All Is True

We'd seen this at the cinema and i knew at once that it was the type of film that would go down well if we screened it at our club: the presence of Judi Dench in the cast generally means a good film and also a decent sizes audience.

Seeing it again made me appreciate it even more, particularly Ben Elton's wonderfully autumnal screenplay. It also went don well with our members.

All Is True

UK 2018          97 minutes

Director:          Kenneth Branagh

Starring:            Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench and Ian McKellen

Awards and Nominations

• Won Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench) at the Movies for Grownups Awards
• Nominations for Best Film, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor (Ian McKellen) at the Movies for Grownups Awards

“Ben Elton has written a sweet-natured, melancholy film about the retirement years of someone he’s lately been turning into his specialist subject: William Shakespeare. The great poet is played here with genial sympathy by the film’s director, Kenneth Branagh, sporting a pretty outrageous false nose. Judi Dench is his wife Anne Hathaway, wearied into resilient impassivity by grief, the unfairness of life and an awful secret. Ian McKellen has a colossal, emphatically wigged cameo as the ageing Earl of Southampton.”

Peter Bradshaw

Following the fire that began during a performance of his play Henry VIII and destroyed the Globe Theatre William Shakespeare (Kenneth Branagh) returns to his family home Stratford upon Avon. His wife Anne (Judi Dench) is still haunted by the death of her only son 17 years earlier, and as Shakespeare struggles to rebuild his broken family relationships and search for inner peace he has to confront the dark heart of his family’s secrets and lies.

The title of the film is the alternate title of Shakespeare’s late play Henry VIII, but the story is most definitely not true: a few key elements of the film reflect the historical record, but others are mere conjecture or even just made up. Prior to writing this screenplay Ben Elton has used the life of Shakespeare as the basis for three series of his witty situation comedy Upstart Crow which included an episode covering the death of Shakespeare’s son. This film is set many years after that death but nonetheless the event drives the action of the plot and there is a distinctly elegiac and autumnal feeling to the way that both William and Anne respond to it and resolve their issues after William’s return to the family home.

Judi Dench was a mentor to Kenneth Branagh at the start of his stage career in the 1980s when she directed him in a number of productions, and in recent years she has performed in several plays that he has produced with his own company. They also appeared together on stage in a production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus where Branagh played the title role and Dench played his mother. In the cinema Dench had a cameo role in Branagh’s Hamlet (1996), they both appeared in My Week with Marilyn (2011) and more recently Dench appeared in Branagh’s film of Murder on the Orient Express, in which Branagh also starred as Hercule Poirot.

Meanwhile despite his prominent position on the poster Ian McKellen as the Earl of Southampton only appears for a short sequence when he visits Shakespeare at home, although he gives a performance that almost steals the film. When McKellen recently brought his one man show to the Watermill he talked about the making of the film and how strange it was to work with Branagh as both co-star and director: seeing Branagh in costume and make-up in the director’s chair made him feel that he was being directed by Shakespeare himself.

Ben Elton made his name as a stand-up comedian in the 1980s but subsequently has become better known as a writer. In addition to writing for successful TV comedies such as The Young Ones, Blackadder and, more recently, Upstart Crow he has also written 15 novels and several musicals including We Will Rock You and Love Never Dies.

Here is a link to the trailer:

Stan & Ollie

We screened Stan & Ollie towards the end of last year. The film looks back to the early 1950s and to a world that has long since disappeared, but as the days go by it seems that the world we lived in in 2019 has also now disappeared - hopefully not for good.

I missed the film at the cinema, was delighted to see it finally at our film club and was not in the least disappointed by it.

Stan &Ollie

UK 2018          97 minutes

Director:          Jon S Baird

Starring:            Steve Coogan, John C Reilly, Shirley Henderson, Nina Arianda and Rufus Jones

“Like the comedy greats to whom this winningly warm film pays tribute, Jon S Baird’s affectionate drama balances humour and pathos, laughter and tears. Set in Laurel and Hardy’s twilight years, it’s more melancholy love story than slapstick showbiz reminiscence. … Superb headline performances from Steve Coogan and John C Reilly are matched by equally sparkling supporting turns from Nina Arianda and Shirley Henderson as Stan and Ollie’s combative wives, providing what an astute promoter dubs ‘two double acts for the price of one!’”

Mark Kermode

Awards and Nominations

• Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor (Musical or Comedy) (John C Reilly)
• Three BAFTA nominations including Outstanding British Film and Best Actor (Steve Coogan)
• Seven British Independent Film Award nominations including Best Actor (Steve Coogan) and Best Supporting Actress (Nina Arianda)
• A further three wins and eight nominations

In 1953 Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (John C Reilly) undertake a gruelling music hall tour around the UK and Ireland as they struggle to raise finance to make another film. As word of their visit spreads their audiences grow and they begin performing in more prestigious venues, including two weeks at the Lyceum Theatre in London, although ill health meant that the tour was the last time that the pair worked together.

Laurel and Hardy made their first film together in 1921, although both were already well established as film actors in their own right, and over the succeeding 30 years made 106 films together. Their films and the characters they portrayed have remained popular with both the general public and serious film fans to this day as Derek Malcolm, a former film critic of the Guardian who as a teenager actually met them on their tour of the UK, recently admitted:

“As someone who met Orson Welles, Luis Buñuel, John Ford, Satyajit Ray, Howard Hawks, Katharine Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin and many others in the course of a long stint as the Guardian’s film critic, I am often asked who was my favourite movie star. The answer is none of them. My favourites are Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Mind you, I was in my mid-teens when I met them, which probably led to the kind of adolescent hero worship I might later have abjured.”

The screenplay is by Jeff Pope who had previously co-written the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Philomena (2013) with Steve Coogan. His previous work for television includes screenplays for Mrs Briggs (2012), Lucan (2013) and Cilla (2014). Jon S Baird has had a varied career as director where his work includes Filth (2013), based on the novel by Irvine Welsh, and episodes of the series Babylon (2014) and Vinyl (2016) which included Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger as executive producers.

Here's the trailer:

Red Joan

Over the years we have been running any film starring Judi Dench has always been popular, and so it proved with Red Joan. The reviews had not been brilliant but it was an enjoyable film with some excellent performances, and it was good to see a story about Cambridge spies that did not overtly refer to Burgess and Maclean.

Red Joan

UK 2018          101 minutes

Director:          Trevor Nunn

Starring:            Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Stephen Campbell-Moore and Tom Hughes

“This 40s period piece tootles picturesquely along like a cold war, heterosexual version of The Imitation Game, the biopic of wartime codebreaker Alan Turing. There is the same prestige Britpic furniture: clipped vowels, kindly officer-class boffins, sexy smoulderers, brilliant women patronised by pipe-smoking, pint-quaffing chaps, illicit (straight) relationships in cramped rooms with a sixpence for the meter.”

Peter Bradshaw

The peaceful retirement of Joan Stanley (Judi Dench) is disrupted when she is taken into custody after MI5 discover that in the past she provided intelligence to the KGB. In 1938 a young Joan Stanley (Sophie Cookson) is studying physics at Cambridge where she falls for a young communist called Leo Galich (Tom Hughes). After graduating Joan is offered a job at a weapons research facility and as the nuclear arms race accelerates she has to decide what she would do to secure peace in the world.

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Jennie Rooney which was inspired by the life of Melita Norwood, a member of the Woolwich Spy Ring, who supplied nuclear secrets to the USSR while working for the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association and thus helped the Soviet development of nuclear weapon technology. In reality Norwood spent a year studying Latin and Logic at the University College of Southampton rather than physics at Cambridge, but the change makes a notional link with the Cambridge Spy Ring that included Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt.

Trevor Nunn has had a long career in the theatre where he has served as Artistic Director of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre as well as directing a series of globally successful musicals such as Cats and Les Miserables. He has also worked in television and to a lesser extent in cinema, although most of his work for television has been to produce screen versions of his own successful stage productions. For the cinema prior to Red Joan he has directed only three films in over more than 40 years: Hedda (1975) with Glenda Jackson as Hedda Gabler; Lady Jane (1986) which gave an early starring role to Helena Bonham Carter as Lady Jane Grey; and Twelfth Night (1996) which starred Imogen Stubbs, Nunn’s then wife, and Helena Bonham Carter in leading roles.

Here's the trailer:

Fisherman's Friends

We started our current season last September but in the light of the Coronavirus Pandemic we decided to can what remains of our programme. I write notes for every film we screen and some people even read them. For the sake of completeness I'll post them all over the next few weeks as I currently have no plans to go anywhere.

I'd not seen this film at the cinema, but it was quite fun: certainly a good way to bring an audience back to our film club after the summer break.

Fisherman’s Friends

UK 2019          112 minutes

Director:          Chris Foggin

Starring:            James Purefoy, Daniel Mays, Noel Clarke and Tuppence Middleton

“Fisherman's Friends is a formulaic but thoroughly amiable and upbeat British comedy with a flavour of Ealing Studios and The Full Monty about it. The plot which the screenwriters have cooked up seems almost an afterthought. The singing fishermen came first. The Fisherman’s Friends really were signed by a major record label, had a top 10 hit, and turned into a full-blown media sensation. The film takes considerable liberties with their story, but fans of extra mature Cornish cheddar won’t be complaining.”

Geoffrey McNab

While visiting a Cornish village on a stag weekend Danny (Daniel Mays) a London music executive is tricked buy his boss (Noel Clarke) into trying to sign a group of local fishermen who sign sea shanties. As he struggles to gain the respect and enthusiasm of the group he is drawn deeper into their traditional way of life and this makes him re-evaluate his own integrity and what success actually means.

The film declares that it is “based on a true story”, but the reality is that Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft, the writers and producers of the film, saw the group Fisherman’s Friends performing on TV, optioned their life rights and then created their own story. The real life story of the group is more mundane: radio presenter Johnnie Walker bought two of the group’s homemade CDs while on holiday in Cornwall and then his manager travelled to Port Isaac to meet them and then negotiated a recording contract worth £1 million for them. A very different view of the contemporary Cornish fishing industry can be seen in Mark Jenkin’s Bait (2019), which Peter Bradshaw described as “an episode of EastEnders directed by F W Murnau” and which Mark Kermode has hailed as one of the defining British films of the decade.

Nick Moorcroft has written a number of successful British comedy films including St Trinian’s (2007) and St Trinian’s: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold (2009,) and more recently the romantic comedy Finding Your Feet (2017). Chris Foggin has worked on a films as diverse as My Week with Marilyn (2011), The Iron Lady (2011) and Effie Grey (2014) as an Assistant Director as well as performing a similar role in a number of high profile television programmes, but this is his first feature film as director.

Here's a link to the trailer: