How we select the films we screen

One of the most difficult tasks we face in running a film society is actually deciding the films that we will screen. When we started the society we planned a whole season of "classics" and then abandoned it as our audience told us it was too esoteric for a village society. Even if a film has been commercially and critically successful it might not work if it has "language" in it: thus despite Ben Kingsley in a lead role Sexy Beast did not go down well.

In order to make our decisions now we have developed the idea of a "Highclere Film", i.e. a film that will appeal to our demographic. Thus anything with Dames Judi Dench, Maggie Smith or Helen Mirren will go down well. Likewise most films that are adaptations and/or period drama; on this bas Love and Friendship was a double whammy.

The only other criteria is that someone on the committee has to have seen the film: we all still bear the scars of 35 Shots of Rum: the film won many awards and had been well reviewed, but we were more than 10 minutes into the screening before we realised that we had not switched on the subtitles.

Thus a first step in the selection process is always to read review, and on this basis the following was a salutary warning:


https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2017/jul/03/the-house-film-flop-mariah-carey-will-ferrell-amy-poehler


This is definitely not a film for us to screen.

The Lady in the Van

This was the final film of our season. Fortunately the DVD release was just in time for us to show it.

Our history shows us that Alan Bennett (The History Boys) and Maggie Smith (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotels et al as well as Downton Abbey) have always been popular so the combination of the two was irresistible.

It was also a very good film, although not quite the comedy the poster seemed to imply.

Here are my notes:

The Lady in the Van

UK 2015                      104 minutes

Director:                      Nicholas Hytner

Starring:                        Maggie Smith, Alex Jennings, Jim Broadbent, Frances de la Tour and Roger Allam

Awards and Nominations

• Won Best Actress Award (Maggie Smith) at the Evening Standard British Film Awards
• Nominations for Best Actress (Maggie Smith) at the Golden Globes and BAFTA Film Awards

“Having come a cropper with his screen adaptation of The History Boys in 2006, director Nicholas Hytner here hits the high notes that distinguished his 1994 stage-to-screen triumph The Madness of King George.”

Mark Kermode

In the 1970s Alan Bennett (Alex Jennings) offers the temporary use of the drive to his north London house to a homeless woman (Maggie Smith). She parks her battered van outside his front door – and stays there for 15 years.

The film is based on Bennett’s 1999 stage play which itself derives from the piece he had written about Miss Shepherd in his book Writing Home, and it reunites many people who have worked with him over the years.  Maggie Smith appeared in A Private Function (1984), Bennett’s first screenplay for the big screen and created the role of Miss Shepherd in the stage version of The Lady in the Van. The play was directed by Hytner, who has directed all of Bennett’s recent stage work, mostly at the National Theatre.  Hytner and Bennett’s previous film was The History Boys (2006) and the principal cast members from this production, with the exception of Frances de la Tour who has a supporting role, appear in cameo roles in this film.

As a stage actor Alex Jennings has won three Olivier awards for his work, which has been mostly with the RSC or at the National Theatre.  Here he has worked many times with Nicholas Hytner and first appeared in a play by Bennett when he had a leading role in The Habit of Art.  He subsequently played Alan Bennett on stage in Untold Stories Bennett’s dramatization of one of his autobiographical sketches. He is a skilled mimic, and in addition to Bennett he has played characters as diverse as Prince Charles in The Queen (2006) and President George Bush in Stuff Happens, David Hare’s “history play” about the Iraq War, once again directed by Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre. 

Here is the trailer:

 

Quartet

It's our AGM on Thursday, so time for the final film of the season.

We try to choose something that will bring in the punters so that they will renew their subscriptions for next year, and this time we've chosen Quartet: something that will fit our age demographic perfectly :-)

I've not seen it and am looking forward to it very much.  Here are my notes:

Quartet

UK 2012                      90 minutes

Director:                      Dustin Hoffman

Starring:                        Billy Connolly, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Pauline Collins, Sheridan Smith, Tom Courtenay

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for one Golden Globe (Maggie Smith as Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy)
• A further three wins and one nomination

“There’s a gentle, sugared honesty in Quartet about old age: it stops short of anything too testing or tragic.  This is a lot closer to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) than it is to Amour (2012), and the only final curtain here is made of heavy, red velvet.”

Robbie Collins

At Beecham House, a home for retired musicians, the annual concert to celebrate Verdi's birthday is disrupted by the arrival of Jean (Maggie Smith), an eternal diva and the former wife of celebrated tenor Reggie (Tom Courtenay) one of the residents.

 

The screenplay is by Ronald Harwood, who adapted it from his play of the same name with the particular members of the film’s cast in mind.  In recent years Harwood has written the screenplays for films as diverse as The Pianist (2002), Oliver Twist (2005) and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) as well as working on the screenplay for Australia (2008) but before this he had a distinguished career as a playwright and novelist.  Initially he had intended to become an actor, and a fascination for the stage and its performers is a recurring theme in his work: in addition to Quartet he wrote both the original play and the screenplay for The Dresser (1983) (one of the best plays and films ever written about the theatre) which starred Tom Courtenay as the general assistant to an elderly actor, After The Lions, a play about the French actress Sarah Bernhardt and All the World’s a Stage, a general history of theatre.

The director of the film is Dustin Hoffman, making his debut as a director at the age of 75.  Hoffman received much critical acclaim for his work on the film.  As the late Roger Ebert noted:

“What’s ... evident is that he loves the stage, loves show business and has a heart full of affection for these elderly survivors.  He also loves his location, here called Beecham House, and scenes are bridged with many shots of the elegantly landscaped grounds.”

After an award-winning career on stage and in film which has included, amongst many other nominations and awards, two Best Actor Oscars and three BAFTAs for Best Actor, in 2013 Hoffman won the Breakthrough Directing Award at the Hollywood Film Festival.

Here's the trailer:

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Here are my notes for this week's screening.  As the film is set in India we'll be serving a selection of Indian snacks and beer to get the punters in the mood.

Despite some of the UK reviews the film seems to have been a sleeper hit, and we have had many requests to screen it, so hopefully we will have a good audience. 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

UK 2011                      118 minutes

Director:                      John Madden

Starring:                        Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Tom Wilkinson, Ronald Pickup and Dev Patel

 “How can I suggest what a delight this film is? Let me try a little shorthand. Recall some of the wonderful performances you've seen from Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy and the others, and believe me when I say that this movie finds rich opportunities for all of them.  Director John Madden ("Shakespeare in Love") has to juggle to keep his subplots in the air, but these actors are so distinctive, they do much of the work for him.”

Roger Ebert

A group of seven British ex-pats leave the UK to travel to the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a retirement destination for “the elderly and beautiful”, in India.  All the characters have their own reason for making the move, but the most urgent is that local prices make retirement possible for all of them.

In the first half of the 1980s there was a cycle of films and television productions about Britain’s preoccupation with India and its imperial history, ranging from the early Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust (1983), the TV series The Jewel in the Crown (1982) to David Lean’s epic version of A Passage to India (1984), all based on novels that explored aspects of the Anglo-Indian experience and life in the Raj.  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is also based on a novel (by Deborah Moggach), but one that explores the English experience of India in the twenty-first century, as a place of off-shoring, outsourcing and call centres.

John Madden made his name with the TV film Mrs Brown (1997) and the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love (1998), of which starred Judi Dench and Tom Wilkinson, before moving to Hollywood where his subsequent films have included Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) and more recently a thriller called The Debt (2011), which starred Tom Wilkinson with Helen Mirren.  He had originally cast Peter O’Toole and Julie Christie to play Norman and Madge before replacing them by Ronald Pickup and Celia Imrie, and subsequently confirmed that he had also considered Eileen Atkins and John Hurt for roles in the film.

 The film has not yet won any awards but there are rumours in the US of a likely nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Maggie Smith.

Here's the trailer: