Goodbye Christopher Robin

I've had a soft spot for Winnie the Pooh ever since I red a brilliant article by Angela Carter that forensically summed up the differences between him and Paddington Bear. However until I'd seen the film (and then read up about AA Milne to prepare these notes) I had not been aware of his extensive career beyond Pooh.

Since this film came out I've also seen Tolkien and apart from their shared experience of the Battle of the Somme it's interesting to note how both writers, albeit in very different ways, used their writing to create a vision of a mythical wonderland.

Goodbye Christopher Robin

UK 2017          107 minutes

Director:          Simon Curtis

Starring:            Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie and Kelly Macdonald

“With its bittersweet interweaving of fact and fantasy, youthful innocence and adult trauma, this tale of the creation of a children’s classic could have been called Saving Mr Milne. Like Mary Poppins, Winnie-the-Pooh occupies a sacred space in our hearts and anyone wishing to co-opt some of that magic must tread very lightly indeed. Director Simon Curtis’s movie could easily have tripped (like Piglet) and burst its balloon as it evokes a dappled glade of happiness surrounded by the monstrous spectres of two world wars. Instead, it skips nimbly between light and dark, war and peace, like a young boy finding his way through an English wood, albeit one drenched with shafts of sugary, Spielbergian light.”

Mark Kermode

Awards and Nominations

• Best Supporting Actress Nomination for Kelly Macdonald at the British Independent Film Awards
•  A further two wins

After his experiences at the Battle of the Somme A A Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) finds it difficult to resume his writing career. He moves his wife Daphne (Margot Robbie) and their son Christopher Robin to a house in the country where he plans to write an anti-war book, but while taking his son for walks in the surrounding woods he begins to make up stories about the boy’s animal toys. The books are a great commercial success, but all this has a detrimental effect on Christopher Robin Milne who rejects his family and the earnings from his father’s writing and then enlists in the army during the Second World War.

Milne read Mathematics at Cambridge but while he was there also edited a student magazine, and after graduating made his living as a writer: he became a regular contributor to Punch (where he met the cartoonist E H Shepherd who was to provide the definitive illustrations for his children’s books) and his other literary output included at least 18 plays (including a stage adaptation of The Wind in the Willows), three novels as well as several screenplays for the early British Film industry. However despite their success at the time all this work has been entirely overshadowed by the success of the two books of stories for children about Winnie-the-Pooh and two associated books of nursery rhymes When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six; in 2002 Forbes magazine ranked Winnie-the-Pooh as the most valuable fictional character and in 2005 Winnie-the-Pooh generated revenue of $6 billion from sales of merchandising products.

The production team for Goodbye Christopher Robin bring some very different backgrounds to the film. The screenplay is by Frank-Cottrell-Boyce who among his other work for cinema has written five screenplays for Michael Winterbottom including Welcome to Sarajevo (1997) and 24 Hour Party People (2002); he also wrote the 2012 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, several award-winning novels for children and two recent episodes of Doctor Who. The soundtrack is by Carter Burwell who has worked extensively with both the Coen brothers and Martin McDonagh, and who among many awards and nominations has received Oscar nomination for the soundtracks he wrote for Carol (2015) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). Director Simon Curtis began his career as a stage director at the Royal Court where he worked as an assistant to Danny Boyle before moving into television where he made his name with the BBC adaptations of Cranford and Return to Cranford (2009). He made his cinema debut with My Week with Marilyn (2011) and followed this with Woman in Gold (2015).

Here is a link to the trailer:

http://21stcenturyfilmbuff.blogspot.com

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:

 

Best Adaptations of Novels

I think it was Phillip Pullman who commented on the close relationship between novels and cinema, in that both genres have the ability to direct the viewer/reader to what the director/author wants to focus on - as opposed to the the theatre where the audience is free to concentrate on whatever it wants to.

Thus it's interesting to see such a range of novels in this list of the best adaptations:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/books-life/6166774/25-best-book-to-film-adaptations.html

It's difficult to argue with most of them, and I'm particularly pleased to see The Remains of the Day, which I thought was one of the best adaptations ever, on the list.  It's also good to see the Harry Potter films as well as The Lord of the Rings trilogy included: both of these were epic in every sense of the word.

the only addition I'd like to make is to propose Notes on a Scandal, which is a brilliant version of an excellent novel that at first reading seems impossible to adapt.