Q: What do An Education and A Single Man have in common?
A: Rather a lot, actually. Both are set in the early 1960s, a time of nuclear anxiety, a fear addressed and expressed by the main young character in each film. Both feature a socially transgressive relationship between a youth on the cusp of adulthood and an older man in or close to middle age. In An Education you imagine that Peter Sarsgaard was chosen partly because he was the closest that the film-makers could find to a thirtysomething Colin Firth, who would have been perfect in the role of the supposedly charismatic, slightly sleazy David. Sarsgaard's a decent actor but doesn't project the magnetism that David must surely have been intended to possess to attract and all but derail Jenny (Carey Mulligan who deserves much of the extravagant praise that she has won in recent months). There's something too uncertain about him, a problem rooted in his delivery - some of this nervousness is clearly intentional and subtle, suggesting David's shiftiness, his unease, his latent guilt at his various deceptions - but some is also perhaps down to the actor's struggle to maintain his English accent. Being aware of an actor's struggle to find their character's voice is inevitably a distraction. This has clearly not been a problem at all for many viewers and would presumably not be noticed by non-English audiences anyway.
This reminded me of an interview that Cher did in this country to plug Mermaids. It was the latest American-accented performance from Bob Hoskins who had been outstanding on stage as Nathan Detroit in the National Theatre production of Guys and Dolls and acting against a cast of cartoons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and when asked how it was the Hoskins had so perfectly mastered the accent, his co-star rather brutally, although not without humour, stated that he didn't sound American to her.
Another interesting case was The Crying Game in which the casting of Forest Whitaker as a cockney soldier and Miranda Richardson as an Irish terrorist/freedom fighter seemed to be an interesting, conscious or unconscious clue to the fact that not everything or everyone here was what they seemed - and such coy spoiler-avoidance may not be necessary after all these years, but still...
A Single Man features three of the four central characters adopting transatlantic voices, Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult playing Americans and Julianne Moore playing an uptight and often if not always tight English woman. The tension in these performances, the concentration needed to sustain them is perfectly fitting for a film that is about the obsessive need of the central character George (a quite magnificent Firth) to be and to be seen to be in control. While Goode's and Hoult's accents seem all but faultless to the English ear, Moore's effort to retain her clipped accent - and there is the odd stumble over certain vowel sounds - somehow works. One film scripted, beautifully by Nick Hornby, the other featuring two actors (Hoult and Firth) who've performed notably in adaptations of Hornby novels (About a Boy and Fever Pitch respectively), they are both in not wholly dissimilar ways, very moving films exploring the conflict between restraint and emotional expression, about the elusiveness, the pain of romantic love.
What's the similar connection between Glenn Close & Andie McDowell in Greystoke: Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes and Jean Hagen & Debbie Reynolds in Singin' in the Rain?
The answer to the question in the last posting was that all four have played movie time-travellers, but three Malcolm McDowell, Guy Pearce and Rod Taylor have played versions of HG Wells' character from The Time Machine (Pearce and Taylor, whose character was in fact called Wells, in the two big screen adaptations of the novel and McDowell playing Wells himself in Time after Time), while Michael J Fox played the teenage time-traveller Marty McFly in the Back to the Future trilogy.
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Friday, 12 March 2010
Green Zone v Inglourious Basterds
Q: What connects Inglourious Basterds, Rogue Male, Valkyrie, The Dead Zone?
A: ps would it help if the list also included the 1990 TV movie The Plot to Kill Hitler? Because one way or another they all feature plots or at least the idea to assassinate the fuhrer. Mild spoiler warning here, but in one significant way Inglourious Basterds is the odd one out in this list is to and that is not the only way in which Tarantino's film is an odd work of art or pulp fiction or meta-movie-making or whatever it is. It's a bizarre movie, a deranged hymn to the literally incendiary power of film and, for all its flaws - it's uneven and overlong - is one of the writer-director's most brilliant efforts to date, a fitting companion piece to Pulp Fiction. To say that it plays fast and loose with historical fact is not so much an understatement as to wilfully miss the point of the film. It is a response, whether conscious or not, to the statement, one often made when a given film is shown to be misrepresenting the historical truth it purports to represent, that: "It's only a movie." Tarantino is, aside from serving up a peculiar, singular piece of entertainment, saying that "it's a movie" but there's no such thing as "only" a movie, that a film is powerful and that, whatever a film-maker's obligation to the truth, to facts, to history, whatever the supposed rules of film-making are, a film can be and do whatever its makers want it to be and do. Paul Greengrass, much of whose career has been spent straddling the worlds of movie-making and the relating of politically charged historical events, has come just a little unstuck in his latest attempt to be simultaneously an entertainer and political soothsayer. Green Zone works, to an extent, as a popcorn movie, it's fast-paced in that frenetic, jerky way that has become Greengrass's signature style, but the dialogue is disappointingly cliche-laden and the plot - essentially a one-note WMD conspiracy thriller that rings true on almost no level - is borderline ludicrous. Film-makers don't necessarily have to tell the truth 24 frames a second, but if they are going to lie at least they have to lie openly and honestly.
Who's the odd one out of Rod Taylor, Michael J Fox, Malcolm McDowell and Guy Pearce?
The answer to the last quiz (a while back) is the role of Brutus in Julius Caesar. McKay played Welles playing Brutus in his 1937 Mercury Theatre stage production, Mason appeared as Brutus in the 1953 film and Robards in the 1970 production.
A: ps would it help if the list also included the 1990 TV movie The Plot to Kill Hitler? Because one way or another they all feature plots or at least the idea to assassinate the fuhrer. Mild spoiler warning here, but in one significant way Inglourious Basterds is the odd one out in this list is to and that is not the only way in which Tarantino's film is an odd work of art or pulp fiction or meta-movie-making or whatever it is. It's a bizarre movie, a deranged hymn to the literally incendiary power of film and, for all its flaws - it's uneven and overlong - is one of the writer-director's most brilliant efforts to date, a fitting companion piece to Pulp Fiction. To say that it plays fast and loose with historical fact is not so much an understatement as to wilfully miss the point of the film. It is a response, whether conscious or not, to the statement, one often made when a given film is shown to be misrepresenting the historical truth it purports to represent, that: "It's only a movie." Tarantino is, aside from serving up a peculiar, singular piece of entertainment, saying that "it's a movie" but there's no such thing as "only" a movie, that a film is powerful and that, whatever a film-maker's obligation to the truth, to facts, to history, whatever the supposed rules of film-making are, a film can be and do whatever its makers want it to be and do. Paul Greengrass, much of whose career has been spent straddling the worlds of movie-making and the relating of politically charged historical events, has come just a little unstuck in his latest attempt to be simultaneously an entertainer and political soothsayer. Green Zone works, to an extent, as a popcorn movie, it's fast-paced in that frenetic, jerky way that has become Greengrass's signature style, but the dialogue is disappointingly cliche-laden and the plot - essentially a one-note WMD conspiracy thriller that rings true on almost no level - is borderline ludicrous. Film-makers don't necessarily have to tell the truth 24 frames a second, but if they are going to lie at least they have to lie openly and honestly.
Who's the odd one out of Rod Taylor, Michael J Fox, Malcolm McDowell and Guy Pearce?
The answer to the last quiz (a while back) is the role of Brutus in Julius Caesar. McKay played Welles playing Brutus in his 1937 Mercury Theatre stage production, Mason appeared as Brutus in the 1953 film and Robards in the 1970 production.
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