Yet these flaws are counterbalanced by the sheer strength of the central narrative, which allows us to feel the frustrations of a Prince Andrei, the vitality of a Natasha, the political conviction of a Pierre.
And that's the beauty of a Pierre et Vacances holiday: you get a lovely villa, and your kids - or your nieces and nephew, in my case - get to do all sorts of things that they can't do at home.
Sunday's episode echoed a number of real-life art stories, including the case of Wolfgang Beltracchi, the convicted art forger who was recently profiled on "60 Minutes," as well as the case of a Pierre-Auguste Renoir landscape painting that was purchased at a flea market for $7.
"Illuminations," also prompted by Rimbaud, fused what might have been the fractious gestures of a Pierre Boulez piano sonata with the cyclonic whorls of an avant-garde jazz pianist like Cecil Taylor.
A copy of a Pierre Matisse sales ledger in the foundation's files shows that only a few pieces in the 1941 show found buyers, one of whom, Solomon R. Guggenheim, paid all of $233.34 — or about $3,500 in today's money — for a work.
(INT. ROCKET CONTROL ROOM - BENJAMIN LINUS, in black suit and shirt with #6 on it, enters room filled with globes of the world. He sees a HOODED MAN, wearing a mask and a robe with #1 on it, as a video of DR. PIERRE CHANG plays on a monitor).
AT FIRST glance, the death this week of Abbé Pierre, a French Catholic priest and former resistance fighter who spent half a century combating poverty, and an ongoing political spat over taxing the rich, have little in common.
One tour de force is his reconstruction of the composition of "Pierre; or, The Ambiguities," the successor to "Moby-Dick".
Other highlights of the Young Vic's new season include a version of DBC Pierre's Booker prize-winning novel Vernon God Little, directed by Rufus Norris.
Coherent optical data processing became a serious subject for study in the 1950s, partly because of the work of a French physicist, Pierre-Michel Duffieux, on the Fourier integral and its application to optics, and the subsequent use of communication theory in optical research.
German director Werner Herzog is to return to fiction for his next project, an adaptation of DBC Pierre's 2003 novel Vernon God Little, reports Variety.
