Angels In America Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

Over-theatrical, and loooooong.

Adapting stage plays for cinema is a difficult art, and American theatrical conventions cope with far greater exaggeration and stylisation than British taste finds comfortable to begin with.

Consequently, this film is not only extraordinarily long (don't make the mistake of thinking that Part II is the same length as Part I, actually it's around double), but irritatingly declamatory at times: poor Emma Thomson as the angel can't once just say 'I', it has to be 'I!I!I!I! (to which one can only say, 'Why, why, why, why?').

There's some fine acting and some interesting stories, but on the whole it's overly solemn, takes itself FAR too seriously and resembles nothing more than one of the duller and longer operas.

'Bigger is better' is all to often what the Americans seem to believe about anything that's supposed to be great, but it's a mentality that can bore.

too much religion!

i know that now is probably not the time to watch an american christian-orientated film, but i did. for a devout secularist such as myself, the constant biblical images, and god being rammed down my throat were jsut too much. the central idea, that gay men, even those with aids, are as much gods creatures as anyone else is admirable but a more secular framework would have been alot easier to handle!