The Mike Leigh Poll

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Super hard to choose. Voted Life Is Sweet for partly sentimental reasons (it was my first Mike Leigh).

Also, RIP Katrin Cartlidge ;_;

Lots of good choices here, but I can think of few theatrical experiences equal to the first time I saw "Topsy-Turvy." Utterly enthralled.

little-known fact: I own a Career Girls t shirt

Soft spot for Abigail's Party. Would love to see it again... is there a quality difference between the us or uk dvd?

Haven't seen the last two yet for some reason.

"Life is Sweet" is the King of Mike Leigh movies. Next I would go for "Naked" and then for "Career Girls" as a distant third.
The only one that doesn't really fit into his works for me is Topsy-Turvy. It's sort of like his "Gosford Park," for me--the exception that proves the work.

Abigail's Party

everyone, just say what you think

Life is Sweet was the first Mike Leigh movie I saw, and I have more affection for it than his other movies even though some of them are technically "better" for one reason or another.

Don't know much Leigh but for me, 'Topsy Turvy' just beats out 'Naked', as fond as I am of that film.

Err... Nut in May I guess. Don't like this guy's output tbh. Naked is such a stupid, stupid film.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

yay bitter nihilist antihero!

topsy turvy is amazing. missed this poll.

Tsk emos.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x55y5q_nuts-in-may-part-1-of-5_shortfilms

I wonder about this...There is a reading of this film that Sally Hawkins's 'happy go luckyness' is just as manic in its own way as David Thewlis in Naked. So in a sense it's a mirror image of Naked - the flip manic side to Naked's depressive side.

Well yeah, it's pretty clear Hawkins's character isn't quite normal, a point which is brought up by the driving instructor (even though he's pretty fucked up himself). But I thought Leigh's point was, that despite her (often manic) perkyness and optimism she can still manage in the world, and she doesn't need to be "brought down" (which is something a cynical viewer would expect to happen). Even if she's not quite normal, her quirks are mostly benevolent, and there's no reason to think something is "wrong" with her.

Finally saw 'Happy-Go-Lucky'. Amazing performances. Still trying to figure out what I thought of it.

I think it's more nuanced than some of the critics have made it to be; certainly the scenes between Poppy and the taxi driver (especially the last one) make it into something more complex than just a optimist manifesto. But I think it still is anti-cynical in the way it suggests Poppy (no matter how manic or mental she is) and her views have no less validity in the world than any other viewpoints, even if her is not quite as popular as some of the more cynical alternatives.

Be sure to report back when you've figured it out.

(x-post)

would have voted 'nuts in may'. there are quite a few other tv films missing from the poll.

i think he's mostly terrible.

I think his rather odd technique, when it works well, is actually pretty amazing.

i still need to see many of these, but even though i liked naked a lot, i would've voted topsy turvy. i really love that movie. for a while there it seemed like it was on one of the cable movie channels every week or so, and i never got tired of it. i think it's maybe the best movie ever made about creative people creating -- everything about the process seemed deeply understood and felt. so many good performances all the way through the cast. and the period stuff is perfect but unobtrusive, it just completely puts you in that world.

Happy-Go-Lucky was one of the most daring, moving films I've seen in ages, and it has an incredible lead performance by Sally Hawkins, so I gotta got for that. I'm probably exactly the kind of viewer it was targeted for, though, because the whole movie is a big anti-cynicist manifesto, and I'm a big anti-cynic.

t-dawg idk how u feel about this but when i was watching this it was pretty much exact like how i picture your lyfe just less fighting for the rights of ppl on internet msg boards. also that driving instructor is how i picture ilx poster whiney g weingarten right down to assaulting attractive dark haired yung women

um that sd dope movie ~~ chilling on the balcony wearnin t shirts and underwear just u no glowing and shit ~~ thats real lyfe

watched happy go lucky last night - really enjoyed it and <3 mike leigh generally - ws all this wite girls def

i personally related to how poppys frustration w/the world manifested as passive aggressive discursive joking - its trying to make people relax and be natural w/o recognizing that this desire has control freak roots of its own

so yeah she was an optimist who believes in the goodness of people - and she was pretty good at connecting when shit got real - but she was also quite willfully personally unexamined - there was a whole lot of ignorance and projection going on

wouldve voted secrets and lies btw - the climatic scene is so raw - shows the cathartic power of the truth

How did I miss this poll? Would probably have voted Secrets and Lies, too. I have a lot of affection for Life Is Sweet, too, and even Career Girls, which few people seem to like.

we can do another one next year that actually has all his films on it.

Wish I caught this poll before - I really love Leigh's films. I missed an opportunity to catch a lot of his shorts at a film fest about 10 years ago. I haven't seen them on dvd.
Torn between several of his films. Life is Sweet has been a go to recommend because it's the first I'd seen. But Naked and the performance by Thewlis are amazing. And Eddy Marsan's Scott the driving instructor is equally amazing. Great, great stuff...

I was looking at this thread in the library about 3 weeks ago ... the woman sitting next to me sees Leigh's head at the top, and says "He's my neighbor!" (London)

missed the thread too, the top 3 probably line up with my picks, haven't seen most of the older ones. i barely remember life is sweet but according to imdb i liked it less than those others anyway

Missed this poll, but "Nuts in May" would have got my vote. It's up there with "This Is Spinal Tap" for me.

Yeah can't help but feel that the Tap guyz knew their Mike Leigh. I like Nuts in May more, partly because when it's not doing its big "lol scratch a hippie" set pieces it's great at changing your perceptions of its characters, rounding them out and making each sympathetic/unsympathetic in turn. Also Finger's blithely optimistic support of Birmingham City.

Odd, missed this whole thread. Reviving due to the film in 1999 poll thread, meaning the inclusion of Topsy-Turvy. Above from Tipsy a couple of months back:

i really love that movie. for a while there it seemed like it was on one of the cable movie channels every week or so, and i never got tired of it. i think it's maybe the best movie ever made about creative people creating -- everything about the process seemed deeply understood and felt. so many good performances all the way through the cast. and the period stuff is perfect but unobtrusive, it just completely puts you in that world.

Agreed -- I just mumbled on the other thread that this film manages the neat trick of being the antithesis of a Merchant-Ivory production while looking like one, and while I'm overstating I don't think I'm far off from that. Providing a dramatic shape to a story that as presented has no start and no end is always a trick but it's handled well, and the frayed endings of the film, the digressions and details throughout, suggest so much contextually without having to dwell on them. A couple of clunky expositional moments like the mention of 'young Winston' (ie Churchill) and all but given the social circles all the various characters are meant to move through, forgivable. (Comes to mind that a comparison of the societal assumptions/actions at play in this and something like Mad Men could be instructive but I'll leave that to fans of said series to pursue further.)

My favorite scene, which I think Tipsy's point illustrates very well, is the extended rehearsal scene where Gilbert, his assistant and three of the ensemble are working in what looks like a somewhat dreary, cold room in the theatre to get the staging and delivery and etc. of a particular scene down to Gilbert's specific standards. The undercurrents, reactions, jokes, the very immediate DYNAMIC of such a crosscutting situation is so very well done.

i probably should have said "creative people collaborating," because obviously it's a different thing than a movie about a painter or writer or something. but the mutual dependence of all the parties, starting with gilbert and sullivan's carefully modulated partnership and then down through the cast and crew and so on, the hierarchies and tensions, the mini-revolt when gilbert cuts a song, the coaxing and coddling of the drug-addled actor -- it seems to me what really attracted leigh to the story was that whole web of relationships that are necessary to any serious collaboration, but are also its greatest obstacle. (and then the contrast between gilbert's fertile professional life on the one hand and his literally barren personal life on the other.)

even the aha moment, if I remember correctly, in which Inspiration Hits Gilbert is staged so that it's perfectly natural that a man of the theater would become inspired by casual fripperies he happens to notice.

Said aha moment is supposed to have actually happened, though apparently there's a question as to whether or not he already had a general idea in his head before the sword dropped from the wall of his study. I did a bunch of scrounging on Gilbert and Sullivan after the film came out and was surprised at how closely many of the details matched to what really happened, such as the revolt of the chorus against Gilbert's decision to cut the Mikado song. (Though there were obviously a few changes -- the play they pulled out as a stopgap revival pre Mikado in the movie, The Sorcerer, wasn't the one used in reality, but I suspect Leigh had a fondness for it and wanted to show it. I'm impressed at the way H.M.S. Pinafore is what hangs over everyone in the movie, as IT'S the career-defining success they know about -- The Mikado is just a hope and might turn out as indifferently as Princess Ida.)

http://www.movieline.com/2010/05/at-cannes-mike-leighs-another-year-critics-favorite.php

mike leigh is such a dick

everyone i've ever spoken to who "knows" says so, and tbh journalists/crix are pretty open about it

james cameron is abrasive but sorta amusingly so

who cares who's a dick? I saw him bristle at a dumb question at the NYFF once.

who cares who's a dick?

ehh it sorta interests me

richard port0n made the point abt 'happy go lucky' that leigh himself does not exactly live up to the credo he's selling there.

kinda like Frank Capra eh

Good stage version of Abigail's Party running in Chicago now.

For those of us who have encountered Leigh in press conferences and one-on-one interviews over the years, perhaps the most grating aspect of Happy-Go-Lucky is the fact that he is temperamentally much closer to the irascible Scott than to the sunny Poppy. In Amy Raphael’s recently published Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, the enormously defensive Leigh (who interprets even the mildest criticism of his work as monumentally insulting) strenuously denies that he’s even slightly defensive. In this light, despite the dangers of ad hoc psychological analysis, it is difficult not to conclude that Poppy’s escapades constitute an extended wish-fulfillment fantasy for the dyspeptic director. (The charitable explanation for Leigh’s behaviour is that he does not “suffer fools gladly.” But since Raphael’s book chronicles Leigh’s tendency to inveigh against all of his critics as “stupid,” the man’s overweening insecurity is all too glaring.) Acerbity is not by nature superior to sweetness and generosity. Nevertheless, since Leigh appears to have more affinities with his gloomier protagonists than with inveterate optimist Poppy, Happy-Go-Lucky, is, good intentions notwithstanding, a rather fraudulent and half-hearted enterprise.

—Richard Porton

that was a fucking shit film

For those of us who have encountered Leigh in press conferences and one-on-one interviews over the years, perhaps the most grating aspect of Happy-Go-Lucky is the fact that he is temperamentally much closer to the irascible Scott than to the sunny Poppy.

This is supposed to be criticism?

it's an illuminating observaish

Illuminating to know that artists are jerks?

well, the specificities, yes

why wouldn't it be pertinent?

Guy who has to marshal dozens of actors every year for his strenuous rehearsal process, and has done so for decades, is a harsh dick? Shocker.

well, the specificities, yes

why wouldn't it be pertinent?

For the purposes of a ILE thread, a little. Otherwise who gives a damn.

it's not the sole criterion of judgement of anything, just interesting

so i think Another Year is my favorite film of the year. pretty surprised

thought I'd seen enough depressing character studies where nothing really happens in my lifetime, but i guess not

Saw Another Year tonight. I think it might be only my second Mike Leigh film, along with Naked--there may have been a third one I've forgotten. On the whole, I had mixed feelings. I felt like I understood perfectly what it was after--a study in everydayness, or also how the previous post describes the film--and sometimes I thought it got there, and other times I felt like I'd seen other films that did it better. My biggest problem was that the conversations often followed what seemed to me to be a very mechanical shot-reaction shot-shot-reaction shot structure, and it sometimes felt like it was people trading off lines, rather than actually conversing.

Anyway, what I really came to post about was the ending. Unbelievably good. Pantheon. Whatever misgivings I had, I would gladly watch it all again for the ending alone.

Last time I crossed paths with him he was introducing an obscure Rivette short.

Also always find it interesting that his family owned a movie theater the premises of which were instrumental in the formation of the Muscle Shoals Sound.

It's good. A dynamite performance from Marianne Jean Baptiste, but Michele Austin as her sister is just as strong. Feel like it loses some steam toward the end after a climactic emotional scene, but I was happy with it overall.

Reunion!

I love how they just snaffle away about twice as much as everyone else does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1RJNZak2Dw

A Sense Of History (short film) is really funny, Broadbent written it and it's nearly a solo performance.

Oh, nice. Didn't know about that and it's on archive.org

I watched about half of Topsy-Turvy for the first time in years. Enchanting as ever,

A household favorite here, we rewatch it now and again. I think it's brilliant, and I love so many of the characters. Just great performances, great filmmaking.

It's one of my very favorite Leigh films too, maybe even my favorite. I only know one person who hates it, and it's for a whole list of inaccuracies...that this person got completely wrong. Especially bizarre because he was a theater major (even though he never actually made it in theater).

Liked Happy Go Lucky a lot but was kind of shocked by how old it looks, feels like a bygone era, which 2008 is but much moreso than I expected.

Kinda curious what made it look old to you?
(I rewatched it recently and can't think of anything that looked off about it. But maybe I'm less observant of such things...)

Hard to say exactly but it hit me as looking several years older than it is