| Holy Smoke | | Cast : | Kate Winslet, Harvey Keitel | | Director : | Jane Campion | | Studio : | Miramax Home Entertainment | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen, Dolby | | Released Date : | February 22, 2000 | | DVD Released Date : | March 01, 2005 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), French (Dubbed), English (Original Language), French (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | July 12, 2005 | | Summary | Holy Smoke! | Content
 | the name says it all....i got this movie after wathcing titanic because i am a kate winslet fan....it is a great movie.... the movie does have some nudity in it |
| Rating | | | Date | May 01, 2005 | | Summary | Jane Campion knows what she's doing... | Content
| I was in a cult, and also went through remarkably similar experiences to both lead characters. The ambiguity, moral breakdown and personal journeys of the two main characters in Holy Smoke are familar territory to many like me. When I watched it, I felt ripped apart (in a good way) at the hands of a brilliant director. But then I was in a cult. And I did undergo a long and gruelling period of emotional adjustment and explorative drifting with no moral direction. Finally, I found that to 'be kind' is a more profound achievement than it appears, and that love can drag you into the 'wrong' places for absolutely the right reasons. In Holy Smoke (misleadingly bad title, Jane), Campion has made a hidden masterpiece, but only for those who actually been there - I don't know why she understands, but she does. If you haven't been to similarly dark and liberating places, the film is unlikely to affect you. This isn't a film for anyone with a fixed moral stance, but it will speak volumes to anyone who has ever had their boundaries totally stripped away. |
| Rating | | | Date | November 23, 2004 | | Summary | It is the good idea for a movie that goes up in smoke here | Content
| "Holy Smoke!" did not turn out to be the movie I was given to expect based on the title and opening scenes, which was disappointing because I was rather interested in seeing the movie I thought I was going to see. Granted, since the director of this 1999 film is Jane Campion, I should have known what the conflict was going to be, but I am almost always thinking ahead when watching a movie and this time I saw a fork in the road where they was not one to be seen.
As we saw in "The Piano," Campion's heroines tend to be women who have to travel to some new place to find out who they really are. In "Holy Smoke!" this transformation has always taken place for Ruth Baron (Kate Winslet), who has found a spiritual awakening with a guru in India. Despite the fact that this is communicated to us by a collage of images of richly saturated colors while Neil Diamond sings "Holly Holy" it appears to be a meaningful transformation, even if the guru is not even a second rate holy man. But as far as her family back in Australia are concerned, Ruth has fallen in with a cult, and so her mother is dispatched to New Dehli to bring her daughter home with a false tale that her father is on his deathbed. Instead she finds a deprogammer, PJ Waters (Harvey Keitel), brought in from the States at some expense to bring her back to the fold.
I should have realized that Ruth's faith could not run deep, but the animosity of her family towards her new life and new beliefs is based on racism more than religion. Consequently I was anticipating that Ruth was going to have the better of Waters, and was expecting a debate that represented the clash between East and West. Instead, "Holy Smoke!" comes down to a battle of the sexes. Ruth and her deprogrammer are sequestered in a halfway house in the Outback where Waters plans to break Ruth in three days, and their initiate discussions strongly suggest that she can give as good as she gets. In fact, we never doubt that Ruth is smarter than Waters and her entire family put together. He lets her walk about outside and play with rocks, which turns out to be just one of many mistakes that he makes in underestimating her.
Then, suddenly, Ruth is standing there naked in the night and all discussions on the relative merits of competing belief systems is completely forgotten. I knew that Ruth was going to turn the tables on Waters, but I did not think it would debunking his machismo. Such a confrontation is certainly worth the having, but setting it up with the notion of deprogramming is just the wrong way to go. You can make a comedy about deprogramming, or you can have a serious film about it, but using it as nothing more than an excuse to put these two people in a shack in the Outback seems a waste.
Ironically, Ruth reveals herself to be such a strong personality that it seems odd she would give herself body and soul to anyone, let alone a guru in India. In contrast we have to believe that Waters' partner in the deprogramming (Pam Grier) must be the key to the operation because his arguments are rather insipid and his ability to withstand either Ruth or her sister-in-law (Sophie Lee) is nonexistent. He really does not present much of a challenge for Ruth, and the worst he looks the less impressive her achievement, and the less we think of this film. It is only Winslet's performance that redeems this film and makes it worth the watching, but then she was why I checked it out in the first place. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 22, 2004 | | Summary | Truly an Ugly Movie | Content
| I've sat through more than my fair share of pretentious films in my attempt to escape Hollywood's drivel. Based on the cast and the strength of the film maker, I thought Holy Smoke would have a good script, strong performances and something to say. Indeed, the film began with much promise, only to bogged down by what I would call an awful second and dreadful third act. How the characters get from point A to point F is beyond me and certainly not motivated by what was shown on the screen. If this movie was designed to question the roles of men and women in religious circles, question physical vs. mental domination in relationships, or question choices vs. others' perceptions of those choices, it would have been a worthwhile use of kodak film. In the end, the film suffers from too many ideas, too little cohesion and too much self-importance.
I would suggest avoiding this film, almost as much as I would avoid Gigli. |
| Rating | | | Date | June 07, 2004 | | Summary | I won't say where the smoke is being blown... | Content
| This film starts out so promising. It could have been a punchy dramatic piece about the nature of belief, and the legitimacy of the concept of free will. Instead, the characters dribble into infantile sexuality, and the film becomes a travelog. I can't believe this film found financing...a real waste of obvious talent. The effect of the ending is to trivialise the opening premise, hence the film winds up being an exercise in meaninglessness with an unpleasant aftertaste. |
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