Thanks for the memories!

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

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

***SPOILERS*** It's when Montana cattle baron Jack Mercy kicked off or better yet passed away that he pulled off his last joke on those who worked on his ranch by designating his tomboy daughter Willa Mercy, Ashley Williams, to take over operations of the massive 25,000 acer Mercy Ranch. To make matters even worse for Willa and the ranch-hands Jack, in his will, had both his other two daughters, who never saw or heard of him until after his death, Tess & Lily, Charlotte Ross & Laura Mennell,forced to stay at the ranch for a full years time in order to get a piece of it, or 33.3%, which was worth some $8,000,000.00 for each of them!All this didn't go too well with the ranch-hands that included Ham, James Baker, together with Pickels, Donovan Workun, and Jim, Tom Carey, who found it very difficult taking orders from a woman! It wasn't long after that a number of cattle mutilations and what seemed like animal sacrifices and poisonings began to pop up at the ranch. Someone was trying to get Willa and her sisters to check out and then take over the ranch before the year was over. But who?As things soon turned out Lily's estranged and crazy husband Jesse, Scott Heindi,who beat her up regularly back in Virginia was out on bail and looking to make his wife's life miserable here in Montana like he did back home! A very jealous and dangerous man Jesse gunned down Lily's Indian lover Adam Wolfchild, Nathanlel Arcand, when he spotted two together kissing leaving Wolfchild for dead and taking a terrified Lily hostage. It's now up to the tall blond and handsome county sheriff Nate, Aaron Pearl, who's in fact having an affair with Tess to get the guy off the streets or ranch before he does any more damage!**SPOILERS*** It's after Jesse is dispatched by the sharp-shooting Willa that you realize that he in fact isn't the person who's been committing all these crimes at the ranch that included the murder and mutilation as well as scalping of poor Pickels. It was Pickel's who had the misfortune of running into the unseen killer when he was coming back to the Mercy Ranch with the daily groceries. In fact the out of control and mentally deranged Jesse was both too crazy & stupid to pull all the crimes off successfully! As it turned out later it was someone else and he was greatly ticked off at the late Jack Mercy for leaving his entire spread, the Mercy Ranch, to his three daughters two of whom he never met in his entire life!Taking Willa hostage the deranged killer gives her the usual speech about how he deserves everything that she and Tess & Lily got and what a raw deal he got out of all this in the late Jack Mercy treating him like dirt! In fact the psycho tells Willa that Jack loved his animals even more then himself! His own flesh & blood! To finally put an end to the movie, that seemed to go on forever,and the crazed killer Willa's boyfriend the tall dark, maybe a little on the light side, and handsome Gary Cooper looking Ben McKintock, John Corbett, comes to her rescue just in the nick of time! Shocked at the sight of the macho as well as strong and silent type Ben Willa's kidnapper, a crack shot with a rifle, lost his composer and missed Ben, who was no more the 15 feet away from him, by a country mile. Ben now getting a clear shot at the now scared in his underwear killer had no trouble ending his killing spree, of both humans and animals, by both finishing him off as well as putting an end to the movie!

I thought this movie was excellent. John Corbett is always excellent. I thought they should have picked someone a little older for his love interest but the actress playing the lead role as the cowgirl daughter did a great job in the role. I wish John Corbett would do more lead roles. He is one of the sexiest actors around but I don't think he gets enough credit. The location picked for filming was a beautiful area. I think this is a movie I could see more than once and still want to see it again. Nora Roberts is one of my favorite authors and I can't wait for Blue Smoke to be aired next week. Angels Fall was a fantastic movie also and I hope to see it again.

So I just finished reading the book yesterday when I noticed that Lifetime would be airing the movie, I thought oh that's perfect. Unfortunately I was VERY disappointed. The writers of the movie took out a lot of what made the book wonderful, the characters didn't fit what the book wrote about them, I mean Corbett as Ben, his age alone prevents him from being the person wrote about in the book, his acting was fine. They had the sisters all wrong, the women who played Lily should have been Willa or Tess and Willa should have been Lily. The casting truly was a mess! Overall the actors didn't do horribly they just didn't fit the parts they were playing. Another HUGE problem was that the movie moved to quickly and either changed some of the best moments in the book or left them completely out! It's sad to say that I liked Beach Girls a heck of a lot better than Montana Sky as far as a movie goes, at least it stuck to some of what the book wrote. Perhaps 2 hours just wasn't long enough to do justice to a truly wonderful book.

I wondered how they were going to pack all of Roberts' truly great 'Montana Sky' into two hours. Sad to say, they couldn't.The basic premise packed three relationships, four, counting the sisters themselves, over a year's time, along with all the mysterious happenings within that period. Only the barest of bones of the story were touched on and even those were rewritten and reworked. Other than the names of the characters, hardly anything, including the events, how they unfolded, and how they were resolved, resembled the original story.As to the actors: Both Laura Mennell as 'Lila' and Charlotte Ross as 'Tess' fit the concept I had of them, but although Ashely Williams did a wonderful job, I couldn't see her as the 'Willa' I imagined in the book. I so adore John Corbett, he was one of the reasons I looked forward to the movie. He had the perfect personality for 'Ben', though in real life he's a good ten years or more older than the character he portrayed. I guess it made sense that 'Nate's' occupation was changed from lawyer to sheriff and Aaron Pearl was good in the re-scripted role. Nathaniel Arcand played a convincing 'Adam'.I couldn't help but think as I read 'Montana Sky', then watched it, that the novel would have been much better adapted to a mini-series. It would have allowed the characters and the events to be fleshed out and evolve as they deserved. In comparison, Angels Fall made a much better transition from book to screen in that it didn't have as much ground to cover and could afford to have some parts dropped without losing the essence of the story.