I went to a preview screening of
Tolkien this evening. My friend and I got there way too early, so we had time to browse at a nearby bookstore and eat way too much ice cream at
Fenton's.
The movie was enjoyable enough, but it's a biopic, with all that entails: events imagined and reimagined, chronology compressed, expanded, and rearranged for dramatic effect, etc. G.B. Smith's
A Spring Harvest, for example, was published in 1918, not "years later" when Tolkien was a professor at Oxford. It was interesting to see how they skirted around material from Tolkien's works that they couldn't legally use.
Sir Derek Jacobi was a good choice to play
Joseph Wright. He found a good balance between the speech of an Oxford don and Wright's native Yorkshire accent.
Speaking of Oxford dons, I can't wait to see Mel Gibson and Sean Penn in
The Professor and the Madman. I loved the book. And of course Gibson has played a Scotsman before.