Midnight in Paris

These are my notes for this week's screening:

Midnight in Paris

USA 2011                    100 minutes

Director:                      Woody Allen

Starring:                        Adrien Brody, Carla Bruni, Kathy Bates, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Tom Hiddleston

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for four Oscars including Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
• Another 39 nominations, including a BAFTA nomination for Best Original Screenplay and 11 wins, including a Golden Globe for Best Original Screenplay.

“This is Woody Allen's 41st film. He writes his films himself, and directs them with wit and grace. I consider him a treasure of the cinema. Some people take him for granted, although Midnight in Paris reportedly charmed even the jaded veterans of the Cannes press screenings. There is nothing to dislike about it. Either you connect with it or not. I'm wearying of movies that are for "everybody" — which means, nobody in particular.  Midnight in Paris is for me, in particular, and that's just fine with moi.”

Roger Ebert

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a disillusioned Hollywood scriptwriter who while visiting Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and future parents-in-law finds that the city has revived his desire to become a serious novelist.  While walking through the city late one night Gil is picked up by a mysterious antique Peugeot that takes him back in time to the 1920s where he meets Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Cole Porter. In subsequent trips to the past he also travels back to the 1892, where he meets Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Degas.  Gil rejects an offer from a girl he meets to stay in the past but his trips back in time help him resolve what to do with his life in the present.   

There are many modern films with a time travel theme with the Back to the Future trilogy and Groundhog Day being the most successful.  In Allen’s own, extensive catalogue, there are certain similarities to The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) in which an actor steps out of a film and falls in love with a girl in the audience.  However Philip French also suggests that Allen has been influenced by Victor Sjoestroem’s silent film The Phantom Carriage (1921), the favourite film of his idol Ingmar Bergman, in which a ghostly coach travels round town at midnight picking up the dead. 

Since 2000 Woody Allen has worked extensively in Europe with European casts where his films have included Match Point (2005) and You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010), both of which were filmed in the UK and the award-winning Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008) which was filmed in Spain.

Here's the trailer:

Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy

Here are my notes for this week's film which we're screening on Thursday:

Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy

UK 2011                      127 minutes

Director:                      Tomas Alfredson

Starring:                        Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberpatch, Kathy Burke, Mark Strong, Tom Hardy and Toby Jones

Nominations and Awards

• Three Oscar Nominations including Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay
• 11 BAFTA nominations including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor (Benedict Cumberpatch and Tom Hardy), Best Supporting Actress (Kathy Burke) and Best Adapted Screenplay
• A further eight wins and 27 nominations

“The genius of Alfredson's film is that despite the fabulously evocative period detail (you can smell the stale cigarette smoke lingering in the yellowing wallpaper) and the pervasive cold war dread, this adaptation of John le Carré's well-loved bestseller is not about spies at all. Just as Let the Right One In presented a surreptitious study of repressed childhood anger disguised in the garb of a neo-gothic vampire tale, so Tinker Tailor buries its central theme of male distrust, duplicity and anxious misidentification within the labyrinthine twists of an international counter-intelligence yarn.”

Mark Kermode

George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is called out of his enforced retirement to identify a Soviet mole who has infiltrated the upper reaches of the secret service.

The film is based on John Le Carré’s 1974 thriller which was famously adapted for television in 1979 with Alec Guinness playing Smiley.  Le Carré had been so impressed by Guinness's performance that he based his characterisation of Smiley in subsequent novels on Guinness.  Oldman was initially diffident about taking the role because of the long shadow cast by Guinness, but he had the support of Le Carré himself, who simply advised him to return to the character described in the novel and use his imagination.  The film also includes casting in depth for many of the supporting roles, with actors of the calibre of John Hurt, Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberpatch playing relatively minor parts.

The TV version had seven episodes to unravel the labyrinthine plot so with the constraints of a feature film the screenwriters had to adopt a different approach, as scriptwriter Peter Straughan explained:

“The adaptation ... involved a kind of mosaic work.  Some long sequences would remain intact ... but in other cases we would take a line or an event from one place in the narrative and move it elsewhere, shifting the fragments around endlessly until it felt right.  The goal was to create a new version of the narrative which would bear a close family resemblance to the source material, but have its own cinematic personality.”

Following the international critical and commercial success of this film there have been stories in the press that Oldman is interested in playing Smiley again in a film of Smiley’s People, Le Carré’s sequel to Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy and once again memorably filmed for TV with Alec Guinness in the title role.

Here's the trailer:

Dickens Bi-Centenary

I decided to celebrate the Dickens bi-centenary in style: by watching the Doctor Who story in which Dickens appears.  Simon Callow plays the great man and there is the added bonus of Eve Myles playing the psychic maid.  The script is by Mark Gatiss, and in a typical stroke of genius Russell T Davies managed to link Gwen from Torchwood to Gwyneth when he brought the characters from Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures into The Stolen Earth.

For anyone missing Doctor Who, here's the trailer: