Screen roundup
28 October 2019 12:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI managed to miss all the last few David Attenborough BBC wildlife documentaries -- there seems to be one along every minute nowadays -- but caught the latest one on Sunday evening. I did think it was a bit odd that all the stories had happy endings (apart from the one with the killer whales, I suppose) and the music was certainly working overtime to instruct us what to think, but the photography was stunning as ever. One gets blasé about that, I'm afraid (though I did get an odd flashback to amazing footage of seals in the Antarctic which I think must have been Herbert Ponting filming with a hand-cranked camera before the First World War).
I missed the series which apparently contained a final programme warning everybody about the evils of climate change (Blue Planet II?), so the heavy coverage of that aspect in this series came as a tangible shift in emphasis — I suppose if you're observing animal behaviour it's particularly obvious. (I knew someone who always used to say that no gardener of her age could ever doubt global warming, just from the changes visible during her lifetime.)
I wonder if that was why the 'Making of' segment appeared to show them journeying to South Georgia under sail? A risky voyage if so; no wonder they were all seasick.
"World on Fire" started out well and has continued excellent, with new depths unfolding with every episode. We still don't know exactly what happened to Harry's father, but it's evidently more complicated than being driven to suicide by his wife; meanwhile she is becoming more than a caricature. (It's worth having a dragon on your side when you're dealing with school bullies...)
Sean Bean, confusingly billed as a major character when he only had a couple of background scenes in the first episode, now has more to do. I actually thought that as a pacifist he might find himself assisting in the Dunkirk evacuation, but I think you'd need previously-established seagoing credentials for that. It makes a change to see a depiction of Dunkirk where it's the Navy doing the rescuing rather than the 'Little Ships'; of course the vast majority of the men were in fact brought back on board warships rather than ferried across the Channel in pleasure craft.
I'm a bit confused as to how Kasia's brother ended up in France after fleeing Danzig on foot, but then I was completely confused as to how he encountered a British armoured unit in what appeared to be East European forests earlier on, alongside Germans and Russians... (There has evidently been a considerable unbilled time lapse between the last two episodes, as evinced by Lois's figure!)
The strand that leaves me completely cold is the homosexual storyline, where I really don't feel anything for either of the characters. It feels like an exercise in box-ticking. And the device of the American broadcaster (transmitting amazingly partisan coverage with official permission from the heart of Nazi Berlin) being used to provide voiceover narration on the progress of the war comes across as unnecessarily clunky; I can see that as an idea it must have looked like a seamless way of getting the information across, but in practice I don't think it works.
Otherwise, it's compelling and flawless television; the relationship between novice officer Harry and his sergeant is both nuanced and instantly familiar from wartime memoirs, and Lois's sly chancer of a brother is also immediately recognisable as a type -- but not usually one given depth as a protagonist. And meanwhile we have the family who are living inside Germany and trying to be good Party members...
I never saw the feature-film adaptation of "The Name of the Rose"; I read the novel and didn't particularly care for it, which is often a good thing when it comes to screen versions. (Great books rarely make great films, and conversely if you are particularly fond of a book then someone else's vision of it rarely accords with your own.) The first episode of the new BBC adaptation looked promising, but I'm having increasing difficulty in following what's going on :-(
It's not at all clear what the various episodes taking place outside the monastery have to do with the characters, or indeed when they are set — I'm assuming they're flashbacks to somebody's past, but I really don't know whose or how many people's. I can never remember who any of the monks in the vast cast are, and the script often doesn't bother to tell us (the interview with the cellarer was a pleasant exception). And this state of perpetual confusion makes it hard to become invested in the outcome: everytime someone runs up and declares that Brother Whatsit is dead, I have no idea who the latest corpse is or why anyone would want to get rid of him. And worse, I'm not at all clear who is suspected of what.
"World on Fire" has an equally large cast, and I'm not having any difficulty recognising any of those (save for the two black jazz players whom I originally assumed to be the same character). So it's not just a case of the programme's failing to cater for audience stupidity...
I watched the film adaptation of "Reach for the Sky" with Kenneth More, and was rather disappointed. I'd assumed it would be better than that, and indeed thought I'd seen it before and enjoyed it. But again it suffers from a tendentious narration problem (in fact they've actually created a fictitious best-friend character to do the narrating, which doesn't work very well). Parts of the film are excellent, and I think some of the problem is that they just tried to fit in too much of Bader's life story; ironically it also doesn't help that I know Paul Brickhill's original book too well and was aware of the things that had been altered and left out.
Kenneth More manages to convey Bader's irrepressible energy and charm (and his mechanical walk, in what is presumably a bravura Method acting performance), and the best sections of the film are the central passages concerning his struggle to learn to walk again and his relationship with Thelma, although the long story of their secret marriage is entirely elided. The beginning is pretty stilted, and the actual accident and hospital sequence are handled with an emotionality that is completely alien to the book (and indeed at times contradict it, as in Bader's reaction to learning that his other leg has been amputated as well). The relationship with his Canadian squadron is well handled, but the Blitz sequences are both rushed and rather repetitive; it's hard to convey airborne tactics to the unitiated just by showing footage of aeroplanes flying, and it's heavily dependent again on voice-over to tell us things that would have been better shown, if they'd had more space to do it in. And the scenes after Bader is captured are good, but weirdly episodic -- it feels like snippets out of something that ought to be a much longer film, with vast chunks missing (a casual mention of multiple escapes and of Colditz).
An over-ambitious attempt that should have been better -- bits of it feel dated in a bad way.
I missed the series which apparently contained a final programme warning everybody about the evils of climate change (Blue Planet II?), so the heavy coverage of that aspect in this series came as a tangible shift in emphasis — I suppose if you're observing animal behaviour it's particularly obvious. (I knew someone who always used to say that no gardener of her age could ever doubt global warming, just from the changes visible during her lifetime.)
I wonder if that was why the 'Making of' segment appeared to show them journeying to South Georgia under sail? A risky voyage if so; no wonder they were all seasick.
"World on Fire" started out well and has continued excellent, with new depths unfolding with every episode. We still don't know exactly what happened to Harry's father, but it's evidently more complicated than being driven to suicide by his wife; meanwhile she is becoming more than a caricature. (It's worth having a dragon on your side when you're dealing with school bullies...)
Sean Bean, confusingly billed as a major character when he only had a couple of background scenes in the first episode, now has more to do. I actually thought that as a pacifist he might find himself assisting in the Dunkirk evacuation, but I think you'd need previously-established seagoing credentials for that. It makes a change to see a depiction of Dunkirk where it's the Navy doing the rescuing rather than the 'Little Ships'; of course the vast majority of the men were in fact brought back on board warships rather than ferried across the Channel in pleasure craft.
I'm a bit confused as to how Kasia's brother ended up in France after fleeing Danzig on foot, but then I was completely confused as to how he encountered a British armoured unit in what appeared to be East European forests earlier on, alongside Germans and Russians... (There has evidently been a considerable unbilled time lapse between the last two episodes, as evinced by Lois's figure!)
The strand that leaves me completely cold is the homosexual storyline, where I really don't feel anything for either of the characters. It feels like an exercise in box-ticking. And the device of the American broadcaster (transmitting amazingly partisan coverage with official permission from the heart of Nazi Berlin) being used to provide voiceover narration on the progress of the war comes across as unnecessarily clunky; I can see that as an idea it must have looked like a seamless way of getting the information across, but in practice I don't think it works.
Otherwise, it's compelling and flawless television; the relationship between novice officer Harry and his sergeant is both nuanced and instantly familiar from wartime memoirs, and Lois's sly chancer of a brother is also immediately recognisable as a type -- but not usually one given depth as a protagonist. And meanwhile we have the family who are living inside Germany and trying to be good Party members...
I never saw the feature-film adaptation of "The Name of the Rose"; I read the novel and didn't particularly care for it, which is often a good thing when it comes to screen versions. (Great books rarely make great films, and conversely if you are particularly fond of a book then someone else's vision of it rarely accords with your own.) The first episode of the new BBC adaptation looked promising, but I'm having increasing difficulty in following what's going on :-(
It's not at all clear what the various episodes taking place outside the monastery have to do with the characters, or indeed when they are set — I'm assuming they're flashbacks to somebody's past, but I really don't know whose or how many people's. I can never remember who any of the monks in the vast cast are, and the script often doesn't bother to tell us (the interview with the cellarer was a pleasant exception). And this state of perpetual confusion makes it hard to become invested in the outcome: everytime someone runs up and declares that Brother Whatsit is dead, I have no idea who the latest corpse is or why anyone would want to get rid of him. And worse, I'm not at all clear who is suspected of what.
"World on Fire" has an equally large cast, and I'm not having any difficulty recognising any of those (save for the two black jazz players whom I originally assumed to be the same character). So it's not just a case of the programme's failing to cater for audience stupidity...
I watched the film adaptation of "Reach for the Sky" with Kenneth More, and was rather disappointed. I'd assumed it would be better than that, and indeed thought I'd seen it before and enjoyed it. But again it suffers from a tendentious narration problem (in fact they've actually created a fictitious best-friend character to do the narrating, which doesn't work very well). Parts of the film are excellent, and I think some of the problem is that they just tried to fit in too much of Bader's life story; ironically it also doesn't help that I know Paul Brickhill's original book too well and was aware of the things that had been altered and left out.
Kenneth More manages to convey Bader's irrepressible energy and charm (and his mechanical walk, in what is presumably a bravura Method acting performance), and the best sections of the film are the central passages concerning his struggle to learn to walk again and his relationship with Thelma, although the long story of their secret marriage is entirely elided. The beginning is pretty stilted, and the actual accident and hospital sequence are handled with an emotionality that is completely alien to the book (and indeed at times contradict it, as in Bader's reaction to learning that his other leg has been amputated as well). The relationship with his Canadian squadron is well handled, but the Blitz sequences are both rushed and rather repetitive; it's hard to convey airborne tactics to the unitiated just by showing footage of aeroplanes flying, and it's heavily dependent again on voice-over to tell us things that would have been better shown, if they'd had more space to do it in. And the scenes after Bader is captured are good, but weirdly episodic -- it feels like snippets out of something that ought to be a much longer film, with vast chunks missing (a casual mention of multiple escapes and of Colditz).
An over-ambitious attempt that should have been better -- bits of it feel dated in a bad way.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-29 10:30 am (UTC)I find it truly terrifying that with so few years left to turn things around, people seem to have no sense of urgency at all.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-30 11:32 pm (UTC)The people who were doing energy-saving and recycling and veganism and living without cars twenty years ago weren't, by and large, doing it because they were afraid about the imminent end of the world. They were doing it for more emotionally complex reasons of belief and self-identity, and they were the ones who didn't see it as a sacrifice but as an affirmation.
I learned to live with reasonable comfort in an unheated house (thus saving vast amounts of energy) because my parents didn't even have central heating until several years into their marriage, and they still regarded it as normal to have thick nightclothes and plenty of blankets in winter, warm the inside of the sheets rather than the whole bedroom, and jump out of bed and get dressed very quickly in the morning, rather than sleeping in T-shirts and then expecting to wake up to a house warm enough for them to be able to sit around and breakfast in them too.
So I grew up regarding that as normal rather than as hardship, and people who couldn't do it as being weak and self-indulgent by implication... which is a bit like growing up in a religious sect and taking it for granted that the rest of the world is damned. It's much easier to flatter people into action than frighten them into action.
I learned to prepare food from scratch and buy fresh produce in season because my parents took it for granted, because their parents took it for granted, because there was a time when there wasn't any alternative. A lot of people got 'liberated' from that sort of old-fashioned ethos by the discovery that they lived in a civilization where it wasn't actually necessary, and indeed where the converse was actively marketed. It just so happened that modern life never really hit my family, so I picked up basic skills that weren't in fashion, not because my parents were idealists but because they were intensely conservative ("with a small C", as my mother, a lifelong left-wing supporter, would always add!)
They weren't doing it to save the world. They were doing it as a sort of hangover from the Blitz spirit, I suppose; the result of years of indoctrination that Waste was Wrong on a moral level rather than an environmental one. You switched off lights in order 'not to waste the electricity' rather than in order to reduce acid rain created by generating it.