I was interested to hear the voices of the animals and whether they sounded anything like those I used in reading the book aloud to my children. Pooh and Eyeore were spot on apart from those awful American accents and you cant go wrong with Piglet and Tigger. I just wish it had been someone posher than Toby Jones as Owl. My favourite was Sophie Okonedo as Kanga. It was such a shame she had so few lines. As for the movie? The sets were the best part, 1950's London street scenes and the station (an old Dover Harbour terminal). Ewan McGregor and Hayley Attwell seemed a little bored with the process, unlike Bronte Carmichael as their daughter who stole the show.
Shown entirely through computer and other video screens, unfortunately these are far too distracting to become engaged in a decent, though generic, tale of a missing daughter. An interesting concept but the script is pretty basic. Harmless fun.
Now here was a big disappointment. I expected something much more from an adaptation of the Chekov classic. On the back of his award winning play "The Humans", Stephen Karam gets the gig to adapt the text. A miserable failure, falling between traditional and modern language, it is a cut and paste of the original's dialogue. OK, this was always going to be better seen in the theatre than on the big screen. They should have employed John Donnelly who wrote such a wonderful modern interpretation for Headlong (seen at the Oxford Playhouse) and Blanche McIntyre who directed. My blog entry gave credit to the casting, something this time was a complete mess. Annette Bening, Elizabeth Moss and Saoirse Ronan are wonderful actresses in their own right, only not this time. And don't get me started on the men. Director Michael Mayer does not help in a very disjointed production. The scenery and sets are great and that is as good as it gets.
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