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

yeah the TV series is a Peter/George buddy movie by comparison. i missed those elements!

does smiley look like a dandy? he looks like someone who has v high professional standards of dress but gets all his suits from the same shop for no particular reason

i tried to watch the tv series last night but was informed i fell asleep three times during the first episode; i managed to dream an integrated scene where various of the potential mole types were having a chilli-eating competition and wake up without realising i'd been asleep, at one point, though on reflection it became apparent

i: this is the currently only ilx thread with the word "Tinker" in the title
ii: wasn't there a thread about when/where/whether ppl put tape across their doors to check whether their flatmates/parents were going through their stuff? What was it called?

I thought it was a very good spy film.

I don't know what Fizzles the Chimp means about paintings.

"Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad."

pinefox, I just wrote a long thing about the paintings, but it didn't send. probably no loss (angry 'FUCK!' aside) but it did expand on what I meant. I can't be arsed to write it again right now - dreadful hangover, but I'll give it another shot later today.

Taping a hair across a doorway or cabinet so you'll know if people have been up in your shit.

does that happen in the book? it seemed a weird lol spy stuff moment: i rationalised it to myself as it being for his wife's benefit, & then was v confused when it was used re:wossname - tom hardy's character -- later

i thought it might be a quick way of demonstrating that boring george smiley nonetheless took all the necessary precautions, that he's a 'proper' spy etc.

Read the book since, and took delivery of the bbc version this morning

in the book i think it serves as an early reminder that underneath the stuffy Whitehall surface of Smiley's life, stakes is high

like a metaphor for roy hodgson's style tbh

watching bbc series all weekend, it's exceptional

Read the book, not too many complaints (aside from it would doubtless benefit from an immediate re-read, which is not going to happen). One thing that didn't come off for me is Prideaux's stalking at the end. If he was the super-spook he was made out to be, no-one would have seen him. And, if as happened, Smiley and co did see him - even just a shadow that vanished - they wouldn't have brushed it off, they would have known with the certain justified paranoia of the spook that they were being followed.

Saw this the other day - bored stiff and somewhat confused for the first half an hour or so but everything got much better from the Istanbul section onwards. Most of the characters seemed a bit thin though, especially the mole suspects.

I liked how tedious and unglamorous it made being a spy look.

bbc has 300 mins + to flesh out al-alein etc, tho strangely there's less of haydon

characterisation is weak i think yeah, whole thing works much better as melancholy, dreamy eye-candy than as any kind of procedural.

still not sure how film-makers revivified the corpse of Peter Lorre to play movie Esterhase

thought Smiley was gonna tell him that when he slapped him he'd take it and like it at one point

lol my favourite line, that

Nnnnhhh I just missed out on a preview screening of this with a Gary Oldman Q&A because my husband is TOO SLOW
Now I have to wait til December with the rest of the US :(

hard to imagine this condensed to 100 minutes

tbf, it's 127 minutes. It's been years since I saw the TV series, but this didn't feel rushed or at all cramped, but obv. there is plenty of stuff from that and the book which was cut.

screening with Gary Oldman sounds like it would have been A+, shame you didn't make it.

It wasn't difficult to follow but it demanded attention (the audience of sixtysomethings snored loudly), and the last fifteen minutes consisted of a "Murder, She Wrote"-style let-me-tell-you-how-it-REALLY-happened denouement

Is Gary Oldman so good an actor that when he disappears into a role like this it's so complete that he doesn't give a performance? I didn't find him very interesting. I did snap to attention whenever John Hurt and his bullfrog face appeared though.

i got sick of the brown-grey dinginess of everything. yeah yeah europe in the 70s i get it.

Usually I complain about "Mad Men"-style "LOL look how things have changed," but not this time. Alfredsom has an eye for the absurd: the owl on fire swooping out of the fireplace; Santa with the Lenin hat.

now that i've seen the bbc version, oldman vs guinness is a harsh comparison - the movie isn't about smiley to anything like the same extent

The actors all hit their notes (I particularly the deftness with which Alfredson handles the revelation of a key character's homosexuality) but, as I did with the miniseries, I wanted more friction from these men.

*I particularly liked

I was surprised at how abstract and oblique this film was. I don't know how it would have made sense to me if I weren't already familiar with the story. It really made me realize how exposition-heavy the mini series is. This was the exact opposite, expecting us to infer a heck of a lot from minimal gestures.

The circus headquarters came off as very sci-fi or even steampunkish. Are those little boxy conference rooms a real life detail or just creative set design?

this movie had me trying to puzzle if oldman's recent preference for minimalist performances is a real aesthetic/artistic preference that he's grown into, or if he's just tired of being pigeonholed

have some more thoughts, but im gonna wait until i finish the mini to post them (have watched first two eps)

the abstractness and obliquity are the film's best assests for me, as a straight story it falls very short i think

the conference room insulated from noise is a detail from the novel, btw, altho the film's realisation of it doesn't feel remotely true to the book

Was there any story-benefit for

SPOILER

- letting the audience think Prideaux is killed
- killing Thesinger
- killing Irina

apart from trying to pack in some cinematicness? It had the effect of making Moscow seem more thuggish than crafty.

well Moscow was!

killing irina sets up smiley's most ruthless moment, when he allows tarr to think that she can be saved because tarr is still of use to him

i really dug this movie, but it creates sort of a catch 22 i guess. i was really into the movie and left it wanting to have the world fleshed out more, so i watched the miniseries... which then makes the movie seem a bit slight in comparison because of how many details are elided - i think they did about the best job they could though

after viewing the movie the only thing that i was slightly dissatisfied with was oldman's perf. i got a kick out of his constantly probing eyes (like an owl), and his accent was quite nice, but i didnt think much else of it. i wanted him to hit a grand slam, and it was more like a ground rule double. i was even more dissatisfied when i saw how much more guinness did with the same role - though to be fair it wasnt really the same role, the movie's smiley was really pared down with fewer character moments, which makes me less than certain whether or not im judging the performance or judging the role

there are things i thought the movie did better (all the ricky tarr stuff was much more artfully presented without really omitting anything that would deepen our understanding of his story), and i thought a lot of the supporting perfs were great - john hurt (who was actually considered for smiley - that might've been a more interesting movie), mark strong, and colin firth really impressed me with how much he suggested about his character with very little screen time, though i would later see that he got his method of manipulating his glasses from ian richardson's bill haydon

the Ricky Tarr monologue in the movel, original miniseries, and new version are a dramatic dead-end. I don't know why.

*is

In the novel it was interminable.

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."

― ('_') (omar little), Wednesday, October 13, 2010 1:43 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

i actually said 'damn!' out loud at that shot

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

― tylerw, Thursday, June 30, 2011 10:58 AM (6 months ago) Bookmark

i was looking at his credits recently and was surprised to find that he wasnt nominated for The Contender as i would've sworn he was - he seemed to get the most positive buzz of anyone in the picture at the time, but Bridges got the supporting nom instead

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

― tylerw, Thursday, June 30, 2011 11:09 AM (6 months ago) Bookmark

not so sure about this now tbh!

the Ricky Tarr monologue in the movel, original miniseries, and new version are a dramatic dead-end. I don't know why.

― lumber up, limbaugh down (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, January 8, 2012 9:30 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

it killed the second episode of the mini for me, just dead in its tracks. definitely not deserving of a 30 minute flashback

i thought the looks that strong and firth exchange in the xmas party flashback were pretty devastating

Usually I complain about "Mad Men"-style "LOL look how things have changed," but not this time. Alfredsom has an eye for the absurd: the owl on fire swooping out of the fireplace; Santa with the Lenin hat.

So I did actually go to a Q&A with Alfredson when I saw this and he said the owl fireplace thing was something that actually happened to Le Carre.

Also I can't be the only person for whom
http://www.pajiba.com/assets_c/2011/04/toby-jones-AFP_62176s-thumb-300x251-23283.jpeg

=

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_2n9G8hS3AbI/TUzDmoPtMFI/AAAAAAAACMQ/-OBCVvsCpps/s400/Pinky+and+the+Brain+Photo.JPG
can I?

Michael Philipps called Toby Jones "the greatst sniveler" in movies.

Toby Jones really annoys me

thought it was funny to find out jared harris was up for toby jones' role first, because ive been getting those two mixed up for a couple years now

I didn't like this much at all (and I loved the book and mini-series). Just plodding and with all the richness of the characters leached out (would have like to have seen this cast stretched out, but as it was most of the performance could at best be described as workman-like here).

found firth's haydon an improvement, if only on physical appearance

Oldman's smiley a bit of a non-event, think placing his character/development at the core of the movie missed the point somewhat.

Toby Jones really annoys me

I know this is unlikely in any case, but you really must avoid Your Highness. Lots of naked Toby Jones.