The Little Stranger

I'd seen this film at the cinema and suggested that we screen it, and it definitely went down well. I think that anyone who saw it expecting a ghost story would have been disappointed, but in terms of atmosphere, pace and performance it was superb.

The Little Stranger

UK 2018          111 minutes

Director:          Lenny Abrahamson

Starring:            Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson, Will Poulter and Charlotte Rampling

“The haunts of childhood are revisited in this oppressively macabre ghost story, set in the miserable austerity of late-40s Britain and in some ways a metaphor for the nation’s complex sense of sacrificial loss. … The Little Stranger is fluently made and really well acted, particularly by Ruth Wilson, though maybe a bit too constrained by period-movie prestige to be properly scary.”

                                                                                                            Peter Bradshaw

In the summer of 1947 Dr Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) is called to visit a patient at Hundreds Hall. He knows the place well as his mother once worked there as a maid but now the place is in decline and its three inhabitants - Mrs Ayres (Charlotte Rampling), her daughter Caroline (Ruth Wilson) and son Roderick (Will Poulter) - feel that the house is haunted by the ghost of Mrs Ayres’ first daughter who had died in childhood.

The film is based on the Booker-nominated novel by Sarah Waters. Despite the theme of her story Waters had not initially intended to write a ghost story: rather her intention had been to explore the rise of socialism how the fading remnants of the gentry dealt with losing their legacies. In this regard her decision to set the story in 1947 is crucial: the Labour landslide of 1945 allowed Attlee’s government to launch the NHS in July 1948. However both novel and film, which Mark Kermode accurately described as a “ghostly story” rather than a “ghost story”, carry echoes of classic ghost stories of the past including The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson; other critics have also commented on their debt to novels (and films) as diverse as Rebecca, Brideshead Revisited and even The Great Gatsby.

All of Sarah Waters’ novels have historical settings and, with the exception of the most recent (The Paying Guests), have been adapted for either television or film. Fingersmith, a complex crime novel set in Victorian England, was memorably adapted by the BBC with a cast that included Sally Hawkins and Imelda Staunton; more recently award-winning South Korean director Park Chan-wook created a critically acclaimed and commercially successful film adaptation of the same book called The Handmaiden in which he transferred the action to colonial Korea in the 1930s.

Lenny Abrahamson is an Irish film director who began his career making commercials before directing independent films about people living on the fringes of Irish society. His film Frank (2014) (which also starred Domhnall Gleeson) a road movie set in Britain, Ireland and the USA received its premier at the Sundance Film Festival and he followed this with the film adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel Room (2015) which received Oscar nominations for Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and for Brie Larson as Best Leading Actress, although during the ceremony only Larson won an award.

Here is a link to the trailer:

Goodbye Christopher Robin

I've had a soft spot for Winnie the Pooh ever since I red a brilliant article by Angela Carter that forensically summed up the differences between him and Paddington Bear. However until I'd seen the film (and then read up about AA Milne to prepare these notes) I had not been aware of his extensive career beyond Pooh.

Since this film came out I've also seen Tolkien and apart from their shared experience of the Battle of the Somme it's interesting to note how both writers, albeit in very different ways, used their writing to create a vision of a mythical wonderland.

Goodbye Christopher Robin

UK 2017          107 minutes

Director:          Simon Curtis

Starring:            Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie and Kelly Macdonald

“With its bittersweet interweaving of fact and fantasy, youthful innocence and adult trauma, this tale of the creation of a children’s classic could have been called Saving Mr Milne. Like Mary Poppins, Winnie-the-Pooh occupies a sacred space in our hearts and anyone wishing to co-opt some of that magic must tread very lightly indeed. Director Simon Curtis’s movie could easily have tripped (like Piglet) and burst its balloon as it evokes a dappled glade of happiness surrounded by the monstrous spectres of two world wars. Instead, it skips nimbly between light and dark, war and peace, like a young boy finding his way through an English wood, albeit one drenched with shafts of sugary, Spielbergian light.”

Mark Kermode

Awards and Nominations

• Best Supporting Actress Nomination for Kelly Macdonald at the British Independent Film Awards
•  A further two wins

After his experiences at the Battle of the Somme A A Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) finds it difficult to resume his writing career. He moves his wife Daphne (Margot Robbie) and their son Christopher Robin to a house in the country where he plans to write an anti-war book, but while taking his son for walks in the surrounding woods he begins to make up stories about the boy’s animal toys. The books are a great commercial success, but all this has a detrimental effect on Christopher Robin Milne who rejects his family and the earnings from his father’s writing and then enlists in the army during the Second World War.

Milne read Mathematics at Cambridge but while he was there also edited a student magazine, and after graduating made his living as a writer: he became a regular contributor to Punch (where he met the cartoonist E H Shepherd who was to provide the definitive illustrations for his children’s books) and his other literary output included at least 18 plays (including a stage adaptation of The Wind in the Willows), three novels as well as several screenplays for the early British Film industry. However despite their success at the time all this work has been entirely overshadowed by the success of the two books of stories for children about Winnie-the-Pooh and two associated books of nursery rhymes When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six; in 2002 Forbes magazine ranked Winnie-the-Pooh as the most valuable fictional character and in 2005 Winnie-the-Pooh generated revenue of $6 billion from sales of merchandising products.

The production team for Goodbye Christopher Robin bring some very different backgrounds to the film. The screenplay is by Frank-Cottrell-Boyce who among his other work for cinema has written five screenplays for Michael Winterbottom including Welcome to Sarajevo (1997) and 24 Hour Party People (2002); he also wrote the 2012 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, several award-winning novels for children and two recent episodes of Doctor Who. The soundtrack is by Carter Burwell who has worked extensively with both the Coen brothers and Martin McDonagh, and who among many awards and nominations has received Oscar nomination for the soundtracks he wrote for Carol (2015) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). Director Simon Curtis began his career as a stage director at the Royal Court where he worked as an assistant to Danny Boyle before moving into television where he made his name with the BBC adaptations of Cranford and Return to Cranford (2009). He made his cinema debut with My Week with Marilyn (2011) and followed this with Woman in Gold (2015).

Here is a link to the trailer:

http://21stcenturyfilmbuff.blogspot.com

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:

Anna Karenina

This week we'll be screening Anna Karenina, a film which I missed while out on general release, but which was definitely on my "must see" list.

Here are my notes:

Anna Karenina

 UK 2012                      130 minutes

Director:                      Joe Wright

Starring:                        Aaron Johnson, Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Domhnall Gleeson, Matthew MacFadyen

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for four Oscars (including Cinematography and Soundtrack)
• A further eight wins and 19 nominations (including BAFTA nomination for Best British Film)

 “Wright's movie is a dazzling affair, a highly stylised treatment of a realistic novel, superbly designed by Sarah Greenwood and edited by Melanie Ann Oliver, with rich photography by Seamus McGarvey, sumptuous costumes by Jacqueline Durran and a highly romantic Tchaikovskian score by Dario Marianelli, all previous Wright collaborators.”

Philip French

Anna Karenina (Keira Knighley) is an aristocrat in Russian high society at the end of the nineteenth century.  When she meets the affluent Count Vronsky (Aaron Johnson) she enters into a love affair that has life-changing consequences.

There have been numerous TV and film adaptations of Tolstoy’s novel, with actresses as diverse as Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh, Jacqueline Bisset and Nicola Pagett all having played the title role, and the resulting adaptations have borne a greater or lesser degree of fidelity to the original story.  Tom Stoppard’s objective, as he worked on his adaptation of the  800 page novel,  was to produce a script that would “deal seriously with the subject of love” as it applies to several pairs of characters: not just the relationship of Anna and Vronsky, but also Anna’s relationship with her husband (Jude Law) as well as the parallel shy relationship between Levin (Domhnall Gleeson)   and Kitty (Alicia Vikander) which Tolstoy himself intended to run as a quiet counterpoint to the passion of Anna’s affair.  Joe Wright filmed the script that Stoppard had written, but having failed to find authentic locations for the Moscow and St Petersberg scenes, decided to set these scenes within a dilapidated 19^th century Russian theatre which became a large-scale image of the upper-class tsarist society amongst which Anna and Vronsky carried on their affair.

After beginning his career in television Joe Wright made his name in the cinema with an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (2005) which won him a BAFTA for Most Promising Newcomer and which starred Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet.  He worked with Knightley again on the multi-Oscar nominated Atonement (2007).  The Soloist (2000), the true story of a homeless classically –trained musician, marked a clear change of direction.  His previous project was another change of direction: Hanna is the story of a 16-year-old girl, raised by her father to be the perfect assassin, who is dispatched on a mission across Europe, while being pursued by a ruthless intelligence agent and her operatives.  Following Anna Karenina Joe Wright is about to make his debut as a stage director with a production of Pinero’s Trelawney of the Wells which is about to open in London.

Here's the trailer: