Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (novel, miniseries, and forthcoming film to be directed by Tomas Alfredson)

benedict cumberbatch hahaha just fucking cast bill nighy and make it a romantic comedy*

*[placeholder for explanation of how it already is]

wonder if they'll leave in the two female characters

i really love how the tv version kind of starts off on this note of smiley being this totally out-of-the-loop outsider who is "too old for this shit", and then he sits down with the british agents at the estate house to meet with the spy-on-the-run, and he takes off his glasses and puts them back on and gives this dude a look which says in an instant that he's the smartest and toughest dude around and it's like "oh shit."

mark strong just got cast, too. so it's him and oldman, firth, cumberbatch, hinds, ralph fiennes and tom hardy.

Holy shit. It might actually work.

Yeah, I found Honorable Schoolboy to be a little odd and difficult to relate to.

One big problem with that one was the woman character, who is as badly drawn as all Le Carre women characters (with possible exception of Connie). I do wonder sometimes whether Le Carre has ever met any actual women.

But I still totally love TTSS and SP.

he takes off his glasses and puts them back on and gives this dude a look which says in an instant that he's the smartest and toughest dude around and it's like "oh shit."

otfm

Absolutely the best moment of the whole series, I get chills just thinking about it.

not sure if this was mentioned but it's apparently retaining the cold war era for the setting.

Thank god for that.

man i gotta find my dvds of the show so i can watch it again

I have a hard time imagining that this could touch the miniseries, which was pretty much perfect.

― Moodles, Friday, November 20, 2009 11:44 AM (10 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i have a hard time imagining that i can't touch my miniseries as someone has borrowed it and i can't remember who :(

― 311 is a joek (s1ocki), Friday, November 20, 2009 11:57 AM (10 months ago) Bookmark

it's always in the place where you least expect it, like the amazon marketplace page of your friend or acquaintance.

Unwittingly I've only watched the compressed, US six-episode (instead of seven) version of the series. Apparently they've even jumbled the chronology of some scenes around. Anyone seen both?

oh shit, that's the version i've seen too (via netflix).

Basically I'm going to get and watch the original no matter how trivial the differences might be. Every scene could be longer. Feels like I can still taste the words exchanged between Smiley and Prideaux in the car, at the hotel, walking around the moors.

Kathy Burke as Connie Sachs

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1322727/Kathy-Burke-star-film-version-John-le-Carr-s-Tinker-Tailor-Soldier-Spy.html

gonna be great this i can feel it. god knows how they're going to squelch it all down to 2 hours. if they can nail the Ricky Tarr bit they've got the rest i think.

tom hardy playing ricky tarr fyi

super stoked for this... killer cast

boom

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2011/jun/30/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-traiker

love john hurt

holy shit i am pumped for this

Probably this is going to be good (Gary Oldman and John Hurt are great), but Smiley and Guinness for me are so inextricably linked that it is impossible to imagine a different actor in that role.

true, hope they pull it off

good to see benny cumby and tom hardy reteaming

Oldman looks the part in that trailer altho he's perhaps still too good-looking to be Smiley, also I can't quite tell from the trail if it's set in period or not, some of the shots look like it is but some don't. Anyway I'm pretty sure this will rock and I demand they do the full trilogy.

it's set in ~the past~ for deffo

'it's the male bridesmaids' - a blogger who gets it

every shot looks period to me

yeah consider me stoked. looks like exactly the right tone. still hard to get my head around a non Guinness/BBC version but hey.

Definitely could work, the brief bit of the Karla interrogation scene was solid.

oldman doing his best obi-wan impression

its still set in the 1970s according to wikipedia

i just rescreened this the other week and it put me on a le carre book/movie/miniseries kick. the miniseries for a perfect spy is kinda 'eh' (though i dont love the novel as much as everyone else does); smiley's people is pretty good but not as good as this.

sick trailer btw

pretty stoked for this based on the trailer, never seen or read any le carré.

i pretty much love anything with spies and the cold war.

dude!!

excited for this!

so many craggy-looking british dudes!

new board description

haha. oldman is so good. has he really never won an oscar?

'oscar' and 'good at acting' are pretty bad predictors of ea. other

yeah, i know. just the "gary oldman BAFTA winner - colin firth academy award winner" thing at the end struck me as wrong.

Psyched for this even though it can't possibly improve upon the mini-series.

yeah, just the condensing of everything to feature length makes me nervous. but looks like they nailed the vibe, judging from the trailer.

ha i don't think his (oldman's) bafta was even for acting? the bafta best actor over the past twenty years is an almost unalloyed cavalcade of mediocrity though, c-fuzz won it for king's speech AND for a single man

xpost

i don't even mind firth, but i'm sure even he would say that oldman's the better actor.

jim in glasgow this

never seen or read any le carré.

― Introducing the Hardline According to (jim in glasgow), Thursday, 30 June 2011 14:19 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i pretty much love anything with spies and the cold war.

― Introducing the Hardline According to (jim in glasgow), Thursday, 30 June 2011 14:19 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

is just crazy talk! you need to get some carré my friend

kinda can't believe i am doing trailer analysis but: the snippets of firth in this make him look great?, like it'll be a good fit for his perma-pensive face

Amazon was pushing his Titanium Noir on me in recommendations but ugh

"A virtuosic mashup of Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler by way of Marvel—the story of a detective investigating the murder of a Titan, one of society’s most powerful, medically-enhanced elites. • “Cross-genre brilliance from the superbly talented Nick Harkaway.” —William Gibson, New York Times best-selling author of Agency"

Anyone seen the new morris doc on Apple TV yet?

rip jerry westerby

roddy martindale might be among my most bad and hated characters ever

https://media.tenor.com/kRKSXNGI84sAAAAC/what-have-you-been-doing-alec-guinness.gif

'love to ann!'

https://snappishproductions.com/images/gfy/love-to-ann.gif

most other characters just give it to her directly

i’ve got the line “Willie Andrewarthur always was the most godawful liar” stuck in my head. Something v earwormy about Nigel Stock’s performance.

me confusing nigel stock with nigel bruce (both of course played sherlock's watson, albeit several decades apart) totally made me wtf for a moment there lol -- nigel bruce was NOT in tinker tailor soldier spy

never read sherlock

was watching this (again). smiley’s “oh damn! oh damn!” after his meeting with martindale is in the book caused by realising he’s left the volume of grimmelshausen he’s just bought at the club. in the adaptation he has “entrusted it to the postal service” after seeing peter guillam trying to intercept it. makes it a bit of a clumsy or incoherent line, even for alec guinness.

he’s left it at the club. he didn’t buy it at the club.

nigel bruce as roddy martindale would have been a thing!

this is imo unresolved

in the series it seems a very deliberate detail in the change a d in the timing of the change

ann likes smiley bcz he's secretly 1 x GOTH

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Simplicissimus_Cover_page1669.jpg

xpost

the other - obvious - thing is that a) martindale is quite an appealing character and b) that he gets v close with his gossip and surmise to the heart of the problem.

expresses what is said at the end of the book - that everyone in some way *knew* it was haydon. it was just impossible to admit - psychologically or organisationally.

this is imo unresolved

in the series it seems a very deliberate detail in the change a d in the timing of the change

hard to imagine smiley monologuing (word? sp?) so coherently and stagily alright

but i meant, and still mean, the decision to post the book

oh yes. i think it’s a decision forced by the dramatisation tbh. too awkward to get it into the club and post club scenes.

maybe it shorthands smiley seeing gwilm and changing his plans, gives him an object to explicitly speak to someone about that shows this happening

as i noted in the obit thread, now that Michael Jayston has passed away, all of the main cast of the BBC series is now gone. though we've still got Ann Smiley and Karla.