"... with the added rider: ‘Just get here when you can, love, and if we don’t get round to vengeance today maybe we can do it tomorrow, at High Ten-ish. Does this work for you?’ So, for this reason, I opted for the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, and...? My dears, how one longed for some tumbleweed to roll by. It would have seemed quite thrilling. Never Let Me Go is, first and foremost, as well as second and secondmost, a spectacularly inert film; so inert that even I, who favours inertness, wanted to go at it with a stick in the hope of beating it into some kind of life. Perhaps such passive solemnity is true to the book, but on screen, along with the sad tinkling piano and the sad violins that just won’t quit, the overall effect is so enervating that you simply don’t feel a damned thing. It was the same with, for example, Jane Campion’s Bright Star. It did all the right things in all the right places, but was so painterly and restrained and in such good taste it could not draw you in emotionally. Indeed, when Keats began to cough, instead of feeling moved or distressed, you simply thought, ‘Oh, good. Not long to go now.’ And that is just what this is like."
From a 2011 review by Deborah Ross (in The Spectator) of the movie "Never Let Me Go," which I watched yesterday after finishing the book. Interesting how, one decade ago, it was so acceptable to trade in such blatant gender stereotypes.
Here's the trailer for the movie (chock full of spoilers, basically, the entire story):
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5 comments:
Lloyd writes:
When Keats began to cough
Not knowing anything about the book or the movie, this appeals to my sense of humour.
The end of Titanic: Leo is already blue, barely hanging on. Just give him a little push, or at most hit his fingers with your fist. This will all be over.
A bad performance of a bad play about Anne Frank. Germans appear on stage, searching the house. Someone yells out: "She's in the attic."
George writes:
"The scenario depicted in the movie exists today. Each year the Chinese Communist Party harvests—for profit—the organs of as many as 100,000 Chinese Christians, Tibetans, Uighyurs, and Falun Gong members. When they are arrested, samples of their blood are taken. When their unique characteristics match those of someone who needs a transplant, they are executed. Sometimes their organs are harvested while they are still alive. Vivisection. www.chinaorganharvest.org. Meanwhile, people in countries all around the world buy T-shirts, toys, computers, and a thousand other things from China. It's a bit like someone in England in 1799 wearing socks made from cotton grown in Mississippi. So, since 2011 the Chinese Communist Party has used 1,000,000 human beings as a profit center somewhat in the same way we raise hogs for food, and somehow this is not the scandal of the century."
Ed writes:
"Ishiguro is the cultural cross of two reticent, lost, imperial island realms. The weather is often gray there. If I did not like them both so much, I'd add, 'whose guts have been sold to the highest bidder.' I'd hope the American equivalent would have a ferocious uprising at the end, but."
Ken B offers this:
"The most gob-smacking thing you have written in ages is your wonder that “ it was so acceptable to trade in such blatant gender stereotypes”. What else is the current gender craze? It’s far more pervasive now, and not just accepted but lauded."
I'd say: You need to work on answering your own question. There's something that's done a lot now but it isn't the same thing. If you want to argue that it is, you'll have to provide depth, not just present yourself as shocked.
Took me a second to understand this, from EDH:
"Never Let Me Go
"What an aptly titled movie!"
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