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?
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Friday, April 15, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, April 1, 2011
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.”
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.
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.
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