Ten Things Wrong With "Winter's Tale"

 (Also published on my Tumblr.)

10. Colin Farrell’s hairstyle in the first half of the movie. Why would a street thug who depends on unobscured vision allow his hair to flop distractingly over his right eye? (No matter how handsome it makes him look.)

9. Was Peter raised entirely by Irish immigrants? It couldn’t have been Pearly Soames, since they met when Peter was already an adult. If not, there is no excuse for that fake accent.

8. How does Pearly expect his henchmen to do their jobs if he doesn’t give them any directions? Romeo was right; that redheaded girl whose silhouette he drew in blood could have been anyone. It’s pure coincidence that they found Beverly, and later Abby. Even a demon should be efficient.

7. If Willa is a child in 1895, and still alive in 2014, that would make her over 120 years old. How is that possible? And why is she still old, as opposed to the unchanged Peter and Pearly? At least their long lives were given some kind of explanation.

6.. The most prominent non-white character, played by Will Smith, is Lucifer. Seriously?

5. If you’re going to reference Native American culture, do it properly.  There’s no way Peter’s unnamed friend’s tribe, whoever they were, could have had only “ten songs”, and “everybody has a miracle inside them” sounds a lot more like the inside of a Hallmark card than any Native philosophy.

4. On that note, they should have made up your minds which myth to follow. Christianity and Native religions don’t exactly gel, one being dualistic (Holy Trinity versus Lucifer) and the other pluralistic (ancestors and animal spirits). As the concepts of good and evil in this movie are completely Western, they should have just called the horse an angel and be done with it.

3. Dying people are not beautiful. They are not graceful, curvy, light-footed and rosy-cheeked. They are not angels who talk to strangers about “the whole world being connected by light” – or if they ever do, it takes a lot of anger, denial and grief before they reach that state. Tuberculosis was called “consumption” for a reason; because the victims coughed blood, shrank down to skin and bones, and seemed to burn out from the inside. Falling in love with someone in that state would take a very unusual person indeed; if done right, it might have made the story much more interesting.

2. I’m no doctor, but even I know that it’s insane to make a fever patient sleep in a tent or walk barefoot in the snow. Instead of helping Beverly, those measures would have only made her worse.

1. Death by Sex. The single worst scene in the movie. Instead of being tragic, it was so disgusting and bizarre that I almost laughed when almost-naked Colin Farrell hauled almost-naked Jessica Brown Findley’s “dead” body out to the greenhouse. I kept expecting her father to catch him. Besides, in this day and age, we really should have a healthier attitude than the Gothic-horror-esque “if she asks for sex, she’ll die from it” – except, perhaps, for the Twilight fans in the audience.