Benedict Cumberbatch in "The Imitation Game"

[sfmpco]

 

Agreed but this was far more distracting than the eating had been, lol! The guy's wife seemed to be dying with embarassment, too.

 

And well she might, in my opinion. If my husband tried something like that, he'd be in big trouble.

 

*Sigh*... everybody seems to have seen this movie but me. That lovely theater where I saw the Hobbit is going to show it soon - for just one night and tadaa, guess what I have to do on that day: correct, work! Hurray. Oh well. What was the DVD invented for. I'll get to see it - eventually.

 

 

Well, the good news is that it's opening in more theaters, so perhaps you will still get a chance to see it.

[Bakerstreet Irregular]

Not to worry Toby, it hasn't been in my area as yet either.

[Carol the Dabbler]

Amazing what one finds on YouTube while looking for something else!  Here's a video interview with Joan Clarke Murray:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB2e9R7bXCk&feature=player_detailpage
 
I think she really does look believably like an older Kiera Knightley -- but mostly it's interesting to hear the story from the woman herself (plus brief bits from a couple of other Bletchley Park veterans).

[T.o.b.y]

Thanks, Carol!

 

HURRRAAAYYYY!!!!! It turns out the preview was so successful that the lovely cinema "near" me (well, two hours train ride near) that shows films in English will be running The Imitation Game for an entire week. I'll be able to see it! Soon! Very soon! Like the next time I get a day off soon! Oh my gosh, this makes me so happy. Oh my... I think I'm going to hop around and clap my hands. The neighbors must hate me. It's 3:30 in the morning where I live.

[Carol the Dabbler]

Yay!!!!!      

 

[Arcadia]

Woo hoo!!!!     To celebrate, I think I'll go have a glass of wine in your honor! :p

[Carol the Dabbler]

Turns out that Joan Clarke Murray interview (above) is an excerpt from a longer 1992 documentary, "The Strange Life and Death of Dr. Turing" -- which is also available on YouTube in two parts:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=gyusnGbBSHE

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LHFzNMgWzw&feature=player_detailpage

 

[T.o.b.y]

Okay. In exactly 46 hours and 20 minutes, I will be seeing this movie. I can't believe how excited I am about this. Okay, if you have to travel to the cinema for literally hours by train to see a film with the original voices, then I guess those visits warrant a bit more excitement than just walking to your local place and plunking yourself down on a seat with your popcorn. I go to the movies the way other people visit the theater.

 

I've read at least three unfavorable reviews tonight just to dampen my expectations and avoid disappointment. But it's no use.

 

The showing is nearly booked out already. There will be a whole large room full of other people who appreciate British English and great acting. It will be so cool and so strange. I bet I'll catch myself staring at the crowd and thinking of people, could that be a Sherlock fan, too, by any chance? Or her? Or her? Has anybody here seen Parades End? Is there maybe another person in the room who has a mild crush on J.J. Field? Does anybody know The Office?

[sfmpco]

I can't wait to hear your thoughts on it, Toby!  

[Caya]

The showing is nearly booked out already. There will be a whole large room full of other people who appreciate British English and great acting. It will be so cool and so strange. I bet I'll catch myself staring at the crowd and thinking of people, could that be a Sherlock fan, too, by any chance? Or her? Or her?

 

Call out "Vatican Cameos" and see who ducks ;).

 

[T.o.b.y]

Call out "Vatican Cameos" and see who ducks ;).

 

That is such a cool idea that I'd almost consider really doing it if I weren't so averse to attracting the attention of strangers. But it really should become an established test for ascertaining how many Sherlock fans are in a room.

[sfmpco]

 

The showing is nearly booked out already. There will be a whole large room full of other people who appreciate British English and great acting. It will be so cool and so strange. I bet I'll catch myself staring at the crowd and thinking of people, could that be a Sherlock fan, too, by any chance? Or her? Or her?

 

Call out "Vatican Cameos" and see who ducks ;).

 

 

 

Wickedly funny!

[Bakerstreet Irregular]

The Imitation Game has finally hit the local theater and now Mother Nature decides to throw a bunch of snow storms in our direction.    Yeesh.....hopefully it will be around for a while, the movie not the storms.

[SherlockedCAMPer]

I saw that there was some snow in some odd spots in the US (saw several pics from Nashville when I woke up).

[sfmpco]

The Imitation Game has finally hit the local theater and now Mother Nature decides to throw a bunch of snow storms in our direction.    Yeesh.....hopefully it will be around for a while, the movie not the storms.

 

I knew it would come to your area!  Get the chains on and go!

[T.o.b.y]

Okay, I've seen it. In all, it was pretty much what I had expected. Benedict Cumberbatch did surprise me, though. Having already watched him as Christoper Tietjens, Julian Assange and Sherlock, I thought I had seen everything he has to offer in the "genius with emotional problems" spectrum, but he actually managed to bring something new to the portrayal of Alan Turing. In fact, about twenty minutes into the movie, I began to forget who the actor was and only saw the character.

 

I must say though, that I thought the kid who played Turing as a boy was at least as good.

 

The film made me laugh, made me cry and made me think, so it fulfills all my criteria for a really good work. I don't care whether it's historically accurate or not - if I want facts, I watch a documentary, not a drama. I care more about truth than reality, and I think the story did a good job in that department.

 

I left the cinema euphoric, but on the train ride home, my fussy little brain piped up and pointed out a few things that bother me. I'll put the following in a spoiler box, because they involve plot details and besides, not everybody might want to read my whining.

 

 

 

- My biggest problem was, as I had foreseen, what they did with the character of Joan Clarke. Not only was casting Keira Knightly in that role not the brightest idea of the century (although her acting was just fine, I must admit), but also, they made her way too perfect. "I am a woman doing a man's job - I can't afford the luxury of being an arse". That was one of the best lines in the script, and unfortunately, it seems to be behind how they wrote the character as well. It seemed to me that because she was the only woman there, they felt they couldn't make her flawed. She was super-intelligent, movie-star level pretty, socially competent, and a really good person with an extremely progressive attitude. Now, I don't deny there are paragons like that in real life, but they are very, very rare, and they don't make for very compelling protagonists in stories, not in my opinion, at least.

 

- The part where Turing breaks up with Joan and tries to get her to leave Bletchley Park doesn't make sense. I mean, I get why he does it. It's the usual "hero finds himself forced to alienate his friends because the powers that be will otherwise use them to put pressure on him and he feels that everyone he is close to is in danger, alone protects me, get away from me before you get hurt, bla, bla, bla." But it had zero impact on the story. She stayed on, anyway. Now, I don't know why the real people broke up, but it would have made more sense in the film, if they had just showed them sitting down quietly somewhere and him telling her that he's gay and doesn't want to drag her into a marriage that will never be physical, because she's young and what if she meets someone else and falls in love and so on and so forth. And then they could have stayed friends. The problem was, though, that they couldn't do that, because they had already made her Miss Super Perfect who, in spite of the fact that this is the 1940s, has zero issues with homosexuality and has this lovely romantic idea of a marriage of minds, which would have made total sense for both characters, so it wouldn't have been believable if they didn't tie the knot just on the basis of his sexual preference. Then, they had argued before that he only proposed to her because it seemed like the only way her parents would let her stay on at Bletchley, so they needed a really, really good reason for him to change his mind there. I guess they wanted a scene that gets her angry enough to blow a fuse and tell her parents and her fiancé to stop telling her what to do with her life, but I would have preferred if they had shown that happen gradually and naturally by just having her live away from home and be part of a great project. To make a long complaint short, I thought the break-up was unnecessarily loud and dramatic.

 

- Some of the funny scenes, while they really had me laughing, were a bit too over the top. Like when Alan marches in one morning determined to "make people like him", gives everyone an apple, and awkwardly tells a joke. I mean, that's totally my humor, and it was adorable, but it seemed more like something from "The Big Bang Theory" than a serious biopic drama.

 

- *Sigh*... it was lovely, but it was... a very safe film. Know what I mean? I felt that I had somehow seen it all before, just never quite this good. It was like following the same recipe for the tenth time and getting the best yet results because of all the practice you've had.

 

Okay, enough with the negative. My favorite part was from where Alan figures out how they can break the code to where the team realizes they have to keep their success a secret and will have to just let a lot of casualties happen or else the Germans will grow suspicious. The "Coventry Conundrum" has fascinated me ever since I heard about it in Sherlock. And my other favorite part was the only two words of German you needed to break Enigma. That was genius, whether it's true or not. Simply brilliant.

 

 

 

So. I hope this film wins all the Oscars it was nominated for, and lots more awards. I really enjoyed it, and I don't regret traveling about a hundred miles to see it or missing my train home and being stranded on a train station in the middle of the night for hours. But it's not the best film I've ever seen, and I still think Sherlock is better. So there. :lol:

 

 

 

 

[Bakerstreet Irregular]

Tonight if I can get my computer straightened out. 

[Arcadia]

Okay, I've seen it......

I think you pretty well summed up my feelings about it! Although I did love

the apple scene, partly because "serious pictures" don't usually have a laugh at the expense of their hero. And also I just melt any time BC does something funny, to be honest.

 

I agree Joan was a bit too perfect, and I think that's the kind of thing that made the movie "safe", and is going to keep it from winning the "big" awards. It was a beautifully constructed script, though, I hope it gets some love somewhere, even if it's not "edgy" enough for Hollywood.

 

[T.o.b.y]

I agree Joan was a bit too perfect, and I think that's the kind of thing that made the movie "safe", and is going to keep it from winning the "big" awards. It was a beautifully constructed script, though, I hope it gets some love somewhere, even if it's not "edgy" enough for Hollywood.

 

 

The thing with Joan, in my opinion, was

that the way they wrote her and him and their relationship, there was absolutely no good reason at all why they should not have stayed together and been really happy as a couple, albeit a platonic one. But they couldn't go there, because that's no what really happened and also it would have made Turing less tragic a figure, so they had to come up with some abstruse twist about MI6 threatening her.

 

 

You think the film will get less credit because someone (casting director, writer, producer, editor, who knows) seems to have made a lot of conventional choices? Interesting. I'd have thought that was the kind of thing you decided on if you wanted to win a big award, not if your goal was to avoid them...

 

[Arcadia]

You think the film will get less credit because someone (casting director, writer, producer, editor, who knows) seems to have made a lot of conventional choices? Interesting. I'd have thought that was the kind of thing you decided on if you wanted to win a big award, not if your goal was to avoid them...

No, I think you make conventional choices when you want to attract a larger audience, and I get the impression that was important to them ... to try to get Turing's story out to as many people as they could reach. But the awards shows often reward the movies that break boundaries somewhere, whether technical or cultural or what have you.

 

Then again, just to prove that it's all a crap shoot, every once in a while you get something like Return of the King or Titanic which both pleases crowds AND breaks boundaries! (I note both of those movies represent technological breakthroughs, I wonder if that's significant?)

[Bakerstreet Irregular]

Looks like I will be making the Imitation Game tonight. Sun is shining, my computer is fixed and all is as right with the world as we can expect it to be, I guess.

[T.o.b.y]

No, I think you make conventional choices when you want to attract a larger audience, and I get the impression that was important to them ... to try to get Turing's story out to as many people as they could reach. But the awards shows often reward the movies that break boundaries somewhere, whether technical or cultural or what have you.

 

Then again, just to prove that it's all a crap shoot, every once in a while you get something like Return of the King or Titanic which both pleases crowds AND breaks boundaries! (I note both of those movies represent technological breakthroughs, I wonder if that's significant?)

 

Um, I know I'm getting off topic here, but what boundaries did you think Titanic broke, unless it was those of good taste? I bloody hated that movie, and I can't think of anything I'd call original about it.

 

If the idea was to make Turing's story and the terrible way in which he was treated by his own government known to the public, then why didn't they stick more closely to historical facts?

 

Anyway. When we left the cinema, I heard a woman say to her companion that she had been skeptical about The Imitation Game because she had only heard of the lead actor as playing Sherlock and she thought it would be "like that". I nearly turned around and said, my dear, Sherlock has a lot more to offer than what you just saw, and Benedict Cumberbatch has played many other roles and taken part in a large variety of films and plays, actually. But of course I did no such thing.

 

[joanneta1]

The film is good but not what the writer of the book on which it is based would have liked to see! However, Benedict gave an interview in the States about it and how he had to make up his concept of the character out of stories because there was no live footage of Turing. Even in the 50s, famous professors kept silent and went on with the job, apparently.

If you research Joan Clarke, you will find an altogether different person from her impersonator, and my main problem in the film is the map of the convoys. There is no way the people at Bletchley could have laid their hands on a German U-boat grid, the whole operations room concerning them was somewhere in Liverpool, so the whole dramatic moment of deciding who is to live and who is to die is just a plot twist. Arcadia and zain already know of my ongoing interest in U-Boats, so check it out in uboat.net concerning the convoy maps. Still, one can only be awed by his artistic perfection. If we think his modernised Sherlock is a misfit, he makes Turing an absolute outsider!

[T.o.b.y]

Looks like I will be making the Imitation Game tonight. Sun is shining, my computer is fixed and all is as right with the world as we can expect it to be, I guess.

 

Hurray! Don't be discouraged by my petty complaining, the movie is absolutely wonderful. I dare you not to be in tears by the time the credits roll.

 

[Bakerstreet Irregular]

I'll take some handy wipes then. I know I'll probably feeling righteous indignation on Turing's behave and be angry.