Reviews

The premise of first season was not that bad and engaging: leaving out the subplot of the ridicule big bad organization that wanted to exploit the autistic geniuses, each episode has a satisfactory solution for the case by following the numbers.

Then came the misterious second character who had similar gifts and the numbers are only given to solve this single narrative line, with a crescendo of murders and violence.

Instead of pursuing new and exciting cases for each episode they have instead chosen the easiest banal thriller plot with corrupt organizations, brainless cardboard villain and helpess protagonists.

Too many killings and nothing else leave me quite disappointed. A wasted opportunity.

...Not George Gershwin, not His Compositions, not His Songs.

The awful thing is this absurd film with totally preposterous characters that should show us the drama of Gershwin sentimental life and motivations: they are completely invented.

I suspect the director of this film has no real knowledge or passion for music, or maybe it's just lack of skill by the writers to convey the creative dimension of a Great Artist as such.

I would have preferred an even imperfect execution and interpretations but an honest script to let us enter His world and transport us into the depth of His musical mind.

Instead it has become a boring fictional bio painted flat on the screen.

This was again as in those years they used to transpose in movies the lives of any great Artists: all these bio-pictures should be perfect candidates for a remake by some talented and passionate modern director!

You may very well say that after listening to the great music wrote by Jerome Kern as interpreted by many of the Great and Glorious Jazz musicians of old and present eras, it is really painful to watch this film as it actually destroys all those wonderful tunes.

The fake bio is already a useless device and most annoyingly it has that horrible (compared to Kern's compositions) and invasive badly arranged soundtrack.

Alas, this kind of films about the then popular American music, mainly from Broadway's shows and generally identified as the Tin Pan Alley productions I find truly disappointing: they should really remake them all and they should come out as they did with De-Lovely, true to the real persons and inspired by their Art.

In that movie, you may not like so much the singers or their interpretations, but the music is uniquely coming from Porter and the atmosphere of the movie as well as the narrative is never interrupted by a silly soundtrack or an absurd subplots.

Jerome Kern wrote such great songs that in this film are just condensed in a shameful five minutes medley in the end, and instead you have to watch the completely invented story of Sally and her father, all with accompanying violins, for a good 2/3 of the movie: very annoying.

Please remake this movie and get inspired and use Kern's songs and music only! And let it be an Artistic event.

This review essentially should apply to all those pseudo-bios of that era about all those authors, from Porter (luckily that had been already done), Gershwin, Rodgers & Harts...

I'M WRITING ABOUT THE EPISODES SO HERE ARE ONLY SPOILERS: I HOPE THE PRODUCERS ARE IN THE KNOW ABOUT THE MASSACRE OF THE BAND OF BROTHERS THEY MADE ON THE Italian BROADCAST BY MEDIASET!

First of all the female in charge of the Italian translation evidently does not know anything about military terms, and I presume English language as well: all the series is distorted to a point the US soldiers sound (thanks to the translators) and look (thanks to the arbitrary cuts) as a bunch of idiots, in the more stereotyped way the military are considered: e.g. the plain word 'Nuts' so anti-rhetoric should have been translated in Italian as 'Balle', which is also a common use for 'words without any relation to Truth', etc. but instead it's translated as 'colcavolo' (lit: 'with cauliflower') that has 'COLCAVOLO' any useful meaning here, except introduce us to the misleading work done, I suspect with subtler intentions; afterwards, to continue with this example, in the original you can hear the voices of the filthy and heroic soldiers commenting in appreciation 'Nuts' for the General so far from rhetoric; in the Italian track you'll hear 'Viva l'America!', as if Pancho Villa is riding again on his white horse, and no s**t (I apologize for the rudeness)... There are countless cases like this, or sometimes less serious: the General comments to Maj. Winters 'so they took away your company to become Battalion XO' in Italian sounds like 'you have been assigned to THE battalion XO' a mysterious unit you'd never heard of; 'the order 'Covering Fire!' whispered by Winters to the MG crew becomes 'There is fire to extinguish!'; the discussion between Webster and Liebgott after the shooting of the presumed nazi on the alps, becomes a kind of apology 'western style': yeah, that was a nazi! The good nazi is only the dead one! etc. or something similar; no mention about the real discussion they had in the original! And we'll not speak about the dialogue, quite funny, between the British soldier dressed as a German soldier, and Hoobler trying to snatch his luger: the scene was just cut off... maybe they realized they were UNABLE to translate the slang, or quite possibly they were unable to get the meaning of any word! It's a real shame they made cuts for about TEN minutes on EACH episode, so to fit the ads in one hour show, I presume: e.g. you'll lose all the beginning of the Hagenau episode, with Webster coming back, up to the point when they are dodging mortar shells to go to the Platoon; eventually you're able to not even note the fact in the end when Webster is helped up on the truck by a friendly hand: who cares if there was a scripting, a director and an editor with a shots' list, beside the hundreds who worked hard to realize a scene and give it a meaning...? It's a pity they also cut off scene like when Toye gives a lenghty list of all the equipment before the jump: no words there had any possible meaning for them; maybe the translators were not paid in full, or possibly they were over payed, who knows? Luckily I'd saw the series already before coming to Italy, beside having read the book. If I were HBO or the Producers, I'd sue the Italian distributors... And sorry for the Lenght! But if you need more details, let me know! I'm not sure what the Italian DVD edition contains: I own only the English language one!

Illudere (to delude) comes from Latin verb 'ludere' (to play), so you're introduced to the 'spy game' as a cruel and yet elaborate and intelligent (!) activity stemming from a complex and as it may appear absurd and vain personal history, whatever it may be; and yet I feel fascinated by the mechanism of treason and loyalty that we are presented in this narrative, the raw material of any relationship, from the personal to the social.

Many years ago when I finally finished reading the book it was a revelation!

At the beginning I was so bored if not for the surprising style of the writing (I really started to love Le Carre after that novel).

The main character is not wavering at all: he has made a choice to redeem his weakness by following the path of faith to friendship and love, or is he not?

After this novel you can have a clearer understanding of the darker version of Green's 'Our Man in Havana', LeCarre's 'The Tailor of Panama'; there you'll end up where there is no game left, there it ends either in tragedy or in a grotesque comical way, or both.

There is no Smiley here to upheld decent human qualities in 'the service', or at least there is no point to introduce him in this case. The BBC has done a superb work with these series from LeCarre's novels: the actors are excellent, as are the locations and sets; the script here is adapted in a linear way that somehow disarm the explosive narrative of the book.

Be warned though, even if someone may find the main character's end laughable in a cynical way, the after taste is bitter.