hyped garbage

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

This film is a combination of a war and a Hallmark movie. Some parts are somewhat accurate to the time such as some uniforms. Others were not hidden well. Or changed to draw in more people in. This film is about a wife/mother Sara Elizabeth, whose husband goes off to the civil war to fight. She waits for him at their house with her daughter Melody, of course there has to be drama so some battles break out near their house. A soldier is injured and goes to their cellar. They find him and care for him. As he stays he falls for Sara Elizabeth. She refuses to get involved with him even though she has feelings for him, to stay true to her husband. After healing he goes home. There is more drama and surprises but that would spoil the movie.

I can usually find the good in most movies, and enjoy most movies - but this one really stinks! Sorry, finally found a movie to watch BECAUSE it's so bad. For starters, the acting is bad. Really bad. Super cheesy 'southern' accents,, flat deliveries. I don't think they did more than one take for any scene. Other than the two stars, i'm pretty sure they got locals to do the other speaking parts. And not well at all. The film work, is okay, but looks like it was shot on a video camera or something. The locations are terrible. I'm pretty sure the entire movie was shot on someone's farm. Looks nothing like a 'southern' style setting at all. No sets other than the house and most of the outdoor stuff is shot on a single country road - no town, no other buildings. The worst parts is the special effects. Two scenes in particular. One scene near the end shows a long column of marching soldiers. This is obviously a shot from another film , super imposed over a field. You can see the shot cut out with difference in the grass and sky. Horrible. The other shot is a dark swirling sky imposed over a field. And yet at the top of the tree line you can see bright blue sky where they couldn't mask the digital impression. Makeup was terrible. Very cheap. The only good thing was the costumes. Christina Ricci's dresses were very well done as were the soldiers uniforms, although I suspect the re-enactment guys brought their own uniforms. Except Tom Berringer's hat wasn't even a military hat. Looked like an old fedora they found in someone's grandfather's closet! Another thing that bugged me was the set. The women lives in what appears to be a very large farm house with huge rooms.. Yet when it is burned to the ground, there is no heaps of charred rubble like there should be. It's just a tiny basement and 1/8 size of the house layered in straw..and obviously fake stones as a foundation. I don't know what they spent the budget on,, but his seriously looks like it was produced by college film students.

If you are looking for a CIVIL WAR extravaganza (The Patriot) with all kinds of CGI battle scenes, or an overblown romance (Gone With the Wind), this won't be the movie for you. It is a simple family romance with a Civil War backdrop. I found it touching, especially the little girl, seven year old Melody played by Gabrielle Popa. The cinematography and story are beautifully muted. For whatever reason I got the same feeling from the movie that I do from early Little House on the Prairie episodes. One or more of the reviews complains that the acting by Cristina Ricci and the little girl Gabrielle Popa was horrible. For the first ten minutes or so I might have agreed but as I became comfortable with movement of the plot I found that I loved Melody's character. She was a smart, strong little girl character and as far away from many of today's glitzy charismatic child stars as can be. I loved her plainness, her questions, and the sadness she felt while hiding the sadness she felt.Anyway, I have a feeling that if you like family drama/romance and remember Little House on the Prairie fondly, War Flowers will be a soft, enjoyable hour and a half.

We saw that this movie starred Christina Ricci and Tom Berenger and figured it had to be decent. Nope. Wrong. Not close. My wife gave it a "C" which was generous; I deemed it a mistake. I could not tell whether the editing was intentional to make it look like it was a t.v. movie, or just bad. The acting was wooden, the story line weak, and the special effects not special nor effective. The story, at its simplest, is about a Civil War wife who is at home waiting for the return of her Confederate sergeant husband. While waiting, with occasional skirmishes going on around her house (which she inexplicably runs through the middle of while dragging her little girl behind her) she discovers a seriously wounded Yankee soldier in her basement. No surprise in that she nurses him back to health. And for no reason, other than perhaps loneliness (which we are forced to guess)she falls in love with the Yankee. There is no heartfelt discussion, no longing looks, no kindnesses from Yankee to his Florence Nightingale, nor even to her daughter.The southern accents are not just contrived, but painful to the ear. There is an occasional, intentional blurring of the scene which almost made me believe that maybe there was supposed to be some type of magic going on (accompanied by the presence of little stars whirring about- literally). However, it was such an odd occurrence, and without any explanation that it just added to the bizarre nature of the movie. The strongest acting comes from the gentleman that plays the one-legged lecherous drunk. Saddled with a ridiculous set of false teeth, he nevertheless seemed excited to be in the movie. Second to the one- legged man was the teddy bear, who played his role well. Christina Ricci, who is talented, simply looked trapped. (And by the way, if you are going to have the heroine make threatening gestures with a "cap and ball" rifle, you need to have the hammers pulled back). Ricci's daughter in the movie appeared to be channeling Ricci's "Adam's Family" performance, which was great in Adam's Family, but not so great in a Civil War romance. Of course, she may have just been as bored as I was with the whole thing. It sounds like a tragic Civil War love story. The real tragedy is that I watched it to the end.