5/5 Got a Replacement
  by Burt Cohen (CA)
The CD was damaged in one place, but they were very good a bout sending a replacement by express shipment. I did have to mail the original back, from the Post Office.

4/5 Chick Flick with a Touch of History
  by K. Vestal (NC)
Set on the campus of conservative Wellesley College in 1953-1954, "Mona Lisa Smile" is a story of gender roles, art, and romance.

An interesting and fast-paced story with great potential, were attention given to historic detail, but instead it stays within the the romantic comedy genre most familiar to Julia Roberts fans. Roberts plays the new non-traditional art history teacher who challenges the Wellesley girls beyond their expected gender roles.

Although convincing in other scenes, Roberts is less convincing as a college teacher, and many of the other characters are almost caricatures, not believable as real personalities. The rudeness is often exaggerated, and although the background is indeed of the 1950s, somehow it is not convincingly presented. It comes across as a 2003 film with a 1950s theme.

If not critically analyzed, however, it is a light and interesting feel-good film with the added bonus of a little gender role history, a little art history, and a little romance, as was most likely its intention.

3/5 Dead Debutantes Society
  by Hikari (Lima, OH USA)
Hollywood hates to let a hackneyed concept go to waste and will milk one success in the genre for all it's worth. No attempt has really been made to obscure that this Julia Roberts vehicle is an all-female remake of "Dead Poets Society" with Roberts in the Robin Williams role (unless switching the discipline of the teacher from English to art history could be called obscure.) And, as is the case with the previous film, the young actors playing the students are far more convincing as inhabitants of an earlier period (the 1950s in both cases) than the adult leads.

In 1953, young first-year instructor Katherine Watson comes all the way from the 'progressive' Left Coast to the 'repressive' East Coast to teach art history at Wellesley College. She lacks previous teaching experience or a doctorate and is a product of a state school, but we know from her gumption and her dazzling smile that she is eminently well-qualified for the post. Once installed in Wellesley, she encounters the requisite stock characters: the timid and proper colleague who teaches deportment and lives in a chitz-covered universe; the authoritarian college president; the closet lesbian (c'mon, a movie set at a girls' school needed at least one); the dashing professor of romance languages, soon-to-be-love interest; and etc. Ms. Watson (though several decades ahead of women's liberation, no one as spunkily single as she would deign to answer to `Miss') gets a rude awakening during her introductory lecture when the well-bred young ladies in her course display their mastery of the text and her rather condescending slide presentation. The class has lots of bodies in it, but only four that will be of concern to us: uber-Mean Girl and debutante bride Betty (Kirsten Dunst); steady Joan (Julia Stiles, channelling an ingenue Jane Fonda); New York sophisticate (read: campus slut) Giselle (Maggie Gyllenhall) and sweet-natured, perky cellist Connie (the adorable Ginnifer Goodwin), who inexplicably can't find a boyfriend. These four girls are roommates; when not sniping at Ms. Watson in class, they snipe at each other in the dorm. A lot of sniping goes on, but it's always the well-modulated, grammatically correct kind.

The plot requires the free-thinking Ms. Watson to be a fish out of water whose `unorthodox' methods promptly have her at odds with the college administration and her students, too, who have reason to be distrustful of this Callifornia bohemian out to sabotage their dreams of matrimonial utopia. We know that Ms. Watson is a bohemian because she wears palazzo pants, embroidered peasant blouses and a beret. Roberts looks great in whatever she wears, but her wardrobe looks much more 1980s than 1950s, even for a bohemian. With her flowing red mane and toothy smile, she suggests (and maybe is meant to) Katherine Hepburn, who played sassy career women years before the period the movie is set in. (and also favored roomy trousers.) Alas, Julia Roberts might have the look, but does not have the chops to channel Hepburn; her inspirational lectures sound most often like preachy harangues. Ms. Watson is a fraud, but a well-connected one: in one scene she gets her class on the scene at the precise moment the newest Jackson Pollack is being uncrated. Those California bohemians evidently know people.

The action covers an entire academic year at Wellesley; a lot of stuff happens, all of it designed to hammer home the theme that Conformity is Bad and Individualism is good. Individualism in this case means eschewing marriage and family in order to attend graduate school and presumably stride around in palazzo pants. By transposing 21st century mores onto Roberts' character, she is rendered a complete anachronism. Ms. Watson might as well be an attractive alien visiting from 50 years in the future, ie. 2003--that's how authentic she feels as an inhabitant of the Eisenhower era. The young actresses, by contrast, disappear into the costumes and manners of 1950s undergraduates hot in pursuit of an M.R.S. degree with more ease. They are the reason to watch this movie, along with some beautiful cinematography (much of it was shot on the Wellesley campus) and meticulous attention to period detail. The soundtrack has some great numbers, but underscoring each new scene with a different 1950s pop hit begins to feel transparent very shortly. This film is lovely to look at, but ultimately superficial. A 1950s-era drama that manages to be respectful of its period while at the same time underscoring its limitations with more resonance is "Far From Heaven" starring Julianne Moore.


3/5 2.5 stars out of 4
  by One-Line Film Reviews (Easton, MD)
The Bottom Line:

Coupling a garden-variety inspiration teacher story to an uninteresting love triangle between Julia Roberts and her two suitors, Mona Lisa Smile is only of interest to people who want to see the fairly rare occurrence of a movie told from a woman's perspective; other than that, it's hardly worth watching.

2/5 Dull
  by Cosmoetica (New York, USA)
The only reason I can honestly say that this film is not as bad as, say, Saving Private Ryan or Titanic or From Hell is simple- the babes are cute as hell- Maggie Gyllenhaal is always sexy in a sly way, Kirsten Dunst does aptly portray the 1950s type whose bodice needs ripping & bosom needs suckling, & Julia Stiles has an eerie porcelain-like perfection, almost preternaturally perfected, that makes her mesmerizing to watch. &, hey, JR is not the best actress on the planet, but her goofy good looks are not punition. I would like to see stars like her wield & flex their power to improve rancid scripts like this. Hopefully the younger babes, if they become stars, will do just that- & ironically learn real lessons from this film that are not contained within. I can only guess JR actually likes clichéd wannabe tear-jerkers, or she lacks the ability to see 1 when she reads it. Either way, take a pass, & try reading anything for 2 hours.