent Ward's film fails to reconcile its diverse tones. What Dreams May Come is a remarkably inconsistent work, failing at a very basic level to present uniform structure and characters...
Despite these omissions, Ward's version of heaven is stunning on purely visual terms. Eduardo Serra, the cinematographer who gave The Wings of the Dove a lush color scheme resembling fresh paint, goes further by setting the early scenes of heaven actually in a painting. The imagery is banal--must the perfect place be out of a paint-by-numbers watercolor?--but richly presented. The art direction suggests that PolyGram spent an inordinate amount of money on the film...
What Dreams May Come is an odd, unsuccessful work. Its subject matter is likely something that could never have been adequately translated to film. Vincent Ward's refusal to provide a fascinating view of the afterlife dooms the film to purgatory. The more basic structural failures and unclear characters place it someplace far worse...
When Robin Williams enters hell, the movie's visual style lags. Like Ward's heaven, hell is a collection of schoolbook cliches, but without the visual flourish that marked the earlier passages. The hell that Woody Allen presented satirically in Deconstructing Harry is far more frightening than the absurdity in What Dreams May Come. Perhaps no director could reconcile presentations of heaven and hell successfully--David Lynch could certainly do the latter--and in this situation, Ward fails at both tasks...