Reviews

I enjoyed this. It was interesting to see how a PPE graduate can use h's knowledge of politics as well as philosophy to approach a peace settlement negotiation. However, what the film missed out was the crucial role of such an undertaking. It failed to highlight precisely and factually what really happened in the mind of the regime before reaching the settlement and how concretely these meetings were related to that decision,

I wish there had been more dialogue and explanations from Micheal Young's side and how he was brought to conjur up such meetings. The writing was not as dramatic as the circumstances allowed them to be . However,there were good actors, but Jonny Lee Miller played his role perfectly in that he portrayed Micheal Young in a dedicated and yet a humble player in the meetings. It was right for him to have a low profile in amongst the others, but it would have given the film more punch had he been given more dialogue in putting forward the importance of such meetings with a terrorist group. After all, the film was as much about Micheal Young's initiative as it was about the end of Apartheid. A good film on the whole.

A group of us watched BBC Sherlock first' then Elementary in order to form a proper opinion on both. Everyone in the group was British. We chose to watch Scandal in Belgravia of the Beeb first. Absolutely dreadful! Sexist, racist, predictable, with boring and cliché punch lines. A boring group of people trying desperately to put across their "Britishness". We just felt really sorry for Ben Cumberbatch to have come down so much as to have accepted such dire dialogues! What a terrible waste of such a brilliant actor. Left to him, he could have injected some of his own Harrovian education into his Sherlock and you would have got the true sense of an upper class eccentric Brit that Sherlock really was. Anyway, we switched to Elementary and we loved everything about the show. Jonny Lee Miller set the standard high for good acting all around. The writing was good, intelligent dialogues, compelling characters, interesting interactions. The show was so cool that it even tickled the fancy of some of us (all London Uniiversity graduates, some Oxbridge) to want to become consultants like Sherlock for NYPD!!! New York seemed like a cool place to be if you want to delve into a whole spectrum of crime scenes! A great 21st century spin on a Victorian investigative crime novel. What Jonny Lee Miller put into his Sherlock was interesting too. A more humane and human portrayal of Sherlock, an essentially obnoxious character who manages to be quite likable and that is thanks to Jonny's own spin on Sherlock. It's also great to see an actor enjoy the character he is playing. He inhabits the role completely and allows us to enjoy the more scientific and persipicacious quality of Sherlock's mind rather than his innate genius or his "British quirkiness" that has always been on the spotlight. This time, "the old colony" beat the Brits at their own game. Big time! But they couldn't have done it without that indispensable Brit, JLM!

I did not know much about Byron before seeing this BBC production with Jonny Lee Miller as Byron. I watched it with a university professor who teaches Byron and who is quite difficult to please when it comes to such productions. We were both nailed right to the end and didn't find anything in the film either superfluous, clumsy or inaccurate. For such a short adaptation, it covered the most essential side of Byron's character without judging the man. The casting was perfect and Jonny Lee Miller's performance was marvellous. His beautiful face had the innocence and yet his diction carried the weight of Byron's all time cynicism and detachment to all things " innocent". I highly recommend everyone to see this film, because, I for one have since plunged myself into reading Byron and Shelly thanks to the compelling way in which Jonny Lee Miller portrayed Byron. This was infinitely more enjoyable and ultimately more useful for a non literary person such as myself than several documentaries I had seen of Byron previously. I only wish the film had been longer with some mention of Byron's extraordinary involvement with Armenia and Armenian language as well.

After all, the adequate way of judging such a film is by how much it influences one in instructing oneself further on the subject or how one's own preconceived views are put into question. That is precisely what this film did to me.