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

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

i have also never read le carre!

and i love spy shit

Lord, man. Get reading immediately.

ned knows

the newest isn't bad at all, actually

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

:D

think my dad has all of them sitting in the book shelf as well, and i've read pretty much anything of promise in there.

like he has a big book with at least three novels in it.

bros u gotta read the smiley series

read. it.

I grew up with Le Carré books all around the house - my dad was/is a big fan of his early stuff (not to mention Eric Ambler - did someone ever make a movie out of Mask of Dimitrios?).

Not all of the Le Carré books are great, he got more verbose as he gained popularity, which I don't think was necessarily a good thing. However both The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy are excellent.

Cumberbatch has his work cut out being half as good as Michael Jayston i think, the relationship between Guillam and Smiley (in the series) was so brilliant; a strange but believable warm funny buddy movie vibe they had going on. age gap between Cumberbatch and Oldman seems much wider but that's just nitpicking.

smiley's age sort of oscillates in the books

which are, secretly, awful

which book first?

i think i'm gonna spend like a million hours at the beach today

the eight (?) books w/ smiley are his best, i think, esp. spy who came in from the cold and "the karla trilogy" (ttss/honorable schoolboy/smileys ppl). the first couple smiley books are "minor" but fun (one is not really even a spy book). the last two are also good but a little more... well theres less action, among other things. apparently looking-glass war is the most "realistic" of le carre's books, which makes it kind of boring.

perfect spy is overrated i think. most of the 90s/2000s stuff that ive read is okay but never quite reaches the smiley heights. tailor of panama is fun.

chronologically youd want to start with "call for the dead" but i think youre better off going w/ spy who came in from the cold

thx dude

"little drummer girl" is good too i thought but i havent read it in 5 or 6 years

*shakes head sadly at thomp*

lol max you're a heavy le carré stan.

heh well like i said i just went on a binge so its all fresh in my brain

Yeah, the first Smiley books are basically crime and detection novels - good examples of them tho, with a strong feeling for dialogue and atmosphere, which once again in many ways is a decayed rural and city version of Golden Period detection thrillers. Find it hard to get behind Smiley's People, either the book or the execrable TV version. Agree w' max about the Looking-Glass War and Perfect Spy certainly.

also i have some of it wrong--looking glass war comes *before* the karla books. and secret pilgrim barely has smiley in it. (hes a minor character in swciftc and lgw too)

Call for the Dead (1961)
A Murder of Quality (1962)
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) (Edgar Award 1965, Best Novel)
The Looking Glass War (1965)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)
The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)
Smiley's People (1979)
The Secret Pilgrim (1990)

lol wikipedia otm

btw one of the great things about the original british miniseries is that patrick stewart plays karla and has... no lines

lol wikipedia otm

― Lamp, Thursday, June 30, 2011 11:38 AM (46 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hee hee i should learn to check wikipedia b4 shooting my mouth off