| . |
Gosford Park
(Reviewed January 7, 2002, by James Dawson)
-
The good points: Interesting, different, well-directed, with lots of great performances from a large cast of Brits including the great Maggie Smith, Richard E. Grant, Helen Mirren, Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi and the lesser-known Kelly Macdonald, who plays Maggie's mousey but strangely sexy maid. Maggie Smith's upper-crust character is so entertainingly rude and blithely disdainful that she is a joy to behold.
The bad points: Bob Balaban, as a mincing Hollywood producer, and Stephen Fry, as a police inspector, play their roles far too broadly. The rest of the movie appears to be designed as a more realistic and believable version of a "Murder on the Orient Express"-type outing, but Balaban and Fry seem to have been dropped in from a goofier and far less "dry and witty" movie.
Also, the sound quality of this film is atrocious. What is it about British productions that so often renders dialog unintelligible? It's not merely the accents (which often are VERY thick). The problem is that lines of dialog frequently seem to have been re-recorded in studios with too much ambient sound. This results in hiss under certain lines...a hiss that vanishes when the lines end, but which reappears when the next line is spoken. Very annoying.
Still, this meandering little movie gets points for creating a strange little world of its own that is full of more interesting people than can be found in any half-dozen typical Hollywood flicks.
Back Row Grade: B
(Return to index by closing this window)
|
. |