damage

Damages: The Complete First Season
$49.95
I started watching Damages when it aired on tv, but I tuned out because I knew watching the episodes a week apart I was missing subtleties. I started again when it came out on dvd, and I'm so glad I watched it this way. The show is the smartest and most riveting show on television. Every frame, every line, and every scene matters. Every character will surprise you. It's visually stunning. A word of warning: you won't want to stop watching, so wait until you have a weekend to devote to this fantastic show.

Damages: The Complete First Season [Blu-ray]
$79.95
This show is superb, definitely one of the best I've ever seen.
The 4 stars are due only to the Blu-Ray Ray picture that is indeed good, but
could've been better. It's an average BD transfer.
Back to the show: There's not even one line, one scene that doesn't matter.
Every single minute of this show matters, reveals something, it can not be missed
or skipped unlike other shows. It seems to be made only of Highlight moments.
If you don't like shows that take to long to get into the facts and to asnwer
all the doubts and ? points, you'll deeply love this one here.
It doesn't keep on hold for 10,15, 25 episodes to show or answer something, like Lost.
For me, it's one of the best ever made and ever aired.

Damage
$24.98
Louis Malle's "Damage" is not the movie that launched Jeremy Iron's career as our reigning upper-crust sex pervert. That would be David Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers" shot 5 years before this film. Mr. Irons would follow this performance with turns in "M. Butterfly" and "Lolita", cementing his reputation as the actor most willing to go to the dark side of sexual perversion, a journey his characters never return from in one piece, if they survive at all. When I read Josephine Hart's 1991 novel of the same name, I wondered idly who could possibly play the leads and seeing Irons here, his casting is a no-brainer. There are very few actors who can pull off the tricky combination of aristocratic breeding and sexual depravity, but this is Irons' stock-in-trade.

When we first meet Dr. Stephen Fleming, he is a respected, high-ranking member of Parliament, with a lovely home complete with servants and an equally handsome family. Apart from feeling inferior to his father-in-law, who is the real source of the family affluence, Stephen's life seems about perfect in every conceivable way, his political star destined to rise even higher. But Stephen's a restless man; despite all his successes, he's wrestling with a mid-life crisis, at loose ends in a career that his ambitious wife wanted for him more than he wanted it himself. He is ripe for a Perfect Storm.

Enter the storm in the form of Anna, the dark and mysterious beauty who introduces herself to Stephen at a cocktail party. The two exchange an immediate frisson of carnal recognition, and Stephen is lost. The supremely inconvenient fact that Anna is dating and soon to be engaged to Stephen's son do not stop this pair from embarking on a torrid, wildly inappropriate, ultimately tragic sexual affair. Anna is damaged, she tells her new lover, and therefore dangerous. The 'damage' stems from the adolescent loss of her brother, in whose death Anna was either directly or indirectly complicit--that is for the audience to judge. Anna is not engaging in false advertising here, but her besotted lover does not heed what she says and stay away from her, to the detriment of everyone his life touches.

As Anna, Juliette Binoche has the more difficult, more unsympathetic role. Anna is an enigma, and enigmas are more easily explained on the page than onscreen, where a reader can get into a character's head. Binoche's Anna does a lot of unsettling stone-faced staring meant to be mesmerising, I guess, but despite her austere beauty which captures Hart's physical descripton of Anna closely enough, something vital has been lost in translation. Binoche's Anna lacks the force of any sort of vitality or spirit; for Malle it is enough that she just look beautiful and tortured. Binoche is very attractive indeed, but in the end, her face alone (and her propensity for wearing black stockings) is not sufficient explanation for all that transpires here. Is Anna a completely amoral self-serving Jezebel out to dismantle a happy family and betray all sorts of trust just because she can, being so irresistible, or does the greater share of blame fall on the men who singlemindedly (or using a lesser head) pursue the forbidden fruit she seems to offer? Whichever you believe, the book offers a more substantial portrait of a complicated woman than the one Binoche offers here.

This is essentially a two-actor showcase, and just about every inch of both actors is on display, particularly Irons. Some of the love scenes are unintentially hilarious; if I'm not wrong, Binoche and Irons may have actually invented several new lovemaking positions, none of them elegant to watch. Miranda Richardson as the wronged wife and Rupert Graves as the wronged son/fiance bring memorable poignancy as the collateral damage in this doomed affair. Even as this movie sickens, you will be unable to look away until the inevitable derailment.

Damage
$15.00
I've seen the movie twice but hadn't read the book until now. Comparing the movie to the book, I'm pleased how they are not so different in structure and plot yet I find the book much better. One thing that I am most surprised about is that Damage is Josephine Hart's first novel. Otherwise, I would have laid more harsh criticism of the book. Really, the book is well-written, and it contains great choice of words while the dialogues are beautifully thought up. I like the feel and the atmosphere of the English high class through the dialogues, actions, thoughts, and attitudes. However, I am still disappointed, as I was in the movie, in the lack of passion and chemistry in the relationship between Anna Barton and...uh....(you know, I was thinking of the characters and how easily I knew the names of them, but I rattled my brain one night for what was the name of the main character and couldn't remember; later, I looked up in the book and couldn't find it; and finally, I looked up online to find the name, and it turned out to be that the main character has no name. It is just so funny.). Anyway, back to Anna and her lover, I remain unconvinced in their love for each other and how they show zero development of their relationship, only just a robotic feel for each other. I think if that part was better developed, then the book certainly would receive five stars from me. However, one could make a very good argument that the story was told primarily from the main character's point of view. That may be a very fine excuse to relieve my criticism. Nevertheless, the story, if cold and passionless, is quite first-rate and very rationally explained. Another thing which I love about the book which almost never happens in books and movies is the details in the aftermath, especially how the main character took care of the affairs and what did he do. This is something that is notoriously untold in stories because people naturally assume when things happen, nothing more is further explored. So, kudos to Josephine Hart for it. As for the shocking parts of the story, I must admit that I am just too desensitized to them because there have been a lot of worse crap in the past decade which have appeared on television, movies, news, and the internet. All in all, Damage is an impressive book which led to an impressive film, and to pick either, I would go with the book.