Leo DiCaprio slated to play Turing in biopic Warner Bros has outbid other film studios to secure the rights to a script on the life of Alan Turing. The Time Warner studio paid an unspecified seven-figure sum for the rights to The Imitation Game, by first-time screenwriter Graham Moore. Moore's screenplay is an adoption of Alan Turing: The Enigma, a biography of the …
Single handedly? My, no! She will be an expert in martial arts, and will fly through the air in bullet time cutting the heads of three adversaries in one go with her sword while she kicks the balls of three SS men three times her weight. All while our our absent minded hero stares oblivious into the nothingness, mentally computing some tough algorithm that will lead them to the end of level boss.
Im sure the gfx will be stunning... all them bits and bytes whizzing about at a few kb a minute. cool effects giving the impresssion of 100's of hours sat at a desk scribbling away with a pencil. possibly a cgi pipe being smoked...
but given:
a> merkins won the war
b> merkin scientists are the best (y'all heard of enistein and fermi right?)
c> a merkin invented the 'puter
d> merkins hate faggots
I suspect the facts in this story will be mangled beyond recognition.
could be worse, tom cruise could be in it.
"Merkin"? Do you really have to? If it were any other people it wouldn't be acceptable to give them an insulting nickname.
And as for Americans hating gays (don't use the F word) that's a gross over generalisation based on a few shouty bigots. The vast majority of all Americans I've ever met do not have a problem with people being gay.
My favourite memory of U-571 was the little footnote at the end just before the credits rolled. It read something like "The US forces success in capturing intact the Enigma codebook marked a great Allied triumph in the war" and then in smaller font something along the lines of "The British had already done this twice and the Canadians once."
They will also show him foiling a Nazi suicide bomb attack, a high speed car chase with several explosions, with Leo handling a variety of semi automatic weapons, solving Femat's Theorem whilst waiting to tell a greatful Winston Churchill that he should pass control of the House of Commons over to the US Congress.
Will they even try to get him to talk with a British accent? Or will they suggest that he has spent many years working in the States
"Apparently in this new film Turing meets an attractive young woman while he is at MIT working on cracking the Enigma codes. After they marry the two go on to live a long and fulfilling life, probably with Turing single-handedly foiling a number of unlikely soviet schemes"
....when the film reveals that Turing did not really die, but his suicide was a faked cover to bring him over to the US for a big operation against the Commies. After all, we did the same thing to Mallory in 'The guns of Navarone'....
Oh my god, the Guns of Navarone film. Now there was a turkey. Take the best character-driven thriller ever written, put Gregory Peck in the lead role, and how could you possibly go wrong? Answer: by comprehensively butchering the plot until there's almost nothing left of what made the book great. Oh, and by casting David Niven, whose lack of acting ability makes Orlando Bloom look like Laurence Olivier.
is ignoring Tommy Flowers who was instrumental in building the code cracking computers at Bletchley Park.
He spent his own cash doing it , and just about got repaid by a not that appreciative government post war.
When is he going to get due recognition and a film ?
Turing has a ring road named after him around Manchester.
What about naming the M25 or North Circular after Tommy his-most-excellent-engineer Flowers ? Or maybe stick a monument on the 4th pedestal at Trafalgar Square. ( for Flowers that is ) , it would sure beat the rubbish they've had on it so far.
I thought Tommy Flowers Colossi computers were installed at Bletchley ? Guessing he did a fair amount of his work at Dollis Hill.
The point still stands , when are we going to have a film about Tommy Flowers ? When is the M25 going to be named Tommy Flowers way ? Mind you Mr Flowers machine worked and were much better than what preceded, the M25 has been shagged and under specified since the day it was opened, so maybe naming the M25 after him wouldn't be so complementary.
Has matured into a pretty good actor, I don't think the Yanks will be that interested as they already think the US of A stole a U-boat capturing the Enigma machine and invented and built the computer Colossus which in fact was built by a postal worker in bletchley, and so won the war.
A film about a gay limey with an American accent won't break box office records and will struggle to get a release over there. The film Enigma was bad enough.
"Turing's wartime achievements in cracking Enigma and other German wartime ciphers failed to count in his favour after he was criminally prosecuted for being homosexual, and forced to undergo humiliating chemical castration and psychiatric treatment before he eventually committed suicide."
Gotta love the decidedly British tall-poppy syndrome. Head's above the parapet? Lop the f*cker off.
I have been listing to Hut 33 for the last week or so and I must say as a film it would work with that cast.
I now have a urge to listen to Millia Jovocih do the "Ring Ring Wacky Wack" bit.
David Mitchell would be a great Gordon, given his angry logic he would do the Luck sceen very well.
I don't see Chris Eclestone as Archie though, the guy who played him on the radio would be a good choice.
Saw Derek Jacobi playing Turing live on stage in the early '90s. Absolutely captivating. He played Alan at various stages of his life, including as a boy, and somehow managed to pull it off. Minimal sets, no effects to speak of and an abstract electronic soundtrack simply linking scenes. Real acting (by all the cast), the like of which I haven't seen since.
"Dip the apple in the brew. Let the Sleeping Death seep through."
Beer, cos he developed quite an appreciation of it during his time in Manchester.
Alan Turing spent some quality time in America, meeting up with some of the brightest mathematics and physicists there such as Claude Shannon, Alonzo Church and von Neumann:
"From September 1936 to July 1938 he spent most of his time at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, studying under Alonzo Church. In addition to his purely mathematical work, he studied cryptology and also built three of four stages of an electro-mechanical binary multiplier.[21] In June 1938 he obtained his PhD from Princeton; his dissertation (Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals) introduced the concept of ordinal logic and the notion of relative computing, where Turing machines are augmented with so-called oracles, allowing a study of problems that cannot be solved by a Turing machine."
Our messaging people were just as stupid as the Germans and caused our codes to be broken too. One example:
"The B-Dienst, created in the early 1930s, had broken the most widely used British Naval code by 1935. When War came in 1939, the B-Dienst specialists had broken into enough British Naval codes that the Germans knew the positions of all British warships. They had further successes in the early stages of the War; the British were slow to change their codes. The B-Dienst could regularly read the British and Allied Merchants Ships (BAMS) code, which proved valuable for U-Boat warfare in the early phases of the Battle of the Atlantic. In February 1942, the B-Dienst broke into the code used for communication with many of the Atlantic convoys."
"His high pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: 'No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.'"
(In the Bell Labs cafeteria, New York, 1943).
- Alan Hodges (Alan Turing: the Enigma of Intelligence, page 251).
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