Walk In The Woods

A Walk in the Woods review. Its hard to understand how someone could read Bill Brysons 1. A Walk in the Woods and think the material screamed hit movie. Brysons writing doesnt scream anything it sets about its work in a hush, tickling, charming, prodding and cajoling so gently that in half an hour you can laugh out loud 1. Still, here we are. After 1. 0 years in development, the film version of Brysons elegantly meandering travelogue about his middle aged attempt on the Appalachian Trail a 2,0. United States has been shepherded into cinemas. The prime mover was Robert Redford, who originally envisioned it as a reunion for himself and Paul Newman Butch and Sundance ambling northwards while the sun set at their side. After Newmans death in 2. Nick Nolte as Stephen Katz, Brysons curmudgeonly travelling partner, and the arrival of director Ken Kwapis Hes Just Not That Into You, The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants re energised the project. I say re energised. Kwapiss film is so un Brysonishly leaden footed that Redford and Nolte might as well have walked the trail in diving boots. When we first see Redfords Bryson, hes giving a television interview about his work in which he cant get a word in edgeways then he arrives home, spots his grandson playing video games, and rolls his eyes theatrically at the sheer gosh darn wackiness of the modern world. The sequence is supposed to paint Bryson as endearingly out of step, but actually just makes him look like a nitwit an impression thats reinforced minutes later as he ham fistedly pitches his old tent from his backpacking days in his back garden, while his conspicuously younger wife Catherine Emma Thompson looks on with smiling indulgence. Microsoft Hup Program Code here. Redfords Bryson doesnt look capable of writing a shopping list, let alone a bestselling series of non fiction books. But Thompson is so good in this brief appearance flinty and funny, though the script gives her almost nothing to work with that you wish the film would send Redford off into the forest and stay behind with her in the kitchen. Robert Redford, Emma Thompson and Nick Nolte in A Walk in the WoodsCredit. Frank Masi, SMPSP. But shes soon shuffled back into the wings, and is probably better off out of it. Instead the support act is Nolte, whose character, a pseudonymous on off friend of Brysons, joins him on the trip when he hears through a mutual acquaintance that the writer is looking for a travelling partner. In the book, Bryson memorably describes Katz as looking like Orson Welles after a very bad night, but in the film he looks more like Welles after a very bad car crash. Like Mickey Rourke, Nolte has gnarled with age, though in the right role he can still be dynamite. He was perfect as the alcoholic father of two UFC fighters in Gavin OConnors Warrior. Here, though, he just looks absurd, and the films insistence that this 7. GN4_DAT_6907251.jpg--.jpg' alt='Walk In The Woods' title='Walk In The Woods' />Buy A Walk in the Woods Read 13373 Movies TV Reviews Amazon. Cally Woods circular, Gatehouse of Fleet. An easy walk through oak and mixed woodland which are a haven for wildlife including red squirrels and good for wildflowers. Police report Tiger Woods was asleep at the wheel, confused, unable to walk Woods whiffed on a field sobriety test, but he did blow a 0. Bryson and Katz were in their 4. Redford, strikingly trim at 7. The walk itself is like a bad sitcom, with lots of grumbling and falling through things  tents, bunk beds, you get the idea and yet more eye rolling, normally at the expense of irritating passers by one played by Kristen Schaal, whos almost as poorly deployed here as Thompson and lets not even get on to Mary Steenburgen, as a motel proprietress with an eye for married writers. Walk In The Woods' title='Walk In The Woods' />Katz comes across as a sex pest, while Bryson is unbearably priggish. In one scene he describes books as television for smart people in a way that made me want to force feed him his cagoule. Hacky lines like that notably absent from the book are symptomatic of a sloppiness that seems to have seeped into every aspect of the production. In one scene, Bryson and Katz gaze past the camera at a majestic view, and the film cuts to not the view itself, but a helicopter shot of a forest, as if the two men were suddenly flying above it on a magic carpet. A late grasp at profundity, on an obviously studio bound, papier mch ledge, meanwhile, just looks too phoney to connect. Its not that Brysons book is somehow unfilmable two great, recent adaptations of walking memoirs, Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon, and Tracks, with Mia Wasikowska, put paid to that theory. Its just that Kwapis didnt film it. A Walk in the Woods shows you two men going from A to B, but their journey is nowhere to be seen. A Walk in the Woods trailer.