list/discuss/rate - your recently watched movies

Caught this flick for the second time last night. Costa-Gavras leads you through a subtle understated classic "missing persons" drama, with Jack Lemmon playing the reluctant father coming down to South America to save his kid. One of the best performances I've seen of his, hands down. Sissy Spacek as the courageous girlfriend does an incredible good job as well, and the two very unlikely personalities going head to head sends off sparks in all directions. Really makes the movie take off. Seeing Lemmon talking to this huge arena of political hostages in hope to get to his boy is just heartbreaking, and he does it so well. He could be your father in that moment.

The 80s made a lot of these subtle movies with little or no "bangs", but the stories they convey - how they're written, performed and subsequently cut, are to me small strokes of genius. 

Directed by Danny Boyle, adapted by Nick Dear, staring Benedict Cumberbatch (Star Trek Edge of Darkness) and Jonny Lee Miller (Trainspotting). Not strictly a film or movie in the accepted sense this was shown in our local independant cinema as part of the 50th aniversary celebrations of the Royal National Theatre, the original performance was a recording of a live broadcast of a stage play made from the theatre to cinemas nationwide in 2011.

 

Unlike other productions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Dear and Boyle remain true to the original story and most notably the creature is given back his voice, here he is articulate and intelligent, prone to quoting Milton's Paradise Lost, (an education given to him by De Lacy the blind man, wonderfully played by Karl Johnson). 

 

In the original theatre run, Cumberbatch and Miller swapped roles each night and in the performance screened this afternoon Miller played the creature to Cumberbatch's Victor Frankenstein - and having seen it, I can't imagine a better pairing (that both have played Sherlock Holmes on TV recently is pure coincidence, this was made before Jonny Lee Miller secured the role in Elementary), Miller's transformation from innocent creature slowly discovering the world around him into a maniacal murderer, mirroring Cumberbatch's equal descent into madness as his creation destroys all around him - both actors complimenting each other perfectly - Miller displaying childlike wonder and unrestrained menace as he struggles to find feeling and emotion while Cumberbatch carries an aloof arrogance, regret and then self-determined revenge, and (as heralded in the role-reversal of the alternate night's performances), as the reversing roles of master and servant enfolds at the end of the play, the question remains who is the true monster, the creator or the creature?

 

A brilliant production, superbly played. Now I want to see the alternate performance with Cumberbatch as the creature.