Moon

These are my notes for our next film:

Moon


UK 2009 106 minutes

Director: Duncan Jones

Starring: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Benedict Wong, Matt Berry and Dominique McElligott

Nominations and Awards

• Won Carl Foreman Award for special achievement in first feature film

• Nominated for BAFTA (Best British Film)

• A further 17 wins and 14 nominations

“Moon is a superior example of that threatened genre, hard science-fiction, which is often about the interface between humans and alien intelligence of one kind or another, including digital... The movie is really all about ideas. It only seems to be about emotions. How real are our emotions, anyway? How real are we? Someday I will die. This laptop I’m using is patient and can wait.”

Roger Ebert

Towards the end of a solitary three year stint mining helium-3 on the moon Sam Bell (Rockwell) experiences a personal crisis. His sole companion is a robot called GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) but just before his scheduled return he has a vision of a dark-haired young woman inside the base and then sees another figure outside on the surface of the moon.

The script is an original story co-written by director Duncan Jones. The film is in the tradition of the great science fiction films of the 1960s and 1970s that Jones watched as he was growing up and the film pays obvious tribute to such classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Silent Running (1972), Solaris (1972 and Alien (1979). In an interview Jones explained that the choice of the moon as a location for his story was deliberate:

"for me, the Moon has this weird mythic nature to it... There is still a mystery to it. As a location, it bridges the gap between science-fiction and science fact. We (humankind) have been there. It is something so close and so plausible and yet at the same time, we really don't know that much about it."


Duncan Jones is the son of David Bowie and his first wife. He made a deliberate choice to avoid the music industry and went to film school only after graduating from university with a degree in philosophy. He directed a number of commercials, including one for a controversial 2006 campaign for French Connection before making Moon as his first feature. The film had originally been intended for a straight to video release before its critical success at the 2009 Sundance Festival led to its commercial release across the US and in the UK. Following this success Duncan Jones has now directed Source Code, a big budget science fiction thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal scheduled for release in April 2011, and has announced plans to make another science fiction film called Mute to be set in the same science fiction universe as Moon in which Sam Bell will make a cameo appearance.

My Sister's Keeper

These are my notes for our most recent screening.  I struggled to find postive news about the film and was not looking forward to it, but in the event it was not as bad as I thought it would be.  I've not read the book, but apparently the plot is quite differeent - to the extent of killing of the younger sister rather than letting the older one die....


My Sister’s Keeper


USA 2009 106 minutes

Director: Nick Cassavetes

Starring: Abigail Bresslin, Sofia Vassilieva, Alec Baldwin, Cameron Diaz and Emily Deschanel

Nominations and Awards

• One win and four nominations

Anna Fitzgerald (Abigail Bresslin) was conceived to be a genetic match for her sister Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) who is suffering from leukaemia. When Kate suffers from renal failure Anna sues her parents for legal emancipation in order to prevent them forcing her to donate a kidney. Her overprotective mother Anna (Cameron Diaz), who has given up a successful career as a lawyer to look after her sick daughter, is horrified when the case comes to trial in court but finally learns the reason why Anna has acted in this way.

The film is based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Jodi Picoult which has the privilege of being among the top ten of the American Library Association’s list of the most challenged books of 2009 (the list also includes such classics as To Kill A Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye and The Color Purple).

Director Nick Cassavetes (who also co-wrote the script) is the son of film director John Cassavetes. He started his career in films as an actor before directing such films as John Q, Alpha Dog, She’s So Lovely, Unhook the Stars and The Notebook.

Home

These are my notes from our last screening.  On balance I enjoyed the film: it was typically French, and any attempt at a US remake would be disastrous.

Home


Switzerland 2009 98 minutes

Director: Ursula Meier

Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Adelaide Leroux and Jacques Gamblin

Nominations and Awards

• Swiss submission for Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film

• Six wins and five nominations


“It's a nightmare metaphor for the horrors of the modern world, but will seem like everyday reality to anyone living around Heathrow or any motorway.”

Philip French

Marthe (Isabelle Huppert) and Michael (Olivier Gourmet) are living a happy, semi-bohemian life with their three children in a remote decrepit house beside an unfinished motorway. Suddenly the motorway is opened and the family becomes isolated from school, workplace and even the shops: Marthe goes to pieces while Michel purchases insulating material to soundproof the house by blocking up all the windows.

Ursula Meier was born in eastern France close to the Swiss border and studied at the Belgium Institute of Visual Arts. After making her name with a number of prize-winning short films she directed Strong Shoulders (2003) as her first full length feature film. This film was selected for the series New Directors/New Films at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2003, with Home receiving its first US screening at the same event in 2009. The film was the official Swiss entry for the foreign language film in the 2009 Academy Awards, but it did not even make the shortlist: the Oscar went to Departures, a Japanese film about an apprentice undertaker.

She wrote the script of Home for Isabelle Huppert before she had even been cast and then searched across Europe for a suitable location before finding an unfinished motorway in Bulgaria and building a house next to it.

Save Our Libraries

I posted this in response to a question about which book changed your life, but it morphed into a statement in support of local libraries and as I used my local library to borrow film books I thought I'd re-post it here:


"I suppose it has to be the first book that I ever bought with my own money: Five Go To a Treasure Island.

Up to that point I'd been reading comics and picture stories, but after receiving a book token as a present from a generous relative my parents took me to a bookshop and I bought my first novel - the first of very many...

It was the books that I've read (combined with the support of my parents, teachers and a well-stocked local library) that got me through the History Entrance Exam after four terms in the sixth form (one of the questions concerned the value of the 19th century novel to the social historian so I wrote about Hardy, Dickens, Eliot and the Brontes). If you want to see what it was like, watch The History Boys.

In an era when the government is looking to cut library services please make sure you support your local libraries: they are far more cost effective than private education!

Declaration of interest: one of my sisters is now a librarian in the local library where I used to study."

Julie & Julia

I've just completed my notes for this week's screening:

Julie & Julia


USA 2009 123 minutes

Director: Nora Ephron

Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Stanley Tucci

Nominations and Awards

• Oscar nomination for Best Actress (Meryl Streep)

• BAFTA nomination for Best Actress (Meryl Streep)

• A further 10 wins and 12 nominations


“...the two lives hang together and the experiences of their heroines placed alongside each other offer revelations about social and cultural change over the past 60 years, from the staid age of the telex and the manual typewriter to the ubiquity of the personal computer and the mobile phone.”

Philip French

In 2002 Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a young writer with an unpleasant day job in New York decides to enjoy herself by cooking every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) by Julia Childs while blogging to document her progress. In a parallel story set in Paris in the 1950s Julia Childs (Meryl Streep) attends Le Cordon Bleu to learn about French cooking and begins work on a book about this for American housewives. After a mention of her blog in an article in The New York Times Powell is courted by a succession of journalists, literary agents and publishers, culminating in the publication of a best-selling book.

It was Streep who received the majority of the nominations and awards for her acting, but the performance of all three actors in the main roles was central to the success of the film, and these carry echoes of other films the actors have appeared in.  Julie begins to regard Julia as a mother figure and a source of inspiration to her, a relationship that echoes their roles in Doubt (2008) where Streep played the Mother Superior and Amy Adams the young nun.  In a similar happy accident of casting, Stanley Tucci as Julia’s humorous and considerate husband Paul, also played the devoted gay associate of Streep’s fashion magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada (2006).

In a career of more than 25 years Nora Ephron, initially as scriptwriter and subsequently as director, has been responsible for many successful films from Silkwood (1983) (starring Streep), Heartburn (1986) (once again with Streep) and When Harry Met Sally (1989) to Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998). Several of these films focus on people leading parallel lives, but for Julie & Julia she takes this plot structure to a different level by having them live in different periods and never meet, a structure that Stephen Daldry used for dramatic rather than comic effect in The Hours which followed the lives of three women (played by Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep again) whose only link was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

Streep received her sixteenth Oscar nomination for her performance in this film. Her next performance will be as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady with Phyllida Lloyd, who previously directed Streep in Mamma Mia! (2008), as director and also starring Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe and Richard E Grant as Michael Heseltine.

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.