QED

Christmas DVDs: Merv Bendle

Summer is a great time to catch up on DVD mini-series and feature films. I look forward to watching various historical dramas and series, including Desperate Romantics, which explores at a leisurely pace the aesthetic theories and erotic behaviour of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and their interaction with John Ruskin and his young, unwillingly chaste wife.

I will also be re-watching The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which deals with similar issues in the same period, but from a quite different perspective.

Having recently visited Lyme Regis, it will be fascinating to see it recast for Victorian times. I look forward to enjoying the Sherlock series, which transports the iconic sleuth in the opposite direction to contemporary times.

A trip to the D-Day beaches and the Normandy Battlefields reminded me how good was the Band of Brothers series, and partially explains why I found The Pacific a little disappointing, even if it did recreate the MCG as it was used to accommodate American GIs, as well as illuminate the wartime mores of Australian women, who found much of interest there. I plan to watch both, along with the Australian triumph about the Great War (filmed largely in Townsville), Beneath Hill 60.

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