The Bookshop

This film was an unexpected pleasure. I'd not read the book but I'd seen the reviews, wanted to see the film, but it disappeared from general release before I managed to catch it.

The presence of Bill Nighy in a film always brings in an audience, although some people are still in recovery from having seen The Limehouse Golem.

Here are my notes:

The Bookshop

UK 2017          113 minutes

Director:          Isabel Coixet

Starring:            Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy and Patricia Clarkson

Awards and Nominations:

• 14 wins including Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Bill Nighy) and Best Actress (Emily Mortimer)
• A further 32 nominations

“The Spanish film-maker Isabel Coixet brings an interesting, unsentimental detachment to this odd tragicomedy of provincial life. She refuses the familiar grace notes of comedy and sugary romance in favour of something more awkward and angular.”

Peter Bradshaw

In 1959 Florence Green (Emily Mortimer), a young widow, decides to risk everything by moving to a sleepy seaside town where she opens its first bookshop. By stocking novels like Lolita and Fahrenheit 451 she opens the eyes of the local residents to the best of modern literature and gains the support of reclusive bachelor Edmund Brundish (Bill Nighy) but her actions incur the wrath of the influential and ambitious Mrs Gamart (Patricia Clarkson) who plans to use the bookshop premises to set up an arts centre. The uncredited narration is by Julie Christie.

The film is an adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1978 novel which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The almost twenty year chronological gap between the setting of the novel and its composition allowed Fitzgerald the perspective to create a story driven by the conflict between small town nostalgia fixated on heritage and an emerging metropolitan liberal progressiveness that in terms of bookselling would culminate several years later in the prosecution and acquittal of Penguin Books for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover. However looking at the film at the current moment it is possible to see the story from another perspective, this time political, in that many Brexit supporters espouse a nostalgia for a past that never existed while many Remainers share a liberal and Eurocentric mindset.

Coixet directed the film from her own screenplay, and in an interview about her work to date she declared that she helps “untangle films from their national context, … clearing the path for thinking about national film from different perspectives”; in this case she has changed the perspective of the story by using locations in Northern Ireland to represent Fitzgerald’s fictional Suffolk coastal town. Throughout all her films she identifies recurrent themes of “emotions, feelings, and existential conflict” although both the setting and time in which The Bookshop is set ensured that for this film her characters repress their emotions and button down their feelings.

All of Coixet’s films have a distinct visual style (she works as her own camera operator), she works in both Spanish and English and she has also acted as a producer for films directed by others; as such within Spain she is regarded as a Catalan auteur. She began her career in advertising where her clients included such global brands as BMW, Renault and Ikea before moving into cinema, although continuing to make commercials through her own production company. On its release in Spain The Bookshop received both a positive critical response as well as great public success. The film received it premier outside of Spain at the 68^th Berlin International Film Festival.

Here is the trailer:

The Limehouse Golem

I have always enjoyed Peter Ackroyd's books, but for some reason I had never read Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. I saw the film at the cinema and then read the book, and was hugely impressed by the way the adaptation converted a novel with such a complex structure into such a superb film.

When we screened it we attracted a number of Bill Nighy fans, but they were somewhat surprised to see him, for once, in a dramatic role.

The Limehouse Golem

UK 2016          109 minutes

Director:          Juan Carlos Medina

Starring:            Bill Nighy, Olivia Cooke and Douglas Booth

“All the world’s a bloody stage in this gothic Victorian East End melodrama, splendidly adapted from a 1994 novel by Peter Ackroyd. A tale of theatrical murder drenched in the rich hues of classic-period Hammer, this gaslit treat sets Bill Nighy’s Scotland Yard detective on the trail of a grisly killer in 1880s London. Swinging between the ghoulish gaiety of the music hall and the grim stench of the morgue, the second feature from Insensibles/Painless director Juan Carlos Medina is a deliciously subversive affair, nimbly adapted by super-sharp screenwriter Jane Goldman and vivaciously played by an impressive ensemble cast.”

Mark Kermode

Awards and Nominations

• Three nominations including Best Film and Best Actor (Bill Nighy)

There is a serial killer – known popularly as the Limehouse Golem – who leaves notes written in his victim’s blood on the loose in Victorian London. Scotland Yard appoints Inspector Kildare (Bill Nighy) to investigate the case whose suspects include music hall star Dan Leno (Douglas Booth), Karl Marx (Henry Goodman), writer George Gissing (Morgan Watkins) and playwright John Cree (Sam Reid). When John Cree is poisoned and his wife Lizzie (Olivia Crooke) is accused of his murder Kildare believes that identifying Cree as the Limehouse Golem will save Lizzie from the gallows.

Screenwriter Jane Goldman has reconfigured the story of Peter Ackroyd’s novel to make it a police procedural and has elevated the role of Kildare, mentioned only briefly in the novel, into the central character but as in so many of Ackroyd’s books, both novels and non-fiction, London is also a major character. Ackroyd anchors this story in the reality of London’s history with its reference to the Ratcliff Highway murders, two attacks on separate families in 1811 that resulted in seven deaths: Thomas de Quincey famously wrote about the murders and Ackroyd has his murderer leave a series of clues in the text of this work in the British Museum. Beyond the British Museum are the streets of London and the world of the music hall and the film contrasts the washed out streets teeming with opium addicts and prostitutes with the brilliant and colourful world of the music hall which provides Londoners with a temporary escape from the drudgery of their lives. But within the world of the music hall nothing is quite as it seems as Dan Leno made his name as a female impersonator, Lizzie Cree performs dressed as a man, and love and death are always in close proximity. 

There had been plans to film the book for many years and the diverse list of potential previous directors includes James Ivory, Terry Gilliam and Neil Jordan. Originally it had been planned that Alan Rickman should play Kildare, but his illness forced his withdrawal and replacement by Bill Nighy, who plays a rare dramatic role. The film is dedicated to Alan Rickman.

Juan Carlos Medina made his name with the Spanish horror film Painless/Insensibles (2012). Since The Limehouse Golem his work has included two episodes each of the TV series Origins and A Discovery of Witches

Here is a link to the trailer:

About Time

As we were due to screen a film the day after Valentine's day we decided to select a rom com. there do not seem to have been too many recent such films, certainly none that would appeal to our audiences, so we went back in time to choose this one.

I had missed it at the cinema and remembered the positive reviews, and the combination of director and stars promised an enjoyable film. I enjoyed it, although it was not in the same league as the films that Curtis had written for Hugh Grant, but any film with a ginger-haired hero called Tim has to be worth watching.

Here are my notes:

About Time

UK 2013          123 minutes

Director:          Richard Curtis

Starring:            Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams and Bill Nighy

Awards and Nominations

• Three wins and ten nominations

“As far as we know, Richard Curtis cannot travel through time. But the kingpin of the Britcom can get a huge movie off the ground. And, along with the possible, Curtis has managed to achieve the impossible. Specifically: he has gone back to 1993 and remade Groundhog Day with a ginger Hugh Grant.”

Catherine Shoard

At the age of 21 Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) learns from his father (Bill Nighy) that the adult men in his family have the ability to travel back in time: they cannot change history, but they can change what has happened in their own lives. When Tim falls in love with Mary (Rachel McAdams) he uses his powers to woo her successfully, but inevitably the subsequent use of his powers has other unforeseen consequences for their future lives together.

In the immortal words of the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) in Blink time is “a big ball of wibbly, wobbly, timey wimey stuff”; as such stories about time travel are popular with scriptwriters as it gives them so much flexibility with their plots. About Time is Richard Curtis’s first foray into what could be called science fantasy rom com and follows in the tracks of the classic Groundhog Day (1993) as well as Sliding Doors (1998) and more recently The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009) (which also starred Rachel McAdams). However Curtis manages to infuse the concept with his own brand of a particularly English type of rom com that produced the classic screenplays for Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999) and Love Actually (2003), and the film builds on these thematic links by the casting of Bill Nighy, who was a member of the large ensemble cast for Love Actually, and Domhnall Gleeson, described by one critic as a ginger replicant Hugh Grant, the star of the earlier films that Curtis had written.

The film was well reviewed despite several gaping plot holes relating to the rules governing time travel: Doctor Who always manages to skirt such inconsistencies by allowing the Doctor to claim, depending on the exigencies of the plot, either that time can be rewritten or that a particular event is a fixed point in time that cannot under any circumstances be changed. Nonetheless the film was a commercial success, especially in South Korea where it became a surprise hit.

Richard Curtis announced that this film, his third that he has directed, is likely to be his last as director, although he would continue to work in the film industry. He is currently working on the story for the film to Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, which will be released later in 2018. In parallel with his film work Curtis has worked extensively for television where he has written scripts for Blackadder, Mr Bean, The Vicar of Dibley and The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. Somewhat unexpectedly, although in the circumstances quite relevant for this film, in 2010 he even wrote a story for Doctor Who, which ended with the Doctor bringing Vincent van Gogh to present day Paris to see his work in the Musée d'Orsay (with Bill Nighy playing an uncredited role as a bowtie-wearing art curator).

Here's a link to the trailer:

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:

 

 

 

Pride

This was our first screening after the New Year: a delayed posting after some unexpected functionality in Windows 10 managed to disable my keyboard for several days. Fortunately I was able to resurrect my old lap top to produce the notes in time.

Pride

 UK 2014                      120 minutes

Director:                      Matthew Warchus

Starring:                        Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, Dominic West, Paddy Considine and Andrew Scott

 Awards and Nominations

• Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture – Musical or Comedy
• BAFTA Award for Best Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer plus Nominations for Best British Film and for Imelda Staunton as Best Supporting Actress
•  BIFA awards for Best British Independent Film, Best Supporting Actress (Imelda Staunton) and Best Supporting Actress (Andrew Scott) plus four further nominations
• Winner of Queer Palm at Cannes Film Festival
• A further three wins and nine nominations

“OK, so it may not have the toughness of Brassed Off or the fleet-footedness of Billy Elliot, but what it does have is spine-tingling charm by the bucket-load. I laughed, I cried, and frankly I would have raised a clenched fist were both hands not already occupied wiping away the bittersweet tears of joy.”

Mark Kermode

During the miners’ strike in the 1980s a group of gay and lesbian activists decide to raise money to support miners’ families. The National Union of Miners is unwilling to accept the group’s support as it does not want to be openly associated with a gay group, so the activists decide to take their donation directly to a mining village in Wales. There is surprise in the village when the activists arrive, but ultimately the two communities build a strong alliance.

Like Brassed Off, The Full Monty and Billy Elliot the film is set against the context of consequences of Britain’s industrial troubles in the 1980s, but unlike the former three films the story of Pride is based on real events.   Many of the individuals in the large cast of characters were real people, with Imelda Staunton in particular receiving excellent reviews for her portrayal of Hefina Headon, being described by one critic as “part Mother Courage and part Hilda Ogden”.

Matthew Warchus is best known as a stage director: he has worked extensively in both the UK in the UK where he has directed both classic and contemporary plays as well as the musical Matilda.  He has directed several plays at the Old Vic in London, including Speed-the-Plow (a superb satire on Hollywood that starred Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum) as well as Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests trilogy. In 2014 it was announced that he would succeed Kevin Spacey as Artistic Director of the Old Vic and that he would be working with the team that produced Matilda to direct a musical version of Groundhog Day as part of his first season.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Here are my notes for this week's screening.  As the film is set in India we'll be serving a selection of Indian snacks and beer to get the punters in the mood.

Despite some of the UK reviews the film seems to have been a sleeper hit, and we have had many requests to screen it, so hopefully we will have a good audience. 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

UK 2011                      118 minutes

Director:                      John Madden

Starring:                        Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Tom Wilkinson, Ronald Pickup and Dev Patel

 “How can I suggest what a delight this film is? Let me try a little shorthand. Recall some of the wonderful performances you've seen from Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy and the others, and believe me when I say that this movie finds rich opportunities for all of them.  Director John Madden ("Shakespeare in Love") has to juggle to keep his subplots in the air, but these actors are so distinctive, they do much of the work for him.”

Roger Ebert

A group of seven British ex-pats leave the UK to travel to the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a retirement destination for “the elderly and beautiful”, in India.  All the characters have their own reason for making the move, but the most urgent is that local prices make retirement possible for all of them.

In the first half of the 1980s there was a cycle of films and television productions about Britain’s preoccupation with India and its imperial history, ranging from the early Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust (1983), the TV series The Jewel in the Crown (1982) to David Lean’s epic version of A Passage to India (1984), all based on novels that explored aspects of the Anglo-Indian experience and life in the Raj.  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is also based on a novel (by Deborah Moggach), but one that explores the English experience of India in the twenty-first century, as a place of off-shoring, outsourcing and call centres.

John Madden made his name with the TV film Mrs Brown (1997) and the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love (1998), of which starred Judi Dench and Tom Wilkinson, before moving to Hollywood where his subsequent films have included Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) and more recently a thriller called The Debt (2011), which starred Tom Wilkinson with Helen Mirren.  He had originally cast Peter O’Toole and Julie Christie to play Norman and Madge before replacing them by Ronald Pickup and Celia Imrie, and subsequently confirmed that he had also considered Eileen Atkins and John Hurt for roles in the film.

 The film has not yet won any awards but there are rumours in the US of a likely nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Maggie Smith.

Here's the trailer: