lilliansimone

This show used to be great. Maybe not the pinnacle of television, but very, very good.

It had a nice cast, good writing (although it erred on not doing enough with the characters) and good directing (after a shaky first season).

But then it all collapsed. The creator of the show left and in came people who like their actresses incompetent and their scripts full of plot holes.

The hiring of Roselyn Sanchez is when this show jumped the shark.

Roselyn Sanchez is possibly the worst actress working as a lead in film and television today... and that's saying a lot! Her complete like of emoting, combined with her lack of diction and her unnaturally immobile face make every scene she's in a painful experience.

In addition, her bad acting exposes how bad the writing has become.

No wonder audiences have been deserting with once huge hit.

There's very little different about this show. It looks and feels the same as so many other bad shows, like The Shield (also on FX!), that look terrible and bring little if anything to the table filmically.

someone should clue in FX that shooting on video does not make a show look real: it just makes it look cheap and ugly! And why not use a tripod for a change... Yes, FX executives... hand-holding the camera constantly for no particular purpose is not brilliant direction. It's not direction at all and it's boring in the utmost.

What a waste of acting talent that show is. I feel bad for Andre Braugher, Linda Hamilton, Dina Meyer...

Rome is a triumph... of hype over actual dramatic achievement.

The HBO production fails to deliver in almost every way because it tries too much to please the executives of HBO and forgets about the audience.

It starts in a completely underwhelming and baffling fashion with a battle scene that is so poorly staged and directed that you can't see what is going on. The culprit: the usual attempt at "edge" by shaking the camera to and fro. That technique has never worked but it doesn't stop the executives to push it because they somehow convinced themselves that it was "hip". How pathetic! It's a pity that Michael Apted is the latest in a line of directors who used to know how to direct to stoop to that level of incompetence. I am shocked he attached his good name to this mess.

After that, the show doesn't get any better (or more historically accurate for the matter!) Everything is described as grim and dirty, again HBO executives' current taste for "edge" as they see it. The problem is this doesn't make for realism, but rather for a very poor visual presentation that is so hackneyed and artificial it reeks fakeness through every pore.

Then we of course had to see pointless sex scenes and pointless nudity which made the miniseries descend into Skinemax territory. Come to think of it, for dramatic content, one of those late night soft porn offerings delivers more for the money.

It is hard to believe that this mess cost so much money as there is no detailed re-creation of anything on-screen, only dirty sets and un-inspired computers paintings that sadly are a long way from matching old-fashioned matte paintings of yesteryear for artistic content. Once again, the demand for CGI because it's "digital" and therefore "hip" is probably the reason for this really bad choice.

In four words: Don't waste your time!

One of the worst half-hearted attempts at fantasy, Witchblade was a clunker all the way.

The real question is why doesn't anyone bother to read the scripts before getting into production. It's especially sad for Yancy Butler whose career was eradicated by Witchblade. Did they switch the scripts on her before shooting? Did anyone warn her of what she was getting into? In a world where a number of truly bad actresses get film after film it was truly disheartening to see Ms. Butler fight against a mountain of clichés and bad lines and try to swim upstream against nonsensical plots, all rolled up in ugly, ugly, ugly cinematography.

She may never be seen again except in supporting parts on cable movies, and it's really a shame because she is talented.

At least the awful Ralph Hemecker, the man behind the bad scripts and the ridiculous look of Witchblade, seems to have completely disappeared too. Maybe there is some justice.

Take a bunch of amateur wanna-be actors and shoots them with Dad's camcorder.

Take the resulting "brilliant" footage and slap it together on the home computer and you get Anne B. Real.

Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against people getting experience by making a feature-length project

I do have a problem, however, with hyping it as if it were a real movie when in fact it is a painful-to-watch home video that you would only sit still for if it were made by your family.

In other words, avoid at all costs.