ant501

Great characters, witty scripts, it has all the makings of a great series. You can't help warming to the cast, they are obviously enjoying their roles because they're so well written. Only problem is the shooting style; the hackneyed wobbling of the camera, the indecisive re-framing and the jerky zooms in and out to create an illusion of documentary. Totally fake. No self-respecting documentary camera person would ever turn in work like this. It's totally unnecessary and I've said it all really but apparently I have to pad this review out to get to the statutory minimum number of characters. Phew!

How can anyone not love this film? The sheer mastery of the claymation technique, added to the flawless set lighting and the endless gags and references to other films.... It's a delight from beginning to end. Smaller children might find it somewhat frightening at times but the adults will love its inventiveness. If some amateur critics on IMDB who happen to be from the USA don't "get" the many references to British culture and institutions then they still have a lot to learn. 10/10.

Put into context it's an interesting documentary but it's basically a 56 minute advertisement for the train company. Photography, sound and editing are very "corporate", and the music budget was.... er.... less than generous.

Very engaging subject and well explained. This despite using a generic format of having the historians pose as interviewees and drive the narrative along by asking questions to which they already know the answers. Maybe the world will have to wait until 100 years after the Normandy Landings for the truth to be revealed, if it is ever fully declassified. What distracts from the story is the incessant pounding music in the background. No, it doesn't make it more exciting. It just irritates.

This is a great series, informative and educational. I can see why some reviewers on here think that it's "politically liberal" but that's because it's made by educated people at Smithsonian; who get their knowledge from academic science and historical research, not from ill-informed people on Twitter.

The big flaw is the level of background music on some (but not all) of the episodes. My guess is that the sound mixer monitored his/her mix at loud levels in the dubbing area, using high quality loudspeakers etc. That's great and probably impresses the client but if you don't pull back the music a lot more when the narrator speaks then this happens: On your massive monitors you can easily hear the narration under the music but at home, where the real customers are, they're probably listening on a tv with lower quality speakers, maybe even on something with compressed audio output. That's where all sounds are treated almost equally and the music and narration blur into one. Ever wondered why the narration is more audible on some episodes but not on others? It's nothing to do with your age.

This is quite typical of the type of epic adventure series made for British TV in the 1980s. But who added the technical specs to this episode? I saw it re-broadcast on ITV4 in November 2020 and it definitely didn't look like it was shot in 35mm. Too much dirt and dust visible on it. Looked like 16mm to me. Good that it was real film though.

Series 4 and the producers are running out of places to feature. The dry dock in this episode was a case in point. The schtick of this series is to start each segment with some extremely contrived "what on earth can this be?" sound bites from a handful of experts, some of whom are quite sensible but they're pitted against a few hammy weirdos. This is a series with a lot of interesting information wallowing in tedious lowbrow padding.

Fascinating concept and a great series. Well, it would be if they had not cast uber-irritant Greg Wallace as the main presenter. His gurning, mockney barrow-boy schtick wears thin after 30 seconds. The other presenters add some gravitas and insight into the history of each product but I have to watch it with the subtitles on and a mute button handy to cut out GW's faked amazement as he patronises each machine operator who is unfortunate enough to be compelled to suffer GW's egotistical contrived patter.

The stage musical is great; this expensively filmed version suffers from having the intolerably smug presence of James Corden in a major role. Also, anyone with any ounce of comprehension in the production team should have known that a key element of the work is about growing up and sexual awakening. The character Jack is supposed to be well into his teens. Hearing a kid who looks about 11 singing about being "drawn into giant breasts" is creepy.

Admittedly I saw this on the Sony Movie Channel and not in the cinema. So perhaps other releases didn't have the same sound problem. But what I saw (and struggled to hear clearly) was flawed. The whispered performances detracted from the overall experience. Do actors *really* have to whisper and mumble their way through the script? Listen carefully and you can hear the dubbing mixer's "noise gates" working flat out. Whenever anyone speaks in the intimate whispered passages, you can hear the background mush behind their tiny voice, which has to be cranked up to maximum in order to hear what they're saying. Then the moment they stop speaking, the noise gate cuts in and the background goes eerily silent until the next line starts. Distracting at best. Otherwise, a great film.

No-one, not even the most amateurish youtuber, would shake a camera around in the way this series is filmed. It totally distracts from the brilliant script and it beats me how anyone could possibly think that it's somehow an acceptable "fly on the wall" technique. Unwatchable.

An interesting subject but the self conscious gimmicky camerawork ruins the show. The camera shots are deliberately wobbly, the footage where the camera operator hunts for focus or adjusts the framing is not cut out but is left for all to see. There are even crash zooms on the rostrum camera shots of historical engravings; a technique that was hackneyed enough back in the 1970s. Why draw attention to the technology in this fashion? It distracts from the content and it just makes the viewer think that the producers can't come up with a good enough story, so they've "embellished" it to distract us from the lack of substance, which is no mean feat with a romantic story such as this.

Ffs, when will film makers realise that shaking the camera around in an agitated manner does NOT make a film look any more "real", nor does it make a mockumentary look any less contrived. This pile of nonsense is completely unwatchable, so don't even bother.

The concept is great. Explain how engineers have created modern marvels, drawing upon past experiments by their predecessors. However, the actual show is unbearably drawn out. I only watched one episode; about the Shanghai Maglev Train. Fascinating subject but it was a half hour documentary padded out to last twice that long. I lost count of the number of times the same shots were re-used; the music was intrusive; the repetitive commentary was aimed at an immature audience and what exactly was the presenter in Shanghai doing? If she was presenting the show then she should have been doing it to camera; if she was an interviewee then she should have been directed to keep her eye line closer to the camera, not be staring into the middle distance. Viewers have to sit through a whole hour of this stuff, just to enjoy a handful of three minute bursts of interesting information separated by plenty of padding. The only reason I give it 4/10 is for a few engaging sequences of archive material and modern experiments, with appropriate homages to the engineering pioneers. Oh and by the way, Nigel Gresley's streamlined locomotive is usually called "Mallard" and not "The Mallard" but it's a moot point so no marks lost there.

This series is another shining star from the genre known as Mockumentary. Some reviewers seem to think that "The Office" set the style but The Office was by no means the first, you only have to look at "Victoria Wood - As Seen on TV", which first appeared on BBC TV in 1985, to see a collection of witty, understated spoofs shot in the documentary style. And of course the year before that, Rob Reiner made "This is Spinal Tap".

Crucially, on Victoria Wood they didn't direct the camera to wave aimlessly about, they used cameramen who knew how to operate a hand held camera. That's my main complaint about this mockumentary "Parks and Recreation". The content may be blisteringly funny but it should not look as if the poor camera operator is suffering from some terrible affliction of the central nervous system. This fake wobbliness not only pervades the mockumentary genre, it's sometimes seen in drama series that are directed in a pseudo-realistic style, e.g. "Law and Order".

But despite the distraction of the wobbly camera, Parks and Recreation is still brilliantly written and performed.

Another user disputed my previous review in which I complained that episode two's content skipped through Tarragona, barely giving it a mention. I got my dates wrong but one can't deny that these types of 'road trip' documentary series tend to give far more airtime to shots of the presenter(s) and less time to the subject matter.

One type of documentary uses the subject matter as a loose way of pinning together all the sequences of transport problems / bad weather / officialdom faced by the personalities involved. In the production world it's called "jeopardy". An emerging documentary subtype is the "Wonders of the Universe" style, which seems to be mostly shots of an enraptured Professor Brian Cox gazing up at the heavens in awe.

My original point was that both before and after Hannibal's crossing of the area, Tarragona was of strategic importance; surely worth more of a mention than the rush to get to some football game.

I am late with this review; many others have said their piece long ago and it appears that many expected it to be a re-make of the famous story.

If Mr Burton had called it "Not Alice In Wonderland" or perhaps "Alice in Wonderland 2" or perhaps "Alice Revisits Wonderland" or even, for as much as I care, "Alice meets Abbott and Costello in Wonderland" then maybe people would take the film on its merits and not on their ill-researched expectations.

I would have stopped there but apparently that is not enough.. so here goes: OK, it had its flaws and a few of the performances were rather derivative. I would be astonished if Helena Bonham Carter ever swore she had never seen Miranda Richardson doing Queenie in Blackadder before forming her characterisation of the Red Queen. Nevertheless she and Alan Rickman and Stephen Fry and Matt Lucas were all great. The only thing I hated was the stupid Futterwacken dance (what was THAT about?).

I don't know if they are all similar but the only episode I saw was shot in the "Let's wobble the camera around to make it look like a documentary" style. Not only is this crass style of shooting distracting but the end results look nothing at all like those of a genuine documentary.

Thankfully, even the shakiest of hand-held camera work on a genuine documentary does not make it look as if the unfortunate camera operator has some terrible neurological disease.

If they wanted to make it look like a documentary then they could ditch the tripods by all means but at least they should have directed the operators to just do normal hand held camera work. What was done on the episode I saw looked totally phoney and contrived.

Yet another example of an English Opera production, recorded on an English stage and yet not being on sale in England, sorry, the UK. Anyway, if you are unfortunate enough to live in the UK and you try hard enough and you have a multi-region player then you can get a Region 1 DVD sent over from the USA. Not a great DVD, no subtitles for example. But better than nothing.

The performances are excellent as other reviewers have already said. The sound is too on-mike in places, which gives the game away a bit; my guess is that what we see and hear is a gluing together of material shot at one or more real live performances with a lot of extra material re-shot without an audience.

What makes this DVD poor is not what is happening on the stage but what is happening in the vision mixing department. Terrible camera directing; silly and contrived angles; poor transitions from closeups to wide shots; gimmicky and superfluous "multi-faceting lens" effects. If only it had been directed by a better director of televised operas (the excellent Brian Large springs to mind) then this would have been a wonderful record of a production that is still (2008) being staged in London. It is sad to think that when it eventually ceases to be performed the only video recording of it will be this visually flawed one.

Nothing, but nothing, can beat the original novel by Stella Gibbons. Ostensibly a parody of earthy novels such as "Precious Bane" and the stuff by D.H. Lawrence, it is in fact a brilliant satire about the human race and what makes us tick, or not tick at all.

The closest any dramatisation has come to capturing her philosophy was probably the BBC Radio 4 version. Sometimes radio has better pictures, because you create the visuals yourself.

This early TV version suffered visually from being studio-bound, presumably because that is how things were done in those days. It also suffered, visually at least, from being directed by Peter Hammond, who loved 'frames within frames' and getting sexual symbolism into every shot; perhaps fashionable at the time but now seen as cliché ridden and hackneyed. However, it has a good cast and although it is really creaky by today's standards it is worth seeing if only as an alternative to the later and in my opinion less interesting John Schlesinger version, which had a huge budget and played the script for its laughs, avoiding the point of the novel.

So what IS the point of the novel? Well, read it and see. We all know a Judith; we all know an Aunt Ada; we all know people who blame their current condition on something in their past, either real or imaginary; we all know many of the human traits and foibles satirised in the novel. What Stella Gibbons did, deliciously, was not just to parody the style of novels by D.H. Lawrence and Mary Webb ("fecund rain spears" and "bursting sheaths") but also to extol the benefits of leading a tidy life full of beauty and harmony. She encapsulates the characteristics of the entire human race into one farmhouse full of superficially dysfunctional people. Read the novel, but, above all: read between the lines.

I went into the cinema without expecting anything in particular. Technically it was excellent, and I did like the way in which the film shows the events through the eyes of the officers. It shies away from showing the actual moments of impact and from over-dramatising the terrible things that were happening to those people up in the towers themselves. However; having avoided some clichés it then shoots itself in the foot with lines like "mommy, when is daddy coming back?" and with the closeups of a Christian cross and representations of a back-lit and glowing Jesus Christ. Maybe the humour was in the water bottle.

For me the most poignant moment of drama was not the interminably drawn out suffering of the cops under their slabs of foam painted to look like concrete but the encounter towards the end between Maria Bello's character and the woman who was coming to terms with the loss of her (son ?). That moment did seem more real than any other.

Overall, the film left me thinking about how these films, even from the best directors, are generically about the triumph of human hope and endeavour. At least this one was only partly predictable. After all the agonising, everybody involved with the two rescued officers gave us an uplifting and happy dénouement but the immense suffering of thousands of others on that terrible day was confined to a few brief moments and a few "summing up" captions at the end. The officers were spared and so were we. Perhaps we should like the film for that very reason.

One of the delights of attending a live performance of an opera, operetta, play, musical, etc is that you might see a production that is so much better than any productions of the work that you have seen before. Far Worse is when you see a production that is so good that you later wish it had been recorded for posterity; and it wasn't.

Anyone fortunate enough to see the English National Opera's London production of "Orpheus in the Underworld" will know what I mean. Taking a swipe at Mrs Thatcher by parodying her as Public Opinion did date it but nevertheless it was a snappy and witty production, done during the time when the ENO was at its peak and with wonderful sets by Gerald Scarfe. Snoo Wilson did a marvellous job on the book, making the songs witty, sexy and far more interesting and incisive than the subtitled translations of the plodding 1977 version under review here. It is possible to buy an audio CD of the ENO production; it is one of the tragedies of the Arts World that nobody ever recorded it on video.

Having said that; this production by the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels, although slow by comparison, does have some fine singing. It also has a nice theatrical device that draws its inspiration from a famous photograph of a railway accident at a Paris station. It probably has more international appeal than the ENO production I am comparing it with.

Unlike some other reviewers I don't take issue with the traditional filmed musical style with which Susan Stroman directed this film; it's some of the performances that don't quite hit the mark. They are either too theatrical for film or the comedy timing is wrong; there is no need to leave a pause for laughs when you shoot or edit a movie. Let's face it; the cast is just not as good or as well directed as they would have been on the original Broadway Show. Suffice to say that the performances from Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick (in particular) seemed tired and lacked conviction and that's not surprising, as they had done it so often on stage. Lane does a nice enough homage to Zero Mostel without losing his own style but don't even start to compare the stodgy Broderick with the neurotic Gene Wilder. Some of the musical numbers are very nicely done in this film though, especially the outdoor ones and the famous "Springtime for Hitler". It is good that Stroman does the musical numbers mainly on wide shots where others might have tried to cut close. I have seen excellent ballet films ruined by too much cutting and too many mid-shots and closeups so it is good that she shot the musical numbers in this film in a traditional style.

The usually wonderful Uma Thurman was terribly miscast in this film and so was Will Ferrell. Thurman just does not look right as Ulla and can't "belt" as well as Cady Huffman (who was Ulla in the original Broadway production). Ferrell is just too young looking for the role of Franz and he lacks menace. He really should not try to pull faces like Jim Carrey; one Jim Carrey in the movie world is quite enough. On the plus side, Gary Beach is wonderful as Roger and is probably the best reason to see this film.

Continuity freaks will love the various jumps in people's positions or expressions between shots and a few hairstyle variations too. I don't normally spot dodgy edits but there are quite a few in this film, even though I only saw it the once. Maybe the hairstyle variations were deliberate, in homage to Roger de Bris' wig jumps on the original 1968 film but I don't think so somehow.

Having not been fortunate enough to see the show on Broadway when it first opened then, without a doubt, for me the best version of this very funny musical is on the DVD documentary entitled "Recording the Producers" (2001) and I urge you to watch that even if you already have the resulting CD of the soundtrack from the Broadway show. It has a cast still fresh from the first opening of the musical on Broadway. Lane and Broderick give perfect performances too. OK, so they are singing the songs and not acting out very much more than a small part of the plot but you will see and *hear* far better performances in almost every role I can think of compared with those on the feature film version of the musical. Cady Huffman does a much better Ulla than poor old Uma and a few of the people who only played bit parts in Stroman's movie version (including Peter Marinos and Eric Gunhus) get a chance to shine on the DVD documentary.

This work of art is just stunningly beautiful and powerful; I saw it performed on stage in London and bought the DVD version the next day. The soundtrack is excellent, the orchestra is well balanced and well conducted. The on-stage performances are breathtaking and moving. My only complaints relate to the vision mixing; a few dodgy camera angles and the rapidity of some of the cuts. This is ballet and although TV directors have a golden opportunity to enhance the experience by showing far more than a square-on proscenium arch shot, they should only rarely cut to anything closer than a mid-shot; certainly not for just one second, it is disorientating and it ruins the flow. Despite the fact that I think the editing leaves a lot to be desired I still give it 10 for sheer mastery in every other area. It's worth adding that there was a Blu-Ray remake in 2011 and in my opinion the remake has far better better choices of shots and editing and is equally deserving of ten stars. Plus it's Blu-ray HD and wide screen so is probably the version I would recommend now. The 1998 original DVD has Adam Cooper in the lead role and no-one can beat him. But we can't make a dream ticket cast so on balance go for the Blu-ray.

(Contains spoiler). In May 2004 I saw this film on its "home ground" in Peru. Peruvian films have a reputation for being gritty and violent and this one was both those things. The top and tail of the film show the main character as an adult but the majority of the film consists of a flashback to his childhood in the Andes, where he was captured and taken from his village by a band of left wing extremists who try to force him to adopt their beliefs and help them in their "armed struggle". He escapes and eventually the band attack his village and there is a bloody fight which culminates in the boy's mother being killed. Of course there is more to the film than that and there are some very moving scenes, some attractive Peruvian landscapes and also some frankly predictable pathos.

Some of the acting is excellent, especially by the boy's mother but some is a bit hammy or maybe that was just the way the actors were directed. Technically there are flaws too, especially in the camera-work and in some fairly obvious use of strong lights outdoors. Furthermore a lot of the dialogue is post-dubbed which makes the sound track a bit too clean and lacking depth and perspective. However, I think it is a film worth watching, if only to see just how terrible and terrifying life in the Peruvian countryside was in the last part of the 20th century and - despite a big improvement in law and order recently - even in 2004 some people still live in fear. My Peruvian friends told me that although the film is a fictional story it represents almost a sanitised version of what really was happening; the reality must have been similar to some of the terrible atrocities of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s.