Water for Elephants - My Notes

After last week's struggle I managed to finish my notes.  I had not been looking forward to the film, but in the event it was better than several of the reviews had suggested.  There was a weakness in the central love triangle but whether this was due to casting or the script I'm just not sure.

Here are my notes:

Water for Elephants

USA 2011                    121 minutes

Director:                      Francis Lawrence

Starring:                        Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson and Christoph Waltz

 Nominations and Awards

• Robert Pattinson won Best Actor at the 2011 Teen Choice Awards
• A further six nominations

“There’s something endearingly old-fashioned about a love story involving a beautiful bareback rider and a kid who runs off to join the circus.  What makes Water for Elephants more intriguing is a third character, reminding us why Christoph Waltz deserved his supporting actor Oscar for Inglourious Basterds.  He plays the circus owner who is married to the bareback rider and keeps everyone else in his iron grip.”

Roger Ebert

As an old man Jason (Hal Holbrook) meets the proprietor of a small travelling circus that he has visited and reveals that he once worked in a circus and was present during one of the most famous circus disasters of all time.   The proprietor asks him to share his story, and he tells how as a young man (now played by Robert Pattinson) after the death of his parents in a car crash he drops out of veterinary school and joins a circus where he uses his skills to look after the health of the circus animals and becomes involved in a tragic love triangle with Marlena (Reese Witherspoon) and her husband (Christoph Waltz) the owner of the circus

The film is based on the best-selling novel by Sara Gruen with a screenplay by Richard LaGravenese who has written screenplays for more than 15 films, including The Bridges of Madison County (1995), The Horse Whisperer (1990) and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010).   However it is the involvement of Robert Pattinson in the film that attracted most publicity.  Following the global success of the Twilight series of films his involvement in Water for Elephants was an attempt to broaden his range beyond that of the brooding vampire.  He received good reviews for his performance of this film and stood his ground against the other two principal actors both of whom have won Oscars for their performances in earlier films.  Following the completion of the Twilight series he has played the lead role in Bel Ami (the first feature film from acclaimed stage directors Declan Donellan and Nick Ormerod) and is currently filming Cosmopolis directed by David Cronenberg.

Here's a link to the trailer:

30 Days of Night

These are my notes from last night's screening - a far cry from the house-trained vampires of the Twilight world:

30 Days of Night


USA 2009 (113 minutes)

Director: David Slade

Starring: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George and Danny Huston

Nominations and Awards

• Nine nominations including four for best horror film.

“For all that die from the preying of the Undead become themselves Undead, and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown in the water.”

Bram Stoker

Each year the town of Barrow in Alaska has a month in which the sun does not arise, the so-called “Thirty Days of Night”. Some inhabitants leave the town and go south for the month while others carry on with normal life. During this period a group of vampires attack the town and start to massacre its inhabitants, but the survivors, led by Sheriff Eben Olseon (Josh Hartnett), fight back and a grim battle for survival ensues.

The film is based on a graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith which they wrote after their initial film treatment received no interest from studios. The subsequent film deal was brokered with Sam Raimi acting as producer; he had been attracted by Templesmith’s unique mood and concepts for the vampires and noted that the project was “unlike the horror films of recent years”. A straight to video sequel entitled 30 Days of Night: Dark Days is due for release in October 2010.

30 Days of Night sits firmly within the sub-genre of vampire films that links directly back to Nosferatu (1922), the greatest of the silent versions, in which Max Schreck portrayed vampire as the hideous creature from European mythology, a creature whose sole desire is to feed on the blood of others. Other films within this tradition include Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979), with Klaus Kinski as the vampire, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1979) (where the appearance of the vampire was based on Max Schreck’s Count Orlok) and the brilliant Let The Right One In (2008) in which a vampire in the form of a young girl helps a young boy to defeat the bullies who are making his life a misery. The Swedish film Frostbiten is set in Lapland and follows essentially the same story as 30 Days of Night but treats it as a farce.

Earlier this year Stephen King bemoaned the way in which the vampire genre has recently been hijacked by "lovelorn southern gentlemen and … boy-toys with big, dewy eyes", referring of course to the global success of the films based on Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight novels: David Slade is currently directing Eclipse, the most recent film in this series.