Margaret on the Celluloid
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Posted Monday, Nov. 14, 2011, at 11:13 AM
There is a certain kind of obsessive, geeky political junkie for whom the prospect of a big-budget Margaret Thatcher biopic is actually thrilling. Meryl Streep as Thatcher! Jim Broadbent as Denis! Richard E. Grant -- Withnail himself -- as Michael Heseltine! Michael Pennington as Michael Foot! And so on. The Daily Mail gives us the trailer:
We get a shade of The King's Speech, a lot of The Queen, and even some of The Godfather, with Broadbent in the Diane Keaton role. I think the presence of obscure-to-Americans figures, like the wild-haired and comic-villain Heseltine and Keith Joseph, will save this from some of the problems that hobbled the truly bad Clinton/Blair drama, The Special Relationship.
What other political dramas need to become movies? It stuns me that we've never had a good Andrew Jackson biopic (Sean Penn playing Jackson-as-president, Jonah Hill as Nicholas Biddle), or an Alexander Hamilton film that turns Jefferson into a sleazy antagonist.


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