My Evening With Marilyn and the Usual British Suspects

[kelly_chambliss]

I went with some friends tonight to see the film My Week With Marilyn, starring Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe and Kenneth Branagh as Laurence Olivier. Williams was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for the performance. That's really all I knew about the film -- that and the fact that I love realistic-looking period pictures.

Imagine how happy I was to find out that the movie is simply packed with the Usual British Suspects -- just about member of the traveling British Stage Roadshow except dear Dame Maggie: there was Judi Dench as Dame Sybil Thorndike, Michael Kitchen as one of Olivier's staff (who sadly disappears less than a quarter into the picture), Derek Jacobi as a royal librarian, Jim Carter as a rather Carson-esque publican, Zoe Wanamaker (swoon) as Marilyn's hilarious and smothering mentor Paula Strasberg, who is wonderfully Jewish-New York without being a caricature ("Open the door, bubuleh," she pleads with Marilyn), Geraldine Somerville in a tiny part as a character's upper-crust mother, and even Emma Watson as a wardrobe girl.

Most of the big-name critics don't seem to have liked the film much (and I see their points), but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Comments

[dueltastic]

That sounds like a lot of fun, actually, and an 83% on Rotten Tomatoes is nothing to sneeze at. (And ignore the NYT, they pan virtually everything worth seeing.)