My family goes back to New Orleans late 1600's early 1700's and in watching the movie I knew it was a history my grand-parents never talked about, but we knew it existed. I have cousins obviously black aka African Americans and others who can "pass" as white and chose not to. It's a hard history to watch when you realize that it's your family they're talking about and that Cane River is all a part of that history. It makes me want to cry and it makes me want to kick the 'arse' of my great grandfathers who owned those plantations and wonder in awe of how my great grandmothers of African heritage lived under that oppressive and yet aristocratic existence...And at the same time had I not come out of that history, I probably wouldn't be the successful business woman I am today living successfully in a fairly integrated world. The acting was both excellent and fair depending upon the actor, but it is a movie that NEEDED to be made. Anne Rice is incredible and I ask myself, why is she 'symbolically' writing about my family and I'm not. I recommend this movie to everyone. Leza

"Feast of All Saints?" Where...? When...?Was the Feast of All Saints storyline and theme edited out? What a waste of a wonderful title! There is never anything in the story that has the remotest connection to the "Feast of All Saints." Nor is there anything in the story about "All Souls Day" which the term is referencing. Why bother to use this title if you never intend to including any kind of storyline or theme about "All Souls Day" or the "Feast of All Saints"? Embarrassly Bad Script & Amateur Writing How did they attract such great talent to this clunker? The writing is so amateur--characters that have known each other all their life go into big long speeches about their life history for the sake of the audience. Not at all the way people talk to each other. What was the Director Thinking?The directing is equally bad! The forced and overly deliberate style feels amateurish. In one scene, a character is yelling "Take your hands off of me" and NO ONE is touching him! The most badly directed scene however, is the incredibly over-the-top battle scene at the beginning of the film.Excessive Gore in a Very Fake, Silly Battle SceneThere are so many dead people in the most fake battle scene. It looks like a Saturday Night Live skit!! You can see extras waiting for their cues to walk across camera. Everyone plays their death scene like 4th grade boys--exaggerating every little gasp and twitch. The blood on battle victims is so excessive and carelessly applied it looks like someone used a ketchup dispenser and just squirted straight lines of red on the costumes.This whole battle scene comes off as the spoof of a really cheesy war movie. You almost expect someone like Will Ferrell and Mike Myers to ride up on a horse and deliver the punchline.Who in Real Life Would Ever Behave this Way?! The most ridiculous bit of writing, directing and casting is actually the focus of the scene: A little girl is standing under the dead body of her hanging father--who is terribly mutilated, and literally dripping blood form his gaping wounds. Even a totally idiot would know he is dead! Yet she is--very monotonously--repeating over and over "Daddy, daddy..." while looking at someone off-screen. She delivered it with about as much believability and passion as you could expect from an non-actor kid that had been repeating the line for the cameras all day.Even if the poor kid had any acting skills, the scene is completely unbelievable. The little girl wouldn't even BE in the middle of the battlefield after hours of carnage--surrounded by hundreds of dead bodies, while she calmly stands there!! Natural instincts would had the kid screaming and terrified, running AWAY from the bloody carnage! Are we Suppose to be Horrified or Laugh...?!One particularly goofy detail, that gives the scene an SNL satire tone, is the father hanging, with a huge hook through his mouth and cheek. He looks like a fish on a hook! The unintentionally funny details, make the whole scene come across as fake and silly.In Fantasy La-La-Land, Mothers and Daughters are the Same Age! Another funny detail, is that you see a central character--the little girl's mother--at the end of the scene and in the next scene, that occurs 20+ years later, she looks exactly the same! She is still young and beautiful, and now the same age as her daughter! I almost turned the movie off right there because the direction and writing were obviously awful--but I tried to stick it out because I wanted to see the Louisiana settings and I like all the actors. I don't know what these fine actors were thinking when they accepted these roles!Who was the Targeted Audience?The excessive amount of blood and badly acted violence in the opening scene are weirdly out of place with the soap opera storytelling tone that follows. It is also a strange way to start a movie that, for the rest of the time, seems targeted to romance novel reading females. Weird inconsistency in tone!

Wow. Yet again, someone's playing games w/great source material. Read the book. I will try, but I tend to give away plot lines (spoilers); so, stop reading NOW if you don't want to know too much.Based on an historical novel about the "free" people of color in LA; the movie drops VERY important expository plot lines. Further, the casting director clearly had no idea how to employ people who could actually act. The actor playing Marcel, the "main" character, is jarring. Every moment he is on screen is excruciating to watch and listen to. A corner "be-bop" dropped into 1800s LA.Plot: Plessage, the custom in LA during the 1800s, or auctioning off light skinned Black women to wealthy white men willing to set them up for life (or the life of the relationship), in nice houses. An entire class of people of color survived, some would say triumphed, by bartering the flesh of these Quadroons.Marcel and his sister are the children of a woman of plessage. Marcel is dark and his sister could be a "passe blanc", one who could pass for white. They have an elder sister as well (not revealed to Marcel until midway through the movie) and their "father's" refusal to free her (she is the daughter of a slave, not a free woman of color), leads to a heartbreaking act of revenge on her part. Difficult to watch, but perhaps the most effective part of the movie, serving as it does to jar the reader into realizing that all life in this town, at this time is plessage: women, white, black, whatever, are merely chattel (from the slave to the wives of the wealthy plantation owner). They are all bartered and sold.Marcel is raised by his mother to believe he is "free" and not really Black, but, as another character tells him, "different", has to learn that he is a "station", not a person. He lives in a world where the facade of "freedom" is maintained by everyone; but when he goes to his father's house, TO THE FRONT DOOR no less, he finds that unless you can "pass blanc", you are simply another Negro. Not different, the same as everyone else.Ironically, his full sister realizes that she IS Black. And she does not aspire to pass or to be anything other than what she is. To love the Black man she loves, to marry, to have as much happiness as is possible in the world that exists. It is her rape by 5 white men that underscores how impossible happiness is in a world where a woman of any color has limited choices.Despite the fact that the cast is headed by some well known names; quite a bit of the acting is abysmal. The actor playing Marcel, Ruby Dee, Ben Vereen, Gloria Reuben...they are simply awful. Accents come and go or don't exist at all. The true saving grace of the film? Jennifer Beals. I didn't know she could actually act; but she is more than credible as the owner of the house where the Quadroon balls are held. When she reveals that for a time she was married to a White English Lord, you even believe she was a credible lady of that "manor".I am not saying to skip this movie; but read the book first. Rich in detail and a feast for the mind, the book far exceeds the midling film.

I am normally skeptical about watching films or mini-series based on novels because the screenplay is always different from the novel. Fortunately, I was wrong! The screenplay was very close to the novel (I guess it helps that the author was an executive producer and writer, huh?)The cast is outstanding. I can't describe how much I enjoyed seeing such a wide range of actors (from Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee to Robert Ri'chard and Bianca Lawson).The location setting... I was expecting to see the homes and cottages I imagined in my mind: what I saw on screen was slightly different. However, it wasn't enough to make me dislike the mini-series.I recommend this for anyone who has read the novel: you will not be disappointed if you have. 8 out of 10 stars!