Gillian Armstrong
10 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
Veteran DoP Don McAlpine (Moulin Rouge, My Brilliant Career) knows how to shoot a period film so that it looks both nostalgic and modern.
Along the way, she subtly evokes the final scene of Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1978), in which the young writer-heroine — an Australian Jo — sadly turns her Prince Charming down.
Adding to the ambience is the magnificent score by Thomas Newman, perhaps only, yes, second to his work on 1994’s Little Women as the best of his impressive career.
(She will also be seen in the Christmastime remake of Little Women.)
(She’ll soon be playing Amy March in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women , due out this fall.)
Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg
influenced by My Brilliant Career (1979)
Themes
If you like this, try: the earlier version with Julie Christie and the book by Thomas Hardy, and “My Brilliant Career”…
As shown by Atonement and Death Defying Acts, Saoirse Ronan, with her piercing gaze, is a technically gifted child actor, but I don't think that even she can pull off the riskier gambits of the storyline, such as Susie's brief return to Earth in another girl's body.
Honour is at the centre of this take on Henry IV Parts I & II and Henry V with (Ronan's Little Women and Lady Bird co-star) Timothée Chalamet playing the wastrel Prince Henry, who grudgingly ascends to the throne and then has to figure out whether his most dangerous enemies are across the Channel or much closer to home.
Her grandfather, the Broadway and Hollywood legend Elia Kazan, directed A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront; her parents are screenwriters Robin Swicord (Little Women, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Nicholas Kazan (Frances, Patty Hearst, Reversal of Fortune, Matilda).
(Sheâd make a great Jo in a remake of Little Women, not that we need one.)
They’ll surely cringe at the way Moggach’s script is cross-pollinated with Tom Jones and Wuthering Heights, and they may take exception to Keira Knightley, with her alarmingly toothy smile, turning Elizabeth Bennet into Jo March from Little Women (Matthew MacFadyen’s mopey take on Darcy won’t win many fans either).