Harry Potter Actors

As a keen fan of Harry Potter (first the books and then the films) I'd always thought that the Staff Room at Hogwarts contained the cream of British acting talent.

I've now read an article, presumably insured by the imminent release of Fantastic Beasts, giving some substance to my assumptions:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/harry-potter-kept-a-quarter-of-the-u-k-s-top-actors-paid/

Judi Dench is the unofficial mascot of our film club, on the basis that whenever we screen one of her films we get a good audience, so it is interesting to see that she tops the list of successful actors who have not appeared (so far) in any Potter-related films.

I just wish that that result of the US Presidential Election had gone the way of fivethirtyeight's final forecast!

 

A Little Chaos

I'm finally back on track in terms of writing my notes for films: the hours of daylight are getting shorter with a consequent reduction in the time I can spend on gardening leave - everything outside has never looked better.

This week's film is all about gardening, and I even managed to add a quote from Simon Schama to add an extra layer of cultural reliance.

Here are my notes:

A Little Chaos

UK 2014                      117 minutes

Director:                      Alan Rickman

Starring:                        Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Matthias Schoenaerts, Alan Rickman and Stanley Tucci

“Even before the first chateau [at Versailles] by Louis Le Vau, the park was made the setting for entertainments that catered to the king’s hunger for self-aggrandisement. Whether they were ostensibly performed in honour of military victories, the king’s latest mistress, or both, they used bodies of water as theatrical platforms on which spectacles that flattered his omnipotence could be performed.”

Simon Schama

Landscape and Memory

After being appointed by King Louis XIV (Alan Rickman) on a project in the gardens of Versailles Andre Le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts) employs Sabine de Barra (Kate Winslet), a woman with an unconventional sense of gardening, to help him complete the work.

Allison Deegan is an actor and wrote an initial version of the screenplay 17 years ago while on maternity leave.  She had admired Alan Rickman after seeing him on stage in Les Liaisons Dangereuses and sent an unsolicited copy of the screenplay to him; he responded favourably and announced that he wanted to direct it.  However despite his support his other work commitments, especially his ongoing role as Snape in the Harry Potter films, meant that the film had to wait.  Initially Deegan had written the role of Le Notre for Rickman, but the extended delay in its production meant that his age made him more suited for the role of Louis XIV, a character who perhaps echoed his responsibilities as director of the film.

On its release the film received generally positive reviews with Tim Robey in The Telegraph commenting:

“If you see only one film about 17^th century landscape gardening this year, it ought to be A Little Chaos, a heaving bouquet of a picture.”

A Royal Night Out

After a quiet period during the Summer, at least in terms of our film club, we started our new season with A Royal Night Out - we hoped it would be a crown-puller, but we only managed a small audience although they were pretty thirty and bar takings were good.

In advance of the film I wondered if it was going to be a sequel to The King's Speech or a prequel to The Queen.  In the event it was neither, and although it was enjoyable with some good performances it was less real than the whole of the Harry Potter saga.

Here are my notes:

A Royal Night Out

UK 2014                      127 minutes

Director:                      Julian Jarrold

Starring:                        Bel Powley, Sarah Gadon, Emily Watson and Rupert Everett

 “…the Windsors are given a sitcom-style veneer of just-like-us approachability in A Royal Night Out – a largely fictional romp that plays as a slab of official palace history as rewritten by Enid Blyton. That may sound ghastly, yet Julian Jarrold’s film has cheerily naff charm in spades. Following the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret as they shed their regal cocoon, joining the great unwashed for the VE Day celebrations, it’s speculative history jauntily dressed as a cut-glass entry in the one-wild-night teen subgenre.”

Guy Lodge

In a broadcast speech to commemorate VE Day on 8 May 1945 Churchill said “We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing”: in London there were three days of uproarious celebration and in Buckingham Palace George VI (Rupert Everett) and Queen Elizabeth (Emily Watson) reluctantly agree that Princesses Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon) and Margaret (Bel Powley) might be allowed to have a night out on the town in the company of carefully selected chaperones.

The initial premise of the film is correct, but the development of the plot is entirely fictional: in 1945 Princess Margaret was only fourteen, the princesses went out in a group of 16 that included military protection, and rather than attending a party at the Ritz the princesses were allowed only to mingle with the crowds that filled the roads around Buckingham Palace.

Justin Jarrold began his career on TV where he directed an episode of Coronation Street before moving on to directing episodes of Cracker and Silent Witness.  After directing several TV films he made his cinema debut with Kinky Boots (2005), following this with Becoming Jane (2007) and Brideshead Revisited (2008).  His most recent TV work has included Appropriate Adult (2011), a dramatization of the life of Fred and Rosemary West, The Girl (2012), about Hitchcock’s relationship with Tippi Hedren while he was making The Birds, and the mini-series The Great Train Robbery (2013).  He is currently working on The Crown, a TV series about the royal family.

Life of Pi

And so we reach the end of another season and it's time for our AGM.  We generally try to choose a film that is going to be popular and this year our choice is Ang Lee's Life of Pi.

Here are my notes:

Life of Pi

USA 2012                    127 minutes

Director:                      Ang Lee

Starring:                        Suraj Sharma, Tabu, Gerard Depardieu and Rafe Spall

Awards and Nominations

• Won four Oscars including Best Director and Cinematography, and nominations for seven further Oscars including Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay
• Two Golden Globe nominations including Best Film and Best Directior
• A further 52 wins and 70 nominations

“[Ang Lee’s] magnificent new film is a version of Yann Martel's Booker prize-winning novel, Life of Pi, adapted by an American writer, David Magee, whose previous credits were films set in England during the first half of the 20th century, Finding Neverland and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.  From its opening scene of animals and birds strutting and preening themselves in a sunlit zoo to the final credits of fish and nautical objects shimmering beneath the sea, the movie has a sense of the mysterious, the magical.  This effect is compounded by the hallucinatory 3D, and in tone the film suggests Robinson Crusoe rewritten by Laurence Sterne.”

Philip French

The film is based on the best-selling novel by Yann Martel, a fanatasy about an Indian boy called Piscine (“Pi”) Patel who survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker as his companion.  The book became a global best-seller – although many of its readers must have thought it was unfilmable.

Several other directors had planned to direct the film before Ang Lee took on the project.  The initial plan was for M Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) to direct, but after he chose to direct Lady in the Water, the studio discussed the project with Alonso Cuaron (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Gravity).  He passed on the opportunity in order to direct Children of Men, and there were subsequently discussions with Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie and Alien Resurrection), who began work on his own screenplay but made no further progress.  In 2009 Fox Pictures finally hired Ang Lee to direct, and although the projected budget of $120 million caused a further delay, filming finally started in January 2011.

One of the costly elements of the budget was Lee’s decision to film in 3D.  He explained this choice in an interview:

"I thought this was a pretty impossible movie to make technically. It's so expensive for what it is.  You sort of have to disguise a philosophical book as an adventure story.  I thought of 3-D half a year before Avatar was on the screen.  I thought water, with its transparency and reflection, the way it comes out to you in 3-D, would create a new theatrical experience and maybe the audience or the studio would open up their minds a little bit to accept something different."

The film opened to widespread critical acclaim, with the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes stating:

 “A 3D adaptation of a supposedly ‘unfilmable’ book, Ang Lee's Life of Pi achieves the near impossible—it's an astonishing technical achievement that's also emotionally rewarding.”

Here's the trailer:

 

Best Adaptations of Novels

I think it was Phillip Pullman who commented on the close relationship between novels and cinema, in that both genres have the ability to direct the viewer/reader to what the director/author wants to focus on - as opposed to the the theatre where the audience is free to concentrate on whatever it wants to.

Thus it's interesting to see such a range of novels in this list of the best adaptations:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/books-life/6166774/25-best-book-to-film-adaptations.html

It's difficult to argue with most of them, and I'm particularly pleased to see The Remains of the Day, which I thought was one of the best adaptations ever, on the list.  It's also good to see the Harry Potter films as well as The Lord of the Rings trilogy included: both of these were epic in every sense of the word.

the only addition I'd like to make is to propose Notes on a Scandal, which is a brilliant version of an excellent novel that at first reading seems impossible to adapt.

 

Actors Laughing Between Takes

This is wonderful, especially the photos from the set of Harry Potter and [not sure which one] and Skyfall:

http://imgur.com/a/TpaJ2

Happy Birthday Mr Shakespeare

I was going to post this yesterday but broadband issues prevented me from doing so.  However there is no documentary evidence of Shakespeare's date of birth, merely a record of a christening, so if if his birthday really was yesterday then this is a belated birthday celebration.

Yesterday I read a sonnet and tonight I've watched the trailer for The Shakespeare Code, one of the best episodes of Russell T Davies's rebot of Doctor Who:

This was an early episode in Series Three, and was screened just at the time that I was participating in the HP Film Blogging Contest.  One of the posts asked contributors to suggest remakes of old films using modern technology.  I suggested that the cast and crew of the then current series would be perfect as the The Shakespeare Code managed to combine Shakespeare himself, Harry Potter and the Marx Brothers (Groucho Marx, (as Rufus T Firefly) becomes president/dictator of Freedonia in Duck Soup) in an episode the combined both comedy and a superb story. 

It mist have worked, as just over a month later my wife and I flew off for a weekend at the Cannes Film Festival.

The Prophecies of Merlin

I've always enjoyed stories based on the legend of King Arthur (John Boorman’s film Excalibur was particularly good) and I've recently been watching the complete series of Merlin, the BBC’s brilliant re-imagining of the early years of Arthur, on DVD.


It’s a clever scenario, and it owes much to the success of other fantasy epics like the Harry Potter series and The Lord of the Rings, but it’s only in the past week that its contemporary relevance has occurred to me. One of the central stories across the episodes in the growing relationship of Arthur and Guinevere (or Gwen as she’s call here) in the face of their different positions in society: he’s a prince and she’s a commoner (in this case a serving maid to the Lady Morgana). Sound familiar?

It's easy to update the character of Merlin as a contemporary spin doctor/PR man, carefully guarding the Prince’s image, but does Buckingham Palace have cellars deep enough to conceal a dragon?