Spectre

For our AGM we try to choose a popular film to attract people to the one meeting we need to have each year. After a disastrous first AGM which we scheduled AFTER a screening and which went on and on we now have the meeting first and then screen the film.

When we had chosen Spectre we had not realised that it was quite so long - so it was a late night. I enjoyed the film very mucht, and agreed with most of the reviews that I'd read, but felt that the escape from Blofeld's lair in the desert was a bit of an anti-climax after so many of the earlier magnificent set pieces.

Here are my notes:

Spectre

 UK 2015                      148 minutes

Director:                      Sam Mendes

Starring:                        Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Lea Seydoux, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw

Awards and Nominations

• Won Academy Award for Best Original Song
• A further seven wins and 23 nominations

“If nothing else, the spelling of the title should tip you off that this is a thoroughly English movie franchise. Bond is back and Daniel Craig is back in a terrifically exciting, spectacular, almost operatically delirious 007 adventure – endorsing intelligence work as old-fashioned derring-do and incidentally taking a stoutly pro-Snowden line against the creepy voyeur surveillance that undermines the rights of a free individual. It’s pure action mayhem with a real sense of style.”

Peter Bradshaw

James Bond (Daniel Craig) attempts to thwart the plans of Spectre to hijack a global surveillance network and discovers that the organisation, led by Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) was behind the events of the previous three films in which Craig has starred as James Bond. Familiar characters such as M (Ralph Fiennes), Q (Ben Whishaw) and Eve Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) re-appear along with Andrew Scott as Max Denbigh, the head of a rival to MI6.

Spectre is the twenty fourth James Bond film and the fourth starring Daniel Craig. The story is original, but incorporates source material from Fleming’s stories, most notably the character of Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz) whose father is a background character in the short story Octopussy. The screenplay reunites scriptwriters John Logan (who wrote Skyfall) and Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (who had worked on five previous Bond films) together with British playwright Jez Butterworth who had made uncredited contributions to Skyfall. The name SPECTRE comes from the novel Thunderball, but as Fleming had incorporated elements of an undeveloped film script into his novel this led to decades of copyright litigation, with the issue only being resolved in November 2013. It was this same dispute that allowed Sean Connery’s belated reprise of the role of Bond in Never Say Never Again (1983), in effect an updated remake of Thunderball (1965).

Sam Mendes had originally turned down the offer to direct Spectre after the success of Skyfall but he changed his mind as he found both the script and the long term plans for the franchise appealing. The film had a budget of $245 million making it the most expensive Bond film made, and it grossed $880.7 million, making it the second highest grossing Bond film after Skyfall and the sixth highest grossing film of 2015.

Sam Mendes has recently ruled himself out of directing the next Bond film and to date Daniel Craig has not confirmed that he will play Bond again. Amid the inevitable speculation about both director and leading actor one interesting potential choice of director that has emerged is Susanne Bier, who in addition to directing The Night Manager (2016) for the BBC had previously won an Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film for In A Better World. Some critics have suggested that Tom Hiddlestone’s performance in The Night Manager was an audition for the role of Bond, although in recent interviews he has downplayed the rumour.

Here's the trailer:

 

Pride

This was our first screening after the New Year: a delayed posting after some unexpected functionality in Windows 10 managed to disable my keyboard for several days. Fortunately I was able to resurrect my old lap top to produce the notes in time.

Pride

 UK 2014                      120 minutes

Director:                      Matthew Warchus

Starring:                        Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, Dominic West, Paddy Considine and Andrew Scott

 Awards and Nominations

• Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture – Musical or Comedy
• BAFTA Award for Best Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer plus Nominations for Best British Film and for Imelda Staunton as Best Supporting Actress
•  BIFA awards for Best British Independent Film, Best Supporting Actress (Imelda Staunton) and Best Supporting Actress (Andrew Scott) plus four further nominations
• Winner of Queer Palm at Cannes Film Festival
• A further three wins and nine nominations

“OK, so it may not have the toughness of Brassed Off or the fleet-footedness of Billy Elliot, but what it does have is spine-tingling charm by the bucket-load. I laughed, I cried, and frankly I would have raised a clenched fist were both hands not already occupied wiping away the bittersweet tears of joy.”

Mark Kermode

During the miners’ strike in the 1980s a group of gay and lesbian activists decide to raise money to support miners’ families. The National Union of Miners is unwilling to accept the group’s support as it does not want to be openly associated with a gay group, so the activists decide to take their donation directly to a mining village in Wales. There is surprise in the village when the activists arrive, but ultimately the two communities build a strong alliance.

Like Brassed Off, The Full Monty and Billy Elliot the film is set against the context of consequences of Britain’s industrial troubles in the 1980s, but unlike the former three films the story of Pride is based on real events.   Many of the individuals in the large cast of characters were real people, with Imelda Staunton in particular receiving excellent reviews for her portrayal of Hefina Headon, being described by one critic as “part Mother Courage and part Hilda Ogden”.

Matthew Warchus is best known as a stage director: he has worked extensively in both the UK in the UK where he has directed both classic and contemporary plays as well as the musical Matilda.  He has directed several plays at the Old Vic in London, including Speed-the-Plow (a superb satire on Hollywood that starred Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum) as well as Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests trilogy. In 2014 it was announced that he would succeed Kevin Spacey as Artistic Director of the Old Vic and that he would be working with the team that produced Matilda to direct a musical version of Groundhog Day as part of his first season.