Talk:Splitting Heirs

Comments

- surely the long first paragraph should be separated and called 'Plot'? Not everyone wants to know the plot ...

- "... aristocratic family, the Bournemouths": Bournemouth is the dukedom rather than the family surname, the dialogue also says specifically "the Dukes of Bournemouth" ...

- "he discovers evidence which he believes reveal him to be the true Bournemouth heir": this is surely established fairly early on as a matter of fact, not just what he believes, so the text could more accurately read "he discovers that he is the true Bournemouth heir"

- it's a bit of a shame to say "Tommy Patel is an Englishman raised by an Indian-English family", because it misses the lovely point that - however white and blue-eyed he was - he believed himself to be an Asian until his mother sees the symbolically signficant silver spoon, connects it with the silver rattle and the monogrammed coverlet, and tells him he was adopted.

- I also got the impression his family were Indian, though lots of web-sites say Pakistani: as I remember it, the dialogue always says 'Asian', leaving the question open - doesn't it?

- Tommy's full name as given in the cast list is a bit of a confusing mixture: in his one persona he's 'Tommy Patel', in the other "Thomas Henry Butterfly Rainbow Peace, heir to the Duke of Bournemouth"

- anyone know why his mother calls him "Ranji"? - some connection with the famous cricketer who became a Maharaja???

- "He befriends American Henry Bournemouth": as the cast-list shows, at that stage he's "Henry Bullock": he only becomes a 'Bournemouth' when his father dies; and once they've accepted that Tommy is the real heir, he's Henry Bullock again, as on the side of the bus at the end, "Henry Bullock Tours"

- for me an important part of the plot and the portrayal of Tommy's character is that he was brought up and lives in a corner shop in Southall [= relatively poor immigrant area] with a dozen people queuing for the bathroom and completely subject to his mother's authority, while commuting daily to the City and handling business worth millions of pounds on the stock exchange; very odd that the author at Rotten Tomatoes thought he was a "lowly bank employee"

- "Shadgrind ... advises him to try to obtain his rightful place in the family" - OK, that describes the beginning of his involvement, but the real point of Shadgrind as part of the film is that he fixed all the murders believing that he would share the proceeds with Tommy ...

- another lovely detail is the collection of family portraits all showing some relationship with Eric Idle ;-)

- it's surely worth saying that they used Longleat as the stately home (according to the credits, and you can recognise it of course)

- the note about 'no DVD edition in the UK' makes it sound as if it weren't released at all there, and that there was no PAL version: it's worth saying that there *was* a VHS/PAL/UK version - there are a few copies around to buy ...

I'll look back in a few days and if no-one has any further comments, I'll add something according to these observations.

David Kettlewell (talk) 11:59, 5 May 2010 (UTC)