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:

Made in Dagenham

Another week and another screening.  Here are my notes:

Made in Dagenham

UK 2010                      113 minutes

Director:                      Nigel Cole

Starring:                        Sally Hawkins, Rosamund Pike, Bob Hoskins, Miranda Richardson and Geraldine James

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for 4 BAFTAs including Outstanding British Film and Best Supporting Actress (Miranda Richardson)
• Another 8 nominations including nominations for Best Actress (Sally Hawkins), Best Supporting Actress (Rosamund Pike) and Best Supporting Actor (Bob Hoskins) at the British Independent Film Awards

“The unexpected thing about Made in Dagenham is how entertaining it is. That's largely due to director Nigel Cole's choice of Sally Hawkins for his lead. In Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky (2009) and again here, she shows an effortless lightness of being. If she has a limitation, it may be that she's constitutionally ill-adapted for playing a bad person”

Roger Ebert

Rita O’Grady (Sally Hawkins) unwillingly becomes shop steward at Ford’s Dagenham plant and then leads a strike of the 187 women sewing machinists, when they walk out against sexual discrimination and claim equal pay. The strike is successful and Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson), as Secretary of State for Labour in Harold Wilson’s government uses it to promote what was to become the 1970 Equal Pay Act.

The inspiration for the film was a radio programme which reunited personnel from both sides of the strike many years later.  Steven Wooley as producer heard the programme and realised its potential as a subject for a film: the key historical events of the story are true, some individual elements of the original characters reappear in some of the strikers, while other characters are entirely fictional.

In the central role of Rita Sally Hawkins is superb: she made her name in a series of films with Mike Leigh, but the tone of this film, despite the potentially grim nature of the subject, is closer to Calendar Girls (also directed by Nigel Cole).  Philip French also suggests a comparison with a naughty Carry On film rather than to Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses, another film about a strike by women, this time by Latino office cleaners in Los Angeles.  

However the film is far more than a vehicle for Sally Hawkins: the cast includes established actresses like Geraldine James and Miranda Richardson as well as rising stars like Andrea Riseborough (Brighton Rock and Never Let Me Go) and Rosamund Pike (Pride and Prejudice and An Education).  Bob Hoskins earned good reviews for his role as a minor union official who is both mentor and friend to Rita and there is a superb cameo from John Sessions as a pipe-smoking Harold Wilson.

Despite the good reviews and numerous nominations for awards, Made in Dagenham had the misfortune to be released in the same year as The King’s Speech which in total won more than 60 major awards.

Here's the trailer:

The King's Speech

We start our new season with a somewhat inevitible choice next week.  These are my notes:

The King’s Speech

UK 2010                      119 minutes

Director:                      Tom Hooper

Screenplay:                   David Seidler

Starring:                        Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter

Nominations and Awards

• Won four Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Actor and Original Screenplay) plus eight nominations (including Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Cinematography).
• Won seven BAFTAs (including Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Music) plus seven further nominations.
• A further 56 wins and 75 nominations

“Although the film involves a man overcoming a serious disability, it is neither triumphalist nor sentimental.  Its themes are courage (where it comes from, how it is used), responsibility, and the necessity to place duty above personal pleasure or contentment – the subjects, in fact, of such enduringly popular movies as Casablanca and High Noon.  In this sense, The King's Speech is an altogether more significant and ambitious work than Stephen Frears's admirable The Queen of 2006 and far transcends any political arguments about royalty and republicanism.”

Philip French

In the early1930s the Duke of York (Colin Firth), the younger son of George V (Michael Gambon), was struggling to overcome a speech impediment with help from Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian speech therapist.  George V died in 1936, and his death was followed by one of those incidents when, in Alan Bennett’s memorable phrase “history rattled over the points”: Edward VIII (Guy Pearce) abdicated in order to marry the divorced Wallis Simpson (Eve Best) and the Duke of York, who had never even seen any state papers was crowned King just as Fascism was on the rise across Europe and Churchill was beginning to warn of the dangers of German rearmament.  Logue continued to work with George V and with his help the King was able to face the challenges of both his Coronation and the public speeches his position demanded of him, including a live broadcast in September 1939 on the outbreak of war.

David Seidler had lived in London during the Second World War and had subsequently developed a stammer from the stress that he had endured.  He had been inspired by the example of George VI’s struggles with his speech impediment and, having moved to the US where he became a scriptwriter in Hollywood, he decided to write about the King.  Lionel Logue’s son committed to give him access to his father’s notes, but only if the Queen Mother consented: she gave her permission, but asked him not to do so in her lifetime.  Seidler subsequently discovered that Logue had treated one of his own uncles, and from him learnt about the techniques that Logue used in his treatment.  From this original source material Seidler produced an initial screenplay that he subsequently turned into a play script, and it was after attending a reading of this that Tom Hooper’s mother called him with a simple message: “I’ve found your next project”.

Although depicting the key historical events of the period, the film makes some changes to enhance the dramatic nature of the story: the Duke of York started working with Logue ten years before the Abdication and the improvement in his speech was noticeable within months rather than years; during the Abdication Crisis Churchill had been a staunch supporter of Edward VIII; and far from distancing themselves from Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement George VI and Chamberlain appeared together on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, an act of endorsement by the King described as “the biggest constitutional blunder that has been made by any sovereign this century”.

The film received rave reviews for its acting, screenplay and direction. Colin Firth received his first Oscar and both Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter received Oscar nominations for their supporting roles.  David Seidler won his first Oscar in his mid-70s, and after a long and successful career as a director on TV and having only directed one other feature film Tom Hooper won Oscars for both Best Director and Best Film.

Here's the trailer:

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.

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.

Waltz With Bashir

These are my notes for last Sunday's screening:


Waltz With Bashir

Israel 2008 (90 minutes)

Director: Ari Folman

Starring: David Proud, Dominic Coleman, Jason Maza, Robyn Frampton and Sasha Hardway

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for an Oscar (Best Foreign Language Film)

• Nominated for two BAFTAs (Best Foreign Language Film and Best Animated Film)

• Nominated for Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival

• A further 20 nominations and 26 wins


In 2006 Ari Folman meets a friend with whom he had served in the Israel Defence Force (IDF) 14 years earlier. His friend has nightmares linked to his experiences during the Lebanon War, but Folman is surprised that he cannot remember anything from that period. Later that night Folman has a vision from the night of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, but he cannot tell if it is true. A friend advises Folman to discuss his vision with other people were in the IDF at the same time in order to understand what happened and to revive his own memories.

Folman spent four years making his film. It started as a live-action documentary with interviews and newsreel footage, and then the production team turned it into an animated film using rotoscope animation techniques. The resulting effect looks like one long hallucination and is perfect for the trauma of Folman’s recovered memories. Only at the end does Folman revert to actual footage depicting the victims of the massacre, with devastating effect.

The atrocities are comparable with those on the Eastern Front during the Second World War that form part of the Holocaust, but reports from witnesses within Europe go unheeded. Finally the slaughter end only when an Israeli general intervenes, and it is at this point that the film transforms from animation into newsreel.

As Philip French noted in his review, the subsequent inquiry into the massacres found Ariel Sharon guilty of gross neglect of duty and ordered that he should never again serve as Defence Minister, but twenty years later he became prime minister. However he also notes that an Arab country would not have established a similar enquiry nor would it have allowed a film like Waltz With Bashir to be made.

The Dench Factor

Each year we do our best to select a programme of films that we hope will be enjoyed by as many people in the village as possible, but with certain exceptions - The History Boys and Elizabeth: The Golden Age - we can never tell what will bring in the punters.  However as we looked back over the attandence figures for our screenings - our treasurer keeps a careful note of members and non-members attending each film - it was possible to discern one factor that most of them shared.  Notes on a Scandal, Mrs Henderson Presents and Casino Royale all drew substantial audiences, and the common factor was that they all starred Judi Dench.

We obviously cannot schedule a full programme of Ms Dench's cinematic work, so instead I've decided to institute a new rating system in order to give our piunters a chance to assess the merits of each film in relation to Judi Dench: I shall call it the Dench Factor.

There will be various categories, depending on the involvement (or not) of Ms Dench as follows:

Dench Factor 5: JD in a starring role.
Dench Factor 4: JD in a co-starring role.
Dench Factor 3: leading actor/actress appeared in a film with JD
Dench Factor 2: supporting actor/actress appeared in a film with JD
Dench Factor 1: actor/actress appeared in a film with someone who had appeared in a film with JD

On this basis Notes on a Scandal and Mrs Henderson Presents both merit a rating of Dench Factor 5 (my system does not offer any guarantee on the quality of the film, but you can forgive Stephen Frears for Mrs Henderson Presents when you see The Queen or Tamara Drewe).  In the same way Casino Royale earns a Dench Factor 2, and Elizabeth: The Golden Age is Dench Factor 3.  Sadly Up In The Air is only Dench Factor 1 (George Clooney starred with Cate Blanchett in The Good German, and CB starred with JD in Notes on a Scandal), but for some reason it seems to be generating a good deal of interest. 

I may need to rework my system to allow for the Clooney Effect.

Planning Meeting

We closed  our last season with the AGM, and as we held it before the screening everyone kept it pretty short.  The good news is that we are still solvent, but the bad news is that we have been dependent on external grants to purchase the big ticket items like projector and sound system, and in the current age of austerity I do not think that the local auythority will look kindly on a grant application to upgrade/replace the kit. 

We made money on most of our Thursday screenings, but for many of our Sunday screeenings the audience was solely committee members and family members.  The other major source of revenue is the bar, and it is clear that our audience is generally thirsty.  I was only half-joking when I suggested that we sould set ourselves up as a Wine Club that also screens films.

It's difficult to coerce people into attending, but we intend to harness the power of the internet to send out reminders to members - or at least to those of  our members have email access - and also intend to run a raffle for our "free" introductory film.  We agreed to have DVDs as prices and I volunteered to find something appropriate for the good folk of Highclere: after a quick trawl through Amazon I bought a box set of Billy Wilder films (including Some Like It Hot - which I saw many years ago on the big screen at the PPP while at Oxford) and another set starring Orson Welles (including The Third Man).

My plan is to blog for the full season and to intersperse updates on our progress with the notes that I prepare for each screening.  Hopefully our choice of Up In The Air will get the season off  to a good start.

Dreaming the same dream in unison

I have seen films in many different locations, from the sublime (Palais de Festival at Cannes) to the ridiculous (The Coronet on Didcot Broadway), but one factor remains constant: even a bad film can seem better by seeing it on a big screen in the company of others.

Once upon a time we poor film buffs were forced to haunt the wilder reaches of BBC2 in search of the occasional glimpse of films by Fellini, Bergman and Truffaut. The arrival of video cassettes improved the supply a little, but it took the the arrival of the DVD to compel movie companies to throw open the cupboard doors and ransack their back catalogues in a desparate attempt to shift some stock before DVDs go the same way as CDs and we download everything on to our iPods.

But no film company is able to provide the real audience experience, and it for this reason that twice a month a loyal and - hopefully - growing band of film fans meet in our local village hall to dream the same dream in unison.

The aim of this blog is to follow the fortunes of our village film club as we embark on our fourth season. Along the way I reserve the right to digress as I think fit into other film-related issues and to write about my favourite films, directors, actors, writers and composers.

The only common thread will be that there will be some link, however tangential, to film.