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.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
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."
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."
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