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:

 

 

What We Did On Our Holiday

This was my sleeper hit of the season. I'd never really watched Outnumbered on TV, but I'd been a keen fan of Drop The Dead Donkey plus the programmes that Andy Hamilton had written for radio.

The casting of the film was intriguing in the mix of the different backgrounds of the key performers, i.e. RSC and Doctor Who, Oscar Nominated Actress plus everything that Billy Connolly has done, but somehow it worked.

It was a black comedy, with definitely touches of Bill Forsyth's work, and iIenjoyed it very much.

Here are my notes:

What We Did On Our Holiday

UK 2014                      95 minutes

Director:                      Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin

Starring:                        Rosamund Pike, David Tennant, Billy Connolly, Ben Miller and Amelia Bullmore

Awards and Nominations

• BAFTA Scotland nominations for Best Actor (David Tennant) and Best Film
• London Critics Circle Film Awards Best Actress Award (Rosamund Pike)
• A further nomination for Best Film

“It’s impossible not to enjoy this big-hearted and sweet-natured British family movie from Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin – effectively a feature-format development of their smash-hit BBC TV comedy, Outnumbered, which pioneered semi-improvised dialogue from the children. It creates a terrifically ambitious (and unexpected) narrative with a tonne of sharp gags.”

Peter Bradshaw

 

Doug (David Tennant) and Abi (Rosamund Pike) take their children on a trip to Scotland to visit Doug’s elderly father for a family party.  Dog and Abi have decided to separate, but have kept the news secret so as to avoid spoiling the party; their children find it difficult to do the same.

Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin created and directed the BBC comedy series Outnumbered which ran from 2007 to 2014. Before this they were best known for the TV comedy Drop the Dead Donkey (1990 to 1998), although as writers their earlier work included sketches for many comedy shows including The Two Ronnies, Smith and Jones, and Not The Nine O’Clock News. 

Rosamund Pike first made her name playing Jane Bennet in Joe Wright’s 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice. She played supporting roles (and received good reviews) in numerous films including An Education (2009), Made in Dagenham (2010) before securing the lead role (and Oscar and Golden Globe nominations) in the acclaimed thriller Gone Girl (2014).  David Tennant’s career has included both stage and screen work: prior to Doctor Who his most high profile film role was in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) but he had already played leading roles with the RSC. Subsequently he returned to the RSC to play the title roles in Hamlet and Richard II (both filmed) as well as teaming up with Catherine Tate (after their brilliant double act in Doctor Who) in a version of Much Ado About Nothing set in the 1980s.  His subsequent TV work has included two series of Broadchurch (with a third series in production) plus the lead role in Gracepoint, its US remake. He also narrated the spoof documentaries 2012 (about the preparations for the London Olympics) and W1A (about BBC bureaucracy).

 Here's the trailer:

 

 

 

Paddington

This was our last film before Christmas, and so we wanted something that would be a bit of fun.  I knew that the film had been well reviewed, but had not expected to have enjoyed it so much and laughed out loud so many times.

After the film I started thinking about Theorem and Boudu Saved from Drowning. Was Paddington an ursine remake?

Here are my notes:

UK 2014                      95 minutes

Director:                      Paul King

Starring:                        Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Peter Capaldi and Ben Whishaw

Awards and Nominations

• BAFTA nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay
• Nomination for Alexander Korda award for Best British Film
• BTVA nomination for Best Voice Acting Award (Ben Whishaw)
• Winner of Best Comedy at the Empire Awards
• Two for nominations for Best Film

“The jokes are good…, ranging from laugh-out-loud observations about the transformative effects of parenthood (and knowing mentions of “exotic wrestlers”) to slapstick bathroom episodes. Ben Whishaw turns out to be the perfect voice of Paddington …, his lilting diction at once childlike and wise, his delivery naive yet oddly noble. ‘Please look after this bear’, says the tag around Paddington’s neck. Rest assured, they have.”

Mark Kermode

 

After travelling from Peru to London in search of a new home, a polite young bear meets the Brown family at Paddington station. The bear is lost and alone so the Brown family offer him a place to stay – and name him Paddington.

 

Paddington Bear first appeared in print in 1958, and since then he has featured in more than twenty books of stories by Michael Bond. In the 1970s the BBC broadcast a series of short films adapted from Michael Bond’s stories with Michael Hordern memorable as the narrator.  For this film Paul King worked with screenwriter Hamish McColl (who had worked with Rowan Atkinson on Mr Bean’s Holiday (2007) and Johnny English Reborn (2011)) to develop a new story that included characters and elements from Bond’s works.

Paddington was Paul King’s first cinema film as director.  He began his career on TV where he directed 20 episodes of The Mighty Boosh and six episodes of Come Fly with Me, although he has also worked in theatre where he has specialised in comedy. David Heyman, best known as producer of the Harry Potter films, bought the film rights to Paddington Bear in 2007 and worked on the story in consultation with Bond and King since then.  Heyman’s aim with the character of Paddington was to achieve the level of verisimilitude for CGI characters achieved in the Harry Potter and recent Planet of the Apes films, although the film also used an animatronic version as well.

Paddington was the most expensive film ever produced by production company StudioCanal but it was a global success with total earnings of USD 259.6 million. It has now been confirmed that there will be a sequel, with King in discussions to direct it.

 Here is the trailer:

 

 

Star Wars...

I'm old enough to remember the arrival of Star Wars first time round. I can remember some of the reviews that pointed out how much George Lucas had borrowed/ripped off (make your own choice) from classic science fiction, as well as the one that pointed out that doctor Who (in his Tom Baker incarnation) would have simply flown the Tardis into the Death Star and destroyed it in several episodes.

in subsequent years I'd picked up on the way Star Wars borrowed from other film genres, especially Casablanca, but the following article gives a much more comprehensive list:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/star-wars--a-new-hope/movies-influences-george-lucas/

However despite all this I'm still going to see the latest instalment when it arrives in the cinema....

Song for Marion

It's the opening night of our new season tonight.  Traditionally we have chosen something popular to pull in the punters and persaude them to sign up to the rest of the season and tonight we are screening Song for Marion.

I know the film received good reviews, but it did not appear too high on my "to see" list - unlike Cloud Atlas which I cannot wait to see - but I'm prepared to be open-minded.

Here are my notes:

Song for Marion

UK 2012                      93 minutes

Director:                      Paul Andrew Williams

Starring:                        Vanessa Redgrave, Terence Stamp, Anne Reid, Christopher Ecclestone, Gemma Arterton

Awards and Nominations

• Three nominations at the British Independent Film Awards for Screenplay (Paul Andrew Williams), Best Actor (Stamp) and Best Supporting Actress (Redgrave)
• Winner of Audience Choice Award at the Nashville Film Festival

“This is a sweet-natured, charming, if modestly conceived picture, which is much better than Dustin Hoffman's recent oldie-song drama Quartet – more relaxed, more persuasive, and it actually delivers the all-important musical climax that Hoffman somehow managed to omit.”

Peter Bradshaw

Marion (Vanessa Redgrave) and Arthur (Terence Stamp) are a long-married lower-middle-class couple.  Although she is terminally ill she is an outgoing member of a local choir (“the OAPz”) run by a young music teacher (Gemma Arterton ), while he refuses to join the choir and is alienated from their son (Christopher Ecclestone).

Both Redgrave and Stamp started their film careers in the early 1960s and starred in some of the most iconic films of the era including A Man for All Seasons (1966) Blow-Up (1966) and Camelot (1967) for Redgrave and Billy Budd (1962), The Collector (1965) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) for Stamp although since then it has been Redgrave who has had by far the more illustrious career both in terms of the films she has made and the quantity of nominations and awards she has received. 

 Paul Andrew Williams made his name with London to Brighton (2006) a brutal thriller that Peter Bradshaw regarded as one of the best British films of the last decade and for which he received a BAFTA nomination for the Most Promising Newcomer in 2007.  He followed this by The Cottage (2008) and Cherry Tree Lane (2010), both of which were also thrillers.  Thus Song for Marion reflects quite a change to his work to date, and is the result of a new joint development programme funded by Pathe and BBC Films.

Here's the trailer:

Downton Abbey Exclusive

Today I can exclusively reveal that the next series of Downton Abbey will include a scene set at a fete - and I will not be in it.

When we went to the local fete - my wife bought up the-plant stall and I made a beeline for the books, I noticed a stall advertising for extras for the next series of Downton Abbey.

I was interested - inevitably - but the date did not work: filming was during the week, and unfortunately I do not have the leave left to take time off.

The high point of the afternoon was seeing Penelope Wilton opening the fete.  apparently she has some kind of role in Downton Abbey, but to me she will always be Harriet Jones - one of a whole range of ancillary characters in Doctor Who.

I resisted the temptation to say "I know who you are"...

The Ten Best British Films Of All Time

The Daily Telegraph, which usually includes some good journalism about films, has just published a list of the Ten Best British Films Of All Time:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/classic-movies/10027283/10-best-British-films-of-all-time-chosen-by-David-Gritten.html

There's plenty to argue about here, and although I would not dispute Don't Look Now, Kes, and Kind Hearts and Coronets, there is nothing by Hitchcock (in his pre-Hollywood phase), Bill Forysth (especially Local Hero) or John Boorman (Excalibur or Hope and Glory). 

Other major omissions are Peter Greenaway, Ken Russell and Terry Gilliam.

Trying to compile a list of best films is about as much use as speculating about who will be the new Doctor Who!!!

I've started so I'll finish...

This is all my own fault.  I've always watched Mastermind and inevitably the thought that came to mind was: I could do that.

Then earlier this year I found the Mastermind website which contained a selection of quizzes, which I tried and found that I was in the top [n]% of the population, where [n] is a reassuringly small number.  There was also a link to follow if you wanted to apply to take part - so I followed it, filled in the form, and then forgot all about it.

Several weeks ago I had a call out of the blue from the production team: an invitation to  meet up so that they could ask me some questions.  I think I answered quite well, as within a week I had another call offering me a place on the programme.  There were some further exchanges while we hammered out the detail of my specialist subject choices, but eventually we finalised a list of three subjects that were OK.

For the first round my subject is the novels of Jasper Fforde:

http://www.jasperfforde.com/

I follow this with the life of HH Asquith:



And for the final I've chosen Doctor Who (2005 to the present):

And now the hard work begins as I'm slowly realising what I've committed myself to: as a first step I'm currently re-reading all of Jasper Fforde's novels  (always a great pleasure) and listening to as many of them as I can find as audio books while I'm driving.

In addition there are two biographies of Asquith on my desk, even as I write this, but I've decided not to start re-watching Doctor Who until nearer the time.

The likely timescales for filming are September, October and November but with no indication yet as to broadcast dates.

This is an ongoing project, so watch out for further updates.



Belated Thoughts on the Jubilee

In all the excitement of the Jubile I missed another opportunity to blog about Doctor Who.  In one of those spooky coincidences that seem to happen a lot (note to self: keep an eye on entropy levels) our current trawl through New Who we last week arrived at The Idiot's Lantern  which as any fule kno is set at the time of the Coronation.

Here's the trailer:

Happy Birthday Mr Shakespeare

I was going to post this yesterday but broadband issues prevented me from doing so.  However there is no documentary evidence of Shakespeare's date of birth, merely a record of a christening, so if if his birthday really was yesterday then this is a belated birthday celebration.

Yesterday I read a sonnet and tonight I've watched the trailer for The Shakespeare Code, one of the best episodes of Russell T Davies's rebot of Doctor Who:

This was an early episode in Series Three, and was screened just at the time that I was participating in the HP Film Blogging Contest.  One of the posts asked contributors to suggest remakes of old films using modern technology.  I suggested that the cast and crew of the then current series would be perfect as the The Shakespeare Code managed to combine Shakespeare himself, Harry Potter and the Marx Brothers (Groucho Marx, (as Rufus T Firefly) becomes president/dictator of Freedonia in Duck Soup) in an episode the combined both comedy and a superb story. 

It mist have worked, as just over a month later my wife and I flew off for a weekend at the Cannes Film Festival.

Voyage of the Damned

Forget Titanic or even A Night to Remember and watch Doctor Who instead:

Dickens Bi-Centenary

I decided to celebrate the Dickens bi-centenary in style: by watching the Doctor Who story in which Dickens appears.  Simon Callow plays the great man and there is the added bonus of Eve Myles playing the psychic maid.  The script is by Mark Gatiss, and in a typical stroke of genius Russell T Davies managed to link Gwen from Torchwood to Gwyneth when he brought the characters from Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures into The Stolen Earth.

For anyone missing Doctor Who, here's the trailer:

Doctor Who About Nothing

We booked our tickets the day after we saw David Tennant and Katherine Tate announcing their production of Much Ado About Nothing on TV, but could only manage to book tickets for a Friday: the journey to London was difficult and very long, but it was worth it for the play.

Josie Rourke had set the action in Gibraltar in the 1980s, which allowed for some brillaint pastiches of typical music for the period.  The set itself was a circle surrounded by louvred doors and windows and with large pillars set across the circle.  This allowed the productionto keep up a fast pace and - more importantly - allowed the stage to revolve during ceertain scenes so that the shifting view that the audience received gave an almost cimematic fluidity to the action.

The gulling scene, complete with a team of painters and decorators, built to a wonderful slapstick crescendo with a paint-spattered Tennant reducing Tate to a fit of the giggles.  The chemistry between them that had been so evident in Doctor Who transferred unaltered to the stage, and just like Miichael Billington in his review on The Guardian, I'd love to see them work together again in something like Private Lives.

Some Thoughts on Doctor Who and Gardeners' World

I have been  a lifelong fan of Doctor Who - I am old enough to have vague memories of the first episode - although it is only more recently that I have watched Gardeners' World with any degree of regularity as it is my wife who is the gardener in our relationship.

Fortunately we are both Doctor Who fans, although in her case I think it was more David Tennant as an actor rather than the character.  Hence there was some concern on her part when Tennant departed and Matt Smith took over the TARDIS.  This more or less coincided with the unexpected handover of the Gardeners' World baton from Monty Don to Toby Buckland where a quick and strictly non-scinetific poll, ie chats with a view close freinds over dinner, revealed an immediate loss of direction of the programme and lack of interest in the charisma free presenter.  Thus it was not entirely unexpected when Gardeners' World returned with Monty Don once more in charge. 

Could the same thing happen with Doctor Who?  I hope not: RTD is an impossible act to follow, and the way I look at it is that if we had not had the four series plus specials with RTD in charge then we would welcome the new incarnation with open arms.  It's not wrong: it's just gone off in another direction, just like Doctor Who has done throughout its history.

I love the steam-punk look of the series and from all the clips I've seeen so far the next story, from a script by Neil Gaiman, should be asbolutely magificent.

Any if you want advice on celery, then talk to the fifth Doctor

The Time Traveler's (sic) Wife

We've had a bit of a revamp of our programme as we had some feedack that our choices were a little too masculine (I enjoyed 30 Days Of Night and was looking forward to seeing Inglourious Basterds) so we're introducing a few "couple friendly" films.  This is the first, although I would have preferred Silence in the Library, which introduced the real wife of a real time traveller (*sigh*).

Anyway, here are the notes:

The Time Traveler’s [sic] Wife


USA 2009 107 minutes

Director: Robert Schwentke

Starring: Eric Bana, Rachel McAdams and Ron Livingston

Nominations and Awards

• Three nominations including Best Fantasy Film

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.”

The Doctor

As a child Henry DeTamble survives a car accident that kills his mother by inadvertently time travelling back in time where he is helped by an older version of himself (Eric Bana). As he grows up he begins a relationship with Clare (Rachel McAdams) but their relationship is complicated by his sporadic time travelling.

The idea of a time travel has featured regularly in films from The Time Machine to the Back to the Future trilogy, and on television Doctor Who has used the same premise to produce a series that has lived through several golden ages since the TARDIS first materialised in 1963.  However The Time Traveler’s Wife ignores the more complex issues of time travel that have appeared in many Doctor Who stories such as when its characters have witnessed real historical events, choosing instead to combine science fiction with romantic comedy in a unique cocktail.

The film is based on the debut novel by the American artist Audrey Niffenegger which became a bestseller in both the US and the UK, where it was selected by the Richard and Judy Book Club. The novel was optioned before publication by Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s production company with Brad Pitt scheduled to play the part of Henry, but the project lapsed once his relationship with Jennifer Aniston ended. At subsequent stages in its development Steven Spielberg, David Fincher and Gus Van Sant all expressed an interest in directing the film, before Robert Schwentke took on the project and cast Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams in the lead roles.

Robert Schwenke started his career as a director in Germany and made his name in the US with the thriller Flightplan (2005). His most recent film is Red (2010) a thriller about a team of veteran special agents, including Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren, called out of retirement for one last mission by Bruce Willis.

The Boat That Rocked

These are the film notes for our final screening of the 2009/2010 season:

UK 2009 (135 minutes)
Director: Richard Curtis
Starring: Tom Sturridge, Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans, Nick Frost and Kenneth
Branagh

Following his expulsion from school Carl (Tom Sturridge) arrives on Radio Rock, a pirate radio ship, to stay with the ship’s Captain Quentin (Bill Nighy) who is also his godfather and meets the disc jockeys who crew the ship. A government minister (Kenneth Branagh) takes offence at the ship’s output and creates the Marine Offences Act in order to close the station down. Quentin and the crew decide to defy the ban, but an attempt to move the ship causes its engines to explode and the ship sinks, but without any loss of life.

The story is based on the real life pirate radio station named Radio Caroline, which broadcast from international waters off the coast of South East England in the 1960s, although Richard Curtis (as both writer and director) was keen to point out that he did not intend to depict the real story of offshore broadcasting; rather he wrote the film solely for entertainment purposes.

Richard Curtis started his career as one of the writers on Not The Nine O’Clock News before creating the Blackadder series with Rowan Atkinson. He made his film breakthrough with his screenplay for Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) which became the highest grossing British film to date and which made Hugh Grant a global superstar. Curtis followed this with the screenplay for Notting Hill (1999) as well as collaborating with Helen Fielding on the screenplays for Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), all of which starred Hugh Grant. In 2003 Curtis directed Love Actually from his own screenplay, once again starring Hugh Grant, and this time in a strangely prophetic role as a “posh boy” Prime Minister. In addition to Grant all the films included a regular group of British actors including Colin Firth, Rowan Atkinson and Bill Nighy in their casts.

In parallel with this successful film career Curtis also created The Vicar of Dibley, which ran from 1994 to 2007, as a vehicle for Dawn French. He followed this with the screenplay of the TV version of The No. 1 Ladies Detection Agency which he co-wrote with Anthony Minghella (who also acted as director) before returning to film with The Boat That Rocked in 2009. His most recent project is a story – Vincent and the Doctor - for the current series of Doctor Who which despite an amusing cameo role for Bill Nighy as an art critic lecturing on Van Gogh failed to reach the standards of recent stories about historical characters such as The Unquiet Dead (Dickens), The Shakespeare Code (Shakespeare – inevitably) or even The Unicorn and the Wasp (Agatha Christie).

Regeneration of the Prime Minister

During the election campaign there were many comments on the Labour Party's fascination with Doctor Who in its use of David Tennant to provide voiceovers for PEBs, and starring roles for Sean Pertwee (son of Jon) and Peter Davison.

However it is only now as the dust from the election finally settles that it's possible to see how Doctor Who provides a strange mirror to the rise and fall of the whole New Labour Project:

* The unexpected and triumphant return of the programme after many years off the screen.

* The replacement of the ninth Doctor by a Scottish successor.

* The return of several key characters from the first series as the final series from RTD reached its conclusion.

* The Tenth's Doctor's final words ("I don't want to go") sum up the amazing week of horse-trading followed the inconclusive result of the Generl Election.

* The casting of the youngest actor ever to play the Eleventh Doctor.

It only remains to be seen now how the Eleventh Doctor's relationship with his new companion will develop over the next five years. The good news so far is that the BBC has commissioned another series which will include a story by Neil Gaiman.

Star Trek

In the great Star Trek versus Doctor Who debate I've always sided with the latter - even before its triumphant renaissance under Russell T Davies. However I have to admit that the film we screened on Sunday was pretty good, and that it deserves its five star review from Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

Here are my notes:

Star Trek

USA 2009 (127 minutes)
Director: J J Abrams
Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana and Simon Pegg

Awards and Nominations
Won Oscar for Best Makeup
A further 11 wins and 45 nominations

James T Kirk meets the half-human Spock while training at the Starfleet Academy. Kirk stows away on the USS Enterprise and together with other cadets like Nyota Uhura, Hiikaru Sulu and Pavel Chekhov has an adventure at the final frontier.

Star Trek first appeared in 1966 as a TV series that ran for three seasons before spawning four more spin-off TV series based in the same universe but with different sets of characters. In the cinema there were 10 Star Trek films featuring initially the (ageing) cast of the initial TV series followed by the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. There are also many novels, comic books and video games, although purists consider these to be non-canonical.

The commercial failure of Star Trek Nemesis (2002) effectively killed the official Star Trek franchise in the cinema and it was not until 2005 that Paramount chose to reboot it with a story featuring the cast of the initial TV series portrayed by a new cast. The script is by Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzan who previously had worked with J J Abrams on Mission: Impossible III (2006) – another successful film franchise based on a hit TV show from the 1960s. Initially Abrams had intended only to produce the film, but decided to direct it as soon as he read the script as “I would be so agonisingly envious of whoever stepped in and directed the movie”. The writers were keen to avoid a complete reboot and thus it was important to them to cast Leonard Nimoy in the film. His performance as the older Spock is one of quiet dignity; and it is his voice over the final credits speaking the legendary words about the mission to seek out new life and new civilisations - amended to meet the politically correct requirements of a new millennium - where no one has gone before.

J J Abrams made his name as a writer and producer of eight films before making his debut as a director with Mission: Impossible III (2008). He followed this by producing the science fiction film Cloverfield (2008) before reverting to the role of director for Star Trek. His current future projects include producing Cloverfield 2 and Mission: Impossible IV as well as a possible commitment to direct an as yet untitled sequel to Star Trek. He has a parallel career in television where his credits include co-creating, writing, producing and directing Lost (2004-2010).

Burn After Reading

This is one of the films I've been most looking forward to seeing this year. I bought a copy in the HMV sale but have not had a chance to watch it yet.

Over the holiday I caught up with In Bruges (brilliant), David Tennant's final performance inDoctor Who (alas) as well as his RSC Hamlet (to be able to purchase tickets for the first night was brilliant and for the RSC to open it on Susan's birthday was even better). After being snowed in this weekend we caught up with Goodnight and Good Luck, an excellent story about the fight against McCarthy with George Clooney, as star, director and co-writer.

Which brings me back to the notes for this week's film:

Burn After Reading

USA 2008 (96 minutes)
Director: Ethan Coen and Joel Coen
Starring: George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich and Tilda Swinton

Awards and Nominations
Nominated for two Golden Globes (Best Picture and Frances McDormand as Best Actress)
A further 10 nominations including BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay

When Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is fired from the CIA he begins to write his memoirs. Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton) wants a divorce and at her lawyer’s request copies many of Osborne’s personal files on to a CD which Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) find at a local gym. Litzke is planning cosmetic surgery and decides to blackmail Osborne Cox in order to finance it. Meanwhile Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) is having affairs with both Katie Cox and Linda Litzke.

The summary of the plot reads like a classic farce, but it leads to mayhem on a huge scale that starts with a broken nose and ends finally with execution by CIA gunmen. The Coens described the film as “our version of a Tony Scott/Jason Bourne movie” and they wrote the screenplay while working on their adaptation of No Country for Old Men (2007). The brothers created characters with George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt and John Malkovich in mind, and the script derived from their desire to involve the actors “in a fun story”. Tilda Swinton was the only main character who did not have a part written specifically for her, and the Coens struggled to develop a common filming schedule for their A-list cast.

The Coens identified idiocy as a major them of the film and described Clooney and Pitt’s characters as “duelling idiots”. Clooney had worked with the Coens twice before and acknowledged that he usually played a fool in their movies:

“I’ve done three films for them and they call it my trilogy of idiots”.

The Coens told Pitt that they had written his role specifically for him and he did not know whether to fell flattered or insulted; he told them that he did not know how to play the part as the character was such an idiot:

“There was a long pause and then Joel goes...”You’ll be fine.””

In a career of nearly 25 years the Coens have produced a series of brilliant films that have been successful with both festival and multiplex audiences. In recent years they have reached new heights of success: No Country for Old Men won four Oscars, including Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film, and their most recent film A Serious Man (2009) opened to rave reviews at the London Film Festival.