gosford park

anyway yr not too old for a whupping so think on

Kelly Macdonald as our nominal viewpoint character and girl detective also stood out. All in all a nice, tight engaging film. Perhaps slightly let down by its quite poor mystery element (I did not really care who did it and the denoument was unbelievable), and the vague idea of what this cast could have done if it had been a Wodehouse plot. Still, excellent work.

didn't bash the whole clarse thing about yer head too much
Hmm, not sure 'bout that. Interesting inversion of your normal Agatha Christie logic tho' (where murder always committed by someone "upstairs", whereas "downstairs" is either stupid or blackmailer or second victim, or all 3.)

1. The old person snoring in front of us.

SE5 = Camberwell, SE15 = Peckham. It's alphabetical up to 18 (or 19, if you use the drum'n'bass spelling for Crystal Palace). Then it all goes to shit.

How interesting am I? (Rhetorical).

Does this (i.e alphabetical) work for NWs and SWs and Es and Ns and Ws too? Would explain a lot.

Ta da.

Places which don't fit this model: NW11, SE19-28 (though it's allegedly alphabetical within 19-27 [Crystal P-West Norwood]), SW11- 20 (like SE, in order from 11-19 [Battersea-Wimbledon]).

Now, if someone could tell me what the extra letters in some central zone postal areas mean (W1V for instance), my life would be complete.

Other London postal district links to brighten up your day:

David McKie on why there's no NE postal district

A list of the codes and the areas they cover

Oh come on Norm, how could I possibly take offence, you old progster, you ;) I KNOW it was affectionate joshing of a grey panther nature!

Now if you called me a Belle and Sebastian fan, that would be summat else altogether!

have got nostalgia on video but have not got round to seeing it yet.

yeah, it's great. what i love is the inversion of the manor-murder setup that forms the basis of all the commentary. rather than introducing the dramatis personae clearly and showing us the lines of relation to each other, into which the murder is inserted as an unknown; the murder is obvious and pretty boring (and it's late in the movie! like 2/3rds in!) even to the characters, but the status and even identities of the characters remain foggy even at the end (ok, who is who's kid? uh, ok that guy wanted this from, wait, i think...) and old bastard getting whacked is easy to understand but class/gender/nationality are a mess.

thank you, hslocki

i would watch a movie called "maggie smith gives people sidelong glances", and i would eat popcorn

being able to rabidly love it as like you do, s1ocki, when there is a Rules of the Game

Aside from "set in a country house," utterly dissimilar films.

spoiler

anyone notice the way altman tips philippe's secret halfway through?

― s1ocki (slutsky), Sunday, 7 November 2004 19:09 (5 years ago)

is this the rental pants moment? iirc? the only thing i really didnt like about this movie was the bumbling detective bit. stephen fry, right? it's just too broad and sticks out from the muted, blithely cruel humor of the rest of the movie, and disrupts the tone too much for me.

― rent, Friday, November 27, 2009 7:11 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ya! not rental pants but they're from a studio wardrobe dept

and ya morbs i get that all teh time with this movie - there's definite intentional similarities but these are two very different movies made 60 years apart, i mean wtf

Switch casts and The Company would've still been better.

― Eric H. (Eric H.), Saturday, February 11, 2006 2:35 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Well... yeah. Naturally.

― Eric H. (Eric H.), Saturday, February 11, 2006 2:35 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

was eric talking to himself here?

at least Malcolm McDowell wouldn't be playing an Italian-American choreographer w/ a Liverpool accent, then.

Did you watch the whole thing, or just pick it up again with ten minutes to go?

Watched the whole thing through. And I'm realy glad I did, since honestly, who cares about the murder (well apart from poor Elsie, but she's on her way to Hollywood, so good for her). The first hour, where we see what's going on upstairs and compare it to what's happening downstairs is just fantastic, that's where the film's impressive.

As for Fry's character, I agree that he's not really in tone with th rest of the movie, but still, I wasn't put off by it. And he does serve a purpose, to strike you repeatedly with the idea that those from upstairs really do not pay any attention whatsoever to anyone but those from their world. And to be honest, after an hour and a half of this movie, I felt it nice to have an easy laugh or two.

rich english ppl are so cool and funny

the scene where jeremy northam is singing and the maids are dancing the charleston outside the door!

love this movie

and poor dorothy, always getting in trouble

rich english ppl are so cool and funny

― ¨°º¤ø„¸¸„ø¤º°¨ (Lamp), Friday, November 27, 2009 2:09 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

*rollin' my damn eyes*

was eric talking to himself here?

Guess I thought I was the only one worth responding to at that point.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZYEvkPRJ7VI/R0NYTLhD4LI/AAAAAAAAABY/y_LiEsMrn7U/s1600/ohsnap.jpg

i saw this with mr altman in attendance and later i was standing as near to him as i am to you now. twinkly dude. but i don't think i was able to say n e thing :(

i think this might be a real anglophile's film but would need to see it again coz that was a looong time ago. iirc the alts said during his room-chat that action movies were responsible for 9/11.

ive been in an anglophile kind of a mood for a couple months which is probably why i watched it this morning

we're pretty effing great, no doubt.

u have a couple OK television miniseries, thats all

anybody who thought either the decor or the mystery were central missed the boat

altman doesnt really seem to care much about the mystery. none of the characters do either, except for the constable, and the scottish hottie from trainspotting

her name is hotty macdonald max

scottie

love this movie

― max, Saturday, January 9, 2010 7:13 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think this might be a real anglophile's film but would need to see it again coz that was a looong time ago

My wife, a bit of an anglophile, felt that underneath it all this film had much more of an American sensibility - maybe because of all the focus on the class stuff and the particular expression of the distaste for the idea of servants

yes, thank God.

yes, a much more egalitarian and democratic society, america, in the 1920s and 1930s.

Well I think she meant that there was a slight hint of hypocrisy in it - Americans feel very morally high about not liking the idea of servants but it's not always founded in truly egalitarian ideals - like there are plenty of wealthy Americans who wouldn't have "servants" but would still have the same class pretenses in their treatment of others.

yeah that's fair play. the irony is that 'gosford park' was written by a wealthy conservative aristo guy who probably has servants. whereas there are plenty of brits who have written works of fiction about the beastly upper classes and their treatment of servants. (of course there have been plenty who have not really seen servant-keeping as a social ill.)

my morbs-baiting point is just that surely many rich americans have kept servants, and surely these, back in the old days, were just as exploited (if not more so, insofar as they were basically excluded from the democratic process) as their british equivalents.

i think hurting's point is the america-of-now attitude of the movie, not what a typical upper-crust american in the '20s would have thought of british society.

i mean hurting's wife.

i mean hurting 2's wife.

yeah exactly. I think she also said it seemed like a modern take.

very. it doesnt look or feel anything like a movie from the era it depicts, really, in any way whatsoever.

might we compare it with 'the rules of the game'?

many people do

i can recall more than one convo where people were like "why bother with gosford park when there's already rules of the game" to much gnashing of teeth from this moi

Very different tonally from ROTG; always with Altman you sense the sourness (not a bad thing).

yeah it's different, i just mean that there was one filmmaker in the 30s who was able (though no-one was able to see it in the end) to make a film with a similar theme and attitude. there were might even have been others -- iirc, hitchcock's 'the skin game' has a touch of it.

(imo renoir had more teeth than people like to reckon now.)

yeah to renoir teeth, in a big way - there's a reason people tried to burn down the theater where it premiered

nrq, yr response had fucknothing to do what I meant or think, so stfu

morbs u like ken loach so tbh im not sure why you'd think bashing-the-toffs was only something americans would do so stfu

Very different tonally from ROTG; always with Altman you sense the sourness (not a bad thing).

it can be a bad thing (like in nashville, challops etc) but it's not in gosford park. the tonal/perspectival difference is down to a lot of things, but at least part of it is the difference between an outsider's critique and an insider's. the insider critique is going to be more detailed, more subtle, more knowing, more complicated and more compromised -- all of which probably apply to ROTG.

nrq, Ken Loach is an exception on your desiccated, royals-fellating isle of the damned.

What's really exhilarating is to see actors be so great in this who were/are so often wasted (Alan Bates RIP, Helen Mirren). And Maggie Smith has a killer line every 10 minutes.

It's the only time I've ever liked Kristin Scott Thomas.

nrq, Ken Loach is an exception on your desiccated, royals-fellating isle of the damned.

― Rage, Resentment, Spleen (Dr Morbius), Monday, January 11, 2010 1:31 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark

confining myself to the cinema (i believe we have produced some playwrights, poets, and novelists of some distinction), loach just does not hold a candle to our very best. he's a mid-range euro naturalist best suited to TV, where he began, but isn't even exceptional there. i don't have much time for his politics, which wouldn't be an insurmountable problem except there's nothing to him except politics.

Except for preternaturally deceptive marketing people, that anyone would describe Gosford Park as a whodunnit is hilarious; it's a theydunnit-and-hooray. One of the most subversive class-war broadsides ever.

I will never forgive you your hatred of Sirk, but that was a pretty devastating dismissal of Loach there, enrique. (Not sure if it's correct or not, obv.)

nrq, Protector of the Empire

(so sort of like there's nothing to Tarantino and, to some degree, De Palma except other people's movies)