I had forgotten how many familiar faces were in the film, and it is a tremendously good film.
Like, “Hey, that’s John Ratzenberger driving Candice Bergen in that army jeep. And their…:eek: dubbing his voice:eek:…THE voice. With…Martin Sheen.
”
:smack::smack::smack:
It was a good film, but I still think E.T. should have won Best Film at the Oscars that year.
I’m no Gandhi expert. That said, has there ever been a more hagiographic portrait of a world figure? It’s been a few years since I saw the movie, but if I remember correctly, Gandhi did one, and only one bad thing in the entire movie. I believe he slapped his wife a few times. Otherwise, he was a pure as the driven snow. As a work of fiction, it was a great movie. But as a work of fact? Not worth the film stock it was printed on.
Can you spot a young Daniel Day-Lewis in one of his earliest appearances?
Yes, as a bully on the street. 
I also spotted a much thinner Richard Griffiths (Harry’ Potter’s Uncle Vernon) and then there was the Temple of Doom connection of Amrish Puri (who played Mola Ram in ToD) and Roshan Seth (who played Chattar Lal in ToD). Also glimpsed were Bernard Hill of King Theoden fame, and perhaps the most obscure was Ken Hutchison who I recognized as the evil Captain of the Guard from LadyHawke.
Could have been worse. My Indian history professor said that there were some who objected to any mere human attempting to portray the Mahatma, insisting that he should instead be depicted on film as a moving orb of light.
There was also not even a passing reference of the Brahmacharya experiments.
Um he was almost certainly pulling your leg. Indians have no objections to actors portraying revered historical figures or even divinities like Ram or Krishna.
Heard (or rather read) about the same story in an interview with the director, Dickie Attenborough, years back. His reply was something like, “We’re not making a movie about bloody Tinkerbell!”
I thought it was a great film, and that Kingsley deserved the Oscar. As for it being a “hagiographic portrait”, well, he was a great man. Not perfect of course, nobody is. We all have our faults. But even in the introduction to the film it said there’s no way, in one film, that a long, complicated life can be depicted, and what they were trying to do was portray the essence of the man.
I once heard a story, don’t know if it’s true, that the Prince of Wales wanted to play Lord Mountbatten, his great uncle. He is said to have cared about the man more than his own father. But of course that bit of casting got squashed.
I hope this doesn’t veer off into GD territory, but here is an interesting article I found about Gandhi and the movie: http://history.eserver.org/ghandi-nobody-knows.txt
I’m not sure how accurate it is, but I figured I’d throw it out there.
Not to mention Nigel Hawthorne (from Yes, Minister and The Madness of King George), Richard Vernon (Slartibartfast from the BBC TV version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and others; can be serious or hysterical playing a part exactly the same way), Shane Rimmer (B-52 co-pilot in Dr. Strangelove, and a couple of Bond films) and Harsh Nayyar (the assassin in Gandhi is the same actor as the news vendor that the alien takes the postcards from in Men in Black).
Whoa. If that article is to be believed, then this movie is farther from the truth than I could ever have imagined.