Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, several other great actors and actresses, and one from a show I loved (Lark Rise to Candleford). Winner of Best Writing of a screenplay by Julian Fellowes, who writes Downton Abbey, a show I love to watch. Many other nominations for awards. This had all the right factors for a movie I would love. Also, I will watch just about any British movie set in this time period.
IMDB describes the plot as:
"Multiple storylined drama set in 1932, showing the lives of upstairs guest and downstairs servants at a party in a country house in England."
On a scale of 1-10, I would give this a solid...6 1/2.
It would have been higher if I had not watched several seasons of Downton Abbey.
The dynamic of this time period with the world of the servants (downstairs) interacting with the higher class (upstairs) is so fascinating to me. But it wasn't new to me thanks to Downton Abbey, which I think would have made the slower pace of this movie more interesting. It's definitely a study of the characters, the personalities, how they interact between the two classes, etc.
The murder part is set up so that you aren't completely positive about the ending, but it really wasn't as much the main point of the story line as it is about the development of all the characters.
This was a decent movie. I think that all the award nominations and famous actors made me have higher expectations for how good it would be. Also, we were very tired and it was late, so not the best scenario to put in a slow paced British drama. We had to turn on the subtitles about 1/3 the way in to follow the plot, as there are so many different people to keep straight, ha ha.
The director apparently used body mics on everyone so you get a lot of background murmuring, which adds to the authenticity of being an observer, but does make it more difficult to decipher some of the strong accents. The camera also never stops moving, even if just slightly, not even really an issue or jerky, just a little fun fact.
A fun addition we made this time, was that I thought it would be fun to try and theme our movie snack to go along with the movie choice of the week. We had eaten a late lunch yesterday so we by movie time we were ready for "fish n' chips." But it will be interesting now to try and find a snack for next weeks movie! Not really one you immediately associate with any type of food.
Corey stated that he is winning on movie picks, and I would reluctantly have to agree. To be fair though, I haven't seen any of my movie choices before, I chose all things that I want to see. He has previously watched almost all of his choices.
We also decided to split up the movie choices and rotate, for both of our sakes, ha ha!
So, next week is Corey's choice from the 1990s. This one will be huge branching out for me with movie genres!
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