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Ernest Hemingway DVD

Kris Zane | Riverside, CA | 10/14/2007

(1 out of 5 stars)

"While I was reading the blurb on the back of the DVD box I noticed that the running time was thirty minutes and this surprised me because I assumed it would run at the minimum of one hour but I kept an open mind as I watched the documentary. As it turned out I was completely disappointed--for several reasons: One, as I mentioned, was the length of the DVD--thirty minutes--which would have been semi-acceptable if it had focused entirely on Hemingway--but it was thirty minutes discussing Hemingway, his mother and father, siblings and extended family (this took up roughly five minutes), then Hemingway going to Italy, his injury in the war, friends there, his affair with Agnes von Kurowski (the American nurse he had an affair with during WW1), the Paris years regarding Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, etc., his four wives and their backgrounds, African safaris, all the while discussing his literary output. It was like reading the novel War and Peace in thirty minutes! It was too little too fast, to where I'm thinking, What's the point? The second problem was it was ninety percent of this idiotic video of photographs, interposed with cheesy video (it looked like it was shot with a home-type camcorder) of various locations Hemingway spent his time--i.e. Oak Park, Paris, Key West, etc. The third problem is minor, but it irritated me immensely: the documentary was narrated by a man with a British accent in this very bored tone. Hemingway was American and the majority of the characters discussed were American; I think it would have been appropriate to have it narrated by an American; that plus this idiotic, detached tone of voice the narrator had really annoyed me. About the only context I think this DVD would be appropriate in would be a high school literature class in which the teacher and class are only mildly interested in Hemingway and the teacher is short on time and wants to give a very quick introduction prior to the class reading Hemingway's works. Hemingway despised mediocrity in doing anything, and this DVD is the epitome of that."