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.

Avatar

We had our last screening after our AGM earlier this month.  Here are my notes:

Avatar


USA 2009 161 minutes

Director: James Cameron

Starring: Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang and Zoe Saldana

Nominations and Awards

• Won three Oscars (Art Direction, Special Effects and Cinematography)

• A further 41 wins an 63 nominations

“Avatar is not simply a sensational entertainment, although it is that. It’s a technological breakthrough. It has a flat-out Green and anti-war message. It is predestined to launch a cult. It contains such visual detailing that it would reward repeat viewings... It is an Event, one of those films you must see to keep up with the conversation.”

Roger Ebert

When his brother is killed, paraplegic Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) decides to take his place in a mission on the distant world of Pandora where he learns of to drive off the native humanoid Na'vi in order to mine for the precious material scattered throughout their rich woodland. Sully infiltrates the Na'vi people with the use of an "avatar" identity where he bond with the native tribe and falls in love with the beautiful alien Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). When Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) launches his plan to exterminate the Na'vi Sully has to take a stand and fight back in an epic battle for the fate of Pandora.

James Cameron began development of Avatar in 1994 and has planned to start filming after the completion of Titanic in 1997 but the necessary technology was not available for him to achieve his vision. He finally started developing is screenplay in 2006 and the film was released in December 2009. The official budget was $237 million, but other estimated have placed this as high as $310 million, with a further $150 million for promotion.

Avatar is the most expensive film made to date: Cameron deliberately cast relatively unknown actors in leading roles to reduce costs but needed a massive budget for special effects as he had developed new camera systems both to film in 3D and to allow motion-capture film making. The lead company for visual effects was Weta Digital in New Zealand who had been responsible for the special effects in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, but in order to complete the film on schedule Cameron also had to involve a number of other special effects companies, including George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic. Both Jackson and Lucas visited the set of Avatar to watch Cameron at work with his new technology.

The story includes a familiar mix of myths and archetypes and in essence transposes the themes of the traditional Western, especially those like A Man Called Horse and Dances with Wolves where the white hero takes the side of the locals against the supposedly civilised invaders, into outer space. In Aliens Cameron’s heroes were Marines fighting a war against vicious extra-terrestrials, but in Avatar, with deliberate echoes of both Iraq and Afghanistan, the Marines are the enemy and the aliens are the good guys.

Following the worldwide success of Avatar Cameron has signed with 20th Century Fox to produce two sequels.

The Lovely Bones

As a result of the Christmas break we have two screenings in one week.  These are my notes for Thursday's film:

The Lovely Bones


USA 2009 135 minutes

Director: Peter Jackson

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for an Oscar (Stanley Tucci) as Best Supporting Actor

• Nominated for an BAFTAs (Saoirse Ronan) as Best Actress and (Stanley Tucci) as Best Supporting Actor

• A further seven wins and 18 nominations

“...an uneasy mixture of crime thriller, horror flick and religious inspirational, with borrowings from Always (the remake by The Lovely Bones producer Steven Spielberg of the wartime ghost movie, A Guy Named Joe), Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Molnar’s Liliom (or at least the musical version, Carousel).”

Philip French

After her murder Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) watches over her parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) as well as George Harvey (Stanley Tucci) – her killer – from heaven. She wants revenge on the man who murdered her, but she needs to weigh this against her desire for her family to heal.

The film is based on the award-winning and best-selling novel by Alice Sebold. Film4 Productions initially acquired the film rights to the novel before it was published and by 2001 Lynne Ramsay (acclaimed director of Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002)) had been hired to adapt the novel and make the film. Following the closure of Film4 Productions Steven Spielberg expressed an interest acquiring the film rights, although finally it was Peter Jackson who was successful in negotiating a deal to develop the project using the same writing team he had used for The Lord Of The Rings to produce the screenplay; Steven Spielberg joined the project in the role of Executive Producer.

The subject matter of the story, the rape and murder of 14 year old girl, posed certain problems for the film makers: Jackson had originally expected that the film would appeal to a “sophisticated, adult audience” but after average reviews the studio began to redirect the film towards females aged 13-20 as this was the demographic that had favoured the film most; it is this same demographic that has made the Twilight franchise such a success.  Consequently Jackson softened and omitted the nastier elements (the rape is only implied in order to achieve the 12A certificate) of the story. Critics gave the film mixed reviews, but were generally unanimous in their praise for the actors, especially Stanley Tucci and Saoirse Ronan.

Peter Jackson made his name with the critically successful Heavenly Creatures (1994), a story of two young girls who become psychologically driven to commit murder, but achieved global fame following the commercial and critical success of his three film adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings (2001-2003). His current project is to take over the direction of two films based on JRR Tolkien’s early novel The Hobbit, after Guillermo del Toro (director of Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy series) had to withdraw from the project which Jackson had initially only agreed to produce.