First Impression

     When I heard that we would be watching a movie modeled after Mrs. Dalloway, I was really interested in how the directors would bring across the intimacy and complexity of the minds of the characters. I think that they did a good job with that, but I found other things in the movie either distracting or differing from my interpretation of the novel.
      First off, I found the music to be striking, but most of the time, completely missing the mark. Yes, it is very thoughtful and tense, but while reading into Clarissa's thoughts, I felt a more neutral aura for everything, and sometimes, rather peppy. I can see where such music would be ideal, as in the moments where Virginia Woolf is just sitting and thinking, as we can see that she is in some sort of dilemma that is not open to us. Music in films is a key carrier of feeling and emotion that cannot be narrated or simply told to the audience. And here, it seemed as the music kept adding more and more stress to the situations, and there was so much of it that I was just sitting there waiting for the characters to kill themselves by the middle of the movie. Every move was accented by stresses in the music that were never resolved. The minority of the pieces made everything more and more depressing while the tempo increased the drama and the tension. But the fact that there was no resolve really bothered my ear. Simply said, the music was over used and did not portray what I would think to be the more realistic and probable sense that it should have.
      Secondly, I liked and disliked the close plot lines of the three major stories. It was interesting how the same events and situations were carried through and adapted to the different years. But! It did get tedious when the scenes changed so quickly and if the trashcan appeared in one, it would definitely appear three scenes later in a different time and so on. Every time you saw something happen, you could expect that it would reoccur very quickly afterwords. Yet I have to give a lot of credit to the different interpretations of the same major story. The adaptations were very interesting and creative.
    And finally, something I did appreciate: the use of color schemes. First off, they matched the story and the music. Most of the time, they created really artistic scenes. That is as much as I will say on that as I want to develop this for a response paper. But overall, I think that the movie was mostly on mark with the book.