We have been running our film club for ten years now and decided to use one screening to celebrate it: we provided prosecco and a special anniversary cake, but the challenge was to choose the right film.
we brainstormed all the titles we could think of with "ten" in them and discarded most of them as too obscure or just plain wrong. And then we thought of Starter for Ten, which was released the year we started and in retrospect would have been a possible film to screen back then.
Never mind, I'm glad to have seen it at last and really enjoyed it.
Here are my notes:
Starter For Ten
It is interesting to look back at a film ten years after its release to see how the careers of its cast and production team have developed. Screenplay writer David Nicholls read English and Drama at Bristol University and turned to writing after struggling to make a career as an actor: he wrote several episodes of the series Cold Feet before writing Starter for Ten as a novel after another series he had been writing was cancelled. His subsequent work includes adaptations of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Great Expectations and Far From the Madding Crowd (starring Carey Mulligan) and among his novels is the award-winning One Day which he later adapted for the screen with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess in the lead roles. Director Tom Vaughan also studied at Bristol University and made his name as a director on TV working on several series of Cold Feet. Starter for Ten was his first feature film and since then he has worked regularly for both TV and cinema. His most recent work has been for the TV series Victoria, for which he has directed three episodes.
James McAvoy was
already a rising star in 2006 with lead roles in The Last King of Scotland (2006), Becoming Jane (2007) and Atonement
(2007) to follow on closely from this film, but Rebecca Hall, James Corden and
Benedict Cumberpatch were all at the start of their TV and film acting careers
after early work on stage. Additionally although Catherine Tate had written and
starred in her own TV series she made this film before she appeared with David
Tennant as a Tardis regular in Doctor Who,
and the multi-talented Mark Gatiss, having made his name in The League of Gentlemen had yet to write
for Doctor Who, co-create Sherlock or become a familiar character
actor with roles in programmes as diverse as Game of Thrones, Wolf Hall,
Sherlock (where his portrayal of
Mycroft had strong echoes of Peter Mandelson)
and The Coalition (where he
actually played Peter Mandelson and memorably made his first appearance out of
a cloud of smoke.).
we brainstormed all the titles we could think of with "ten" in them and discarded most of them as too obscure or just plain wrong. And then we thought of Starter for Ten, which was released the year we started and in retrospect would have been a possible film to screen back then.
Never mind, I'm glad to have seen it at last and really enjoyed it.
Here are my notes:
Starter For Ten
UK 2006 92
minutes
Director: Tom
Vaughan
Starring: James McAvoy, Alice Eve,
Rebecca Hall, Catherine Tate, Benedict Cumberpatch and Mark Gatiss
Awards
and Nominations
- One
win at the Austin Film Festival
- Three
nominations including Best British Film at the Empire Awards
“A modest and very
British movie (though co-produced by Tom Hanks), Tom Vaughan's Starter For Ten is a rite-of-passage
comedy about the working-class Essex boy Brian Jackson's first two terms
studying English literature at Bristol University in 1985. James McAvoy is amusing
and convincing as the gauche Brian who leaves his old chums (Dominic Cooper and
James Corden from The History Boys)
back home on the estuary and is torn between two fellow students, the
self-consciously sophisticated, middle-class Alice (Alice Eve), and the wry,
politically active Jewish Rebecca (Rebecca Hall). Much of the action turns on
Brian joining Bristol's University Challenge team (Mark Gatiss does a hilarious
Bamber Gascoigne). Among the various scenes of humiliation two stand out, one
very funny in the style of Lucky Jim Dixon's weekend at Professor Welch's home,
the other truly painful.”
Philip
French
It is interesting to look back at a film ten years after its release to see how the careers of its cast and production team have developed. Screenplay writer David Nicholls read English and Drama at Bristol University and turned to writing after struggling to make a career as an actor: he wrote several episodes of the series Cold Feet before writing Starter for Ten as a novel after another series he had been writing was cancelled. His subsequent work includes adaptations of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Great Expectations and Far From the Madding Crowd (starring Carey Mulligan) and among his novels is the award-winning One Day which he later adapted for the screen with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess in the lead roles. Director Tom Vaughan also studied at Bristol University and made his name as a director on TV working on several series of Cold Feet. Starter for Ten was his first feature film and since then he has worked regularly for both TV and cinema. His most recent work has been for the TV series Victoria, for which he has directed three episodes.
Here's the trailer:
