A lovely-looking, capably made motion picture.
The Keeper: The Legend of Omar Khayyam (2005)
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Vanessa Redgrave, Moritz Bleibtreu, Rade Sherbedgia, C. Thomas Howell
Reviews
Comes to us wrapped in hand-woven shawls of struggle and perseverance.
While sumptuously beautiful, the film is often stilted and undermined by some painfully amateurish performances that no good intentions can smooth over.
The writing, acting and direction are so amateurish that the only thing you'll care about is escaping the theater.
The director approaches the enormity of his task with an earnest enthusiasm, offering a likable alternative to the assembly-line banality of so many family films.
More education than entertainment, Mashayekh's first feature length film tells a valid story but fails to produce on the promise of court intrigues and swordplay.
The story behind the making of The Keeper is more inspiring than the film itself.
Ambitious, heartfelt and grand in both its ideas and its pride of place (the Middle East), the film suffers from its virtues.
A reverentially pokey drama that plays less like a conventional movie than a lengthy series of hagiographic historical tableaux.
The Keeper suffers from a surfeit of scattershot acting and clunky narrative devices that usher the viewer back and forth through time with all the subtlety of a culture clash.
The movie's intentions are like the starry constellations that inspire the eponymous hero: out of reach.
In story structure, performances, pacing, and dialogue, the film's the work of a first-timer. In its deep love for an ancestral culture, it shines.
The movie gets historical with the warring factions in Persia, Hassan's attempt to assassinate the Sultan, and other Lawrence of Arabia style stuff in the desert.
For those who know of Omar Khayyam, make the trip to the theater to see this one. If you're just curious, wait for the DVD.
Rough around the edges, it's still a formidable movie that's stunning visually.
An accomplished first film that manages to comment on the current situation in the Middle East while dealing movingly -- and in very human terms -- with the importance of heritage and history in contemporary life.
The result is an admirable attempt that fails under the weight of its own ambition.
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by: xarshiax 11/17/06
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