After a blink and you'll miss it debut as young Wendy in Spielberg's Hook (odd they never worked together again), Gwyneth Paltrow firmly announced her presence in a series of remarkable supporting turns - Flesh and Bone, Se7en, Midnight and Valentino, Hard Eight - before cementing her fame as the still definitive embodiment of Jane Austen's Emma in 1996.
She wasted no time cashing in on her new name and pulled a Jessica Chastain in 1998 except, but with all leading parts. Hush is a bit embarassing, really, but she is excellent in A Perfect Murder, Sliding Doors is highly entertaining and just a bit brainy, she's fairly smashing in Great Expectations and, of course, Shakespeare in Love won her the Oscar which, all things (Cate Blanchett) considered, it is hard to begrudge her.
She's done plenty of great work since - Royal Tenenbaums, The Talented Mr Ripley, Possession, Sylvia, Two Lovers, even Duets- but is frankly underappreciated.
Using Mike Newell's latest as an excuse to celebrate Francesco Clemente's incredible pieces, used in Alfonso Cuaron's 1998 re-imaging of the Charles Dickens classic.
While it's primetime counterpart picks up every technical Emmy it contended for, the trailer for Mike Newell's latest adaptation of Charles Dickens' enduring classic, Great Expectations, lands, and gives reason to believe it may be worth another outing.
The technical side of things look rightly gorgeous, War Horse's Jeremy Irvine shows actual personality and Helena Bonham Carter owns Miss Havisham with eerie, gothic flair.
Filmed 19 times in total, 8 times for the big screen, Expectations is a perennially popular, but only occasionally successful, literary source. Of the movie versions, only David Lean's 1946 version really hits the mark with solid performances and gorgeous styling, but I must profess a particular fondness for Alfonso Cuaron's much maligned modern re-imagining of the tale with Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke.
Sure, Cuaron's version abandons most of the plot in favour of the central romance (really far less of a romance in the original book), but it's a sensual, lightly artsy romance nonetheless, with an edgy mix of sumptuous score and pop classics (including the single that introduced me to Ms Tori Amos), a welcome obsession with the colour green and sharp performances from the young ones (Paltrow in particular) and the veterans (Bancroft, in particular - awesome, if hammy, as re-named kook Ms Dinsmoor).
It may have been the Francesco Clemente paintings - a defining influence on me as a teenager - or the fact that I was quite in love with Gwyneth Paltrow - she had an exceptional year - or it could have been the admittedly the kissing in the rain scene that undoubtedly inspired much terrible poetry on my part, but I'm always happy to let Cuaron's stylised experiment intoxicate me (my admiration is justified, incidentally, by the brilliance he later showed with Children of Men).
