Did Michael Jackson secretly finance this?

Rating: Null/10 (2 October 2007)

Speak up!
I wish some of the cast would have mumbled less, especially since some of them were doing accents other than their own. Do I have to crank up the volume as if on a metal concert in order to understand some of the lines? Whispering in movies is annoying, but unfortunately an increasing problem.
But it's not the major problem here. FN is mostly manipulative schmaltz that Hollywood has served its sheepy audiences for nearly 100 years. Predictable every step of the way, which is unfortunate because the acting and the production values are good overall. At first I saw this as a typical family picture, but eventually realized it's tailor-made for women i.e. a typical syrupy chick-flick hence the movie's hysterically absurd high IMDb rating. Winslet dying young? But of course. Forget Princess Diana's tear-jerker funeral, get your handkerchiefs out for Winslet's overly melodramatic death. Based on true events, my butt.
Having a main character die from a sudden illness while falling in love - especially when young - is one of the oldest clichés in the movie book, and shows a lack of imagination, which is ironic because one of this movie's main themes is having and maintaining imagination. If only the writers of this script had listened to their own credo, this might have been a more original and better movie.
There are some dull moments as well, but these are mostly in the first half. At first I welcomed the fact that the four boys do not talk and behave like adults, but even this didn't last for the duration, because toward the end two of the boys started expressing themselves far too eloquently and intelligently for their respective age, which Depp "rewarded" by telling the oldest Winslet son that he has become a man. Handkerchiefs! Why do film-makers assume that only intelligent (or super-intelligent) children deserve our sympathy? That's quite a bit of elitist thinking, when one thinks about it, especially for Hollywood's liberals who pretend to always side with the weak.
I also find the casting of old people an increasing problem in Hollywood. Julie Christie's face looks very unnatural, due to weekly face-lifts, hence she comes off as a grotesque alien instead of as a woman that could be Winslet's mother. As an alien she can only lay eggs, and not give birth to beautiful women.
Winslet looks great, as always, but she doesn't try very hard. A scene early on in which she says that she can't imagine how horrible it must be for kids to lose a mother is a good example of her laziness.
Another problem with the movie is its typically Hollywoodesque twisting of the truth. I would have had no problems had they changed the names of all the characters at least. But they didn't. The writer of "Peter Pan" was most probably a pedophile, and TWO of the boys committed suicide in real life. Wow! What a great "dad" Barrie must have been!
I guess Michael Jackson's pedophilia and his obsession with Neverland and the androgynous Peter Pan character must be in some way related to all this, but I just can't seem to figure out in what way...
The next time MJ makes an appearance in court, being accused yet again of molesting little boys, his lawyers should play this movie to the jury to end the trial in two hours, hence save everyone the expenses of another sham of a celebrity trial.
For a little bit of satire: http://rateyourmusic.com/list/Fedor8/johnny_depp__a_biography