Gosford Park

[mellicious]

I watched Gosford Park again last night - most of it, anyway - and started watching Angels in America, which is good because I've had both of them out from Netflix for over a month. It was necessary to watch Gosford Park again because the first time I watched it I wasn't really watching, you know? Or rather, I wasn't really paying attention - at the beginning, especially, and after I finally got really interested I was very confused about who some of the characters were. Actaully, having watched most of it twice now - I stopped at the point of the murder the 2nd time through, mostly because I thought the detective was really annoying and I didn't want to have to see him again - but even after two times through I still don't know who some of those people were. And I guess it's a sign of a good movie that I am interested in knowing. This is a movie that I might conceivably buy, because I can see watching it several more times - it's dense, there's a lot going on in practically every scene, and that makes it a lot more interesting to re-watch because you keep on seeing things you missed before.

I noticed that it was both "screenplay by" and "based on an idea by" Bob Balaban and Robert Altman, which is interesting. (I probably knew that four years ago when it won its Oscar, but I had forgotten.) I wonder if a lot of the dialogue was improvised, like a normal Altman movie? At least part of it could conceivably have been, I guess. All that overlapping dialogue, particularly in the Below Stairs scenes, seems like a good candidate for improvisation. It's also not exactly a typical "mystery" movie, in the sense that nobody seems very interested in the solution to the mystery. (In fact, it's not officially solved, is it? It could turn up on "Cold Case" any time now... "Who killed Sir William Whatsit in 1932? New evidence shows...")