Simon-Rogopag

The new Angelique to me is a sign of everything that's wrong with the French TV of last 20 or maybe even 30 years. French art-house cinema is still pretty strong, and they often produce quite good commercial movies too , but TV is a different story. French TV used to produce some nice, immensely watchable (if not particularly profound) literary adaptations that used to be very popular with viewers far beyond France, especially in many eastern European countries and former USSR. What we get now is absolutely unwatchable, inconsistent, and pretentious. There are good exceptions like Engrenages or Les Revenants, but these are more like French takes on popular US TV models. When it comes to material based on the history of France, the French TV is churning up things like faux-arty but completely incomprehensible new version of Accursed Kings after Maurice Druon, atrociously amateurish new version of La Dame de Monsoreau after Dumas and this dud - Angelique, Marquise of Boredom. The original film series is often criticized for the turning the source material into some Alexandre Dumas- Lite period adventure pieces, but that is exactly why I loved them. In all honesty, the source books are not masterpieces. I have read almost all of them and I believe that at best they are just a cape and sward adventures in lush period settings told from a woman's perspective (kind of precursor of The Outlander), at worse (and every subsequent book is getting worse and worse) they are just your average romance novels that are supposed to have Fabio on the cover (ok, maybe slightly better researched and written than your average romance novel, but you know still a type of book where the titular lady hero spends pages objectifying various sexy studs, still holding a candle for a love of her life and simultaneously getting in touch with her inner goddess...). The original film adaptations (5 films) were made by Bernard Borderie who few years before that made perhaps the most satisfying (yet still imperfect) adaptation of The Three Musketeers. He treated Angelique in the same way, making it a rollercoaster of fast paced adventures of the beautiful heroine with swordfights, poisonings, exotic locales, and a little bit of sexual titillation. The quality of films varied - I consider 1st and 3rd films excellent, 2nd and 5th are OK and 4th is even worse (though its worst part - a hilarious "torture by cats" scene comes directly from the source material). Now, there are certain dedicated fans of the books that consider that these films don't do justice to the source material but sorry, in my opinion they mostly improve upon the books (and in my opinion there are very few films out that improve upon the books). I wonder what these critics think of this new take that manages to make the France of Louis XIV look as a completely unattractive and unpleasant place, has the ladies and gentlemen behave like street thugs, and turn the titular character into some kind of swashbuckling tomboy. I did not like anything about this series from casting to costume design. The old film had a gorgeous leading actress - Michelle Mercier, whose popularity for a while even rivaled that of Brigitte Bardot. Nora Arnezeder seems to be a beautiful and talented young lady - and maybe with a right material and presentation she can become a prominent star - but the way she is directed, dressed, even lit in this series make her look completely plain and forgettable. As to the gentleman around her? In addition to charismatic Rober Hossein as Joffrey, almost every suitor of Angelique was drop dead gorgeous: Gulianno Gemma, Sammi Frey, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and many more. Here they all look drab and boring. However, the worst offender is the director - the directing is simply inept, from time to time even amateurish. And am not speaking about artistic choices, I am speaking about simple things like setting up a scene, transitions between pivotal events, built up of tension or rather lack of thereof. I read some reviews praising the costumes and sets, come on, you can't be serious?!

Sarah Phelps is a genius. In her previous Christie adaptations she opened up my eyes on gender problems in Britain. And now she has revitalized an outdated book by certain Christie by using its mundane and predictable story to reveal xenophobia of the British people, apparently a national trait that I, as a foreigner and a frequent visitor to UK, was hitherto unaware of. Every random character in this TV film, whether a landlady or a train conductor, not to mention vicious children and policemen are looking for every opportunity to humiliate and insult Hercule Poirot for no reason other than his ridiculous accent. I have no doubt that children of these vicious people are the ones who prevent poor immigrants from crossing the English Channel these days.... I could never imagine that in 21st century BBC would make films of such subtlety and insight into social problems... reminds me of the Soviet Cinema of 1930s and no, I do not mean Eisenstein. There too, the filmmakers were required to expose the important topics under the guise of comedies or crime movies and a lighthearted comedy would turn into lecture about the evil bourgeoisie mistreating the working class or sabotaging the big bright egalitarian future.

Of course, a talented person could include such "lessons" into the story so seamlessly and elegantly that we would applaud to it, we would embrace it, we would enjoy it. But, alas, Sarah Phelps is not that person.

I must admit I did like the new version of And There Were None scripted by Phelps, but after enduring her sledgehammer and loudspeaker adaptations of The Witness for the Prosecution (though it had some moments, but mostly in acting/directing department, not the script), Ordeal by Innocence (bad in every possible way) and now this atrocity (the worst of the lot), I wish she would move on to write editorials for Guardian and leave adaptations of poor Agatha Christie to someone with more talent, subtlety and sense of humour.

One of the most insufferably boring and humorless disaster films ever committed to celluloid. Makes admittedly mediocre and predictable rival volcano movie - Dante's Peak- look like a masterpiece. It's not even camp or scary and almost every actor is unbearably annoying (though the teenage daughter of the main character that behaves like a 6 year old takes the cake as one of the most annoying children in the history of film). At least in the 70s they used to have funny fashions, campy dialogues and all-star casts. One drank Ava Gardner is worth more than the entire cast and crew of this film combined.