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In case you missed me bleating about it on Twitter and Tumblr last night I was all about The Remains of the Day yesterday - I was suddenly overcome with the need to watch the film all day, and so I watched it when I got home, and then I posted a few magnificent gifs from it over at the Tumblr, see here and here, golly it is a gorgeous movie. Besides being thematically similar, in that they're both about repressed people not allowing their Great Love to blossom, watching Remains this time I kept getting whiffs of Won Kar-wai's In the Mood For Love from it, when the camera would allow itself to be romantic. That whole sequence on the pier towards the end is lit like a Wong Kai-wai fever dream with those pink and green lights.
Anyway you might be asking yourselves why the hell is he talking about The Remains of the Day while he posts pictures of Ben Chaplin and Billy Crudup in bed together in Stage Beauty, and you'd probably be right to be a bit quizzical on that score - it's because Ben Chaplin's in Remains, silly. A fact I'd forgotten til there he was in all his adorableness. He kept reminding me of Rob James Collier in Donwton Abbey, actually.
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Anyway since he doesn't sleep with Billy Crudup in Remains of the Day (the film's only flaw, I'd say) then I had to head off to other places. Truth be told I've never actually seen Stage Beauty. Should I? Or is this all I need to see here?
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2 comments:
Thanks a lot for link to Remains shots; I'm now crying at work. How is that possible from just those images? Seriously underrated film...
Skip the film version of Stage Beauty. Jeffrey Hatcher's play is hilarious, but the movie loses most of its wit and is marred by Claire Danes's strange composite of two completely different characters from the source material (higher-ups only wanted one female lead; more poster friendly).
The play, it's also worth noting, is not a romance--because the main character is gay, start to finish. In the film, the guy suddenly becomes attracted to women after a terrifyingly bad sex/morning after scene. It's not handled in an "Oh, he's bisexual" way so much as an ill-conceieved, borderline-homophobic way. Someone who worked on the film told me Crudup forced the change because he didn't want his character to stay gay, he wanted him to "redeem" himself. Blech.
Also, the fact that the two actors are lovers, not competitors, makes the climax of the film INCREDIBLY weird. But I won't ruin it for you, in case you do decide to watch...
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