Birdsong (TV)

This TV miniseries irritates the hell out of me. They fancy themselves Anthony Minghella making "The English Patient" or something. Besides gruesome WWI battlefield scenes, liberally littered with broken bodies and spilled bowels, there are long takes of nothing but people staring at each other, muttering a few words that are supposed to be romantic or profound. If it weren't for Richard Madden's minor role in it, I would have given up within the first half hour. Poor Eddie Redmayne. I do like him and don't mind his freckles, but all his endless sad gazing at the camera with his deep-set eyes, accompanied by faint, tinkly soundtrack music, just got me sick and tired after the first dozen times. Oh, the endless, endless weeping! Ugh. The pace is "artfully" ponderous and the scenes are damned repetitive. The characters and plot seemed to have come straight out of trashy French romance novels. The soapy cliches have been exploited so ad nauseum by now that even the trashiest genre fiction writers today would be ashamed to recycle them. I guess only the serious mainstream literary authors, sitting in their musty university English department offices, are not embarrassed to continue to exploit these cliches. Why the fuck are these characters so fucking weepy and hysterical all the time at the slightest provocation? Yet they are supposed to be hardened by war and carnage. This is as bad as Korean TV soap operas. The last straw is that the hero lives to the end! Yay, happy ending! Everyone else dies, on the battlefield, in the trenches, in the tunnels, whatever, but he survives desperate situations over and over and over again. Groan. I am sorry but this kind of storyline can no longer gain the respect of anyone who has gone through A Song of Ice and Fire. Perhaps I should blame GRRM for spoiling my appetite. Once you've tasted the most potent flavors, the watery old crap just won't do.