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.