This blog contains the notes that I write for the films we screen in our village film society together with other posts about films I've seen or film related articles and books that I've read.
I am a lifelong reader of The Observer and until his retirement one of the regular highlights of the paper was Philip French's film review.
It was from his writing that I began to learn that cinema can be much more than what is on at the local multiplex, that it has a history that constantly influences even the most anodyne of commercial releases, and that it is possible to write well about even the worst films. he also had a brilliant sense of humour and could never miss the chance to work a cringe-making pun into an otherwise serious review.
With the holidays behind us we can re-start our Film Club screenings.
Our first film for 2014, in an attempt to pull in the punters, is The Great Gatsby. It's been a bit of a struggle to produce the notes as I'm still getting used to the alarm clock in the morning, but I've just finished them and here thay are:
The
Great Gatsby USA 2013143
minutes
Director: Baz
Luhrmann
Starring:Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey
Mulligan, and Tobey Maguire
“So what of this 3D
fourth screen version of The Great
Gatsby?It is, you might
say, a story of three eggs.The
mysterious central character is the self-made Jay Gatsby, a millionaire
bootlegger who in the summer of 1922 lives at West Egg, the township outside
Manhattan on Long Island Sound where the nouveaux riches have built their
mansions.Across the bay at East Egg are
the grand houses of the old-money people, among them the rich, brutal, Ivy
League philistine Tom Buchanan, husband of the southern belle Daisy, whom
Gatsby courted as an officer and temporary gentleman in the First World War.After losing her to Buchanan because he was
penniless, he now seeks to recapture her.The third egg is Baz Luhrmann's curate's
egg of a film, good and bad in parts, but mainly a misconceived venture.
Luhrmann is a cheerful vulgarian and his movie suggestive of Proust directed by
Michael Winner.”
Philip
French
Awards
and Nominations
11
wins
30
nominations
Despite the title,
the film’s main character is Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) who is the
unreliable narrator of Fitzgerald’s source novel as well as the catalyst who brings
the enigmatic Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Daisy (Carey Mulligan) together
again.The film follows the structure of
the novel by having Carraway as the narrator, but anchors it in reality by
making him tell it in flashback as part of his treatment for depression and
alcoholism just after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.Luhrmann emphasis this literary conceit by makings
words from the book float in the air around Carraway with some lines from the
novel actually written on the camera lens.
Many critics praised
DiCaprio’s central performance as the millionaire bootlegger and some praised
the vibrant energy of Luhrmann’s production, but as Scott Foundas pointed out
in Variety:
“...what
Luhrmann grasps even less than previous adapters of the tale is that
Fitzgerald... was offering an eyewitness account of the decline of the American
empire, not an initiation to the ball.”
With the sound track
of the film Luhrmann follows the precedent that he set on MoulinRouge in using
deliberately anachronistic songs which nonetheless help to build up the atmosphere
of the Jazz Age.But Philip French notes
several less obvious anachronisms in other details of the production: it is unlikely that Nick could have read Ulysses while still at Yale as it was
only published in Paris in 1922 while Rhapsody
in Blue is performed at one of Gatsby’s parties two years before Gershwin
wrote it.
The
Great Gatsby has been adapted for the screen six
times.These include a silent version
(now lost) and a 1949 adaptation that starred Alan Ladd as Gatsby as well as
the more famous 1974 version (from a script by Francis Ford Coppola) that
starred Robert Redford as Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy and Sam Waterston as Nick
Carraway.Additionally it has inspired ballets,
musicals as well as several stage adaptations, including one in which the cast
performed the full text of the novel in a production that lasted over eight
hours.
I particularly like his description of the role of the critic:
For Kermode, a critic should first "accurately describe a film and then ascribe it to the right school of film, before mentioning its tangential connections to other films. Beyond that, your opinion is opinion and my feeling is that you should be honest about that. I don't think the reader has to agree with you and I don't think a critic is there to tell you what to see. They are there to contextualise, to describe, to be passionately honest and entertaining."
When we started out film society each of the committee members took on a different responsibility. Our treasurer is an accountant and we have two techies who can set up he projector and sound system in what looks like a couple of minutes.
This did not leave much foe me to do. Initially I took on responsibility for the bar and ensured we have sufficient stocks for our screenings - in terms of profitability we are a wine club that screens films. However we also realised that we needed to provide information on our films to our customers, and so I took on responsibility for producing film notes.
As a lifelong reader of The Guardian and The Observer I always read the reviews by Peter Bradshaw and Philip French, but as I started googling for information about some of our more obscure films I started finding more and more references to Roger Ebert and his reviews. Soon he became a regular source of material, and it was always a pleasure to read both his blog and his reviews of just about any film, not just the next one that we were due to screen.
I knew he had been ill, but his sudden death was a real shock. The following website is a fitting tribute to his brilliant life and career:
