Connick, who was among Idol's most engaging mentors in past seasons, is even more adept in this new role, and the chemistry on the current panel is at least on par with the more celebrated Voice cast. As Idol wraps its auditions this week before heading to Hollywood, I find myself looking more forward to the actual competition than I have in years.
Directed with aplomb by Mat Whitecross, who periodically decides, in the course of this four-hour feast, to stop making a movie about a man and instead make a Bond movie, Fleming is the kind of movie that winks at you constantly and you never get annoyed by the intimations.
The Bond stuff is, on the whole, more enticing than Ann and Ian’s psychological pas de deux, which skirts up against real issues--and rape fantasies--before giving them a gauzy gloss of true love.
Despite its troublesome subject, the series succeeds, moderately, in letting you know that it knows that Bond, as his creator conceived him, is a relic, and that Fleming's pulp-novel aspirations are worth skewering.
With fine supporting players like Anna Chancellor as Fleming’s wartime superior, Second Officer Monday, and Rupert Evans as Ian’s brother Peter, this four-part series makes us care about people whose fate neither we nor they can easily summarize.
If only writers John Brownlow and Don Macpherson focused more on Fleming's wartime spy-jinks than on his extended mating dance with the already married and cheating Ann.
The performances here are all good, and the chemistry between Cooper and, particularly, his lovers is palpable.
Their [John Brownlow and co-writer Don Macpherson's] saga is so vividly shaded, even minor characters resonate.
Fleming’s life could have used an editor; the four-part series feels repetitive and should have been cut in half.
Une biographie très romancée de l’auteur de James Bond : on se demande sans cesse ce qui est plus ou moins vrai, plus ou moins faux, éxagéré ou à la limite, plus ou moins caricaturé ! Cela dit, hormis les effets numériques qui font de la peine, cette mini-série en 4 épisodes est bien agréable, elle se laisse regarder comme un vrai roman… Ian Fleming, héros de la guerre secrète, grande gueule, (in)novateur, homme à femmes ou mythomane opportuniste veinard issu d’une famille de la grande bourgeoisie ? C’est là sans doute toute la contradiction de celui qui voulait être James Bond, je suppose. Bref, on y croit pas trop mais c’est fort divertissant et bien mené.
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