Their Finest

The less "official" work I have to do, the more my day seems to fill up with other urgent matters: hence there is less time for me to keep this blog up to date.

Thus although we have finished our screenings for the Christmas period I am behind with posting my notes, so here we go with the first catch-up session.

Their Finest was my recommendation after having seen it at the cinema. It was good to see that it went down well, I enjoyed it even more at a second viewing and I was delighted to see that Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian has nominated the screenplay as one of the best of the year.

Here are my notes:

Their Finest

UK 2016          117 minutes

Director:          Lone Scherfig

Starring:            Gemma Arterton, Sam Clafin, Bill Nighy, Jack Huston and Paul Ritter

Awards and Nominations

• Nominations for Best Debut Screenplay (Gaby Chiappe) and Best Effects at the British Independent Film Awards
• One other win and one other nomination

“You’d need a heart of stone and a funny bone of porridge not to enjoy this sweet-natured and eminently lovable British film – a 1940s adventure, with moments of brashness and poignancy. It’s all about the love that flowers in the ruins of blitz-hit London and in the dusty offices of the Ministry of Information’s film unit as various high-minded creative types use the magic of cinema to keep the nation’s pecker up.”

Peter Bradshaw

 

During the London Blitz Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) is recruited by the Ministry of Information to write scripts for propaganda films that the public will like, and investigates a story of two young girls who supposedly piloted a boat to help with the evacuation at Dunkirk. The story turns out to be not entirely true but it provides the basis of a feature film that the MoI team decide to make. They cast veteran actor Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy) in a supporting role and as the film goes into production they constantly have to revise the script to meet government requirements, including the unexpected addition of an American character to the beaches of Dunkirk so that the film will help the appeal to the US to join the war on the Allied side.

The film is one of several recent releases – Dad’s Army (2016), Darkest Hour (2017), Dunkirk (2017) and Churchill (2017) – that cover an earlier period in British history which involved certain difficulties relating to events in mainland Europe. Perhaps this focus on Europe reflects current political pre-occupations, although the government’s approach to the Brexit negotiations seems to be far closer to the Home Guard of Walmington-on-Sea rather than to Churchill, as depicted in Darkest Hour, who as a newly appointed Prime Minister in the summer of 1940 used his eloquence to persuade the Cabinet to continue to fighting Hitler and the Nazis rather than seek some form of negotiated settlement; this was the decisive event which saved the country and which Simon Schama has rightly described as “the first great battle of the Second World War”.

In his enthusiastic review of the film Peter Bradshaw focuses on the filmmaking part of the story rather than its historical context and compares the film with Truffaut’s La Nuit Americaine (1973):

“It’s a film unashamedly and cheerfully in love with the conjuring tricks and artifice of cinema. There’s a showstopping matte shot of massed troops on the Dunkirk beach, painted on to glass, and a demonstration of how dubbing and editing can create an illusion of physical presence. Truffaut talked about la nuit americaine – here’s a film about la nuit britannique, a very British kind of film magic. In an earlier scene, Amanda Root plays an actress wearing a hat that recalls Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, and later there’s a scene next to a mocked-up third-class railway carriage.”

Lone Scherfig began her career in Denmark before making her name internationally with the Oscar-nominated An Education (2009). Her subsequent work has included One Day (2011), an adaptation of the novel by David Nicholls, and The Riot Club (2014), a filmed version of Laura Wade’s play Posh.

 Here's a link to the trailer:

 

 

 

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:

Tamara Drewe

For once I'm actually ahead of myself.  We'll be screening Tamara Drewe on Thursday and I finished my notes last week.

Tamara Drewe


UK 2010 114 minutes

Director: Stephen Frears

Starring: Gemma Arterton, Dominic Cooper, Luke Evans, Roger Allam and Tamsin Greig

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for two awards

“Like the filthiest possible feature-length episode of The Archers, and with a tiny conceptual dash of Straw Dogs, Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel series Tamara Drewe has been converted into a fantastically mad and undeniably entertaining bucolic romp...”

Peter Bradshaw

Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton), a successful newspaper columnist, returns to the picturesque Dorset village of Ewedown where she grew up with plans to write a chick-lit bestseller. Her ex-boyfriend Andy (Luke Evans) has not moved away and realises that he is still in love with her, but Tamara begins a passionate relationship with Ben Sergeant (Dominic Cooper), a narcissistic rock star. The village also includes a writers’ retreat run by crime writer and serial adulterer Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam) who also takes a fancy to Tamara. Two young village girls, bored with their empty lives, sneak into Tamara’s house and use her computer to send an identical Valentine message to all three men.

The film is based on a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds which appeared first as a weekly strip in The Guardian before being published as a book. If the story sounds familiar it is because Simmonds has reworked Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd in a contemporary rural setting and has used the plot both to satirise the pretensions of literary life, a recurrent theme in her work, as well as to expose the crisis in the modern countryside, where people commit deplorable acts out of resentment and sheer boredom.

Stephen Frears (and screenplay writer Moira Buffini) have turned the story into another “State of the Nation” film that have featured regularly in Frears’ long career. Frears has made twenty feature films as diverse as My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity and The Queen, but as Philip French has noted he has shown an interest in certain recurrent themes and situations, including the taking of moral decisions in precarious situations, the secret manipulation of other people’s lives and the often unintended consequences of everyday actions.

Gemma Arterton’s first film appearance was as the Head Girl in St Trinians and her first role of significance was the Bond girl Strawberry Fields in A Quantum of Solace. She subsequently played Tess in a TV adaptation of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Immediately before Tamara Drewe she appeared in the blockbusters Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia, and she recently received rave reviews for her performance on stage in Ibsen’s The Master Builder at the Almeida.

Here's the trailer: