chflindt

This is a staggeringly bad film. Imagine if the Guardian had sponsored some particularly dim 5th-formers to make a movie about the 'class struggle' in the UK. The dialogue...the direction...the characters....the cliches....

I stumbled across this film being shown late on the BBC - who, no doubt - will be working themselves into an onanistic frenzy about its portrayal of 'toffs' out in the sticks, and therefore feel justified in paying out tellytax payers' cash for this tosh.

The views of the English countryside are nice, and if you're a fan of spotting farm machinery parked up in farmyards, you might enjoy about a minute of this film. And the early Land Rover is the most convincing thing in the whole show. But that's it.

Avoid. Please.

Affinity was the television low point of Christmas 2008. It seemed to have been thrown together at the last minute, with jarring editing, terrible sound balances, and a script that seemed to have been put together by a cliché-filled computer. Everything seemed wrong - the men's facial hair, the extras' wooden street-walking, the dreadful music, the sheer repetitiveness (we turned it into a drinking game: one finger for 'walks nervously through prison gates', two fingers for 'walks nervously into cell'; we all got very drunk.) I loathe wobbly-cam shots, trying to watch characters as they bounce around the screen in a haphazard fashion, but occasionally, it can be bearable - Bourne, for instance. 'Affinity' was not the place for wobbly-cams, especially when they are mixed - seemingly at random - with steady shots. I hate to ask it, because he is supposed to have TV's Midas Touch, but is Andrew Davies entering 'Emperor's New Clothes' territory?