 | Best acting
rating: 5
Mark Strong in title role in this made for TV movie.
Mark Strong's charactor is one of the most challenging and complicated roles in recent time for any actor and he is fantastic in this role. Watching him interacts with other actors in this movie is like enjoy a piece of Art.
This DVD formated for regional 2 (UK etc) so you will have to play them in your computer unless you have a multi-format DVD player.
But it is really well worth of the trouble. Strongly reommend this movie.
|
Strong stuff
rating: 5
One of those enigmas that the industry occasionally throws up is why is Mark Strong such a genuinely impressive actor on television yet so astonishingly bland whenever he appears in a movie? He's certainly at his very best in The Long Firm. The BBC series got lost in the tail-end of the avalanche of post-Guy Ritchie British Mockney gangster movies, but this four-part TV drama is in a class of its own. Each seen through a different character's eyes (Derek Jacobi's gay politician, Lena Headey's b-movie bit-player and Phil Daniels' drug dealer), the first three episodes are superb in their evocation of the late 50s and 60s and the milieu underachieving third-league homosexual ("I'm not gay, I'm a homosexual") Jewish East London gangster Harry Starks (Strong, living up to his name) and his delusions of respectability and love of Judy Garland and Dorothy Squires. The final episode is less successful, largely because it is filtered through Shaun Dingwall's shallow and too comically stereotyped sociology professor who learns his own mediocrity through Harry's intellectual outgrowing of him - the scenes with Strong are excellent, but when the focus is on Dingwall it's too much a soft satire of 70s. Yet even that lapse of judgment can't detract from the overall quality of the series - this is the real deal and deserves to be far better known.
Extras on this widescreen disc are sparse - simply a producer/director audio commentary with Strong on the first and fourth episodes - but with a show this good, who needs all the trimmings?
|
|
