User Reviews

First of all, the number of existing reviews for the feature THE CITY OF YOUR FINAL DESTINATION was larger than my maximum threshold for adding another review today (only ill-informed egotists would write the 800th comment on a movie, not realizing it will end up unread forever on "page" 63 of the compilation, to which NO ONE would have the time or patience to click to). I gave director James Ivory's latest offering a rating of 9 (of 10). Unfortunately, this accompanying bonus feature is an uneven pastiche of disjointed segments; its sound and picture were badly unsynchronized on my DVD (though there was no such problem with the feature film). Though comments are included from Ivory and all of the principal actors, they are woven together here in a fashion producing nearly intentional-seeming non sequiturs. Further, the film clips shown with these comments sometimes are quite incongruous. Since the full, official title of this short is presented as "SORTING IT OUT AT OCHO RIOS--SCENES FROM THE MAKING OF: THE CITY OF YOUR FINAL DESTINATION, 2006-2007," maybe there was a LONGER version of this making of that Laura Linney burned in the fireplace with the only copy of her late husband's second roman a clef. I would not be surprised, as this whole thing is sort of an exercise in Pirandelloism. Finally, to those who accuse novelist Peter Cameron (whose book is the basis for the feature, and who makes an on-screen comment within this short) of plagiarizing the Henry James novella, THE ASPERN PAPERS: no one is accused of plagiarizing the Bible or Shakespeare, so it's about time the statute of limitations runs out on James, Dickens, Twain, the Brontes, Austen, Melville, Cooper, Conrad, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, and the rest of those dead white people, not to mention Dumas).