Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

This film is like a children's fable that forgot it's supposed to have a moral.The movie begins with Melody Wilder (Saffron Burrows) having the worst day of her life. Her doctor tells her she has cancer and will be dead in two months, then she loses her job and finally, her boyfriend breaks up with her. So Melody abandons her crappy basement apartment, takes all her money out of the bank and decides to live like there's no tomorrow. For Melody, that weirdly involves living like a hermit in an expensive penthouse loft and buying a lot of stuff over the phone. Two delivery people fall in love with Melody. One's a man and one's a woman but neither of them have any reason to quickly fall into bed with Melody. Capping it all off, Melody buys and learns to play a guitar like the one she was fascinated with as a child, which we see in repeated flashbacks to her unhappy childhood living with her bickering hippie parents over a music store. As for the rest of the plot, I don't want to give it away…but have you ever heard the story about the guy who was told he had 6 months to live, so he spent all his money and ran up huge bills on his credit cards because he's never have to pay them back? If you remember the twist to that story, you know what happens in The Guitar.Writer Amos Poe seems to have come up with a script that is completely oblivious to its own meaning. The story of Melody is about freeing yourself from the chains that are holding you down, an ignorant desire for fulfillment, the perils of self-indulgence and the tempting appeal of the strange and unknown. This screenplay doesn't even acknowledge of that. It doesn't demonstrate or explore why Melody is a timid, tiny person before her diagnosis. It can't recognize how pathetic it is for someone to spend their last days on Earth catalog shopping. It fails to understand why someone might be truly attracted to someone in Melody's circumstance and how and why that attraction would wither away. It's even unable to fathom the lesson that either Melody or the audience is supposed to get from this film. The Guitar is like the work of a color-blind painter who makes the sky yellow and the sea black and the ground pink without knowing that he's doing it.Director Amy Redford gives us a textbook example of the congenital flaw in the modern filmmaker. Individual images in The Guitar look nice, yet none of them flow together or add up to anything. Redford might be able to make good commercials or, given the large number of montages in this movie, great music videos. She doesn't give any indication she has the slightest idea how to tell a story visually, however.Saffron Burrows spends a great deal of the film in her birthday suit, though we quite strategically never get a good look at her breasts. Whether she's clothed or not, Burrows manages to summon up a grand total of two expressions for her entire performance. She either looks anguished or befuddled. She never even blends the two. It's like someone switches her from one setting to the other. None of the other actors have a chance to show they can do anything more than exactly what the director tells them to do. We do get to see one of Paz de la Huerta's boobs and are thankfully spared the sight of any man ass.It wouldn't be completely accurate to say The Guitar is a bad movie. It is aggravating and perplexing because you keep expecting the film to have a point and it never does, despite everything about the story indicating that it should. Unless you enjoy being exasperated, don't pick up The Guitar.

I rented this film because I wanted to see some nudity with class. I got that and more, from plot to acting to sound to cinematography.Where would I rank this film? Certainly in the top 100, probably the top 50 I have ever seen and I've seen thousands of films. I have even written my own screenplay but it's far different from 'The Guitar.' I didn't want to see this film end. I actually predicted that Melody would join up with a rock band. At first, I wanted her to get really rich and famous, but eventually, I felt the film ended quite well.My tastes in films is very bizarre and so was this film. My #1 film of all time is 'Montenegro,' an American/Swedish co-production. That may give the reader a perspective of my stance on movies.I will look up Saffron Burrows filmography and possibly rent some of her works. She looks a lot like a woman I knew 25 years ago; very tall, nice behind and small-breasted with long, unruly hair.I could go on but I'm finished gushing. Now, I will recommend the film to my son and his wife and others who I know will enjoy this production.

just finished watching it on cable TV.dding't have a clue what would it be,but loved!just loved!It's always surprising to see how women,generally speaking,react towards the hardships of life.in one single day,Melody get's fired and dismissed by her boy friend-not to mention that in the same day she was diagnosed with cancer and a month to live.The director chose the winter landscape to sum up the tragedy,the lack of any possible sense life can be,the despair... the actress (Burrows) offers us a superb acting,especially when she's suffocated by the weight of her existence,and her pain.Outstanding.When she decides to abandon her terrible living quarters and goes to a loft,she is ready to enlarge her limits,her boundaries .she needs then beautiful artifacts ,and she buys them.Roscoe and Cookie become part of her cure.the guitar was her long dream,buried in the past and finally she gets it.it could be a pet or a child,but for her was the guitar.probably is a female's film and not to be seen with glasses of moralism.loved the direction,the photography,the plot,the acting.

Adolescent, uninspired movie about a girl who is dying and decides to buy things, kiss girls, and become unbearably shrill.There's no sense of reality here. Seriously, this movie makes the television programme "Friends" look gritty. We've seen this all before SO MANY TIMES. Not a note of originality in the tinny, cliché-ridden screenplay. Pretentious? This movie is so self-important it's almost sickening. It's a lame, boring artistic failure. Some of the supporting roles are well cast. I wish Ms. Redford more luck next time.