(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Ftrailers.apple.com%2Ftrailers%2Ffox_searchlight%2Fneverletmego%2Fimages%2Fposter-large.jpg&hash=9fa08e13a2ed7860273f510d2401113dfc7f00cb)
In his highly acclaimed novel NEVER LET ME GO, Kazuo Ishiguro (THE REMAINS OF THE DAY) created a remarkable story of love, loss and hidden truths. In it he posed the fundamental question: What makes us human? Now director Mark Romanek (ONE HOUR PHOTO), writer Alex Garland and DNA Films bring Ishiguro's hauntingly poignant and emotional story to the screen. Kathy (Oscar® nominee Carey Mulligan, AN EDUCATION), Tommy (Andrew Garfield, BOY A, RED RIDING) and Ruth (Oscar® nominee Keira Knightley, PRIDE & PREJUDICE, ATONEMENT) live in a world and a time that feel familiar to us, but are not quite like anything we know. They spend their childhood at Hailsham, a seemingly idyllic English boarding school. When they leave the shelter of the school and the terrible truth of their fate is revealed to them, they must also confront the deep feelings of love, jealousy and betrayal that threaten to pull them apart.
Director: Mark Romanek
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Charlotte Rampling, Sally Hawkins, Nathalie Richard, Andrea Riseborough
In theaters: October 1st, 2010
http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/fox_searchlight/neverletmego/
Can't wait for this!
I'm just going ahead and filling out my Xixax awards ballot now. Best Film, Director, Screenplay, Leading and Supporting Females. The jury's still out on that scarf-wearing fancy lad.
I am certainly intrigued but that scream in the road bit had me laughing. That was some Billy Walsh bullshit.
pretty bad trailer. seems like a movie that can't be marketed well though, unless you reveal whatever this big secret is about what they are..
Just enough properness for me to dig.
I follow Romanek on Twitter and it was so cute how he was so nervous about what people were going to think of the trailer.
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Quote from: picolas on June 16, 2010, 03:25:10 AM
. . . seems like a movie that can't be marketed well though, unless you reveal whatever this big secret is about what they are..
Truth. It would work if a chorus performed a rendition of Radiohead's "Morning Bell" to it . . .
Cut the kids in half
Cut the kids in half
Cut the kids in half
Release me
Release me
Release me
Release me Just kidding. (I had to make a subtle dig at Mr. Fincher's TSN trailer.)
Shits and giggles aside -- I have high hopes for this film. It is a fantastic novel.
double post
If assigned the task, I would tease the film this way (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwMeFIXQc-c).
OR (http://www.youtubedoubler.com/?video1=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DXUCK162votQ&start1=32&video2=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DDAwGWptsOls&start2=136&authorName=Romanerd)?
haha holy shit that site is fucking awesome. a mashup comparer? omg yes. it must be spun off into its own thread because we love mashing shit together and seeing if it goes. remember that thread where we all created our own album covers using a random image, quote and word?
Quote from: picolas on July 28, 2010, 03:17:10 PM
OR (http://www.youtubedoubler.com/?video1=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DXUCK162votQ&start1=32&video2=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DDAwGWptsOls&start2=136&authorName=Romanerd)?
Hahaha. Sold! That preview will get me in line opening day!
The whole thing looks beautiful.
The beginning looks intriguing.
The end looks sappy.
from my blog (http://modage.tumblr.com/post/1121230712/never-let-me-go):
I love Mark Romanek. Cool kids will name Jonze, Gondry or Cunningham as their favorite music video directors from the 90's, but mine was Romanek. I could always tell within a few seconds if it was one of his videos and always liked them. Curiously I wasn't in love with his debut film One Hour Photo. I thought it was well made and well acted but I just didn't fully connect with it. Eight long years later he returns with his sophomore film, an adaptation of the book Time Magazine called "The Best Novel Of The Decade".
Never Let Me Go looks like the work of an entirely different filmmaker than the one who made One Hour Photo. The film is beautifully shot, but not showy. Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley all give good performances, Mulligan in particular is someone I feel like I could watch for hours. But again, something is missing. The film is (beautifully) sad, but I didn't connect with it emotionally.
The beginning of the film teems with life as the younger characters find first love and are told the "secret" of the film. From that point on the film is a sad march towards the inevitable when it needs a few more injections of life into the story. I needed another moment of happiness, of connection, of something to invest me in the adult versions of these characters. This is a well made film but just misses being a great one. I'm absolutely convinced that Romanek will make a masterpiece someday, he just hasn't done it yet.
i really didn't like one hour photo and never planned to give it a second chance but after finding out more about romanek and seeing as it was his first film and i was pretty young when i saw it and a lot of time had passed since then, i had pretty high hopes for this. i am now convinced that he's an awkward movie director.
right off the bat the first 20 minutes or so are quite awkward because he's dealing with a shitload of child actors, and i get the impression he's directing them like they're adults. very very few children at any given time can handle that kind of specific direction. most great child performances are lulled from them, partially improvised etc. romanek has no understanding of this. every moment is precisely crafted and the children come off as unrelatable awkward awkwards. BUT i saw what he was going for and was willing to overlook that.
then two of the children are replaced with REALLY GREAT ACTORS. i mean, carey mulligan is going to win an oscar. that's just an inevitability. and andrew garfield. i wanted to understand why he's about to appear in everything for the next few years and this movie answered that. he's freaking great. original, raw, uses his whole being, etc. oh and kiera knightley who is always pretty solid i think. so from that point on the performances are no longer a problem, and may very well be the best thing about the film.
sci-fi movies have a built-in hurdle that must be overcome quickly or they will fail: they must silence the audience's questioning of their premise; its probability, its plausibility, its logic.. at the very least, a good sci-fi must make the audience feel comfortable enough to meet it halfway and stop wondering about how this or that works and just enjoy it. i could not meet this movie halfway. there are far too many holes, many of them practically waved in your face, to let the questions be silenced. i'm sure the book does a better job in this respect because it's a first person narrative and it has a lot more time to explain things.
*vague quasi-spoils*
there are also questions of motivation.. a rumour that the characters follow despite knowing firsthand that it can't be true. now i can understand they're feeling pretty desperate, and they could perhaps delude themselves into believing the rumour could be real, but the movie basically never addresses or shows this idea of delusion. it makes their pursuit of the rumour very puzzling, so the full impact of what happens with that storyline is partly lost.
*end vague quasi-spoils*
all the flaws and awkwardness aside, i did find myself affected by it when i left the theatre. i did feel a deep sense of gratitude. and i did find myself thinking about it a lot over the last day. but damn, this movie makes so many obvious mistakes. i'm kind of angry at it for not being as amazing as it should have been.
The book is more opaque about certain things in that way that books can be - for example, it never suggests the alternate history the way this does at the beginning - but for the most part it's a dead-on adaptation. And it upset me and made me really sad in a quiet, subtle way without ever truly destroying me. I think it had the potential to destroy me, but that it stopped short - which isn't really a bad thing. I have a feeling that it's going to stick with me.
I liked this movie. I was more affected by the front half, and much of the middle. THAT LITTLE GIRL LOOKS SO MUCH LIKE CAREY MULLIGAN IT'S FREAKY. And she was heartbreaking. As the movie goes into their later adulthood, I felt like the movie became a bit rushed, and perhaps less inspired. It kind of felt like route execution, and the movie lost a lot of steam for me. It also got a bit maudlin toward the end. I have the feeling that this whole last part works much better in the book, and it's one of those things where you really need to get more of a sense of time passing and time lost than you can pack into a 2 hour movie. So the impact of, say, seeing an old friend again after 10 years, isn't very strong because the audience just saw them 10 minutes ago.
But yes, the front half and the beginnings of the love story and the pining and the tragedy of their purpose was all very lovely and moving. Oh, and the solid muted colors as title cards? Beautiful!
I didn't like this at all. I thought it was a mess. Started out really great, but as they became adults, it lost a lot of what it had going for it. I kept waiting for something to happen, but nothing really ever did. It kept everything so vague, which I usually enjoy, but here it was just frustrating. I wish it would have touched more on the world around them because I found that far more interesting than the silly love triangle the story focused on. Did anyone else think Keira Knightley looked like Vampire Hunter D in this?
Spoilers, I guess.
Why didn't the kids just split? I mean, if I you're being used and know it, why not split? It never gave any indication that they could be tracked down. They seemed to just obey. And why were these women so infatuated with Tommy? The kid was a dope. There was nothing about him at all that made you feel like they could fall in love with him. He was just a dumb awkward kid and turned into a dumb awkward adult. I was really disappointed in Andrew Garfield's performance in this. He didn't seem like the next big thing to me.
I was really looking forward to this one and decided to see it this weekend instead of Social Network because I figured Social Network will be around in the theaters for awhile, but I wish I hadn't.
hmm knightly's got a knack for picking up scripts that only look oscar in trailers.
Quote from: Stefen on October 10, 2010, 01:25:51 PMWhy didn't the kids just split?
In the Creative Screenwriting podcast Kazuo Ishiguro and Alex Garland talk about this. People accept their fate. In the podcast they made the obvious comparison to concentration camp inmates. Which does ring true. The movie could do a better job of selling it.
guess i'll have to read the book first in case this ruins it.
I'll probably be seeing this again soon, but I can at least say this movie is absolute eye candy. Narratively it didn't bother me, maybe I'd have to read the book, but it didn't seem like something too special considering it was THE BEST NOVEL OF THE DECADE. Not even to say it was a bad story, per se, but most of the time I was just glued to the composition of each scene.
This movie is beautiful with a handful of problems. Carey Mulligan took my heart in An Education, but now she's fucking taken my soul. Her performance is so powerful, and she hardly says a word in the entire film. Andrew Garfield is good at being dumb, wide-eyed innocent, so I see why he'll make a good Peter Parker. It'll be very different.
Mark Romanek's imagery is, again, beautiful, and he is great at texturing the world with poetic icons (the bird on the tea kettle, the paper trash on the barbed wire). I think he just needs a stronger screenplay and more time working with actors. My wife has read the book and told me several things they changed, which seems crazy that they would ever change them because they would have been great moments in the film. It seems like they flattened the overall emotional level of the film, which sort of worked for me, but maybe that's what prevented it from being great. It's too subdued, too passive.
The book is extraordinarily subdued and passive as well, though (a book I actually did read, yay!). As I got to the end, I was increasingly unsure of how it would work as a film, just because it's so anti-climactic; it creates the impression that it's building up to something, but takes the unusual tactic of deflating those expectations rather than accommodating them. It works in book form, but our minds are so trained to a certain form of storytelling in cinema that what comes across as nuanced and clever in prose could feel on the screen like a sneeze that never comes.
I am still looking forward to the movie, though. One thing that may throw me off: I went through the whole book picturing Keira Knightley as Kathy and Carey Mulligan as Ruth, and now I've looked at imdb and found it's the other way around. I think I like my way better.
*Maybe Spoilers*
I didn't know much going in and boy am I glad that I did that. I'm just now re-reading every post now.
A sad portrait of dying youth scraping at every moment to get at or experience more of life. However tragic or futile it is they want to grab at more. This really touched my heart like no other film with british actors ever had. So much elegant beauty and quiet dignity is infused into the hour and forty three minutes that I started weeping by the end. Guess its the only sci-fi film to do this to me. Although, I wouldn't call this a sci-fi film by any conventional stretch of the imagination. In fact I really don't categorize it as such.
I can look over the problems with this film like most sci-fi films or most films in general if it hits me like an emotional ton of bricks or I get something out of it visually I'll purchase the film. By golly, I'm buying this on blu-ray the next time I pick up some films (in bulk of course).
It's rare that I wish for a movie to be longer, but it really would have benefited from an extra 20-30 minutes, building up the characters more while they're still at Hailsham. Maybe it's just from having read the book first, but it felt like so much of the later developments between the characters is given short shrift by our only getting glimpses of how their relationships developed earlier in the film. It's a beautiful film, and even with my reservations I was fully moved by it, but I never felt we got a sense of the ups and downs of the friendship between Ruth and Kathy, or really any sense of connection between Kathy and Tommy prior to the last act.
Carey Mulligan really is a wonder, though; I can't get enough of that girl.