- It’s about girls, right?
- You know when a trailer says “THE GREATEST LOVE STORY OF ALL TIME”? It’s kind of nice if it actually delivers on that. I know it’s a rather hard title to live up to but come on, give me something to go on. If someone told me to see this and then asked me to rank this on a big list of the greatest love stories of all time, I’m not sure it would make the Top 1000.
- They kept going on about how beautiful Fermina was, but the actress they cast was like a pale and sickly Angelina Jolie (and that’s saying something). The girl who played her cousin was totally ten thousand times more beautiful.
- This movie wins the award for Most Awkward Sex Scenes ever. Yes, scenes: plural. I wanted to die the first time Fermina and Dr. Benjamin Bratt were going to have sex, holy cow. I also wanted to die later on when Fermina and Florentino finally get to consummate their love on a river boat, septuagenarian style. Kill me, please.
- Best lines in the entire movie:
Dr. Benjamin Bratt: I think I’m dying.
Fermina: That would be best, then we can both have some peace.Zing!
- Florentino was kind of ridiculously pathetic at times and I sort of wished his mother would tell him to just suck it up, although I suppose she did try by getting him that job three weeks down river. Still. Man up!
- That said, Javier Bardem was freaking adorable in the role. He’s very expressive.
- One of the main selling points of the trailer was that this movie featured original songs by Shakira. And by “original songs” I mean pointless wailing in neither English or Spanish.
- The ageing of the characters was really weird. Since the story takes place over the span of fifty years, they’re obviously going to send the actors to the Gloria Stuart School of Ageing except I could never quite tell how old they were supposed to be at any given point. They used the same actor for Fermina all the way through, but Florentino started out as one random bright-eyed actor before evolving into Javier Bardem. Benjamin Bratt somehow stayed pretty timeless, which irritated me until Florentino commented on how he never seemed to age.
Love in the Time of Cholera
As far as diseases go, I don’t think I’d put cholera in my Top Five Favourites.
IMDB Plot Synopsis Florentino, rejected by the beautiful Fermina at a young age, devotes much of his adult life to carnal affairs as a desperate attempt to heal his broken heart.