Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

:bears:

Stellar cast / acting / pacing / plot.
Gary Oldman should be a shoe-in for Best Actor.

This and 'Moneyball' are easily the two best movies of the last 12 months.

 

Horrifically boring. Incredibly slow to develop, would lull a Ritalin-popping meth addict to sleep.

However....

It was a brilliant movie, and everyone did a stellar job. So many visual cues, great scenes with little dialog that still conveyed incredible amounts of information if you paid attention. I think the key is that you need to go in expecting a film that realistically portrays the ARDUOUS, difficult, and frankly often tediously boring realm of intelligence collection. Not an action film, not a "thriller" by any means.

If you can accept that, and watch the film for the work of art it is, you will realize how incredibly well done it is. Gary Oldman says so little, but by the time the film was done I found myself wondering if he should be nominated for an Oscar. Good cast as a whole, although I really can't stand Colin Firth's barking style of acting.

Mark Strong again putting in a solid performance.

I'd bet half the people that see this hate it, the other half love it.

 

:bears::bears::bears:

 

Agreed. On every point. ::
It's not for people force-fed a diet of 'Reality-Quick-Fix-Drama-Shite', that's for sure...

However, the main importance that everyone needs to understand is that MI6 were, back in the day (1960s/1970s), 1st-line-of-defense against the Russian/Soviet empire.

I love all the secrey and shrouded paranoia involved: woman at the office asks one of the offices' juniors what he got up to at the weekend: "Oh, you know, the usual - visiting Aunts"

I’m a big fan of the cerebral thriller, this was cryptic as I would imagine the real world of espionage being. But it requires such patience for working out jargon in the first hour that it does risk putting folks off.

Anyway, the pieces of the puzzle come together easily in the final act, and only looking back can you appreciate how engaging this film actually was.


You realy have to watch the original 7-part series from 1979 starring Sir Alec Guiness to really get into it.

 

Actually he pretty much confirmed what I saw from the trailer. Although I love dramas this one looked like it would be a bit slow even for my tastes and I had already decided I'd likely take a pass on it.