Talk:Charlie Bubbles

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Film: British

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I have removed an odd-looking flag on this article whose justification was unclear, I don't see any unusual technical terms in the article. PatGallacher (talk) 21:00, 8 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

POV and the point

I just removed a fair bit of POV, but there's still more I didn't get. I didn't come here to improve this article, however. I've never seen the entire movie. I did watch a fair amount of it on television with my cousin when I twelve years old. I wondered then why the title character was obviously so unhappy and bored. My cousin said that this was because he didn't really write his books himself; he was a plagiarist. Was my cousin right? I came here to find out. Or maybe Bubbles's books are crass commercial exploitations. If there is an explanation, whatever it is, then this article should tell us. On the other hand, if there is no explanation, then the movie itself would seem to me fairly pointless. TheScotch (talk) 08:45, 25 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Charlie is bored because, materially, he has everything, and therefore nothing to strive for or look forward to, and his 'successful', deracinated life is arid and vapid. (The privileged box at Old Trafford means his son can't really enjoy the game with the crowd, that crowd emotion being kind of the point of watching football.) But the old schoolfriend journalist, still stuck in Manchester, who of course claims that people have 'false values' down south, is clearly intended to be seen as making an envious show of sour grapes: he's in touch with his roots, sure, but he'd leave for the glamour and money and excitement of London at the first opportunity, as the Beatles unsurprisingly left Liverpool. Halliwell's Film & Video Guide 1999, HarperCollins, London, 1998, ISBN 0-00-653013-3, p.146, says of Charlie Bubbles (which it awards three stars out of four), 'in its unassuming way it indicts many of the symbols people lived by in the sixties.' I think that means both celebrity-worshipping bourgeois consumerist affluence and supposedly honest northern grit (which was a very fashionable trope at the time). There is a difficulty in that we don't know what kind of writer Charlie is. He might write thrillers, but the suggestion is that he is a northern 'literary' writer adopted by the Establishment, like Alan Sillitoe (Finney made his name and fortune in a Sillitoe screen adaptation, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which made the writer's name and fortune too) or David Storey (who also had a big hit with This Sporting Life, again adapted for a successful British New Wave film, which made Richard Harris a big star), even though Charlie's lifestyle is a bit grander than theirs. This might in turn give an added explanation for his boredom and accidie, because, having gladly left that northern working-class life behind, he no longer has anything much to write about: he has lost the thing that made him famous. Khamba Tendal (talk) 18:06, 23 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Plot summary OR

Ploy summary contains numerous instances of editorializing and evaluation, not a factual retelling of plot points. (Posted in iOS client, to be refined later.) David Spalding (☎ ✉ ✍) 16:47, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Examples:

"tell a story of two tales"
"is a clear but stark reminder of the north-south divide"
"further exemplifying this narrative"
"are an accurate record of "
"The film cuts to the clean and modern streets of central Manchester, " (unnecessary description of film construction, not the plot)
"The screenplay was written by Shelagh Delaney." (extraneous info in plot summary)
"a sentence that is clearly aimed towards the boy who done good"
"and it isn't difficult to see why she won a BAFTA in 1968 for Best Supporting Actress." clearly requires citation, or is OR
"Much of the film depicts the world from the mind of the person, whereby the viewer becomes Charlie so we see much of the film through the eyes of a clever but melancholy and dissatisfied observer of life. The character Charlie Bubbles was almost type-casting for Finney; he had risen to film-stardom from a background as a bookie's son - Finney’s father plays a cameo role of a bookie in the film - in the neighbouring, mainly working class Pendleton district of Salford. Charlie Bubbles was not only Albert Finney's debut as a director, but was also the last time he directed a box-office film." This isn't Plot summary AT ALL, but someone's OR
"The film is a slightly surreal offshoot of the kitchen sink drama,... " entire paragraph is clearly OR, or uncited editorializing

Reading the last three paragraphs should be ample indication of someone putting OR editorial/review comments into the Plot section. Given time I may surgically remove all of this and await someone to remove the tag post-edit.

Looking at the page history, a LOT of these statements remain from versions without any distinct PLOT section. They are carried over from someone's uncited OR in an early version of the article. -- David Spalding (☎ ✉ ✍) 17:59, 27 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]