Excellent adaptation.

A Masterpiece!

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This film as also from the book where it came from is a true masterpiece. Not only in its wording but the characters, the acting and the storyline and its tongue in cheek poke at radio writers of that era (i.e. the 1950's). If you don't have a writer background or have lived the era of radio plays you might not get the humour or the subtle below the belt jokes embedded in the play. But I strongly suggest you to watch and learn - this movie took a long time to make and is well worth seeing.

I came across this movie when going thru all of the movies of Keanu Reeves. I watched it and was thrilled with the movie. It was funny, hilarious and had a good story line. The movie was well paced. Funny from the start. Loved all of the characters in the movie. What a great collection of actors in a movie---from the main stars to the characters in the radio soap opera. And oh Peter Falk was at his best showing his many talents for comedy. The chemistry between Keanu Reeves and Barbara Hershey was right on target with her cynical life view and Keanu's innocent and naïveté of life. Great acting on his part and Barbara Hershey. It was so great to come across a movie made with such love and enthusiasm. Wish Hollywood made movies like this again instead of all these CGI movies made for the younger generation. I guess they think only kids go to the movies nowadays. I loved this movie so much I added it to my DVD collection to watch over and over when there is nothing at the theaters to see or anything on TV except reality shows. Recommend this movie for pure total enjoyment and fun.

I've watched this film twice and still don't know exactly how to respond to it. It's as if I'd been sawed in two, right down the sagittal plane. I'm impressed that the story was from Mario Vargas Llosa, a noted Peruvian novelist, essayist, and political figure. I mean, you can't help but admire a person who can become perhaps the most important writer of fiction in Latin America AND a serious candidate for president of Peru, who almost made it, by the way.The movie is clearly ambitious. It takes risks that most aspiring blockbusters wouldn't dare. The story of two mismatched real-life lovers -- the older and wiser Barbara Hershey and the younger and dumber Keanu Reeves -- is intercut with a radio play. This is 1951, mind you, so radio plays are listened to religiously. The radio play, a kind of soap opera with medical interludes, is written by Peter Falk, who steals from actual incidents in the lives of others, including the conundrum of Hershey and Reeves.The performances are uniformly good. Even Reeves is passable. Peter Falk is outrageously hammy. For reasons that are a little fuliginous he dresses up at various points as a dainty French maid, a dovening Rabbi, and an Irish Cardinal. It's full of diverse themes involving love, art, so-called real life, the sociology of enmity, and some others -- I guess. I got confused.The problem is that none of these themes are explored in enough depth to make the story gripping rather than just interesting. Of course, one hopes for a happy outcome. And one gets it -- out of nowhere. When the two lovers are alone in a field, Falk shows up driving a fire engine, gives them his blessings, and takes off dressed in the Cardinal's robes.The whole enterprise is more of a puzzle than a satisfying artifact. If it weren't for my own magnificent performance, which lifts the film into the realm of the celestial, but which I have discounted, I wouldn't know how to assess it. I'll have to leave the judgment to individual viewers.

This movie is so typical of Hollywood's treatment of New Orleans' language and culture. I am a native of New Orleans, and neither I nor anyone I've known down there has that extreme southern drawl that is depicted in this movie (and in many others, such as JFK). Keanu Reeves' accent was especially bad. I can't believe John Larroquette sold out and faked his accent as well. He's from New Orleans, and he didn't sound like that on Night Court. If anything, Barbara Hershey's character was closer to the New Orleans accent. Depending on the section of New Orleans, some residents sound much like New Yorkers. Watching this movie was like watching Gone With the Wind, without the same caliber.I am also offended by the plot itself. It presupposes that all New Orleanians or Louisianians are inbreeders (as depicted by Aunt Julia and Martin's love affair), furthering an unfair stereotype.I was disappointed by the deletion of a few scenes I saw filmed at my college, Loyola University. That was the main reason I wanted to see this movie.