Like Jaws, I just can’t figure out why this movie influenced so many people. I received my scuba certification around the time Jaws was released. The movie was so hockie that it did not stop me from diving or fear sharks in such a way that it could only be described as paranoya (sp?). So it is with the movie a River Runs Through It. A few fly fishing scenes and somehow people are moved (driven) to start fly fishing in numbers never seen before or since the movie.
Brad Pitt can be a good actor at times. I liked him in Interview With a Vampire and Oceans Eleven. But there are times like in this movie he is really bad! Craig Sheffer on the other hand was very good. I liked his character. If only they had paired him with a worthy actor it would have made this okay movie worth renting again.
I just could not get passed Brad Pitt’s terrible acting to really enjoy or understand the movies mass appeal.
Watch the movie with the sound off and fast forward through the parts that dont involve fishing.
I think the appeal in the movie is that fly fishing in the movie shows it to be an art, it brings out the best in fly casting, makes it look so peaceful and flowing kind of like a ballet with a rod and reel.
btw I much prefered the book to the movie.
I also enjoyed Jaws, but I think I was 12, and it didnt keep me out of the Ocean.
Just watched it the other night . I liked the big wide casts the Kids did and then the evolvement of their casts as the movie went on. The plot of the movie was b rated. In my opinion it would have benefited from a better story line. I have no idea why the general public like this movie.
Though I love fly fishing I found the movie boring.
Maybe its a kind of chick flick because just because Brad was in it. . Now if Angelina Jolie co starred with Brad It would have been academy award fodder.
The cliffhanger ending of the movie could have been the memorable line that He flung back at her as he rode off into the sunset Would have been " Quite Frankly my Dear I don’t fish the dam"
It’s a movie…strictly Hollywood. Enjoyable entertainment, and the fishing part of the movie is pretty interesting subject matter. The rest is just moviedom ga-ga.
about one or two notches above mindless entertainment. By all means no classic, and don’t take it too seriously. Better on DVD, cause you can rewind to see good stuf twice, and fasf forward to burn through the lame stuff…ModocDan
Got the DVD for a gift long after I read the book. I try to never watch a movie after reading a book, because I’m usually disappointed. Yep, the same thing happened this time.
I really enjoyed the book, because books make you visualize what you are reading. Each reader sees something different in their mind’s eye. Pick up a copy at the library and give it a go. Movies rarely do justice to a book which has been well received. If it makes the best seller’s list, then a movie with a bunch of twits shows up to try to outdo the book…or so it seems to me.
I did not care for "A River Runs Through It’. The movie left me as cold as the river. The movie “Legends of the Fall” is much better. Also,
Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Troy are good Pitt movies.
Doug
It was just on the other evening as I flipped through the channels, so we watched the last 30 minutes or so. I made the comment to my wife that it was a shame they picked one of “America’s sexiest men” to play in it, but didn’t balance him out with an equally sexy woman. That would have made the movie much, much better. As a movie it’s so, so. What I like the most about it was the fish they used. I’ve read that they were actually fake, but they looked pretty real to me.
The book was good, much better than the movie, as usual. The other stories in the book (Pimps and Lumberjacks is the one I remember the title of) were pretty good too, but not as good as A River Runs Through It.
I received an original copy of the book as a b-day gift along with a copy of the dvd a few years ago. Kinda neat gift.
Legends of the Fall was an awsome movie. It’s a chick flick, but there are a lot of pretty cool dude scenes too, especially the end. I’ve always thought that if they added fly fishing to that movie (and some hot actresses) it would be the best movie ever.
As you may know McClain’s day job for a number of years was an English Professor at the University of Chicago an institution whose liberal ambiance and emphasis on the theoretic makes it significantly different from Missoula, Mt. He had something of a reputation as a curmudgeon who took great pleasure in rejecting the first efforts of his student essays in the terse manner that his father rejected his own early attempts at writing. Only with work would his demeanor soften revealing a humane side that is evident in his writing.
His literary background is evident in the poetic nature of many of the book’s passages. His description of grace through art through work as applied to fly fishing is a literary example of elitism that we fly fisheman are all too often accused of. In that same presbyterian vein the description of the fly cast is not only elegant but is useful to the neophyte’s perception of proper technique.
His closing description of an old man who has outlived his family fishing alone in the fishing alone in the closing light of the canyon hoping for the rise of a trout and surrounded by memories is one of my favorite passages in the literature of angling.
The long reply is therefore that this is a small novelette well worth the time of any fisherman.
I read it in the 80’s when I was recovering from a pulmonary embolism and confined to my home for a month. It’s a fine tale about coming of age on the west slope of the Montana Rockies in the 30’s and 40’s with some excellent incidental anecdotes about fly fishing and it’s importance to the family patriarch.
When the movie first came out, I thought it was about flyfishing. My wife and I took our young daughter, and a couple girlfriends of hers, to the movie. The girlfriends were daughters of a guy I work with, who is a pretty conservative Babtist. I was pretty embarrassed by the bare-butt scene in the movie. I thought the movie was OK, but not great. I suppose the combination of Robert Redford and Brad Pitt had lots of appeal for women of various age groups. I hear western flyfishermen bemoan the increase in crowds on trout streams after “The Movie”. Have the crowds died down, now that “city slickers” have learned that fly fishing is harder than it looks?
Apples and oranges here. The movie Jaws had absolutely nothing to do with the facts of shark attacks on humans and never pretended to. It opened up on our instinctive fear of being eat alive. Most humans are thrilled by fear that they know is not going to harm them or, rather, the thrill of harmless fear appeals to us. Of course, some of us get a thrill out of fear whether the situation we are in is harmless or not. Like me. An “A” type personality. The thrill seekers.
A River Runs Through It appeals to the everybody feel good, I feel your pain, yuppie do-gooder, liberal bleeding heart side. It is so far out of touch with reality as to be almost hilarious. It has no value to me at all. Horrible acting, huggy bear, kissy face goody two shoes type of screen writing and just plain yuck. As far as the fly fishing goes, even I do better than that casting wise.
Ironfoot; Part of your post…
(quote) “I hear western flyfishermen bemoan the increase in crowds on trout streams after “The Movie”. Have the crowds died down, now that “city slickers” have learned that fly fishing is harder than it looks?” (end quote).
No, the “crowded west” still feels the pinch of that movie, to a great degree. Mainly, because the yuppified found out, “Fly fishing IS NOT as hard as it seems”, when they spent their disposable income on lessons, to learn it!
I’m sure, by now, it’s the same, about anywhere across the country, but for a few years, after the movie came out you would see very often, these “walking Orvis Shops”, jumping out of their $65,000.00 “Eddie Bauer Broncos” and head off towards one body of water or another.
Fly fishing, in fact, is STILL on the “upswing”; at least out west here according the Fly Angler’s Tackle Association. Sales have steadily gone up over the past several years, but it’s of course not all due to a single movie.
I didn’t care for the movie, but that’s also because I know one of the actors that was in it and I can’t stand him, personally!
But, for all the hoopla that the movie and the subsequent sudden increase in fly fishing it may have brought with it, it DID do some good. When certain elements became more involved in fly fishing and it rose to the status of “An IN THING to do”, donations to such efforts as the clean up of the river,where the movie was mainly shot, the Blackfoot), increased ten fold. As, did, clean up and restoration efforts on many western waterways.
I loved the movie. I’ve seen it about 8 times and a friend even bought me a dvd for Christmas. In many ways the two brothers in the movie were alot like my brother and I. To me, it’s a great movie.
