the us guy, Cumberbatch, will speak for Turing. He will pull "our" sympathy.
The good news is that no film is the only version of the past and I can hope for more. The bad news is that this one looks like it wants to be definitive. And if it's good, I'll be happy! But there are queerer tellings out there and I want someone to throw $15 million at them.
I shudder any time Keira Knightley is cast as anything.
I don't dislike her, either! I have very little sense of her outside Pirates of the Caribbean, but I love those movies (okay, I love the first movie and I love a combination of storylines from the second and third. Everything about the cannibal island should please go away forever and I remain bemused by Sao Feng). But she is a known quantity of mainstream attractive female star and I worry, seeing her cast, that the film wishes its audience to think of Joan Clarke as a romantic lead. Co-protagonist is one thing, but it's more important to the history of the war that she invented her own codebreaking techniques than that Turing proposed to her. She was recruited straight out of Cambridge with a double first in Mathematics.
Also, I really hope she's not portrayed as the only woman at Bletchley. The GCCS had fewer women on the books as cryptanalysts than clerical staff or number-crunchers—and they were paid less for the privilege; Clarke herself was promoted to "Linguist" just so she could draw a salary comparable to her level of work, despite knowing no languages other than English—but the wartime Bletchley population was something like eighty percent female. The more stories are declassified, the more the picture breaks down of men doing mathematics while the girls made tea. Dilly Knox ran an all-female team that broke the Abwehr Enigma in 1941. I have the impression that was not unusual. I mean, read this article. Or this one. Or this. Or this.
And there's no one listed as Dilly Knox, damn it.
Their Morcom has an interesting face. There are few pictures of Christopher, but the two I've seen agree on the cheekbones.
no subject
The good news is that no film is the only version of the past and I can hope for more. The bad news is that this one looks like it wants to be definitive. And if it's good, I'll be happy! But there are queerer tellings out there and I want someone to throw $15 million at them.
I shudder any time Keira Knightley is cast as anything.
I don't dislike her, either! I have very little sense of her outside Pirates of the Caribbean, but I love those movies (okay, I love the first movie and I love a combination of storylines from the second and third. Everything about the cannibal island should please go away forever and I remain bemused by Sao Feng). But she is a known quantity of mainstream attractive female star and I worry, seeing her cast, that the film wishes its audience to think of Joan Clarke as a romantic lead. Co-protagonist is one thing, but it's more important to the history of the war that she invented her own codebreaking techniques than that Turing proposed to her. She was recruited straight out of Cambridge with a double first in Mathematics.
Also, I really hope she's not portrayed as the only woman at Bletchley. The GCCS had fewer women on the books as cryptanalysts than clerical staff or number-crunchers—and they were paid less for the privilege; Clarke herself was promoted to "Linguist" just so she could draw a salary comparable to her level of work, despite knowing no languages other than English—but the wartime Bletchley population was something like eighty percent female. The more stories are declassified, the more the picture breaks down of men doing mathematics while the girls made tea. Dilly Knox ran an all-female team that broke the Abwehr Enigma in 1941. I have the impression that was not unusual. I mean, read this article. Or this one. Or this. Or this.
And there's no one listed as Dilly Knox, damn it.
Their Morcom has an interesting face. There are few pictures of Christopher, but the two I've seen agree on the cheekbones.