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Reviews
The Elephant Queen (2018)
quietly overwhelming.
For some reason, all ! want to watch during Coronavirus isolation are films about wild animals.... This one is a quietly compelling. A story of inter and co-dependancy among species (who knew bullfrogs could be so gruesome) gives way to an intimate but epic, beautiful but harrowing journey. Death seems closer than ever for animals in the wild.
The narrative text is a bit OTT at ties, but you only really notice because, when you consider the starkness and the grandeur of what you're looking at (the cinematography is a glory), words are either not enough or not necessary.
By the end, you're left with an awful 'how long can they go on?' (climate change, pollution, habitat destruction, poachers - y'know, the 'side effects' of that human virus infecting the planet...) sort of feeling.
David Attenborough's comment came to mind! "The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?" or film.
Chimerica (2019)
Forgetting to remember
Pretty solid adaptation.
The most chilling character so far is the creepy Koch brothers employed Chinese nephew... but all up, it's the scariness of the internet and the increasingly shifting sand under what we thought of as 'truth'.
The local Chinese kids who don't know about what happened at Tiananmen Square, the reporter who falsifies an image, the internet of instant forgetting.. Communists crushing truth or Trump trampling it, the future looks grim.
In answer to eamonn7: since the story includes dialogue regarding and footage from the time of the 'impending' 2016 election... i'd Suggest that, rather than 2009, it's set in, well... 2016.
The Blacklist (2013)
Spooks it ain't.
James Spader's idiosyncratic characterisation of Reddington hugely enjoyable. Megan Boone, however, is dire; she really is atrocious, lacking any of the style, commitment and, yes, humour, that made Jennifer Garner so fabulous in the similarly enjoyable, ludicrous, never resolving Alias.
After sitting through the entire first two seasons, I have decided to prerecord episodes and fast forward through any of the bits Boone appears in - the plots are not exactly airtight, so you can afford to miss her banal performance - including the physical battles Agent Keen inevitably looses (she rarely even looks over her shoulder when disquiet comes upon her, and her idea of camouflage gear seems limited to donning a beanie to set off her perfectly applied make-up).
There's way too much torture and shoot-first-ask-questions-later behaviour, but I guess this is America. Spooks it ain't.
Reign (2013)
Any resemblance to any person living or dead...
I'm glad Megan Follows is in work but, for this piece of excrement, I sure hope it was well remunerated!
Y'know, if you're only going to pay lip service to historical, documented fact (well, a couple of characters have the names of people who actually existed..), shouldn't you have to issue some sort of warning or disclaimer? - 'Any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely co- incidental..' Details that completely change the story - Mary's sickly Dauphin husband died when he was about 15, here he's played by a healthy looking chap in his 20s who looks like a knitwear model.. what am I saying, THEY ALL LOOK LIKE KNITWEAR MODELS. Mary seems not to have been raised in the French court from early childhood, but in a convent off the coast of.. somewhere--- Bad acting, bed-head hairdos, hilariously historically-implausible character names - especially those replacing the names of the Marys (Mary Beaton, Mary Seton, Mary Fleming, Mary Livingstone) who are now named Greer, Kenna, Lola and Aylee... Puh-leeeez!!! It's history channelled by, oh, Paris Hilton.. nah! let's be honest, history as enacted by the characters of Neighbours
Crap Crap Crap Crap and did I mention, Crap!! This show is a dog. The crap of a dog.
The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising (2007)
Almost unbelievably bad.
It's difficult to express just how very very bad this film is. It's as if someone made a really cheap film, with an awful lot of money..
Banal dialogue, intrusive, confused design, miscast Actors and special effects that seem to owe more to a psychedelic 60s drug haze than Magic.
Ian McShane IS Ian McShane- remorselessly, and, it seems unable or unwilling to relinquish his acquired American accent. The kid who plays Will (I'm trying to avoid knowing his name..) is smug and tedious. Frances Conroy is terrible; from her all-purpose fake English accent and patronizing characterisation, to her 'John Lennon' glasses (what are they all about?? Maybe they're symbolic and she's looking at the world through rose coloured glasses...HA! Or maybe it's another element in the hideous design nightmare that is The Seeker...
But it's unfair to single out individual artists. They're uniformly bad. Even Christopher Eccleston.
I give it a '1' but only because I can't leave a '0'
The Elusive Pimpernel (1969)
Desperately seeking Percy
The most romantic Percy to date, bar none!!!!!
Looks like I'm talking to myself here, but Anton Rogers was just wonderful as the Pimpernel, and Diane Fletcher as Lady Blakeney had none of the irritating qualities - a kind of smugness seeming almost de rigueur - that have seemed to attach to every other performance of Marguerite I've seen. In fact the whole cast were splendid, with Bernard Hepton a particularly disagreeable, sinister Chauvelin.
I guess that I'll never get to see it again, what with so many versions having been made since - they just aren't as good...
of course if anyone knows of a way to access B(efore) V(ideo) footage...
David Copperfield (1974)
Someone put this on DVD Please!!!
I remember this as a glorious adaptation with a wonderful cast.
In response to the previous review, I'm pretty sure it was Jacqueline Pearce (Servalan in 'Blake's 7') who was Rosa Steerforth, and wasn't Anthony Andrews, Steerforth?...
In a dream world I'd have this on DVD, in the meantime, did anyone ever record it???
(If you click on 'more' under the cast overview, you will see the whole cast and crew list!)