Must See Movie...

I wanted to but couldn't!

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

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.

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.

This picture was not a disappointment -- it was a travesty. If I were Louise Penny I would be on a rampage. This picture was miscast, stilted and perfunctory. How the charm and sensuality of the book could be intentionally reduced to this abomination is a testament only to the consistency of a lackluster effort. Maybe a mini series could manage the subtleties and nuances of the books. Really this could have been filmed anywhere - New England, the North Carolina mountains -- there was no flavor of a Canadian village so carefully created in the books. Gamache was reduced to a bilious sort of sourpuss and Jean Guy was more Miami Vice than Sûreté Du Québec.

What a disappointment, Inspector Lynley goes to Quebec and is still having problems with his wife.Having read most of Louise Penny's books based in the Province of Quebec I expected the dialogue to be in English but English as spoke by a Francophone in Quebec. I have grown weary of Inspector Lewis, Miss Marple, Poirot, etc. based in upper class English settings. The Chief Inspector Gamache series is much more interesting based in Quebec with all of the Francophone influences. Surely there are enough English speaking Francophone actors in Canada to fill out the roles. Even the actor playing Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir is apparently fluent in French, wow, couldn't come up with an accent.What a shame that none of the Quebec atmosphere survived the film making. Just another English who done it.