the father and i went to see the imitation game (the new cinemas at nex make him an easily-persuaded companion to afternoon screenings when i’m not in school) but i cannot say that i found the movie to be all that. it is not a bad movie at all, but i did not like the treatment much: it appeared to me rather shallow, romanticised (though no more than in the way modern movies tend to be), and had given very short shrift to the actual science and technology of the breakthroughs, which would have been what was truly gripping (bletchley park in the movie never felt to me like the legendary bletchley park)  — it was simply not brainy enough. just for once, i wish they would make a movie about a scientist that conveyed something of the intellectual excitement of the science itself, and of the scientific genius of the scientist —  we seem to have left that kind of thing to speculative and futuristic thrillers, and stripped that out of biopics of scientific men (if anything, these movies tend to honour the emotional-lynchpin women in their lives — and, since i’ve seen cumberbatch in the 2006 hawking tv movie and now theory of everything, i think that is quite enough of the same thing for a while (biopics about difficult actors, on the otherhand —  hancock, kenneth williams, peter sellers, wilfrid brambell and harry h corbett, tend to be much defter with the human element without necessarily turning out a tale of tortured artistic genius ruined by alcoholism — the dylan thomas movie, on the other hand, was a disaster and a bore.)

as for the final message about the 2013 exoneration and the plight of the many, many men who had likewise been subjected to that cruel indignity, of course i’m glad we’re facing up to treatment of a great man — ( i am not sure they should have ran those titles over the bonfire  — it seemed to have lost in that flickering light, with its readability, some of its moral impact.)  — but they ought to have dealt with that more explicitly and more intelligently, instead of that piffling nonsense (apparently wholly made up for the film) about blackmail and soviet spies — there is enough prejudice against gay men without implying that they are national security risks — and i hated the way they turned him into some kind of frankenstein cradling his machine-monster towards the end, having lost his mental acuity (this is not a beautiful mind, thank you very much) — chemical castration is vile, but it had not, in fact, ruined his work, and i don’t think the lgbt community would have wanted to score that cheap emotional point at the expense of a more biting truth.