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The Hippopotamus: Fry Stephen

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The Hippopotamus review – eccentric adaptation of Stephen Fry's novel 1 June 2017 The Guardian www.theguardian.com, accessed 19 December 2020 Film Notes An ageing writer finds himself caught up in a mystery in this underwhelming adaptation of Stephen Fry's comic novel Ted Wallace is an old, sour, womanising, cantankerous, whisky-sodden beast of a failed poet and drama critic, but he has his faults too. A thought experiment to characterize the narrator of this book: What if somehow Oscar Wilde and Howard Stern had a son together?

The Hippopotamus - Penguin Books UK

Poet Ted Wallace is summoned to his friend's country manor to investigate a series of unexplained miracles.There is not a lot to this movie. Don't expect dramatic plot twists, edge of the seat action, moving performances or fire works of any kind. My goodness what fruity language Fry uses! You can feel his enjoyment, and also the huge force of his desire to please you, as you read this Mail on Sunday The work of the original author (Stephan Fry) shines through at times, but the script writer left muddy finger prints trying to keep the story moving and to fit studio norms & marketing expectations. The shift in writing style is jarring at times. It is only by the grace of Roger Allam's talented performance that the movie succeeds for 3 of the 8 stars I am giving it. Roger Allam is very good at playing a pompous intellectual who has become cynical and critical of all (see him in 'V" and other works).

The Hippopotamus - Film - British Comedy Guide The Hippopotamus - Film - British Comedy Guide

And Ted sets out to do his Teddish usual, but, being the perceptive soul he is, and fundamentally still a good man, he lays off the booze and unravels the mystery of Swifton Hall. Adrian also brings out our darker side. His semi-sociopathic ability - eagerness even - to lie, outright lie, when nothing is gained; this is something we can also relate to, whether we like it or not. Adrian - or perhaps Fry - exposes us as sad, pathetic people who feel, know, that they simply aren't as interesting as they'd like to be. His habitual lying revolves around himself and his experiences; he says what he wants people to know, and how he wants them to think of him. And we've all done the same. How many new-age college girls are spontaneously lesbian, vegetarian whale-lovers after their 18th birthday? Much more than actually /are/ lesbian, vegetarian, or whale-lovers for their lives, but it's something to /say/. It's a distraction from the fact that they, like so many others, are white, middle-class American girls who go home to the family they said was dead for Christmas and are at the college on a sports scholarship for lacrosse. Ho-hum. You wouldn't date a girl like that.So, what actually is the game? Is Fry aiming for a certain effect, or is this just a lazily tossed-off first novel which fails to hang together only because its author failed to care? Taken individually, I found all the chapters to be at least reasonably entertaining. There aren't too many other novels that I would think of in terms of which chapter was my favorite (it's Chapter Six—I highly recommend it and suspect it would remain quite enjoyable if you read it alone and gave the rest of the book a miss). Taken as a whole, the book fails miserably to cohere into any meaningful narrative. The average American lexicon is insufficient to catch the full meaning of the various diatribes the protagonist goes on. He is impish and bitter about the mundane nature of survival. The film adds a voice over to give the audience the musings and assorted drunken drivel from the author protagonist, who is a crumpled forgettable middle-aged man of no discernible attributes. Stephen Fry's five novels are The Liar (1991), The Hippopotamus (1994), Making History (1996), The Stars' Tennis Balls (2000) and Revenge: A Novel (2003). He has also published a collection of work entitled Paperweight (1992); and Rescuing the Spectacled Bear: A Peruvian Journey (2002) – his diary of the making of a documentary on the plight of the spectacled bears of Peru. His book Stephen Fry in America was published in 2008.

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