Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

I watched this story years ago and discovered the youth of Janet Frame and i was glad at the beginning. The beginning where we can see Janet as a little girl is full of life and animated.The little red-haired actress is funny with her hair and malice even if she has bad times at school especially with her teacher who punishes her for stealing money..We can see that Janet is oppressed and has no friends..So sad but she keeps her good mood and discovers books and literature and soon develops a passion for books and poems..then she is an adolescent and loves writing poems and studying but her life is marred by two tragedies ,the death of two of her siblings in a horrible way.She begins to change and feel depressed with maybe a feeling of guilt..Then in the next part Janet grew up and is a young adult portrayed by Kerry fox but things are getting complicated.Janet must work and begins to teach but she is awfully shy ,in a sick way and she has outbursts of anguish.Unfortunately she will be admitted in a psychiatrist ward and stay there for 8 years totally cut off from the outside world and considered like an abnormal person but she will continue to write which will save her. After this time i got bored of this film because it was too long and the character of Janet is quite lonely which made me think of a pathological woman ,unable to communicate and almost autistic. I think that this movie is sincerely too long and 30 minutes less would have been enough with a good end because the end is difficult to understand.It isn't a family movie neither like an entertainment but a study of character ,a psychological movie with oppressive moments.

Superficially, this is a sort of "My Brilliant Career," meets "A Beautiful Mind."It features one of the most extraordinary actresses, new to me. I saw her in "Intmacy" and had to find more. It is made by a talented and sometimes engaging filmmaker who explores how women are haunted. It is about a writer whose books don't grab me, but whose story does. She believed herself haunted.The problem is that these three songs from different souls don't overlap that much.Frame created written images that were teased out of a struggle with life, one that infused her. Her sanity came from the writing. She didn't write about insanity and marginalization, she wrote from them to counter and co-opt them somewhat. This engages the reader because most of us are afraid to go as deeply into the darkness as these visions indicate.That's a different thing entirely than the story Campion has chosen to give us, which is about all the external agency that surrounded her. I cannot think of an instance where the literary kite and the cinematic string are in such different dimensions. Sure, its an interesting story that someone's light survived, I suppose. But we never see that light, or the ledges that were climbed, or the images that were carried out for us.What's left for Fox to do is emote visually. She does an extraordinary job, quite apart from the fact that it is ineffective in this container. I really do think she's something — another of those Australian/New Zealand crowd that just seem to have something that is rare elsewhere.She and the girls who play her younger selves are redheads. That's not at all a cinematic device, though it is used cleverly to mend the three actresses. Frame actually had that Clarabelle hair.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

This is an excellent mini-series that I couldn't stop watching. Based on the true-life story of writer Janet Frame, it provides an insight into a mental health system that further hampered, rather than improved its patients, and shows how one woman managed to get passed this, to become the respected woman New Zealanders now know her as.

I discovered this incredible film by accident, if there are such things as accidents like this...I saw the title in a movie review book (and a very brief summary) and it intrigued me. Because I knew it was a New Zealand import from years ago, I never even bothered trying to locate a copy. So when it called out to me months later from the shelves in the video shop, I felt eerily compelled to rent it. I watched it by myself in the wee hours of the morning--and it could not have been more ideal.An Angel at My Table is the story of New Zealand's famous writer, Janet Frame. Fairly long, but never boring, it is told in three 50 minute interludes, taking us through her impoverished childhood, awkward adolescence, and the terrifying and eventually triumphant years that follow: Janet was a plump little girl, with an unruly mop of bright red hair. She was fascinated with books and stories at an early age ~ a friend had lent her a copy of Grimm's which she treasured. A certificate of merit in grade school allowed her the use of the public library where she became even more immersed in literature. Despite financial hardships, her father managed to buy her a journal "for her writings." By her late teens she was no longer plump, but a rather crippling shyness had set in. At social functions she played the wallflower. She preferred to be by herself, where she could nurture her passion for creating stories. She went on to become a teacher (though the idea no longer appealed to her), and suffered a panic attack when a supervisor "sat in" on one of her classes. It was advised that Janet have a psychiatric evaluation--a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia (later changed to nothing more than shyness and depression) landed her in a mental institution for eight years of electric shock therapy, each session she narrated to be: "equal in fear to that of an execution." She was scheduled for a partial lobotomy when news reached her doctors that she had won a national literary award--during her hospitalization her sister had published a book of Janet's short stories. She was almost immediately released under the premise that a talented author couldn't possibly need the treatment she had been receiving....At this point Janet was in her late twenties, but her lengthy "exile" had given the impression that she was considerably younger than that. A friend of the family's, another writer who admired her work, offered her a cottage on his property so that she could write seriously in a distraction-free environment. She accepted the offer and her first completed work there was accepted soon after. European travels were arranged for her, more successful books were born, and fame attained...I've heard it claimed that Janet had also attained happiness, but I am not sure that I agree. Janet had found numerous freedoms, emotional and financial and of course physical, but happiness? I believe that she had become comfortable with herself, and perhaps that in itself is a happiness. She never did fit into the surrounding world--but lived peacefully alone on the vaporous outskirts. A very supportive therapist in London had told her, "If people tell you that you should go out there and mix, and you don't feel like it,...don't." She took his words to heart.I was surprised with the overall beauty of this film~I guess I should not have been~the director was Jane Campion (The Piano, Portrait of a Lady). The New Zealand landscapes and backstreets of Spain were gorgeously rendered, the accompanying score at times both capricious and melancholy. But above all, what struck me most, was how I identified with Janet. The plump and impoverished childhood, the obsession with writing, the painful shyness and reclusiveness. The life of the outsider~luckily minus the stay in the psychiatric ward. On some level I was Janet (or am Janet). And there is something oddly redemptive in finding a twin on screen or in a book, however juvenile the notion...