Day 11 | A movie that disappointed you
When I thought about the question for today, two very recent films came to mind almost immediately: Brideshead Revisited and State of Play. The fact that both films are adapted from acclaimed British miniseries is just a coincidence. Or actually maybe it's not.
Maybe the fact that both stories were already so well-served and presented in their long-form versions made them that much more difficult to fit within a two-hour film. This is certainly true for State of Play since I actually did see the 6-hour brilliant miniseries it was based on and the film just never reached those levels. I'll give them an out by noting that I was very sleepy the day I saw the film, but I still remembered being extremely annoyed with them taking out some of the more interesting elements and characters from the miniseries to shorten the film. I also thought that Russell Crowe was severely miscast.
Admittedly I never saw the original 11-episode miniseries version of Brideshead Revisited that aired in 1981, but with roughly five more hours to fit into standard movie time than State of Play, it was always going to be difficult making it work. And it felt like it. The characters themselves were great and the film itself started out well enough, but the latter half sort of meandered into nothingness as the film trudged along to end.
With actors such as Helen Mirren, Rachel McAdams, Jason Bateman, Ben Whishaw, Matthew Goode, Emma Thompson, and Michael Gambon I had high enough expectations for both of these two films. Ultimately, they just didn't deliver.
