We'll Take Manhattan (2012)

A lot of fun.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This is a very under-rated film. Aneurin Barnard is magnetic as the confident, stubborn impertinent Cockney photographer David Bailey who crashes through the stuffy British fashion establishment with his talent, passion and determination. Instead of making him a figure of fun, or a caricature, Barnard shows how Bailey sticks up for what he senses is the right way to do his photographs. And he does have excellent instincts. His clashes with the ultra posh Vogue editor, played by Helen McCrory, are emblematic of the establishment fashion world clashing sharply with the gung-ho youth culture in the 1960s. As the model Jean Shrimpton, Karen Gillan has a quiet, doe-like, yet intelligent and otherworldly quality -- she has the X factor that makes her convincing in the role. ''I'm not changing nothing,'' says Bailey. He's willing to put his career on the line to have artistic control. Sure, it IS just about fashion, but it's a beautifully made film made with real passion and heart.

never heard of these people! so i decided to watch and find out.first i could not understand some of the dialog due to that inner city British accent - sorry. then the editing jumped around so. the story line is disjointed early on so you cannot get to know these characters. it was as if the director was in a fuss to get to the NYC scenes.the NYC part of the film is much more interesting and in that the characters shine. unfortunately they must have hired a 10 year old to do the 'tourist' snap shots of the city as those photos were just awful an added nothing to the story. we know they are in 'the big city'.the two strong willed leads and the insecure model slowly become a bit unbelievable and then the shows over!will not watch again.

Karen Gillan is pretty and picturesque with a near-perfect clipped Jean Shrimpton accent, but the real drama of the film is between Helen McCrory's stuffy aristocratic sub-editor of Vogue, and the brash, foul-mouthed David Bailey (or "Bailey" as he likes to call himself) as portrayed authentically and confidently by Aneurin Barnard. These two chalk and cheese types are at each other's throats for practically the whole film, so much so that it slightly distracts from the interest of the pictures and the story, well played though the roles are.Whether Bailey really had this much trouble with his bosses is speculative, but he certainly must have ruffled a few feathers in those early days (and his photos in truth, make for gritty but otherwise surprisingly poor use of Manhattan.) Whether this iconic photo shoot was really the birth of the Swinging Sixties is also open to doubt (Bailey himself has no love of the Beatles who are heard on the radio back home), and the New York of 1960 was probably not quite as clean as the New York of today, but the pictures are nonetheless well captured, and the film is enjoyable as an account of two young people's journey of discovery.

This dramatisation of the epochal David Bailey / Jean Shrimpton photo-shoot in New York, January 1962 made for an entertaining if occasionally shallow viewing. Presented very much as a confrontation between rebellious youth and fusty conservatism (in the person of their accompanying chaperon, the tyrannical, but brittle and of course much older Lady Rendlesham), Bailey and Shrimpton are portrayed as the advance guard of the whole Swinging 60's movement, a point rather unsubtly made with its references to the Beatles and Mary Quant just before the end. Whether Bailey's contribution to photography was quite as seismic as the Beatles on music or Quant on fashion is open to debate but as a light, amusing and easy on the eye entertainment, it worked well I thought. Bailey's famous pictures are well recreated, much to the righteous indignation of behind-the-times Rendlesham, and while there's not much more to the piece than their various contretemps, interspersed with Shrimpton's occasional vulnerability, precocity and gaucheness, one has to respect the difficulty in making the fashion world a gripping dramatic undertaking. The acting of the three leads was very good, Aneurin Bernard especially good as the saturnine, Cockney-on-the-make, "don't call me David" Bailey, Helen McCrory equally so as the ever-so posh Lady Rendlesham and if Karen Gillan sometimes seems too old for the 18 that the real Shrimpton was at the time, she comes through in the end as her character develops some maturity and wisdom. I don't have much of an opinion of the fashion world but saw from this how the whole "supermodel" phenomenon of recent times got its start. Whether that was something I desperately needed to know, I'm not sure but the production did satisfy my curiosity in British popular culture in the 60's and was also one of the rare programmes my wife and I could sit and watch together with equal interest and yes, enjoyment