#Brexit the uncivil war

[elennemigo]

"When (Benedict´s) characters become obsessed with something."

[Insp. by @/Ayatay tweet.]

[bcth-uk]

@giftober 2023 Day 3: Mood.

[itsawritblr]

Tim McMullan in Brexit: The Uncivil War. Proof that he can do other voices and mannerisms in character.

Looking at his IMDB, I'm really surprised how most of his movie and TV roles have been fairly small, and pretty much the same kind of characters. It's on stage where he's been given meaty roles with variety.

When he wears glasses he looks like my 7th grade Social Studies teacher.

[invisibleicewands]

Spooky monks and Michael Sheen murals: behind the scenes of new BBC drama The Way

Michael Sheen says he wants viewers of his new drama The Way “to feel like what it has felt like for the last 10 years of living” in the UK.

That is, “in a society where you don't know if you're in a horror film or a sitcom,” he told viewers at a Q&A for the show on Monday night. “Something that feels life and death stakes suddenly goes incredibly surreal and absurd, and then goes back to being incredibly scary again.”

The Way, which is due to air in February, follows the Driscoll family in the old industrial town of Port Talbot on the Welsh coast. Estranged from each other, they nevertheless have to set out on a cross-country odyssey to safety when they become tied up with civil unrest in the area.

In addition to making a cameo appearance in the show, The Way also marks Sheen’s first directorial role.

“I was never going to direct it. And then they said it's going to be in Port Talbot and then I have to direct it,” he joked.

“And the original seed of the idea was, I had this idea about watching a British family being uprooted and you didn't know why. And having to kind of flee their homes and go on the journey across Britain and then get across the channel. So it was a sort of refugee journey in reverse to the way we normally see it.”

It is also a passion project for the Welsh actor, who grew up in and now lives in Port Talbot himself – while the cast, who are majority Welsh, mostly grew up in the same area.

“There was so much of him in it,” said Steffan Rhodri about Sheen, who plays dad Geoff Driscoll (and who went to drama school with him). “I mean, you see a bit of Port Talbot. The one bit you didn't see is a massive wall with a mural of him on it.”

Was it hard to film the show without including it? “It was very hard,” Sheen joked. “We came very, very close – I mean, we were literally around the corner from it, and Callum made me go and have a photograph with it between takes. So that was difficult.”

‘Callum’ is Callum Scott Howells, best known for his performance in Russell T Davies drama It’s A Sin. He plays the disaffected Driscoll son, Owen – whom we first meet as a lonely figure looking for connection, and who gets caught up in the riots that sweep the town.

“It says in the script, James put something like, ‘we don't know why at this point, but he's feeling something. He’s there now, and he’s present’. And that for me kind of said everything. Like he doesn't he doesn't even know why he's rioting, but he's doing it,” Howells said.

“That was something that I really kind of threw myself into, and Michael was great in allowing me to do that. Yeah, those riot scenes were so fun, we just got to go nuts, you know. I headbutted a riot shield… because I’m nuts.”

The show itself also features the writing talents of James Graham, best known for political film Brexit: The Uncivil War and BBC crime drama Sherwood.

“We talked collectively about not wanting a traditional dystopian future, which was, which was really grim and bleak,” he said. "I think we all got excited by imagining the reverse of that... what if it was the myths and the legends and the folklores that embed themselves in our national psyche. Do they trap us? Do they inhibit us?"

The end result, he said, was a "contamination of genres." Not just social realism: the second episode becomes "a road movie, or an adventure movie on foot.

"So you start to see these elements of the myths and legends that the family carry with them become those stories we grew up with like Watership Down and Wizard of Oz, and it becomes very fantastical and weird."

[myhumaninteractionsafterall]

Nov. in Film

Misc. stuff. Making more headway on A24 completion. I technically watched 27 because I watched the first and the 14th ones about 4 times each and they are new favorites.

1, 14, 16

After Yang (2021)

Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm (2022)

Black Adam (2022)

Brexit: The Uncivil War (2019)

Burroughs: The Movie (1983)

Columbus (2017)

Easter Sunday (2022)

First Cow (2019)

Freakonomics (2010)

Good Time (2017)

Inside Job (2010)

Jerry and Marge Go Large (2022)

Lightyear (2022)

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021)

Moonlight (2016)

Raymond & Ray (2022)

Rifkin's Festival (2020)

See How They Run (2022)

Waves (2019)

The Woman in the Fifth (2011)

[innitmarvellous]

Don’t ask me why I made these. Well, I was bored and this scene was quite funny. xD

[anindoorkitty]

Room with a view

[lichtblickpink]

BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

the most versatile actor on this planet

(4 totally different characters in one gif)

[augustabella]

My personal Top-7-List of Rory’s TV roles.

This is a completely subjective list, made for my own pleasure. The list may vary from time to time, but altogether I’m happy with it. He’s such a versatile and brilliant actor and he played so many different characters, so it’s difficult to choose. But I try my best.

1. “The Creature” aka Caliban, aka John Clare aka The Orderly in “Penny Dreadful”

His portrayal of this unhappy man, trapped inside this hideous body, desperately fighting for love and affection, broke my heart. And after A Blade of Grass I was completely hooked. And it changed my life - for the better. I started researching Rory and discovered a fascinating – and incredibly nice – man. So thank you John Logan for casting him!

His best TV role so far (and yet I’m highly sceptical about the PD Spin-off)

2. Stephen Lyons in “Years and Years”

Bloody hell, Russell T Davies really sends the audience to a Tour de force. Rory as Stephen, the eldest of four siblings, a rather wealthy financial advisor who looses everything. His money, his family. I love the scene when he realises that his Dad died. You can see the whole range of emotions he’s going through. Acting at its finest.

3. Michael Baker in “Count Arthur Strong”

I love this character. And I still think it’s a shame they cancelled the show. The desperate attempt of Michael to stay sane in all that madness is a joy to watch. My favourite episode is “The Affair”

4. Henry Bolingbroke in “Richard II.”

Rory and Shakespeare. There is nothing more to say.

5. Robert Lessing in “Quacks”

What a gloriously arrogant bastard. I think he really enjoyed playing such a narcissistic bugger. Sadly this show was cancelled after one season.

6. Craig Oliver in “Brexit”

Based on true events and characters, as we all know.

7. Prime Minister Callow in “Black Mirror”

Yes, the one with the pig. Scary to watch.

And there are so many other roles.. DCI Pence in “Guerilla”, he really scared the shit out of me in some of the scenes. Or as David Whitehead in “Southcliffe”. And so on and so forth. I think Rory deserves so much more attention for his talent and his skills.

Rory for OBE!

[the-cumberbatchs-stupid-penwing]

Yes, THIS:

Is the same man.

[elennemigo]

☆ GIFTOBER 2021 | DAY 5: ANGRY 

Angrybatch II - (part I)

[legionnaireslover]

Review roundup: deserved kudos for BC

Just a sampling of the AVALANCHE of praise for BC's performance in Brexit: The Uncivil War!

I WILL be watching this when it comes to my country of Canada later this month, but for now I can revel in all the critical acclaim this exciting new drama is gathering. There is so much buzz about this I can barely keep up with all the alerts on my Google feed!

What a GREAT start for BC in 2019! And there's LOTS more to look forward to - Ironbark, the Doctor Strange sequel and of course, on a more personal level - the arrival of the Cumberbatches' new baby! 2019 is looking good!😍🤩😁

[lovercumberlover]

Brexit: The Uncivil War

Brexit: The Uncivil War is a 2019 British television drama film directed by Toby Haynes, produced by House Productions for Channel 4. It depicts the lead-up to the 2016 referendum, principally through the activities of the lead strategists behind the Vote Leave campaign, that prompted the United Kingdom to exit the European Union, commonly known as Brexit. It aired on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom on 7 January, and will air on HBO in the United States on 19 January. Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Dominic Cummings, the Campaign Director of the official designated Brexit-supporting group, Vote Leave

[invisibleicewands]

The BBC’s new three-part drama The Way is Michael Sheen’s directorial debut. It has been nearly a decade in gestation, this story of civil unrest fermenting in Sheen’s Welsh home town of Port Talbot – cradle of militant unionism and symbol of working-class fury and pride. It has been created with writer James Graham (Brexit: The Uncivil War, Quiz, Sherwood) and – slightly more unusually, documentary auteur Adam Curtis.

The opening episode is something so different and fresh that even if you can’t say you’re actively enjoying it (though I was), the power and ambition of it all, the unashamed idiosyncrasy that permeates the direction, the allusiveness of the narrative and its slightly dreamlike (or nightmarish) off-kilter quality surely makes you sit up and take notice. It has a clear, accessible narrative at its heart, for sure, but the sensibility is rare and all its own.

It’s a tale of civil discontent, sparked by the death of a youngster in a vat of molten slag at the steelworks and his father’s self-immolation – in grief, in protest, in some unspeakable combination of the two – thereafter. The union blames management and decades of underinvestment. Management offers to reline a furnace, a sop to the emotion of the moment, rather than a recognition of needs. “We didn’t realise we were buying a mood,” says one of the new investors, with a combination of bafflement and frustration.

The unfurling of the unrest plays out for the viewer mostly through the long-established local Driscoll family. The late paterfamilias was a committed striker in the 80s, the failure of which terrible feat of suffering and endurance is largely blamed by the family for his death. His son Geoff (the stalwart Steffan Rhodri, last seen in the excellent Men Up at the end of last year) takes an approach to communicating with the bosses that is more pragmatic/conciliatory/weak/treacherous – delete according to political proclivities. He is separated from his wife and family for reasons that become clear over the succeeding episodes, as does the specific bad blood between his son, benzos addicts and petty dealer Owen (Callum Scott Howells), and his police officer daughter Thea (Sophie Melville).

As the internet is shut down within the town, tensions rise, curfews are imposed and riots between townsfolk and police start to break out. The Driscolls become the police – and the media – scapegoats for it all, and are eventually forced, along with Owen’s eastern European girlfriend, Anna (Maja Laskowska), to flee their home and their town.

Threaded through this growing but none-too-incredible – especially to a post-lockdown audience also being assailed with headlines about coming redundancies at Port Talbot’s Tata Steel (though business secretary Kemi Badenoch has extensive explanations about how government investment is actually saving the works) – dystopian landscape are, presumably thanks mostly to the Curtis influence, potent illustrative clips of real-life news and CCTV footage. Through them the sense of dislocation increases, while the themes of the drama only become more closely knit. From Graham – and, I’d posit, Sheen’s powerful sense of Welshness and all that means historically as well as currently – come the more mystical, ancient touches. The importance the town places on the works’ pilot light never going out; the sword made of the first steel forged in the town, long before modern industry got there; the red-hooded figure appearing and disappearing; Sheen as Geoff’s father’s ghost and/or manifestation of his conscience, pursuing him as they make their escape. And then, as the Cambrian borders become increasingly policed, there is (garbed in a costume somewhere between pastor, Clint Eastwood nemesis and Matthew Hopkins’ finest) the Welshfinder.

It is a bravura opening episode – powerful, confident, ambitious, confrontational and unexpected. It conjures precisely the feeling of a town on the edge, a tinderbox for the powder keg that is an increasingly divided Britain as a whole. Then it pushes things a little further and if you squint just a tiny bit, you could be looking at the future. Maybe even a blueprint, if you were so minded. It feels like a drama fully in the tradition of Bleasdale, Loach, Alan Clarke and Jimmy McGovern, and if it occasionally falls victim to the latter’s tendency to agitprop, that still leaves it head and shoulders above the usual fare.

It doesn’t quite meet the high bar it has set for itself over the remaining episodes. Although they gesture towards the issue of displaced persons and what is to be done with waves of desperate people, they become too much about the internal dynamics of the Driscolls and their family history to feel as innovative or thrilling as that which has gone before. But you can live off the first hour for quite some time to come.