Movies versus Cinema

A billiant speech by Steven Soderbergh on the difference between movies and cinema:

http://www.indiewire.com/article/full-transcript-of-steven-soderberghs-impassioned-state-of-cinema-rant-from-sfiff

In summary, movies are what we watch and cinema is something that is made.

The Help

And as the day approaches when the clocks will spring forward into Summer Time, here are my notes for our last screening before the AGM in June:

The Help

USA 2011                    146 minutes

Director:                      Tate Taylor

Starring:                        Allison Janney, Bryce Dallas Howard, Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain, Mike Vogel, Octavia Spencer, Sissy Spacek, Viola Davis

 Awards and Nominations

• Won Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer).
• Three Oscar Nominations including Best Picture, Best Actress (Viola Davis) and Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Chastain).
• Won BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer)
• Four BAFTA Nominations including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress (Viola Davis) and Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Chastain).
• Won Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
• A further 37 wins and 46 nominations.

“Let's clear those caveats out of the way first.  The Help is a broad southern melodrama that implicitly frames the push for racial equality as the tale of oppressed African-Americans who are given their voice by a lone white do-gooder.  Its moral universe is rendered in bright cartoonish strokes while its feisty journalist heroine is conveniently allowed to float free from the mores of a culture (specifically 1960s Mississippi) she has lived in all her life. Viewed as an airbrushed, Dettol-heavy fairytale, however, it's rousingly effective.”

Xan Brooks

Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (Emma Stone) is a young white woman who returns to her home in 1960s Mississipp, during the Civil Rights era with aspirations of a career in journalism.  She befriends Abileen Clark (Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer), two black maids and) and decides to write a controversial book from their point of view (their white employers refer to them merely as "the help"), exposing the racism they are faced with as they work for white families.

 The film is based on Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel which was rejected by 60 literary agents before publication when it then spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List.  Thee book has strong autobiographical echoes of Stockett’s own life as Stocket was brought up in Mississippi by a black housekeeper and she based the character of Minny on her friend Kathryn Stockett’s who subsequently won many awards, including an Oscar and a BAFTA for her portrayal.  

The film is directed by Tate Taylor from his own screenplay.  He was a school friend of Stockett and he optioned the film rights to her book before it was even published.  His first film as director was a low budget comedy called Pretty Ugly People; with The Help he managed to secure Oscar nominations for three of the actresses and a win for Octavia Spencer.

Here's the trailer:

Sarah's Key

Here are my notes for this week's screening:

Sarah’s Key / Elle s’appelait Sarah

France 2010                 110 minutes

Director:                      Gilles Paquet-Brenner

Starring:                        Aidan Quinn, Dominique Frot, Frederic Pierrot, Kristin Scott Thomas, Melusine Mayance, Niels Arestrup

Nominations and Awards

• Kristin Scott Thomas nominated for Cesar (Best Actress)
• One further nomination and two wins

Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas) is an American journalist investigating the deportation in 1942 from occupied Paris of more than 13,000 non-French Jewish émigrés and refugees and their French-born children to their deaths in Auschwitz.  A series of flashbacks depict the events from the perspective of a young girl who witnessed them and illustrates the willing, even enthusiastic involvement of the French bureaucracy in helping the Nazis.

The key historical event of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup are true, but the film itself is based on a novel by the best-selling French author Tatiana de Rosnay which became an international success.  Kristin Scott Thomas, who is bi-lingual, delivers her English dialogue with an American accent and speaks fluent French for the scenes set in France.

The French government declined to acknowledge any state complicity in the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup until 1995 when President Chirac apologised for the part that French policemen and civil servants had played in the raid.

Here's a link to the trailer:

The Ghost

Here are my notes for our screening this week: 

The Ghost

UK 2010                      128 minutes

Director:                      Roman Polanski

Starring:                        Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall

Nominations and Awards

• Won Silver Bear (Best Director) at the Berlin Film Festival
• Won Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Ewan McGregor), Best Screenplay (Roman Polanski and Robert Harris), Production Design and Music at the European Film Awards
• A further 11 wins and 21 nominations

“The Ghost is Roman Polanski's best film since Tess 30 years ago, and as immaculately crafted a thriller as we're likely to see this year. It may not be in the very first rank of his pictures, of which Chinatown remains the peak. But in every respect it's a characteristic work, with echoes of those stories of intruders breaking into troubled relationships (Knife in the Water, Cul-de-sac), savvy innocents getting out of their depth (Chinatown), people losing touch with their own identities (Repulsion, The Tenant), and the operation of a malevolent fate in a world where, like Oliver Twist, the trusting hero of Polanski's last film, you need to be suspicious of the kindness of strangers.”

Philip French

Ewan McGregor plays an anonymous ghost writer hired to work on the dull memoirs of a former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) in order to justify a $10 million advance.  When he arrives in New England to begin work with Lang he discovers that his predecessor had died in mysterious circumstances, and then it seems that history might be about to repeat itself as he begins to discover alarming clues about Lang’s past in his predecessor’s notes.

 The film is based on the best-selling novel by Robert Harris, who also worked with Polanski on the screenplay which skilfully distils the complexities of the plot into a fast paced thriller.  In his novel Harris quotes Evelyn Waugh’s epigraph from Brideshead Revisited (“I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they”) but it is clear that the Langs are inspired by a recent British Prime Minister and his wife.  Pierce Brosnan gives a superb performance as Lang, and although he displays many of Blair’s characteristics he makes him a distinct character (quite unlike Michael Sheen’s uncanny impersonation of Blair in The Queen).  In a similar vein Olivia Williams turns Ruth Lang, despite her initial superficial resemblance to Cherie Blair, into a far more complex character.

Roman Polanski achieved international success with Knife in the Water (1962) and subsequently has lived and worked in the UK, the USA and most recently in Europe. In the USA his most successful film was Chinatown (1974) which received 11 Oscar nominations.  After leaving the USA in 1978 to avoid arrest he has lived and worked in Europe where his films have included Tess (1979), Death and the Maiden (1994) and The Pianist (2001), which won both the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Director. 

Following the success of The Ghost, which he shot in Germany with the bleak desolation of the North German coast standing in for Martha’s Vineyard, Polanski has recently directed Carnage, from the play God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, which was set in New York but which he filmed in studios in Paris.

Here's the trailer:

Dreaming the same dream in unison

I have seen films in many different locations, from the sublime (Palais de Festival at Cannes) to the ridiculous (The Coronet on Didcot Broadway), but one factor remains constant: even a bad film can seem better by seeing it on a big screen in the company of others.

Once upon a time we poor film buffs were forced to haunt the wilder reaches of BBC2 in search of the occasional glimpse of films by Fellini, Bergman and Truffaut. The arrival of video cassettes improved the supply a little, but it took the the arrival of the DVD to compel movie companies to throw open the cupboard doors and ransack their back catalogues in a desparate attempt to shift some stock before DVDs go the same way as CDs and we download everything on to our iPods.

But no film company is able to provide the real audience experience, and it for this reason that twice a month a loyal and - hopefully - growing band of film fans meet in our local village hall to dream the same dream in unison.

The aim of this blog is to follow the fortunes of our village film club as we embark on our fourth season. Along the way I reserve the right to digress as I think fit into other film-related issues and to write about my favourite films, directors, actors, writers and composers.

The only common thread will be that there will be some link, however tangential, to film.