The Secret Life of Bees

These are the notes for our last screening before the Christmas break:

The Secret Life of Bees

USA 2008 (110 minutes)
Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood
Starring: Dakota Fanning, Queen Latifah, Paul Bettany and Jennifer Hudson

Awards and Nominations
10 wins and 14 nominations

In South Carolina in the early 1960s Lily Owens (Dakota Fanning) is haunted by the memory of her late mother. In order to escape from her lonely life and cruel father Lily flees with Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson), her caregiver, to a South Carolina town which holds the secret to her mother’s past, and while she is there she meets the intelligent and independent Boatwright sisters (Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys and Sophie Okonedo) who show her their Black Madonna and tell her about her mother.

The film is based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Sue Monk Kidd. Kidd took three and a half years to write her novel and explained its origins in an interview:

“I grew up surrounded by black women. I fell they are like hidden royalty dwelling among us, and we need to rupture our old assumptions and develop the willingness to see them as they are....

As a girl I lived in a country house where at least 50,000 bees hived within the walls of one of our shut-off rooms. When I went in there, I could hear hummy-honey leaking through the wall and puddling on the floor. That image stayed with me for years before I decided to write it. And then when I finally did begin, I was told that it might sell as a short story but not as a novel. I sold the short story but... it wouldn’t let me go. Four years later I had to go back and write the novel.”

Bythewood is one of the very few African-American female directors to have a film distributed by Hollywood. She made her name by directing Disappearing Acts (2000) and both writing and directing Love & Basketball (2000), with Spike Lee as producer which won her the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. For The Secret Life of Bees her executive producers were Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith.

Borders RIP

The local branch of Borders was advertising the last few days of its closing down sale and I wandered in to see if I could find any last minute presents for anyone - or for me.

The DVD section looked as if a hurricane had passed through, but I was tempted by a few books - Margaret Attwood's latest novel plus a handsome edition of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell with a fascinating introduction by Neil Gaiman - until I realised that even with discounts of up to 40% I could probably buy them cheaper from Amazon.

Cinema Paradiso

I tend to write my notes at different times and in different places, but these have to be the most unusual. I wrote most of this between a series of meetings held over three days in London while negitiating the finer points of an international support contract.

I have to admit that this is one film that until this screening had escaped me, but having seen it I'd be happy to see it again. I subsequently found the soundtrack on Spotify and spent an enjoyable hour listening to it while marking up a contract for a bid I'm working on. Such are the joys of working from home.


Cinema Paradiso

Italy 1988 (123 minutes)
Director: Giuseppe Tornatore
Starring: Salvatore Cascio, Marco Leonardi, Philippe Noiret and Jacques Perrin
Awards and Nominations

Won Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
A further 19 wins and 12 nominations


A famous film director returns home to a Sicilian village for the first time after almost 30 years. He reminisces about his childhood at the Cinema Paradiso where Alfredo, the projectionist, first brought about his love of films. He also remembers his lost teenage love, Elena, whom he left behind when he set off for Rome.

In a poll in 2007 readers of The Guardian chose Cinema Paradiso as the greatest foreign language film ever made by a considerable margin. However when it was originally released in Italy it performed badly at the box office and it was shortened to 123 minutes for its international release. In this version it became an instant success: amongst its many awards it won both the Special Jury Prize at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2002 Tornatore released an extended director's cut with a running time of 173 minute version (known in the U.S. as Cinema Paradiso: The New Version).

The 2002 version reinstates more of the story of the adult Elena, but all three versions omit the major historical national and international events of the period that would have affected the whole of Italy after the Second World War, focussing instead on the different films screened in the village. But it is this infectious celebration of film that makes the repeat viewings worth it . As David Thomson puts it:

“It has many film clips, from Renoir to Antonioni, and a little boy’s face as seen through the booth window is a winning effect – the first dozen times you see it. After that, you’re on your own.”

Tornatore has made ten further films in the 20 years since the release of Cinema Paradiso, but to date none of them has even come close to matching its worldwide success.

Milk

These are my notes for Milk which we screened in mid November. Work has been pretty hectic, so I need to catch up on things.

Milk

USA 2008 (129 minutes)
Director: Gus Van Sant
Starring: Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch and Josh Brolin

Awards and Nominations
Won Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Sean Penn)
Won Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (Dustin Lance Black)
Six further Oscar nominations including Best Film and Best Director
A further 32 wins and 39 nominations

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay politician to hold a major public office in the US. After moving to California he became a campaigner for gay rights and was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1975. Three years later a disaffected fellow Supervisor assassinated both Milk and George Moscone, the Mayor of San Francisco

Dustin Lance Black spent three years researching Milk’s life and interviewing Milk’s associates after seeing the 1984 documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk and used this work to produce his screenplay. The screenplay reached Gus Van Sant, who had made an abortive attempt to make his own film on the life of Harvey Milk fifteen years previously, and Van Sant at once decided to film it. The film makers used Milk’s original camera shop as well as San Francisco City Hall as key locations, and several of Milk’s associates portray themselves. Other characters portrayed in the film are still active in US public life and of these the most prominent is Dianne Feinstein, who made the announcement of the assassination of Milk and Moscone to the media. After succeeding Moscone as mayor she was subsequently elected to the US Senate and in 2009 she presided over the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Gus Van Sant had made several small independent films which had been artistically successful before obtaining commercial success with the black comedy To Die For (1995), which gave Nicole Kidman a breakthrough role as a homicidally ambitious weather girl on a cable TV station, and Good Will Hunting (1997), which launched the careers of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. After the commercial failure of a strangely pointless shot for shot colour remake of Psycho (1998) Van Sant returned to series of smaller scale films which continued to win artistic plaudits, culminating in his winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Elephant (2003), a story inspired by the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.

Critics gave Milk widespread acclaim and Sean Penn, who bears a surprising physical resemblance to the real Harvey Milk, won many awards including a second Oscar, for his performance. The film appeared on many critics’ lists of the best films of 2008.

Weird Stuff

One of the joys of my role in the Film club is that I have a valid excuse to search out reviews and other information on the films that we are screening so that I can produce the notes for our members.

Usually this involves a quick trawl through the archives of Philip French and Peter Bradshaw with the odd vist to Wikipedia and IMDB for a killer quote or a list of awards and nominations. However Cinema Paradiso presented me with a challenge as it appeared long before online reviews, although of course it featured regularly in the usual "best of" lists. However conicidentally I had picked up my copy of Have You Seen?: A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films by David Thomson, which is brilliant for late-night browsing, although I am still only on the letter C. I hadn't looked at it for a while, but after opening the at my bookmark I turned the page to find his article on Cinema Paradiso. Spooky!

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

Here are the notes I wrote before seeing the film:

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

UK/USA 2008 (94 minutes)
Director: Mark Herman
Starring: Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, David Thewliss and Vera Framiga

Awards and Nominations
Two wins and five nominations including:
* Vera Franiga won the Best Actress Award and Mark Herman was nominated as Best Director at the British Independent Film Awards
* Joint Winner (with Slumdog Millionaire) of the Audience Award at the Chicago Film Festival

Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is living a comfortable life in Berlin during the Second World War but things change for the worse when his family has to move to the country: his father (David Thewliss) is a high ranking Nazi SS officer and his new posting is as commandant of a concentration camp. In his innocence Bruno sees the camp as a “farm”, and after initially wondering why the inhabitants all wear striped pyjamas he makes friends with a young Jewish boy of his own age who lives in the camp.

The film is based on the book of the same name by John Boyne, who described his story as a parable rather than historical fiction. But Boyne’s choice of the Holocaust as background to his novel was bound to provoke strong reactions: one reviewer questioned the overall premise of the story, claiming that there were no nine year old boys in Auschwitz as the Nazis killed all those not old enough to work. But on this specific point Boyne is close to the truth: records from Auschwitz registered that in January 1944 there were 773 male children under the age of 15 living in the camp and some were used as messengers, although it is impossible to forget the enormous numbers of other children who died in the gas chambers every day.

The film produced similarly mixed reactions from its audiences, with a tranche of good reviews praising its fidelity to the source novel and its avoidance of a clichéd ending, but with a dissenting critic who while accepting the power of the film described it as a Hollywood version of the Holocaust, literally a Disneyfication.

Mark Herman first came to prominence as writer and director of films like Brassed Off (1996) and Little Voice (1998). John Boyne is a graduate of the school of Creative Writing at UEA and has written eight other novels, although none has matched the success of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas which to date has sold more than five million copies worldwide.


Even though I knew the story the film was just as powerful as I had expected it to be, and the audience left in almost complete silence.

Inherit The Wind

We've just been to see Inherit the Wind at the Old Vic, a dramatisation of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial with Kevin Spacey and David Troughton giving brilliant performaces as the defence and prosection attorneys.


When the play was first performed in the 1950s it was seen as a critique of the anti-communist witch hunts (it appeared at the same time as The Crucible), but following recent news reports about the alleged support for the teaching of creationism in schools, it now comes across as a critique of the idiocies of biblical literalism. Philip Pullman wrote a facinating article showing how both political and religious totalitarianism fears knowledge, and seeing a play like this makes us realise that the battle with superstition will be never-ending.


I've recently been reading Darwin, and his "theory" is substantiated by examples gleaned from years of detailed research and observation. For the record I'm not against the teaching of creationism in schools: just so long as it forms part of a general session on creation myths and no one makes a claim that there is the merest iota of truth in it.