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Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne and Timothy Spall: British Biopic Stars Own Best Actor Race

October 6, 2014 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Cumberbatch as Alan Turing

Cumberbatch as Alan Turing


It’s the British invasion of the Oscar race. It’s only October and three British actors – Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne and Timothy Spall – are already dominating the Best Actor race. And each of them comes carrying a biopic on his shoulders: The Imitation Game about mathematician Alan Turing for Cumberbatch, The Theory of Everything about cosmologist Stephen Hawking for Redmayne and Mr. Turner, a drama about the master landscape painter aka J.M.W. Turner stars Spall.

Biopics have always been one of Oscar’s favorite genres: Consider A Beautiful Mind, Lincoln, 12 Years a Slave, Dallas Buyers Club, Walk the Line, The Last King of Scotland and Milk. It may have been The King’s Speech that inspired this outpouring of veddy veddy English movie, but while the current crop is similar in genre, they are not the birds of one feather. The actors may play real-life public figures, but their approaches to their characters couldn’t be more different.

[RELATED: Lost Benedict Cumberbatch Drama Surfaces in Russia]

Redmayne, 32, fresh off awards buzz for his singing romantic hero in Les Miserables, takes on the brilliant yet physically challenged Hawking. He told Yahoo Movies that he believes biopics appeal to actors and audiences because of “the cult of celebrity…We see images of people like Hawking, or Turing, or Turner, and yet, because we are all human, we’re aware that it can’t be as simple as it looks on the surface. Biopics reveal what grounds these stellar individuals as human beings rather than just as achievers.”

In The Theory of Everything, Redmayne’s portrayal of Hawking begins at Cambridge – also the actor’s alma mater — before illness sets in. On campus, Hawking romances the pretty scholar (Felicity Jones) who will become his wife. But very shortly, Hawking’s fingers have trouble grasping a pencil, he trips over his own feet – and it is one long spiral from cane to wheelchair as ALS changes the course of his life. Despite this, he still authors the bestseller The Brief History of Time. This performance could easily be compared to the one that won Daniel Day-Lewis an Oscar for My Left Foot in 1990.

[RELATED: Eddie Redmayne Talks About Meeting Stephen Hawking and Why the Role Terrified Him]

Cumberbatch, 38, gives a complex emotional performance, where the intellectual’s scars are largely internal. The actor expresses every glimmer of feeling in his blue-green eyes, delivering brilliant line readings from a sharp script. He slayed me. The Emmy-winner best known for playing the TV’s sociopathic Sherlock Holmes takes on a figure less known in America than Hawkings, in a story with a less traditional arc.

Alan Turing, a brilliant and difficult puzzle-solver and Cambridge academic cracked the German Enigma code, playing a major part in defeating the Nazis in WWII. A homosexual, his greatest personal tragedy occurred in 1952 when Her Majesty’s government arrested him for the crime of gross indecency. Turing accepted chemical castration to avoid prison, only to commit suicide one year later. The bitter irony here is that his genius preserved democracy, but his own society failed him less than a decade later.

[RELATED: ‘Mr. Turner’ Paints a Mesmerizing Portrait of an Obsessive Artist]

And then along comes Spall, 57, the classically trained character actor best known for playing Wormtail in the Harry Potter saga. (He also played Winston Churchill in The King’s Speech.) He brilliantly carries this Mike Leigh directed biopic of the Victorian landscape painter J.M.W.Turner. Spall has already won a Best Actor award at Cannes for his portrayal, an almost comic conglomeration of grunts, mutters, and grumbles roughly translated into English. While his Turner is far from eloquent or emotionally accessible – much less likeable – he is deeply human. Spall shows us a brilliant artist who creates transcendent work, even if his life is a patchwork of bullying and carnal urges and, now and then, genuine affection. Working in Leigh’s signature style, there is a feeling of improvisation to Spall’s performance, a looseness and spontaneity, as if the paint has hardly dried before they move on to the next scene.

God save her, the English monarch plays a role in all three features: Queen Victoria turns up at one of Turner’s art exhibitions only to fling insults at his canvases, Queen Elizabeth bestows an OBE on Hawking at the end of The Theory of Everything and, in 2013, she posthumously pardoned Turing from all charges of indecency.

Cumberbatch who, following rapturous reviews, will now be launched by The Weinstein Company on a Best Actor campaign, confided to Yahoo Movies: “The thing I’m interested in is that the buzz creates and generates an audience…I want a lot of people to understand Turing. Any attention that encourages people to get to know, understand and marvel and thank Alan Turing — at that whole strand of his all-too-brief life — is justification enough.”

Filed Under: Movies & TV, Oscar Race Tagged With: Benedict Cumberbatch, best actor, Eddie Redmayne, Mr. Turner, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, Timothy Spall

Toronto Critic’s Pick: Benedict Cumberbatch Bristles with Brilliance in ‘The Imitation Game’

October 5, 2014 By Thelma

Cumberbatch as Alan Turing

Cumberbatch as Alan Turing


Taking its place among those handsome biopics the British do so well, The Imitation Game tells the fascinating (and ultimately tragic) story of mathematician Alan Turing. A day after the UK enters the Second World War, the Cambridge-educated Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) arrives at Bletchley Park, a top-secret center for breaking military codes used by the Germans — and is soon put to work on cracking a heretofore impenetrable code called Enigma. As presented by director Morten Tyldum (Headhunters), the mercurial Turing is impatient with social conventions and the accepted chain of command. And he is harboring his own risky secret: he prefers bedding boys to girls, resisting even the charms of Joan Clarke, a particularly fetching fellow code-breaker (played by Keira Knightley).

Cumberbatch, as you might expect, bristles with brilliance in the role – and should be considered an Oscar frontrunner. We’ve seen him as Sherlock Holmes, so we never doubt that he packs more brainpower than anyone else on the Enigma-busting team. But, unlike the emotionally cold sleuth, Turing is a real-life historical figure, sensitive and troubled. He feels deeply and passionately for his life’s work, and tears often flood his eyes, a repressed stammer forcing itself on his lips. The performance bears so many shades of varying emotion, on the surface and deep below, that it is nothing short of miraculous.

Among Turing’s many challenges, so vividly embodied by Cumberbatch, is one of identity: who he is, must remain an enigma. The mathematician and crossword-puzzle fanatic cannot make public his proclivities, no more than he can share who he fully is: A genius of visionary foresight into the still-embryonic field of artificial intelligence, and one of the pioneers behind the development of the modern computer.

While ultimately breaking Enigma, and turning the tide of the war in the Allies favor, Turing did not survive to enjoy the ascendance of democracy in his post-war life. In 1952, the police charged him with gross indecency after he acknowledged that he was in homosexual relationship. A judge imposed a sentence of chemical castration. He committed suicide a year later.

Some may know Alan Turing from the play turned TV film Breaking the Code, starring Derek Jacobi, or the movie Codebreaker or even the recent musical, A Man from the Future,composed by two members of the Pet Shop Boys. Yet, with cult-star Cumberbatch in the lead, the Turing triumph and tragedy will reach a much wider audience. Hopefully the film’s message of hard-won tolerance, and the sacrifices made by lesser-known martyrs to the cause, will bolster the continued struggle for equality for all.

The Imitation Game opens in theaters on Nov. 21

Filed Under: Celebrity, Movies & TV, Oscar Race Tagged With: Alan Turing, Benedict Cumberbatch, best actor, best picture, Best Screenplay, biopic, Keira Knightley, The Imitation Game

St. Petersburg Diary: “Lost” Benedict Cumberbatch Drama Surfaces in Russia

October 3, 2014 By Thelma

Benedict Cumberbatch hoards family secrets in "Wreckers"

Benedict Cumberbatch hordes family secrets in “Wreckers”

Imagine my surprise to be in St. Petersburg and see a Benedict Cumberbatch movie about which I knew nothing. I discovered that Cumberbatch, now headed for an Oscar nomination in The Imitation Game, starred in Wreckers. The British independent film directed by first-time Director D. R. Hood premiered in the UK in 2011 after the star’s first season playing the title role in Sherlock and around the time of stand-out supporting roles in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and War Horse. Following its British release in 2011, in Japan in 2014 and on television in the Netherlands in 2012. the film never made it to the United States.

In the intimate drama that The Guardian called a “sure-footed debut,” Cumberbatch plays David, a teacher who moves from London with his beautiful young wife Dawn (Claire Foy) to the rural village where he grew up with his young brother, Nick (Endeavour‘s Shaun Evans). Bliss ensues — chickens are raised, eggs harvested, old farmhouse rehabbed — until Nick shows up unexpectedly. The Afghan vet has a full duffel bag of difficulties from sleepwalking to PTSD, not to mention a bundle of family secrets that David has neglected to tell his bride. Nick’s presence starts roiling up the family mud beneath the deceptively bucolic surface of village life.

Foy, Cumberbatch spark

Foy, Cumberbatch spark


Cumberbatch is in fine form, working without the net of uber-brilliance that defines his Sherlock or Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, or the superpowers of his Khan in Star Trek into Darkness. His David is relatively normal, a decent husband with just a few human-sized skeletons in his closet. He’s softer here, a man in love romantically and fraternally. His character is emotional, sexy, and a bit rough under his posh pretensions as he tries desperately to keep his past buried.

Wreckers is not remarkable solely as a star vehicle for Cumberbatch. Fans of BBC’s Endeavour, the prequel to the long-running series Inspector Morse, will appreciate Evans who is currently best known as the awkwardly charismatic Oxford detective.

And then, as David’s sensitive wife, there is Foy. Remember that name: the freckled English beauty that resembles Karen Allen or Margot Kidder’s going to be big. She has the role of Anne Boleyn in the upcoming BBC/HBO miniseries Wolf Hall slated for 2015. For anyone that’s read the Hilary Mantel historical bestseller on which it’s based, you know that is one major meaty role, the kind of wily regal female that made Lena Headey’s career in Game of Thrones

Filed Under: Criticism, Movies & TV Tagged With: Benedict Cumberbatch, Clare Foy, Endeavour, Shaun Evans, Sherlock, SPIMF, St. Petersburg, The Imitation Game, Wreckers

Oh, Agatha, ‘Endeavour’ Series 2 Would be Miss Marple’s Favorite Show

July 3, 2014 By Thelma 1 Comment

Men in White Skins: Shaun Evans and Roger Allam play members of the Oxford City Police CID

Men in White Skins: Shaun Evans and Roger Allam play members of the Oxford City Police CID

I would not go so far as to say that Shaun Evans is the new Benedict Cumberbatch, but he is one of those yummy PBS nerds (like Laurence Fox of Inspector Lewis) that grows on you as the episodes pile up. In Endeavour, he does not play a funny guy, but a plain, sincere, smart Oxford scholarship student turned drop out with a chip on his often rounded shoulders. His name is Morse, Endeavour Morse in this prequel to the long-running Inspector Morse series based on the Colin Dexter novels.

In the newer shows of The Bridge era, they would dump Endeavour Morse on the Asperger’s Spectrum with his intense intellect and focus and failure to pick up social cues but I’m so tired of playing amateur psychoanalyst. Did Sherlock have Asperger’s? Does it matter?

I have now watched all of Season 2,
currently screening on PBS but available in one big dose of four addictive episodes on DVD, continues in the early sixties and while Britons around Morse are just beginning to turn on and tune out, he’s relatively square. That he takes up with the attracting and caring Black nurse down the hall is interesting. It seemed inevitable in the first series, and is just unfolding in the second. But that’s because, so far, the romance is secondary to a series of brilliant puzzle-box mysteries that would impress Agatha Christie. Sure, if the guest star is a recognizable name it’s likely he’s caused a corpse or molested a child sometime. Basically the plots are jaw-droppingly serpentine, whether the crimes take place with a hint of the supernatural in a girl’s school that was once the site of a dreadful killing (“Nocturne”), or a series of housewife stranglings with a black silk stocking (“Sway”), there are always hints of sexual perversion, betrayal and institutional corruption in the shadow of the Oxford dons.

Here’s a peak at the series. I’ll post more soon:

Filed Under: Movies & TV Tagged With: Benedict Cumberbatch, Endeavour, Masterpiece Mystery!, pbs, Shaun Evans

The TIFF13 Countdown Continues – 6 Days – ‘August: Osage County’ Trailer

August 30, 2013 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Watch this trailer — and you want to watch the movie immediately. Based on Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer-Prize Winning play about a dysfunctional family reunited for a funeral comes to the screen with Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts as bickering mother and daughter. Not star-chocked enough? George Clooney produced! With Benedict Cumberbatch, Sam Shepard, Ewan McGregor and more!

Filed Under: Movies & TV Tagged With: August: Osage County, Benedict Cumberbatch, dysfunctional family drama, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Oscars 2013

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