Okay so I was watching the new adaptation on ITV, and well it was pretty bad.
They got newcomers to play the lead characters. In their favour I must say that at least they didn't swallow their lines like most newcomers. But the inability to act was the downside.
The bad guy was played by Sam Neill, which was good, but they had him twirl his moustache, which was so excruciatingly cliched that it wasn't funny.
Must say that the family that took Yuri Zhivago in were well done. Really sweet like the Weasleys.
One character gets a sword-cut down his face, yet doesn't scar. Dear whoever the director was, much though you may not want to disfigure the actor who has to do a lot of acting later on, if they could do it without impairing the acting in 1958 (or whenever DZ the film was filmed) then I'm sure you can now.
The other main problem was that I dislike the characters of both Yuri Zhivago and Lara. I really didn't think they were good enough for the people they married.
They both married these really nice sweet people and then cheat on them. Even if, as my mother says, it was a matter of true love over tender feelings, I still think it's a spectacularly shitty thing to do.
My mother meanwhile was carping about the language not being suitably old style. I said it wouldn't have sounded old style way back in the when, but Mum said it wasn't the style, it was the modern idioms used and the sentance construction she didn't like.
So yeah, we had fun ripping it appart.
