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Armando Iannucci's The Personal History Of David Copperfield

Started by Blue Jam, June 23, 2018, 10:28:55 PM

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Blue Jam


chveik


Shoulders?-Stomach!


Blue Jam

I'd love to see Mark Heap as Dickens himself, in a nod to the excellent Desperate Romantics.

garbed_attic

I miss the (lack of) Sebastian Coe-baiting in Iannucci's recent works :(

Blue Jam

To my shame I have just realised that I have never read any Dickens, so I shall try and rectify that before the film's out. Dickens' works are all out of copyright and the Kindle editions are free to download on Amazon, if anyone was unaware...

Some sparse casting details here:

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt6439020/fullcredits/cast?ref_=m_tt_cl_sc

chveik

Wow, that's quite an incredible casting.
Iannucci did a BBC documentary about Dickens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lZB6E0-yCk

Quote from: Blue Jam on June 29, 2018, 05:37:57 PM
To my shame I have just realised that I have never read any Dickens, so I shall try and rectify that before the film's out.

Well I haven't read 'David Copperfield' but I did read 'A Tale of Two Cities' and it bored the shit out of me. There's decent stuff in there, no doubt, but it's drowned in endless tedium about the cosy twee capers of dear old Mrs. Miggins and silly old Mr. Farthington (or whatever they were called). That's like 80% of the book, you can really tell that it was written as a serial and he spread out the good parts to keep people reading on.

The stuff about The Terror was interesting, and the ending was quite moving. I suppose the benefit of an adaptation is that you could just cut it down to those good parts. Therefore I am willing to give adaptions a chance. But I will never read another one of his books, no sir I refuse.

Dex Sawash

I'm 5 years in to Tale of 2 cities, about 100 pages. The one with Pip and Miss Havisham is good enough.

Hope this film has a great ensemble cast.

mothman

I've had Dickens' complete works on my Kindle for years now. I hope to read them one day. I'll probably have to wait until I'm stuck somewhere with nothing to do for a long period of time, like being in prison, or chained to a radiator by a terrorist group. When I won't have my Kindle. My life is full of these little ironies.

Small Man Big Horse

The AV Club has reviewed this and it sounds okay, but I can't say I'll be rushing to see it:

QuoteI can't help but wonder if a better version of True History Of The Kelly Gang would run another hour, giving us the full epic of his life. Similar thoughts crossed my mind during another history lesson that screened at the top of TIFF: Armando Iannucci's earnest Charles Dickens adaptation The Personal History Of David Copperfield (Grade: B-), which attempts the ambitious feat of cramming all 600-plus pages of source material into a brisk two hours of screen narrative—and, somewhat remarkably, actually pulls it off. But while the act of gracefully condensing this big book into a coherent movie is indeed impressive, the truth is that said movie does end up feeling a bit like glorified cliff's notes, albeit ones enlivened by Iannucci's gift for volleying banter.

This counts as something of a major change of pace for the Veep creator, pulling him out of the halls of power and away from the backstabbing and venom-spewing political numbskulls that have capered through his previous work. (Perhaps The Death Of Stalin simply took that mode of midnight-black satire as far as it could go.) Not that there's no backstabbing or spewed venom in the 19th-century story of David Copperfield (a spirited Dev Patel), who rides up and down the ladder of social strata, from birth to mid-adulthood, from Suffolk to London, encountering a large, eccentric cast of characters—played here by the likes of Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Ben Whisaw, Gwendoline Christie, Benedict Wong, Rosalind Eleazar, Iannucci favorite Peter Capaldi, and more— along the way. It's a fairly faithful retelling, deviating most notably in the colorblind casting, a casual diversification of Dickens' ensemble that adds another layer to the retained original commentary on class and privilege.

Like a tonier literary adaptation coming to theaters next week, and which I'll share some thoughts on tomorrow, The Personal History Of David Copperfield is a plot machine. One can't help but wonder if this would work better on the small screen, where more of the texture and detail of Dickens' world-building could be preserved and spread out across a roomier runtime. Certainly, that medium might better suit Iannucci's televisual visuals; with the exception of a few set-collapsing flourishes, like a scene of David's idyllic vacation in a boathouse being intruded upon by a metaphorical giant hand, the director works in his usual walk-and-talk mode. But the film's charms are real and nimble, provided by the author but also by Iannucci, whose affinity for silver-tongued exchanges proves a surprisingly compatible bedfellow to Dickens' signature generosity of characterization. Their sensibilities merge agreeably.



BlodwynPig


Blue Jam

Quote from: olliebean on September 08, 2019, 10:28:09 PM
I honestly had no idea Iannucci was even into magic.

Perhaps Jed Maxwell is an author avatar...

Alberon

I think it's a great idea. I mean you have the success of 'Three of a Kind' and then the struggles that came after. Can't wait to see it.


Salty_fries

I saw this film last night and it's really really great. Don't know how much I can say right now (can you even get 'spoilers' for a 170 year old book?) but you should definitely see it when it comes out.

Better than Paddington, somehow. 9/10

Blue Jam

Got tickets booked for Saturday. Currently reading the source material, out of copyright and therefore free on Kindle, having shamefully never read any Dickens before, and am now really looking forward to it. In particular it seems that Peggotty and Mr Peggotty are especially well cast.

Dewt

At the end of the trailer:



Disney finally releasing that Jade Goody bio?


Attila

Quote from: Blue Jam on January 21, 2020, 08:28:09 PM
Got tickets booked for Saturday. Currently reading the source material, out of copyright and therefore free on Kindle, having shamefully never read any Dickens before, and am now really looking forward to it. In particular it seems that Peggotty and Mr Peggotty are especially well cast.

You're in for a treat when you get to the chapter about him making the Statue of Liberty disappear.



he he he



olliebean

Quote from: Attila on January 23, 2020, 05:44:28 PM
You're in for a treat when you get to the chapter about him making the Statue of Liberty disappear.

The revelations about Tracey Ullman and Lenny Henry are quite something, as well.

Quotehe he he

Blue Jam

Blimey, those Murdstone fuckers are a right pair. Captain Phasma and Tommy Saxondale's neighbour? Yeah, that sounds about right.

kittens



Blue Jam

I had the same problem with this as I had with the BBC's most recent adaptation of The Three Musketeers: it just wasn't as clever, subtle or funny as the > 100-year-old source material.

Blue Jam

That said, I fucking love Daisy May Cooper. Perfect casting and best thing in it by a mile.


Bennett Brauer

I liked it a lot, but it was a mish-mash because of the things that were altered or omitted for time, and some parts seemed too rushed - eg David's childhood and his mother's role, and the storm climax.

Good lead performance, Hugh Laurie was fun, Ben Whishaw and Tilda Swinton excellent. Paul Whitehouse was underpowered. Big Capaldi fan but he wasn't really right for Micawber, and his accent was distractingly over-the-top. (A hundred times better than the Michael Richards version though.)  Seven on ten.