Miss Potter

MISS POTTER is a biography of Beatrix Potter, artist and author of a series of fantasy children's books about rabbits, geese, pigs, and hedgehogs. MISS POTTER was directed by Chris Noon, director of the engaging and beautiful movie, BABE, which concerns a pig. MISS POTTER stars Renee Zellweger, Lucy Boynton (as young Beatrix Potter), Ewan McGregor (Potter's publisher and fiance), Barbara Flynn (as Potter's A-hole mother), and Bill Paterson (as Potter's understanding, wise, and flexible father). This is one of the greatest movies that I've seen in the past 50 years, and I watched it three times in the past three days. If you are an amateur artist, or if you are a published author, then you will absolutely adore this movie.OPENING MINUTES. The movie begins with images of a small wooden box being opened. Inside are artists' pencils. Then, we see a pair of hands sharpening a pencil with a knife. Then, we see a hand pouring water from a glass (for the purpose of water color painting), and then we see a hand reaching for an artist's brush. Then, we see a hand opening up a water color set (just like the kind I used when I was a kid in the 1960s). Finally, at 1 min, 45 seconds into the movie, we see a hand holding a brush and painting streaks of blue on fancy artists' paper.ZELLWEGER MAKES HER ENTRANCE. At three minutes, Zellweger says, "There's something delicious about writing the first words of a story, you can never be sure of where they will take you." Then, Zellweger explains her quest to find a publisher of her children's book. "I've been selling my drawings for greeting cards for 7 years," she explains during her interview with a publisher. At 5 min, 30 seconds into the movie, the publisher accepts her book. Zellweger is pleased, of course, and the viewer will be treated to an episode where she twists her lips, flexes her lips, and where her lips move in little grimacing expressions. This is how Zellweger expresses pleasure because of the acceptance of her book. Of course, there are many flabby-lipped actresses, such as Zellweger, Julia Roberts, Angelina Jolie, and the abundantly annoying Anne Hathaway (she often uses a very annoying VOCAL FRY when speaking, and her mouth looks like a frightening monster-mouth, such as that of the Joker in the Batman cartoon). But Zellweger is the only flabby-lipped actress to use her own lips as a tool for expressing emotions. Truly, Zellweger exploits her lips, to good effect, as an organ of expression just as ordinary actors use their hands and eyes to communicate various emotions.BEATRIX POTTER GETS FLACK FROM PARENTS. At 8 1/2 minutes into the movie, Zellweger is back home (she lives with her parents, even though she's in her early 30s). The movie shows Potter's mother, who has a condescending attitude towards Potter, which continues to the very end of the story. At 9 min, 50 sec, begins the first of several flashbacks, where we see Beatrix Potter as a child. We see excellent sketches of rabbits and other animals, made by the 8-year old Potter. In this first flashback, Potter's father tells the 8-year old girl that her job is to get married and become a homemaker. He says, "something suitable to the young lady who will soon grow up and run a fine home, just like her mother." At 13 minutes into the movie, the flashback concludes, and Zellweger gets a visit at her home from the youngest of the three brothers. Then, the viewer is treated with dialogue about the technical features of the book-printing procedures. Potter's parents give her flack for wanting to visit the printing house, and she confronts them saying, "I see absolutely no reason why an artist shouldn't visit her printer." At 17 minutes, we see a flashback where Potter at age 10 is sketching in her garden, while her brother plays croquet. We see a real hedgehog and a real rabbit meandering in the garden, and Potter and her brother chase the rabbit. At 19 min, 30 seconds, the mother and father both pester the ten year old Beatrix Potter, regarding their expectations that she will some day get married. But the ten year old insists that she not get married. The mother says, "Really Beatrix, what young man is ever going to marry a girl with a face full of mud?" (Beatrix has mud on her dress and face, from chasing the rabbit in the garden.) "Well, I shan't marry it doesn't matter," insists the 10-year old Potter. "Of course you shall marry, all girls marry," says her arrogant and bullying mother. "I did, your grandmother did . . ." continues the arrogant mother. "Well I shan't, I shall draw," insists the ten year old Potter. "Those silly drawings, who will love you," says the A-hole mother, derisively. "My art and my animals, I don't need more love than that," insists the 10 year old Potter.PRINTING PRESSES. At 21 minutes, we are back at the publisher, and Zellweger is showing her drawings for her Peter Rabbit book. The viewer is treated to some excellent video of printing presses. Zellweger complains about the first color print (this scene occurs in the same room as the printing presses). She complains, "It's muddy." then, the printer adjusts the color to make it lighter. Eventually a love relationship develops between Zellweger and the youngest of the three brothers (he was assigned to her project).SISTER OF THE THREE PUBLISHER BROTHERS. At 24 minutes into the movie, a sister ("Millie") enters the plot, and she likes Zellweger and exclaims, "I have decided that you and I are going to be friends . . . I warn you, I am prepared to like you very much." The sister and adult Beatrix Potter share the view that there is nothing shameful about a woman staying single. The bit of dialogue that goes, "I warn you, I am prepared to like you very much" struck me as very unusual and clever.UNATTRACTIVE GEEK EPISODE. At 27 minutes comes an amusing part, where Zellweger's mother reminds her that she had been introduced to several appropriate men of the same social class as Potter's parents. What is amusing, is that we are shown flashbacks of each of the potential husbands (suitors), and they are each disclosed as being an unattractive and disgusting geek. At 30 minutes, another flashback is shown, where the girl Beatrix Potter explains about a stupid duck, and we see her duck drawings. This flashback is part of the main plot where adult Beatrix Potter is showing her publisher her next book, which concerns a duck, and which is called Jemima Puddle Duck.CONCLUSION. I don't want to give away too much, and so I'm not writing any more. The script and dialogue in this movie, from start to finish, is stunningly clever, unique, and attractive. How I love this movie. The movie is just as suitable for adults as it is for children. Also, there are no guns, no bad words, and no concupiscence. Actually, the movie continually invokes concupiscence, because in all of the scenes where adult Beatrix Potter is in the presence of the young publisher brother, an elderly lady (apparently a servant hired by Potter's parents to be a chaperone) is following close behind.

This biopic, starring Renée Zellweger as famed children's author and illustrator Beatrix Potter, is director Chris Noonan's first feature film since the enchanting Babe, released eleven years ago. Even though Zellweger's goofy brand of charm swept me off my feet in movies like Nurse Betty and Bridget Jones's Diary, I prepared to go on auto-pilot while I watched what I thought would be a benign but sappy "chick flick."Yet, when the opening credits rolled, I sat straight up as Zellweger dipped her painbrush into a water glass. In the close-up of the stirring brush, the water turns from translucent to a deep royal blue. I was struck with the sense of instant recognition upon seeing the work of a great but forgotten artisan materialize before my eyes.No, I'm not referring to Beatrix Potter, but to another woman from the early twentieth century, Natalie Kalmus. From the 1930s through 1950, she was color consultant for Technicolor, the company behind the opulent film process invented by her husband, Herbert Kalmus. For without Technicolor--a process Natalie Kalmus supervised down to the choice of paint and wardrobe fabric colors for such movies as Gone With the Wind, Duel In the Sun, and The Red Shoes--Miss Potter's director of photography Andrew Dunn would have had difficulty capturing that particularly saturated hue of royal blue.This is no small detail. While there have been great advances in multi-channel digital sound, nothing on the visual side has ever topped the warmth and feel of Technicolor's dye-transfer prints, which the company reintroduced to the screen in 1998 after a twenty-year absence. Although they discontinued that process in 2002, they've been able to maintain that trademark "look," working with filmmakers at every step of production to create lush, vivid final prints with a new proprietary photochemical process. How fitting that this movie chose to honor the work of an artist whose exacting attention and mania for color detail in the printing of her work matched that of another.Miss Potter opens as thirty-two-year-old spinster Beatrix Potter occupies an upstairs bedroom of her upper-crust parents' London home. While it would seem she leads a charmed life of comfort and security, Beatrix is a veritable child-woman, bereft of both connubial bliss and human companionship outside her family, her life dominated by her snobbish, uptight mother (Barbara Flynn). Having rejected one unsuitable suitor after another (products of her mother's matchmaking), she has sworn off marriage. It appears that this poor little rich girl is fated to grow old, gray, and barren--as though she'd never lived at all.Beatrix's predicament is that she's a decidedly eccentric personality trapped in a period when the social circles prescribed and proscribed by rigid British formality allow for very little behavioral deviation, particularly from women. She has no friends to speak of, save for the cheeky farm animals that she sketches and paints. In fact, the lonely woman carries on imaginary, though serious, conversations with Peter Rabbit, Hunca Munca, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and Benjamin Bunny. In mid-drawing, she stops to scold them for their mischievousness, scrunching her nose, dimpling her cheeks, and squinting at them. In delightful, colorfully animated watercolor sequences, they wink back, oink, and shake their tail feathers. If another American actress affecting an English accent (such as Gwyneth Paltrow) had been cast in this silly role, I'd probably have left the theater straightaway. But Zellweger has such an irrepressible ebullience that her dotty prattle seems whimsical and endearing.Little does Beatrix realize that her miniature, imaginary world holds the key that will let her escape the lonely house and make her way in the real world. When she calls upon a publisher, portfolio in hand, the Warne Pothers (Anton Lesser and David Bamber) at first dismiss her children's book as unprofitable nonsense. But they decide to publish The Tale of Peter Rabbit anyhow, as a sop to their younger Pother, Norman. Acted with spirited resolve by Ewan McGregor, the sissified Norman has tired of "playing nursemaid" to his elderly mother and finally put his foot down, demanding a position in the family business. He takes Beatrix's "bunny book" quite seriously and throws himself into its publication.Now, movies with mama's boys named Norman usually wind up with female corpses in the bathtub, but this tale's passions are far more sensible. Norman's inexperience winds up being a boon to Beatrix, who's initially skeptical about his business acumen. He allows her to carefully supervise the book's presentation and printing. Soon, their business partnership blossoms into romance, although Beatrix's mother disapproves of her whirlwind courtship (as she intones, aghast) "with a tradesman."Unfortunately, in order to give us a glimpse into her furry characters' origins, the film takes side excursions into Potter's childhood that almost undermine the movie. Child actress Lucy Boynton's portrayal of young Beatrix comes off as snotty and petulant. If the movie were merely about Beatrix Potter's quirky little "drawrings," then it would appear that she hasn't matured at all since childhood, except by no longer being annoying.However, the movie's true drama is about Beatrix's maturing into a level-headed, business-savvy woman, and the main story arc, as old as Romeo and Juliet, redeems the picture. Norman's marriage proposal forces Beatrix, for the first time in her life, to make a decision against her parents' wishes. Upon visiting her banker, she discovers that her books have made her wealthy beyond her wildest dreams. Now having the means to strike out on her own, Beatrix finally chooses independence.Richard Maltby's script also touches upon Potter's tireless efforts as a conservationist. Here, the Technicolor effect is felt most strongly, conveying breathtaking mountain and waterfront vistas filmed on location in the Isle of Man and Scotland. Another nice touch, I thought, was how the script related Potter's efforts to preserve her beloved Cumbria from land development and possible ecological despoilment. Although shown silently attending a meeting of local agitators, our Miss Potter's solution is to attend a real-estate auction and to bid on a foreclosed farm. It's an uncomplicated (though perhaps unintentional) demonstration of how the free market can provide non-governmental solutions to its own perceived failings. By the time she died, in fact, Beatrix Potter had bequeathed to the National Trust for preservation thousands of acres in England's scenic Lake District.Complementing quietly heart-rending portrayals by Zellweger and McGregor is a poignant one from Bill Paterson, playing Beatrix's enthusiastically supportive father. When he makes a point of purchasing one of her books, she protests that she could have simply given him a copy. "But I wanted to buy one, like everyone else," he replies, beaming with a parent's pride. Emily Watson also turns in a quirky performance as Norman's sister, Millie, a proto-feminist who wears neckties and encourages Beatrix's nonconformist aspirations.While composer Nigel Westlake's score is treacly during the film's "fairy tale" moments, he does what any sensible British film composer ought to during scenes depicting Beatrix's and Norman's ardor and sorrows: he lifts heavily from Elgar and Vaughan Williams, which is always welcome to my ears.And though the story is uneven in its exposition, I nonetheless found a soft spot in my heart for Miss Potter. It's a tender film that transforms the screen into a stunning Technicolor storybook, as is appropriate for this hugely popular children's author. Projecting a quirky, benevolent sense of life, Miss Potter carries itself with quiet dignity and shows how one woman gained the world by keeping her soul.

This is a wonderful film story about Beatrix Potter and how she got started and overcame resistance to her works. A great love story (twice) and true depiction of one of the greatest children's authors/illustrators of modern times. Excellent acting throughout.

This beautiful film is in my opinion the best film of this decade, bar none. Forget all the special effects, explosions, violence, foul language and fast moving garbage which 99% of modern films offer, in this picture we return to the days of well crafted and scripted, finely acted, and gorgeously photographed gems of the golden age of movies. In a wonderful re-creation of Edwardian London the story of Beatrix Potter is charmingly told with a brilliant cast, especially the main stars Renee and Ewan.It is one of those rare films where you are genuinely disappointed when it ends, you are left wanting more. See it, and buy the disc, it's one to treasure and will become a timeless classic.

Was disappointed this was in french could not understand a word could you give me address to return it please mrs r guest 1ferrier court Blackburn bb1 3ll

Arrived in very good condition.The film itself is a powerful story behind the Beatrix Potter stories.For this film you will need to have tissues handy as it is a weepy in certain parts.Be warnedDavid White

great film

Such a lovely story, sad too in places, but worth a watch 😊