Product Details

• Actors: Saffron Burrows, Isaach De Bankol, Paz de la Huerta, Mia Kucan, Adam Trese
• Directors: Amy Redford
• Writers: Amos Poe
• Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Starz / Anchor Bay
• DVD Release Date: February 10, 2009
• Run Time: 95 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B001L28J2M
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #17,416 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "The Guitar" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Actress Amy Redford's directorial debut, The Guitar, pivots on a potentially risible concept made palatable by a charismatic cast: an attractive woman discovers she's dying, maxes out her credit cards, and indulges her every materialistic and sexual whim (and yes, Amy is Robert Redford's daughter). But what sounds like an art-house version of The Bucket List offers its own unique charms--at least for those who don't take it too literally. Moments after Melody Wilder (Saffron Burrows) finds out she has inoperable throat cancer, she loses her job and her boyfriend, leaving her alone and broke in New York City (Janeane Garofolo gives her the bad medical news). So, she abandons her basement apartment and moves into a cavernous loft, where she orders fancy outfits and furnishings, throws the refuse out the windows, and dines on take-out while dreaming of the red Stratocaster she coveted as a girl. Soon Mel’s life revolves around her new stuff and the kindly individuals who deliver it to her: the married Roscoe (Isaach de Bankolé) and engaged Cookie (Paz de la Huerta). All the while, the willowy Burrows, much like Ali McGraw in Love Story, makes listless and pale seem more glamorous than sad, but just as tragedy gives way to fantasy, Mel returns to reality once her credit runs out. As a how-to guide for the terminally ill, The Guitar won't win many points, but as a metaphor for spiritual emptiness, it gets the job done. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Product Description

Studio: Starz/sphe Release Date: 02/10/2009

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Saffron Burrows Soars, December 2, 2008

By 

Joel S. Schneider (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Guitar (DVD)

I saw "The Guitar" at a film festival and I was very moved by the experience. The central character goes through a transformation when confronting her mortality that anyone who's open to the experience will find incredibly absorbing. Don't be put off by the talk of going on a spending spree - that is NOT what the film is actually about (its not a validation of wanton materialism) - the buying of material objects is just part of a process that the character, Melody, needs to go through in order to discover what's important. For any connoisseur of the beautiful, talented Saffron Burrows this film is a wonderful gift. She delivers a deeply felt and brilliant performance that dominates the screen in almost every scene. Its hard to imagine anyone else being able to animate this challenging role the way Ms Burrows has - she performs magic. There are whole scenes where she is alone on the screen and has no dialogue and sometimes not even any clothes. Its quite primal. Later she explores her sexuality and discovers more of what she's been missing and has a lot of fun, too. I don't want to give too much away but I will state that the film is much like a parable and has an ending that might startle some - either positively or negatively. Many people will love this film and I can also imagine some disliking it - it depends on your perspective. In my case, I thought about "The Guitar" for days after I saw it - it really resonated.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Freedom, August 13, 2009

By 

T. Johnson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Guitar (DVD)

I enjoyed this movie. I felt the whole premise is about what would happen if you were completely freed from the normal boundaries of the day to day world and you could do anything you wanted - no longer locked into your current real world situation, no longer concerned with duties and the expectations of anyone around you, no longer contorted to fit into the box you've made for yourself in life. The path of the character made perfect sense to me. Saffron Burroughs did a fine job of acting, and her beauty is almost a kind of poetic element of the film. In many ways the movie was all about healing and restoration, both of the body and the spirit, through the freedom to breathe.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Saffron Burrows gives a nice performance but can't save a ridiculous script, August 4, 2009

By 

RMurray847 "afilmcritic.com" (Albuquerque, NM United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Guitar (DVD)

(What's this?)

Melody Wilder is having a bad day. First, she finds out that she has one to two months to live. (Apparently, she had been "feeling crappy," saw a doctor and was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. No treatment is offered to slow the progress, or to make her more comfortable. Just "take the day to arrange your affairs and then come back to see a counselor." Yeah, right.

Stunned, Melody makes her way back to her office. She arrives at her cubicle only to be "downsized" by her boss in front of everyone. He hands her a check for 4 weeks severance, shrugs and walks off. Yeah, right.

Distraught, she calls her "boyfriend" who reluctantly agrees to meet with her. Before she can say anything, he's trotting out believable, original lines like "I'm feeling trapped. Not me...my lifeforce" and "my therapist thinks I need to get in touch with my inner child." So she gets dumped unceremoniously by a guy who only speaks in cliches. Yeah, right.

Melody has nothing in her life, so she contemplates suicide. By happenstance, she sees a half page ad in the New York Times advertising the gorgeous, beautiful, spacious loft with a river view...but it's only available for two months rental. So, yeah, right...I guess I'd spend that kind of money advertising to rent a space I only had for two months. Anyway, Melody leaves everything she has except the clothes on her back, empties her accounts, and proceeds to move into this gorgeous loft (and it IS) and starts to furnish it to her liking using her huge pile of credit cards.

Finally, the movie seems to get something right. If you were all alone and about to die, it might be a VERY viable choice to just max out your credit cards and indulge. Although I must say that the choices for indulgence that Melody makes aren't the ones I would make...but to each his/her own. She confines herself entirely to her apartment (in fact, she even tosses her few clothes out the window, and until she gets new ones, struts around quite naked.)

Eventually, Melody makes friends with her pizza delivery girl and her UPS man. In fact, they all become more than friends...although it is nearly impossible to see what draws these people together other than pure hedonism. But its all scripted in such a way as to make it all an implausible dream.

Melody also remembers how as a young girl she yearned to own this lovely red electric guitar...so she finally treats herself, and spends hours on end trying to learn the instrument. These scenes, though mostly dramatically inert, do generate some emotion...the idea of connecting to music in a way that you almost feel inside your body.

Saffron Burrows is Melody, and she does a very nice job. Were the role mishandled, the movie would have been completely unwatchable. As it is, Burrows dives deep into her character and we frequently see real emotion on her face. It's the kind of performance that will make casting directors take note of her skills, and perhaps land her some roles worthy of whatever talent she has.

In THE GUITAR, however, the script writer almost utterly lets her down. The final section of the film is utterly, completely ludicrous in a way that almost made me groan. Jeanneane Garfalo, as the doctor (in a cameo that is totally jarring) is forced to utter one of the most outrageously stupid medical explanations I've ever heard in a movie. The movie, when it was all said and done, was mostly just a big slap to my intelligence and to my understanding of how humans really behave.

If you want to see Saffron Burrows take a big step as an actress (or want to see this frighteningly skinny actress nude for long stretches), this movie might be for you. Otherwise, avoid it!