Very Cool!!!
... View MoreClever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.
... View MoreExcellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
... View MoreThis movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.
... View MoreBenedict Cumberbatch is brilliant as Patrick Melrose. I must confess that in the middle of the first episode I considered not watching anymore as it is a very distressing issue however I am glad I did. This series touches on many issues and speaking out against what is wrong and defending children at all costs is paramount.
... View MoreSuperbly scripted drama, definitely not an advert for drink or drug abuse, harrowing and at times painful to watch, yet surprisingly touching and hilarious in places. Benedict Cumberbatch absolutely acts his socks off, surely he is one of the finest actors of his generation. In the final episode he achieved something very rare indeed, I forgot I was watching Benedict Cumberbatch and that the events causing him such pain had not actually happened to the actor. A slight watering of the eyes occurred for thIs chap, such was the intensity of the performance I was watching. Glorious.
... View MoreSuch brilliant acting. Especially in episode 1, Benedict Cumberbatch is playing a drug addict so genially, one is at awe at his acting talent. Stunning casting overall. I appreciate the educative side of the series, the peak into a family where a child is abused by a paedophile father, the psychological profiles of the perpetrator and his victims. It uncovers tragic happenings that are normally hidden from the eyes of other people. Watching this series made me research more on the subject and on how to spot and help victims. The direction, photography, design, costumes - piece of art!
... View MoreA picky FB friend insists that the TV series, based on Edward St Aubyn's novels, misses "the nuances of upper-class English life." Maybe so... The scenes set in the US--a rich widow's country seat, an East Side funeral home, a drug bazaar down by the old fish market (was that ever even a thing?)--do seem to be taking place in some prestige-soap-opera Neverland, about halfway between Downton Abbey and Naked Lunch. Strangely, only the scenes set at the Melrose family's postcard-perfect villa in the south of France feel like they belong to our world. As is often the case, 'cumberpatch quickly comes to seem like the only possible casting choice. Patrick's a compulsively jokey young man ("lucidity is overrated") who's endured every possible form of child abuse and gone on to abuse every possible substance as an adult. Despite his history, and despite St Aubyn's deadly-serious themes of abuse, addiction, recovery and redemption, much of the series plays like an old-school comedy of manners; Patrick's near-fatal coke binge in the first ep is embellished with cartoony optical FX, and Princess Margaret even turns up during a set-piece banquet scene, perhaps to illustrate St Aubyn's thesis that the fish rots from the head. By the end of the series, the tale of Patrick's personal catastrophe--the offscreen horrors and the drug damage--and the sharp-eyed social satire seem perfectly in balance, and as with Faust at the end of his long ordeal, there's even a hope of redemption for Patrick... if he doesn't f-- that up too. The supporting cast is very good, almost too good in the case of Hugo Weaving and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Patrick's terrifying parents, as well as Pip Torrens (Tommy Lascelles in The Crown) as the most enduring of Patrick's father's hateful old cronies. Anna Madeley is especially refreshing as Patrick's wife (the words "long suffering" don't begin to state the case), one of the few appealing and seemingly undamaged characters.
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