Quartet

It's our AGM on Thursday, so time for the final film of the season.

We try to choose something that will bring in the punters so that they will renew their subscriptions for next year, and this time we've chosen Quartet: something that will fit our age demographic perfectly :-)

I've not seen it and am looking forward to it very much.  Here are my notes:

Quartet

UK 2012                      90 minutes

Director:                      Dustin Hoffman

Starring:                        Billy Connolly, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Pauline Collins, Sheridan Smith, Tom Courtenay

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for one Golden Globe (Maggie Smith as Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy)
• A further three wins and one nomination

“There’s a gentle, sugared honesty in Quartet about old age: it stops short of anything too testing or tragic.  This is a lot closer to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) than it is to Amour (2012), and the only final curtain here is made of heavy, red velvet.”

Robbie Collins

At Beecham House, a home for retired musicians, the annual concert to celebrate Verdi's birthday is disrupted by the arrival of Jean (Maggie Smith), an eternal diva and the former wife of celebrated tenor Reggie (Tom Courtenay) one of the residents.

 

The screenplay is by Ronald Harwood, who adapted it from his play of the same name with the particular members of the film’s cast in mind.  In recent years Harwood has written the screenplays for films as diverse as The Pianist (2002), Oliver Twist (2005) and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) as well as working on the screenplay for Australia (2008) but before this he had a distinguished career as a playwright and novelist.  Initially he had intended to become an actor, and a fascination for the stage and its performers is a recurring theme in his work: in addition to Quartet he wrote both the original play and the screenplay for The Dresser (1983) (one of the best plays and films ever written about the theatre) which starred Tom Courtenay as the general assistant to an elderly actor, After The Lions, a play about the French actress Sarah Bernhardt and All the World’s a Stage, a general history of theatre.

The director of the film is Dustin Hoffman, making his debut as a director at the age of 75.  Hoffman received much critical acclaim for his work on the film.  As the late Roger Ebert noted:

“What’s ... evident is that he loves the stage, loves show business and has a heart full of affection for these elderly survivors.  He also loves his location, here called Beecham House, and scenes are bridged with many shots of the elegantly landscaped grounds.”

After an award-winning career on stage and in film which has included, amongst many other nominations and awards, two Best Actor Oscars and three BAFTAs for Best Actor, in 2013 Hoffman won the Breakthrough Directing Award at the Hollywood Film Festival.

Here's the trailer:

Australia

These are my film notes for last week's screening of Australia - an attempt to break the record for the number of other films mentioned in a single set of notes.

Once again I wrote the notes before I'd seen the film, and now after the screening I can report that although it had a few impressive set pieces, the overall effect was some considerable way less than the sum of its parts.

Australia 2008 (165 minutes)
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Ben Mendelsohn, Bill Hunter, Bryan Brown and David Wenham
Awards and Nominations
• Nominated for an Oscar
• A further 7 wins and 19 nominations

In September 1939 Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) flies to Australia where her errand husband is running cattle station. After the murder of her husband she and Drover (Hugh Jackman) drive 2,000 head of cattle on a journey of several hundred miles across the desert to Darwin where they will be sold. Several years later Lady Sarah returns to Darwin to look for a young half-aboriginal boy whom she regards as her adopted son, and while she is there she witnesses the Japanese attack on the city.

The cast includes actors such as Bryan Brown, Jack Thompson and Bill Hunter who all made their names in the great period of Australian cinema in the 1970s and 1980s when directors such as Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford and Fred Schepisi were exploring the history of their country and their national identity in films like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and Gallipoli (1981). From this strong beginning subsequent generation of film makers moved away from such major themes, focussing instead on contemporary subjects and producing films such as Strictly Ballroom (1992), Luhrmann’s first film which became a global success after winning an award at the Cannes Film Festival. Luhrmann built on this legacy of anti-heroic cinema in his next two films, with Romeo + Juliet (1996) being set in Latin America and Moulin Rouge (2001) in fin-de-siècle Paris.

Luhrmann decided that his next film would be about the history of Australia, and after six months of research he settled on a story set just before the Second World War in which he could combine a historical romance with a story about the Stolen Generations, mixed race Aboriginal children who were removed from their parents and integrated into white society. Luhrmann wrote the screenplay in conjunction with Stuart Beattie, whose work ranges from the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy to 30 days of Night (2007), and Ronald Harwood, best known for his screenplays for The Pianist (2002) and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).

With this complex pedigree of screenwriters and with two Australian actors who made their names in Hollywood in the leading roles, rather than returning to the style of the founders of the new wave of Australian cinema Luhrmann imposes a Hollywood sensibility on the film which contains two distinct parts: a so-called “wallaby western” and then a war movie. The first part of the film echoes two famous John Wayne westerns, Red River and The Cowboys, while the sound track evokes the music that Elmer Bernstein wrote for films such as The Magnificent Seven. In the second part there are scenes which are reminiscent of From Here to Eternity, Gone with the Wind (the burning of Atlanta) and Tora! Tora! Tora!

Luhrmann is currently working on another adaptation of The Great Gatsby, although no details of any casting have been announced.