One of my all time favorites.

Instant Favorite.

hyped garbage

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

The Granada people got it right in 1979 when they set out to film "Brideshead Revisited." They realized that Evelyn Waugh's great novel could not be done justice in a single film of two or even three hours. It had to be made into an extended mini-series. Thus, the great 11-part TV series of 1981 - the first and only great film version of Waugh's novel. Yet, in 2008, BBC Films thought it was time for a remake. The result is this film adaptation. It lasts just over two hours. It skims over or skips characters. It changes the focus, and thus the story. It misses the essence of Waugh's story completely. So, it's more proper to call this a major revision - a revised story based on Waugh's novel. Even Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain and Michael Gambon as Lord Marchmain can't lift this revised story to an acceptable imitation. Apparently, because the story is so profound, BBC films chose to promote this as a remake of the TV series from Waugh' great novel. That being the case, one is led naturally to comparison. Thus, this film fails. Still, for some fair acting by the cast, I give it five stars as though it were a different story entirely. After all, the cast can't be held accountable for the plot. Although Thompson's almost muted performance hints that she may realize she's in a far inferior work that has borrowed a great title.

The grace of non-intervention is the disgrace of intervention. The disgrace of intervention is the disgrace of help.The disgrace of help is the disgrace of no injury. The disgrace of no injury is the grace of injury. The grace of injury is the grace of violence.Violence is intolerable. Grace is inspiring. Inspiring intolerance is uninspiring tolerance. Uninspiring tolerance is the illusion of non-inspiration and the illusion of tolerance. The illusion of non-inspiration is the reality of inspiration and the illusion of tolerance is the reality of intolerance.A reality of inspiration is a history of inspiration, which is a non-history of non-inspiration. A non-history of non-inspiration is a non-experience of non-inspiration. A reality of intolerance is a history of intolerance. A history of intolerance is a non-history of tolerance. A non-history of tolerance is a non-experience of tolerance.The experience of inspiration is the experience of intolerance - the literal experience of being inspired is the literal occurrence of violence.Authority is inspiring - censorship is inspiring.Censorship is the lack of style - the lack of style is inspiring

interesting for cast and not exactly for adaptation itself. because it seems be a run. and the price is, first, the lost of nuances. than, the fall by novel because its competition is not only with the book but with a real good series.solution for a wise verdict is to ignore its source. in this case, all seems be better. a slice from an old world,a cold religious confession, a dominator character, destiny and choices, love story and a bitter return. after its end, for not remain only with memories about a nice film, the decent choice is to read the novel. not for confrontation with the movie. only for use the chance to be part from a seductive, delicate, refined space. and for explore a beautiful literary style.

The impression I got as I saw scenes of this movie unfold before my eyes was something akin to the impression I would get if modern men had put on period dress and then removed their pants and underwear and went strolling around beautiful monuments in the Old World. Not exactly a pleasant thought, but then, this is not a particularly pleasant movie to watch. Julian Jarrold's Brideshead Revisited fails as an adaptation of the novel, fails to tell a coherent story and ultimately fails as a veritable work of cinema.Let's begin with the adaptation. Detractors of this movie compare it unfavorably to the 1981 Granada TV serial, which was extremely faithful to the novel. Defenders plead that such a comparison is unfair, that a 2-hour movie should never be judged by the same criteria as an 11-hour epic. My response is that cinematic adaptations of novels are as a rule miserably inferior to TV-serial adaptations in terms of capturing the author's intended character development, themes and plot pacing. Moreover, on a psychological note, one might find it hard not to take the filmmakers' choice of the same Castle Howard for Brideshead as seen in the 1981 serial as evidence that they WANT us to compare this to the original.If that be the case, they should have been more careful what they wished for. Adaptations are tricky, remakes are even trickier, and anything that calls itself "Brideshead Revisited" is holding itself up to a lofty standard, one that is almost certainly beyond the reasonable scope of standard-length cinema.Unlike Waugh, who intended the novel as an exposition of Catholic life and the Christian struggle, Davies and Brock are both sons of Anglican vicars whose attitudes towards Christianity run from ambivalent fascination to outright hostility, and this shows through in numerous alterations to the story. But why does this vision not hold up on its own? Why can we not forget about the title, and accept Jarrold's film as its own product, merely "inspired by" Brideshead Revisited? The problem is that they preserved enough of the plot framework of the original to end on a more positive, Catholic note, and so it becomes impossible to totally forget the original. As a result, final product feels messy and incoherent: there is no plausible hint as to the real reason why religion could have both the negative and the sympathetic fallout seen in the film. This is not ambivalence: this is the authors setting up a mystery with absolutely no clues to solve it. It's the difference between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dame Agatha Christie, the latter of whom cheats in her mystery novels by giving the detective essential information that the reader does not have, so that the mystery is unsolvable. Such anticlimax is symptomatic of storytellers who do not really understand their craft or who are too lazy to bother to learn.But Christie, at least, understood her subject matter enough to turn out fodder that was good enough to make for amusing and engaging stage ambiance. The same cannot be said for Davies and Brock: to the extent that their screenplay preserves the theme of Catholicism, they get the religion wrong, at several points. Not having the time to dwell on Charles's discovery of the meaning of the aristocratic world of the Marchmains, they reduce his deep love affair with that world to a tawdry lust ball - a lust triangle for sex and a quest for material riches. In so doing, they both overplay the snobbery of the upper classes and aristocrats as though the Marchmains belonged to nothing more than a fixed anachronistic caste, and overestimate the banal impliability of the upper-middle and bourgeois milieux. Brideshead, here, might as well be a museum, the Marchmains A-list Hollywood stars and Charles, a senior executive at Enron.Now, let's turn to the cinematic aspects of the film, since after all movies are all about pictures and sound, right? Well, see my first paragraph for an idea. Another reason this film inevitably suffers by comparison to the 1981 serial is that that one left us with distinctive ideas about how earlier generations might have carried themselves. The pace, the mannerisms and facial expressions and the lighting in the 2008 film are all quintessentially modern. There is no subtlety of movement or of imagery, and the now explicitly homosexual relationship between Charles and Sebastian isn't the half of it. The females at Brideshead look like porcelain dolls, at best. Transitions do not exist: clashing moods and images and overlay one another in succession at a rate that makes a sugary breakfast cereal commercial on 1990s Saturday morning TV look like a leisurely stroll in the park. Lines either are murmured so halfheartedly that the actors' own frustration with the script's stupidity show through, or are belted with such melodrama as to make an American soap opera star blush.All-in-all, the film not only lacks merit as an adaptation of Waugh's novel, but it also lacks merit, PERIOD. It is too short, too shallow, too incoherent, too facile, too ambitious and at the same time too lazy. Find 11 hours to kill and watch the TV serial, or just buy the book. Don't be lazy and rushed to get what's in it.