True, this is character over spectacle, but characters count
359328
Granted, the budget on these television movies is such that the spectacle of battles during the Napoleonic War are reduced to dozens of soldiers on each side rather than massed formations of thousands of troops.  But if these adaptations of Bernard Cornwell's novels were given the big screen treatment so that the battles sequences met our expectations we would certainly not be in double-figures with regards to the number of movies made to date.  Consequently, "Sharpe's Eagle," the second in the series (but the first novel), sacrifices spectacle to focus on characters, which is fine because that is what this series is about.

For his second mission Lt. Richard Sharpe (Sean Bean), is sent with his Rifles to join the South Essex.  The battalion is run by the incompetent Sir Henry Simmerson (Michael Cochrane), who, along with most of his officers, turn their collective noses up at Sharpe having risen up through the ranks.  There are a couple of notable exceptions, one is Major Lennox (David Ashton), an officer Sharpe remembers for his distinguished service in India and Captain (Gavin O'Herlihy), who hails from Virginia, who play pivotal roles in what is to happen.  The problem is that Sharpe has to fight his war on two fronts, not only worried about the French in front but also the other officers, who are looking for a chance to stab him in the back (literally).

Another key part of this story has to do with how the South Essex have never been in battle and there are a couple of nice sequences with Sharpe and his Rifles prepare the troops for their baptism under fire.  Unfortunately, the incompetence of their leaders results in a disaster during what should have been a simple mission to destroy a bridge when the South Essex lose their colours, which is not a bad thing of monumental proportions.  The need to regain their honor and the unspoken promise Sharpe makes to a dying man to capture one of the Imperial Eagles, touched by Napoleon himself, that sit atop the French standards set up the final part of the story.

The climax of "Sharpe's Eagle" is the Battle of Talavera, one of the bloodiest of the war and the one for which Sir Arthur Wellesley (David Troughton) becomes Lord Wellington.  Of course the cowards run to live another day and brave young soldiers die, but such is war.  As many have indicated, all we get is a sketch of the battle, which suffers in comparison to the historical details Cromwell provides in the book.  But the best moments in this movie are those of character, such as when Sharpe proves repeatedly he has more of a sense of honor than the strutting peacocks who call themselves gentlemen and when Major Hogan (Brain Cox) gives an officer some idea of why challenging Sharpe to a duel would be suicide.  Throughout the movie Hogan gets all of the good lines, while most of Sharpe's best moments involve intense looks at the objects of his displeasure.

"Sharpe's Eagle" also makes excellent use of a song sung by the British soldiers throughout the episode, especially by one young tenor.  There is a sense in which these movies are more about the men serving in the British army during the Napoleonic Wars than about the officers, which is as it should be.  The relationship between our hero and both Patrick Harper (Daragh O'Malley) and Teresa (Assumpta Serna) continue to evolve as do the plots to get rid of Sharpe.  Clearly there are elements here to be continued, but that is the primary attraction.  There are well over a dozen of these Sharpe movies and we can watch these early ones knowing that there is a long haul to enjoy.
3976587
While It is not easy to get into the heroic but ultimately tragic odyssey of Franz Biberkopf,  the story draws you in.  This kaleidoscopic picture of the Berlin of the late 1920s portrays in great detail the social stresses and structures of the late Weimar Republic, with hints at the margins of the rise of the National Socialists, the still born birth of German Communism and the general moral corruption of the people and the times.

Franz Biberkopf has just been released from Tegel Prison,  where he has served four years for killing his girlfriend Ida.  No hint from the text as to why the sentence was so short,  but the indications are that it was a crime of passion,  and so manslaughter must have been his sentence.  The overly emotional Biberkopf is determined to go straight, but he is not psychically equipped to stay on that course.  The picture of him is a sympathetic one,  even as we see him falling in with thieves,  becoming a pimp and getting himself implicated (wrongly, I must add)  in the death of yet another woman,  the good hearted prostitute Mitzi,  f/k/a Sonia, nee Emilie.  Identity is not a sure thing in this world.  While we see Franz's decline and fall,  to the distress of his friends in the demimonde in which he is enmeshed,  he also seems to grow in some sort of moral stature.  He is a man for all that and tries to do the right thing even as he inevitably fails.

His love for Mitzi and attraction to his friends is used cynically against him by the Pum gang, Luders,  the evil Reinhold and  others also fighting for a toehold on life in the Babylon Berlin of the doomed times.  Doblin was a doctor,  with expertise in psychiatry, and his understanding of his characters has a decided psychiatric bent,  much more observational than clinical,  but it adds to the richness of the portrait of Franz and the entire canvas of characters.

While I would not put this on my list of the Great 100 books as The Guardian did,  it is good indeed,  and there are echoes and correspondences with the work of many other writers whom Doblin matches in ability, at least in this his masterpiece.  We have echoes of the newsreel technique of Dos Passos in USA;  the urban walkabout of Joyce in Ulysses;  the emotional farrago of giants tilting against each other for the sheer hell of it that we see in Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities.  Mixed in with this is reliance on the Bible;  folk songs; popular music; marches; and the noises, sounds and melodic harmonies of nature wild and tamed in this jungle of a city.

It is not a totally easy read,  and the psychological shifts that Franz and other characters undergo are not completely explicable,  or to be understood as such.  Doblin does not tidy up the messy picture of human behavior that he serves up to us.  But it feels authentic,  and while ultimately depressingly sad,  it's well worth the reading.
1866788
Characters and scenes are described in such a way as to seem reality in a universe just out of reach
3706451
Too many characters at times, but a really good read.
1170665
Though the story lines are not complex, the characters and performances are rich and fully satisfying. Perhaps it is because of the everyday kinds of experiences portrayed here that we get to follow people rather than plots in such an engaging way.
2174262
It makes no sense to worry over the niceties of plot or character; this is a big storm picture and on that score the creators did a fine job. The scenic design is excellent, the action is exciting, the actors suitably heroic, there are some barking dogs for the dog people and a pack of wolves in the heart of NYC to remind people that Wall Street will survive any crisis. There is even a bit of political correctness to remind the audience of which Party they should have voted for to avoid all these trouble (though. since there the message is covert. nobody should get steamed up. I enjoyed the surface, which was the heart of the piece, and pretty much ignored any clutter which got in the way. There is a good chance you will enjoy it, too; always provided that you resist searching for profundity.
949155
I think some people are reading into this movie a bit much.  There is no overarching social commentary.  Think of this as Watchmen Redux.

The point of Watchmen is to take comic books out of their rarefied world and place them in a real-world context.  If superheroes existed, what would their economic situation be?  What would their politics be?  *Super* strips out the politics and the social commentary but leaves the delusion and the violence.

I tend to think that violence in movies is a bit of a cop-out.  If you can't move your audience through emotional involvement with believable characters sketched in depth, you can always toss in some violence and get the audience to bray.  Here, though, the violence is amped up to such a degree that it actually amounts to something novel and startling.  Ellen Page's go-for-broke performance and the hilarious Christian superhero comic add to the movie's crazed exuberance.
2261078
So much attention to detail, fine acting is mesmerizing
612276
One sign of a well-crafted character is that the reader comes to care about that character with more than the detachment typical of fiction.  Martha Grimes is one of a few talented authors who can create such characters seemingly at will, not only the repeating theme characters such as Richard Jury and Melrose Plant, but those whose appearance is abbreviated to the confines of a single volume.
This Grimes does in the person of a young lady named Carrie Fleet.  She, and the events surrounding her mysterious origin, constitute the central structure of the Deer Leap.  Among other things, Carrie loves animals, and detests a local laboratory that engages in animal testing of consumer products.  It is the graphic nature of Grimes' description of this that has put some readers off; however, it should be emphasized that Grimes has not jumped onto a PETA soapbox here.  These scenes are tightly and economically written, and are necessary to the plot and especially to its harrowing denouement.  Without giving too much away, it is in the resolution of these circumstances that we discover to our surprise that we care about certain characters perhaps more than we thought we did, and it is this resolution that makes The Deer Leap perhaps the most poignant of the Richard Jury series.  The reader may curse Grimes for having gotten to him or to her, and that is one sign of a superb performance in authorship.
This is a necessary continuation of the Jury series in other ways as well, for example, along the way we get to discover why Melrose Plant now carries a cosh instead of the more stylish sword-cane he used to carry.  And that is really all this reviewer can squeeze in without giving away the surprises.  Once a reader has finished The Deer Leap he or she will not be able to read any of the Richard Jury series quite the same way again.
2665182
You often hear from actors that villains are more challenging to portray than those characters that are inherently good, because unless the character (and the movie) is utterly campy, they need to be complex enough in order for the audience to be interested in them.

The same holds true in booksI'd imagine that at times, creating "bad" characters might pose more of a challenge, since in order to keep the reader's attention (and perhaps at least a little sympathy), the character has to be more than just evil. If that truly is the case, Caroline Kepnes did an excellent job in her new book You, because she hooked me completely on (and even had me rooting for) a character who did completely odious things.

The day that Guinevere Beck walks into the New York City bookstore where Joe Goldberg works, he is instantly smitten, by her sexiness, her intellect, and her sense of humor. It doesn't take long for Joe to convince himself that Beck is the one meant for himand all he needs to do is convince her of that fact. He does his research (some of it is actually legitimate) and he begins to understand what makes Beck tick, and he plots his course for how he can get her to fall for him.

While Beck is attracted to, and intrigued by, Joe, she is far more complex than he realizes, and there are a number of obstacles that stand in the way of a potential relationship. There's her occasional not-quite-boyfriend Benji, and her needy best friend Peach, for starters. And she has issues. But none of this detracts Joe from pursuing his goal of a happy ever after with Beck. No matter what he has to do.

This is a book about the fine, sometimes blurry line between love and obsession, and how nothing is quite what it seems. It's both a fascinating social commentary and a true page-turner about infatuation, and not letting anything stand in the way of what you believe is your destiny.

You is (the grammarian in me winced when putting those two words together in a sentence) truly a testament to Kepnes' exceptional talent, because in lesser hands, you wouldn't care about Joe's pursuit of Beck beyond being troubled by it. But there are times when you can't quite figure out which character is more unsympathetic, and times when you're actually rooting for Joe to win Beck over. (Other times, not so much.)

I really enjoyed this book in a can't-look, can't-look-away type of way. I thought the story was a bit more drawn out than it needed to be, but I was utterly fascinated (and repulsed) by Kepnes' characters. This is one book I'll be thinking of for a long while...
681635
the writers hone in and articulate people's actions and to some degree their motivations.  fascinating stuff, even if sometimes the underlying  structure (rags to riches to rags to riches) is all over the place.  but wait...a lot of life is like that.
2339080
Although interesting at times, there is so much that says "yeah right" about this.  The main character is made out to be just a snot nosed kid, but then pulls off feats of incredible wit to save the day.  This is why I rated it a 3 star rating.
4381029
Gilmore as a character is someone you like immediately. The complexity of all the other interacting characters really make you think this is a true story.
4224306
The book reads more like a play than a novel, with a large cast of characters adding their perspectives and experiences of life and death to an overall chorus.  Some reviewers who didn't like the book might not have read many plays in the past.  The writing style creates a tone and ambience that eventually yields a feeling of powerful transcendence and wisdom as the characters reach their moments of catharsis.  The last "act" is incredibly moving and has an almost cinematic quality to it. You have to accept that you will be reading dialog from many characters and have to allow their voices to build up to something.  As in a play, there are few descriptions, few concrete details.  These emerge through the dialog.
1497144
There is a timelessness to the characters, their motives and actions.
485746
The staging is amusing. In fact, I was slightly shocked at the beginning where the depths of the Rhine is represented by a hydro-electric dam and those Rhine-maidens become "call-girls". Yet, in some strange way, the production works. And it grows on you with each successive viewing.
The direction of Patrice Chereau is fluent. Indeed, it's so fluent that one feels that the 2.5 hour work lasts only for slightly more than an hour. Maybe it's because Chereau's clever direction (and Brian Large's wonderful video direction) made viewers focus on the dramatic strengths of this opera. Or maybe the staging is so full of interesting (and dramatically valid) strokes that one is totally engrossed by the viewing experience. The performances of the singers are fine, too.
Despite initial reservations, I must say I like it a lot now.
1303755
This story of intertwined lives in Europe's run-up to and experience of World War II is a powerful character study. The plot device of a valuable jewel with the power to protect the owner, but devastate those around the owner, to me symbolized the struggles of all those immersed in war and deluded by the seduction of war as a means to an end. The title reflects the pervasive theme of blindness throughout the books. Virtually all the characters exist in a state of blindness to various aspects of their conditions and beliefs. There is one possible exception, a character referred to as a giant who seems able to see through the faade of propaganda and unreasonable hope of the nave in order to find an optimal path to, as best as he can, protect himself and those he respects.  The writing is very satisfying and engaging. The pace keeps the reader turning pages. The texture of subplots and secondary characters and antagonists add both realism and interest from start to finish.  A minor quibble was the authors decision to jump around in time. If found this distracting and unnecessary, but tolerable. The fabric of endings among the surviving characters delivers what I regarded as a well-grounded picture of how total war finally plays out, not unlike the way a wave washes toward shore with force and fury, but retreats, having affected every grain of sand in some way, yet leaving the overall pattern of reality not so terribly unlike the way it was before the wave hit.  This is a good read, more character-based than action, but with enough action to provide satisfaction at more than one level.