jcprimeau

If you want to really appreciate these stories in the way the author Alf Wight intended, this is the version to watch, not the boring new adaptation.

The first few seasons are just so enjoyable. Unfortunately, it went downhill in the later seasons with the exit of Tristan and the replacement of Helen, but there are plenty of great episodes in these earlier seasons.

The actors in this are uniformly great, between Robert Hardy and Peter Davison having the more flashy parts, and Christopher Timothy in the lovable and effectively played main character.

The life of the Yorkshire Dales and the farmers are excellently rendered and, while we are often moved by the stories that don't always have happy endings, the treatment is never overly sentimental.

Many actors have been trying to shift to being directors and Bradley Cooper is one of those. He clearly wants to be taken seriously as a director as can be witnessed by the black and white sequences taking place in Bernstein's youth and another scene where Bernstein and his wife are talking in their backyard, shot from a long distance with the view blocked by a fence.

Many characters in this film are real people, which can be discovered by carefully examining the cast list. This includes such music greats as Aaron Copland and Serge Koussevitzky, but does Cooper tell us who those people are? Oh no! Viewers are assumed to be either experts in all facets of Bernstein's life, or to not really care about who they are seeing on screen (in which case he could just have used fictitious or composite characters). There are many other people parading in this film at various points who were important in his life, but again no clues are given as to who they are or why they are there.

The most glaring example of Cooper's pretentious and ineffective style for me was the Malher symphony performance taking place in a church. Now, it's not that unusual for concerts to be given in churches, so I didn't get the particular significance of this event until I researched it afterwards and found that this performance was given shortly after President Kennedy's assassination. Cooper could have given a hint of this at least, by showing the date for instance, but no. As a result the poignancy of that event is wasted.

Bernstein's children are shown to some extent but they don't add anything of interest. The only saving grace of this film is Carey Mulligan's performance as his wife, which was note-perfect.

Otherwise you can learn something about Bernstein's life by watching this, but only after doing some subsequent research.

Chico & Rita is a great love story set in pre-revolutionary Cuba with incursions in New York, Las Vegas and a few other places. I thought the choice of making this as an animated film was particularly interesting: it's unexpected and yet works really well. There was a lot of attention to detail in depicting the Cuba of the period and other locations as well (e.g. The sparsely developed Las Vegas of the 1950s).

The music is a real treat in this feature, including Cuban mambos as well as jazz and even some classical. Again a lot of research must have gone into representing real musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Woody Herman, who are weaved with the fictitious characters of the film.

One small quibble is the voice of the female lead which, while pleasant and well suited for the softer numbers, didn't seem strong enough to be that of a singing star of that period.

The relationship between the two main characters maintains interest throughout and the main supporting character (Chico's friend and manager) is also well drawn.

Highly recommended, in particular for latin music and jazz lovers.