Paddington

This was our last film before Christmas, and so we wanted something that would be a bit of fun.  I knew that the film had been well reviewed, but had not expected to have enjoyed it so much and laughed out loud so many times.

After the film I started thinking about Theorem and Boudu Saved from Drowning. Was Paddington an ursine remake?

Here are my notes:

UK 2014                      95 minutes

Director:                      Paul King

Starring:                        Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Peter Capaldi and Ben Whishaw

Awards and Nominations

• BAFTA nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay
• Nomination for Alexander Korda award for Best British Film
• BTVA nomination for Best Voice Acting Award (Ben Whishaw)
• Winner of Best Comedy at the Empire Awards
• Two for nominations for Best Film

“The jokes are good…, ranging from laugh-out-loud observations about the transformative effects of parenthood (and knowing mentions of “exotic wrestlers”) to slapstick bathroom episodes. Ben Whishaw turns out to be the perfect voice of Paddington …, his lilting diction at once childlike and wise, his delivery naive yet oddly noble. ‘Please look after this bear’, says the tag around Paddington’s neck. Rest assured, they have.”

Mark Kermode

 

After travelling from Peru to London in search of a new home, a polite young bear meets the Brown family at Paddington station. The bear is lost and alone so the Brown family offer him a place to stay – and name him Paddington.

 

Paddington Bear first appeared in print in 1958, and since then he has featured in more than twenty books of stories by Michael Bond. In the 1970s the BBC broadcast a series of short films adapted from Michael Bond’s stories with Michael Hordern memorable as the narrator.  For this film Paul King worked with screenwriter Hamish McColl (who had worked with Rowan Atkinson on Mr Bean’s Holiday (2007) and Johnny English Reborn (2011)) to develop a new story that included characters and elements from Bond’s works.

Paddington was Paul King’s first cinema film as director.  He began his career on TV where he directed 20 episodes of The Mighty Boosh and six episodes of Come Fly with Me, although he has also worked in theatre where he has specialised in comedy. David Heyman, best known as producer of the Harry Potter films, bought the film rights to Paddington Bear in 2007 and worked on the story in consultation with Bond and King since then.  Heyman’s aim with the character of Paddington was to achieve the level of verisimilitude for CGI characters achieved in the Harry Potter and recent Planet of the Apes films, although the film also used an animatronic version as well.

Paddington was the most expensive film ever produced by production company StudioCanal but it was a global success with total earnings of USD 259.6 million. It has now been confirmed that there will be a sequel, with King in discussions to direct it.

 Here is the trailer:

 

 

Star Wars...

I'm old enough to remember the arrival of Star Wars first time round. I can remember some of the reviews that pointed out how much George Lucas had borrowed/ripped off (make your own choice) from classic science fiction, as well as the one that pointed out that doctor Who (in his Tom Baker incarnation) would have simply flown the Tardis into the Death Star and destroyed it in several episodes.

in subsequent years I'd picked up on the way Star Wars borrowed from other film genres, especially Casablanca, but the following article gives a much more comprehensive list:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/star-wars--a-new-hope/movies-influences-george-lucas/

However despite all this I'm still going to see the latest instalment when it arrives in the cinema....

Testament of Youth

I'd seen the brilliant BBC adaptation many years, but this version caught the spirit of the book as well.

Here are my notes:

Testament of Youth

 

UK 2014                      129 minutes

Director:                      James Kent

Starring:                        Alicia Vikander, Kit Harington, Taron Egerton, Dominic West, Emily Watson and Miranda Richardson

 

“A fine and moving film, if heavy-handed in places. The screen version of Testament of Youth gilds the lily of Vera Brittain’s memoir – though fans of the book may well feel it didn’t need so much extra adornment.”

 

Alex von Tunzelmann

Awards and Nominations

·         Best Actress Nomination for Alicia Vikander at the British Independent Film Awards

·         Best Breakthrough British Filmmaker Nomination for James Kent at the London Critics Circle Film Awards

·         Best British Newcomer Nomination for Taron Egerton at the London Film Festival

After winning a place to read English at Oxford University in 1915 Vera Brittain decides to delay her degree so that she can work as a Voluntary Aid Detachment during the First World War. Her fiancé Roland Leighton, close friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow and her brother Edward have all enlisted, and as the war progresses all are killed. After the war Vera Brittain became a pacifist.

Vera Brittain published Testament of Youth in 1933 having previously tried and failed to write about her wartime experiences in fictional form. The book was well received but it failed to achieve the “classic” status of books about wartime experience such as Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves and Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon.  Even the fiftieth anniversary of WW1 in the 1960s (where the appearance of Oh What A Lovely War together with the arrival of feminism prompted a re-appraisal of the history of the period) failed to bring it to wider audience.  The book only became widely known in in the 1970s when the feminist publishing house Virago Press republished the book and it became their best-selling title, and then in 1979 the BBC produced a superb five part adaptation with Cheryl Campbell as Vera. 

 James Kent began his career as a director by working on EastEnders before moving on to TV movies and bigger budget series.  His most recent work in both the US and UK has included Agatha Christie: Poirot, Margaret (tracing the final days of Margaret Thatcher in power) and several episodes of the historical drama The White Queen.  Testament of Youth is his first film for cinema.