Flyerplesys Perfectly adorable

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Griff Lees Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Beulah Bram A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

HotToastyRag I don't usually like movies or books that go back and forth constantly between the past and the present. I'm usually frustrated, lamenting over the lost art of a linear storyline. I'm glad I stuck it out and watched Closing the Ring; it was very entertaining.The film starts at Shirley MacLaine's husband's funeral. Christopher Plummer sits outside with her during the service. Then, a flash to the past, with a young Shirley MacLaine surrounded by three adoring servicemen about to be shipped off to WW2. Which one is young Christopher Plummer? Which one is her husband? As the film continues, more mysteries are introduced. Neve Campbell can't understand her mother's attitude after her father's death. And in Ireland, Pete Postlethwaite is digging in a dangerous area, finding pieces of a wrecked WW2 airplane. Each flashback to the 1940s gives just one more piece to the ever-growing puzzle, and it keeps the audience on the edge of their seats. I kept pressing pause when I rented this movie with my mom to talk about what I thought would be revealed. Sometimes I was right, sometimes I was wrong, and that made the plot even more entertaining.Probably because one of the first movies I seeing Christopher Plummer in was The Lakehouse, I never found him to be a very likable guy. He was so convincingly cold, I had a hard time seeing him as anything else. However, in Closing the Ring, Christopher Plummer gives a very different performance. I'm going to have to rethink my impression of him. In one scene, he burst into tears so naturally, I wanted to reach through the screen and embrace him in a tight hug.While the younger actors in the movie aren't going to be nominated for Oscars anytime soon, the older folks make up for it. Shirley MacLaine looks beautiful, so if you're one of her fans, don't miss this one! And if you like WW2 movies, or movies that flash back and forth with a little mystery, you'll love it.

herbqedi Closing the Ring features complex and scintillating performances from Shirley MacLaine (as Ethel Ann), Christopher Plummer (As Jack) with solid by veterans such as the late great Peter Postlethwaite and Brenda Fricker. Neve Campbell in a sort of third lead is also terrific as the daughter who is frustrated and nonplussed over being shut out by her mother. As you might expect, the young people in this film get a bit more of the screen time (although not nearly as skewed as usual - see The Debt, etc.). Mischa Barton as the young, high-spirited, and willful Ethel Ann, supplies the energy and marvelous acting to make these segments work along with the chemistry with the young man playing Teddy (her soul- mate). For me, the other young actors in these segments, the fellow who played Chuck (Arnell) was supposed to be sturdy but quiet; he was quiet but the sturdy art was never reflected by the actor - he just seemed pathetic. Gregory Smith who played young Jack, had lots of personality and complexity, but there is no way that person grows up physically or emotionally to be Christopher Plummer's Jack. On the other side of the pond, the young actors playing tartly Eleanor (later Fricker) and callow young Quinlan (later Postlethwaite) were perfectly cast and acted in their tiny roles. The head-turning performance to me was by the irrepressible Jimmy (Martin McCann) who took the role of the romantic and impetuous naif far beyond the script in his mannerisms and energy.Overall, this is a bit overlong with some unnecessary sequences and a bit too much melancholia. But, that's my opinion and mostly nitpicking. If you like epic WWII romances and as a romantic love to say their present-day resolutions, this movie is well worth your time.

lor_ Great filmmakers usually end their careers on a sour note and this is no exception; barring some inept future use of British lottery money it is unlikely that the knight Sir Richard (nay, call me LORD Richard) will get another 15 million pounds or so to blow again.Pick your favorite: Henry Hathaway bowed out with SUPER DUDE (a blaxploitation film I had the privilege of viewing in Cleveland on a double bill at the Scrumpy Dump Theater (!) some 35 years ago; Billy Wilder ended with BUDDY BUDDY; William Wyler had THE LIBERATION OF L.B. JONES (on paper a step up from SUPER DUDE, but not by all that much); Frank Capra with POCKETFUL OF MIRACLES which he really hated, per his autobiography; Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (hardly up to his high standards); Otto Preminger had THE HUMAN FACTOR, which I (alone?) liked (I've been a rabid Nicol Williamson fan since seeing him at Stratford as one of the greatest Macbeths, opposite Helen Mirren) and which costarred Attenborough. Even Michael Powell, apart from a look-back docu, culminated his career with an innocuous but hardly impressive Children's Film Foundation effort THE BOY WHO TURNED YELLOW, which I watched once at MoMA for completeness. There are obvious exceptions: Joe Mankiewicz bowed out with SLEUTH, an estimable movie and David Lean's A AGE TO India was a winner.Per the particularly self-serving (and useless) "making of" featurette on the DVD release titled "Love, Loss & Life", CLOSING THE RING is the folly of several producers who fell in love with a first-timer's screenplay based on the actual finding of an old wedding ring in the Irish hills. The flimsy, yet convoluted, script got funding and, per the interviews, bowled over Attenborough, too. How audience react, limited to video fans in the U.S. where the Weinsteins thought better of wasting money on a theatrical release, is an individual matter, but the tired blood on screen here is frankly an embarrassment.Some cinematic lions, notably Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer, as well as from a more recent generation Brenda Fricker and Pete Postlethwaite, are matched against some young talent, but the performances are uniformly poor. Having seen all of Attenborough's theatrical releases in first-run I concede he is capable of very good (Gandhi) but when he is bad, he turns out execrable material, notably the insulting A CHORUS LINE adaptation. I enjoyed YOUNG WINSTON, but then again I liked NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA by Schaffner back then too -pageantry is easy to take. But when Richard tried a genre film MAGIC for Joseph E. Levine, after making A BRIDGE TOO FAR for that once-famous showman, mediocrity ruled -about 10 steps below no-budget maestro Lindsay Shonteff's DEVIL DOLL. Despite the filmmakers' protests of how moving and inspirational this love story hit them, on the screen it is flat and dull. The young cast, led by Mischa Barton, gives paper-thin performances, and the attempt by Attenborough "to be hip" by having Barton nude a couple of times is beneath contempt. That's as old a ploy as THE YELLOW TEDDY BEARS, a well-meaning (and boring) British exploitation film from 1964 for which I saw a vintage U.S. coming attraction just this past weekend (resuscitated by Something Weird Video) in which extraneous nude scenes were added to release it stateside as GUTTER GIRLS. Now I might accuse the Weinsteins of such ploys, but for Richard to stoop that low -wow!The back and forth plotting from 1941 (actually 1944 it turns out in the narrative later) and 1991 to shoehorn in the Irish Troubles is undigested screen writing of the worst order. Connections between the two are lame and all the "maybe" and suggestive material goes nowhere. For example, strident Neve Campbell (a performance worse even than her terrible effort in the Alan Rudolph dud about sex INTIMATE AFFAIRS) as Shirley's grown up daughter creates wonderment as to "who's her daddy" but it turns out to be strictly a red herring, time-wise. Ditto casting Fricker of all people as the old-age version of a W.W. II "tart" who slept with all the Yanks -this hook is dangled for the viewer and left unresolved. Postlethwaite is perhaps the best performer in this one, but his role is 100% functional, designed for a big "reveal" only.I've never seen MacLaine so disinterested (and uninteresting) in a movie- she looks like she's playing under protest. The character of a woman who had basically three beaux but wasted her life attached to the dead one is ittedly unplayable but she doesn't even try. Plummer has more energy, perhaps he alone was given Geritol on the set, but this is a thankless assignment as the "good buddy" who never got the girl. The debuting young Irish thesp Martin McCann is insufferably cheery in what turns out to be the lead role, the boy who found "the ring". Closeups and other emphasis on the object make one think we are living in the shadow of Tolkien, but needless to say this totem is of zero importance.CLOSING THE RING is so bad one is reminded of the late Frank Perry's disastrously soapy MOMMIE DEAREST and MONSIGNOR, for which a wonderful director ended up being the butt of catcalls from Midnight Movie audiences. Unfortunately, its plotting is too dull and execution too mediocre for this lame RING to end up with any such afterlife, avoiding even the pitiful fate of having Hedda Lettuce lead camp followers in weekly derision at my local Chelsea (NY division, not England) cinema.

lastliberal For the life of me, I cannot figure how this got in my queue. I almost sent it back without watching, but there must have been a reason I put it there.Yes, Sir Richard Attenborough has made a lot of good films (Ghandi, Cry Freedom, Chaplain). Maybe this will be one of them. There are a lot of good actors here: Christopher Plummer, Neve Campbell, and Pete Postlethwaite, to name a few.Maybe it was to see Mischa Barton ("The O.C."), who played Shirley MacLaine's character as a young girl. We got a nice view when she was getting it on with Teddy (Stephen Amell). We get a full view later on when he is leaving for gunnery school.The story takes place in the present, when Ethel Ann (Shirley MacLaine) has just buried Chuck (David Alpay), and 50 years prior at the dawn of WWII, when Chucck and Teddy (Stephen Amell) were heading off to war.A young boy (Martin McCann) has just found a rind belonging to Teddy and Ethel Ann at a B-17 crash site that Quinlan (Pete Postlethwaite) has been digging up. He has to get away from the IRA, so he brings it to America.Ethel Ann goes back with him to Belfast and finds love for the first time in 50 years.It was an excellent story. I was surprised, thinking it would be a Lifetime special, but the actors in it made it special.