The Mike Leigh Poll

Yes, I really liked it as a film..I was very sympathetic to Mary and found Tom and Gerri a bit cold and self-satisfied.

for some reason I was thinking it was Loach who was making the Peterloo movie, which definitely would have contained lots of dubious expositional dialogue as well

Fwiw, I'd like to see a Loach take on this. His Spanish civil war film includes lots of exposition but is still very good and moving. I do think it owes a lot to Watkins though, in a very respectful way.

Something about the hand held camera in the debating scenes in Land and Freedom makes it feel very vital.

Also, Loach has a way of depicting the people in power as evil because they just are evil. Leigh's only way of depicting that is to make them catoonishly ridiculous. Although we love in a world where Jacob RM is taken seriously so you could say it's understandable.

Live*

that too though, sometimes

I sometimes think that the debating scenes in land and Freedom are some of the best stuff Loach has ever done. And that that whole sequence, the exciting and tragic liberation of the village, followed by the dull and frustrating debate, is one of the best depictions of politics in film.

what does everyone think of Topsy-Turvy? thinking of checking that one out this week...

I think it's my favorite of all of his films

it's top five

splendid!

my favorite is Life is Sweet... if only for that final scene between Nikola and her mom

Career Girls is still one of his best imo. It's the energy of Katrin Cartlidge, that believable dynamic with the timid Lynda Steadman character. It's just so endearing and appealingly modest, and probably best of all, the pathos isn't overplayed with Ricky, nor the eccentricity of the main characters. Ricky's still a wretched sod and could probably do with a more sympathetic, rounded characterisation than just being some hapless, handicapped foil, but he's someone you can imagine existing in their world, that people of their age might view as entertainment or be casually callous towards, or just misunderstand without it necessarily being an indictment on their character, because he's just kind of there and they're all awkward misfits. Leigh doesn't make him particularly likeable either, instead of patronising and treating Hannah and Annie didactically. The thing with Leigh too is that for all his on the nose caricatures and clumsy melodrama, and Jed massively otm upthread, when he gets it right he leaves the right sort of ambiguity with characterisation, such as with Sally Hawkins in Happy Go Lucky, and Mary, Gerri and Tom in Another Year. It's hard to know exactly where he stands in Another Year, but it's strongly hinted that Gerri and Tom and their son are quite smug and casually haughty, but just as easily Mary can be seen as pathetic, envious and resentful. Maybe Leigh doesn't see it that way, perhaps he's thinking simply that Mary is a misunderstood, downtrodden, mistreated friend whom sees the light at the end, but I doubt that.

yeah career girls is one that didn't impress me much upon release but when i watched it again a couple of years ago i was surprised how much i liked it.

I really like the Career Girls score too, which I've just discovered is by Marianne Jean-Baptiste

Topsy-Turvy is perfection. I can watch it again and again

I am not that keen on his historical ones, even Topsy-Turvy I don't really get, but Career Girls is probably the film of his that I've rewatched more than any other, it really captures a time and a place so well, and Katrin Cartlidge is just brilliant, never got why it was considered minor.

I didn't consider it minor so much as wretched when I saw it 20 years ago. I think I hated it because Katrin Cartlidge seemed a cartoon character. But I'm now super-interested to see it again given what you say and how I think about my 25-year/old self.

Wow, Winstanley is by one of the It Happened Here guys. Thanks!

From that Quietus article:

Arguably the most memorable of Leigh’s female collaborators, Alison Steadman, would meet Leigh during work on Grown Ups – beginning not only a marriage but a creative partnership that would spawn, amongst others, Abigail’s Party and Life is Sweet.

Am I missing something here, or is that a clunking mistake?

Yes, I think it must mean Hard Labour rather than Grown Ups.

I didn't consider it minor so much as wretched when I saw it 20 years ago. I think I hated it because Katrin Cartlidge seemed a cartoon character. But I'm now super-interested to see it again given what you say and how I think about my 25-year/old self.

― Alba, Tuesday, November 6, 2018 4:15 AM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I remember the criticism of the time being that he'd workshopped the characters until they had ridiculous amounts of ticks and quirks, but I knew people who behaved just like that in real life.

Wow, Winstanley is by one of the It Happened Here guys

by both of them. i only wish the Youtube was in slightly better quality.

There's a BFI Blu-Ray of it too (haven't seen it myself, but I imagine the picture quality is superior to the YouTube print)

yeah the BluRay's been on my wishlist for ages

Fopp currently have a BFI sale on the go - Blus at six quid a pop - but annoyingly Winstanley isn't part of the promotion

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

― Indiana Morbs and the Curse of the Ivy League Chorister (Dr Morbius)

Still got it?

I was enthralled by Brenda Blethyn in Secrets & Lie, but no one else is at her level in this movie. Timothy Spall especially, who has a few very clunky "big," basically greek chorus lines - he even says "Secrets and lies!" at the end.

Another thing: after watching Secrets & Lies, I spent a while looking at clips of Naked on youtube. Lesley Sharp is extraordinary in that film, imo the best performance in a Leigh film besides Jane Horrocks in Life is Sweet. what else is Sharp in that's worth seeing? (I've seen Vera Drake)

Marianne Jean-Baptiste is marvelous opposite Blethyn.

She is. extraordinary composure without ever seeming overly stoic or aloof. Blethyn is amazing in S&L - that 7 minute shot of them in the diner is a tour de force - but like I said I think it really goes off the rails in the last act. against Timothy Spall basically spelling out the movie, Blethyn all of a sudden seems histrionic. still, as Josh said itt nearly a decade ago, I've met that woman.

Lesley Sharp is bob's wife in Rita, Sue and Bob too!

doesnt fit me anymore but it's probly somewhere

Rewatched Naked just the other day. Then randomly saw Wonder Woman (2017) and stupidly amused myself thinking of it as a sequel of sorts.

Or prequel, I guess.

I’ve made four period films. Vera Drake is in a slightly different department because it’s set during a time, and in a world, that I remember. And all of the other films are set around the nineteenth century, which is recent enough to sit in our received memory, if not our actual memory. If I were to make a film that was set in the ninth century, I would find it very difficult. The nature of how people would be talking and behaving would be a concoction. But while making Peterloo, Topsy-Turvy, or Mr. Turner there was a great deal to find out about, even how people talked and what language they used. Whatever film we make, whether it’s contemporary or not, the amount of research that goes on is always colossal. People research everything they can think of to make those characters three-dimensional....

All processes, creative and otherwise, involve laying foundations and doing all the donkeywork, which can be very tedious. Nothing beats the actual filmmaking or shooting and being on set. And the postproduction, which is a glorious thing always.

First of all, that’s where you make the film. Secondly, if you’ve been rehearsing for six months, then shooting for four months and getting up at four o’clock in the morning, it’s like a rest cure! It’s very exciting, and I go backward and forward between the editor and composer, and then we start. People say to me, “You must love the rehearsals best.” I don’t. I hate the rehearsals because it’s donkeywork and you haven’t got anything to show at the end of the day. You’re just preparing and preparing and sometimes it can be quite grueling. On all of my films, and Peterloo is no exception, all the preparation work has happened, but I can only construct each scene in the location. I can’t write it without seeing it. So we do that by improvising and then pinning it down and distilling it and then finally writing it through rehearsal. And the whole business of shooting and working with the cinematographer and all the rest—that’s marvelous. It’s a privilege.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6275-a-sit-down-with-mike-leigh

Pinkerton diggin' Peterloo (opens in US today)

The characterizations throughout have more than a touch of Hogarth-like caricature to them, but Leigh reserves true grotesquerie for the ruling classes, whom he’s never made a secret of his feelings about—I direct you to his 1992 short A Sense of History, in which the fictional 23rd Earl of Leete (Jim Broadment) gives a guided tour of his splendid estate, gradually leaking details of his murder of his entire family along the way. Here, too, the gentry are found with blood on their hands. Significantly, it’s only when the film arrives at the fateful sixteenth of August that the speechifying stops, that words fail—Joseph’s family are unable to make out Hunt’s speech from the hustings; a magistrate’s reading of the riot act from a window over the square is lost to the wind; and when Yeomanry and cavalry advance suddenly with sabers drawn, actions speak louder. The carnage that follows is genuinely awful, as overwhelming in its way as the Battle of Shrewsbury is in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965)—a comparison not to be wielded lightly. Leigh isn’t shooting for you-are-there-“immersivity,” but rather for a clarified confusion; he doesn’t seek to do dubious honor to the dead by trying to approximate the firsthand experience of their final moments, only to show how these things might very well have happened, in all the panic and clumsiness. (Among other things, Leigh captures the very indignity, the awkwardness, of finding one’s self killed.) After a film so heavy with conference and conversation, the eruption of violence is as shocking as that abrupt cut to the pounding of the looms in the mill—a reign of savagery after so much talk, talk, talk attesting to high-minded civilization. And when the smoke has cleared, it remains only to coin still another word: “Peterloo.”

https://www.artforum.com/film/nick-pinkerton-on-mike-leigh-s-peterloo-2019-79196

so anyone seen it?

it's terrible. ludicrous.

well

Missed it when it played here for a week

Should've made the effort but "a lesser Topsy-Turvy" was all I heard

I loved it, y'all should watch it. I cried at the end.

Now on Amazon Prime (in the UK at least). I think it's fair to say that Jed's is the majority opinion.

Yeah, I saw the comments.

"a lesser Topsy-Turvy" was all I heard

uh, the tone is rather different....

I could've done with a little less hyperventilating by the villains (that one spitty guy in partic), but he delivered the goods with that climax (never thought I'd see that many extras in a Leigh picture). Also liked the vanity and ego of the Rory Kinnear reform star, and moments like the maid asking "Am I in the picture?" No, you are not.

I can't believe Amazon funded it.

when the two shrews in the doorway yelled "GO 'OME TO YER 'USBANDS!" one can't help but mutter "Trumpists"

i'm sure Amazon will get the National Guard to take care of their packers in a pinch.

one of my top five films of 2019

https://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2020/02/01/the-best-films-of-2019/

I agree re: Rory Kinnear's performance/character is a wonderfully drawn and played classic melt poseur arsehole! The aftermath scenes are so hard hitting, it's quite a powerful finish. It really stayed with me did this.