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Post by francesca on Jan 7, 2011 2:30:16 GMT
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Post by rueful on Jan 7, 2011 2:39:19 GMT
Hahaha, of course!!! That's why she couldn't clutter up the apartment with all her old furniture from Venice (which as i recall blocked the fire escape in the book). It's so she could get up and down it!!!! That would have been a scene i'd liked to have watched - the pair of them hotfooting it down the fire escape!!! ;D Oh, yes, the furniture. It all makes sense to me now!  |
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Post by numbat on Jan 7, 2011 2:56:23 GMT
Frannie, feel free to say anything you like about Jacob and Rachel. This is an open forum after all and you are entitled to your opinion. But maybe try to be a little less rude next time. That is how you started the conversation - the internet equivalent of poking me in the chest with your index finger and getting in my face......... And surely you can't say he'll be left holding the baby, but at the same time say that it has nothing to do with my writing, because it's only in my writing that there is a baby!!! I just have trouble coming to grips with your logic. But i'm walking away now. Topic closed. Hahaha, of course!!! That's why she couldn't clutter up the apartment with all her old furniture from Venice (which as i recall blocked the fire escape in the book). It's so she could get up and down it!!!! That would have been a scene i'd liked to have watched - the pair of them hotfooting it down the fire escape!!! ;D Oh, yes, the furniture. It all makes sense to me now! I wonder if in screenwriting world, the fact that they needed them to have a way to escape was one of the reasons behind her not being as per the book and cluttering up his apartment with her stuff. And of course, they wouldn't want to dirty the beautiful view of Rome by having Aurelio's Mama be anything less than a gorgeous older woman now would they!! ;D |
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Post by jothehat on Jan 7, 2011 9:07:26 GMT
I've watched Vendetta several times now, and I don't know why this just struck me today: So are we supposed to believe that Mama went out the fire escape?! I have to say, I just cannot see that happening. Did I miss something in that scene? I have to admit I assumed they were in the elevator that was going down as Tito and the boys entered the apartment. But she seems like a sensible sort of woman, I'm sure she'd handle the fire escape with aplomb if needs be... |
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Post by numbat on Jan 7, 2011 9:13:51 GMT
I thought so too Jo, but later his son comes in and says that they went out by the fire escape. So it's not really clear.
I'm watching it again tonight so i'll have another look.
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Post by jothehat on Jan 7, 2011 10:07:18 GMT
Ha! Any excuse eh Numbat?
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Post by numbat on Jan 7, 2011 10:12:50 GMT
Hahahaha, i'm actually making my friends watch it tonight, Jo!!!
They are shallow women (much like myself) easily bribed by the promise of cocktails and tiramisu. And they are tolerant of my Rufus obsession having already been made to watch TOTS and T&I.
I think they'll appreciate our beautiful Aurelio!! I mean, what's not to love.........
;D
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Post by dreamer on Jan 7, 2011 12:57:55 GMT
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Post by rueful on Jan 8, 2011 14:12:18 GMT
I think, they didn't show the fire escape because here we have not it, and if there is , it's not like yours. Just some public buildings, schools have them noticeable. Anyway, I wondered too, how had they escaped from the apartment. Thanks for that information, Glo. It's nice to have someone who can explain certain differences to us. I'm copying this review I posted on the Zen webpage thread, since we're trying to be organized (and failing, a bit  ). A discussion board linked on the BBC webpage thedabbler.co.uk/2011/01/transcendent-zen/ starts off with a fantastic review: Last Sunday night’s Aurelio Zen mystery (three episodes on BBC1, Sunday 8pm), Vendetta, was remarkably coherent for the genre. The plots of TV thrillers rarely stack up, even in the ninety-minute-plus format spacious enough to accommodate a comprehensive effort. Even the first and most successful of this particular sub-genre, Morse - despite its excellent acting, setting, dialogue and production values - rarely had a plot that wasn’t at least a little wobbly.
Wallander, the most recent of these efforts prior to Sunday’s Zen, shared Morse‘s qualities but also its often defective plotting. Otherwise Wallander and Zen are very much the same sort of thing: a BBC co-production with European TV companies, destined to play periodically for a decade or two in the policier slot in schedules across Europe and presumably elsewhere. Both use leading actors who can really act, a supporting cast populated by actors of similar quality, and a well-worked script which is beautifully shot on what looks like a rather lavish budget.
Where Wallander seemed to be filtered through colours evocative of its Skåne location (the blues found in its big summer sky and on the edges of a long, LED-lit winter; the yellows of its cornfields, dunes and wooden interiors, both colours strangely echoed in the Swedish flag), Zen uses a palette provided by Caffé Nero (from latte creams to espresso browns). I’m not an aficionado but Zen also surely contains a few nods in the direction of Italian neorealismo cinema of the ’50s and ’60s (not least the retro credits – a treat for typeface connoisseurs).
But similarities aside, Zen achieves, ahem, a higher form of enlightenment. Sunday night’s plot certainly lived up to Buchan’s description of this sort of genre work: ‘where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible’. The difference from most of its counterparts was that, despite its defiance of probabilities, its plot was internally coherent: it made perfect and effortless sense on its own terms. Personally, I find that absent this there can be no suspension of disbelief – everything unravels if the plot doesn’t fit together. My enjoyment of many a Morse and Wallander has been spoiled because I’ve been given an unwelcome reminder that I’m watching a piece of mere TV artifice rather than a world I can get imaginatively lost in.
Sunday’s plot was not just coherent, it was subtle and satisfying: it felt unforced despite the dénouements of plot and sub-plot dovetailing very nicely at the end. But TV producers can take only so much of the credit for this (or blame when it doesn’t work out). Michael Dibdin, the author of the original Zen thrillers, was a master plotter.
He was also a genuinely good writer, his style putting him in a different league from most authors of thrillers. This may explain why his name isn’t as well-known as some lesser writers: originality of expression and plots that make you think don’t always recommend themselves to consumers of genre fiction. As CS Lewis observed (recently quoted here):
The hackneyed cliché for every appearance or emotion…is for [the unliterary reader, i.e. the vast majority] the best because it is immediately recognizable. ‘My blood ran cold’ is a hieroglyph of fear. Any attempt, such as a great writer might make, to render this fear concrete in its full particularity, is doubly a chokepear to the unliterary reader. For it offers him what he doesn’t want, and offers it only on the condition of his giving to the words a kind and degree of attention which he does not intend to give. It is like trying to sell him something he has no use for at a price he does not wish to pay.
Without wishing to claim literary greatness for Dibdin he does tend to give his ‘words a kind and degree of attention’. Admittedly, the Zen series of novels had something of a dip in quality about half-way through, but, rather like Rankin’s, these are thrillers that achieve a quality that can transcend the genre.
What’s more, in their sinister portrait of modern Italy they have a revelatory quality that bears comparison with non-fiction exposés such as Tobias Jones’s Dark Heart of Italy. In fact, one potential failing of the TV series may be – at least on the evidence of the first episode – its portrayal of Zen as rather more heroic than he is in the books: Dibdin’s Italy is short of unalloyed heroism. The gorgeous Rufus Sewell playing him certainly helps at least half the audience warm to the character (periodic sighs and near-swoons from the other end of the sofa were testament to this). His love interest wasn’t bad either: played by an Italian actress, with all that implies (both pictured, top).
Dibdin died three years ago at the age of sixty. He was a real loss. At least his most memorable character is living on, and in some glory.I like this review because so many  ones I've seen have complained about the story--"too slow" or "too difficult"--which is a sad commentary on the audience I guess. Although I disagree that there were no questionable plot points. We've already discussed a couple in the spoiler thread. the weak explanation of Lucia could count as a questionable plot point to people who haven't read the books, and I still want to know if we're supposed to think Mama went out the window! But I think the plot and story were much, much, much better than the complainers are saying it was. This part cracked me up: |
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Post by GreenEyesToo on Jan 8, 2011 14:24:08 GMT
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Post by numbat on Jan 9, 2011 1:20:20 GMT
Rueful, this is my latest take on the "fire escape" issue having watched it for the fourth time.
I think Aurelio and Mama are in fact coming down in the elevator. When Spadola and sons reach the apartment and find them gone, son comes in and says "there's a fire escape" as though that is an excuse for how they got away. But the truth (that they both realise) is that they let them get away, by running up the stairs and not having the sense to meet the elevator at the bottom first.
I think that's why he lays down his gun and has a sit down Mama's chair, because he's in pain and he's tired and he knows that they let Aurelio escape.
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Post by GreenEyesToo on Jan 9, 2011 1:52:13 GMT
Another nice review, from The Observer: Perhaps the most testing challenge that confronts crime drama is how to stay the right side of absurdity. It doesn't matter how good the acting is, or how impressive the location work, a sinking feeling will inevitably set in if the plot is ludicrously unrealistic. So Wallander, for example, may be bathed in naturalism, but it's also bathed in blood, and therefore in the Swedish countryside, where murderers are as rare as coconut palms, belief is the preserve of the credulous.
Happily, there is a place in which a great deal of tireless work – grazie Silvio Berlusconi – has been done to redraft the borders of absurdity, and its name is Italy. It's the ideal environment for crime drama because there's no need to waste valuable time on creating a backstory of corruption and intrigue. Like shady piazzas and crumbling palazzos, it comes with the terrain.
Say what you like, though, about the moral imperfections of the Italian criminal justice system, it does not tolerate physical imperfection. Even with its washed-out, gritty colour, everything and everyone looked exquisitely beautiful in Zen, a lavish new detective series based on Michael Dibdin's novels and set in Rome.
There was not a Taggart or a Lewis in sight. Instead, there was the demon-eyed Rufus Sewell in a suit so watchable it deserved a separate acting credit. Sewell is a versatile performer whose intelligence probably hasn't been given the recognition it deserves. But then it's hard enough to forgive him his physiognomic good fortune without having to add praise on top.
He played Aurelio Zen, a wry cop who is separated from his wife and living with his mother. Zen is possessed of a unique reputation for incorruptibility, though he's not above playing the system if opportunity arises. In the first of three films, he wooed his boss's married secretary (Caterina Murino) with such ingenious passivity that she had to ask if they were going to have an affair. He was also sexually propositioned by a criminal witness, trapped in a flooded cave, twice faced execution, and throughout appeared less ruffled than a man visiting a new barber.
Alongside Sewell, crammed razored cheek by lantern jaw, was a gallery of British male – how to put it? – talent: Greg Wise, Ed Stoppard, Ben Miles and a rare TV sighting of Anthony Higgins. If they all looked as though they'd stepped out of the pages of L'Uomo Vogue, they sounded as though they'd just flown in from Stansted.
Like its stablemate, Wallander, Zen relies on the jarring conceit of sticking a cast of British actors in a foreign setting to play foreigners with British accents. Strangely, it works, perhaps because it's so visually arresting that the ear soon gives up without much protest.
Or at least it works with the men. With the women, it's a different question, because by and large they are Italian. Andy Harries, who runs the company (Left Bank Pictures) that produced Zen (and Wallander), has said that British actresses can't play Italian women because there's something distinctive about the Italian female "form".
It's one of those arguments to which one could raise all manner of intellectual and ideological objections, but the truth is I couldn't remember what any of them were when Murino arrived on screen.
She is not the type of civilian assistant you might occasionally glimpse in The Bill or, come to that, down at your local nick. If I say that Murino was previously best known for playing a Bond girl in Casino Royale, that conveys some idea of her "form", but not nearly enough. Put it this way, she made Sewell look plain. She made him look English.
With all that distracting surface to boast, Zen could easily have been an empty vessel underneath. That it wasn't was due to some temperately judged performances – neither too hot nor too cool – a crisp script, a couple of enjoyable set pieces and a labyrinthine storyline that, thanks to its setting, just managed to stay the right side of absurd.www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/jan/09/zen-above-suspicion-silent-witness-review |
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Post by Petruchio - Good God on Jan 9, 2011 11:13:28 GMT
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Post by kygal on Jan 9, 2011 14:19:09 GMT
Love all the great reviews! Hopefully that means many more Zen episodes.
Mama seems more fit on screen than in the books...I believe she could go down the escape..lol.
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Ems
Mind in the Sew-er
It's the wanting that keeps us alive.
Posts: 198
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Post by Ems on Jan 9, 2011 22:31:32 GMT
Just have one complaint - I don't like the romance between Zen and that girl (I forget her name). I thought after the first episode they'd be together, but it's gone on into the second episode and I find it a bit distracting. It seems to be just flirty looks, one liners and lots of snogging. Could just be me, though I suppose it adds more to the show. But anyway, apart from the romance, I like it more with each episode and I enjoyed this 'case' a lot more than the last one. Funny, clever and well written  |
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