35 Shots of Rum

Here are my notes for tomorrow's screening.  The film sounds fascinating and I'm really looking forward to the screeening.

35 Shots of Rum


France 2008 100 minutes

Director: Clair Denis,

Starring: Alex Descas, Gregoire Colin, Ingrid Craven, Jean-Christophe Folly, Julieth Mars Touissant, Mati Diop and Nicole Dogue

Nominations and Awards

• One win and four nominations (including Best Director, Best Film and Best Ensemble Cast)

“There are no big, jarring cliches here; change is something that happens slowly, something to be thought about. Letting go isn’t easy, and this excellent, nuanced film refuses to pretend otherwise. It's a film you have to lean into, pay attention to and, careful now, think about”

Phelim O’Neill

Lionel (Alex Descas), a widowed train driver, has retreated in to a controlled and insular life, looking after Gabrielle (Mati Diop), his university age daughter and is almost isolated in his Paris apartment block apart from a small circle of friends. He knows that it’s time for a change and that Gabrielle needs to cut the apron strings, and then the catalyst arrives in the shape of Ruben (Jean-Christophe Folly), a worldly-wise student.

Clair Denis was born in francophone Africa and most of her films have been set there or concern people from these former colonies now living in France. In 35 Shots of Rum she also takes a few cues from the understated family dramas of Yaujiro Uzu, placing her actors as if she is setting up a still photograph and using long takes with a stationary camera, and with a tendency to frame scenes in long shot.

Clair Denis has made ten films since 1988 and the best of her early work is Beau Travail (1999), a loose transposition of Melville’s Billy Budd to a Foreign Legion barracks in Djibouti. Her most recent film is White Material (2009) starring Isabelle Huppert and Christopher Lambert which is set back in Africa and concerns a white French family struggling to save its coffee plantation in the face of political uprising among the local population.

She is also Professor of Film at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

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.

A Serious Man

Welcome to 2011!  Here are my notes for our first screening of the New Year:

A Serious Man


USA 2009 105 minutes

Director: Ethan and Joel Cohen

Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick, Richard Kind and Fred Melamed

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for two Oscars (Best Film and Best Original Screenplay)

• A further eight wins and 28 nominations including BAFTA nomination for best original screenplay


“If it is possible to imagine a Woody Allen script with all the schtick exfoliated, and then filmed by Lynch, that master of conveying the under-the-skin bizarreness of small-town America, you have A Serious Man. Although perplexing and unnerving, with a finale that will not satisfy all tastes, the Coen brothers' latest film is the most daring project they have ever undertaken. It is mordant. It is philosophical. It addresses all the big questions. It is frequently hilarious. And it feels like somewhere along the line David Lynch took over.”

Joe Queenan

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor of theoretical physics in Minnesota in 1967 is planning his son’s bar mitzvah when his wife (Sari Lennick) tells him that their marriage is over: she wants a divorce so that she can marry Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), a smug and wealthy widower. Larry has never been particularly religious, but with his life suddenly in pieces he becomes convinced that only the local rabbis can help him.

Joel and Ethan Coen grew up in a Jewish household in Minnesota in the 1960s and in A Serious Man they have produced a story that for the first time is set both in the location and at the time in which they grew up. The film is quite different from any of its predecessors and their decision not to cast established film stars (Michael Stuhlbarg was cast on the basis of his stage work in New York and has very few film credits, even in minor roles) means that it is difficult for an audience to get its bearings as the story develops. Also the film begins in an entirely unexpected way, with an unsettling folk tale drenched in mortality and fear that may – or may not – be linked to the main story. The Coens have always produced films which contain a brilliant mix of bright comedy and bitter darkness, and when as in A Serious Man they get the balance right the result can be marvellous.

In a career of more than 25 years the Coens have produced a series of brilliant films that have been successful with both festival and multiplex audiences. In recent years they have reached new heights of success: No Country for Old Men won four Oscars, including Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film, A Serious Man received two Oscar nominations, and their most recent film, a remake of True Grit with Jeff Bridges in the lead role, has just opened to rave reviews and whispers of potential Oscar nominations.

Gran Torino

These are my notes for our Sunday screening:

Gran Torino


USA 2008 116 minutes

Director: Clint Eastwood

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Ahney Her, Bee Vang, Christopher Carley and John Carroll Lynch

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for Golden Globe

• A further 13 wins and 7 nominations

"It is a film that is impossible to imagine without the actor in the title role. The notion of a 78-year-old action hero may sound like a contradiction in terms, but Eastwood brings it off, even if his toughness is as much verbal as physical. Even at 78, Eastwood can make 'Get off my lawn' sound as menacing as 'Make my day,' and when he says 'I blow a hole in your face and sleep like a baby,' he sounds as if he means it."

Kenneth Turan

Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) is a recently widowed veteran of the Korean War who has become alienated from his family and angry at the world. Thao (Bee Vang), the bookish son of Kowalski’s Hmong neighbours, attempts to steal his prized 1972 Ford Gran Torino as part of an initiation into a gang. Kowalski prevents the theft, and then begins to develop a relationship with both the boy and his family.

The screenplay is by Nick Schenk who was trying to develop a story about a widowed Korean War veteran trying to come to terms with changes in his neighbourhood. Based on his own his own experience of meeting such refugees he decided to place a Hmong family among Kowalski’s neighbours in order to create a culture clash: the Hmong had sided with the South Vietnamese and the Americans during the Vietnam War and ended up in refugee camps with the South Vietnamese lost the war and the Americans pulled out. Schenk was advised by industry insiders that a film with elderly characters as it could not be sold, but Eastwood was able both to direct and star in it as production on Invictus, his next film as director, had slipped to early 2009.

Eastwood said that he “had a fun and challenging role, and it’s an oddball story”. The film has an elegiac quality and Eastwood has indicated that after starring in more 40 films (many of which he also directed) at the age of 78 this is likely to be his final acting experience. The good news is that with 35 credits as director he shows little sign of wanting to slow down: since Gran Torino he has directed both Invictus (2009) and Hereafter (2010) and is currently working on Hoover, a biography of J Edgar Hoover, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role.

The Time Traveler's (sic) Wife

We've had a bit of a revamp of our programme as we had some feedack that our choices were a little too masculine (I enjoyed 30 Days Of Night and was looking forward to seeing Inglourious Basterds) so we're introducing a few "couple friendly" films.  This is the first, although I would have preferred Silence in the Library, which introduced the real wife of a real time traveller (*sigh*).

Anyway, here are the notes:

The Time Traveler’s [sic] Wife


USA 2009 107 minutes

Director: Robert Schwentke

Starring: Eric Bana, Rachel McAdams and Ron Livingston

Nominations and Awards

• Three nominations including Best Fantasy Film

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.”

The Doctor

As a child Henry DeTamble survives a car accident that kills his mother by inadvertently time travelling back in time where he is helped by an older version of himself (Eric Bana). As he grows up he begins a relationship with Clare (Rachel McAdams) but their relationship is complicated by his sporadic time travelling.

The idea of a time travel has featured regularly in films from The Time Machine to the Back to the Future trilogy, and on television Doctor Who has used the same premise to produce a series that has lived through several golden ages since the TARDIS first materialised in 1963.  However The Time Traveler’s Wife ignores the more complex issues of time travel that have appeared in many Doctor Who stories such as when its characters have witnessed real historical events, choosing instead to combine science fiction with romantic comedy in a unique cocktail.

The film is based on the debut novel by the American artist Audrey Niffenegger which became a bestseller in both the US and the UK, where it was selected by the Richard and Judy Book Club. The novel was optioned before publication by Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s production company with Brad Pitt scheduled to play the part of Henry, but the project lapsed once his relationship with Jennifer Aniston ended. At subsequent stages in its development Steven Spielberg, David Fincher and Gus Van Sant all expressed an interest in directing the film, before Robert Schwentke took on the project and cast Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams in the lead roles.

Robert Schwenke started his career as a director in Germany and made his name in the US with the thriller Flightplan (2005). His most recent film is Red (2010) a thriller about a team of veteran special agents, including Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren, called out of retirement for one last mission by Bruce Willis.

Broken Embraces (Los Abrozos Rotos)

These are my notes for Broken Embraces which we will screen on Sunday evening:

Broken Embraces (Los Abrozos Rotos)

Spain 2009 127 minutes

Director: Pedro Almodovar

Starring: Angela Molina, Blanca Portillo, Jose Luiz Gomez, Lluis Homar, Penelope Cruz, Ruben Ochandiano and Tamar Novas

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for BAFTA (Best Film not in the English language)

• Nominated for Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival

“...a richly enjoyable piece of work, slick and sleek, with a sensuous feel for the cinematic surfaces of things and, as ever, self-reflexively infatuated with the business of cinema itself.”


Peter Bradshaw

Harry Caine (Lluis Homar) is a blind scriptwriter who is assisted by his faithful assistant Judit (Blanca Portillo) and her son Diego (Tamar Novas).  His past catches up with him when he hears of the death of Ernesto Martel (Jose Luiz Gomez), a wealthy businessman who had hired him, then known as Mateo Blanco, to direct an ironic comedy called Girls and Suitcases and starring the beautiful Lena (Penelope Cruz) who had become Martel’s mistress to pay her father’s medical bills.  Blanco fell in love with Lena, and Martel sent his gay son to film the making of the film and to give him the daily footage which he obsessively scrutinised.  Blanco and Lena ran away together, but they were involved in a car crash which left Blanco blind.

Almodovar has a lifelong obsession with cinema, and cinematic references homages and quotations appear throughout his films and are often part of their fabric: All About My Mother combines elements of All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire, but Broken Embraces is actually about film and the process of making films, which Almodovar suggests is a metaphor for life itself.  The style of the film is 1950s American film noir, but the story, with its dual narrative and father/son and straight gay opposites is reminiscent of other Almodovar films.  Additionally Girls and Suitcases, is a pastiche of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1987) which was Almodovar’s first major success.  The cast also includes many Almodovar regulars such as Angela Molina and Penelope Cruz (in her fourth Almodovar film).

The film was first screened in competition in the 2009 Cannes Film Festival along with Inglourious Basterds and Looking For Eric but lost the Palme d’Or to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (which we screened in our 2009 season).

The Hurt Locker

We will be screening The Hurt Locker on Thursday 4th November.  My notes are as follows:

The Hurt Locker


USA 2008 (131 minutes)

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Starring: Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Christian Camargo, David Morse, Guy Pearce, Jeremy Renner and Ralph Fiennes

Nominations and Awards

• Won six Oscars including Best Film, Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow) and Best Original Screenplay (Mark Boal)

• Won five BAFTAs including Best Film, Best Director Kathryn (Bigelow) and Best Original Screenplay (Mark Boal), Best Cinematography and Best Editing.

• A further 68 wins and 47 nominations

The film is set in and around Baghdad in 2004 and follows the final 38 days of a tour of duty of an American bomb disposal squad.

The script is by Mark Boal, a freelance journalist and scriptwriter who was embedded with an America bomb disposal squad in Iraq for two weeks.  Boal turned his experiences into a fictional reworking of real events and explained his objective in writing the script:

"The idea is that it's the first movie about the Iraq War that purports to show the experience of the soldiers. We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can't see on CNN, and I don't mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn't actually put photographers in with units that are this elite."

Bigelow, who had previously worked with Boal when she turned one of his articles into a short-lived TV series, expanded on this: she aimed to explore “the psychology behind the type of soldier who volunteers for this particular conflict and then, because of his or her aptitude, is chosen and given the opportunity to go into bomb disarmament and goes forward [sic] what everybody else is running from.”

Most of the serious films that Hollywood had previously produced about Iraq such as Syriana (2005), Lion for Lambs (2007) and Rendition (2007) had been liberal-patriot multi-stranded stories set in Washington, the Middle East and elsewhere with big name stars in the leading roles. For The Hurt Locker, in addition to sole location of Baghdad and the surrounding area (but filmed in the sweltering heat of Jordan and Kuwait) Bigelow deliberately made a point of casting relatively unknown actors in the leading roles as “it underscored the tension because with the lack of familiarity also comes a sense of unpredictability”.

The Hurt Locker had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2008 where it received a ten minute standing ovation at the end of its screening. It received many other festival screenings around the world but distributors were reluctant to buy it for screening in the US as previous films about the Iraq War had performed badly at the box office. The film eventually opened in the US in June 2009 in a few cinemas, and as such became eligible for consideration for the 2010 Oscars. Subsequently it was screened in more than 500 cinemas and received nine Oscar nominations and won six, including Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win this award.