Rating: 
Summary: The Sheltering Sky
Review: For those of us fortunate enough to have been in North Africa, visited Paul Bowles' Morocco, and walked in the footsteps of Port and Kit Moresby through the intricacy of forgotten souks while followed by mules, and multiracial children speaking French, Spanish, Arabic and some English, this movie will refresh and invigorate the passion for travel. It will illuminate the travails of relationships, cultures, the unfathomable grief of losses; the whirlwind of ignited desire. Strongly recommend.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't watch it
Review: I found The Sheltering Sky the most unbearably slow-paced movie ever created. I slipped into a coma within the first half hour and woke up an hour later to see that the movie was still playing. In disgust, I shut it off, never to look back.
Rating: 
Summary: The Cinematography cover all the weaknesses of the movie
Review: I know some people think the plot is not as strong as the other Bertoluci's movies. However in my opinion, the cinematography of this movies are too good to be true. If you like the cinematography of the English Patient, you probably will love this movie.
Rating: 
Summary: Read the Book Instead
Review: I recently read Paul Bowles "The Sheltering Sky" and found it to be a haunting, captivating, and philosophical masterpiece. It is a book that will stay with me forever. I was excited to see that it had been made into a movie. However, I found the movie disappointing. I think the book does not lend itself well to being translated to film since much of the "story" is the underlying thoughts, feelings and changes within the characters. The film starts with a "narrator" observer (Mr Bowles himself!) but after that scene the narration does not continue. Then there is the last part of the book where Kit joins the nomad caravan. In the book I found this to be "believeable" but on screen it was silly especially without knowing what was really motivating her since the dialog of her thoughts was left in the book. I couldn't help wondering what someone who had not read the book would think was going on and WHY. I also found the dialog a little "stilted" - more like dialog in a play than a movie. The scenery and desert shots were beautiful. Ah well. This just proves once again that the "movie" in your own mind is the best there is! Read the book!
Rating:
Summary: No cookie cutter drama here...
Review: I viewed the movie first, was so intriqued with it that I had to read the book. This movie, I believe was designed to most affect you after you have viewed it. It is after you have viewed the movie and sit back to reflect on the movie that you realize how powerful the movie is and how it seems to sum up what happens in long term love relationships (these affects are all around us as witnessed by our friends and nieghbors separations and divorces) as if somehow humans can't seem to stay monogamus past 5 to 10 years - though the pain delivered to both parties through infedelity is immense it seems to happen in many long term relationship again and again. I am single and am surrounded by failing marriages and relationships which seems to be a case in point. There seems to be a force pushing people to others after the chemistry of two people have settled - though companionship is a most vital quality of long term relationships. This movie outlines companionship even after the physical excitement has waned and the photo journalism of these characters lives in the desert is breathtaking. You will leave this movie with more of an emotional response than an analytical response, it is winding and vast and does not come together like a cookie cutter - paint by numbers movie. If you can sit through this drama, you will come away with a nod to the human condition agreeing with what we see in the movie and all around us.
Rating:
Summary: No cookie cutter drama here...
Review: I viewed the movie first, was so intriqued with it that I had to read the book. This movie, I believe was designed to most affect you after you have viewed it. It is after you have viewed the movie and sit back to reflect on the movie that you realize how powerful the movie is and how it seems to sum up what happens in long term human love relationships (these affects are all around us as witnessed by our friends and nieghbors separations and divorces) as if somehow humans can't seem to stay monogamus past 5 to 10 years - though the pain delivered to both parties through infedelity is immense it seems to happen in long term relationship again and again. I am single and am surrounded my failing marriages and relationships which seems to be a case in point. There seems to be a force pushing people to others after the chemistry of two people have settled though companionship is a most vital quality of long term relationships. This movie outlines this and the photo journalism of these characters lives in the desert is breathtaking. You will leave this movie with more of an emotional response than an analytical response, it is winding and vast and does not come together like a cookie cutter - paint by numbers movie. If you can sit through this drama, you will come away with a nod to the human condition agreeing with what we see in the movie and all around us.
Rating:
Summary: Poor novel poorly adapted
Review: I'm not certain what it is that characterizes a book as 'Literary'. Perhaps Literariness requires that the work cohere with a previously established order of literature, something like Eliot's 'Tradition'; or perhaps it is a universal value which some texts possess and others simply do not, and of which it is the responsibility of the critic to uncover - I really don't know. However, I am fairly certain that, if we are speaking in terms of canonization, Paul Bowls novel constitutes apocrypha. In terms of characterization (isn't any), structure (dissolved half way through) and intellectual depth (think Matrix style existentialism - I mean, it's hardly Beckett is it), three criteria by which, I think, we may judge the Literary aspirations of a novel, the Sheltering Sky is clearly forcefully un-literary, perhaps even self-consciously so. I was thus shocked to read the comments of a previous reviewer, according to whom the film's problems were a direct result of the novels Literariness. Clearly he hasn't read the book. There are within the novel sections pleasantly evocative of contemporary Africa. However, these sections are not enough to redeem it from the angsty, inarticulate existentialist mess that it descends into. In short the novel collapses under the weight of its own pretension. Wisely, Bertolucci seems to play down the existentialist side of things, and to concentrate instead on the cinematic rendering of post-war Africa. Of course, as a medium film enjoys huge advantages over literature in this respect: film works through the senses, we 'feel' them; the novel, on the other hand, is experienced intellectually, and is thus subject inevitably to the abstractions and distortions which mar the process of evocation. We really see these advantages in effect here: visually Bertolucci's film is nothing short of stunning. Yet this is not enough somehow - having mostly removed the quasi-philosophical core of the novel, the film feels empty (witness the pointless stilted, expositional dialogue of the first 30 minutes, for example). This emptiness is not to be filled by pchycological character study or exiting plot shifts - both characters and plot are handles in the film as amatuerishly as they were in the book. Bertolucci undertakes to fill this emptiness, it seems, by reinventing the story as an 'erotic-drama', to attempt to charge it with a fervidness that was (perhaps deliberately) only latent within the novel. The practical results of this are a couple of rather gratuitous shots of Debra Winger's bottom, and the scene featuring the Bedouin prostitute with gratuitously large breasts. Consequently the film is about as erotic as your average soft-core porno movie.
Rating:
Summary: For an audience that has traveled
Review: If you've traveled a great deal, and have experienced the weird emptiness of coming home, you will understand this movie. Debra Winger's character becomes a woman without a home, but is much better for it. This is an incredible, wonderful movie, best understood by ex-patriots.
Rating:
Summary: Good dramatisation of a terrible book
Review: It seems churlish not to rate more highly a film which achieves pretty much all it set out to achieve, but I think you have to judge a film by its overall impression, and while this is beautiful and probably elegiac, it is still an intensely annoying film about a couple of very dislikeable people. That isn't Bernado Bertolucci's fault, of course: Paul Bowles' novel of the same name is an intensely annoying, pretentious book. Bertolucci has, if anything, improved on the raw material in the parts he has left out, but fundamentally he can still be brought to book for filming it the first place. I have only recently finished reading The Sheltering Sky. I hated it. When I read the glowing, passionate reviews of pretty much every reviewer on Amazon, I thought I must have missed something, or completely misunderstood the book. Just to check, I got hold of the movie. To my tremendous relief, I now see I didn't (or, if I did, then so did Bertolucci): the film is pretty much exactly how I imagined it would be. Malkovich nails the Port Moresby character (how odd, incidentally, to name your lead character after a place in Papua New Guinea). Port is what the Brits would describe in their inimitable way as a "complete wanker". Debra Winger captures Kit Moresby's high-tensile stupidity perfectly. In her opening scene, she wigs out after roughly fifteen seconds of an innocuous conversation because she doesn't want Port to talk about a dream he has had, lest Tunner should repeat it back in New York. But then within twenty minutes, she's having sexual intercourse with Tunner behind Port's back, apparently without a second thought to the stir this might create back home should Tunner happen to mention it. Port is no cuckold, though: Even before Kit's infidelity, he has, during the course of an evening stroll, wound up having it off with a Bedouin prostitute at the edge of town. Thereafter, disaffection for the protagonists is total. It is impossible to care a fig whether either lives or dies, and the only value the film offers is the satisfaction of seeing that one of them does eventually die, together with a star comedy turn by Timothy Spall, Bertolucci's luscious cinematography, and a number of gratuitous shots of Debra Winger's nether regions. None of which is reason enough to rent this for an evening, sad to say.
Rating:
Summary: Are You Lost?
Review: It's great to see this movie on DVD. I was struck by Bertolucci's use of vivid color and texture throughout the film, and of how Kit's journey from beginning to end leaves her with an almost transcendant perspective on her own life and the world. I am not sure if the old man in the cafe is played by the author Bowles himself, but it seems as though his presence is a kind of bookend effect; he sends his character out into the unknown and is there to receive her when her journey has ended. A mesmerizing experience!
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