I chuckled when I seen them in the background, you would never see that nowadays in the middle of a newsroom. That said, this movie was not very interesting. There was little suspense and the mystery was anticlimatic.
Plus the editing was not done very well. Gretta Sacchi-who was she and why was she helping Gabriel Byrne(who has beautiful haunting eyes)?
Not bad but not that good either.
5 out of a 10.
While cinematographically, this film looks quite modern, it has a lot of things which really date it:
1. The ghastly moog-synthesizer soundtrack
2. Lots of smoking everywhere
3. Seedy offices (that probably aren't centrally heated, given the fact that Mr Byrne wears a thick tweed jacket and pullover all the time)
4. No computers, and newspapers still very much the big breakers of news
5. The press office being right over an old 'hot metal' printing press, which must have been pretty unusual even in 1984
6. A divorced journalist being able to afford the mortgage/rent on a nice studio flat in a mansions block AND run a BMW
7. Civil servants dressing like the Duke of Windsor instead of shambling around in ill-fitting polyester suits
8. The old Hungerford Bridge without any beggars in sight.
9. A proper old fashioned prison with uniformed inmates, like the one in 'Porridge'.
10. Analogue tape recorders
11. Analogue 'sliding top' photocopier
12. Mullen uses a public 'phone to call in his report
Do you laugh whenever you watch a film or TV show and the well-dressed leading character skids to a stop, jumps out of their fast car and desperately runs for a call booth or public 'phone in the back room of a bar or café instead of whipping out their palm-sized mobile/cellphone ?
"Oh look - a lovely spider! And it's eating a butterfly!"
'' ,,
""I take full responsibility for what happened. That's why the person who was responsible went immediately" - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
"Do you laugh whenever you watch a film or TV show and the well-dressed leading character skids to a stop, jumps out of their fast car and desperately runs for a call booth or public 'phone in the back room of a bar or café instead of whipping out their palm-sized mobile/cellphone ?"
No. Why would I?
"Do you laugh whenever you watch a film or TV show and the well-dressed leading character skids to a stop, jumps out of their fast car and desperately runs for a call booth or public 'phone in the back room of a bar or café instead of whipping out their palm-sized mobile/cellphone ?"Precisely. And that's my point - the previous poster had given a number of details which they felt "really date" the film, including the lack of computers "newspapers still very much the big breakers of news". Granted, I'm pretty sure that these days computers are used by journalists, and in the design, layout and editing of most newspapers; but I thought it more than a little unfair that this film, made in the mid-eighties, could be declared "really dated" -and in an apparently derogatory sense (even if not completely written off)- for, amongst other things, the absence of the world wide web, which of course was yet to be invented...
No. Why would I?
'5. The press office being right over an old 'hot metal' printing press, which must have been pretty unusual even in 1984'
Until the Wapping revolution in 1986 which brought in computers on a grand scale, hot metal was still how newspapers were printed.
Its that man again!!