The Help

And as the day approaches when the clocks will spring forward into Summer Time, here are my notes for our last screening before the AGM in June:

The Help

USA 2011                    146 minutes

Director:                      Tate Taylor

Starring:                        Allison Janney, Bryce Dallas Howard, Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain, Mike Vogel, Octavia Spencer, Sissy Spacek, Viola Davis

 Awards and Nominations

• Won Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer).
• Three Oscar Nominations including Best Picture, Best Actress (Viola Davis) and Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Chastain).
• Won BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer)
• Four BAFTA Nominations including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress (Viola Davis) and Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Chastain).
• Won Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
• A further 37 wins and 46 nominations.

“Let's clear those caveats out of the way first.  The Help is a broad southern melodrama that implicitly frames the push for racial equality as the tale of oppressed African-Americans who are given their voice by a lone white do-gooder.  Its moral universe is rendered in bright cartoonish strokes while its feisty journalist heroine is conveniently allowed to float free from the mores of a culture (specifically 1960s Mississippi) she has lived in all her life. Viewed as an airbrushed, Dettol-heavy fairytale, however, it's rousingly effective.”

Xan Brooks

Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (Emma Stone) is a young white woman who returns to her home in 1960s Mississipp, during the Civil Rights era with aspirations of a career in journalism.  She befriends Abileen Clark (Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer), two black maids and) and decides to write a controversial book from their point of view (their white employers refer to them merely as "the help"), exposing the racism they are faced with as they work for white families.

 The film is based on Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel which was rejected by 60 literary agents before publication when it then spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List.  Thee book has strong autobiographical echoes of Stockett’s own life as Stocket was brought up in Mississippi by a black housekeeper and she based the character of Minny on her friend Kathryn Stockett’s who subsequently won many awards, including an Oscar and a BAFTA for her portrayal.  

The film is directed by Tate Taylor from his own screenplay.  He was a school friend of Stockett and he optioned the film rights to her book before it was even published.  His first film as director was a low budget comedy called Pretty Ugly People; with The Help he managed to secure Oscar nominations for three of the actresses and a win for Octavia Spencer.

Here's the trailer:

Sarah's Key

Here are my notes for this week's screening:

Sarah’s Key / Elle s’appelait Sarah

France 2010                 110 minutes

Director:                      Gilles Paquet-Brenner

Starring:                        Aidan Quinn, Dominique Frot, Frederic Pierrot, Kristin Scott Thomas, Melusine Mayance, Niels Arestrup

Nominations and Awards

• Kristin Scott Thomas nominated for Cesar (Best Actress)
• One further nomination and two wins

Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas) is an American journalist investigating the deportation in 1942 from occupied Paris of more than 13,000 non-French Jewish émigrés and refugees and their French-born children to their deaths in Auschwitz.  A series of flashbacks depict the events from the perspective of a young girl who witnessed them and illustrates the willing, even enthusiastic involvement of the French bureaucracy in helping the Nazis.

The key historical event of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup are true, but the film itself is based on a novel by the best-selling French author Tatiana de Rosnay which became an international success.  Kristin Scott Thomas, who is bi-lingual, delivers her English dialogue with an American accent and speaks fluent French for the scenes set in France.

The French government declined to acknowledge any state complicity in the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup until 1995 when President Chirac apologised for the part that French policemen and civil servants had played in the raid.

Here's a link to the trailer:

Love's Kitchen

Tomorrow evening we're hosting a special event: a screening of Love's Kitchen with an introduction from the director James Hackin followed by a Q&A session afterwards.

I'd heard that the film did not do well at the box office - understatement - but I hadn't realised how bad the reviews were.  I've checked  out the usual suspects, ie Wikipedia, The Guardian and The Observer, but have struggled to find very much.

After much thought I decided on simple and straightforward statements of fact...

Here are my notes, much shorter than usual:

Love’s Kitchen
UK 2011                      xxx minutes

Director:                      James Hacking

Starring:                        Dougray Scott, Claire Forlani and Simon Callow

 Rob Haley (Dougray Scott) plays a headstrong, award-winning chef who goes into decline after his wife dies.  He decides to buy an ailing country pub in a rural paradise and, inspired by a meeting with Gordon Ramsay, manages to turn it into a successful gastro-emporium.  Then he begins to date Kate Templeton (Claire Forlani) daughter of a local squire who happens to be a successful restaurant critic.

 In addition to Scott and Forlani (who are married in real life) the film also includes well-known actors of the calibre of Simon Callow (playing a food critic clearly modelled on Keith Floyd), Peter Bowles (unsurprisingly playing the village squire) and Michelle Ryan as a kitchen assistant.

The film was shot in Letchmore Heath in Hertfordshire which, as Peter Bradshaw noted in his review in The Guardian, was also the location of the 1960 sci-fi classic Village of the Damned.

Here's a link to the trailer:

Jane Eyre

These are my notes for this week's screening:

Jane Eyre

UK 2011                      121 minutes

Director:                      Cary Fukunaga

Starring:                        Mia Wasilowska, Michael Fassbinder, Judi Dench, Jamie Bell and Sally Hopkins

 Nominations and Awards

• One nomination for Best Actress (Mia Wasilowska) in the British Independent Film Awards

“Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is among the greatest of gothic novels, a page turner of such startling power, it leaves its pale latter-day imitators like Twilight flopping for air like a stranded fish.  To be sure, the dark hero of the story, Rochester, is not a vampire, but that's only a technicality. The tension in the genre is often generated by a virginal girl's attraction to a dangerous man. The more pitiful and helpless the heroine the better, but she must also be proud and virtuous, brave and idealistic. Her attraction to the ominous hero must be based on pity, not fear; he must deserve her idealism.  This atmospheric new Jane Eyre, the latest of many adaptations, understands those qualities, and also the very architecture and landscape that embody the gothic notion.”

Roger Ebert

Jane Eyre (Mia Wasilowska) arrives at the home of St John Rivers (Jamie Bell) after fleeing from Thornfield Hall, the home of Edward Rochester (Michael Fassbinder) who had engaged her as governess his young “ward” Adele and then proposed marriage on false pretences.  St John Rivers proposes marriage and a future as a Christian missionary, but subsequent events allow Jane to return to Thornfield and her true love.

Charlotte Bronte’s novel has been filmed many times with the 1944 version (from a script by Aldous Huxley) starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine in the lead roles is the best known.  The book has also inspired many other writers including Daphne du Maurier whose novel Rebecca (also filmed with Joan Fontaine) uses the same character types that Roger Ebert has notes in the quotation above.   Jean Rhys has an even closer connection with Charlotte Bronte as her novel Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Edward Rochester’s marriage to his first wife in the Caribbean.  The novel was also the inspiration for The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde, which involved a cunning plot by international villains using a prose portal to break into the novel and kidnap Jane Eyre and hold her to ransom....   

                                                                                                      

The screenplay for this new version is by the playwright and screenwriter Moira Buffini, who also wrote the screenplay for Tamara Drewe based on the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds.  Cary Fukunaga made his name with the American/Mexican film Sin Nombre (2009) for which he won the best director award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. 

Here's the trailer:

The Ghost

Here are my notes for our screening this week: 

The Ghost

UK 2010                      128 minutes

Director:                      Roman Polanski

Starring:                        Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall

Nominations and Awards

• Won Silver Bear (Best Director) at the Berlin Film Festival
• Won Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Ewan McGregor), Best Screenplay (Roman Polanski and Robert Harris), Production Design and Music at the European Film Awards
• A further 11 wins and 21 nominations

“The Ghost is Roman Polanski's best film since Tess 30 years ago, and as immaculately crafted a thriller as we're likely to see this year. It may not be in the very first rank of his pictures, of which Chinatown remains the peak. But in every respect it's a characteristic work, with echoes of those stories of intruders breaking into troubled relationships (Knife in the Water, Cul-de-sac), savvy innocents getting out of their depth (Chinatown), people losing touch with their own identities (Repulsion, The Tenant), and the operation of a malevolent fate in a world where, like Oliver Twist, the trusting hero of Polanski's last film, you need to be suspicious of the kindness of strangers.”

Philip French

Ewan McGregor plays an anonymous ghost writer hired to work on the dull memoirs of a former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) in order to justify a $10 million advance.  When he arrives in New England to begin work with Lang he discovers that his predecessor had died in mysterious circumstances, and then it seems that history might be about to repeat itself as he begins to discover alarming clues about Lang’s past in his predecessor’s notes.

 The film is based on the best-selling novel by Robert Harris, who also worked with Polanski on the screenplay which skilfully distils the complexities of the plot into a fast paced thriller.  In his novel Harris quotes Evelyn Waugh’s epigraph from Brideshead Revisited (“I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they”) but it is clear that the Langs are inspired by a recent British Prime Minister and his wife.  Pierce Brosnan gives a superb performance as Lang, and although he displays many of Blair’s characteristics he makes him a distinct character (quite unlike Michael Sheen’s uncanny impersonation of Blair in The Queen).  In a similar vein Olivia Williams turns Ruth Lang, despite her initial superficial resemblance to Cherie Blair, into a far more complex character.

Roman Polanski achieved international success with Knife in the Water (1962) and subsequently has lived and worked in the UK, the USA and most recently in Europe. In the USA his most successful film was Chinatown (1974) which received 11 Oscar nominations.  After leaving the USA in 1978 to avoid arrest he has lived and worked in Europe where his films have included Tess (1979), Death and the Maiden (1994) and The Pianist (2001), which won both the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Director. 

Following the success of The Ghost, which he shot in Germany with the bleak desolation of the North German coast standing in for Martha’s Vineyard, Polanski has recently directed Carnage, from the play God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, which was set in New York but which he filmed in studios in Paris.

Here's the trailer:

Avatar

We had our last screening after our AGM earlier this month.  Here are my notes:

Avatar


USA 2009 161 minutes

Director: James Cameron

Starring: Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang and Zoe Saldana

Nominations and Awards

• Won three Oscars (Art Direction, Special Effects and Cinematography)

• A further 41 wins an 63 nominations

“Avatar is not simply a sensational entertainment, although it is that. It’s a technological breakthrough. It has a flat-out Green and anti-war message. It is predestined to launch a cult. It contains such visual detailing that it would reward repeat viewings... It is an Event, one of those films you must see to keep up with the conversation.”

Roger Ebert

When his brother is killed, paraplegic Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) decides to take his place in a mission on the distant world of Pandora where he learns of to drive off the native humanoid Na'vi in order to mine for the precious material scattered throughout their rich woodland. Sully infiltrates the Na'vi people with the use of an "avatar" identity where he bond with the native tribe and falls in love with the beautiful alien Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). When Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) launches his plan to exterminate the Na'vi Sully has to take a stand and fight back in an epic battle for the fate of Pandora.

James Cameron began development of Avatar in 1994 and has planned to start filming after the completion of Titanic in 1997 but the necessary technology was not available for him to achieve his vision. He finally started developing is screenplay in 2006 and the film was released in December 2009. The official budget was $237 million, but other estimated have placed this as high as $310 million, with a further $150 million for promotion.

Avatar is the most expensive film made to date: Cameron deliberately cast relatively unknown actors in leading roles to reduce costs but needed a massive budget for special effects as he had developed new camera systems both to film in 3D and to allow motion-capture film making. The lead company for visual effects was Weta Digital in New Zealand who had been responsible for the special effects in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, but in order to complete the film on schedule Cameron also had to involve a number of other special effects companies, including George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic. Both Jackson and Lucas visited the set of Avatar to watch Cameron at work with his new technology.

The story includes a familiar mix of myths and archetypes and in essence transposes the themes of the traditional Western, especially those like A Man Called Horse and Dances with Wolves where the white hero takes the side of the locals against the supposedly civilised invaders, into outer space. In Aliens Cameron’s heroes were Marines fighting a war against vicious extra-terrestrials, but in Avatar, with deliberate echoes of both Iraq and Afghanistan, the Marines are the enemy and the aliens are the good guys.

Following the worldwide success of Avatar Cameron has signed with 20th Century Fox to produce two sequels.

Me and Orson Welles

These are the notes for our screening this Sunday:

Me and Orson Welles


UK 2008 114 minutes

Director: Richard Linklater

Starring: Ben Chaplin, Christian McKay, Clair Danes, Eddie Marsan, Kelly Reilly, Zac Efron, Zoe Kazan

Nominations and Awards

• BAFTA Nomination for Best Supporting Actor (Christian McKay)

• A further three wins and nine nominations

“Me and Orson Welles is not only entertaining but an invaluable companion to the life and career of the Great Man.”

Roger Ebert

In 1937 Richard Samuels (Zac Efron) on a visit to New York meets Orson Welles (Christian McKay) who hires him to play the part of Lucius in a modern dress version of Julius Caesar that he is directing at the Mercury Theatre.

The film is based on real events, although its story comes from a novel by Robert Kaplow, who had seen a photograph of Orson Welles and a young man and wondered what the young man was thinking. The majority of the characters portrayed in the film are real people and it goes to great lengths to recreate the first night of what was for its time a radical version of Shakespeare’s play: the actors wear dark green uniforms and Sam Browne belts and salute with raised arms - all deliberately chosen to echo contemporary events in Mussolini’s Italy.

The film received many positive reviews with many critics selecting Christian McKay for his performance as Welles for particular mention. McKay had not previously appeared in a leading role on screen but had played Welles in a one-man show on stage in both the UK and USA. In his review Philip French commented:

“...at the end the show belongs to Christian McKay, the fourth and best actor to play Welles on screen. When we first see him the resemblance is merely passing, but after five minutes we think we're in the presence of the arrogant, irresistible young Orson himself, such is the accuracy of the body language, the facial expressions and above all that resonant voice, purring and booming. When after the first night curtain he asks, "How the hell do I top this?", the complexity of his future life flashes before us.”

Despite its New York setting Richard Linklater shot most of the film in the UK, both at Pinewood Studios and a number of locations including the Isle of Man where the Gaiety Theatre in Douglas was used for the inside of the Mercury Theatre.

Richard Linklater made his name with a series of independent films like Slacker, Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise that have non-formulaic narratives and seemingly random occurrences, which some critics have hailed as alternatives to contemporary blockbusters. His films also concentrate on philosophical talk rather than physical action, thus linking him with traditional European art house cinema. His next film will be Bernie, a black comedy based on the true story of the murder of a rich Texan widow in the 1990s.

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:

My Sister's Keeper

These are my notes for our most recent screening.  I struggled to find postive news about the film and was not looking forward to it, but in the event it was not as bad as I thought it would be.  I've not read the book, but apparently the plot is quite differeent - to the extent of killing of the younger sister rather than letting the older one die....


My Sister’s Keeper


USA 2009 106 minutes

Director: Nick Cassavetes

Starring: Abigail Bresslin, Sofia Vassilieva, Alec Baldwin, Cameron Diaz and Emily Deschanel

Nominations and Awards

• One win and four nominations

Anna Fitzgerald (Abigail Bresslin) was conceived to be a genetic match for her sister Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) who is suffering from leukaemia. When Kate suffers from renal failure Anna sues her parents for legal emancipation in order to prevent them forcing her to donate a kidney. Her overprotective mother Anna (Cameron Diaz), who has given up a successful career as a lawyer to look after her sick daughter, is horrified when the case comes to trial in court but finally learns the reason why Anna has acted in this way.

The film is based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Jodi Picoult which has the privilege of being among the top ten of the American Library Association’s list of the most challenged books of 2009 (the list also includes such classics as To Kill A Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye and The Color Purple).

Director Nick Cassavetes (who also co-wrote the script) is the son of film director John Cassavetes. He started his career in films as an actor before directing such films as John Q, Alpha Dog, She’s So Lovely, Unhook the Stars and The Notebook.

Home

These are my notes from our last screening.  On balance I enjoyed the film: it was typically French, and any attempt at a US remake would be disastrous.

Home


Switzerland 2009 98 minutes

Director: Ursula Meier

Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Adelaide Leroux and Jacques Gamblin

Nominations and Awards

• Swiss submission for Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film

• Six wins and five nominations


“It's a nightmare metaphor for the horrors of the modern world, but will seem like everyday reality to anyone living around Heathrow or any motorway.”

Philip French

Marthe (Isabelle Huppert) and Michael (Olivier Gourmet) are living a happy, semi-bohemian life with their three children in a remote decrepit house beside an unfinished motorway. Suddenly the motorway is opened and the family becomes isolated from school, workplace and even the shops: Marthe goes to pieces while Michel purchases insulating material to soundproof the house by blocking up all the windows.

Ursula Meier was born in eastern France close to the Swiss border and studied at the Belgium Institute of Visual Arts. After making her name with a number of prize-winning short films she directed Strong Shoulders (2003) as her first full length feature film. This film was selected for the series New Directors/New Films at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2003, with Home receiving its first US screening at the same event in 2009. The film was the official Swiss entry for the foreign language film in the 2009 Academy Awards, but it did not even make the shortlist: the Oscar went to Departures, a Japanese film about an apprentice undertaker.

She wrote the script of Home for Isabelle Huppert before she had even been cast and then searched across Europe for a suitable location before finding an unfinished motorway in Bulgaria and building a house next to it.

Julie & Julia

I've just completed my notes for this week's screening:

Julie & Julia


USA 2009 123 minutes

Director: Nora Ephron

Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Stanley Tucci

Nominations and Awards

• Oscar nomination for Best Actress (Meryl Streep)

• BAFTA nomination for Best Actress (Meryl Streep)

• A further 10 wins and 12 nominations


“...the two lives hang together and the experiences of their heroines placed alongside each other offer revelations about social and cultural change over the past 60 years, from the staid age of the telex and the manual typewriter to the ubiquity of the personal computer and the mobile phone.”

Philip French

In 2002 Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a young writer with an unpleasant day job in New York decides to enjoy herself by cooking every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) by Julia Childs while blogging to document her progress. In a parallel story set in Paris in the 1950s Julia Childs (Meryl Streep) attends Le Cordon Bleu to learn about French cooking and begins work on a book about this for American housewives. After a mention of her blog in an article in The New York Times Powell is courted by a succession of journalists, literary agents and publishers, culminating in the publication of a best-selling book.

It was Streep who received the majority of the nominations and awards for her acting, but the performance of all three actors in the main roles was central to the success of the film, and these carry echoes of other films the actors have appeared in.  Julie begins to regard Julia as a mother figure and a source of inspiration to her, a relationship that echoes their roles in Doubt (2008) where Streep played the Mother Superior and Amy Adams the young nun.  In a similar happy accident of casting, Stanley Tucci as Julia’s humorous and considerate husband Paul, also played the devoted gay associate of Streep’s fashion magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada (2006).

In a career of more than 25 years Nora Ephron, initially as scriptwriter and subsequently as director, has been responsible for many successful films from Silkwood (1983) (starring Streep), Heartburn (1986) (once again with Streep) and When Harry Met Sally (1989) to Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998). Several of these films focus on people leading parallel lives, but for Julie & Julia she takes this plot structure to a different level by having them live in different periods and never meet, a structure that Stephen Daldry used for dramatic rather than comic effect in The Hours which followed the lives of three women (played by Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep again) whose only link was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

Streep received her sixteenth Oscar nomination for her performance in this film. Her next performance will be as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady with Phyllida Lloyd, who previously directed Streep in Mamma Mia! (2008), as director and also starring Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe and Richard E Grant as Michael Heseltine.

35 Shots of Rum

Here are my notes for tomorrow's screening.  The film sounds fascinating and I'm really looking forward to the screeening.

35 Shots of Rum


France 2008 100 minutes

Director: Clair Denis,

Starring: Alex Descas, Gregoire Colin, Ingrid Craven, Jean-Christophe Folly, Julieth Mars Touissant, Mati Diop and Nicole Dogue

Nominations and Awards

• One win and four nominations (including Best Director, Best Film and Best Ensemble Cast)

“There are no big, jarring cliches here; change is something that happens slowly, something to be thought about. Letting go isn’t easy, and this excellent, nuanced film refuses to pretend otherwise. It's a film you have to lean into, pay attention to and, careful now, think about”

Phelim O’Neill

Lionel (Alex Descas), a widowed train driver, has retreated in to a controlled and insular life, looking after Gabrielle (Mati Diop), his university age daughter and is almost isolated in his Paris apartment block apart from a small circle of friends. He knows that it’s time for a change and that Gabrielle needs to cut the apron strings, and then the catalyst arrives in the shape of Ruben (Jean-Christophe Folly), a worldly-wise student.

Clair Denis was born in francophone Africa and most of her films have been set there or concern people from these former colonies now living in France. In 35 Shots of Rum she also takes a few cues from the understated family dramas of Yaujiro Uzu, placing her actors as if she is setting up a still photograph and using long takes with a stationary camera, and with a tendency to frame scenes in long shot.

Clair Denis has made ten films since 1988 and the best of her early work is Beau Travail (1999), a loose transposition of Melville’s Billy Budd to a Foreign Legion barracks in Djibouti. Her most recent film is White Material (2009) starring Isabelle Huppert and Christopher Lambert which is set back in Africa and concerns a white French family struggling to save its coffee plantation in the face of political uprising among the local population.

She is also Professor of Film at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

The Lovely Bones

As a result of the Christmas break we have two screenings in one week.  These are my notes for Thursday's film:

The Lovely Bones


USA 2009 135 minutes

Director: Peter Jackson

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for an Oscar (Stanley Tucci) as Best Supporting Actor

• Nominated for an BAFTAs (Saoirse Ronan) as Best Actress and (Stanley Tucci) as Best Supporting Actor

• A further seven wins and 18 nominations

“...an uneasy mixture of crime thriller, horror flick and religious inspirational, with borrowings from Always (the remake by The Lovely Bones producer Steven Spielberg of the wartime ghost movie, A Guy Named Joe), Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Molnar’s Liliom (or at least the musical version, Carousel).”

Philip French

After her murder Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) watches over her parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) as well as George Harvey (Stanley Tucci) – her killer – from heaven. She wants revenge on the man who murdered her, but she needs to weigh this against her desire for her family to heal.

The film is based on the award-winning and best-selling novel by Alice Sebold. Film4 Productions initially acquired the film rights to the novel before it was published and by 2001 Lynne Ramsay (acclaimed director of Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002)) had been hired to adapt the novel and make the film. Following the closure of Film4 Productions Steven Spielberg expressed an interest acquiring the film rights, although finally it was Peter Jackson who was successful in negotiating a deal to develop the project using the same writing team he had used for The Lord Of The Rings to produce the screenplay; Steven Spielberg joined the project in the role of Executive Producer.

The subject matter of the story, the rape and murder of 14 year old girl, posed certain problems for the film makers: Jackson had originally expected that the film would appeal to a “sophisticated, adult audience” but after average reviews the studio began to redirect the film towards females aged 13-20 as this was the demographic that had favoured the film most; it is this same demographic that has made the Twilight franchise such a success.  Consequently Jackson softened and omitted the nastier elements (the rape is only implied in order to achieve the 12A certificate) of the story. Critics gave the film mixed reviews, but were generally unanimous in their praise for the actors, especially Stanley Tucci and Saoirse Ronan.

Peter Jackson made his name with the critically successful Heavenly Creatures (1994), a story of two young girls who become psychologically driven to commit murder, but achieved global fame following the commercial and critical success of his three film adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings (2001-2003). His current project is to take over the direction of two films based on JRR Tolkien’s early novel The Hobbit, after Guillermo del Toro (director of Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy series) had to withdraw from the project which Jackson had initially only agreed to produce.

A Serious Man

Welcome to 2011!  Here are my notes for our first screening of the New Year:

A Serious Man


USA 2009 105 minutes

Director: Ethan and Joel Cohen

Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick, Richard Kind and Fred Melamed

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for two Oscars (Best Film and Best Original Screenplay)

• A further eight wins and 28 nominations including BAFTA nomination for best original screenplay


“If it is possible to imagine a Woody Allen script with all the schtick exfoliated, and then filmed by Lynch, that master of conveying the under-the-skin bizarreness of small-town America, you have A Serious Man. Although perplexing and unnerving, with a finale that will not satisfy all tastes, the Coen brothers' latest film is the most daring project they have ever undertaken. It is mordant. It is philosophical. It addresses all the big questions. It is frequently hilarious. And it feels like somewhere along the line David Lynch took over.”

Joe Queenan

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor of theoretical physics in Minnesota in 1967 is planning his son’s bar mitzvah when his wife (Sari Lennick) tells him that their marriage is over: she wants a divorce so that she can marry Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), a smug and wealthy widower. Larry has never been particularly religious, but with his life suddenly in pieces he becomes convinced that only the local rabbis can help him.

Joel and Ethan Coen grew up in a Jewish household in Minnesota in the 1960s and in A Serious Man they have produced a story that for the first time is set both in the location and at the time in which they grew up. The film is quite different from any of its predecessors and their decision not to cast established film stars (Michael Stuhlbarg was cast on the basis of his stage work in New York and has very few film credits, even in minor roles) means that it is difficult for an audience to get its bearings as the story develops. Also the film begins in an entirely unexpected way, with an unsettling folk tale drenched in mortality and fear that may – or may not – be linked to the main story. The Coens have always produced films which contain a brilliant mix of bright comedy and bitter darkness, and when as in A Serious Man they get the balance right the result can be marvellous.

In a career of more than 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, A Serious Man received two Oscar nominations, and their most recent film, a remake of True Grit with Jeff Bridges in the lead role, has just opened to rave reviews and whispers of potential Oscar nominations.

Gran Torino

These are my notes for our Sunday screening:

Gran Torino


USA 2008 116 minutes

Director: Clint Eastwood

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Ahney Her, Bee Vang, Christopher Carley and John Carroll Lynch

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for Golden Globe

• A further 13 wins and 7 nominations

"It is a film that is impossible to imagine without the actor in the title role. The notion of a 78-year-old action hero may sound like a contradiction in terms, but Eastwood brings it off, even if his toughness is as much verbal as physical. Even at 78, Eastwood can make 'Get off my lawn' sound as menacing as 'Make my day,' and when he says 'I blow a hole in your face and sleep like a baby,' he sounds as if he means it."

Kenneth Turan

Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) is a recently widowed veteran of the Korean War who has become alienated from his family and angry at the world. Thao (Bee Vang), the bookish son of Kowalski’s Hmong neighbours, attempts to steal his prized 1972 Ford Gran Torino as part of an initiation into a gang. Kowalski prevents the theft, and then begins to develop a relationship with both the boy and his family.

The screenplay is by Nick Schenk who was trying to develop a story about a widowed Korean War veteran trying to come to terms with changes in his neighbourhood. Based on his own his own experience of meeting such refugees he decided to place a Hmong family among Kowalski’s neighbours in order to create a culture clash: the Hmong had sided with the South Vietnamese and the Americans during the Vietnam War and ended up in refugee camps with the South Vietnamese lost the war and the Americans pulled out. Schenk was advised by industry insiders that a film with elderly characters as it could not be sold, but Eastwood was able both to direct and star in it as production on Invictus, his next film as director, had slipped to early 2009.

Eastwood said that he “had a fun and challenging role, and it’s an oddball story”. The film has an elegiac quality and Eastwood has indicated that after starring in more 40 films (many of which he also directed) at the age of 78 this is likely to be his final acting experience. The good news is that with 35 credits as director he shows little sign of wanting to slow down: since Gran Torino he has directed both Invictus (2009) and Hereafter (2010) and is currently working on Hoover, a biography of J Edgar Hoover, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role.

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.

Broken Embraces (Los Abrozos Rotos)

These are my notes for Broken Embraces which we will screen on Sunday evening:

Broken Embraces (Los Abrozos Rotos)

Spain 2009 127 minutes

Director: Pedro Almodovar

Starring: Angela Molina, Blanca Portillo, Jose Luiz Gomez, Lluis Homar, Penelope Cruz, Ruben Ochandiano and Tamar Novas

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for BAFTA (Best Film not in the English language)

• Nominated for Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival

“...a richly enjoyable piece of work, slick and sleek, with a sensuous feel for the cinematic surfaces of things and, as ever, self-reflexively infatuated with the business of cinema itself.”


Peter Bradshaw

Harry Caine (Lluis Homar) is a blind scriptwriter who is assisted by his faithful assistant Judit (Blanca Portillo) and her son Diego (Tamar Novas).  His past catches up with him when he hears of the death of Ernesto Martel (Jose Luiz Gomez), a wealthy businessman who had hired him, then known as Mateo Blanco, to direct an ironic comedy called Girls and Suitcases and starring the beautiful Lena (Penelope Cruz) who had become Martel’s mistress to pay her father’s medical bills.  Blanco fell in love with Lena, and Martel sent his gay son to film the making of the film and to give him the daily footage which he obsessively scrutinised.  Blanco and Lena ran away together, but they were involved in a car crash which left Blanco blind.

Almodovar has a lifelong obsession with cinema, and cinematic references homages and quotations appear throughout his films and are often part of their fabric: All About My Mother combines elements of All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire, but Broken Embraces is actually about film and the process of making films, which Almodovar suggests is a metaphor for life itself.  The style of the film is 1950s American film noir, but the story, with its dual narrative and father/son and straight gay opposites is reminiscent of other Almodovar films.  Additionally Girls and Suitcases, is a pastiche of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1987) which was Almodovar’s first major success.  The cast also includes many Almodovar regulars such as Angela Molina and Penelope Cruz (in her fourth Almodovar film).

The film was first screened in competition in the 2009 Cannes Film Festival along with Inglourious Basterds and Looking For Eric but lost the Palme d’Or to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (which we screened in our 2009 season).

The Hurt Locker

We will be screening The Hurt Locker on Thursday 4th November.  My notes are as follows:

The Hurt Locker


USA 2008 (131 minutes)

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Starring: Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Christian Camargo, David Morse, Guy Pearce, Jeremy Renner and Ralph Fiennes

Nominations and Awards

• Won six Oscars including Best Film, Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow) and Best Original Screenplay (Mark Boal)

• Won five BAFTAs including Best Film, Best Director Kathryn (Bigelow) and Best Original Screenplay (Mark Boal), Best Cinematography and Best Editing.

• A further 68 wins and 47 nominations

The film is set in and around Baghdad in 2004 and follows the final 38 days of a tour of duty of an American bomb disposal squad.

The script is by Mark Boal, a freelance journalist and scriptwriter who was embedded with an America bomb disposal squad in Iraq for two weeks.  Boal turned his experiences into a fictional reworking of real events and explained his objective in writing the script:

"The idea is that it's the first movie about the Iraq War that purports to show the experience of the soldiers. We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can't see on CNN, and I don't mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn't actually put photographers in with units that are this elite."

Bigelow, who had previously worked with Boal when she turned one of his articles into a short-lived TV series, expanded on this: she aimed to explore “the psychology behind the type of soldier who volunteers for this particular conflict and then, because of his or her aptitude, is chosen and given the opportunity to go into bomb disarmament and goes forward [sic] what everybody else is running from.”

Most of the serious films that Hollywood had previously produced about Iraq such as Syriana (2005), Lion for Lambs (2007) and Rendition (2007) had been liberal-patriot multi-stranded stories set in Washington, the Middle East and elsewhere with big name stars in the leading roles. For The Hurt Locker, in addition to sole location of Baghdad and the surrounding area (but filmed in the sweltering heat of Jordan and Kuwait) Bigelow deliberately made a point of casting relatively unknown actors in the leading roles as “it underscored the tension because with the lack of familiarity also comes a sense of unpredictability”.

The Hurt Locker had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2008 where it received a ten minute standing ovation at the end of its screening. It received many other festival screenings around the world but distributors were reluctant to buy it for screening in the US as previous films about the Iraq War had performed badly at the box office. The film eventually opened in the US in June 2009 in a few cinemas, and as such became eligible for consideration for the 2010 Oscars. Subsequently it was screened in more than 500 cinemas and received nine Oscar nominations and won six, including Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win this award.

30 Days of Night

These are my notes from last night's screening - a far cry from the house-trained vampires of the Twilight world:

30 Days of Night


USA 2009 (113 minutes)

Director: David Slade

Starring: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George and Danny Huston

Nominations and Awards

• Nine nominations including four for best horror film.

“For all that die from the preying of the Undead become themselves Undead, and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown in the water.”

Bram Stoker

Each year the town of Barrow in Alaska has a month in which the sun does not arise, the so-called “Thirty Days of Night”. Some inhabitants leave the town and go south for the month while others carry on with normal life. During this period a group of vampires attack the town and start to massacre its inhabitants, but the survivors, led by Sheriff Eben Olseon (Josh Hartnett), fight back and a grim battle for survival ensues.

The film is based on a graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith which they wrote after their initial film treatment received no interest from studios. The subsequent film deal was brokered with Sam Raimi acting as producer; he had been attracted by Templesmith’s unique mood and concepts for the vampires and noted that the project was “unlike the horror films of recent years”. A straight to video sequel entitled 30 Days of Night: Dark Days is due for release in October 2010.

30 Days of Night sits firmly within the sub-genre of vampire films that links directly back to Nosferatu (1922), the greatest of the silent versions, in which Max Schreck portrayed vampire as the hideous creature from European mythology, a creature whose sole desire is to feed on the blood of others. Other films within this tradition include Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979), with Klaus Kinski as the vampire, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1979) (where the appearance of the vampire was based on Max Schreck’s Count Orlok) and the brilliant Let The Right One In (2008) in which a vampire in the form of a young girl helps a young boy to defeat the bullies who are making his life a misery. The Swedish film Frostbiten is set in Lapland and follows essentially the same story as 30 Days of Night but treats it as a farce.

Earlier this year Stephen King bemoaned the way in which the vampire genre has recently been hijacked by "lovelorn southern gentlemen and … boy-toys with big, dewy eyes", referring of course to the global success of the films based on Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight novels: David Slade is currently directing Eclipse, the most recent film in this series.

A Single Man

These are my notes for the film we will be screening tonight:

A Single Man


USA 2009 (99 minutes)

Director: Tom Ford

Starring: Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult

Awards and Nominations

• Won BAFTA for Best Leading Actor (Colin Firth)

• Nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Colin Firth)

• A further 12 wins and 23 nominations

“...an indulgent exercise in 1960s period style, glazed with 21st-century good taste, a 100-minute commercial for men’s cologne: Bereavement by Dior.”

Peter Bradshaw

George Falconer (Colin Firth), an ex-pat English professor at a Los Angeles college in 1962 is struggling to cope after the death of his long term partner Jim (Matthew Goode) in a car accident. He plans to commit suicide and the film follows him over the course of his final day as he meets various people including Charley (Julianne Moore), a semi-alcoholic divorcee, and Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), a bisexual student, but these encounters force him to reconsider his decision.

The film is based on a semi-autobiographical 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood that is set at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, i.e. before the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, when Isherwood was concerned about losing his young partner who wanted to move from Los Angeles to the more relaxed atmosphere of San Francisco. Isherwood’s decision to set the action over the course of one day was inspired by his admiration for Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which took its structure from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Another critic noted the novel’s resemblance to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, even going so far as to suggest that its title could be Death in Venice, Cal.

Colin Firth received unanimous praise as well many awards for his performance in the film. In The Guardian Peter Bradshaw noted that the role of Falconer

“is such a perfect match for Firth’s habitual and superbly calibrated performance register: withdrawn, pained, but sensual, with sparks of wit and fun.”

He made his film debut with a lead role in Another Country (1984), but it was his role as Mr Darcy in the TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1996) that brought him to international attention. Since this success he has appeared in a wide variety of films on a regular basis, ranging from art house to purely commercial, but it is A Single Man that has brought him his greatest critical acclaim to date. He has recently received rave reviews as well as predictions of future awards for his performance as George VI in The King’s Speech (2010) which will receive its first UK screening at the 2010 London Film Festival.

Tom Ford made his name as creative director for Gucci and YSL before setting up his own brand – Tom Ford – in 2005. In his new role he had dressed many of Hollywood’s leading men, and in parallel with his own label also established his own film production company. A Single Man is the first film that his company has produced as well as his first film as director.