Boviosity!

I haven't seen it yet, but I hear Cold Mountain is a pretty good movie.

When I see it, I hope to be able to choose between two opposing views of the movie:

Is it, as Mackubin Thomas Owens says, a stirring and thought provoking evocation of a heretofore little-seen aspect of the Civil War: the story of ordinary soldiers and the pressures faced on the home front by their women?

This is the "other war," one in which war has lost its nobility and those on the Confederate home front are in as much danger from other southerners as they are from Yankee marauders.

Or is it, as Roger Ebert seems to think, a poorly executed romantic drama that suffers for keeping its pretty Hollywood stars apart for most of the movie and therefore, I suppose, denies dumbo the chance to soak his hankie with tears of lovelorn gratitude?

Cold Mountain" has the same structural flaw as "The Mexican" (2001), a movie you've forgotten all about.

Great start. Assume your readers are stupid. Go from there.

Both stories establish a torrid romantic magnetism between two big stars, and then keep them far apart for almost the entire movie.

[...]So few are their meetings, indeed, that later in the story they're able to count off on their fingers every time they have seen each other, and it doesn't take long enough to make us restless.

Good thing, too. Wouldn't want a restless Roger Ebert anywhere in the theatre, probably gasping with exasperation at how long the scene's draaaagging on.

[...]His long trek back to Cold Mountain has been compared with some justice to Homer's Odyssey, since he meets fabled characters and seductresses along the way, but in a movie that begins with the two heroes barely meeting each other, this long sequence becomes alarming: Will their reunion take place in old age?

[...]To return to the comparison with "The Mexican" -- it too went to extraordinary lengths to tell parallel stories that separated Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, despite the manifest fact that the audience had purchased tickets in order to see them together.

Geez, you'd think the weary sophisticate who took us fat stupid Americans to task for our reliance on fantasy would really really like a movie drama about sacrifices made by lovers, no matter how pretty, in a real historical war.

And, most amazingly:

There is so much to enjoy about "Cold Mountain" that I can praise it for its parts, even though it lacks a whole.

What the hell is Ebert saying here? Since the movie fails so utterly as romantic drama, how about reviewing what's actually up on the screen, popcorn breath?

I guess if you're going to believe that movies are not about what they are about, but they're about how they're about what they're about, it would help to at least know what the movie's about. I can't wait to figure it out for myself.

Ebert is certainly no help.