Virginia Tilley

I've tried twice and can't get through the first episode. It's like nobody involved in this production had any idea what racism and slavery were like and just dreamed it up. Maybe it's all supposed to be one extended dream. If so, it doesn't work. Simply on a practical level, too much behavior just doesn't make sense, knocking me out of the story. Examples: White man tips his hat to a field slave and apologizes for disturbing her? Whew, out of the question. White luncheon is conducted while a runaway slave is bloodily whipped in front of them? Never - for the self-styled superior race that kind of ugliness was firmly consigned to the slave quarters. Slaves picking cotton in languid fashion like they are fondling lint on a bedspread? It's a harvest: they would have been moving and picking fast under the close watch of the overseer. Cora standing perfectly still in the middle of the harvest looking at the sky undisturbed? Yeah right - what we know of those settings says slaves weren't even allowed to straighten up. The escaping group moving at a slow stroll, diddling with bushes like they are wandering through a rose garden, and realizing only after they've made a break for it and been jumped by white men, whom they inexplicitly escape, that they will be be chased by dogs? ("We should have thought of this"). And then that terminally weird train in an unimaginably huge underground cavern pulling up with a shout of "all aboard"... What on earth? Metaphor? It didn't come off like metaphor. Just a crazily wrong historical botch. The dreamy, suspended quality unfortunately also soaks up any sense of real humanity. There should be a reason we're following these particular people, but like others here I can't connect with Cora. Caesar is engrossing, if sometimes baffling; Cora is merely blank. Even when she spots a snake in a swamp (I was thinking "water moccasins!" all through that segment, as anyone would who knows those swamps), she only stares, impassive. Perhaps it's a set-up for character development in further episodes. But one has to care enough to stay with the story, and with all the plot difficulties it's impossible to believe we're in good hands. I was strongly motivated to like this. Simply can't do it.

Not having read the books, I don't miss what others found painfully changed. But I still found the series a mixed bag and reading complaints from readers helps me understand this. 1. Having been driven to despair by Jackson's Two Towers (second movie) in LOTR and disgusted by the ruination of Lewis's Narnia books, I firmly believe it's Not Okay for producers to adopt and then mangle great works to suit their own ideas about dramatic effect, modern sensibilities or whatever. So I have to back up others here by encouraging WOT producers to consider a hard truth: if Jordan's books had been written like your writers' instincts suggest, they would have sunk like a stone, like thousands of other decently written fantasy books. WOT had special originality and chemistry that made it famous and earned its awards. Mess with it at your peril. You've already run into trouble with this, with changes that weakened characters and created logical inconsistencies. Rein it in. 2. For nonreaders, the series provided some splendid world-building. I got a strong sense of a universe with a rich, complicated history and wanted to know more. This was achieved through great detail - costumes, architecture, expositions about past crises - as well as mortal threats to main characters a la GOT. Beautiful production! That said, I'm far more interested in characterizations than special effects and I was startled by how short this season was. I hope the producers can keep audience priorities straight: don't sacrifice episodes for expensive, time-consuming CGI. 3. What others found "woke" I found fantastic: a woman-centered universe at last! Strong, complicated female characters, with a culture genuinely built around them - the very first such universe I've seen. Giant liberating breath of fresh air. (It seems some male reviewers here freak out at the slightest loss of male centrality - well, go soothe yourselves with the other 99.9999% of fantasy fiction.) The relationship between Moiraine and Siuan was truly extraordinary: two mature women, both seasoned professionals, having an adult relationship pivotal to the plot - wow! Deep friendships and rivalries among all the women were moving and gripping. Excellent. The most truly creative alternative universe I've seen. 4. Where it dragged, lost momentum and became confusing was in the sexual tension and pairings shoveled in, as though everyone must have a romantic partner. I found most of these scenes distracting and sometimes inexplicable, and, reading reviews, I see this incessant pairing isn't in the books. I strongly hope the writers back off from this compulsion and give room for these friendships as they were written. There's so much else to explore here. The powerful, nonsexual bond between the Aes Sedai and their warders, for example, is fascinating. Don't mess with it. Conclusion: I was very glad to watch this and keen on seeing the next season. I just hope the producers remember that sacrificing episodes for special effects isn't what this audience wants - a longer season next time, please. And while considering what changes are unavoidable for the adaptation, put a placard on the writers' wall: "Jordan knew best!"

Having some nostalgia for the original 1956 David Niven version and gun-shy after the painful 2004 Coogan remake, I was worried about this new attempt. But based on the first episode I'm liking this very much. The ensemble, with the trailing reporter added to make a threesome, is actually far more engaging than the original. Rather than the punctilious stuffy Phineus Fogg, whose character arc in the Niven version is a nearly flat line, we have a timid, disorganized Fogg whose shocked encounter with the outside world promises some real character development. Rather than the servant dragged along by an oblivious London snob, we have a multilingual Passepartout with his own complex history and motives for the journey. And the journalist is, thank God, not a silly caricature but actually convincing as the ambitious young woman trying to break through sexist hide-bound Victorian tradition. All of them have heart and inner strengths starting to show and they already have a budding chemistry that makes me look forward to their further adventures. As family fare, the story seems ready to dip into some gritty issues as well - an attempted assassination, mob riots, the destruction of the Paris Commune - without any labored political preaching. Good script, good direction, good acting... Let's hope it fulfills its promise!

I first read the novel shortly after it came out and several times after that, engrossed by its fascinating world building including a poetic indigenous desert culture, mystical philosophy, allusions to a deep and traumatic history of several millennia and galactic political scheming that today suggests Game of Thrones. I was therefore dreading this film, expecting it would fail, due partly to the trailers that suggested gargantuan bang-pow CGI and partly to the catastrophic earlier attempt by Lynch. What a joyful surprise to find this interpretation so faithful to the mood, characterizations and events described in the book. It's entrancing, absorbing, enthralling and a monumental success. Coupled to part two when that comes out - not making it is unimaginable - this is a near-revolutionary advance in the sci fi film genre and a splendid monument to Herbert's work Inevitably, much is cut out in this mostly expositional "part one." What suffers most are the conversations and meetings by which we come to appreciate the complex characters and relations among the Duke, Thufir Hawat, Gurney Halleck (no balliset here) and Yueh. Viewers who haven't read the book won't pick up here on the true identity and perspective of Liet Kynes or how the Bene Gesserit operate (e.g., they are certain to miss crucial moments such as Jessica's accidental discovery of the term "maker" while interviewing the Shadout Mapes). Characters other than Jessica and Paul are outlines to be filled in later. But the larger tone and mystique of the book is beautifully conveyed, with generous help from Zimmerman's astonishing, mesmerizing score. This film also stands out as perhaps the best use of CGI I've ever seen. The giant ships, rather than providing eye-popping action, instead convey merely by their stark, gravity-defying grandeur that we are indeed eight millennia on the future, a history conveyed in the book by opaque lines such as the religious injunction that "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind"). The worms, thankfully, are depicted with a beauty that makes sense of their Fremen deification as Shai-hulud. If the CGI desert doesn't convey the magic of the desert cinematography in Lean's immortal Lawrence of Arabia, the loss isn't serious. I had just one quibble about something few are likely to notice, and that was Timothée Chalamet's spoken lines. No attempt at British accents in this film, which is fine, but the actors have a range of accents and all have the diction that these roles call for. The character of Paul, the ducal heir, is multi-lingual and hyper-educated by our standards. Yet Chalamet's accent is unvarnished US-high-school, a bit slurred, a bit nasal, and, crucially, not matching the accents of those playing Paul's family. I was pulled out of the illusion every time he opened his mouth. Hopefully someone will work with him to improve this in part two

This film is a legendary classic for many reasons, as thousands of reviews have observed, but one is its extraordinary portrait of human complexity. Those who view it after seeing The Magnificent Seven, which was inspired by it, will find a far more complicated and absorbing story, set in feudal Japan. The innocence and hope of the villagers is here far more layered with cowardice and fickle attitudes toward the samurai they have persuaded to help them. The Samurai, initially moved by the farmers' plight, are dismayed to learn that these same villagers hunt down and kill wounded samurai after local battles, stealing and hoarding their armor. The resulting complexity, in an assortment of people thrown together in a crisis, is fascinating. Samurai values of poise, reserve, courage and reticence are on full display here, but without the glossy style attributed to their art in western films (for instance, The Last Samurai). The story does offer some lovely touches, such as a version of the classic fable of three samurai passing through a door with a hidden threat. Otherwise, the rough life of poor, unemployed samurai (ronin) and the abject poverty of the farmer caste is portrayed in gritty, exquisite detail. Mifune brings to life a society of bare survival, where the loss of a filthy pole shack is a family calamity and life or death rides on a harvest. The film does raise challenges for Western viewers. Especially, the acting is very broad by western standards. Yet it remains engrossing, with a splendid cast of character actors playing the samurai as well as the desperate, overwhelmed, and sometimes craven villagers. Mifune himself plays the clownish, tormented farmer-turned-samurai Kikuchiyo in the stylized form of contemporary Japanese film alluding to Kabuki, a bold choice. It's also a decidedly male film. Of the only two women characters treated as individuals, one appears only in the abstract, tragic mystique typically permitted women in Japanese classic films. The other is equally lacking in personality, but with the twist of having her father hide her in the woods and cutting her hair to disguise her as a boy. For anyone curious about classic Japanese film, this film is a wonderful introduction. But I think it's a must-see for anyone with a spark of interest in cultural diversity. A distinctly Japanese ethos, or later ideas about one, is explored here by a master craftsman. It will stretch and challenge those new to this genre and leave them with a much wider horizon. Reading one or two of the eloquent analyses of this film composed over the decades will be a helpful aid in this sense.

Stunning, tender film, beautifully filmed and. narrated. No attempt to describe the content can do it justice. The only film I've seen like it is "Into the Okovango," but this goes even further in achieving a poetic, personal resonance with its subject, the extraordinary connection between a man and a unique animal in the great kelp forests off the South African coast. Sets a new standard for nature films that few will meet.

Spoilers here: I loved the book, which always makes watching a film version perilous. But I really thought this version unnecessarily irritating and, although it offered some decent acting and scenery, ultimately painful. It really strips out everything that made the book such a treasure. The worst parts were the character rewrites. The first serious jar was finding Martha, the sweet and kindly maid, stripped of all her warmth and the generosity that, crucially in the book, first begins to penetrate Mary's selfish shell. Dickson, who in the book is the spiritual guide for Mary and Colin, had none of the glow that transforms them both. And then there's the cheap device of making the housekeeper, Mrs. Medlock, unnecessarily villainous. In the book, it's the entire apparatus of bad medical care, terrified servants and English emotional repression that is suffocating Colin. Stereotypical villains aren't needed and don't appear. Everything outside the house is off, too. First there's that pointless dog, as though the audience needed one - a crude way to escape the more sophisticated directing chore of conveying the mystique of the robin, perhaps? (The Robin is a CGI thing of unnecessary cuteness.) And of course, there's the garden itself. In the book, it's a walled, overgrown, neglected space that inspires Mary's first discovery of nature when she first digs around crocus shoots to let them 'breathe." Its rebirth in the book - the return of blossoms under their combined care - is bound up in Mary and Colin's finding their own inner lives, all three recovering from sorrow and neglect. In this movie it's a vast, shapeless, rambling space with a pond where the kids, of course, laugh and splash. Forget the mystique of tender growing things; it's basically a child's dream playground. With a big wet dog, how cute. Even the manor is oddly redefined (maybe to save money on props?). In the book, Misselthwaite is grand and beautiful but closed, dark and oppressive, haunted by sorrow, beauty turned into prison. Here it's a stark, gutted shell, having been occupied by soldiers (why?) and finally goes up in flames - uh, emblemizing rebirth, in case you missed it. Cliches abound in this movie, poaching and replacing all the unique bits and twists that made this book so famous and so loved. Even the book's famous emotional peak, when Colin runs into his father's arms, is weirdly ducked. The director apparently thought it more realistic to have Colin still struggling with crutches. So much for the emotional pay-off - the beaming lad, the proud father, the astonished servants. It's always a shame when someone making a famous book into a film doesn't understand or even like the book. The Narnia films were a sin against literature. The Jackson LOTR, after the first film, kept going off Tolkien heights into the juvenile abyss of Jacksonesque story-telling that wrecked his King King. Maybe someday directors will remember what they knew better in the 1940s - that these immortal authors were better writers than they are. If these classics had been written like these movies are written, they would have sunk like a stone.