Bridget Jones's Baby

This is our most recent screening. there was some debate, ie a quick chat, about whether it was too "popular" for our society, but there have been requests in the past for more "female friendly" films - I still remember Mama Mia with a shudder, although it was a profitable evening on the bar - so we went ahead with it.

I'd enjoyed the film at the cinema and found it even better on a second screening: there were some filthy lines I'd not picked up, knowing how the film was going to end made it possible to see the misdirection that the production team had carefully applied at key points, and I'd completely missed that Darcy's middle name was "Fitzwilliam".

I'm pleased to record that just about everyone enjoyed it - and once again we had good takings on the bar.


Here are my notes

Bridget Jones’s Baby

UK 2016                                  123 minutes

Director:                                  Sharon Maguire

Starring:                                   Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth, Patrick Dempsey, Emma Thompson, Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones

“This is a better Bridget than the last movie, The Edge of Reason, because it doesn’t feel the need to indulge shark-jumping setpieces like zipping off to Thailand. We stick in her old London manor of Borough and she’s still in the same old scuzzy flat, still working for a cable TV news company, where she has now improbably become a producer. This is pretty broad comedy we’re talking about: not Mrs Brown’s Boys-broad, but broad nevertheless. Yet the effect is achieved in the same way as the first movie. Basically, Bridget presides over a kind of coalition government of very good supporting turns which on aggregate enforce their chaotic comic rule over the audience. Just about.”

 Peter Bradshaw

Shortly after her forty-third birthday Bridget Jones (Renee Zellweger) discovers that she is pregnant but is only 50% sure who the father is: after getting drunk at a music festival she sleeps with a handsome stranger (Patrick Dempsey), and at the christening of a friend’s child she meets Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) again and they subsequently spend the night together. As her pregnancy progresses Bridget makes increasingly desperate efforts to obtain DNA samples from each man to confirm which of them is the father.

It is a truth universally accepted that a globally successful film must be in want of a sequel (or two). Thus the 2001 film of Bridget Jones’s Diary, from Helen Fielding’s bestselling novel was followed in 2004 by a looser adaptation of her novel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, with a screenplay by a team that included both Andrew Davies (whose work includes the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice that made Colin Firth’s name) and Richard Curtis. This too was globally successful and from 2009 there was discussion of a third film. Although Renee Zellweger and Colin Firth soon committed to the project, despite protracted negotiations over the screenplay Hugh Grant declined to take part. Thus the film finally went ahead without Daniel Cleaver and the screenplay, by a team that includes Fielding and Emma Thompson (who created a superb role for herself), goes back to Helen Fielding’s original columns in The Independent to produce a new story that introduces Jack Quant (Patrick Dempsey) as a rival love interest to Mark Darcy. Somewhat confusingly Helen Fielding has also just published a new novel Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries in which Daniel Cleaver, Hugh Grant’s character, plays a significant part.

On its UK release the film became the most successful romantic comedy ever. In terms of its overall performance in 2016 in the UK and Ireland it was the third most successful film of the year, being beaten only by Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. All three films are either sequels or spin-offs; this is perhaps indicative of the risk averse attitude of producers of big budget films.

 

Here's the trailer:

 

 

Love & Friendship

I'm in catch-up mode: we screened this film at the beginning of last month but I'm only now getting round to updating my blog.

One of the advantages of this time of year is that there are so many good films on release as the awards season comes into view, but the disadvantage is that with everything else going on it means that other jobs have to slip.

The film was far better than I expected and VERY different from any other adaptation of a Jane Austen Novel that I'd seen either on TV or the big screen.

Here are my notes:

Love & Friendship

Ireland/Netherlands 2016         93 minutes

Director:                                  Whit Stillman

Starring:                                    Kate Beckinsale, Xavier Samuel, Chloe Sevigny, Morfydd Clark, Tom Bennett and Stephen Fry

Awards and Nominations

• 3 wins and 32 nominations, including Film of The Year, Best Adapted Screenplay (Whit Stillman), Best Actress (Kate Beckinsale) and Best Supporting Actor (Tom Bennett) 

“What audacity, what elegance! Here is a hilariously self-aware period comedy polished to a brilliant sheen. Whit Stillman was probably born to direct a Jane Austen movie. But he has found a new way of dramatising Austen – or just found a new Austen, an Austen who appears to have pre-emptively absorbed 21st-century satire and inoculated herself against it. This Stillman has done by lighting on an early, posthumously published novella, Lady Susan, bringing it to the screen, and renaming it after a quite separate piece of juvenilia, thus playfully echoing the classic noun balances of her more famous titles.”

Peter Bradshaw

Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale), a beautiful but penniless widow, comes to the estate of her in-laws to absent herself from the colourful rumours about her past dalliances. While staying at their estate she decides to find husbands for both her debutant daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark) and herself.

In her short life Jane Austen completed six novels: four of these were published to acclaim during her lifetime, two were published posthumously and all have been adapted many times for the stage, TV and cinema. Of these the most successful have been Andrew Davis’s superb TV adaptation of Price and Prejudice (1995), which gave Colin Firth the role of a lifetime as Darcy, Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995), with an Oscar winning screenplay by Emma Thompson and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995), which updated the action of Emma to contemporary Beverley Hills. But Austen had been writing from an early age and her Juvenila included the epistolary novels Love and Freindship (sic) and Lady Susan, and it is the latter work which Whit Stillman has adapted, although he borrowed the title (with corrected spelling) from the former.

The first three films which Stillman wrote and directed – Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998) – are all comedies of manners based on his own early life, and in a recent retrospective of his work it was suggested that his films all have a sort of costume drama sensibility, but without the costumes, and now with Love & Friendship he had made a costume drama, period dress and all. However Stillman rejected this view of his film:

"Love & Friendship doesn’t loom as a costume drama, because it’s a pretty funny comedy, so it’s really not what you might anticipate. It’s not Downton Abbey in any way, shape or form. There are a lot of very good English comic actors who have done the supporting parts and really shine… I love Jane Austen. I sort of wanted something of my own to work on between paid script writing assignments. It’s good that I had so much time with no producer or studio executive wanting delivery quickly because it’s an incredibly funny novella she wrote, but hard to read and hard to dramatize. It’s an epistolary form from the 18th century and there are all these very funny ideas and lines buried within. It’s kind of an inaccessible format and it was a long process of adaptation”

The film had its premiere at the 2016 Sundance Festival before going on release in the US in May 2016 and within three months it had taken over $18 million against an estimated budget of $3 million. It is early in the current awards season but in December 2016 at the Evening Standard Film Awards Kate Beckinsale won the award for Best Actress and Tom Bennett the award for Best Supporting Actor, and in The Guardian review of the Best Films of 2016 Love & Friendship appeared in sixth place.

Here's the trailer:

 

The Love Punch

After the sublime Casablanca we screened The Love Punch as our last show before Christmas.

It caught the zeitgeist with the corporate raid and the loss of pensions as the raison d'etre for the plot, the cast were excellent and despite it being obvious from the first scene how it was going to end on the whole I enjoyed it.

Here are my notes:

The Love Punch

UK 2013                      94 minutes

Director:                      Joel Hopkins

Starring:                        Pierce Brosnan, Emma Thompson, Timothy Spall, Celia Imrie

“It really is completely absurd, and yet writer-director Hopkins carries it along at a canter... The accomplished cast do their considerable best. Likable fun.”

Peter Bradshaw

Despite their divorce Richard (Pierce Brosnan) and Kate (Emma Thompson) have an amicable relationship.  Richard is about to retire and when he learns that his pension fund has been frozen as his investment company is under investigation for fraud he and Kate decide to recover the money some other way.  With the help of a friendly couple (Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie) they travel to the south of France and plan to steal the diamond that Richard’s employer had given to his girlfriend.

 

Joel Hopkins was born in London but moved to the US to study at University.  He made his name with Jump Tomorrow (2001) which received good reviews on its limited release and was nominated for two British Independent Film Awards: the Douglas Hickox award for debut filmmakers and the Award for Best Screenplay.  He also won the BAFTA Carl Foreman Award for Most Promising Newcomer.

He met Emma Thompson while he was being considered to direct Nanny McPhee (2005) for which she had written the screenplay as well as starring as the title character.  After seeing her in a play with Dustin Hoffman he was inspired to write a film that reflected their interpersonal chemistry: the resulting film Last Chance Harvey (2008) was well received by critics.

Here's the trailer: