Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

the audience applauded

Good concept, poorly executed.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

The viewers of the original Welles 1942 production of "The Magnificent Ambersons" were no doubt often mystified as to the plot line because so many scenes were cut by RKO. This newer version restores at least three episodes to flesh out the plot. The first shows Aunt Fanny and the hapless uncle actually putting down their money in the lawyer's office for the doomed headlight shares and the second actually portrays the accident which took Georgie to the hospital rather than simply showing the audience a newspaper clipping about the affair. And the final scene at the hospital bed was nowhere to be found in the original.As to the ending, the makers of the newer version definitely did not (despite the advertising) follow Welles' script completely since OW's own ending was a downer with Georgie being rejected. Both RKO and the 2002 remake both agreed on supplying a happy ending which I understand corresponds to Tarkington's own novel. To rationalize this one might agree that despite all of Georgie's vile behavior and misdeeds, still he was the son of the woman Morgan had once loved and to forgive and afterward see Georgie would always remind him of her. So it's not completely illogical and sentimental.The one definite miscasting I found was that of Jennifer Tilly as Aunt Fanny. She was nowhere near old enough to be anyone's aunt, compared to the original's Agnes Moorhead who was just about right.I found Johnathan Rhys-Meyers fascinating in his vivid overacting. He was the one you didn't want to stop watching. In contrast I found Tim Holt's version of Georgie in 1942 rather stiff and wooden compared to JRM's lively impersonation of a highly despicable character who made you want to jump onto the screen yourself and teach him some manners. The 2002 version brought out the Freudian Oedipal aspect of the mother-son relationship much more strongly than the original as well.By the happiest of coincidences I saw TMA just after watching in a theater the movie "Me and Orson Welles." In the movie, based on Welles' production of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" at the Mercury Theater in New York in 1937, Welles is shown studying Tarkington's novel in his spare moments and underlining important passages from it as well as quoting lines from it during one of his radio dramatic appearances. Welles explains to another character that Tarkington was a friend of his family. I'm sure that Welles, the spoiled son of an adoring mother, found Georgie quite autobiographical even though he appears in another man's book. By adapting Tarkington's novel into his own screenplay Welles certainly found a character in Georgie with whom to identify.

Rented this movie online reading it was using Welles' original screenplay, thinking it was his directors' cut. Got it and learned it was an A&E remake for cable TV. Have not seen original, but watched this one anyway, and the acting was truly awful. The dude playing the grandson George was over the top and since his character is in almost every scene, it made watching this painful. There are few movies I won't sit through, but because of this guy, I kept asking my wife if she wanted to continue - which she did, though she agreed with me at the end. Close second to him was the acting for his aunt's character. For the rest of the characters, the acting performance was inversely proportional to the number of lines.

A classic novel by Tarkington. A classic (albeit incomplete) film by Welles. If these happened to fall in the lap of your average tax accountant, said accountant could easily direct a better version of "Ambersons" than the mega turd I just witnessed.Anyone who's seen this atrocity knows how bad it is. We know it was filmed in video on a cheap back lot somewhere. We know it looks less realistic than the average Lifetime issue-of-the-week movie. We know that the little letter-writing interludes where the actors face the camera don't so much resemble cinematic art as they do an Allstate commercial. And most obviously, we know that the acting is universally putrescent. The performances aren't just stagy. They're middle-school-production-of-Death-of-a-Salesman stagy. That's some pretty bad stagy, if you ask me. I pity all of the actors involved, but especially young Mr. Rhys-Myers. I know he can and has turned in a decent performance. However, I say in all solemnity that his portrayal of George made me want to find a time machine, travel back to the 2003 Oscars, join the voting committee, and convince my colleagues to bequeath the Best Actor statuette to Hayden Christensen for Star Wars: Episode II. As bad as that performance was, it far exceeds Rhys-Myers' George in every dimension. I never thought I'd live to see acting this bad.And I've seen some stinkers, dammit.All of this, we know. But the question still burning in my mind is, HOW THE HELL DID THIS HAPPEN? My only explanation is one I cribbed from Ebert, of all people, in his review of some other celluloid disaster. According to the Fat One (and I for once agree with him): Bad filmmakers can only go so low. When a bad director makes "I Spit on Your Grave Pt. IV", you know it's gonna be bad, and it's a kind of bad that you've seen a zillion times. But when a well-respected auteur makes a bad film, it somehow manages to plunge into depths of badness never before reached or even thought of. Thus, when you team a good director like Arau ("Like Water for Chocolate") with a dependably professional cast featuring Stowe, Rhys-Myers, Mol, and Cromwell for heaven's sake, it oughta be good. But they managed to create a new level of bad. So I guess the best thing you can say about this "Ambersons" is that it's unique. I certainly didn't see it coming.

I haven't read Orson Welles' book or have seen the 1942 movie, but have seen this A&E adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons. This movie was almost painful to watch. Even though this was an all-star cast, I only felt that Madeleine Stowe (Isabel Amberson Minafer), Bruce Greenwood (Eugene Morgan) and James Cromwell (Major Amberson) were a credit to this movie. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (George Amberson Minafer) and Gretchen Mol (Lucy Morgan) may have looked their respective parts, but little else. Both Rhys-Meyers and Mol tend to overact their parts to a fault and Jennifer Tilly (Fanny Minafer) is outright hilarious, and not in a good way.This movie adaptation has been butchered in the worst way in that I wouldn't recommend this movie to anyone. It's one of those movies that you see and tell yourself, "Well, that's 2 hours of my life I'll never get back.."