01-10-2007, 10:42 PM
01-11-2007, 02:04 AM
Quote:Top, since season 2 is about to start (in the U.S. on the 14th). Supposedly, we get a big set-piece battle scene this time (maybe Philippi?).
Yes indeed, Philippi it is.
The real question: Will Vorinus be with Antony (due to his earlier pledge) and Pullo with Octavian and thus against each other?
Also...
For those in the US who purchase any HBO DVD box set (including Rome Season One) from Best Buy they are throwing in a bonus DVD of the first episode from Season 2. I have it -- but have not yet watched it as I am working my way through Season 1 again.
Perhaps I will watch it before the 14th.
Narukami
01-11-2007, 07:19 AM
That is just teasing!
01-11-2007, 04:59 PM
Quote:That is just teasing!
Guilty as charged. :oops: :? oops:
But I REALLY have not watched it -- yet.
However...
As soon as I do I will let the Legion know.
I am expecting more of the same: Sex, Blood, Screaming and lots of it.
:wink:
Narukami
01-12-2007, 12:23 AM
Quote:But I REALLY have not watched it -- yet.
However...
As soon as I do I will let the Legion know.
I don't want to know anything about the story until I sit down and watch it. Please put the following before anything you post about it:
[size=150:2ojnqlio]SPOILER ALERT!!!![/size]
:wink:
I'm serious.
01-12-2007, 06:45 AM
Quote:Narukami:3f836un6 Wrote:But I REALLY have not watched it -- yet.
However...
As soon as I do I will let the Legion know.
I don't want to know anything about the story until I sit down and watch it. Please put the following before anything you post about it:
[size=150:3f836un6]SPOILER ALERT!!!![/size]
:wink:
I'm serious.
Not to worry my friend -- I already had that in mind.
:wink:
Narukami
01-12-2007, 08:49 AM
Greetings Members of the Legion,
So, I just finished watching the HBO promo copy of Episode One Season II of Rome.
I do not think there is any need for a plot summary -- members of this site know this history (the fall of the Republic) well enough to know where this season is going. Season II starts exactly where Season I ended and deals exclusively with the few days that immediately follow Caesar's death. No surprise there.
There are no real spoilers here, but in honor of Tarbacus and his wish to enter the new season of Rome unsullied as it were, I invoke Spoiler Alert.
MINOR SPOILER ALERT
There is a sub-plot dealing with Vorinus, his children, and the death of his wife. We also see the initial maneuvering between Antony and Octavian and who is already the smarter of the two.
I do not know Roman funeral customs so I can not say if what was shown is accurate or not.
Also...
It is disappointing that the series flys by important events which we hear about, but do not see, like the speeches by Brutus and Antony at Caesar's funeral. Of course, it is hard to match the poetry of Shakespeare, so perhaps the producers of Rome are smart not to try.
END SPOILER ALERT
I think it is safe to say that if you enjoyed Season I you will not be disappointed by the Season II opener, nor, if this episode is any guide, the rest of the season. The tone and the style are, for all intents and purposes, essentially the same as before. Likewise, if you did not enjoy Season I it is very unlikely you will find Season II to be any better.
Finally -- I enjoyed it. Perhaps this is a guilty pleasure, or my tastes are too plebeian. If so then I'm guilty as charged.
I am reminded of an old saying we have here -- Even bad Sci-Fi films are better than no Sci-Fi films. (Yes, I know, some films stretch that to the breaking point and beyond, but generally speaking it holds true.) The same might be said of films about ancient Rome. Even poor films about Rome are better than no films about Rome. There are exceptions to that rule, no argument there, but Rome is not one of them.
Rome Season II will be on HBO this Sunday here in the US.
Narukami
So, I just finished watching the HBO promo copy of Episode One Season II of Rome.
I do not think there is any need for a plot summary -- members of this site know this history (the fall of the Republic) well enough to know where this season is going. Season II starts exactly where Season I ended and deals exclusively with the few days that immediately follow Caesar's death. No surprise there.
There are no real spoilers here, but in honor of Tarbacus and his wish to enter the new season of Rome unsullied as it were, I invoke Spoiler Alert.
MINOR SPOILER ALERT
There is a sub-plot dealing with Vorinus, his children, and the death of his wife. We also see the initial maneuvering between Antony and Octavian and who is already the smarter of the two.
I do not know Roman funeral customs so I can not say if what was shown is accurate or not.
Also...
It is disappointing that the series flys by important events which we hear about, but do not see, like the speeches by Brutus and Antony at Caesar's funeral. Of course, it is hard to match the poetry of Shakespeare, so perhaps the producers of Rome are smart not to try.
END SPOILER ALERT
I think it is safe to say that if you enjoyed Season I you will not be disappointed by the Season II opener, nor, if this episode is any guide, the rest of the season. The tone and the style are, for all intents and purposes, essentially the same as before. Likewise, if you did not enjoy Season I it is very unlikely you will find Season II to be any better.
Finally -- I enjoyed it. Perhaps this is a guilty pleasure, or my tastes are too plebeian. If so then I'm guilty as charged.
I am reminded of an old saying we have here -- Even bad Sci-Fi films are better than no Sci-Fi films. (Yes, I know, some films stretch that to the breaking point and beyond, but generally speaking it holds true.) The same might be said of films about ancient Rome. Even poor films about Rome are better than no films about Rome. There are exceptions to that rule, no argument there, but Rome is not one of them.
Rome Season II will be on HBO this Sunday here in the US.
Narukami
01-12-2007, 12:39 PM
Quote:It is disappointing that the series flys by important events which we hear about, but do not seeSame as in series I. We heard nothing about cvaesar's battles in Spain and then in Greece most was hearsay and gossip in Rome.. Scenes in Egypt were also very short and most shot inside buildings!
Quote:Even poor films about Rome are better than no films about Rome.My thoughts exactly!!!
01-12-2007, 05:13 PM
Today's LA Times ran a review of the new season of HBO's Rome.
Again, no plot points that will come as much of a surprise to anyone who has been watching.
The reviewer does compare the battle between Attia and Servilia as something out of the old Soap Opera Dynasty, and he's right there is quite a bit of soap in this Roman opera. However that is not a surprise -- when the BBC sat down to make "I Claudius" they hit upon the idea of doing it like an American Soap Opera and the form worked beautifully. Granted, the amount of soap may have gone up for this show, but that is the glory of having a bigger budget.
One interesting note: It seems they are going to change actors playing the part of Octavian (passage of time) and they have a photo in the paper of the "older" Octavian with some of his troops.
The Eagle is being carried on horseback by a soldier wearing a regular helmet -- not bare headed or wearing an animal skin. :?
The helmets are the same as last season's. :?
The shields are rectangular scutum, not oval. :?
The soldiers are wearing segmented armor not mail. :?
They are also wearing knee length trousers. :?
Because they are switching actors for Octavian I wonder if perhaps they will end this season at Actium? (Of course, as we all know, I Claudius opens with a celebration marking the anniversary of that battle.) If this indeed is the last season then Actium would seem the right place to end it.
Narukami
Again, no plot points that will come as much of a surprise to anyone who has been watching.
The reviewer does compare the battle between Attia and Servilia as something out of the old Soap Opera Dynasty, and he's right there is quite a bit of soap in this Roman opera. However that is not a surprise -- when the BBC sat down to make "I Claudius" they hit upon the idea of doing it like an American Soap Opera and the form worked beautifully. Granted, the amount of soap may have gone up for this show, but that is the glory of having a bigger budget.
One interesting note: It seems they are going to change actors playing the part of Octavian (passage of time) and they have a photo in the paper of the "older" Octavian with some of his troops.
The Eagle is being carried on horseback by a soldier wearing a regular helmet -- not bare headed or wearing an animal skin. :?
The helmets are the same as last season's. :?
The shields are rectangular scutum, not oval. :?
The soldiers are wearing segmented armor not mail. :?
They are also wearing knee length trousers. :?
Because they are switching actors for Octavian I wonder if perhaps they will end this season at Actium? (Of course, as we all know, I Claudius opens with a celebration marking the anniversary of that battle.) If this indeed is the last season then Actium would seem the right place to end it.
Narukami
01-14-2007, 11:04 PM
LA Times Review of HBO's Rome Season 2
http://www.calendarlive.com/media/photo ... 324384.jpg
Rome' on the brink
The citizens of ‘Rome’ try to find their place in a changing society after the assassination of Julius Caesar.
'Rome'
(Franco Biciocchi / HBO)
By Robert Lloyd, Times Staff Writer
When we last saw our heroes, or whatever they are, centurion cum senator Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) had just watched his wife jump to her death; in fact, he had been about to kill her, having discovered that the child she told him was his grandson was in fact her own. His old friend and fellow soldier Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson) was lighting out for the territories with the freed slave Eirene (Chiara Mastalli), whose fiancé he had recently murdered in a fit of jealousy. And Julius Caesar (Ciarán Hinds, in an appropriately limp performance) was lying on the floor of the Senate, quite dead.
And so we find him, still dead, when "Rome" returns to HBO this Sunday night for a second and reportedly final season of this period soap opera, although there is, of course, much activity around him, as all the survivors try to find their place in the New Rome Order. Though none of its many historically based if not wholly factual characters know it yet, this is the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, to which most of them profess fealty — certainly none of them suspect that the instrument of its transformation into the well-known Roman Empire will be weedy young Octavian (played for a few episodes this season, as last, by Max Pirkis, and thereafter by Simon Woods). Not even he suspects it. But he will make the chariots run on time, later, as Augustus Caesar.
"Rome" is smart, dirty fun. As a co-production of HBO and the BBC, with a largely British cast, it has something of the dry wit of "I, Claudius" but is also soaked in the get-naked-and-cuss explicitness of American premium cable. (It is rather more circumspect in regard to violence, which happens mostly offscreen.)
Whereas the traditional modern attitude toward this material is to at least pretend to make it the occasion for some useful contemporary moral, "Rome" — like its HBO slate-mate "Deadwood" — attempts instead to re-create the social order and prejudices of a gone time in a way that resonates with and plays against our own without exactly judging it. Because the old rules are not ours, the markers by which we usually read a narrative — e.g., murderers will be punished — don't quite work. And because nearly all the adult characters have blood on their hands, it becomes possible to root for any of them, and to sympathize, in some crooked way, with almost the worst of them. While still finding them strange.
We like stories of Rome, I think, because in spite of the intervening centuries we can recognize ourselves there: a technologically superior mercantile and military superpower pressing an enormous thumb upon the Western world, its bustling cities full of bars and restaurants and hot-drink shops and theaters. Positively Dickensian in the way it trains an eye on both the powerful and the poor, "Rome" wants us to see the present in the past — offering cocktail parties, rich girls smoking hemp ("I brought back two sacks from Macedonia sooooo much better than the Italian kind"), a criminals' den that looks like nothing so much as a 1st century BC Bada Bing.
This combining of the remote and the familiar is at the heart of the series and is reflected also in its mix of styles and attitudes: of the real and the fabulous, the historical and the fanciful, the smart and the sensational, the low and the high, the vulgar and the refined. This is perhaps supposed to mirror the Roman world itself, but it's also good show business.
One of the particular pleasures of "Rome" is that of watching something that seems made by people who have taken care to know their stuff — even the stuff they ignore in the name of making their story more like a television show than a docudrama. The historical consciousness extends to the props and costumes and sets; spread across 5 acres at Rome's Cinecittà studios, the re-created city is recognizably Italian in color and texture, rather than the shiny white neoclassical piles that form the Rome of our Hollywoodized imagination. The fact that the streets and houses all seem actually habitable makes the words actors say in them all the more convincing.
There are all kinds of delicious performances here — James Purefoy's loutish, laddish, animal-clever Marcus Antony; Tobias Menzies' upright, tortured Brutus; McKidd's dangerously stiff-minded Vorenus (who will briefly become the Tony Soprano of the Aventine Hill before, in a distinct echo of "The Searchers," heading off to find his kidnapped children); Lee Boardman's hired-knife Timon, who will likely have more to do this season with the arrival of his brother, a revolutionary from Judea.
But they all seem to me strung between the poles of Stevenson's faithful and sensible Pullo, on the relatively good side, and Polly Walker's Atia of the Julii, who carries on a kind of Krystle-Alexis rivalry with Lindsay Duncan's Servilia, on the relatively bad — both of them trying to survive in a dangerous world, both utterly human, for better or worse.
[email protected]
http://www.calendarlive.com/media/photo ... 324384.jpg
Rome' on the brink
The citizens of ‘Rome’ try to find their place in a changing society after the assassination of Julius Caesar.
'Rome'
(Franco Biciocchi / HBO)
By Robert Lloyd, Times Staff Writer
When we last saw our heroes, or whatever they are, centurion cum senator Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) had just watched his wife jump to her death; in fact, he had been about to kill her, having discovered that the child she told him was his grandson was in fact her own. His old friend and fellow soldier Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson) was lighting out for the territories with the freed slave Eirene (Chiara Mastalli), whose fiancé he had recently murdered in a fit of jealousy. And Julius Caesar (Ciarán Hinds, in an appropriately limp performance) was lying on the floor of the Senate, quite dead.
And so we find him, still dead, when "Rome" returns to HBO this Sunday night for a second and reportedly final season of this period soap opera, although there is, of course, much activity around him, as all the survivors try to find their place in the New Rome Order. Though none of its many historically based if not wholly factual characters know it yet, this is the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, to which most of them profess fealty — certainly none of them suspect that the instrument of its transformation into the well-known Roman Empire will be weedy young Octavian (played for a few episodes this season, as last, by Max Pirkis, and thereafter by Simon Woods). Not even he suspects it. But he will make the chariots run on time, later, as Augustus Caesar.
"Rome" is smart, dirty fun. As a co-production of HBO and the BBC, with a largely British cast, it has something of the dry wit of "I, Claudius" but is also soaked in the get-naked-and-cuss explicitness of American premium cable. (It is rather more circumspect in regard to violence, which happens mostly offscreen.)
Whereas the traditional modern attitude toward this material is to at least pretend to make it the occasion for some useful contemporary moral, "Rome" — like its HBO slate-mate "Deadwood" — attempts instead to re-create the social order and prejudices of a gone time in a way that resonates with and plays against our own without exactly judging it. Because the old rules are not ours, the markers by which we usually read a narrative — e.g., murderers will be punished — don't quite work. And because nearly all the adult characters have blood on their hands, it becomes possible to root for any of them, and to sympathize, in some crooked way, with almost the worst of them. While still finding them strange.
We like stories of Rome, I think, because in spite of the intervening centuries we can recognize ourselves there: a technologically superior mercantile and military superpower pressing an enormous thumb upon the Western world, its bustling cities full of bars and restaurants and hot-drink shops and theaters. Positively Dickensian in the way it trains an eye on both the powerful and the poor, "Rome" wants us to see the present in the past — offering cocktail parties, rich girls smoking hemp ("I brought back two sacks from Macedonia sooooo much better than the Italian kind"), a criminals' den that looks like nothing so much as a 1st century BC Bada Bing.
This combining of the remote and the familiar is at the heart of the series and is reflected also in its mix of styles and attitudes: of the real and the fabulous, the historical and the fanciful, the smart and the sensational, the low and the high, the vulgar and the refined. This is perhaps supposed to mirror the Roman world itself, but it's also good show business.
One of the particular pleasures of "Rome" is that of watching something that seems made by people who have taken care to know their stuff — even the stuff they ignore in the name of making their story more like a television show than a docudrama. The historical consciousness extends to the props and costumes and sets; spread across 5 acres at Rome's Cinecittà studios, the re-created city is recognizably Italian in color and texture, rather than the shiny white neoclassical piles that form the Rome of our Hollywoodized imagination. The fact that the streets and houses all seem actually habitable makes the words actors say in them all the more convincing.
There are all kinds of delicious performances here — James Purefoy's loutish, laddish, animal-clever Marcus Antony; Tobias Menzies' upright, tortured Brutus; McKidd's dangerously stiff-minded Vorenus (who will briefly become the Tony Soprano of the Aventine Hill before, in a distinct echo of "The Searchers," heading off to find his kidnapped children); Lee Boardman's hired-knife Timon, who will likely have more to do this season with the arrival of his brother, a revolutionary from Judea.
But they all seem to me strung between the poles of Stevenson's faithful and sensible Pullo, on the relatively good side, and Polly Walker's Atia of the Julii, who carries on a kind of Krystle-Alexis rivalry with Lindsay Duncan's Servilia, on the relatively bad — both of them trying to survive in a dangerous world, both utterly human, for better or worse.
[email protected]
01-14-2007, 11:19 PM
Metal segs? 
hock:
hock: 01-15-2007, 06:50 PM
Looks like it. They even have an excuse, if they bother with an explanation why these soldiers look different from the ones we've seen before. They were raising a lot of legions fast during the civil wars so maybe they went with armor that was quicker to produce than the hamata. But I suspect they're just doing it so we'll be able to tell Octavian's soldiers from Antony's in the fight scenes.
01-15-2007, 06:52 PM
Quote:Looks like it. They even have an excuse, if they bother with an explanation why these soldiers look different from the ones we've seen before. They were raising a lot of legions fast during the civil wars so maybe they went with armor that was quicker to produce than the hamata. But I suspect they're just doing it so we'll be able to tell Octavian's soldiers from Antony's in the fight scenes.
coughsixthcoughferratacough
01-15-2007, 07:41 PM
Quote:Metal segs?Prepousterous! They should be made of leather! :twisted:
01-15-2007, 08:58 PM
Quote:Metal segs?
_________________
They have gone for the Romans in 'Jesus of Nazareth' look with bronze lorica, khaki bracae and tunics . Basically all that is missing is the ring on the helmet. Oh sorry I think they have those :wink:
Graham.