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:

The 20 Best Films of all Time chosen by me - Part 4

For this final selection I'm moving into new territory: the best adaptions (of novels or plays).

In order to play fair I've only included films where I have also read or seen the original source material.

1. The Company of Wolves - Neil Jordan
Neil Jordan worked with Angela Cater to produce a wonderful adaptation of two of her short stories from The Bloody Chamber that is brilliantly evocative of the Hammer Horror films that used to be on late night TV at the weekend.

2. The Remains of the Day - James Ivory
I'd read and enjoyed the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro and was slightly apprehensive about how anyone could adapt such a complex novel.   But James Ivory had cornered the market in up-market literary adaptations, the screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is brilliant and both Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson give the performances of their lives.

3. The French Lieutenant's Woman - Karel Reisz
Another superb film from a novel which many people considered unfilmable.  Harold Pinter's adaptation solves the problem brilliantly, although the final section is far more Pinter than Fowles. Meryl Streep captures the character of Sarah brilliantly and there is an early cameo from Penelope Wilton in the final section

4. The Lord of the Rings - Peter Jackson
I'd loved the books from the moment I read them and had sat though both the Ralph Backshi part adaptation that was partly animated plus (honest) a one man version on the Edinburgh Fringe.  But from the first moments of The Fellowship of the Ring I knew that this was the real thing. 

I've even been to a screening where a live orchestra performed Howard Shore's magnificent soundtrack live.

5. Atonement - Joe Wright
Another potentially unfilmable novel which David Hare adapted brilliantly and which was one of the high spots in the first season of our Film Society:

Honourable mentions:

I've read the book and cannot wait to see Cloud Atlas: from what I've read about the film it is magnificent.

I'd read about Adaptation and finally managed to track down and enjoy a copy.  this is a film about the writing of a film, with a superb late period performance by Meryl Streep in what must have been a gift of a role.