The Danish Girl: Tom Hooper panders to the squeamishly middle class

[touchingcloth]

Has anyone seen this yet? I was hugely disappointed with it - it felt like anything challenging or worthwhile from the real life story was axed for fear of offending people's sensibilities, the most glaring example being that, in a film about the world's first gender reassignment patient, perhaps three sentences of dialogue at most are devoted to how the surgery will work and the dangers it will entail, and the subsequent depiction of going through the surgery and living with the results (which took up no more than the final 20 minutes of a two hour film) made it look like it was no more harrowing than a trip to the dentists.

Absolute schlocky bullshit from start to finish, barely amounting to more than Eddie Redmayne coquettishly pirouetting in a dress for his boring wife for 120 minutes. The dialogue was terrible, the characterisations were non-existent, and I feel like the surface wasn't scratched of a story of palpable and immense import. It was like Downton does Queer as Folk. Waste of time.

[Custard]

Not seen Danish Girl, and probably never will, but the constant media loving up of Eddie Redmayne is really getting tiresome. Total flavour of the month ballsacks. And The Theory Of Everything was one of the most boring films I've ever seen

Irrational and unfair i know, but I can't stand his face either.

2 bags of popcorn

[Steven]

It didn't need to be good, just have lots of shots of Redmayne dragged up moodily flitting his eyelids for all the liberal-baiting it needed to succeed. Will give the twats in Hollywood enough of a boner to chuck a few awards its way I suppose.

[touchingcloth]

God it was shit. Reading into the history of the people the story was based on just compounds the shitness, too. Redmayne portrays a slightly camp man married to a cherub-faced wet flannel of an obedient wife, when in reality he was probably an intersex person and she was a lesbian, and they'd glommed onto each other in a mutually beneficial marriage of convenience.

Likewise the doctor who performed Lili's first reassignment operation is portrayed as this avuncular but largely nondescript man, but in reality he was an early and extremely vocal proponent of LGBT and women's rights, who campaigned against laws criminalising homosexuality, helped to pioneer reassignment surgery, and was ultimately forced into exile when the Nazis came to power and took exception to his work.

Another detail entirely absent from the film is how Lili had to fight to have her new gender legally recognised after she transitioned. Fuck's sake, there's a film to be made just from that little lot alone, but instead we've been treated to this insipid little story about a boy who likes tights. Given the subject matter, I didn't think I'd come away from this particular film with the word "heteronormative" bouncing around my noggin, but Hooper, Redmayne et al managed it by gum.

[Steven]

Lucinda Coxon spent 10 years on the screenplay, apparently. These biographical examinations of notable tormented people, as with Hawking or Turing recently are usually presented as simplistically antithetical pantomimetic situations where there's grossly opposing extreme good and bad elements/people acting upon the protagonist, rather than the predicament they're in being far more confused and complicated. It's such broadly Fairy Tale type trash most of the time.

Even something like Lynch's The Elephant Man muddies the water by making Merrick a captive of a draconian mountebank who is rescued by kindly old Dr Treeves, when in fact he was treated very well by the Carney folk who helped him display himself as a sideshow curio, and what other profession could he take to make money, and he was given a very sizeable portion of the profits and it was Treeves who used him very much to make a name for himself. Even to the point of publishing a book after his death where he even gets Merrick's name wrong..

[touchingcloth]

Lucinda Coxon spent 10 years on the screenplay, apparently. These biographical examinations of notable tormented people, as with Hawking or Turing recently are usually presented as simplistically antithetical pantomimetic situations where there's grossly opposing extreme good and bad elements/people acting upon the protagonist, rather than the predicament they're in being far more confused and complicated. It's such broadly Fairy Tale type trash most of the time.

10 years! It's not even an original screenplay - it was adapted from the novel of the same name which was expressly written as fiction rather than biography. What was she doing for 10 years? In that amount of time she could have exhaustively researched and written an entirely new biography alongside a screenplay, but she didn't even bother to write any dialogue. 10 years of "Lili puts on tights. Lili is demure. Lili remove tights. Lili is still demure post-de-tightin, ergo Lili is not contingent on tights! Lili has surgery and dies."

The fictionalisation per se is no bad thing, but if you're going to go down that route I think you need to absolutely nail the story. Last year's Suffragette was a largely fictional account of factual events, and it was excellent - everything that this film should have been and more. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll springs to mind, too, but that film makes it quite clear that it has an unreliable narrator and  is based as much on the Dury mythos as it is actual events.

Edit: That Turing film was dreadful. The Danish Girl took more than a few cues from that in terms of shooting style and economy of truth, but at least the dialogue and events in The Imitation Game gave the cast a chance to show off their acting chops a little.

[BlodwynPig]

i had the misfortune to watch Wilde last night. Abomination.

[Famous Mortimer]

From the trailer, it does seem like if that woman had never suggested he pop a dress on, he'd have kept his twig and berries for the rest of his life.

[B Piper@The Gates Of Dawn]

It's Sally Hawkins I feel sorry for.

[mothman]

Every trailer, every poster, every promotional image I've seen, Redmayne seems to have the same facial expression. The same one as in the Hawking film. Can he do anything else?

[Steven]

Can he do anything else?

Looks like he's doing 'vinegar strokes' in this one:

[Phil_A]

I'm glad I'm not alone in finding the ascent of Redmayne to acting aristocracy completely baffling. He's somehow become ubiquitous without ever really being any good. Whenever I've seen him "act" it just seems like there's nothing there. He's like the male Jenna Coleman.

It's also interesting that if you look him up youtube you'll find endless interviews and publicity bumpf, but next to no clips of any of his films. Whatever his appeal might be(and it's not too hard to guess), it's clearly not for what he actually does for a living.

[Steven]

It's also interesting that if you look him up youtube you'll find endless interviews and publicity bumpf, but next to no clips of any of his films. Whatever his appeal might be(and it's not too hard to guess), it's clearly not for what he actually does for a living.

I just remember him from Black Death and The Pillars Of The Earth, and not for performance really but looking 'interesting' I'd imagine, not quite sure what in particular put him on the map.