Sarah's Key

Here are my notes for this week's screening:

Sarah’s Key / Elle s’appelait Sarah

France 2010                 110 minutes

Director:                      Gilles Paquet-Brenner

Starring:                        Aidan Quinn, Dominique Frot, Frederic Pierrot, Kristin Scott Thomas, Melusine Mayance, Niels Arestrup

Nominations and Awards

• Kristin Scott Thomas nominated for Cesar (Best Actress)
• One further nomination and two wins

Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas) is an American journalist investigating the deportation in 1942 from occupied Paris of more than 13,000 non-French Jewish émigrés and refugees and their French-born children to their deaths in Auschwitz.  A series of flashbacks depict the events from the perspective of a young girl who witnessed them and illustrates the willing, even enthusiastic involvement of the French bureaucracy in helping the Nazis.

The key historical event of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup are true, but the film itself is based on a novel by the best-selling French author Tatiana de Rosnay which became an international success.  Kristin Scott Thomas, who is bi-lingual, delivers her English dialogue with an American accent and speaks fluent French for the scenes set in France.

The French government declined to acknowledge any state complicity in the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup until 1995 when President Chirac apologised for the part that French policemen and civil servants had played in the raid.

Here's a link to the trailer:

Love's Kitchen

Tomorrow evening we're hosting a special event: a screening of Love's Kitchen with an introduction from the director James Hackin followed by a Q&A session afterwards.

I'd heard that the film did not do well at the box office - understatement - but I hadn't realised how bad the reviews were.  I've checked  out the usual suspects, ie Wikipedia, The Guardian and The Observer, but have struggled to find very much.

After much thought I decided on simple and straightforward statements of fact...

Here are my notes, much shorter than usual:

Love’s Kitchen
UK 2011                      xxx minutes

Director:                      James Hacking

Starring:                        Dougray Scott, Claire Forlani and Simon Callow

 Rob Haley (Dougray Scott) plays a headstrong, award-winning chef who goes into decline after his wife dies.  He decides to buy an ailing country pub in a rural paradise and, inspired by a meeting with Gordon Ramsay, manages to turn it into a successful gastro-emporium.  Then he begins to date Kate Templeton (Claire Forlani) daughter of a local squire who happens to be a successful restaurant critic.

 In addition to Scott and Forlani (who are married in real life) the film also includes well-known actors of the calibre of Simon Callow (playing a food critic clearly modelled on Keith Floyd), Peter Bowles (unsurprisingly playing the village squire) and Michelle Ryan as a kitchen assistant.

The film was shot in Letchmore Heath in Hertfordshire which, as Peter Bradshaw noted in his review in The Guardian, was also the location of the 1960 sci-fi classic Village of the Damned.

Here's a link to the trailer:

Water for Elephants - My Notes

After last week's struggle I managed to finish my notes.  I had not been looking forward to the film, but in the event it was better than several of the reviews had suggested.  There was a weakness in the central love triangle but whether this was due to casting or the script I'm just not sure.

Here are my notes:

Water for Elephants

USA 2011                    121 minutes

Director:                      Francis Lawrence

Starring:                        Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson and Christoph Waltz

 Nominations and Awards

• Robert Pattinson won Best Actor at the 2011 Teen Choice Awards
• A further six nominations

“There’s something endearingly old-fashioned about a love story involving a beautiful bareback rider and a kid who runs off to join the circus.  What makes Water for Elephants more intriguing is a third character, reminding us why Christoph Waltz deserved his supporting actor Oscar for Inglourious Basterds.  He plays the circus owner who is married to the bareback rider and keeps everyone else in his iron grip.”

Roger Ebert

As an old man Jason (Hal Holbrook) meets the proprietor of a small travelling circus that he has visited and reveals that he once worked in a circus and was present during one of the most famous circus disasters of all time.   The proprietor asks him to share his story, and he tells how as a young man (now played by Robert Pattinson) after the death of his parents in a car crash he drops out of veterinary school and joins a circus where he uses his skills to look after the health of the circus animals and becomes involved in a tragic love triangle with Marlena (Reese Witherspoon) and her husband (Christoph Waltz) the owner of the circus

The film is based on the best-selling novel by Sara Gruen with a screenplay by Richard LaGravenese who has written screenplays for more than 15 films, including The Bridges of Madison County (1995), The Horse Whisperer (1990) and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010).   However it is the involvement of Robert Pattinson in the film that attracted most publicity.  Following the global success of the Twilight series of films his involvement in Water for Elephants was an attempt to broaden his range beyond that of the brooding vampire.  He received good reviews for his performance of this film and stood his ground against the other two principal actors both of whom have won Oscars for their performances in earlier films.  Following the completion of the Twilight series he has played the lead role in Bel Ami (the first feature film from acclaimed stage directors Declan Donellan and Nick Ormerod) and is currently filming Cosmopolis directed by David Cronenberg.

Here's a link to the trailer:

Water for Elephants

We're screening this film on Thusday, but nothing I've read on it so far has made me look forward to seeing it, and I'm really struggling to produce any notes.

We've just agreed that our next two films after this week will be Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy and Midnight in Paris, and I can't wait: both of these were on my "want to see" list for 2011.