The Mike Leigh Poll

Ha ha. Sorry fo polluting the whole thread.

jed otm itt. Watched this last night and it was sortof enjoyable in a deadeyed bbc way with loads of semi-recognisable actors hamming it up but was complete antithesis of everything I like about topsy turvy (its baggy improvisatory feel, its digressary construction).

worst things:
the score! twee and saccharine and overbearing.
maxine peake and her exposition-spouting family (I usually like maxine peake, although I'm starting to get sick of her playing the exact same character and wearing the exact same hat). There are a number of these 2-dimensional 'noble' characters (such as the guardian journalists excitedly founding theguardian.com at the end) prattling on flatly throughout. They sortof appear every now and then, as if Leigh has been reminded that he needs to connect the plot more explicitly to historical context and often results in tritely presented scenes like the egg bartering at the beginning (we do not remain interested in the household accounts of the maxine peakes, this single egg-buying experience is supposed to account for quite a bit here.). The film seems as bored of these characters as I was but prefers to snigger at the hammy 'characters' in a way I found pretty repulsive and boring.
casual mysogyny: unless you are a saintly pragmatic female main character, you are likely to be an imbecile or a shrew. I find this to be the single most damning thing in leigh's films, and doubly weird that he made such a complex film about the politics of abortion (vera drake) considering how frequently his characterisations of women are so hateful. in this one the 'dimwit maid' character really stood out. How can someone insert characters like that and still be considered (a) interested in realism and (b) to be some sort of figurehead of progressivism in britain*?

Its disappointing because the historical events are interesting, and the contemporary resonances many (the spying on progressive movements, the authoritarianism and paranoia of the british ruling class etc) and at the very least the film seems to have somewhat restored the events to more mainstream knowledge in the uk (hopefully somewhat durably).

*don't answer this one

Fascinating, and I couldn't disagree more strongly.

I suspect that some of the things I find most egregious about Leigh might not be so legible if you haven't spent much time in the UK (especially England), although I think his weird women issues would be obvious to an alien.

Just watched Career Girls for the first time, having seen most of his other films. This seem quite poor. The student year scenes I found excruciatingly bad and the mature years were ok - but not just enough chemistry between Hannah and Annie to make it interesting. The 'coincidences' or meeting former college acquaintances just seemed to be mostly a mess (or a miss).

The acting in the "young" scenes in Career Girls must be some of the worst (or most misguided) ever done by talented actors. I literally could not understand why they were talking and gesturing in such contrived ways. 20 years later, I'm no wiser. Was it meant to show how precocious they were? Were the viewers meant to hate the characters as much as I did?

Didn't expect to read Mr. Turner as an idiosyncratic exegesis on creativity, depression and the anguish that runs through them but by the end I was kinda wrecked by it.

Really need a supercut of Spall's variety of grunts - whether as exclamation, criticism, joy, sadness, or all the nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and conjunctions.

Topsy Turvy was playing on Criterion 247. First time I've seen it since 2000. I forgot how good it is on a scene by scene basis. I need to rewatch some other favorites as it was my best movie experience in months.

haven't seen Career Girls since it was in theaters, still sticks out in my mind as the one real misfire in his filmography( i haven't seen them all) but might be worth a ~rescreen. i adore Katrin Cartlidge so the fail seems even more out of character, maybe i missed something first time around?

i've seen the run from high hopes through topsy-turvy, i think naked had the biggest impact on me, but all of them are worthwhile except for career girls

one of my favorite things about my 20+ year history on this board is i very often will dip into a long running thread to drop a random thought and then i'll scroll back and see me saying a very similar but completely forgotten take 15 years ago.

Career Girls is one of my favourites, think it was the first Mike Leigh film I saw and it has really stuck with me. I can appreciate that it's more cartoonish than his other films but it really captures something about student life in 80s London and how the adult world flattens out your emotions.

yeah i can see if you were in that moment that it depicts it hits harder, to me it just seemed like he worked up a lot of the scenarios with the 2 main actresses and at the end it just wasn't that compelling but i will take another look

I haven't seen CG since I saw it in the theatre the summer it came out but I really liked it. Of course that could be because of the Cure soundtrack but I remember it fondly.

Wonder what it'd be like watching Career Girls and The Souvenir back to back.

Topsy-Turvy felt so very not 1999 when it came out that its warm reception felt a little counterintuitive to the overwhelming "1999: the year that changed movies" hype out there at the time. Glad to see time has more than vindicated it (and Eyes Wide Shut, to cite another example).

Speak for yerself.

At the time of their release, I loved Career Girls and struggled to connect with Topsy Turvy, but I think the period setting of the latter may have been a barrier for college-aged me. The fact that I adored Mr. Turner 15 years later has made me want to revisit TT.

I wish more people had watched Peterloo. If it's his last film, what a bow.

I keep putting it off. Need to rectify that.

xp he's already finished another (though a few years ago he admitted he was having a lot of difficulty finding funding for another project):

https://variety.com/2024/film/global/mike-leigh-hard-truths-marianne-jean-baptiste-first-look-1235910527/

Just saw Nuts in May on Criterion or somewhere, and really enjoyed it... you could see he was already on his path

Mr. Turner has been added to the canon since the poll, what say ye?