BetterMost, Wyoming & Brokeback Mountain Forum
The World Beyond BetterMost => The Culture Tent => Topic started by: YaadPyar on April 19, 2009, 10:52:03 pm
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OK - I rented two movies I've heard such great stuff about, and haven't been very happy with either. I didn't realize that they were both by Mike Leigh, but the presence of Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsan in both seems a good clue.
Imelda Staunton as "Vera Drake" acted so well, and the movie was solid, but soooooo slow, and never really went anywhere. And the delightful optimism of Poppy in "Happy Go Lucky" was irritating from the time the movie started.
The constant in both movies seemed lives almost completely unexamined...good-hearted women with a real impulse to make life better, but not actually very interesting people.
In Happy Go Lucky especially, the characters seemed so one-dimensional, and the sound track and Poppy character both seemed so clumsy and inelegant.
Anyone else see both of these flicks? Anyone else have the same response?
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I haven't. But Imelda Staunton was wonderful in Peter's Friends, a movie I highly recommend to all BBM lovers.
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I haven't seen his movies. For a minute there I thought you were talking about Mike Nichols, and I thought, "what happened?!?!"
BTW, there's a retrospective of MN's work at MOMA. He is one of only nine people to have won all four major show business awards.
The plan is to show projects that range from his early work like the classic The Graduate and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, plus more recent cinematic excursions like Charlie Wilson's War and Angels in America. But as with any big retrospective, the big draw will be "Mike Nichols in Conversation." The director will be on-hand on April 18 for an informal conversation, not just with some random interviewer, but with a collection of his closest writing and acting collaborators. This list includes Nora Ephron, Elaine May, and Buck Henry.