Gran Torino

These are my notes for our Sunday screening:

Gran Torino


USA 2008 116 minutes

Director: Clint Eastwood

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Ahney Her, Bee Vang, Christopher Carley and John Carroll Lynch

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for Golden Globe

• A further 13 wins and 7 nominations

"It is a film that is impossible to imagine without the actor in the title role. The notion of a 78-year-old action hero may sound like a contradiction in terms, but Eastwood brings it off, even if his toughness is as much verbal as physical. Even at 78, Eastwood can make 'Get off my lawn' sound as menacing as 'Make my day,' and when he says 'I blow a hole in your face and sleep like a baby,' he sounds as if he means it."

Kenneth Turan

Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) is a recently widowed veteran of the Korean War who has become alienated from his family and angry at the world. Thao (Bee Vang), the bookish son of Kowalski’s Hmong neighbours, attempts to steal his prized 1972 Ford Gran Torino as part of an initiation into a gang. Kowalski prevents the theft, and then begins to develop a relationship with both the boy and his family.

The screenplay is by Nick Schenk who was trying to develop a story about a widowed Korean War veteran trying to come to terms with changes in his neighbourhood. Based on his own his own experience of meeting such refugees he decided to place a Hmong family among Kowalski’s neighbours in order to create a culture clash: the Hmong had sided with the South Vietnamese and the Americans during the Vietnam War and ended up in refugee camps with the South Vietnamese lost the war and the Americans pulled out. Schenk was advised by industry insiders that a film with elderly characters as it could not be sold, but Eastwood was able both to direct and star in it as production on Invictus, his next film as director, had slipped to early 2009.

Eastwood said that he “had a fun and challenging role, and it’s an oddball story”. The film has an elegiac quality and Eastwood has indicated that after starring in more 40 films (many of which he also directed) at the age of 78 this is likely to be his final acting experience. The good news is that with 35 credits as director he shows little sign of wanting to slow down: since Gran Torino he has directed both Invictus (2009) and Hereafter (2010) and is currently working on Hoover, a biography of J Edgar Hoover, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role.

The Time Traveler's (sic) Wife

We've had a bit of a revamp of our programme as we had some feedack that our choices were a little too masculine (I enjoyed 30 Days Of Night and was looking forward to seeing Inglourious Basterds) so we're introducing a few "couple friendly" films.  This is the first, although I would have preferred Silence in the Library, which introduced the real wife of a real time traveller (*sigh*).

Anyway, here are the notes:

The Time Traveler’s [sic] Wife


USA 2009 107 minutes

Director: Robert Schwentke

Starring: Eric Bana, Rachel McAdams and Ron Livingston

Nominations and Awards

• Three nominations including Best Fantasy Film

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.”

The Doctor

As a child Henry DeTamble survives a car accident that kills his mother by inadvertently time travelling back in time where he is helped by an older version of himself (Eric Bana). As he grows up he begins a relationship with Clare (Rachel McAdams) but their relationship is complicated by his sporadic time travelling.

The idea of a time travel has featured regularly in films from The Time Machine to the Back to the Future trilogy, and on television Doctor Who has used the same premise to produce a series that has lived through several golden ages since the TARDIS first materialised in 1963.  However The Time Traveler’s Wife ignores the more complex issues of time travel that have appeared in many Doctor Who stories such as when its characters have witnessed real historical events, choosing instead to combine science fiction with romantic comedy in a unique cocktail.

The film is based on the debut novel by the American artist Audrey Niffenegger which became a bestseller in both the US and the UK, where it was selected by the Richard and Judy Book Club. The novel was optioned before publication by Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s production company with Brad Pitt scheduled to play the part of Henry, but the project lapsed once his relationship with Jennifer Aniston ended. At subsequent stages in its development Steven Spielberg, David Fincher and Gus Van Sant all expressed an interest in directing the film, before Robert Schwentke took on the project and cast Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams in the lead roles.

Robert Schwenke started his career as a director in Germany and made his name in the US with the thriller Flightplan (2005). His most recent film is Red (2010) a thriller about a team of veteran special agents, including Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren, called out of retirement for one last mission by Bruce Willis.

Broken Embraces (Los Abrozos Rotos)

These are my notes for Broken Embraces which we will screen on Sunday evening:

Broken Embraces (Los Abrozos Rotos)

Spain 2009 127 minutes

Director: Pedro Almodovar

Starring: Angela Molina, Blanca Portillo, Jose Luiz Gomez, Lluis Homar, Penelope Cruz, Ruben Ochandiano and Tamar Novas

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for BAFTA (Best Film not in the English language)

• Nominated for Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival

“...a richly enjoyable piece of work, slick and sleek, with a sensuous feel for the cinematic surfaces of things and, as ever, self-reflexively infatuated with the business of cinema itself.”


Peter Bradshaw

Harry Caine (Lluis Homar) is a blind scriptwriter who is assisted by his faithful assistant Judit (Blanca Portillo) and her son Diego (Tamar Novas).  His past catches up with him when he hears of the death of Ernesto Martel (Jose Luiz Gomez), a wealthy businessman who had hired him, then known as Mateo Blanco, to direct an ironic comedy called Girls and Suitcases and starring the beautiful Lena (Penelope Cruz) who had become Martel’s mistress to pay her father’s medical bills.  Blanco fell in love with Lena, and Martel sent his gay son to film the making of the film and to give him the daily footage which he obsessively scrutinised.  Blanco and Lena ran away together, but they were involved in a car crash which left Blanco blind.

Almodovar has a lifelong obsession with cinema, and cinematic references homages and quotations appear throughout his films and are often part of their fabric: All About My Mother combines elements of All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire, but Broken Embraces is actually about film and the process of making films, which Almodovar suggests is a metaphor for life itself.  The style of the film is 1950s American film noir, but the story, with its dual narrative and father/son and straight gay opposites is reminiscent of other Almodovar films.  Additionally Girls and Suitcases, is a pastiche of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1987) which was Almodovar’s first major success.  The cast also includes many Almodovar regulars such as Angela Molina and Penelope Cruz (in her fourth Almodovar film).

The film was first screened in competition in the 2009 Cannes Film Festival along with Inglourious Basterds and Looking For Eric but lost the Palme d’Or to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (which we screened in our 2009 season).

The Hurt Locker

We will be screening The Hurt Locker on Thursday 4th November.  My notes are as follows:

The Hurt Locker


USA 2008 (131 minutes)

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Starring: Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Christian Camargo, David Morse, Guy Pearce, Jeremy Renner and Ralph Fiennes

Nominations and Awards

• Won six Oscars including Best Film, Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow) and Best Original Screenplay (Mark Boal)

• Won five BAFTAs including Best Film, Best Director Kathryn (Bigelow) and Best Original Screenplay (Mark Boal), Best Cinematography and Best Editing.

• A further 68 wins and 47 nominations

The film is set in and around Baghdad in 2004 and follows the final 38 days of a tour of duty of an American bomb disposal squad.

The script is by Mark Boal, a freelance journalist and scriptwriter who was embedded with an America bomb disposal squad in Iraq for two weeks.  Boal turned his experiences into a fictional reworking of real events and explained his objective in writing the script:

"The idea is that it's the first movie about the Iraq War that purports to show the experience of the soldiers. We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can't see on CNN, and I don't mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn't actually put photographers in with units that are this elite."

Bigelow, who had previously worked with Boal when she turned one of his articles into a short-lived TV series, expanded on this: she aimed to explore “the psychology behind the type of soldier who volunteers for this particular conflict and then, because of his or her aptitude, is chosen and given the opportunity to go into bomb disarmament and goes forward [sic] what everybody else is running from.”

Most of the serious films that Hollywood had previously produced about Iraq such as Syriana (2005), Lion for Lambs (2007) and Rendition (2007) had been liberal-patriot multi-stranded stories set in Washington, the Middle East and elsewhere with big name stars in the leading roles. For The Hurt Locker, in addition to sole location of Baghdad and the surrounding area (but filmed in the sweltering heat of Jordan and Kuwait) Bigelow deliberately made a point of casting relatively unknown actors in the leading roles as “it underscored the tension because with the lack of familiarity also comes a sense of unpredictability”.

The Hurt Locker had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2008 where it received a ten minute standing ovation at the end of its screening. It received many other festival screenings around the world but distributors were reluctant to buy it for screening in the US as previous films about the Iraq War had performed badly at the box office. The film eventually opened in the US in June 2009 in a few cinemas, and as such became eligible for consideration for the 2010 Oscars. Subsequently it was screened in more than 500 cinemas and received nine Oscar nominations and won six, including Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win this award.

30 Days of Night

These are my notes from last night's screening - a far cry from the house-trained vampires of the Twilight world:

30 Days of Night


USA 2009 (113 minutes)

Director: David Slade

Starring: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George and Danny Huston

Nominations and Awards

• Nine nominations including four for best horror film.

“For all that die from the preying of the Undead become themselves Undead, and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown in the water.”

Bram Stoker

Each year the town of Barrow in Alaska has a month in which the sun does not arise, the so-called “Thirty Days of Night”. Some inhabitants leave the town and go south for the month while others carry on with normal life. During this period a group of vampires attack the town and start to massacre its inhabitants, but the survivors, led by Sheriff Eben Olseon (Josh Hartnett), fight back and a grim battle for survival ensues.

The film is based on a graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith which they wrote after their initial film treatment received no interest from studios. The subsequent film deal was brokered with Sam Raimi acting as producer; he had been attracted by Templesmith’s unique mood and concepts for the vampires and noted that the project was “unlike the horror films of recent years”. A straight to video sequel entitled 30 Days of Night: Dark Days is due for release in October 2010.

30 Days of Night sits firmly within the sub-genre of vampire films that links directly back to Nosferatu (1922), the greatest of the silent versions, in which Max Schreck portrayed vampire as the hideous creature from European mythology, a creature whose sole desire is to feed on the blood of others. Other films within this tradition include Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979), with Klaus Kinski as the vampire, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1979) (where the appearance of the vampire was based on Max Schreck’s Count Orlok) and the brilliant Let The Right One In (2008) in which a vampire in the form of a young girl helps a young boy to defeat the bullies who are making his life a misery. The Swedish film Frostbiten is set in Lapland and follows essentially the same story as 30 Days of Night but treats it as a farce.

Earlier this year Stephen King bemoaned the way in which the vampire genre has recently been hijacked by "lovelorn southern gentlemen and … boy-toys with big, dewy eyes", referring of course to the global success of the films based on Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight novels: David Slade is currently directing Eclipse, the most recent film in this series.

A Single Man

These are my notes for the film we will be screening tonight:

A Single Man


USA 2009 (99 minutes)

Director: Tom Ford

Starring: Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult

Awards and Nominations

• Won BAFTA for Best Leading Actor (Colin Firth)

• Nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Colin Firth)

• A further 12 wins and 23 nominations

“...an indulgent exercise in 1960s period style, glazed with 21st-century good taste, a 100-minute commercial for men’s cologne: Bereavement by Dior.”

Peter Bradshaw

George Falconer (Colin Firth), an ex-pat English professor at a Los Angeles college in 1962 is struggling to cope after the death of his long term partner Jim (Matthew Goode) in a car accident. He plans to commit suicide and the film follows him over the course of his final day as he meets various people including Charley (Julianne Moore), a semi-alcoholic divorcee, and Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), a bisexual student, but these encounters force him to reconsider his decision.

The film is based on a semi-autobiographical 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood that is set at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, i.e. before the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, when Isherwood was concerned about losing his young partner who wanted to move from Los Angeles to the more relaxed atmosphere of San Francisco. Isherwood’s decision to set the action over the course of one day was inspired by his admiration for Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which took its structure from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Another critic noted the novel’s resemblance to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, even going so far as to suggest that its title could be Death in Venice, Cal.

Colin Firth received unanimous praise as well many awards for his performance in the film. In The Guardian Peter Bradshaw noted that the role of Falconer

“is such a perfect match for Firth’s habitual and superbly calibrated performance register: withdrawn, pained, but sensual, with sparks of wit and fun.”

He made his film debut with a lead role in Another Country (1984), but it was his role as Mr Darcy in the TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1996) that brought him to international attention. Since this success he has appeared in a wide variety of films on a regular basis, ranging from art house to purely commercial, but it is A Single Man that has brought him his greatest critical acclaim to date. He has recently received rave reviews as well as predictions of future awards for his performance as George VI in The King’s Speech (2010) which will receive its first UK screening at the 2010 London Film Festival.

Tom Ford made his name as creative director for Gucci and YSL before setting up his own brand – Tom Ford – in 2005. In his new role he had dressed many of Hollywood’s leading men, and in parallel with his own label also established his own film production company. A Single Man is the first film that his company has produced as well as his first film as director.

Waltz With Bashir

These are my notes for last Sunday's screening:


Waltz With Bashir

Israel 2008 (90 minutes)

Director: Ari Folman

Starring: David Proud, Dominic Coleman, Jason Maza, Robyn Frampton and Sasha Hardway

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for an Oscar (Best Foreign Language Film)

• Nominated for two BAFTAs (Best Foreign Language Film and Best Animated Film)

• Nominated for Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival

• A further 20 nominations and 26 wins


In 2006 Ari Folman meets a friend with whom he had served in the Israel Defence Force (IDF) 14 years earlier. His friend has nightmares linked to his experiences during the Lebanon War, but Folman is surprised that he cannot remember anything from that period. Later that night Folman has a vision from the night of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, but he cannot tell if it is true. A friend advises Folman to discuss his vision with other people were in the IDF at the same time in order to understand what happened and to revive his own memories.

Folman spent four years making his film. It started as a live-action documentary with interviews and newsreel footage, and then the production team turned it into an animated film using rotoscope animation techniques. The resulting effect looks like one long hallucination and is perfect for the trauma of Folman’s recovered memories. Only at the end does Folman revert to actual footage depicting the victims of the massacre, with devastating effect.

The atrocities are comparable with those on the Eastern Front during the Second World War that form part of the Holocaust, but reports from witnesses within Europe go unheeded. Finally the slaughter end only when an Israeli general intervenes, and it is at this point that the film transforms from animation into newsreel.

As Philip French noted in his review, the subsequent inquiry into the massacres found Ariel Sharon guilty of gross neglect of duty and ordered that he should never again serve as Defence Minister, but twenty years later he became prime minister. However he also notes that an Arab country would not have established a similar enquiry nor would it have allowed a film like Waltz With Bashir to be made.

An Education

These are my notes for this week's screening:

An Education


UK 2009 (95 minutes)

Director: Lone Scherfig

Starring: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Dominic Cooper, Rosamund Pike and Emma Thompson

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for three Oscars: Best Film, Best Actress (Carey Mulligan) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Nick Hornby)

• A further 18 wins and 45 nominations including a BAFTA Award for Best Actress for Carey Mulligan and seven further nominations including Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Outstanding British Film

In 1961 London Jenny Millar (Carey Mulligan), a 16 year old schoolgirl in the process applying to Oxford, meets a charming older man David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard) who starts taking her out and then charms her parents into accepting the relationship. Jenny eventually realises that Goldman is a con man, but nonetheless accepts his proposal of marriage and drops out of school – and then she discovers that he is already married. Jenny returns to school to renew her studies and next year is accepted at Oxford.

The film is based on an autobiographical memoir by the journalist Lynn Barber who as a schoolgirl had an affair with conman Simon Prewalski, an associate of Peter Rachman before reading English at St Anne’s College Oxford. The script is by Nick Hornby, better known as the author of novels such as Fever Pitch, About A Boy, and High Fidelity, who explained in an interview what drew him to the story:

“She’s a suburban girl who’s frightened that she’s going to get cut out of everything good that happens in the city. That, to me, is a big story in popular culture. It’s the story of pretty much every rock ‘n’ roll band.”

The story also has echoes of the kitchen-sink dramas of the 1960s like Billy Liar and A Taste of Honey although the trouble that Jenny gets to is the – potential – loss of her Oxford career. The film concludes with Jenny at Oxford remarking in a voiceover: “I probably looked as wide-eyed, fresh and artless as any student. But I wasn’t.” This is, if anything, an understatement: as Lynn Barber revealed during a recent appearance on Desert Island Discs, she managed to sleep with more than 50 men during two terms at Oxford.

Carey Mulligan received unanimous praise for her performance as Jenny in what was only her second film appearance. She played Kitty Bennet in Joe Wright’s version of Price and Prejudice (2005) and then spent three years playing leading roles in a number of TV programmes including Ada Clare in Bleak House and Sally Sparrow in Blink (one of the best Doctor Who stories ever). Following the international success of An Education she was cast in a co-starring role in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), Oliver Stone’s sequel to Wall Street (1987) and will appear shortly in a starring role with Keira Knightley in Never Let Me Go (2010), from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, which will receive its first screening at the 2010 London Film Festival.

Up In The Air

These are my film notes for our first screening which is due to take place on Thursday 16th September:

Up in the Air

USA 2009 (109 minutes)

Director: Jason Reitman

Starring: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for 6 Oscars: Clooney (Best Actor), Farmiga (Best Supporting Actress), Kendrick (Best Supporting Actress), Best Film, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay

• A further 44 wins and 53 nominations (including BAFTA nominations for Clooney, Farmiga and Kendrick)

“In one sense, it’s a movie about a man who fires people for a living. In another sense, it’s a movie about a man who collects air miles excessively. In another sense it’s about a man who meets a woman who’s so similar to him that even though they both believe in the idea of living solo, they begin to fall in love.”

Jason Reitman

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) loves his job as an outplacement counsellor, travelling around the US laying off staff for managers too cowardly to do it for themselves and aiming to achieve a personal goal of earning ten million frequent flyer air miles with American Airlines. He is enjoying a casual relationship with Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), another frequent flyer, but his footloose life becomes complicated when his boss asks him to mentor the dynamic Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) who has developed a new method of lay-off using a webcam which saves money by reducing the need for expensive air travel.

Reitman wrote the screenplay with Sheldon Turner and, although it is based loosely on a novel by Walter Kim, stated that he wrote the three main parts with Clooney, Farmiga and Kendrick in mind. Both Reitman and Clooney were aware of the apparent similarities between Clooney’s public persona and the role he played, and Reitman confirmed that the casting of Clooney was key to the success of the film:

“If you're going to make a movie about a guy who fires people for a living and you still want to like him, that actor better be damn charming and I don't think there’s a more charming actor alive than George Clooney. I was very lucky he said yes.”

In his review of the film Philip French described George Clooney as giving his best performance to date and the character of Bingham as the best role that he has played: Bingham is “Arthur Miller’s Willie Loman reshaped as a romantic hero for the post-industrial world, burdened not by a case of samples but credit cards”.

But the film is very much an ensemble piece and both Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick won much praise for their supporting performances. Prior to her success in Up in the Air Vera Farmiga was better known as a stage actress, although she did appear memorably as the Mother in The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas (2008). Anna Kendrick played the role of Jessica in Twilight before being cast in this film, and has subsequently played the same character in each of the sequels. Her most recent role is in Scott Pilgrim vs the World (2010).

Jason Reitman is the son of Ivan Reitman who directed the two Ghostbuster films in the 1980s. His first film as a director was Thank You For Smoking (2005) but he made his name with the multi-award winning Juno (2007).

The Dench Factor

Each year we do our best to select a programme of films that we hope will be enjoyed by as many people in the village as possible, but with certain exceptions - The History Boys and Elizabeth: The Golden Age - we can never tell what will bring in the punters.  However as we looked back over the attandence figures for our screenings - our treasurer keeps a careful note of members and non-members attending each film - it was possible to discern one factor that most of them shared.  Notes on a Scandal, Mrs Henderson Presents and Casino Royale all drew substantial audiences, and the common factor was that they all starred Judi Dench.

We obviously cannot schedule a full programme of Ms Dench's cinematic work, so instead I've decided to institute a new rating system in order to give our piunters a chance to assess the merits of each film in relation to Judi Dench: I shall call it the Dench Factor.

There will be various categories, depending on the involvement (or not) of Ms Dench as follows:

Dench Factor 5: JD in a starring role.
Dench Factor 4: JD in a co-starring role.
Dench Factor 3: leading actor/actress appeared in a film with JD
Dench Factor 2: supporting actor/actress appeared in a film with JD
Dench Factor 1: actor/actress appeared in a film with someone who had appeared in a film with JD

On this basis Notes on a Scandal and Mrs Henderson Presents both merit a rating of Dench Factor 5 (my system does not offer any guarantee on the quality of the film, but you can forgive Stephen Frears for Mrs Henderson Presents when you see The Queen or Tamara Drewe).  In the same way Casino Royale earns a Dench Factor 2, and Elizabeth: The Golden Age is Dench Factor 3.  Sadly Up In The Air is only Dench Factor 1 (George Clooney starred with Cate Blanchett in The Good German, and CB starred with JD in Notes on a Scandal), but for some reason it seems to be generating a good deal of interest. 

I may need to rework my system to allow for the Clooney Effect.

Planning Meeting

We closed  our last season with the AGM, and as we held it before the screening everyone kept it pretty short.  The good news is that we are still solvent, but the bad news is that we have been dependent on external grants to purchase the big ticket items like projector and sound system, and in the current age of austerity I do not think that the local auythority will look kindly on a grant application to upgrade/replace the kit. 

We made money on most of our Thursday screenings, but for many of our Sunday screeenings the audience was solely committee members and family members.  The other major source of revenue is the bar, and it is clear that our audience is generally thirsty.  I was only half-joking when I suggested that we sould set ourselves up as a Wine Club that also screens films.

It's difficult to coerce people into attending, but we intend to harness the power of the internet to send out reminders to members - or at least to those of  our members have email access - and also intend to run a raffle for our "free" introductory film.  We agreed to have DVDs as prices and I volunteered to find something appropriate for the good folk of Highclere: after a quick trawl through Amazon I bought a box set of Billy Wilder films (including Some Like It Hot - which I saw many years ago on the big screen at the PPP while at Oxford) and another set starring Orson Welles (including The Third Man).

My plan is to blog for the full season and to intersperse updates on our progress with the notes that I prepare for each screening.  Hopefully our choice of Up In The Air will get the season off  to a good start.

Forthcoming Attractions

As the end of August approaches and the evenings draw in, it will soon be time for the Film Club to launch its 2010-2011 season.

Once again we've followed the strategy of starting the season with a "big" film that was both a commercial and critical success - in this case Up In The Air - and we'll be following this with regular screenings through to the end of April.  For our Thursday screenings we've chosen a selection  of (hopefully) popular films that will bring in a good audience, as we need to sell tickets to keep the Club solvent, and on Sundays we'll be screening an idiosyncratic mix of independent and foreign language films.

The full programme is as follows:

Thursday Screenings

• An Education
• A Single Man
• The Hurt Locker
• Gran Turino
• A Serious Man
• The Road
• Public Enemies
• The Wrestler
• The Sound of Music (honest!)

Sunday Screenings

• Waltz With Bashir
• 30 Days of Night
• Broken Embraces
• Inglourious Basterds
• The Hangover
• 35 Shots of Rum
• Home
• Moon
• Me and Oson Welles
• Bienvenue Chez Les Ch'tis

I must admit to not having seen any of these, so I'm looking forward to an enjoyable, interesting and - hopefully - profitable season.

SNOW WHITE: THE SEQUEL

Everyone agreed it had been a fairy tale wedding, and for a few years it had seemed that Snow White and the Prince were enjoying the happiest of marriages.

But time passed and things changed. There was no one single event that people could point to at the time to show that things were not well in the royal marriage – rather a slow steady accumulation of detail that made sense only in retrospect.

It had started with the joint appearances. From the time that they had announced their engagement it was clear that she was a real star and newspaper editors soon realised that a picture of her on the front page always led to an increase in sales. And Snow White herself was not above using the press for her own purposes: she had made a fortune by selling the story of her time in the woods with the seven dwarfs while at the same time hitting all seven of the dwarfs with a series of gagging writs and injunctions to ensure that her version of events was the only one in the public domain.

Of course Snow White and the Prince still made public appearances – it was part of the job description after all – but from now on all such appearances were strictly solo. Snow White continued to draw big crowds, and over time they grew even bigger, but the Prince, although he was always attended by a respectable audience, seldom managed to attract too much press attention.

Finally the news was broken to a world that already suspected what it now heard: Snow White and the Prince were living apart, although no one had yet mentioned a divorce.

Alone in her home in the country Snow White paced fretfully from room to room. She was missing the adulation that greeted here wherever she went and was in a bad mood. Deep in thought she suddenly found herself in a room she did not recognise. It was a large room, completely empty apart from a large cheval mirror with an ornate golden frame that stood in the centre of the room. She immediately recognised it as a magic mirror, and asked it the obvious question:

“Mirror, mirror on the stand,
Who is the fairest in the land?”

The mirror responded immediately, its voice seeming to come from the centre of her reflection.

“You are. There’s no doubt at all.”

The voice was firm and the tone was deep.

Snow White felt reassured. What ever else was wrong in her life she was still the most beautiful woman in the kingdom.

It was not long after this that news broke of the Prince’s affair with one of the Ugly Sisters. Snow White had known about this almost from the start and had herself been involved in a series of relationships over the past few years. However the difference was that she had been discreet and so far not a word had leaked to the press. But now with the news of the Prince’s affair splashed across every front page she felt devalued: this news could fundamentally affect her position in the kingdom.

After hours of thought she decided to consult the mirror. This time there was an ominous pause before the mirror spoke, and its voice was hesitant:

“Um. You are. Definitely. No doubt at all.”

This threw her into a dreadful temper. She took off one of her shoes and threw it at the mirror. The glass immediately shattered into a thousand pieces, that lay like a frost of diamonds on the carpet.

Snow White spent days planning her come back campaign: a major television interview followed by a whole series of carefully stage-managed photo opportunities. These had the desired effect, but by the time they were over Snow White was exhausted. Her media adviser suggested that a period of withdrawal from the public eye might be beneficial, so Snow White decided to take a holiday.

It was while she was at the coast in a neighbouring kingdom that she met Aladdin. He had long since separated from his wife and now was part of a group of minor characters from fairy stories who lived hard and played hard.

Snow White thought it was love at first sight – again. Aladdin was very kind. He took her for rides on his magic carpet. After much prompting he even introduced her to his genii. But the press were not far behind them. And it was while trying to escape from the press that their carriage, driven by a drunken coachman overturned, and both Snow White and Aladdin were killed.

It was an accident of course, but Aladdin’s father could not accept it, seeing in it the dark hand of Jurisfiction. And so although Snow White was dead her story carried on, and conspiracy theorists everywhere lived happily ever after.

The Boat That Rocked

These are the film notes for our final screening of the 2009/2010 season:

UK 2009 (135 minutes)
Director: Richard Curtis
Starring: Tom Sturridge, Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans, Nick Frost and Kenneth
Branagh

Following his expulsion from school Carl (Tom Sturridge) arrives on Radio Rock, a pirate radio ship, to stay with the ship’s Captain Quentin (Bill Nighy) who is also his godfather and meets the disc jockeys who crew the ship. A government minister (Kenneth Branagh) takes offence at the ship’s output and creates the Marine Offences Act in order to close the station down. Quentin and the crew decide to defy the ban, but an attempt to move the ship causes its engines to explode and the ship sinks, but without any loss of life.

The story is based on the real life pirate radio station named Radio Caroline, which broadcast from international waters off the coast of South East England in the 1960s, although Richard Curtis (as both writer and director) was keen to point out that he did not intend to depict the real story of offshore broadcasting; rather he wrote the film solely for entertainment purposes.

Richard Curtis started his career as one of the writers on Not The Nine O’Clock News before creating the Blackadder series with Rowan Atkinson. He made his film breakthrough with his screenplay for Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) which became the highest grossing British film to date and which made Hugh Grant a global superstar. Curtis followed this with the screenplay for Notting Hill (1999) as well as collaborating with Helen Fielding on the screenplays for Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), all of which starred Hugh Grant. In 2003 Curtis directed Love Actually from his own screenplay, once again starring Hugh Grant, and this time in a strangely prophetic role as a “posh boy” Prime Minister. In addition to Grant all the films included a regular group of British actors including Colin Firth, Rowan Atkinson and Bill Nighy in their casts.

In parallel with this successful film career Curtis also created The Vicar of Dibley, which ran from 1994 to 2007, as a vehicle for Dawn French. He followed this with the screenplay of the TV version of The No. 1 Ladies Detection Agency which he co-wrote with Anthony Minghella (who also acted as director) before returning to film with The Boat That Rocked in 2009. His most recent project is a story – Vincent and the Doctor - for the current series of Doctor Who which despite an amusing cameo role for Bill Nighy as an art critic lecturing on Van Gogh failed to reach the standards of recent stories about historical characters such as The Unquiet Dead (Dickens), The Shakespeare Code (Shakespeare – inevitably) or even The Unicorn and the Wasp (Agatha Christie).

Regeneration of the Prime Minister

During the election campaign there were many comments on the Labour Party's fascination with Doctor Who in its use of David Tennant to provide voiceovers for PEBs, and starring roles for Sean Pertwee (son of Jon) and Peter Davison.

However it is only now as the dust from the election finally settles that it's possible to see how Doctor Who provides a strange mirror to the rise and fall of the whole New Labour Project:

* The unexpected and triumphant return of the programme after many years off the screen.

* The replacement of the ninth Doctor by a Scottish successor.

* The return of several key characters from the first series as the final series from RTD reached its conclusion.

* The Tenth's Doctor's final words ("I don't want to go") sum up the amazing week of horse-trading followed the inconclusive result of the Generl Election.

* The casting of the youngest actor ever to play the Eleventh Doctor.

It only remains to be seen now how the Eleventh Doctor's relationship with his new companion will develop over the next five years. The good news so far is that the BBC has commissioned another series which will include a story by Neil Gaiman.

The Soloist

These are my notes for the film we screened last night. It was the last film of the season and although it was good we had a pretty small audience. next year we plan to end the season before Easter.

The Soloist

USA 2009 (117 minutes)
Director: Joe Wright
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Robert Downey Jr. and Catherine Keener

Awards and Nominations
Four nominations including Best Actor nominations for both Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.

While at the Juillard School Nathaniel Ayers (Foxx) developed schizophrenia and after becoming homeless is reduced to playing a two-stringed violin on the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Steve Lopez (Downey) is a journalist, and after meeting Ayers he decides to write a column about him and his homelessness. The column is a great success, and as Lopez continues both to write about Ayers and to help him he is forced to grapple with the complex issues of the thousands of mentally ill who live on the streets of Los Angeles.

With its subject matter the film seems to be a close companion to Shine (1996), which was based on the life of the pianist David Helfgott who spent years in institutions after a mental breakdown. However Philip French, somewhat idiosyncratically, links it to Marley & Me (2008) and Julia & Julia (2009) in that all three films started as newspaper columns which their authors then turned into books.

The film is based on a true story that Steve Lopez told in a series of columns that eventually became a book called The Soloist. Since the success of the book Lopez has maintained a relationship with Ayers and has become his mentor. But Lopez always saw Ayers as more than one individual with a story to tell:

“I was told early on that this was a rare opportunity to humanise thousands like him. This story took me into a whole world, a world so close... to City Hall. Without him, without the evolving drama of his life, nobody would have cared about the public policy of it.”

As his relationship with Ayers continued Lopez became both an expert and an advocate for mental health and homeless issues and speaks regularly on the lecture circuit.

After beginning his career in television Joe Wright made his name in the cinema with an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (2005) which won him a BAFTA for Most Promising Newcomer and which starred Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennett. He worked with Knightley again on the multi-Oscar nominated Atonement (2007). The Soloist marked a clear change of direction and helped Wright escape from being seen as a director of prestige adaptations of literary classics. His current project is another change of direction: Hanna is a story about a teenage assassin from Easter Europe who escapes from her background when a French family take her in.

The White Ribbon

These are my notes for the film we are screening this Sunday - and this is the film I've been most looking forward to seeing all year. From everything I have read I do not expect to be disappointed.

The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band, Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte)

Austria 2009 (143 minutes)
Director: Michael Haneke
Starring: Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka and Michael Katz

Awards and Nominations
Winner of Palme d’Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival
Winner of the 2009 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film
Nominated for 2 Oscars, including Best Foreign Language Film
A further 15 wins and 30 nominations

A series of mysterious incidents occur in a Northern German village in the 12 months preceding the outbreak of the First World War. The pastor, doctor and baron rule over the women, children and peasant farmers of the village, but although they exercise stern discipline over the members of their own families - the pastor forces his children to wear the white ribbon of purity as a punishment for wrongdoings – they are unable to identify the perpetrators.

According to Haneke, the film is about “the origin of every type of terrorism, be it of political or religious nature”, but his film refuses to offer up easy answers or even resolve the events it portrays. The story is narrated by the local teacher, looking back in old age, who announces that these events “could perhaps clarify something that happened in this country”. It is not clear what motive the narrator has for remembering – or misremembering – the events: possibly after surviving two world wars and achieving some social standing in Germany his own hindsight is now questionable.

Michael Handke started his career on German television and came to international notice when The Piano Teacher/La Pianiste (2001) with Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Magimel won the Grand Prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, while its stars won the Best Actor and Actress awards. Handke won the same award at Cannes for Hidden/Caché (2005) which was also nominated for the Palme d’Or. The White Ribbon received its first screening at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival where it won both the Palme d’Or and the international film critics’ prize.

The Guardian included The White Ribbon at number five in its list of the best films of the noughties (sic) where Peter Bradshaw described it as:

"...a ghost story without a ghost, a whodunnit without a denouement, a historical parable without a lesson, and for two and a half hours this unforgettably disturbing and mysterious film leads its viewers alongside an abyss of anxiety."

Star Trek

In the great Star Trek versus Doctor Who debate I've always sided with the latter - even before its triumphant renaissance under Russell T Davies. However I have to admit that the film we screened on Sunday was pretty good, and that it deserves its five star review from Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

Here are my notes:

Star Trek

USA 2009 (127 minutes)
Director: J J Abrams
Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana and Simon Pegg

Awards and Nominations
Won Oscar for Best Makeup
A further 11 wins and 45 nominations

James T Kirk meets the half-human Spock while training at the Starfleet Academy. Kirk stows away on the USS Enterprise and together with other cadets like Nyota Uhura, Hiikaru Sulu and Pavel Chekhov has an adventure at the final frontier.

Star Trek first appeared in 1966 as a TV series that ran for three seasons before spawning four more spin-off TV series based in the same universe but with different sets of characters. In the cinema there were 10 Star Trek films featuring initially the (ageing) cast of the initial TV series followed by the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. There are also many novels, comic books and video games, although purists consider these to be non-canonical.

The commercial failure of Star Trek Nemesis (2002) effectively killed the official Star Trek franchise in the cinema and it was not until 2005 that Paramount chose to reboot it with a story featuring the cast of the initial TV series portrayed by a new cast. The script is by Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzan who previously had worked with J J Abrams on Mission: Impossible III (2006) – another successful film franchise based on a hit TV show from the 1960s. Initially Abrams had intended only to produce the film, but decided to direct it as soon as he read the script as “I would be so agonisingly envious of whoever stepped in and directed the movie”. The writers were keen to avoid a complete reboot and thus it was important to them to cast Leonard Nimoy in the film. His performance as the older Spock is one of quiet dignity; and it is his voice over the final credits speaking the legendary words about the mission to seek out new life and new civilisations - amended to meet the politically correct requirements of a new millennium - where no one has gone before.

J J Abrams made his name as a writer and producer of eight films before making his debut as a director with Mission: Impossible III (2008). He followed this by producing the science fiction film Cloverfield (2008) before reverting to the role of director for Star Trek. His current future projects include producing Cloverfield 2 and Mission: Impossible IV as well as a possible commitment to direct an as yet untitled sequel to Star Trek. He has a parallel career in television where his credits include co-creating, writing, producing and directing Lost (2004-2010).

State of Play

These are the notes for the film we screened last night:

State of Play

USA 2009 (128 minutes)
Director: Kevin Macdonald
Starring: Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Robin Wright Penn and Helen Mirren

Awards and Nominations
Won International Award Best Actor (Russell Crowe) at the Australian Film Institute
Two further nominations, including Kevin Macdonald as Best Director

Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) is leading an investigation into PointCorp, a private defence contractor whose operations involve the supply of mercenaries, when he hears that that Sonia Baker, a lead researcher in his team has apparently committed suicide on the subway. Reporter Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) had been at college with Collins and as he investigates the death with his colleague Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) they begin to wonder whether Sonia Baker had been murdered.

The film is based on the six part TV drama by Paul Abbott first broadcast in 2003 which was set in London in the early days of New Labour. The film transposes the action to contemporary Washington under a Republican Administration, and the need to distill the core story into two hours means that what it loses in terms of character development it gains in terms of pace. Kevin Macdonald said that it was the complex blend of fiction with journalism and politics that had initially attracted him to the story, adding that he wanted to examine the ways that societies learn what is going on in the world and the extent to which people can trust what they read in the papers. He cited a series of key 1970s films – The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor and especially All The President’s Men - as a major influence on State of Play.

The initial screenplay was by Matthew Michael Carnahan (who previously wrote the screenplay for Lions for Lambs (2007), Robert Redford’s most recent film as director) with further contributions from both Tony Gilray (scriptwriter for all three Bourne films and writer/director of Michael Clayton (2007) and Duplicity (2009)) and Peter Morgan, who wrote the screenplay for The Last King of Scotland (2006), Kevin Macdonald’s debut feature as a director, as well as the screenplays for The Queen (2006) and Frost/Nixon (2008). Despite Paul Abbott’s role as Executive Producer he had no involvement in the screenplay.

Brad Pitt had originally been cast as Cal McAffrey, but he left the production a week before production began as a result of differences over the script which could not be resolved due to the 2007-2008 Screenwriters Strike, and Russell Crowe took on the role at the last minute after a personal approach from Kevin Macdonald. This cast change delayed production and had the knock on effect of Ben Affleck taking over the role of Collins from Edward Norton, who had to leave due to scheduling conflicts. Fortunately Helen Mirren was able to adjust her own filming schedule to retain her key cameo role of Cameron Lynne, the editor of the Washington Globe - although some UK critics wondered why DCI Tennison had suddenly taken up a second career in journalism.

State of

Harry, He’s Here To Help (Harry, Un Ami Qui Vous Veut Du Bien)

Harry, He’s Here To Help (Harry, Un Ami Qui Vous Veut Du Bien)

France 2000 (117 minutes)
Director: Dominik Moll
Starring: Laurent Lucas, Mathilde Seigneur, Sergi Lopez and Sophie Guillemin

Awards and Nominations
BAFTA nomination for Best Film not in the English Language
Nomination for Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival
A further seven wins and 12 nominations

On a hot summer day Michel Pape (Laurent Lucas) is driving south from Paris with his wife Claire (Mathilde Seigneur) and three young daughters to a remote farmhouse they have bought in order to renovate. While they stop at a service station a stranger introduces himself to Michel as Harry Balesteros (Sergi Lopez) a school friend whom he has not seen for twenty years. Harry slowly insinuates himself into the life of the family and then sets about reorganising Michel’s life with advice and manipulative acts.

The key motif of the plot – a charming sociopath inveigles his way into a stable relationship before wreaking havoc – is a key plot device from films like Strangers on a Train to The Talented Mr Ripley. However it is the former that is the key to this film, which consciously echoes a whole series of Hitchcock classics: Harry is the corpse in The Trouble With Harry and Balesteros is the name of the innocent victim in The Wrong Man. Philip French has also noted a more subtle Hitchcock reference: Hitchcock is said to have abhorred eggs, but Harry eats them raw and Michel starts writing a story called Les Oeufs.

All four actors perform well in the leading roles, but it was Sergi Lopez who won a Cesar for Best Actor. Since this film he has worked with a number of major European directors and has portrayed villainous characters in films such as Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and, more famously, in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), in which he played the psychopathic Captain Vidal.

Dominik Moll was born in Germany, studied film in New York and now teaches film at the French National Film School. After the success of Harry, He’s Here To Help, for which he also wrote the screenplay, Moll directed Lemming (2005) a psychological thriller starring Charlotte Rampling and Charlotte Gainsbourg, once again from his own script. His next film will be The Monk, based on the classic Gothic novel by Matthew Lewis and starring Sergi Lopez.

Australia

These are my film notes for last week's screening of Australia - an attempt to break the record for the number of other films mentioned in a single set of notes.

Once again I wrote the notes before I'd seen the film, and now after the screening I can report that although it had a few impressive set pieces, the overall effect was some considerable way less than the sum of its parts.

Australia 2008 (165 minutes)
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Ben Mendelsohn, Bill Hunter, Bryan Brown and David Wenham
Awards and Nominations
• Nominated for an Oscar
• A further 7 wins and 19 nominations

In September 1939 Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) flies to Australia where her errand husband is running cattle station. After the murder of her husband she and Drover (Hugh Jackman) drive 2,000 head of cattle on a journey of several hundred miles across the desert to Darwin where they will be sold. Several years later Lady Sarah returns to Darwin to look for a young half-aboriginal boy whom she regards as her adopted son, and while she is there she witnesses the Japanese attack on the city.

The cast includes actors such as Bryan Brown, Jack Thompson and Bill Hunter who all made their names in the great period of Australian cinema in the 1970s and 1980s when directors such as Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford and Fred Schepisi were exploring the history of their country and their national identity in films like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and Gallipoli (1981). From this strong beginning subsequent generation of film makers moved away from such major themes, focussing instead on contemporary subjects and producing films such as Strictly Ballroom (1992), Luhrmann’s first film which became a global success after winning an award at the Cannes Film Festival. Luhrmann built on this legacy of anti-heroic cinema in his next two films, with Romeo + Juliet (1996) being set in Latin America and Moulin Rouge (2001) in fin-de-siècle Paris.

Luhrmann decided that his next film would be about the history of Australia, and after six months of research he settled on a story set just before the Second World War in which he could combine a historical romance with a story about the Stolen Generations, mixed race Aboriginal children who were removed from their parents and integrated into white society. Luhrmann wrote the screenplay in conjunction with Stuart Beattie, whose work ranges from the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy to 30 days of Night (2007), and Ronald Harwood, best known for his screenplays for The Pianist (2002) and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).

With this complex pedigree of screenwriters and with two Australian actors who made their names in Hollywood in the leading roles, rather than returning to the style of the founders of the new wave of Australian cinema Luhrmann imposes a Hollywood sensibility on the film which contains two distinct parts: a so-called “wallaby western” and then a war movie. The first part of the film echoes two famous John Wayne westerns, Red River and The Cowboys, while the sound track evokes the music that Elmer Bernstein wrote for films such as The Magnificent Seven. In the second part there are scenes which are reminiscent of From Here to Eternity, Gone with the Wind (the burning of Atlanta) and Tora! Tora! Tora!

Luhrmann is currently working on another adaptation of The Great Gatsby, although no details of any casting have been announced.

Eat Drink Man Woman

Notes as follows:

Eat Drink Man Woman (Yin shin an nu)

Taiwan/USA 1994 (124 minutes)
Director: Ang Lee
Starring: Sihung Lung, Yu-Wen Wang and Chien-lien Wu

Awards and Nominations
Nominated for Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film
Nominated for BAFTA for Best Foreign Language Film
Nominated for Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film
A further four wins and seven nominations

Senior Master Chef Chu lives in a large house in Taipei with his three unmarried daughters: a school-teacher nursing a broken heart, a career woman and a student who works in a fast food restaurant. As each daughter encounters a new man and the relationships flourish, their traditional roles within the family evolve. Chu has lost his wife, is losing his sense of taste and is aware that he is getting old. Reminiscing with an old friend Chu comments that the two main human desires are “to eat and drink and to have sex” and the film includes numerous scenes displaying the technique and art of gourmet Chinese cooking for the family’s Sunday dinner, the intricate preparations for the family meal expressing its members’ unspoken feelings for each other.

Ang Lee studied film in New York but made his name in his native Taiwan with two studies of Chinese American relationships in Pushing Hands (1992) and The Wedding Banquet (1993), the second of which was nominated as Best Foreign Film in both the Golden Globes and Oscars. Lee returned to Taiwan for Eat Drink Man Woman, a study of traditional values, modern relationships and family conflicts in Taipei, and after its international success moved to Hollywood.

Lee has subsequently directed a diverse series of films which include Sense and Sensibility (1995) from the novel by Jane Austen, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) based on the Chinese wuxia (martial arts and chivalry) genre, Hulk (2003) a blockbuster based on the Marvel Comics character, and Brokeback Mountain (2005) a small budget independent film based on a short story by Annie Proulx. To date Lee’s films have won seven Oscars, eight Golden Globes and 12 BAFTAs. He is currently working on Life of Pi, based on the award-winning novel by Yann Martel.

In 2002 Eat Drink Man Woman suffered the usual fate of a successful foreign language film in the US: an English language remake called Tortilla Soup about a Mexican chef and his family in contemporary Los Angeles. Peter Bradshaw described it as “a film so tooth-grindingly irritating you will feel your mouth filling up with enamel powder”.

Revolutionary Road

These are the film notes for last night's screening:


Revolutionary Road

USA 2009 (119 minutes)
Director: Sam Mendes
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Michael Shannon, Richard Easton and Jay O Sanders

Awards and Nominations
* Nominated for three Oscars, including Best Supporting Actor (Michael Shannon)
* Won Golden Globe for Best Actress (Kate Winslet)
* A further five wins and 21 nominations including BAFTA nominations for Best Actress (Kate Winslet) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Justin Hayes)

In 1950s Connecticut Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) works discontendely for a Manhattan computer company while his wife April (Kate Winslet) once had ambitions to be an actress but is now a housewife who takes part in amateur theatricals. In the throes of a quarter life crisis they plan to move to Paris to retrieve their lives, but while April becomes hooked on her pipe dream Frank gets cold feet.

There had been several earlier unsuccessful attempts to film the 1961 novel by Richard Yates, but it was only after Kate Winslet told her husband Sam Mendes that she would like to play the part of April Wheeler that he agreed to direct it, and only when DiCaprio had been cast as Frank Wheeler that the film actually went into production. Winslet and DiCaprio made their names in Titanic (1997), and since then both actors have had successful careers in a number of high profile films although this is the first time that they had worked together again. Nonetheless the friendship that they had developed while making Titanic endured, and this helped them portray a couple so convincingly in this film. Both actors received praise for their performances, but it was Winslet who won the awards (although as she had been nominated for Best Actress Oscar for her performance in The Reader she was ineligible for a nomination for her performance in this film, and she competed against herself in the BAFTAs, winning the Best Actress award for her performance in The Reader). The shoot was so emotionally and physically draining for DiCaprio that he postponed his next film for two months.

Revolutionary Road was Yates’ first novel, and was a finalist in the National book Award of 1961 (Catch-22 was also shortlisted). Despite being championed by writers as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut, Dorothy Parker, William Styron and Tennessee William and receiving almost universal critical acclaim for his work, none of his novels sold well and all went out of print after he died in 1992. However in recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in his work: in the UK Nick Hornby made one of the suicidal characters in his 2005 novel A Long Way Down carry a copy of Revolutionary Road so that it could be discovered on his corpse.

Sam Mendes made his name as a stage director with award-winning productions in both the UK and the USA. In 1999 as a novice film maker he directed American Beauty which won five Oscars, including Best Director and Best Film. He followed this with Road to Perdition (2002) which included Paul Newman’s final screen appearance in a major role. It has just been announced that Mendes will direct the as-yet-untitled next Bond film, which is due for release in 2011.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon)

France 2007 (112 minutes)
Director: Julian Schnabel
Starring: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigneur, Marie-Josee Croze, Anne Cosigny and Max von Sydow

Awards and Nominations

* Nominated for four Oscars including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ronald Harwood)
* Won BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay
* Won Best Director (Julian Schnabel) at the Cannes Film Festival and nominated for the Palme d’Or
* A further 39 nominations and 32 nominations

In 1995 Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), the 43-year-old editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, suffered a massive stroke that left him with a condition called locked-in syndrome. He was paralysed apart from some movement in his head and eyes, and his sole method of communication was by blinking his left eye. With the help of transcribers who repeated the alphabet to him until he blinked at the selected letter, over a period of 10 months Bauby dictated a memoir of his life - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Bauby eventually completed his book and it was published to critical acclaim; shortly after its publication Bauby died of pneumonia.

The film was originally to be made in English with Schnabel as director working from Ronald Harwood’s screenplay and with Johnny Depp as Bauby. Depp withdrew from the film because of scheduling conflicts with other projects and Pathé took over as producer. According to Ronald Harwood Pathé wanted to make the movie in both English and French and that this is why bi-lingual actors were cast although everyone secretly knew that two versions would be impossibly expensive and that Schnabel had decided that it should be made in French – even going so far as to learn French in order to make the film.

Julian Schnabel made his name as an artist and after participating as the Venice Biennale in 1980 subsequently became a major figure in the Neo-expressionism movement before moving into film making. He insists that he is essentially a painter, although now he is better known for his films:

“Painting is like breathing to me. It’s what I do all the time. Every day I make art, whether it is painting, writing or making a movie.”

Both of Schnabel’s earlier films were concerned with artists: Basquiat (1996) is a biopic of the painter Jean-Michael Basquiat and Before Night Falls (2000) is based on the autobiographical novel by Reinaldo Arenas. Schnabel has subsequently directed a documentary film of a live concert by Lou Reed in New York as part of his Berlin tour, which Schnabel also designed.

Burn After Reading

This is one of the films I've been most looking forward to seeing this year. I bought a copy in the HMV sale but have not had a chance to watch it yet.

Over the holiday I caught up with In Bruges (brilliant), David Tennant's final performance inDoctor Who (alas) as well as his RSC Hamlet (to be able to purchase tickets for the first night was brilliant and for the RSC to open it on Susan's birthday was even better). After being snowed in this weekend we caught up with Goodnight and Good Luck, an excellent story about the fight against McCarthy with George Clooney, as star, director and co-writer.

Which brings me back to the notes for this week's film:

Burn After Reading

USA 2008 (96 minutes)
Director: Ethan Coen and Joel Coen
Starring: George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich and Tilda Swinton

Awards and Nominations
Nominated for two Golden Globes (Best Picture and Frances McDormand as Best Actress)
A further 10 nominations including BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay

When Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is fired from the CIA he begins to write his memoirs. Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton) wants a divorce and at her lawyer’s request copies many of Osborne’s personal files on to a CD which Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) find at a local gym. Litzke is planning cosmetic surgery and decides to blackmail Osborne Cox in order to finance it. Meanwhile Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) is having affairs with both Katie Cox and Linda Litzke.

The summary of the plot reads like a classic farce, but it leads to mayhem on a huge scale that starts with a broken nose and ends finally with execution by CIA gunmen. The Coens described the film as “our version of a Tony Scott/Jason Bourne movie” and they wrote the screenplay while working on their adaptation of No Country for Old Men (2007). The brothers created characters with George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt and John Malkovich in mind, and the script derived from their desire to involve the actors “in a fun story”. Tilda Swinton was the only main character who did not have a part written specifically for her, and the Coens struggled to develop a common filming schedule for their A-list cast.

The Coens identified idiocy as a major them of the film and described Clooney and Pitt’s characters as “duelling idiots”. Clooney had worked with the Coens twice before and acknowledged that he usually played a fool in their movies:

“I’ve done three films for them and they call it my trilogy of idiots”.

The Coens told Pitt that they had written his role specifically for him and he did not know whether to fell flattered or insulted; he told them that he did not know how to play the part as the character was such an idiot:

“There was a long pause and then Joel goes...”You’ll be fine.””

In a career of nearly 25 years the Coens have produced a series of brilliant films that have been successful with both festival and multiplex audiences. In recent years they have reached new heights of success: No Country for Old Men won four Oscars, including Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film, and their most recent film A Serious Man (2009) opened to rave reviews at the London Film Festival.

The Secret Life of Bees

These are the notes for our last screening before the Christmas break:

The Secret Life of Bees

USA 2008 (110 minutes)
Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood
Starring: Dakota Fanning, Queen Latifah, Paul Bettany and Jennifer Hudson

Awards and Nominations
10 wins and 14 nominations

In South Carolina in the early 1960s Lily Owens (Dakota Fanning) is haunted by the memory of her late mother. In order to escape from her lonely life and cruel father Lily flees with Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson), her caregiver, to a South Carolina town which holds the secret to her mother’s past, and while she is there she meets the intelligent and independent Boatwright sisters (Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys and Sophie Okonedo) who show her their Black Madonna and tell her about her mother.

The film is based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Sue Monk Kidd. Kidd took three and a half years to write her novel and explained its origins in an interview:

“I grew up surrounded by black women. I fell they are like hidden royalty dwelling among us, and we need to rupture our old assumptions and develop the willingness to see them as they are....

As a girl I lived in a country house where at least 50,000 bees hived within the walls of one of our shut-off rooms. When I went in there, I could hear hummy-honey leaking through the wall and puddling on the floor. That image stayed with me for years before I decided to write it. And then when I finally did begin, I was told that it might sell as a short story but not as a novel. I sold the short story but... it wouldn’t let me go. Four years later I had to go back and write the novel.”

Bythewood is one of the very few African-American female directors to have a film distributed by Hollywood. She made her name by directing Disappearing Acts (2000) and both writing and directing Love & Basketball (2000), with Spike Lee as producer which won her the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. For The Secret Life of Bees her executive producers were Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith.