The General in His Labyrinth explores the labyrinth of Bolívar's life through the narrative of his memories, in which "despair, sickness, and death inevitably win out over love, health, and life". Following the success of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", García Márquez decided to write about the "Great Liberator" after reading an unfinished novel by his friend Álvaro Mutis. He borrowed the setting—Bolívar's voyage down the Magdalena River in 1830—from Mutis. García Márquez spent two years researching the subject, encompassing the extensive memoirs of Bolívar's Irish aide-de-camp, Daniel Florencio O'Leary, as well as numerous other historical documents and
Love in the Time of Money the film's artificiality, making you gratingly aware of how much has been left out and how much of the drama is based on secondhand assumptions rather than genuine insight." Lisa Schwarzbaum of "Entertainment Weekly" wrote, "It's not about love. It's not about money. It's not even about sex, although the transaction of cold, love-starved sexual business propels the daisy-chain encounters that make up "Love in the Time of Money". If anything, theater director Peter Mattei's dingy, mannered, visually ragged resetting of Max Ophuls' unimprovable 1950 beaut "La Ronde" (based on an 1896 play by Arthur Schnitzler) is about scenes of