I finished watching the recent BBC miniseries of War & Peace on Monday. It's a very good adaptation of Tolstoy's novel, of the quality you'd expect from Andrew Davies, the man responsible for the BBC adaptations of other classic works including Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Doctor Zhivago, Bleak House, and both the original and recent House of Cards series.
It's long, at over six hours, but (I know my recollection of the novel isn't exactly total recall) it doesn't seem to have the sheer scale of events in the same depth and detail as Tolstoy was able to tell them, and the same goes for characters. It was something I partly expected, but it would be interesting to read the book again this summer and then watch the series a second time to see if going in with all events fresh in my mind would make a difference, and this is something I intend to do.
I also began – and nearly finished – the fifth season of The Wire with the commentaries on six of the episodes, so there are two left to watch tonight. As with the previous seasons, the commentaries involve a good mix of writers, directors, editors, and actors, so there is a healthy variety of information being imparted, and varying degrees of entertainment – there is one with Dominic West in which he and the other actor spend a lot of time laughing about the dialogue being spoken and the quality of the breasts on show! It isn't the most illuminating one, but it's quite funny to listen to highly trained and respected actors reduced to smutty minded schoolboys!
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