The Personal History of David Copperfield, aka the Latest Armando Iannucci

Holy cow, how did I not hear about this until now???

https://youtu.be/l4GfEi_GyyU

I heard an interview with Armando Iannucci on NPR last week about the movie, it really made me want to see it.

For once I wasn’t afraid of spoilers, since I read the book about 3 times over for class back in the mid 80s. But after listening to the interview, I realized, wait, I don’t remember what happens at all. I’m sure it will all come back to me when I watch the movie, but right now, it’s a complete blank.

Goddammit Armando Iannucci has to stop making stuff, because every time one gets a thread, I think it’s about me.

Here was that interview from last Saturday:

Streaming in the US tomorrow:

It was on Amazon Prime in the UK, but not sure what the US situation is. Fantastic film though, visually inventive and funny, some great performances as well.

This is on HBO Max now. Looking forward to watching it soon.

After more than a year on my watchlist, I finally sat down and watched this last night. It’s messy, it tries about four different framing devices at once, and it moves at a breakneck pace with some distractingly illogical transitions. And yet… there’s just so much great character work and gags. I attribute that as much to Dickens as to Iannucci. I don’t really know the book, so it was interesting to read up on the differences in the story, but obviously so many of these characters are classic literary figures–Uriah Heep and Mr. Micawber, etc. And everyone is played by top-flight actors. Every one of the characters deserved more time to get fleshed out, but then you’d have a miniseries. Which is probably the ideal form for this. It does feel like it got edited nearly to death. Still, it’s vibrant and funny even when its awkward and rushed.

Darn, I missed it! It’s not on HBO Max anymore. Looks like these days it’s on Hulu.

Yeah, with a couple of ad interruptions, unfortunately.