Anna Karenina

Here is the promised first "movie critic of the week" post that I promised in my last post. While I was talking to some London natives, they were lamenting how all TV shows and movies release later in the UK than in the States because, duh, most popular shows and films are filmed and released by American companies. However, the new film adaptation of Anna Karenina is not one of those films. It is for all intents and purposes a British film...even though it's a Russian novel. This gets especially odd and confusing when everyone's accents in Imperial Russia are English accents...but we'll forgive and forget this little issue.

From IMDB.com

Anyways, as promised by the trailers and the movie poster (as seen above), the film Anna Karenina is a beautifully filmed and staged epic film to match the epic storyline. The sumptuous costumes and sets really set the mood for the film. Everything is so beautifully created and on top of that, director Joe Wright decided to set the entire film within a theatre. The pit, audience boxes, stage, backstage, and rafters of the theatre are all constantly transformed to create a new setting. For instance, the walkways above the stage are used to represent the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. In another scene, the entire theatre was transformed into a horse racing stadium. The entire concept is both interesting and well done. For this reason, the film constantly entertains.

Admittedly, I have never read Leo Tolstoy's novel and therefore know very little about the specifics of the storyline. So in terms of the adaptation of the novel, I felt like it was cohesively put together and very comprehensive given that novel, I assume, is a very dense storyline. However, I do think that the plot did suffer from the creative ideas for the film. Properly conveying Leo Tolstoy's work didn't seem to be the main focus of the film, but rather how interestingly it could be portrayed. At one point while watching the film, I thought of a concept that a choreographer I worked with taught me. It's called "KISS", i.e. "keep it simple stupid". I personally feel like the adapting of the novel would have been benefited from this concept. But then we probably would have missed out on all the great film techniques used by Wright in directing the film. So I think how people receive the film will be based on their expectations for the film. If you love Joe Wright's work, you'll probably think its different from his past films but very interesting. If you're a huge Leo Tolstoy fan, you'll probably be disappointed.

Anyways, I can't wait for it to be released in the US so I can hear all of your opinions on the film. And overall, I would say the film is definitely enjoyable and worth paying the money to go see in theaters.

P.S. If there is anything you, as an audience to my blog, would like me to focus more on in these critics, please let me know!

P.P.S. I had my first celebrity siting yesterday! Tom Hiddleston from Midnight in Paris, which I reviewed in an earlier post, and The Avengers walked past me on his way to the bathroom in the Laban dance building while I was at a social for one year programme/post-graduate students. Seriously, I almost peed myself from excitement...