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:

 

 

One Day

Another month and another film... Here are my notes for this week's screening:

One Day

UK 2011                      108 minutes

Director:                      Lone Scherfig

Starring:                        Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, Jodie Whittaker, Ken Stott, Patricia Clarkson, Rafe Spall, Romola Garai

 “In a season of movies dumb and dumber, One Day has style, freshness, and witty bantering dialogue. Anne Hathaway is so attractive that she would be advised to sometimes play against type (the eyeglasses she wears at the beginning are a bit over the top).  Jim Sturgess contributes the film's most versatile performance, one that depends on exact timing and control of the balance between pathos and buffoonery.  It's a decent night at the movies, if however a letdown after An Education, the previous film by Lone Scherfig.”

Roger Ebert

Upper class Dexter (Jim Sturgess) and working class Emma (Anne Hathaway) graduate from the University of Edinburgh on 15^th July 1988; they spend the night together but decide to remain just as friends.  The story then follows their respective lives on the same date over the next twenty years. 

The film is based on the award-winning novel of the same name by David Nicholls.  He worked as an actor for a number of years before writing several number novels as well as a number of TV and film scripts.  His screenplays include adaptations of two his novels: Starter for 10 (2006) and One Day (2011). 

 In the book the unusual structure of following the protagonists on just one day over a twenty year period works well, although in the film it is possible to see this just as a gimmick.  However as author of both the original novel and the screenplay there must be a reason for its retention and in The Guardian film blog David Cox proposes an interesting theory:

“Emma and Dex throw away what should have been the prime of their lives. He wraps himself up in coke and self-love; she hides herself in her own cocoon of denial. The book's annual audit anatomised their folly in meticulous detail. Their wasted years were mercilessly ticked off and the course of their delusion was unerringly charted until they were subjected to deserved punishment.

This is the chronicle of wasted youth, rich in emotional nuance and period detail, that the book's snapshots encapsulated so tellingly. In the film's necessary haste, they reveal only blurry banality. Perhaps this key element of the book could have been conveyed through some means other than annual snapshots in a way that would have been more compatible with a two-hour film. Perhaps not.”

There was also criticism of Anne Hathaway’s Yorkshire accent, with one critic describing it as all over the shop (“Sometimes she's from Scotland, sometimes she's from New York, you just can't tell.”).  Anne Hathaway subsequently claimed that she watched Emmerdale to help her as she found the accent “a challenge”.

 Lone Scherfig started her career in Denmark, but she gained worldwide fame when she directed the internationally successful An Education in the UK.

Here's the trailer: