How to write film notes

We have a couple of techies in our film club who set up the projector and sound system for each screening, and an accountant who is our treasurer.  As I'm neither technical nor an accountant I'm happy to leave all that to them: my job is to buy the wine, run the bar - and produce the film notes.
The challenge here is to produce some interesting notes about a film which (for the most part) I have not seen and to put in some form of context.  Once of the best films we have ever screened was Downfall, about the last days of Hitler in the bunker, although I did receive one complaint about a spoiler in the following notes:

DOWNFALL (DER UNTERGANG)

Germany 2005, 156 minutes

Director:          Oliver Hirschbiegel

Starring:          Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Juiliane Kohler and Ulriches Matthes

Awards and Nominations

• Oscar Nomination for Best Film Foreign Language Film, plus another 13 nominations and 14 wins.

In April 1945 the war in Europe is reaching its final stages, and as the Red Army approaches Berlin Hitler and his entourage take refuge in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery.  As Hitler celebrates his birthday he spends the final ten days of his life increasingly isolated from reality as he orders his entourage to uses non-existent battalions of the Wehrmacht to stage a glorious counter-attack.  While they are in Hitler’s presence his officers politely maintain this fantasy, but when they are alone there is just one topic of conversation: how best to commit suicide while Berlin burns around them.

 The script is based closely on information from Inside Hitler’s Bunker (2002) by Joachim Fest, a German historian of the Nazi period who was able to use material only recently made available from the archives of the former Soviet Union, as well as first-hand accounts of those who had actually been in the bunker with Hitler, including Albert Speer and Traudl Junge, who as Hitler’s secretary was able to provide a uniquely intimate perspective on the death throes of the Third Reich. 

In Germany the treatment of any aspect of the Third Reich is still a sensitive issue and Downfall broke one the last taboos in its depiction of Hitler by a German-speaking actor; until this point German films had only used newsreel film to depict Hitler.  In English language films on this subject there seems to have been a convention that a portrayal of Hitler requires classical training and Alec Guinness, Derek Jacobi, Anthony Hopkins and Alec McCowen have all given their own impersonation of the Führer.  However Bruno Ganz, who was actually born in Switzerland, has a German-speaking authenticity that blows away all earlier portrayals by showing that even in private Hitler shouted and raved: there was never a charming statesman or brilliant visionary.

Concern about the portrayal of Hitler ensured that the film received international coverage.  In the UK Ian Kershaw, a biographer of Hitler, commented:

“Knowing what I did of the bunker story, I found it hard to imagine that anyone (other than the usual neo-Nazi fringe) could possibly find Hitler a sympathetic figure during his bizarre last days. And to presume that it might be somehow dangerous to see him as a human being — well, what does that thought imply about the self-confidence of a stable, liberal democracy?

Of all the screen depictions of the Führer, this is the only one which to me is compelling. Part of this is the voice. Ganz has Hitler's voice to near perfection. It is chillingly authentic.”

 The film ends with a brief extract from the documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary in which an elderly Traudl Junge, one of the few survivors from the bunker still alive, speaks of her youthful infatuation with Hitler and recognises that her young age was no excuse for not asking crucial questions about either Nazism or its victims.  She died shortly after the release of the documentary and in one of her final interviews is reported to have said “Now that I’ve let go of my story I can let go of my life.”

Here's the trailer:

One Day

Another month and another film... Here are my notes for this week's screening:

One Day

UK 2011                      108 minutes

Director:                      Lone Scherfig

Starring:                        Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, Jodie Whittaker, Ken Stott, Patricia Clarkson, Rafe Spall, Romola Garai

 “In a season of movies dumb and dumber, One Day has style, freshness, and witty bantering dialogue. Anne Hathaway is so attractive that she would be advised to sometimes play against type (the eyeglasses she wears at the beginning are a bit over the top).  Jim Sturgess contributes the film's most versatile performance, one that depends on exact timing and control of the balance between pathos and buffoonery.  It's a decent night at the movies, if however a letdown after An Education, the previous film by Lone Scherfig.”

Roger Ebert

Upper class Dexter (Jim Sturgess) and working class Emma (Anne Hathaway) graduate from the University of Edinburgh on 15^th July 1988; they spend the night together but decide to remain just as friends.  The story then follows their respective lives on the same date over the next twenty years. 

The film is based on the award-winning novel of the same name by David Nicholls.  He worked as an actor for a number of years before writing several number novels as well as a number of TV and film scripts.  His screenplays include adaptations of two his novels: Starter for 10 (2006) and One Day (2011). 

 In the book the unusual structure of following the protagonists on just one day over a twenty year period works well, although in the film it is possible to see this just as a gimmick.  However as author of both the original novel and the screenplay there must be a reason for its retention and in The Guardian film blog David Cox proposes an interesting theory:

“Emma and Dex throw away what should have been the prime of their lives. He wraps himself up in coke and self-love; she hides herself in her own cocoon of denial. The book's annual audit anatomised their folly in meticulous detail. Their wasted years were mercilessly ticked off and the course of their delusion was unerringly charted until they were subjected to deserved punishment.

This is the chronicle of wasted youth, rich in emotional nuance and period detail, that the book's snapshots encapsulated so tellingly. In the film's necessary haste, they reveal only blurry banality. Perhaps this key element of the book could have been conveyed through some means other than annual snapshots in a way that would have been more compatible with a two-hour film. Perhaps not.”

There was also criticism of Anne Hathaway’s Yorkshire accent, with one critic describing it as all over the shop (“Sometimes she's from Scotland, sometimes she's from New York, you just can't tell.”).  Anne Hathaway subsequently claimed that she watched Emmerdale to help her as she found the accent “a challenge”.

 Lone Scherfig started her career in Denmark, but she gained worldwide fame when she directed the internationally successful An Education in the UK.

Here's the trailer: