All Is True

We'd seen this at the cinema and i knew at once that it was the type of film that would go down well if we screened it at our club: the presence of Judi Dench in the cast generally means a good film and also a decent sizes audience.

Seeing it again made me appreciate it even more, particularly Ben Elton's wonderfully autumnal screenplay. It also went don well with our members.

All Is True

UK 2018          97 minutes

Director:          Kenneth Branagh

Starring:            Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench and Ian McKellen

Awards and Nominations

• Won Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench) at the Movies for Grownups Awards
• Nominations for Best Film, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor (Ian McKellen) at the Movies for Grownups Awards

“Ben Elton has written a sweet-natured, melancholy film about the retirement years of someone he’s lately been turning into his specialist subject: William Shakespeare. The great poet is played here with genial sympathy by the film’s director, Kenneth Branagh, sporting a pretty outrageous false nose. Judi Dench is his wife Anne Hathaway, wearied into resilient impassivity by grief, the unfairness of life and an awful secret. Ian McKellen has a colossal, emphatically wigged cameo as the ageing Earl of Southampton.”

Peter Bradshaw

Following the fire that began during a performance of his play Henry VIII and destroyed the Globe Theatre William Shakespeare (Kenneth Branagh) returns to his family home Stratford upon Avon. His wife Anne (Judi Dench) is still haunted by the death of her only son 17 years earlier, and as Shakespeare struggles to rebuild his broken family relationships and search for inner peace he has to confront the dark heart of his family’s secrets and lies.

The title of the film is the alternate title of Shakespeare’s late play Henry VIII, but the story is most definitely not true: a few key elements of the film reflect the historical record, but others are mere conjecture or even just made up. Prior to writing this screenplay Ben Elton has used the life of Shakespeare as the basis for three series of his witty situation comedy Upstart Crow which included an episode covering the death of Shakespeare’s son. This film is set many years after that death but nonetheless the event drives the action of the plot and there is a distinctly elegiac and autumnal feeling to the way that both William and Anne respond to it and resolve their issues after William’s return to the family home.

Judi Dench was a mentor to Kenneth Branagh at the start of his stage career in the 1980s when she directed him in a number of productions, and in recent years she has performed in several plays that he has produced with his own company. They also appeared together on stage in a production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus where Branagh played the title role and Dench played his mother. In the cinema Dench had a cameo role in Branagh’s Hamlet (1996), they both appeared in My Week with Marilyn (2011) and more recently Dench appeared in Branagh’s film of Murder on the Orient Express, in which Branagh also starred as Hercule Poirot.

Meanwhile despite his prominent position on the poster Ian McKellen as the Earl of Southampton only appears for a short sequence when he visits Shakespeare at home, although he gives a performance that almost steals the film. When McKellen recently brought his one man show to the Watermill he talked about the making of the film and how strange it was to work with Branagh as both co-star and director: seeing Branagh in costume and make-up in the director’s chair made him feel that he was being directed by Shakespeare himself.

Ben Elton made his name as a stand-up comedian in the 1980s but subsequently has become better known as a writer. In addition to writing for successful TV comedies such as The Young Ones, Blackadder and, more recently, Upstart Crow he has also written 15 novels and several musicals including We Will Rock You and Love Never Dies.

Here is a link to the trailer:

Dunkirk

We started the New Year with Dunkirk: not really a seasonal film, but it is new to DVD and we attracted a reasonable audience.

I'd seen the film at the cinema and had been impressed and was looking forward to seeing it again. The structure is complex but it looks very simple: as ever the art is in concealing the art.

One of my main recollections from the first film was Mark Rylance's superb performance, and I was equally impressed on this second viewing. I assume that his character would have been old enough to have taken part in WW1: he does not mention this but you can sense it from his heroic weariness as he decides to take his boat to Dunkirk rather than merely handing it over to the Navy.

Here are my notes:

Dunkirk

UK 2017          106 minutes

Director:          Christopher Nolan

Starring:            Fionn Whitehead, Barry Keoghan, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy and Kenneth Branagh

Awards and Nominations to date

• Number 13 in The Guardian’s list of the Best Films of 2017
• Nominated for Golden Globe for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Score
• Nominated by the London Critics Circle Film Awards for Best Film, Best British/Irish Film, Best Director and three other categories
• A further 18 wins and 86 nominations

“This is a powerful, superbly crafted film with a story to tell, avoiding war porn in favour of something desolate and apocalyptic, a beachscape of shame, littered with soldiers zombified by defeat, a grimly male world with hardly any women on screen. It is Nolan’s best film so far. It also has Hans Zimmer’s best musical score: an eerie, keening, groaning accompaniment to a nightmare, switching finally to quasi-Elgar variations for the deliverance itself.”

Peter Bradshaw

 During the fall of France in the Spring of 1940 Allied soldiers have retreated to the coast at Dunkirk. As the troops wait for evacuation the Royal Navy requisitions small civilian vessels that can sail in the shallow waters close to the beaches, while in the air Spitfires try to save British ships from attack by Nazi planes.

Nolan directed the film from his own script which tells the story of the evacuation from the perspectives of land, sea and air. Each story develops over different timescales so that although they are edited together it is only towards the climax of the film that the different narratives coincide. He had initially conceived the idea for the film in the mid-1990s but had postponed the project until he had enough experience of directing large scale action films. His aim was to tell the story solely from the perspective of the soldiers on the beaches: thus the invading Nazi forces do not appear. Additionally Nolan avoided any scenes with Churchill who had become Prime Minister only on10^th May 1940 in order to prevent the complexity of the domestic political situation undermining the story of the evacuation. The circumstances of Churchill’s assumption of power and subsequent wartime premiership are a major story themselves and are the subject of Joe Wright’s forthcoming film Darkest Hour (2017) with Gary Oldman starring as Churchill.

The major events in the film are based on the historical record and Nolan worked closely with a historical consultant to ensure the accuracy of the film; similarly although the characters are all fictional some of them are based in part on Dunkirk veterans whose stories Nolan encountered during his research. The evacuation at Dunkirk itself was a major turning point in the Second World War and appeared on screen as early as 1942 as part of the plot of Mrs Miniver. In 1958 Leslie Norman, father of Barry, directed Dunkirk which starred John Mills, Richard Attenborough and Bernard Lee; the film became the second most popular production of the year in the UK. The evacuation also featured in a key sequence in Joe Wright’s Atonement (2007) and more recently Their Finest (2016) depicted the making of a wartime propaganda film about Dunkirk to raise morale in a war-ravaged Britain. 

On its release in 2017 Dunkirk received praise for its screenplay, direction, soundtrack and photography, with some critics acclaiming it as one of the greatest war films ever made. Somewhat inevitably Nigel Farage attempted to use the film to promote his own blinkered perspective of history by circulating a photograph of himself in front of a poster for the film with the patronising exhortation: “I urge every youngster to go out and watch #Dunkirk”. Clearly he had forgotten that Britain did not stand alone against Nazi Germany and that Churchill himself, a lifelong patriot, amateur historian and arguably the greatest British Prime Minister of the twentieth century, had actually favoured an “indissoluble” union with a France. In an era of fake news it is vital to remember the following words of wisdom: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts”.

Here is a link to the trailer:

My Week with Marilyn

It's our AGM early next month, and we've decided to screen My Week with Marilyn.

Here are my notes:

My Week with Marilyn

UK2011                       101 minutes

Director:                      Simon Curtis

Starring:                        Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Redmayne, Emma Watson and Judi Dench

 Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for Oscars for Best Actress (Michelle Williams) and Best Supporting Actor (Kenneth Branagh)
• Nominated for six BAFTAs including Best British Film, Best Actress (Michelle Williams), Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench) and Best Supporting Actor (Kenneth Branagh)
• A further 14 wins and 26 nominations

“In 1956, Marilyn Monroe came to Britain to make a movie at Pinewood Studios with Laurence Olivier. This was the tense and ill-fated light comedy The Prince and the Showgirl, scripted by Terence Rattigan, a film that became a legend for the lack of chemistry between its insecure and incompatible stars.  One was a sexy, feminine, sensual and mercurial diva.  The other would go on to make Some Like It Hot.  ... My Week With Marilyn is light fare: it doesn't pretend to offer any great insight, but it offers a great deal of pleasure and fun, and an unpretentious homage to a terrible British movie that somehow, behind the scenes, generated a very tender almost-love story.”

Peter Bradshaw

Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) is the Third Assistant Director on The Prince and the Showgirl which Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) is filming in the UK with Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) as both director and leading man.  Monroe has been accompanied to the UK by her husband Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott), but when he leaves her to return to the US she spends an intimate romantic week alone with Clark.  The film is based on a memoir that Colin Clark (son of Lord Clark of Civilisation and younger brother of Alan Clark, Conservative MP and famous diarist) wrote from the diaries that he kept about his time working with Olivier as a general dogsbody on The Prince and the Showgirl. 

Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh secured both critical praise and award nominations for their performances, but the film has casting in depth and includes established performers such as Judi Dench (as Sybil Thorndike), Julia Ormond (as Vivien Leigh) and Zoe Wanamaker (as Paula Strasberg, Marilyn Monroe’s acting coach) as well as relative newcomers such Eddie Redmayne (recently seen in Birdsong on TV) and Emma Watson (moving on from her role as Hermione in the Harry Potter films).

The screenplay is by Adrian Hodges who has worked extensively in television where, amongst his work, he has adapted two of Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockheart novels for TV as well as creating and writing episodes for Primeval and writing episodes for the BBC remake of Survivors.  Simon Curtis as director had worked extensively in theatre before making his television debut with Cranford.  He followed the success of this series with the widely acclaimed film A Short Stay in Switzerland, which starred Julie Walters in a true story of a woman who decided to take her own life in a Dignitas clinic.

Here's the trailer: