Watch Quills For Free

People are voting emotionally.

Did you people see the same film I saw?

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Geoffrey Rush plays the slightly insane Marquis de Sade, a sexually explicit writer during 18th century France. Banished to an asylum, he still writes his naughty stories, smuggling them out through Kate Winslet, the laundress. While the powers that be want him to stay silent, Kate and his other readers are riveted. Meanwhile, the priest Joaquin Phoenix tries to hide his growing feelings for Kate, and Doctor Michael Caine is sent to evaluate the patient.If you like extremely naughty period pieces, you'll probably like Quills. It feels a bit over the top, but that tone is probably on purpose to fit in with the setting. A low-key film in a lunatic asylum just wouldn't work! Geoffrey does a very good job, but since he's not exactly likable, it's hard to root for him. If he had a compulsion to write dirty stories, why did he have to smuggle them out for public consumption? If his were the only eyes to read his work, it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble. It also would have made for a much shorter movie.I didn't end up liking this film, because besides Michael Caine, I'm not a big fan of the cast. And, while I'm not exactly a prudish film-goer, I like the vulgarity to serve a purpose in the film, rather than just to titillate the audience. This film has excessive sexual content, both consensual and nonconsensual, and I felt like I needed a good cleansing afterwards.Kiddy Warning: Obviously, you have control over your own children. However, due to sex scenes, nudity, violence, and strong sexual content, I wouldn't let my kids watch it. Also, there may or may not be rape scenes.

the story of Marquis de Sade is known. as ball of myths and suppositions and rumors. as result of lecture, in the late childhood, of his writings. the film do not propose a portrait of him. but the web who defines and support his eccentricity. Quills remains always a surprise for the viewer. for its status of mechanism of a clock. because the performances of each actor becomes part of fascinating game of a delicate work of clock. each scene becomes key for discover the truth behind appearances. the idealism against the right public image. the love and the manipulation. the fear and its use for build the cage. the mistakes. the duel between Marquis and Royer-Collard represents the axis of a story about values and risks to assume the words. and, as each great film, Quills has the precious gift to say a story of today. as a parable, maybe. as demonstration, surely. this is the detail who does it not a good film but almost an experience.

I'm both wary and attracted to films of this sort, period films. On one hand, there is usually good writing, good acting, some luxurious camera-work. And like good sci-fi, they tend to remind us that our present struggles are a continuation, inherited limits.All of which are true here. The film is about the notorious De Sade imprisoned in a madhouse and the purpose of art at large, limits and struggles: just what kind of human being are we? animal or divine? should our expressions reflect or liberate? The actors give their all, Caine and Rush chafing against the limits imposed on their characters from the outside, Winslet and Phoenix forming internal struggles.But the thing is, it's not truly daring, truly provocative. It's not a matter of more sex or more perversion in keeping with Sade, not at all.It's that we have expert theatre but not some reflective human space, what Pasolini could bring in his own period films, not his Sade adaptation but the vitality of his Decameron, the profound and inexplicable joy that hides behind our demons of self and has the power to shatter and ambiguously transform them, showing them to be grotesquely harmless masks forced on us by society.The one great scene here is the one that opens the film, where Sade from his window witnesses an aristocratic lady about to be decapitated before a gleeful mob; transforming desire and caress into a universe of urges, creating an emotional air that is as much of its spying author as of its participants. These few minutes are so perfectly imagined everything else comes across as a slight disappointment.

If you look at the cast names, as I did when the credits rolled, you may think you're in for a wonderful time. You're not. There is something about Western society in the past half-century or so: Our self-appointed social visionaries can't relinquish the silly idea that sex and more sex will release us from our backward hangups, usher in a new era of equality and peace, and maybe do the ironing, too. Despite all evidence to the contrary since the '60s, this conviction is advanced with energy and enthusiasm bordering on obsessive/compulsive disorder. The rest of us can only watch in bored disenchantment and growing impatience.This movie really has nothing to say. It makes a few gestures about free will clashing with priggish authoritarianism. There's some gas-bagging about importance of ahhht and ahhhtists. Some women are stripped bare by a director who evidently feels he has something to say. ...And ...we watch in bored disenchantment and growing impatience. There's a scene about halfway in, set as theatrical production by asylum inmates under direction of the Marquis (Geoffrey Rush, in acting service above and beyond the call of duty). He's burdened with a thudding, anachronistic line about shocking his audience with... the truth or something. It would be fine burbled at some academia cocktail party; not so convincing a sentiment in 18th-century France. The scene is supposed to be deliriously funny and invigorating as the prudes have their nose rubbed in clumsily staged sex acts. It fails on both counts. This is the time to go out front for a cigarette, beer or mind-numbing narcotic, just to shake out the fake laughter banging in your head.Where's Peter Brook when we really need him? I give it three stars for great cinematography and art direction. Minus-two for storyline philosophy that should've been junked with all those old Hot Tuna albums.