Nora Roberts' Midnight Bayou (2009)

This is How Movies Should Be Made

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Excellent, a Must See

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Midnight Bayou The most annoying aspect to reincarnation is switching over all of your identification.Unfortunately, the returning soul in this made-for-TV-movie has to change more than just his name.Despite his Eastern education, Boston lawyer Declan (Jerry O'Connell) is drawn to New Orleans and purchases a plantation to renovate.Around town he meets a local, Lena (Lauren Stamile), whom he is inexplicably attracted to.As the renovations continue, the mansion's history unravels its self to Declan via vivid flashbacks of a former female resident's murder.Desperate for answers, he seeks the wisdom of Lena's grandmother (Faye Dunaway), a voodoo priestess with past life experience.However, the spiritual truth that Declan seeks will change his life forever.A more mystical love story than what Nora Roberts is known for, this adaptation of her novel muddles in mediocre acting but surprises in the shock-ending department.Incidentally, when you're reincarnated in Louisiana, 9 times out of 10 you come back as a crayfish.Yellow Light vidiotreviews.blogspot.com

what we have to understand is that sometimes what works in books does not necessarily mean that it works on the big screen.. this movie deviates consequently from the book.. i am a Nora Roberts fan and i do understand that many fans like me did not enjoy this movie very much, maybe because there were many alteration of the story.. but we have to take note that the plot remains truthful from its origin.. the theme of girl meets boy afraid to fall in love because of all the pain she went through, mother being the main villain, same as the mother-in law  hundreds of years ago.. and of course solving the mystery of one of the heroine's disappearance.. all in all it was an entertaining movie... one should just have an open mind and feel what the director wants us to feel.. be transported in Lucian and Abigail's time.. feel their love for one another and feel the distaste and hate of Josephine and jealousy and envy of Julian towards Abigail. at the present time, Lina's apprehension to give all her heart to declan was devastating.. i can feel her pain. also she was torn about her mother. hating her for leaving and walking all over her through out her life but at the same time longing for the love a mother should give her child. and of course let us not forget the ever loving, supporting and mystic grandmother... i congratulate the director, the cast and crew for bringing these characters alive... i wouldn't have them any other way...

When will movie makers understand that people people from New Orleans do not speak with that generic Gone With The Wind southern accent? Most people in Louisiana do not sound like that these days. And referring to a "loaf" of cornbread, seriously? If you're going to throw in details based on where the story is set, do better research. I realize that's kind of nitpicky, but it seems like too many movies and television shows get details about Louisiana and New Orleans wrong. Don't even get me started on True Blood. Love the show, but there's something in almost every episode that makes me shake my head.Other than those problems, it was a fairly decent adaptation. Better than some of the other Nora Roberts movies.

***SPOILERS*** Ghost story by Nora Roberts about the deep south that covers some 120 years and at least four generations of the New Oleans Manet family.It's when young collage student Declan Fitzpartrick, celebrating Fat Tuesday, saw this ghostly young woman outside Manet Hall that he was determined in buying the long deserted mansion. Some eight years later and now having a very successful law practice in Boston Declan was now able to buy his dream house feeling that he had some strange and unearthly connection to it. Declan, in hiding his real intentions, plans on using it a law center for the local's in the area. It's then that Declan meets Lina Simone who's descendants once owned Manet Hall and whom he's connected to through the distant past-reincarnation-in ways he, who doesn't believe in the supernatural, could never have imagine!The supernatural angle in the movie is a bit hard to follow in that were given two entirely different stories to what happened with Lina's great great great grandfather Lucian in the abandonment of him and is infant daughter by his wife, Lina's great great great grandmother, the former Manet Hall maid Abigail. We get most of this confusing story from Lina's Grandma Odette who seems to have supernatural powers herself in her knowing things, especially about Declan, that she has no way of coming up with.The movie,almost by accident, really starts to heat up when Lina's junkie mom Marie Rose shows up from Huston needing quick cash, $10,000.00, to pay off her drug suppliers back in Texas. Trying to blackmail Declan, for her drug money, who has since fallen in love with her daughter-Lina-Marie Rose ends up getting into even deeper trouble, with the local sheriff, then she ever was with the drug dealers back in the Lone Star State. It's Marie Rose guilt, that lead to her drug addiction, which in fact activated the strange events that happened over 100 years ago leading to Abigail's mysterious disappearance. What really saves the movie is the events that happened back then in the late 1890's, at Manet Hall, that somehow found their way back to the present-2009-with both Declan and Lina.****SPOILER ALERT****It's not only the difference between some 120 years but the reality in what happened back then as well as the change of identities of the major characters in the film that set up the movies unexpected, to everyone involved, as well as surprise ending!I may take an unlimited amount of time but the "Wheel of Life"-Reincarnation- eventually makes amends for the mistakes made by those of us,all of humanity, who are art of it. Even if it in the end it takes as much as a dozen lifetimes for it to eventually correct them!