Cats in Films

As any fule kno the real purpose of the internet is to disseminate pictures of cats - and thay also appear in many films

Thus I could not overlook this brilliant article by Anne Billson (tentatively linked to Inside Llewyn Davies which featured a prominent cat) listing the most memorable feline peformnances:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10572306/Cats-improve-every-film-they-are-in.html 

But as the co-carer of two ginger cats it was a shock to see how many ginger cats appeared on her list - as well as in Inside Llewyn Davies.

Silver Linings Playbook

Another week and another screening: this time it's Silver Linings Playbook - a rom com with a difference.

Once again this is a film that has been on my "want to see" list, so it's good to be able to catch it at last.

Here are my notes:

Silver Linings Playbook

USA 2012                    122 minutes

Director:                      David O Russell

Starring:                        Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert de Niro and Jackie Weaver

“Silver Linings Playbook has a suitably upbeat title and several of the key ingredients for a standard Hollywood "feelgood movie" – an oddball hero returning home to make peace with his family, an encounter with a kookie girl whom he ends up chasing through the festive, snow-flecked streets at Christmas, a couple of public contests (a dance and a football game) on the results of which the future depends.  And indeed the movie does make you feel quite good about humanity as the final credits roll.   But this is a David O Russell movie, his sixth since 1994, and for him feeling good is the reward for completing an emotional assault course.”

Philip French

Awards and Nominations

• Won Oscar for Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence) plus seven further nominations including Best Film, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress and Adapted Screenplay
• Won BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay and two further nominations (Best Actor and Actress)
• A further 60 wins and 58 nominations

Pat (Bradley Cooper) a former school teacher has just spent eight months in a psychiatric hospital suffering from bi-polar disorder following a violent incident with his now ex-wife.  On his release he meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) a young widow and despite his initial plan for a reconciliation with his ex-wife Tiffany persuades him to be her partner in a community dance competition and their relationship develops.

Throughout his career David O Russell has maintained an oblique approach to the world as well as a strong interest in dysfunctional families.  He made his debut with Spanking the Monkey (1994) a comedy about a middle-class lad who develops an incestuous desire for his attractive invalid mother, and made his commercial breakthrough with Three Kings (1999) a thriller set in the Gulf War.  His previous film was The Fighter, a biopic of the welterweight boxer Micky Ward and his rough Irish-American background, with the film receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Film and with both Christian Bale and Melissa Bale winning Oscars for their supporting roles.

 His most recent film is American Hustle, again starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper as well as Christian Bale.  The film was well received and has just received 10 Oscar nominations including ones for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress.

Here's the trailer:

Famous Film Quotes as Charts

This is wonderful: the top 100 Film Quotes converted into charts and flow diagrams:

http://flowingdata.com/famous-movie-quotes-as-charts/

Somewhat inevitibly I like the entry for "Play it again" from Casablanca.

The Great Gatsby

With the holidays behind us we can re-start our Film Club screenings.

Our first film for 2014, in an attempt to pull in the punters, is The Great Gatsby.  It's been a bit of a struggle to produce the notes as I'm still getting used to the alarm clock in the morning, but I've just finished them and here thay are:

The Great Gatsby
USA 2013                    143 minutes

Director:                      Baz Luhrmann

Starring:                        Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Tobey Maguire

“So what of this 3D fourth screen version of The Great Gatsby?  It is, you might say, a story of three eggs.  The mysterious central character is the self-made Jay Gatsby, a millionaire bootlegger who in the summer of 1922 lives at West Egg, the township outside Manhattan on Long Island Sound where the nouveaux riches have built their mansions.  Across the bay at East Egg are the grand houses of the old-money people, among them the rich, brutal, Ivy League philistine Tom Buchanan, husband of the southern belle Daisy, whom Gatsby courted as an officer and temporary gentleman in the First World War.  After losing her to Buchanan because he was penniless, he now seeks to recapture her.  The third egg is Baz Luhrmann's curate's egg of a film, good and bad in parts, but mainly a misconceived venture. Luhrmann is a cheerful vulgarian and his movie suggestive of Proust directed by Michael Winner.”

 

Philip French

Awards and Nominations

• 11 wins
• 30 nominations

Despite the title, the film’s main character is Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) who is the unreliable narrator of Fitzgerald’s source novel as well as the catalyst who brings the enigmatic Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Daisy (Carey Mulligan) together again.  The film follows the structure of the novel by having Carraway as the narrator, but anchors it in reality by making him tell it in flashback as part of his treatment for depression and alcoholism just after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.  Luhrmann emphasis this literary conceit by makings words from the book float in the air around Carraway with some lines from the novel actually written on the camera lens.

 Many critics praised DiCaprio’s central performance as the millionaire bootlegger and some praised the vibrant energy of Luhrmann’s production, but as Scott Foundas pointed out in Variety:

“...what Luhrmann grasps even less than previous adapters of the tale is that Fitzgerald... was offering an eyewitness account of the decline of the American empire, not an initiation to the ball.”

With the sound track of the film Luhrmann follows the precedent that he set on Moulin Rouge in using deliberately anachronistic songs which nonetheless help to build up the atmosphere of the Jazz Age.  But Philip French notes several less obvious anachronisms in other details of the production:  it is unlikely that Nick could have read Ulysses while still at Yale as it was only published in Paris in 1922 while Rhapsody in Blue is performed at one of Gatsby’s parties two years before Gershwin wrote it.

The Great Gatsby has been adapted for the screen six times.  These include a silent version (now lost) and a 1949 adaptation that starred Alan Ladd as Gatsby as well as the more famous 1974 version (from a script by Francis Ford Coppola) that starred Robert Redford as Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy and Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway.  Additionally it has inspired ballets, musicals as well as several stage adaptations, including one in which the cast performed the full text of the novel in a production that lasted over eight hours.

 

Here's the trailer: