Boringly shallow story
Well-treaded territory (Think Geoffrey Rush's take on Peter Sellers) about a horny dude that doesn't gain my interest or sympathy. Great acting and decent directing, especially the cast.
A real shame to sit through.
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she's all over the old man?
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You mean she talked to him(about her similarity to his dead wife)? It was nice to see Valarie Karprisky. She's aged well.
The story was about how absurd a life can be, what Mount-Stuart kept referring to as "luck" (good or bad). He had some dreadful things happen that made his life a net-minus. If only that V2 rocket had overshot F&L. Things happen.
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Well, you didn't really prove the script to be mediocre. The only thing you really proved was that it was strange that Mounstuart remained incarcerated for so long. Just because it's the norm for people of his background to have a Spanish Christian name doesn't mean he can't be Christened Logan. Hardly makes it a bad programme.
Well, some people DO live such mad lives, and most people's lives are influenced by good and bad luck. Yes, it's exaggerated, but it's drama, drama is often about the ordinary and extraordinary combined. It's also about more than just plot.
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I've only seen the first ep of this series. Was curious about other people's take on it. The OP of this thread comes close to my own thinking. Which is:
I don't like this character. I don't like the entire premise of the story, which seems to be, "Life happens to us in random ways over which we have no control. Pity us poor humans." Bleh!
This guy makes one bad choice after another, mostly from selfishness and an assumption that he deserves something special from life just for being him.
How can a character like that be anything other than boring??? I wish Matthew Macfaydden weren't in this. He's a wonderful actor and I don't like to think of him making such a poor script choice.
Nomad
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=97645771496
Yes, that's exactly right.
Now, this character's selfishness, however, doesn't stop after Episode One, but spreads and multiplies unbearably. Before it's all over, he'll attack employees at the publishing firm, and everyone from nurses to the minister in the hospital.
Well, even the characters who might have made the program somewhat interesting and entertaining are ruined here. Kim and Gillian are two of today's finest actresses, but they are unable to rescue this travesty, in what now becomes probably their worst performances.
So, this entire production becomes so unpleasant, distasteful, and painful to watch that it is completely intolerable to last through the final curtain. They don't even show the handsome minister without blurring him in the backdrop when Logan attacks him.
"Any Human Heart" should be entitled "No Human Heart" because it demonstrates a complete waste of talent, not to mention the viewer's time, with a horrible screenstory and negative direction.
"Life is never easy for those who dream." -- Robert James Waller
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I think it's too facile to say that my dislike for this show is because I don't like selfish protagonists. Nor do I much like your left-handed slap here: "...other than those in which we have to fall in love with selfless heroes amid the sound of sappy music." You don't know that much about any of us here to imply what we would like. Moreover, it's not an either/or sort of thing.
One of the features of really good fiction, whether it's in a book, a film or a play, is that the author gets the audience engaged with the characters on some level...even the reprehensible characters. A really good and recent example of that would be the Swearengen character on Deadwood. A meaner, nastier, more self-serving SOB is hard to imagine. He feeds people to pigs, after all! Yet, we're drawn to him because all those things are mixed up with a humanity that's hard to dismiss.
Some may think otherwise, but I think Macfaydden's character in Any Human Heart fails in that most fundamental of things...to make me care about him. Whether this is the fault of the author, the director or the actor is a mystery, as it often is.
Nomad
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=97645771496
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You have expressed exactly the way I feel. I recorded the episodes but had so little interest that I didn't bother watching the last one until months later, as I was cleaning out the DVR. Why did I keep watching at all? Because I thought the acting was excellent, the scenery was beautiful and kept my attention, it sounded like an interesting story, and I couldn't believe that there wouldn't be more to it than there was.
shareI view LMS (having read the book and seen the telly series) a little like I view Charles in Brideshead. In Brideshead, although Charles is the lead, he is almost merely a device through which we encounter the other characters and what happens between them.
Does LMS have to be likeable? Selfishness and poor decision making is not uncommon in the average being. It's a jolly good read that I feel lost its way somewhat around the New York period.
I agree with the OP. It was, for the most part, a big yawning bore about a selfish, shallow person. I was not drawn into the story at all and only watched all 4 episodes because a very good friend of mine put it in his top 3 British telly dramas of all time! How bizarre is that?
I suggest he hasn't seen much British telly drama if this is the best he can come up with!
I gave it a 4.
How bizarre is that?
It's most bizarre that someone would sit and watch OVER FOUR HOURS of "a big yawning bore" and then, instead of switching it off, come on to IMDb and trash it. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think it's stupid as well as bizarre. share
I agree with you, thbryn. Many things in life are based on luck and while we have choices about some things, some are entirely out of our hands. How we react to these things we can't control, like the war or a death of a loved one, or an illness, is up to us. Everyone handles them differently. We can;t know what it is like to walk in someone else's shoes. This program shows us a man whose life is driven by his luck and his choices, good or bad.