Starter for Ten

We have been running our film club for ten years now and decided to use one screening to celebrate it: we provided prosecco and a special anniversary cake, but the challenge was to choose the right film.

we brainstormed all the titles we could think of with "ten" in them and discarded most of them as too obscure or just plain wrong. And then we thought of Starter for Ten, which was released the  year we started and in retrospect would have been a possible film to screen back then.

Never mind, I'm glad to have seen it at last and really enjoyed it.

Here are my notes:

Starter For Ten

UK 2006                      92 minutes

Director:                      Tom Vaughan

Starring:                        James McAvoy, Alice Eve, Rebecca Hall, Catherine Tate, Benedict Cumberpatch and Mark Gatiss

Awards and Nominations

• One win at the Austin Film Festival
• Three nominations including Best British Film at the Empire Awards

“A modest and very British movie (though co-produced by Tom Hanks), Tom Vaughan's Starter For Ten is a rite-of-passage comedy about the working-class Essex boy Brian Jackson's first two terms studying English literature at Bristol University in 1985. James McAvoy is amusing and convincing as the gauche Brian who leaves his old chums (Dominic Cooper and James Corden from The History Boys) back home on the estuary and is torn between two fellow students, the self-consciously sophisticated, middle-class Alice (Alice Eve), and the wry, politically active Jewish Rebecca (Rebecca Hall). Much of the action turns on Brian joining Bristol's University Challenge team (Mark Gatiss does a hilarious Bamber Gascoigne). Among the various scenes of humiliation two stand out, one very funny in the style of Lucky Jim Dixon's weekend at Professor Welch's home, the other truly painful.”

Philip French

 
It is interesting to look back at a film ten years after its release to see how the careers of its cast and production team have developed. Screenplay writer David Nicholls read English and Drama at Bristol University and turned to writing after struggling to make a career as an actor: he wrote several episodes of the series Cold Feet before writing Starter for Ten as a novel after another series he had been writing was cancelled. His subsequent work includes adaptations of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Great Expectations and Far From the Madding Crowd (starring Carey Mulligan) and among his novels is the award-winning One Day which he later adapted for the screen with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess in the lead roles. Director Tom Vaughan also studied at Bristol University and made his name as a director on TV working on several series of Cold Feet. Starter for Ten was his first feature film and since then he has worked regularly for both TV and cinema. His most recent work has been for the TV series Victoria, for which he has directed three episodes.

 James McAvoy was already a rising star in 2006 with lead roles in The Last King of Scotland (2006), Becoming Jane (2007) and Atonement (2007) to follow on closely from this film, but Rebecca Hall, James Corden and Benedict Cumberpatch were all at the start of their TV and film acting careers after early work on stage. Additionally although Catherine Tate had written and starred in her own TV series she made this film before she appeared with David Tennant as a Tardis regular in Doctor Who, and the multi-talented Mark Gatiss, having made his name in The League of Gentlemen had yet to write for Doctor Who, co-create Sherlock or become a familiar character actor with roles in programmes as diverse as Game of Thrones, Wolf Hall, Sherlock (where his portrayal of Mycroft had strong echoes of Peter Mandelson)  and The Coalition (where he actually played Peter Mandelson and memorably made his first appearance out of a cloud of smoke.).

 

Here's the trailer:

 

 

The Wars of the Roses

Over the past week I've finally managed to catch up with the brilliant BBC adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry VI and Richard III plays, ie The Wars of the Roses.

I've seen Richard III several times (with Anthony Sher, Ian McKellen and Kevin Spacey playing the king): each was brilliant in very different productions: traditional, a fascist 1930s, and mid-Atlantic. However these were standalone productions and it is only when you see how Richard develops over the three parts of Henry VI that you can fully understand all the historical background. Having also recently visited Laycock Abbey which was used as a location it was interesting to see how well it worked on screen.

It was no surprise to discover that Benedict Cumberpatch was brilliant in the lead role, but the production had casting in depth with Judi Dench and many other superb actors in supporting roles.

However having watched it at a time when news of the US presidential elections is flooding media as I watched the plays I began to see a strange and unexpected counterpoint to the drama. And then this morning I read this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/opinion/sunday/shakespeare-explains-the-2016-election.html?_r=0

Years ago I read a book called Shakespeare Our Contemporary while studying A Level English. Now I know that Shakespeare will always be our contemporary.

12 Years a Slave

This week we are screening 12 Years a Slave - one of the best films of 2013.

Here are my notes:

12 Years a Slave

 USA 2013                    133 minutes

Director:                      Steve McQueen

Starring:                        Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Cumberpatch, Lupita Nyong’o, Michael Fassbender, Paul Dano and Brad Pitt

Awards and Nominations

• Won three Oscars  - Best Film, Best Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley) and Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o), and nominated for six more, including Best Actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Best Supporting Actor (Michael Fassbender)
• Won two BAFTAs – Best Film and Best Actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and nominated for seven more including Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Michael Fassbender) and Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o)
• A further 212 wins and 193 nominations

“While it is not the role of critics to tell people which films to see and which to avoid (audiences make those decisions for themselves), let me begin by saying that if you have any interest in cinema – or, for that matter, in art, economics, politics, drama, literature or history – then you need to watch 12 Years a Slave."

Mark Kermode

In 1841 Solomon Northrop (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an educated black man born free in New York State, is tricked, drugged and sold into slavery in the South.  Here he initially becomes the property of the relatively benign plantation owner Ford (Benedict Cumberpatch) but later is sold on to the sadistic Epps (Michael Fassbender).  After 12 years he is rescued and finally is able to return to his family.

Northrop published his memoir of his time as a slave in 1853, shortly after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling novel about Slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and both books provided dramatic stories for the political debate over slavery that took place in the US in the years leading up to the Civil War.  Subsequently the book fell into obscurity until the 1960s when two historians researched Northrop’s story, retraced his journeys, and published a scholarly edition of the text that is still in print.

After the success of his film Hunger (2008) Steve McQueen had expressed an interest in making a film about “the slave era in America” with “a character that was not obvious in terms of their trade in slavery” but it was not until he was given a copy of Northrop’s memoir that he found his story:

“I read this book, and I was totally stunned. At the same time I was pretty upset with myself that I didn't know this book.  I live in Amsterdam where Anne Frank is a national hero, and for me this book read like Anne Frank's diary but written 97 years before – a firsthand account of slavery.  I basically made it my passion to make this book into a film.”

The film received almost universal acclaim from both critics and audiences for its acting, especially the performances of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender and Lupita Nyong’o, as well as Steve McQueen’s direction, the screenplay by John Ridley and its faithfulness to Northrop’s original memoir.

Steve McQueen began his career in the UK as a Turner prize winning visual artist whose work included numerous short films.  His first feature film was Hunger (2008), starring Michael Fassbender about the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike, and in 2011 he made Shame, once again starring Michael Fassbender as a sex addict whose life is turned upside down when his estranged sister reappears in his life.