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kleinbl00  ·  3657 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Lion in Winter - Discussion Thread

The thing I love best about Lion in Winter is the mundanity of it. I mean, these are some of the most noteworthy people in English history and what we're shown is, at core, petty familial bickering over the holidays cast against truly humungous scale. It serves to make everyone more human, everything more relatable and the overall scope of history more approachable.

The dialog is absolutely crackling, too, and delivered by absolute monsters of the stage. Can you imagine being Anthony Hopkins or Timothy Dalton, up against Peter O'Toole and Kate Hepburn, without knowing you'd someday be Anthony Hopkins or Timothy Dalton?

Something not immediately obvious is that the shot that introduces Geoffrey was crazy special effects of the day. Zoom lenses were still pretty avant garde at the time and that particular shot slams from absolute longest to absolute shortest. It's kind of amazing considering the state of the art in 1968.