Marketing Failure

We always plan to show a popular film for our AGM, but generally do not want to screen something tht would attract paying punters elswewhere in the season: hence we'd decided to replace Saving Mr Banks with The Book Thief, and when w discovered that this was not available we'd chosen Life of Pi - and I'd written the notes.

But no one had told our marketing guru and so we'd sent out a email advertising Saving Mr Banks.  We had a surprisingly good audience for a sunny June evening but we were  not sure what they'd turned out to see, and so we had a vote and Saving Mr Banks won. I enjoyed it very much and did not have to write any notes and if we do screen Life of Pi next season then I will have the notes ready.

Here's the trailer for Saving Mr Banks:

On a silly note, I also like the re-cut trailer for Scary Mary Poppins:

 

Life of Pi

And so we reach the end of another season and it's time for our AGM.  We generally try to choose a film that is going to be popular and this year our choice is Ang Lee's Life of Pi.

Here are my notes:

Life of Pi

USA 2012                    127 minutes

Director:                      Ang Lee

Starring:                        Suraj Sharma, Tabu, Gerard Depardieu and Rafe Spall

Awards and Nominations

• Won four Oscars including Best Director and Cinematography, and nominations for seven further Oscars including Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay
• Two Golden Globe nominations including Best Film and Best Directior
• A further 52 wins and 70 nominations

“[Ang Lee’s] magnificent new film is a version of Yann Martel's Booker prize-winning novel, Life of Pi, adapted by an American writer, David Magee, whose previous credits were films set in England during the first half of the 20th century, Finding Neverland and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.  From its opening scene of animals and birds strutting and preening themselves in a sunlit zoo to the final credits of fish and nautical objects shimmering beneath the sea, the movie has a sense of the mysterious, the magical.  This effect is compounded by the hallucinatory 3D, and in tone the film suggests Robinson Crusoe rewritten by Laurence Sterne.”

Philip French

The film is based on the best-selling novel by Yann Martel, a fanatasy about an Indian boy called Piscine (“Pi”) Patel who survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker as his companion.  The book became a global best-seller – although many of its readers must have thought it was unfilmable.

Several other directors had planned to direct the film before Ang Lee took on the project.  The initial plan was for M Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) to direct, but after he chose to direct Lady in the Water, the studio discussed the project with Alonso Cuaron (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Gravity).  He passed on the opportunity in order to direct Children of Men, and there were subsequently discussions with Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie and Alien Resurrection), who began work on his own screenplay but made no further progress.  In 2009 Fox Pictures finally hired Ang Lee to direct, and although the projected budget of $120 million caused a further delay, filming finally started in January 2011.

One of the costly elements of the budget was Lee’s decision to film in 3D.  He explained this choice in an interview:

"I thought this was a pretty impossible movie to make technically. It's so expensive for what it is.  You sort of have to disguise a philosophical book as an adventure story.  I thought of 3-D half a year before Avatar was on the screen.  I thought water, with its transparency and reflection, the way it comes out to you in 3-D, would create a new theatrical experience and maybe the audience or the studio would open up their minds a little bit to accept something different."

The film opened to widespread critical acclaim, with the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes stating:

 “A 3D adaptation of a supposedly ‘unfilmable’ book, Ang Lee's Life of Pi achieves the near impossible—it's an astonishing technical achievement that's also emotionally rewarding.”

Here's the trailer: