dangermousie | Atonement (and some on Elizabeth the Golden Age)

Oh GOD.

Here is the Atonement trailer. The freaking thing made me cry. I wonder how I'll deal with watching it in the theater.

Atonement, for those who don't know is a British movie that opened the Venice Festival and has recently opened in the UK but not yet in the USA (it opens here in December). It's based on a really really acclaimed, heart-breaking novel by Ian McEwan. Here is a good summary of the story, from amazon's description of the novel:

This haunting novel, which just failed to win the Booker this year, is at once McEwan at his most closely observed and psychologically penetrating, and his most sweeping and expansive. It is in effect two, or even three, books in one, all masterfully crafted. The first part ushers us into a domestic crisis that becomes a crime story centered around an event that changes the lives of half a dozen people in an upper-middle-class country home on a hot English summer's day in 1935. Young Briony Tallis, a hyperimaginative 13-year-old who sees her older sister, Cecilia, mysteriously involved with their neighbor Robbie Turner, a fellow Cambridge student subsidized by the Tallis family, points a finger at Robbie when her young cousin is assaulted in the grounds that night; on her testimony alone, Robbie is jailed. The second part of the book moves forward five years to focus on Robbie, now freed and part of the British Army that was cornered and eventually evacuated by a fleet of small boats at Dunkirk during the early days of WWII. This is an astonishingly imagined fresco that bares the full anguish of what Britain in later years came to see as a kind of victory. In the third part, Briony becomes a nurse amid wonderfully observed scenes of London as the nation mobilizes. No, she doesn't have Robbie as a patient, but she begins to come to terms with what she has done and offers to make amends to him and Cecilia, now together as lovers. In an ironic epilogue that is yet another coup de the tre, McEwan offers Briony as an elderly novelist today, revisiting her past in fact and fancy and contributing a moving windup to the sustained flight of a deeply novelistic imagination.

Oh boy. I can't wait until this opens here. Also, if James McAvoy has decided to embark on a campaign to make me swoonily in love with him, he is succeeding. He was the one part I truly loved about Narnia (generally not a movie for me), and then swoon-worthy in Becoming Jane, and now this. *puts King of Scotland on top of her netflix queue*

A slightly longer trailer:

ETA. MMMMMM. Elizabeth: The Golden Age trailer. I might take back my apprehension. I don't mind ahistorical if it entertains me (the first movir failed but this just might do it). EEEEE!