Night of the Demon

Once upon a time the BBC used to entertain us with classic ghost stories at Christmas; of these the best was Jonathan Miller's filmed version of Oh Whistle and I'll Come, based on the classic story by M R James.

As a result of this I read a brilliant selection of James's stories with an introduction by Nigel Kneale and have regularly re-read them - especially late at night during the winter.

Until recently I had not realised that Night of the Demon was based on The Casting of the Runes, and after reading a brilliant blogpost by Anne Billson on films that had scared her I managed to track down a copy on DVD.

Last week I watched it and it was superb: glorious black and white and filmed in the late 1950s, and with more suspense and sudden shocks than many current Hollywood films with budgets of an order of magnitude larger.

It also provided one of the samples for Kate Bush on her Hounds of Love Album, one of my all-time favourite recordings.

Here's a link to the US trailer where it was released as The Curse of the Demon:

Jane Eyre

These are my notes for this week's screening:

Jane Eyre

UK 2011                      121 minutes

Director:                      Cary Fukunaga

Starring:                        Mia Wasilowska, Michael Fassbinder, Judi Dench, Jamie Bell and Sally Hopkins

 Nominations and Awards

• One nomination for Best Actress (Mia Wasilowska) in the British Independent Film Awards

“Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is among the greatest of gothic novels, a page turner of such startling power, it leaves its pale latter-day imitators like Twilight flopping for air like a stranded fish.  To be sure, the dark hero of the story, Rochester, is not a vampire, but that's only a technicality. The tension in the genre is often generated by a virginal girl's attraction to a dangerous man. The more pitiful and helpless the heroine the better, but she must also be proud and virtuous, brave and idealistic. Her attraction to the ominous hero must be based on pity, not fear; he must deserve her idealism.  This atmospheric new Jane Eyre, the latest of many adaptations, understands those qualities, and also the very architecture and landscape that embody the gothic notion.”

Roger Ebert

Jane Eyre (Mia Wasilowska) arrives at the home of St John Rivers (Jamie Bell) after fleeing from Thornfield Hall, the home of Edward Rochester (Michael Fassbinder) who had engaged her as governess his young “ward” Adele and then proposed marriage on false pretences.  St John Rivers proposes marriage and a future as a Christian missionary, but subsequent events allow Jane to return to Thornfield and her true love.

Charlotte Bronte’s novel has been filmed many times with the 1944 version (from a script by Aldous Huxley) starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine in the lead roles is the best known.  The book has also inspired many other writers including Daphne du Maurier whose novel Rebecca (also filmed with Joan Fontaine) uses the same character types that Roger Ebert has notes in the quotation above.   Jean Rhys has an even closer connection with Charlotte Bronte as her novel Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Edward Rochester’s marriage to his first wife in the Caribbean.  The novel was also the inspiration for The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde, which involved a cunning plot by international villains using a prose portal to break into the novel and kidnap Jane Eyre and hold her to ransom....   

                                                                                                      

The screenplay for this new version is by the playwright and screenwriter Moira Buffini, who also wrote the screenplay for Tamara Drewe based on the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds.  Cary Fukunaga made his name with the American/Mexican film Sin Nombre (2009) for which he won the best director award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. 

Here's the trailer:

The Ghost

Here are my notes for our screening this week: 

The Ghost

UK 2010                      128 minutes

Director:                      Roman Polanski

Starring:                        Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall

Nominations and Awards

• Won Silver Bear (Best Director) at the Berlin Film Festival
• Won Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Ewan McGregor), Best Screenplay (Roman Polanski and Robert Harris), Production Design and Music at the European Film Awards
• A further 11 wins and 21 nominations

“The Ghost is Roman Polanski's best film since Tess 30 years ago, and as immaculately crafted a thriller as we're likely to see this year. It may not be in the very first rank of his pictures, of which Chinatown remains the peak. But in every respect it's a characteristic work, with echoes of those stories of intruders breaking into troubled relationships (Knife in the Water, Cul-de-sac), savvy innocents getting out of their depth (Chinatown), people losing touch with their own identities (Repulsion, The Tenant), and the operation of a malevolent fate in a world where, like Oliver Twist, the trusting hero of Polanski's last film, you need to be suspicious of the kindness of strangers.”

Philip French

Ewan McGregor plays an anonymous ghost writer hired to work on the dull memoirs of a former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) in order to justify a $10 million advance.  When he arrives in New England to begin work with Lang he discovers that his predecessor had died in mysterious circumstances, and then it seems that history might be about to repeat itself as he begins to discover alarming clues about Lang’s past in his predecessor’s notes.

 The film is based on the best-selling novel by Robert Harris, who also worked with Polanski on the screenplay which skilfully distils the complexities of the plot into a fast paced thriller.  In his novel Harris quotes Evelyn Waugh’s epigraph from Brideshead Revisited (“I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they”) but it is clear that the Langs are inspired by a recent British Prime Minister and his wife.  Pierce Brosnan gives a superb performance as Lang, and although he displays many of Blair’s characteristics he makes him a distinct character (quite unlike Michael Sheen’s uncanny impersonation of Blair in The Queen).  In a similar vein Olivia Williams turns Ruth Lang, despite her initial superficial resemblance to Cherie Blair, into a far more complex character.

Roman Polanski achieved international success with Knife in the Water (1962) and subsequently has lived and worked in the UK, the USA and most recently in Europe. In the USA his most successful film was Chinatown (1974) which received 11 Oscar nominations.  After leaving the USA in 1978 to avoid arrest he has lived and worked in Europe where his films have included Tess (1979), Death and the Maiden (1994) and The Pianist (2001), which won both the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Director. 

Following the success of The Ghost, which he shot in Germany with the bleak desolation of the North German coast standing in for Martha’s Vineyard, Polanski has recently directed Carnage, from the play God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, which was set in New York but which he filmed in studios in Paris.

Here's the trailer:

Never Let Me Go

Here are my notes for this week's film:

Never Let Me Go

UK 2010                      103 minutes

Director:                      Mark Romanek

Starring:                        Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Charlotte Rampling and Sally Hawkins

Nominations and Awards

• Won Best Actress Award (Carey Mulligan) at the British Independent Film Awards
• Won Best Actor Award (Andrew Garfield) at the Evening Standard British Film Awards
• A further three wins and 20 nominations.

“This is a good movie, from a masterful novel...  What is happening is implied not spelled out.  We are required to observe.  Even the events themselves are amenable to different interpretations.  The characters may not know what they are revealing about themselves.  They certainly don’t know the whole truth of their existence.  We do, because we are free human beings.  It is sometimes not easy to extend such stature to those we value because they support our comfort.”

Roger Ebert

Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield) are all pupils at a boarding school who become entangled in a love triangle.  As their relationship develops they gradually learn why they are at the school and what their fate will be.   

The film is based on the 2005 novel by Kazou Ishiguro who won the Booker Prize in 1989 for The Remains of the Day (memorably filmed by James Ivory with brilliant performances by Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins in the lead roles).  The screenplay for Never Let Me Go was written by Alex Garland, a friend of Ishiguro who had purchased the film rights before the novel was published.  Garland is an established novelist in his own right (his novels include The Beach and The Tesseract) as well as a screenwriter whose work includes the scripts for 28 Days Later (2002) and Sunshine (2007) both directed by Danny Boyle, who had previously directed a film based on The Beach (2000).

Carey Mulligan was cast in the key role of Kathy on the advice of one of the producers who had just seen her performance in An Education (2009) and Keira Knightley agreed to join the cast after a request from Carey Mulligan (they had both appeared in the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice where Knightley played Elizabeth Bennet and Mulligan, in her first film role, played Kitty Bennet. 

Mark Romanek began his career as a director of music videos where he worked with musicians of the calibre of k d lang, David Bowie, Madonna, Michel Jackson and Johnny Cash.  He made his name with the psychological thriller One Hour Photo (2002) for which he also wrote the screenplay, and Never Let Me Go appeared in many critics’ lists of the best films of 2010. 

Here's the trailer:

Made in Dagenham

Another week and another screening.  Here are my notes:

Made in Dagenham

UK 2010                      113 minutes

Director:                      Nigel Cole

Starring:                        Sally Hawkins, Rosamund Pike, Bob Hoskins, Miranda Richardson and Geraldine James

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for 4 BAFTAs including Outstanding British Film and Best Supporting Actress (Miranda Richardson)
• Another 8 nominations including nominations for Best Actress (Sally Hawkins), Best Supporting Actress (Rosamund Pike) and Best Supporting Actor (Bob Hoskins) at the British Independent Film Awards

“The unexpected thing about Made in Dagenham is how entertaining it is. That's largely due to director Nigel Cole's choice of Sally Hawkins for his lead. In Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky (2009) and again here, she shows an effortless lightness of being. If she has a limitation, it may be that she's constitutionally ill-adapted for playing a bad person”

Roger Ebert

Rita O’Grady (Sally Hawkins) unwillingly becomes shop steward at Ford’s Dagenham plant and then leads a strike of the 187 women sewing machinists, when they walk out against sexual discrimination and claim equal pay. The strike is successful and Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson), as Secretary of State for Labour in Harold Wilson’s government uses it to promote what was to become the 1970 Equal Pay Act.

The inspiration for the film was a radio programme which reunited personnel from both sides of the strike many years later.  Steven Wooley as producer heard the programme and realised its potential as a subject for a film: the key historical events of the story are true, some individual elements of the original characters reappear in some of the strikers, while other characters are entirely fictional.

In the central role of Rita Sally Hawkins is superb: she made her name in a series of films with Mike Leigh, but the tone of this film, despite the potentially grim nature of the subject, is closer to Calendar Girls (also directed by Nigel Cole).  Philip French also suggests a comparison with a naughty Carry On film rather than to Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses, another film about a strike by women, this time by Latino office cleaners in Los Angeles.  

However the film is far more than a vehicle for Sally Hawkins: the cast includes established actresses like Geraldine James and Miranda Richardson as well as rising stars like Andrea Riseborough (Brighton Rock and Never Let Me Go) and Rosamund Pike (Pride and Prejudice and An Education).  Bob Hoskins earned good reviews for his role as a minor union official who is both mentor and friend to Rita and there is a superb cameo from John Sessions as a pipe-smoking Harold Wilson.

Despite the good reviews and numerous nominations for awards, Made in Dagenham had the misfortune to be released in the same year as The King’s Speech which in total won more than 60 major awards.

Here's the trailer:

The King's Speech

We start our new season with a somewhat inevitible choice next week.  These are my notes:

The King’s Speech

UK 2010                      119 minutes

Director:                      Tom Hooper

Screenplay:                   David Seidler

Starring:                        Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter

Nominations and Awards

• Won four Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Actor and Original Screenplay) plus eight nominations (including Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Cinematography).
• Won seven BAFTAs (including Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Music) plus seven further nominations.
• A further 56 wins and 75 nominations

“Although the film involves a man overcoming a serious disability, it is neither triumphalist nor sentimental.  Its themes are courage (where it comes from, how it is used), responsibility, and the necessity to place duty above personal pleasure or contentment – the subjects, in fact, of such enduringly popular movies as Casablanca and High Noon.  In this sense, The King's Speech is an altogether more significant and ambitious work than Stephen Frears's admirable The Queen of 2006 and far transcends any political arguments about royalty and republicanism.”

Philip French

In the early1930s the Duke of York (Colin Firth), the younger son of George V (Michael Gambon), was struggling to overcome a speech impediment with help from Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian speech therapist.  George V died in 1936, and his death was followed by one of those incidents when, in Alan Bennett’s memorable phrase “history rattled over the points”: Edward VIII (Guy Pearce) abdicated in order to marry the divorced Wallis Simpson (Eve Best) and the Duke of York, who had never even seen any state papers was crowned King just as Fascism was on the rise across Europe and Churchill was beginning to warn of the dangers of German rearmament.  Logue continued to work with George V and with his help the King was able to face the challenges of both his Coronation and the public speeches his position demanded of him, including a live broadcast in September 1939 on the outbreak of war.

David Seidler had lived in London during the Second World War and had subsequently developed a stammer from the stress that he had endured.  He had been inspired by the example of George VI’s struggles with his speech impediment and, having moved to the US where he became a scriptwriter in Hollywood, he decided to write about the King.  Lionel Logue’s son committed to give him access to his father’s notes, but only if the Queen Mother consented: she gave her permission, but asked him not to do so in her lifetime.  Seidler subsequently discovered that Logue had treated one of his own uncles, and from him learnt about the techniques that Logue used in his treatment.  From this original source material Seidler produced an initial screenplay that he subsequently turned into a play script, and it was after attending a reading of this that Tom Hooper’s mother called him with a simple message: “I’ve found your next project”.

Although depicting the key historical events of the period, the film makes some changes to enhance the dramatic nature of the story: the Duke of York started working with Logue ten years before the Abdication and the improvement in his speech was noticeable within months rather than years; during the Abdication Crisis Churchill had been a staunch supporter of Edward VIII; and far from distancing themselves from Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement George VI and Chamberlain appeared together on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, an act of endorsement by the King described as “the biggest constitutional blunder that has been made by any sovereign this century”.

The film received rave reviews for its acting, screenplay and direction. Colin Firth received his first Oscar and both Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter received Oscar nominations for their supporting roles.  David Seidler won his first Oscar in his mid-70s, and after a long and successful career as a director on TV and having only directed one other feature film Tom Hooper won Oscars for both Best Director and Best Film.

Here's the trailer:

Kevin Spacey in Richard III

We bought our tickets the day booking opened but last Saturday was the earliest we could get tickets to see Spacey in Richard III.

Having seen him in both Speed the Plow (excellent) and Inherit the Wind (outstanding) and then having seen the reviews we knew we were in for a treat - and we were not disappointed.

I've never studied the play, although I've seen it twice before (with Anthony Sher and Ian McKellan in case you're interested) and apart from the outstanding performances by both actors and very interesting productions my main recollection is a complex plot governed by by a mass of intertwined dynastic relationships.

The Old Vic chose the "information light" route for the programme: as a standalone production there was more focus on the psychology of tyranny rather than the history of the War of the Roses, and as I watched it I realised that this silo approach worked and kept me focussed on the play.  The only element which I found slightly disconcerting was the Anglo American cast: the colour blind casting worked well - as it always does - but to me, with the sole and honourable exception of Spacey who gave a towering performance, the American cast members seemed to struggle with the text.

Spacey won the acting honours, but I'd also award prizes to Gemma Jones (as a witch-like Queen Margaret who haunted many of the scenes) and Haydn Gwynne (as the Duchess of York) who was more than capable to standing up to Spacey's elemental force.

As we drove home from the Old Vic we heard the sound of many police sirens, and as country bumpkins we thought this was standard for a Staurday night in Londeon; it was only when we checked the headlines on Sunday morning that we realised that there had been riots.  The play includes scenes where the citizens of London are persuaded to call for the Duke of Gloucester to assume the crown as Richard III; on Saturday evening their descendants clearly had other priorities.

Doctor Who About Nothing

We booked our tickets the day after we saw David Tennant and Katherine Tate announcing their production of Much Ado About Nothing on TV, but could only manage to book tickets for a Friday: the journey to London was difficult and very long, but it was worth it for the play.

Josie Rourke had set the action in Gibraltar in the 1980s, which allowed for some brillaint pastiches of typical music for the period.  The set itself was a circle surrounded by louvred doors and windows and with large pillars set across the circle.  This allowed the productionto keep up a fast pace and - more importantly - allowed the stage to revolve during ceertain scenes so that the shifting view that the audience received gave an almost cimematic fluidity to the action.

The gulling scene, complete with a team of painters and decorators, built to a wonderful slapstick crescendo with a paint-spattered Tennant reducing Tate to a fit of the giggles.  The chemistry between them that had been so evident in Doctor Who transferred unaltered to the stage, and just like Miichael Billington in his review on The Guardian, I'd love to see them work together again in something like Private Lives.

Avatar

We had our last screening after our AGM earlier this month.  Here are my notes:

Avatar


USA 2009 161 minutes

Director: James Cameron

Starring: Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang and Zoe Saldana

Nominations and Awards

• Won three Oscars (Art Direction, Special Effects and Cinematography)

• A further 41 wins an 63 nominations

“Avatar is not simply a sensational entertainment, although it is that. It’s a technological breakthrough. It has a flat-out Green and anti-war message. It is predestined to launch a cult. It contains such visual detailing that it would reward repeat viewings... It is an Event, one of those films you must see to keep up with the conversation.”

Roger Ebert

When his brother is killed, paraplegic Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) decides to take his place in a mission on the distant world of Pandora where he learns of to drive off the native humanoid Na'vi in order to mine for the precious material scattered throughout their rich woodland. Sully infiltrates the Na'vi people with the use of an "avatar" identity where he bond with the native tribe and falls in love with the beautiful alien Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). When Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) launches his plan to exterminate the Na'vi Sully has to take a stand and fight back in an epic battle for the fate of Pandora.

James Cameron began development of Avatar in 1994 and has planned to start filming after the completion of Titanic in 1997 but the necessary technology was not available for him to achieve his vision. He finally started developing is screenplay in 2006 and the film was released in December 2009. The official budget was $237 million, but other estimated have placed this as high as $310 million, with a further $150 million for promotion.

Avatar is the most expensive film made to date: Cameron deliberately cast relatively unknown actors in leading roles to reduce costs but needed a massive budget for special effects as he had developed new camera systems both to film in 3D and to allow motion-capture film making. The lead company for visual effects was Weta Digital in New Zealand who had been responsible for the special effects in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, but in order to complete the film on schedule Cameron also had to involve a number of other special effects companies, including George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic. Both Jackson and Lucas visited the set of Avatar to watch Cameron at work with his new technology.

The story includes a familiar mix of myths and archetypes and in essence transposes the themes of the traditional Western, especially those like A Man Called Horse and Dances with Wolves where the white hero takes the side of the locals against the supposedly civilised invaders, into outer space. In Aliens Cameron’s heroes were Marines fighting a war against vicious extra-terrestrials, but in Avatar, with deliberate echoes of both Iraq and Afghanistan, the Marines are the enemy and the aliens are the good guys.

Following the worldwide success of Avatar Cameron has signed with 20th Century Fox to produce two sequels.

Some Thoughts on Doctor Who and Gardeners' World

I have been  a lifelong fan of Doctor Who - I am old enough to have vague memories of the first episode - although it is only more recently that I have watched Gardeners' World with any degree of regularity as it is my wife who is the gardener in our relationship.

Fortunately we are both Doctor Who fans, although in her case I think it was more David Tennant as an actor rather than the character.  Hence there was some concern on her part when Tennant departed and Matt Smith took over the TARDIS.  This more or less coincided with the unexpected handover of the Gardeners' World baton from Monty Don to Toby Buckland where a quick and strictly non-scinetific poll, ie chats with a view close freinds over dinner, revealed an immediate loss of direction of the programme and lack of interest in the charisma free presenter.  Thus it was not entirely unexpected when Gardeners' World returned with Monty Don once more in charge. 

Could the same thing happen with Doctor Who?  I hope not: RTD is an impossible act to follow, and the way I look at it is that if we had not had the four series plus specials with RTD in charge then we would welcome the new incarnation with open arms.  It's not wrong: it's just gone off in another direction, just like Doctor Who has done throughout its history.

I love the steam-punk look of the series and from all the clips I've seeen so far the next story, from a script by Neil Gaiman, should be asbolutely magificent.

Any if you want advice on celery, then talk to the fifth Doctor

The Prophecies of Merlin

I've always enjoyed stories based on the legend of King Arthur (John Boorman’s film Excalibur was particularly good) and I've recently been watching the complete series of Merlin, the BBC’s brilliant re-imagining of the early years of Arthur, on DVD.


It’s a clever scenario, and it owes much to the success of other fantasy epics like the Harry Potter series and The Lord of the Rings, but it’s only in the past week that its contemporary relevance has occurred to me. One of the central stories across the episodes in the growing relationship of Arthur and Guinevere (or Gwen as she’s call here) in the face of their different positions in society: he’s a prince and she’s a commoner (in this case a serving maid to the Lady Morgana). Sound familiar?

It's easy to update the character of Merlin as a contemporary spin doctor/PR man, carefully guarding the Prince’s image, but does Buckingham Palace have cellars deep enough to conceal a dragon?

Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis

Here are my notes for our final screening of the current season:

Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis


France 2008 105 minutes

Director: Dany Boon

Starring: Dany Boon, Karl Merad and Zoe Felix

Nominations and Awards

• Nomination for Cesar for Best Original Screenplay

• Nomination for Best Film (European Film Awards)


Philippe Abrams (Karl Merad), a postal worker in southern France is banished to a town near Dunkirk for two years after falsely claiming to be disabled in order to secure a Mediterranean posting. To his surprise Philippe finds the town charming, but his wife refuses to join him. He decides to tell her what she wants to believe, that life in Northern France is wretched, but then she decides to join him in order to relieve his gloom...


The film broke nearly every box office record in France. By February 2010 more than 20.5 million had seen the film, thereby breaking a record that had stood since 1966. The film was also successful internationally and has spawned plans for a number of international remakes. In Italy Bienvenuti al Sud was released in 2010, with a plot concerning the relocation of a postal service manager from near Milan in northern Italy being relocated to Castellabate a small town near Naples in the south and with Dany Boon appearing in a cameo role.

There has also been discussion about an inevitable US remake, provisionally titled Welcome to the Sticks. There has been no firm announcement about casting or the plot, although there have been hints that the story may revolve around a multinational company.

The Sound of Music

We're screening the singalong version...

Here are my notes:

The Sound of Music


USA 1965 174 minutes

Director: Robert Wise

Starring: Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Eleanor Parker, Richard Haydn and Peggy Wood

Nominations and Awards

• Won five Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture

• A further 10 wins and 10 nominations


“The movie was the second collaboration of producer-director Robert Wise and screenwriter Ernest Lehman – they had killed West Side Story a few years earlier, which was a more serious crime than making The Sound of Music because the latter had always been brain-dead.”

David Thomson

Maria (Julie Andrews), a young novice leaves an Austrian convent to become a governess to the children of Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer), a Naval officer widower.

The film is based on the 1959 stage musical Rodgers and Hammerstein, which itself derived from two West German films: The Trapp Family and The Trapp Family in America. Originally the plan had been for a stage play about the Trapp family which included songs from their repertoire, but this quickly evolved into a full blown musical with all new songs which ran for more than three years on Broadway and which has enjoyed regular revivals since then. The film excluded several songs from the original stage show and included several new songs which have been retained in subsequent stage revivals.

The story of the musical makes significant changes to the real story: Maria Von Trapp was a tutor to just one of the children rather than a governess to the whole family; they lived in Austria for several years after their marriage and had two further children before going into exile; and when the family did go into exile it was by train to Italy, as Captain Von Trapp had Italian citizenship through being born in territory held by Italy after the First World War (and from a geographical perspective Switzerland does not share a mountainous border with Salzburg).

Robert Wise started his career an editor on Citizen Kane (1941) and then worked as assistant director on Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) before directing The Curse of the Cat People (1944) for Val Lewton. He directed several more horror films before he turned to noir with the thriller Born To Kill (1947) and his subsequent films encompassed science fiction (The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)), board room drama (Executive Suite (1954)) and historical epic (Helen of Troy (1956)) before he won his first Oscar for Best Director with West Side Story (1961). He preceded The Sound of Music with the terrifying horror film The Haunting (1963) and followed it with The Sand Pebbles (1966), which secured him an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. He carried on working up to the late 1970s where he directed the first Star Trek film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). He died in 2005.

Despite his ability to work in and master so many genres Martin Scorsese has argued that his choice of subject matter and approach still functioned to identify him as an artist and not merely an artisan who allowed a story that a studio assigned to dictate his style.

Me and Orson Welles

These are the notes for our screening this Sunday:

Me and Orson Welles


UK 2008 114 minutes

Director: Richard Linklater

Starring: Ben Chaplin, Christian McKay, Clair Danes, Eddie Marsan, Kelly Reilly, Zac Efron, Zoe Kazan

Nominations and Awards

• BAFTA Nomination for Best Supporting Actor (Christian McKay)

• A further three wins and nine nominations

“Me and Orson Welles is not only entertaining but an invaluable companion to the life and career of the Great Man.”

Roger Ebert

In 1937 Richard Samuels (Zac Efron) on a visit to New York meets Orson Welles (Christian McKay) who hires him to play the part of Lucius in a modern dress version of Julius Caesar that he is directing at the Mercury Theatre.

The film is based on real events, although its story comes from a novel by Robert Kaplow, who had seen a photograph of Orson Welles and a young man and wondered what the young man was thinking. The majority of the characters portrayed in the film are real people and it goes to great lengths to recreate the first night of what was for its time a radical version of Shakespeare’s play: the actors wear dark green uniforms and Sam Browne belts and salute with raised arms - all deliberately chosen to echo contemporary events in Mussolini’s Italy.

The film received many positive reviews with many critics selecting Christian McKay for his performance as Welles for particular mention. McKay had not previously appeared in a leading role on screen but had played Welles in a one-man show on stage in both the UK and USA. In his review Philip French commented:

“...at the end the show belongs to Christian McKay, the fourth and best actor to play Welles on screen. When we first see him the resemblance is merely passing, but after five minutes we think we're in the presence of the arrogant, irresistible young Orson himself, such is the accuracy of the body language, the facial expressions and above all that resonant voice, purring and booming. When after the first night curtain he asks, "How the hell do I top this?", the complexity of his future life flashes before us.”

Despite its New York setting Richard Linklater shot most of the film in the UK, both at Pinewood Studios and a number of locations including the Isle of Man where the Gaiety Theatre in Douglas was used for the inside of the Mercury Theatre.

Richard Linklater made his name with a series of independent films like Slacker, Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise that have non-formulaic narratives and seemingly random occurrences, which some critics have hailed as alternatives to contemporary blockbusters. His films also concentrate on philosophical talk rather than physical action, thus linking him with traditional European art house cinema. His next film will be Bernie, a black comedy based on the true story of the murder of a rich Texan widow in the 1990s.

Tamara Drewe

For once I'm actually ahead of myself.  We'll be screening Tamara Drewe on Thursday and I finished my notes last week.

Tamara Drewe


UK 2010 114 minutes

Director: Stephen Frears

Starring: Gemma Arterton, Dominic Cooper, Luke Evans, Roger Allam and Tamsin Greig

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for two awards

“Like the filthiest possible feature-length episode of The Archers, and with a tiny conceptual dash of Straw Dogs, Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel series Tamara Drewe has been converted into a fantastically mad and undeniably entertaining bucolic romp...”

Peter Bradshaw

Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton), a successful newspaper columnist, returns to the picturesque Dorset village of Ewedown where she grew up with plans to write a chick-lit bestseller. Her ex-boyfriend Andy (Luke Evans) has not moved away and realises that he is still in love with her, but Tamara begins a passionate relationship with Ben Sergeant (Dominic Cooper), a narcissistic rock star. The village also includes a writers’ retreat run by crime writer and serial adulterer Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam) who also takes a fancy to Tamara. Two young village girls, bored with their empty lives, sneak into Tamara’s house and use her computer to send an identical Valentine message to all three men.

The film is based on a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds which appeared first as a weekly strip in The Guardian before being published as a book. If the story sounds familiar it is because Simmonds has reworked Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd in a contemporary rural setting and has used the plot both to satirise the pretensions of literary life, a recurrent theme in her work, as well as to expose the crisis in the modern countryside, where people commit deplorable acts out of resentment and sheer boredom.

Stephen Frears (and screenplay writer Moira Buffini) have turned the story into another “State of the Nation” film that have featured regularly in Frears’ long career. Frears has made twenty feature films as diverse as My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity and The Queen, but as Philip French has noted he has shown an interest in certain recurrent themes and situations, including the taking of moral decisions in precarious situations, the secret manipulation of other people’s lives and the often unintended consequences of everyday actions.

Gemma Arterton’s first film appearance was as the Head Girl in St Trinians and her first role of significance was the Bond girl Strawberry Fields in A Quantum of Solace. She subsequently played Tess in a TV adaptation of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Immediately before Tamara Drewe she appeared in the blockbusters Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia, and she recently received rave reviews for her performance on stage in Ibsen’s The Master Builder at the Almeida.

Here's the trailer:

Moon

These are my notes for our next film:

Moon


UK 2009 106 minutes

Director: Duncan Jones

Starring: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Benedict Wong, Matt Berry and Dominique McElligott

Nominations and Awards

• Won Carl Foreman Award for special achievement in first feature film

• Nominated for BAFTA (Best British Film)

• A further 17 wins and 14 nominations

“Moon is a superior example of that threatened genre, hard science-fiction, which is often about the interface between humans and alien intelligence of one kind or another, including digital... The movie is really all about ideas. It only seems to be about emotions. How real are our emotions, anyway? How real are we? Someday I will die. This laptop I’m using is patient and can wait.”

Roger Ebert

Towards the end of a solitary three year stint mining helium-3 on the moon Sam Bell (Rockwell) experiences a personal crisis. His sole companion is a robot called GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) but just before his scheduled return he has a vision of a dark-haired young woman inside the base and then sees another figure outside on the surface of the moon.

The script is an original story co-written by director Duncan Jones. The film is in the tradition of the great science fiction films of the 1960s and 1970s that Jones watched as he was growing up and the film pays obvious tribute to such classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Silent Running (1972), Solaris (1972 and Alien (1979). In an interview Jones explained that the choice of the moon as a location for his story was deliberate:

"for me, the Moon has this weird mythic nature to it... There is still a mystery to it. As a location, it bridges the gap between science-fiction and science fact. We (humankind) have been there. It is something so close and so plausible and yet at the same time, we really don't know that much about it."


Duncan Jones is the son of David Bowie and his first wife. He made a deliberate choice to avoid the music industry and went to film school only after graduating from university with a degree in philosophy. He directed a number of commercials, including one for a controversial 2006 campaign for French Connection before making Moon as his first feature. The film had originally been intended for a straight to video release before its critical success at the 2009 Sundance Festival led to its commercial release across the US and in the UK. Following this success Duncan Jones has now directed Source Code, a big budget science fiction thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal scheduled for release in April 2011, and has announced plans to make another science fiction film called Mute to be set in the same science fiction universe as Moon in which Sam Bell will make a cameo appearance.

My Sister's Keeper

These are my notes for our most recent screening.  I struggled to find postive news about the film and was not looking forward to it, but in the event it was not as bad as I thought it would be.  I've not read the book, but apparently the plot is quite differeent - to the extent of killing of the younger sister rather than letting the older one die....


My Sister’s Keeper


USA 2009 106 minutes

Director: Nick Cassavetes

Starring: Abigail Bresslin, Sofia Vassilieva, Alec Baldwin, Cameron Diaz and Emily Deschanel

Nominations and Awards

• One win and four nominations

Anna Fitzgerald (Abigail Bresslin) was conceived to be a genetic match for her sister Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) who is suffering from leukaemia. When Kate suffers from renal failure Anna sues her parents for legal emancipation in order to prevent them forcing her to donate a kidney. Her overprotective mother Anna (Cameron Diaz), who has given up a successful career as a lawyer to look after her sick daughter, is horrified when the case comes to trial in court but finally learns the reason why Anna has acted in this way.

The film is based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Jodi Picoult which has the privilege of being among the top ten of the American Library Association’s list of the most challenged books of 2009 (the list also includes such classics as To Kill A Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye and The Color Purple).

Director Nick Cassavetes (who also co-wrote the script) is the son of film director John Cassavetes. He started his career in films as an actor before directing such films as John Q, Alpha Dog, She’s So Lovely, Unhook the Stars and The Notebook.

Home

These are my notes from our last screening.  On balance I enjoyed the film: it was typically French, and any attempt at a US remake would be disastrous.

Home


Switzerland 2009 98 minutes

Director: Ursula Meier

Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Adelaide Leroux and Jacques Gamblin

Nominations and Awards

• Swiss submission for Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film

• Six wins and five nominations


“It's a nightmare metaphor for the horrors of the modern world, but will seem like everyday reality to anyone living around Heathrow or any motorway.”

Philip French

Marthe (Isabelle Huppert) and Michael (Olivier Gourmet) are living a happy, semi-bohemian life with their three children in a remote decrepit house beside an unfinished motorway. Suddenly the motorway is opened and the family becomes isolated from school, workplace and even the shops: Marthe goes to pieces while Michel purchases insulating material to soundproof the house by blocking up all the windows.

Ursula Meier was born in eastern France close to the Swiss border and studied at the Belgium Institute of Visual Arts. After making her name with a number of prize-winning short films she directed Strong Shoulders (2003) as her first full length feature film. This film was selected for the series New Directors/New Films at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2003, with Home receiving its first US screening at the same event in 2009. The film was the official Swiss entry for the foreign language film in the 2009 Academy Awards, but it did not even make the shortlist: the Oscar went to Departures, a Japanese film about an apprentice undertaker.

She wrote the script of Home for Isabelle Huppert before she had even been cast and then searched across Europe for a suitable location before finding an unfinished motorway in Bulgaria and building a house next to it.

Save Our Libraries

I posted this in response to a question about which book changed your life, but it morphed into a statement in support of local libraries and as I used my local library to borrow film books I thought I'd re-post it here:


"I suppose it has to be the first book that I ever bought with my own money: Five Go To a Treasure Island.

Up to that point I'd been reading comics and picture stories, but after receiving a book token as a present from a generous relative my parents took me to a bookshop and I bought my first novel - the first of very many...

It was the books that I've read (combined with the support of my parents, teachers and a well-stocked local library) that got me through the History Entrance Exam after four terms in the sixth form (one of the questions concerned the value of the 19th century novel to the social historian so I wrote about Hardy, Dickens, Eliot and the Brontes). If you want to see what it was like, watch The History Boys.

In an era when the government is looking to cut library services please make sure you support your local libraries: they are far more cost effective than private education!

Declaration of interest: one of my sisters is now a librarian in the local library where I used to study."

Julie & Julia

I've just completed my notes for this week's screening:

Julie & Julia


USA 2009 123 minutes

Director: Nora Ephron

Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Stanley Tucci

Nominations and Awards

• Oscar nomination for Best Actress (Meryl Streep)

• BAFTA nomination for Best Actress (Meryl Streep)

• A further 10 wins and 12 nominations


“...the two lives hang together and the experiences of their heroines placed alongside each other offer revelations about social and cultural change over the past 60 years, from the staid age of the telex and the manual typewriter to the ubiquity of the personal computer and the mobile phone.”

Philip French

In 2002 Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a young writer with an unpleasant day job in New York decides to enjoy herself by cooking every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) by Julia Childs while blogging to document her progress. In a parallel story set in Paris in the 1950s Julia Childs (Meryl Streep) attends Le Cordon Bleu to learn about French cooking and begins work on a book about this for American housewives. After a mention of her blog in an article in The New York Times Powell is courted by a succession of journalists, literary agents and publishers, culminating in the publication of a best-selling book.

It was Streep who received the majority of the nominations and awards for her acting, but the performance of all three actors in the main roles was central to the success of the film, and these carry echoes of other films the actors have appeared in.  Julie begins to regard Julia as a mother figure and a source of inspiration to her, a relationship that echoes their roles in Doubt (2008) where Streep played the Mother Superior and Amy Adams the young nun.  In a similar happy accident of casting, Stanley Tucci as Julia’s humorous and considerate husband Paul, also played the devoted gay associate of Streep’s fashion magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada (2006).

In a career of more than 25 years Nora Ephron, initially as scriptwriter and subsequently as director, has been responsible for many successful films from Silkwood (1983) (starring Streep), Heartburn (1986) (once again with Streep) and When Harry Met Sally (1989) to Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998). Several of these films focus on people leading parallel lives, but for Julie & Julia she takes this plot structure to a different level by having them live in different periods and never meet, a structure that Stephen Daldry used for dramatic rather than comic effect in The Hours which followed the lives of three women (played by Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep again) whose only link was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

Streep received her sixteenth Oscar nomination for her performance in this film. Her next performance will be as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady with Phyllida Lloyd, who previously directed Streep in Mamma Mia! (2008), as director and also starring Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe and Richard E Grant as Michael Heseltine.

35 Shots of Rum

Here are my notes for tomorrow's screening.  The film sounds fascinating and I'm really looking forward to the screeening.

35 Shots of Rum


France 2008 100 minutes

Director: Clair Denis,

Starring: Alex Descas, Gregoire Colin, Ingrid Craven, Jean-Christophe Folly, Julieth Mars Touissant, Mati Diop and Nicole Dogue

Nominations and Awards

• One win and four nominations (including Best Director, Best Film and Best Ensemble Cast)

“There are no big, jarring cliches here; change is something that happens slowly, something to be thought about. Letting go isn’t easy, and this excellent, nuanced film refuses to pretend otherwise. It's a film you have to lean into, pay attention to and, careful now, think about”

Phelim O’Neill

Lionel (Alex Descas), a widowed train driver, has retreated in to a controlled and insular life, looking after Gabrielle (Mati Diop), his university age daughter and is almost isolated in his Paris apartment block apart from a small circle of friends. He knows that it’s time for a change and that Gabrielle needs to cut the apron strings, and then the catalyst arrives in the shape of Ruben (Jean-Christophe Folly), a worldly-wise student.

Clair Denis was born in francophone Africa and most of her films have been set there or concern people from these former colonies now living in France. In 35 Shots of Rum she also takes a few cues from the understated family dramas of Yaujiro Uzu, placing her actors as if she is setting up a still photograph and using long takes with a stationary camera, and with a tendency to frame scenes in long shot.

Clair Denis has made ten films since 1988 and the best of her early work is Beau Travail (1999), a loose transposition of Melville’s Billy Budd to a Foreign Legion barracks in Djibouti. Her most recent film is White Material (2009) starring Isabelle Huppert and Christopher Lambert which is set back in Africa and concerns a white French family struggling to save its coffee plantation in the face of political uprising among the local population.

She is also Professor of Film at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

The Lovely Bones

As a result of the Christmas break we have two screenings in one week.  These are my notes for Thursday's film:

The Lovely Bones


USA 2009 135 minutes

Director: Peter Jackson

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for an Oscar (Stanley Tucci) as Best Supporting Actor

• Nominated for an BAFTAs (Saoirse Ronan) as Best Actress and (Stanley Tucci) as Best Supporting Actor

• A further seven wins and 18 nominations

“...an uneasy mixture of crime thriller, horror flick and religious inspirational, with borrowings from Always (the remake by The Lovely Bones producer Steven Spielberg of the wartime ghost movie, A Guy Named Joe), Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Molnar’s Liliom (or at least the musical version, Carousel).”

Philip French

After her murder Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) watches over her parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) as well as George Harvey (Stanley Tucci) – her killer – from heaven. She wants revenge on the man who murdered her, but she needs to weigh this against her desire for her family to heal.

The film is based on the award-winning and best-selling novel by Alice Sebold. Film4 Productions initially acquired the film rights to the novel before it was published and by 2001 Lynne Ramsay (acclaimed director of Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002)) had been hired to adapt the novel and make the film. Following the closure of Film4 Productions Steven Spielberg expressed an interest acquiring the film rights, although finally it was Peter Jackson who was successful in negotiating a deal to develop the project using the same writing team he had used for The Lord Of The Rings to produce the screenplay; Steven Spielberg joined the project in the role of Executive Producer.

The subject matter of the story, the rape and murder of 14 year old girl, posed certain problems for the film makers: Jackson had originally expected that the film would appeal to a “sophisticated, adult audience” but after average reviews the studio began to redirect the film towards females aged 13-20 as this was the demographic that had favoured the film most; it is this same demographic that has made the Twilight franchise such a success.  Consequently Jackson softened and omitted the nastier elements (the rape is only implied in order to achieve the 12A certificate) of the story. Critics gave the film mixed reviews, but were generally unanimous in their praise for the actors, especially Stanley Tucci and Saoirse Ronan.

Peter Jackson made his name with the critically successful Heavenly Creatures (1994), a story of two young girls who become psychologically driven to commit murder, but achieved global fame following the commercial and critical success of his three film adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings (2001-2003). His current project is to take over the direction of two films based on JRR Tolkien’s early novel The Hobbit, after Guillermo del Toro (director of Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy series) had to withdraw from the project which Jackson had initially only agreed to produce.

A Serious Man

Welcome to 2011!  Here are my notes for our first screening of the New Year:

A Serious Man


USA 2009 105 minutes

Director: Ethan and Joel Cohen

Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick, Richard Kind and Fred Melamed

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for two Oscars (Best Film and Best Original Screenplay)

• A further eight wins and 28 nominations including BAFTA nomination for best original screenplay


“If it is possible to imagine a Woody Allen script with all the schtick exfoliated, and then filmed by Lynch, that master of conveying the under-the-skin bizarreness of small-town America, you have A Serious Man. Although perplexing and unnerving, with a finale that will not satisfy all tastes, the Coen brothers' latest film is the most daring project they have ever undertaken. It is mordant. It is philosophical. It addresses all the big questions. It is frequently hilarious. And it feels like somewhere along the line David Lynch took over.”

Joe Queenan

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor of theoretical physics in Minnesota in 1967 is planning his son’s bar mitzvah when his wife (Sari Lennick) tells him that their marriage is over: she wants a divorce so that she can marry Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), a smug and wealthy widower. Larry has never been particularly religious, but with his life suddenly in pieces he becomes convinced that only the local rabbis can help him.

Joel and Ethan Coen grew up in a Jewish household in Minnesota in the 1960s and in A Serious Man they have produced a story that for the first time is set both in the location and at the time in which they grew up. The film is quite different from any of its predecessors and their decision not to cast established film stars (Michael Stuhlbarg was cast on the basis of his stage work in New York and has very few film credits, even in minor roles) means that it is difficult for an audience to get its bearings as the story develops. Also the film begins in an entirely unexpected way, with an unsettling folk tale drenched in mortality and fear that may – or may not – be linked to the main story. The Coens have always produced films which contain a brilliant mix of bright comedy and bitter darkness, and when as in A Serious Man they get the balance right the result can be marvellous.

In a career of more than 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, A Serious Man received two Oscar nominations, and their most recent film, a remake of True Grit with Jeff Bridges in the lead role, has just opened to rave reviews and whispers of potential Oscar nominations.