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

pointless and popular feeling I'm sure and not really a complaint but preferred the telly cast and the v different tone of some sections and characters - particularly tarr and connie. seems a funny thing to say too since the telly one must have been drawn out at least as much as the movie but it did feel to me like it dragged rather more - maybe just means the story better suits a serial to spread the slow pacing which of course is fundamental out a bit. it was always going to be compared to the telly one though. funny that smiley's trusted coterie was made up of two of the modern era's greatest fictional minds: sherlock holmes and trigger. colin firth's zoo enclosure was weird. was relieved we didn't see smiley's nipples during the pond-swimming scenes.

i ploughed through the tv series yesterday, it doesn't drag at all even though yes it's just people in rooms - this is because when in those rooms they actually have conversations of substance rather than just exchange two lines and stare out the window as in the film

Kudos for the quality staring though...

so is there a reason i can't find this movie anywhere within 50 miles?

it's undercover

brevity

rumour has it it's using the identity of 'marley & me' so look for that

:)

^ if you see this man pls notify the authorities

Didn't care for this much. Too compressed (lots of being led by the nose in terms of getting from plot point A to plot point B via dialogue/voiceover) and at the same time too many wasted minutes, e.g the walk of shame at the start. I know this killed two other birds, viz showed us the layout of the Circus and it was something to post the opening credits over but it just looked silly. Would have liked more screen time for Alleline, Bland and especially Esterhase to fill out their characters a bit. Oldman doesn't get an "oh, fuck" moment - see comments upthread about Guinness removing the glasses and putting them back on. So you never quite believe he's anything other than a doormat e.g. the scene where he's putting the Minister straight about Witchcraft just jars.

Enjoyed the scenes where Guillam's at the Circus second time round, but that was about it.

The Circus irritated me a bit, actually. Long time since I've read the novels, but isn't it called The Circus cos it's a shabby rabbit warren on Cambridge Circus, rather than a purpose built open-plan warehouse style place? The old identity of the Circus is kind of crucial - the building embodies the faults of the organisation it houses - old fashioned, labyrinthine, unfit for purpose, on the brink of collapse.

So you never quite believe he's anything other than a doormat

with an unfortunate resemblance to john major, making the final few shots of the film unintentionally comical

ok here is the REAL question: what is the wooden gizmo little bill roach makes and brings to prideaux at the end of the film?

also: IRL what is the building that played the circus, and where is it in london?

blythe house, west kensington

yes I was disappointed that we didn't find out about the wooden thing! maybe in the next movie?

i am hoping the next film continues the harry potter-ish element, like the FLAMING OWL QUIDDITCH moment

haha yeah

++ loved the look, mise en scene somewhere between 10 rillington place and brazil (with a dash of the ipcress file); i think tomas alfredson's sense of place is strong anyway, as is JLC's of course, and they compliment one another here
-- gary oldman seemed to be playing smiley as a man in a rubber alec guinness mask; he has the voice down but you felt he was often just standing there saying "listen! i have the accent down!" (deep caveat: if alfredson's conception is mission impossibly and oldman was actually playing a mole in an alec guinness mask)
++ some of the second-rung actors were excellent (BC = guillam; MS = prideaux; KB = connie obviously; JH + control) (and LACON: i am a huge giant fan of simon mcburney as near-walk-on in "popular" drama, he is often massively cheeky and scene-stealing in a subtle way, and was here too) -- interestingly mcburney was probably the most effective at overly "playing" a double (the little fellow who played esterhase was the worst: but only one of the mole-suspects was presented as remotely attractive) (making it easy to guess which one was the mole)
-- it didn't solve and i think exacerbated the tension between the two species of book JLC tries to pass of as one; one a fraught procedural about precision of observation (where the unglam uber-technician turns out champ), and one a sententious lament about the morality of geo-political manouevre by other means <-- the second is by a long way the least interesting, jlc is shrewd about (non-female) people but windy at best when he turns this into aggregate generalised form... and this film did not allow space for much of the former, in fact: the detecting was as nugatory as the "playing double" was
++ it did actually clarify a few plot points in the original!

forgot to say: i strongly feel alfredson is of the "secret intelligence is a worthless activity, and besides these men were drunks and clowns" school = VG TICK in ref my own equivalent prejudices

despite the ultra-grimy mise en scene, this is anything but a work of sociological or historical realism: no such milieu ever existed, and the director is unbothered if we leave the cinema thinking this

only period detail i found slightly 'off' = smiley eating in a wimpey bar!

what's wrong with wimpy? he *was* using a knife and fork

i was meant to be seeing this this evening, & the idea that he is just doing an alec guinness impersonation put me off, but the idea that he eats in a wimpy using a knife and fork actually leaves me feeling into it again

everybody ate w a knife and fork in a wimpy in the 70s! i just think smiley, spooks in general, were a bit m class for a burger joint in the 1970s - but maybe it is 'deep cover'

thought this was excellent, found it a very immersive viewing experience, good performances- not having read the book nor seen the bbc version i still found it ok to follow.

maybe it was a joke that everything moves slowly even the fast food

wimpy existed in 1973! they were the first UK burger places iirc -- and the fact they eat at one is taken from the book

the one point where i was thrown out of story into overt anachronism watch was that -- in his makeshift investigation headquarters -- smiley appeared to have some scissors with black plastic handles: I DON'T REMEMBER THESE IN MY YOUTH, and it made me go AHA! (tho i may be completely wrong, but i think he would have old-school all-metal scissors)

oldman is the most disappointing element i think: and really all this proves is that smiley is basically a flawed and implausible character, a problem that guinness alone has solved to date

it's not called a wimpy in the book

1967 - Fiskars manufactures the world's first plastic-handled scissors

:o

one of the things i really like about all the tech in the circus is that it looks like it was STATE OF THE ART AND GLEAMING about ten years before

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3VmRI-df85U/TQAo0kQdqRI/AAAAAAAAR8o/BHkG3iI1jkc/s400/bowie_scissors.jpg

This 1974 portrait of David Bowie was part of an all day studio session in Los Angeles to promote the Diamond Dogs album. Bowie picked up the scissors absent-mindedly and O'Neill decided to keep them in the shoot to symbolize the cutting edge nature of Bowie's music.

haha awesome

i feel smiley was as likely to be using those scissors as he was to be listening to aladdin sane as he stuck tiny photos onto chesspieces

suppose if he'd absent-mindedly picked up a pile of shite o'neill would have probably asked him put it down for the photos

Only anachronism I noticed in this was during the scene where Irina was wheeled onto the boat to Odessa, where a huge recent-looking poster/banner could be seen at the left-hand side of the shot (the design style and typefaces seemed more early-to-mid 2000's than 1973. Yes, I'm a design nerd). Also, a friend pointed out that some scenes had speed bumps in shot?

Silliness aside, loved it.

"bowie absent-mindedly picked up a return-to form"

possible sensible suggestion for the wooden gizmo that b.roach makes = a v-thing to pull one's boots off with (no wonder prideaux yelled at him)

finally reading j.sutherland's essay on TTSS in S&S: tempted to liveblog this too, it seems quite poor :(

it's a wooden prototype for what eventually became that v-slicer vegetable cutting wondertool advertised on uk living after 2.00am

saw this last night. i think i might have enjoyed it more were i not in the middle of a godawful headache, such that each shot's lighting and sound produced a reaction in terms of pain before i got to consider aesthetics -- it was aight tho

heard from the row behind: "man, there was such great 50s design in that film"

okay something of a SPOILER follows

what's the logic of guillam -- after smiley warns him that those on top will now have their eye on him -- immediately throwing his boyfriend out? is the idea that he's so gauche that he thinks 'they' will care enough to use it against him?

actually, okay, it's established that he genuinely doesn't want other people aware -- viz. the play he makes of flirting with the office staff and such -- it just seemed a weird revision to the plot, when stuff like haydon and prideaux is an open secret. & i guess it's better than the hippie girlfriend, & that shot of cumberbatch crying was one of the more affecting moments

yeah, i think that haydn and prideaux being an open secret didn't necessarily exclude the possibility that the same thing could be used against guillam if necessary

yes i think it's odd: there's actually very little in the film -- except the bill roach stuff? -- that isn't directly plot-driving, and that bit really isn't, so it sticks out

i: is it a general point about the dangers of being gay in the secret service in the early 70s? prob true but kind of a digression -- and why is it only suddenly now that guillam realises this?
ii: is it there as a marker of what danger guillam suddenly realises they're actually in? prob true but not well set up: we don't actually get a sense they're being watched (and they apparently bundle toby e into a car right outside the circus: certainly nearby)
iii: is it just character-colour? if so why only for PG?
iv: is there a ppl-wearing-rugs-are-a-kind-of-mole counter-textual subtext? <--- this (since his boyf is bald)

also: is prideaux (mark strong in a rug) crying at the xmas party bcz he too was watching haydon squeezing lady ann's bottom?

ps Toby Jones has such an awesome resume: Robert Cecil 1st Earl of Salisbury, William Hogarth, Daniel Quilp, Truman Capote, Arnim Zola, Percy Alleline, Karl Rove, Dobby the house elf

think that it's one of quite a few ways we can link guillam to haydon? Homosexual but plays the ladies man, possibly a little idealistic for the role, maybe there's more but off the top of my head....

(Arnim Zola is the evil-doctor minion in Capt America not the French novelist: muddlingly enough I saw Capt Am the day before I saw TTSS)

"link" in what sense though? that he's been his lover? that he idolises and imitates him? that he's exposed bcz all gay ppl are secretly pals? if yr right it underlines that complaint that they don't really do enough work to guild haydon up into the god he is in the book -- which you can kind of do without plotwise, but it removes quite a lot of what's at stake in his exposure (which is pretty much all the british secret service's internal glamour)

prideaux was crying? whenever it was my observational skills had plainly gone to shit by that point

kind of curious if this movie is followable if you come in blind, at least without some kind of cheat sheet -- i read it a while ago & i've been following this thread so i had the list of names primed already -- but it seems like a hell of a lot of people to keep track of

which conversely was one of the things i didn't like about it! that it had to start with john hurt explaining THERE IS A MOLE! AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL! and that there had to be periodic flashbacks with smiley picturing them all in the soundless room. or shots of the bloody chess set.

(xpost.)

'link' in that guillam is a shadow-version of haydon, i thought he meant

otoh i liked that the corniest Spy Movie Lines -- "we're not so very different, you and i" -- "we're on the same side, george" -- were kind of recontextualised -- toby aware of the limpness of it as he says it, oldman in that very uncomfortable too-close-up address to an absent karla communicating: i don't know what, exactly

i thought the talking-to-an-empty-chair bit was fucking embarrassing tbf

'link' in that guillam is a shadow-version of haydon: not i think well achieved by the film on its own, but i find it REALLY hard to unremember what i (often unhelpfully) know from the book as you can image, since (a) i reread it last week and (b) i wrote it all down like an idiot!

hence the prob i had with that boyf-dumping scene was that i had too many conflicting ways of possibly reading it, w/o any clues, so it jumped right out as a bit of a weird change to decide on -- if i could grasp their rationale instantly i wouldn't have been nagged by it (this is partly a result of the way i think about films and books and etc anyway: "ok so why make this move here?" all the time)

yeah, link was just a story device, i meant.

Followed it without a cheatsheet btw, got a little muddled before the big unveiling but otherwise fine.