Mr Holmes

It's been a bit of a year, and I'm hopelessly behind in posting my notes for the films we have screened.

Way back at the end of January we showed Mr Holmes: Ian McKellen as an ageing Sherlock Holmes. While I enjoyed both the film and his performance, the whole entity did not work for me. I've read too many of Conan Doyle's stories to accept the basic set up of the film. and the long shadow of the BBC's brilliant Sherlock looms large over any attempt to make any film about Sherlock Holmes.

Here are my notes:

Mr Holmes

UK 2015                      103 minutes

Director:                      Bill Condon

Starring:                        Ian McKellen, Laura Linney, Milo Parker, Hiroyuki Sanada and Hattie Morahan

Awards and Nominations

• Five nominations for Ian McKellen  as Best Actor
• A further four nominations

“Like its eponymous hero, the film drifts in and out of focus as it sifts through its deck of memories, a touch broad here, a little undercooked there, sometimes satirical, more often whimsical. Yet Jeffrey Hatcher’s script neatly ties together the interplay between myth and memory – both unreliable and malleable – while McKellen nurtures his character’s changing nature with affection and grace.”

Mark Kermode

After retiring to the South Downs and taking up bee-keeping an elderly Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen) is looked after by his housekeeper Mrs Holmes (Laura Linney) and her young son.  As his health declines and he begins to lose his memory he reviews the two cases that made him retire from his role as a consulting detective.

Despite a long, award-winning career on the national stage that began in 1965 Ian McKellen’s screen rolls were for a long time limited to TV and/or specific British films like Richard III (1995), a screen adaptation of the acclaimed National Theatre production that moved the action of the play to a fascist 1930s. It was not until he secured an Oscar nomination for best actor for his portrayal of James Whale in in Gods and Monsters (1998), Bill Condon’s breakthrough film as director, that his international film career began.  Since then his roles as an Oscar nominated Gandalf in Peter Jackson’s two Tolkien trilogies and Magneto in the ongoing X-Men series have meant that he currently stands at 14 in the top 20 of the highest grossing actors in the USA (based on the box office takings of the films in which he has starred) and well ahead of long-established stars such as Robert de Niro and Matt Damon.

Bill Condon started his film career as a scriptwriter for independent films before becoming a director. His screenplay for Gods and Monsters won him an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay and he subsequently wrote the Oscar nominated screenplay for Chicago (2002) His subsequent films as director have included Kinsey (2004) and the musical Dreamgirls (2006), for which he also wrote the screenplay, as well The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Parts 1 and 2, the final films of the lucrative vampire franchise. He is currently working on a film version of Beauty and the Beast, a film version of the Disney stage musical starring Emma Watson and Dan Stevens - with Ian McKellen as Cogsworth (a character who has been transformed into a pendulum clock).

Here's the trailer:

 

The 20 Best Films of all Time chosen by me - Part 4

For this final selection I'm moving into new territory: the best adaptions (of novels or plays).

In order to play fair I've only included films where I have also read or seen the original source material.

1. The Company of Wolves - Neil Jordan
Neil Jordan worked with Angela Cater to produce a wonderful adaptation of two of her short stories from The Bloody Chamber that is brilliantly evocative of the Hammer Horror films that used to be on late night TV at the weekend.

2. The Remains of the Day - James Ivory
I'd read and enjoyed the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro and was slightly apprehensive about how anyone could adapt such a complex novel.   But James Ivory had cornered the market in up-market literary adaptations, the screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is brilliant and both Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson give the performances of their lives.

3. The French Lieutenant's Woman - Karel Reisz
Another superb film from a novel which many people considered unfilmable.  Harold Pinter's adaptation solves the problem brilliantly, although the final section is far more Pinter than Fowles. Meryl Streep captures the character of Sarah brilliantly and there is an early cameo from Penelope Wilton in the final section

4. The Lord of the Rings - Peter Jackson
I'd loved the books from the moment I read them and had sat though both the Ralph Backshi part adaptation that was partly animated plus (honest) a one man version on the Edinburgh Fringe.  But from the first moments of The Fellowship of the Ring I knew that this was the real thing. 

I've even been to a screening where a live orchestra performed Howard Shore's magnificent soundtrack live.

5. Atonement - Joe Wright
Another potentially unfilmable novel which David Hare adapted brilliantly and which was one of the high spots in the first season of our Film Society:

Honourable mentions:

I've read the book and cannot wait to see Cloud Atlas: from what I've read about the film it is magnificent.

I'd read about Adaptation and finally managed to track down and enjoy a copy.  this is a film about the writing of a film, with a superb late period performance by Meryl Streep in what must have been a gift of a role.

Lighting the Beacons

We saw that there would be a Diamond Jubilee Beacon being lit on the Downs above our village, so we decided to go and watch it being lit.

Needless to say the location we had found on the website was incorrect, but a large cardboard sign directed us several hundred yards up the road, where the cars parked on the verge made us realise that something was happening.

There was a small crowd present, some of whom had been present for the Silver and Golden Jubilee Beacons, and we waited together and looked out over the dark plains below.  There was a wonderful sense of timelessness there, a feeling that we were sharing in something that stretched back at least to the Armada - or even earlier as there are so many ancient earthworks in our area. 

We did our best to ignore the signs of 21st Century Berkshire, and as we watched we spotted several beacons spread out across the landscape beneath us.

At 10.00pm the signal was given for someone to light ours: there was a countdown, a flash of flame, and then a great cheer.

We drove home listening to the soundtrack of the beacon sequence in The Lord of The Rings: