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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
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Fine acting, fine series
I have not read the books, but I found the video series enthralling.
The acting is superb. Most of it was filmed on (or near) location, so the backgrounds are great.
The story really is Harriet's, but Guy, her husband, is interesting and evolving.
The war and its stresses are omnipresent; but oddly enough, despite the suddenness and ruthlessness of war, war never changes the underlying human dynamics.
Harriet and Guy both learn about each other, and themselves--a long, wrenching, and believable process.
Like many BBC productions, this one is quite literary (Guy is a professor of English in various locales) and will be fun for lovers of Brit Lit.
Guy mounts a production of Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" in Romania, and is later chastised by the foreign office for doing it while the Nazis were advancing. He replies, "I don't see how anything I could have done would have stopped the Germans."
Yet in truth, the choice of the play was apt: betrayal, ruthlessness, naked greed for power, cynicism, corruption--precisely what was going on in Bucharest as the Germans came.
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Choose Carefully
Brilliant Series, but unfortunatly , the copy I received was Region 1, and I was unable to play it on my DVD player. No worries on my computer, but the big screen was impossible. But a top show.
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A little-known gem of a miniseries
On the brink of World War II, follow a young British academic couple (played by Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh)from Bucharest to Athens to Egypt.
Meet their friends, their refugees, their colleagues, and the locals in each country who are bewildered, befriended, bemused, or betrayed by the Brits.
Learn a lot of history painlessly as the inevitability of the war unfolds.
Become interested enough to go back to the original Olivia Manning novels; for once the film does the book justice. The series has excellent detail in costumes, language, politics, dress, silliness, and seriousness. The plot is complex and compelling, the writing literate, intelligent, and entertaining. Best of all, the acting is superb.
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Thompson the terrible
Why do I dislike Emma Thompson so much as an actress? Aha, I know why -- she can't act. She can read lines and make gestures, but never makes me believe for a second that she's who she's pretending to be. She ruins everything she touches. I have to admit I couldn't watch this in its entirety, purely because of her. For those who haven't seen the show, just look at her picture on the box; she looks like a woman wearing a hat that belongs somewhere, anywhere, else. It's like a pimple on cheese. Apart from her, it was OK, but I don't like Branagh either, another actor afflicted with an unhealthy dose of self-consciousness in his acting, which is fatal.
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quick and perfect, thank you very much!
I ordered the DVD in the US around the 15th Dez. and it was delivered at Cologne only two weeks later - I think this is a good job.
