Sarah's Key

Here are my notes for this week's screening:

Sarah’s Key / Elle s’appelait Sarah

France 2010                 110 minutes

Director:                      Gilles Paquet-Brenner

Starring:                        Aidan Quinn, Dominique Frot, Frederic Pierrot, Kristin Scott Thomas, Melusine Mayance, Niels Arestrup

Nominations and Awards

• Kristin Scott Thomas nominated for Cesar (Best Actress)
• One further nomination and two wins

Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas) is an American journalist investigating the deportation in 1942 from occupied Paris of more than 13,000 non-French Jewish émigrés and refugees and their French-born children to their deaths in Auschwitz.  A series of flashbacks depict the events from the perspective of a young girl who witnessed them and illustrates the willing, even enthusiastic involvement of the French bureaucracy in helping the Nazis.

The key historical event of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup are true, but the film itself is based on a novel by the best-selling French author Tatiana de Rosnay which became an international success.  Kristin Scott Thomas, who is bi-lingual, delivers her English dialogue with an American accent and speaks fluent French for the scenes set in France.

The French government declined to acknowledge any state complicity in the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup until 1995 when President Chirac apologised for the part that French policemen and civil servants had played in the raid.

Here's a link to the trailer:

Love's Kitchen

Tomorrow evening we're hosting a special event: a screening of Love's Kitchen with an introduction from the director James Hackin followed by a Q&A session afterwards.

I'd heard that the film did not do well at the box office - understatement - but I hadn't realised how bad the reviews were.  I've checked  out the usual suspects, ie Wikipedia, The Guardian and The Observer, but have struggled to find very much.

After much thought I decided on simple and straightforward statements of fact...

Here are my notes, much shorter than usual:

Love’s Kitchen
UK 2011                      xxx minutes

Director:                      James Hacking

Starring:                        Dougray Scott, Claire Forlani and Simon Callow

 Rob Haley (Dougray Scott) plays a headstrong, award-winning chef who goes into decline after his wife dies.  He decides to buy an ailing country pub in a rural paradise and, inspired by a meeting with Gordon Ramsay, manages to turn it into a successful gastro-emporium.  Then he begins to date Kate Templeton (Claire Forlani) daughter of a local squire who happens to be a successful restaurant critic.

 In addition to Scott and Forlani (who are married in real life) the film also includes well-known actors of the calibre of Simon Callow (playing a food critic clearly modelled on Keith Floyd), Peter Bowles (unsurprisingly playing the village squire) and Michelle Ryan as a kitchen assistant.

The film was shot in Letchmore Heath in Hertfordshire which, as Peter Bradshaw noted in his review in The Guardian, was also the location of the 1960 sci-fi classic Village of the Damned.

Here's a link to the trailer:

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:

Water for Elephants

We're screening this film on Thusday, but nothing I've read on it so far has made me look forward to seeing it, and I'm really struggling to produce any notes.

We've just agreed that our next two films after this week will be Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy and Midnight in Paris, and I can't wait: both of these were on my "want to see" list for 2011.

Night of the Demon

Once upon a time the BBC used to entertain us with classic ghost stories at Christmas; of these the best was Jonathan Miller's filmed version of Oh Whistle and I'll Come, based on the classic story by M R James.

As a result of this I read a brilliant selection of James's stories with an introduction by Nigel Kneale and have regularly re-read them - especially late at night during the winter.

Until recently I had not realised that Night of the Demon was based on The Casting of the Runes, and after reading a brilliant blogpost by Anne Billson on films that had scared her I managed to track down a copy on DVD.

Last week I watched it and it was superb: glorious black and white and filmed in the late 1950s, and with more suspense and sudden shocks than many current Hollywood films with budgets of an order of magnitude larger.

It also provided one of the samples for Kate Bush on her Hounds of Love Album, one of my all-time favourite recordings.

Here's a link to the US trailer where it was released as The Curse of the Demon:

Jane Eyre

These are my notes for this week's screening:

Jane Eyre

UK 2011                      121 minutes

Director:                      Cary Fukunaga

Starring:                        Mia Wasilowska, Michael Fassbinder, Judi Dench, Jamie Bell and Sally Hopkins

 Nominations and Awards

• One nomination for Best Actress (Mia Wasilowska) in the British Independent Film Awards

“Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is among the greatest of gothic novels, a page turner of such startling power, it leaves its pale latter-day imitators like Twilight flopping for air like a stranded fish.  To be sure, the dark hero of the story, Rochester, is not a vampire, but that's only a technicality. The tension in the genre is often generated by a virginal girl's attraction to a dangerous man. The more pitiful and helpless the heroine the better, but she must also be proud and virtuous, brave and idealistic. Her attraction to the ominous hero must be based on pity, not fear; he must deserve her idealism.  This atmospheric new Jane Eyre, the latest of many adaptations, understands those qualities, and also the very architecture and landscape that embody the gothic notion.”

Roger Ebert

Jane Eyre (Mia Wasilowska) arrives at the home of St John Rivers (Jamie Bell) after fleeing from Thornfield Hall, the home of Edward Rochester (Michael Fassbinder) who had engaged her as governess his young “ward” Adele and then proposed marriage on false pretences.  St John Rivers proposes marriage and a future as a Christian missionary, but subsequent events allow Jane to return to Thornfield and her true love.

Charlotte Bronte’s novel has been filmed many times with the 1944 version (from a script by Aldous Huxley) starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine in the lead roles is the best known.  The book has also inspired many other writers including Daphne du Maurier whose novel Rebecca (also filmed with Joan Fontaine) uses the same character types that Roger Ebert has notes in the quotation above.   Jean Rhys has an even closer connection with Charlotte Bronte as her novel Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Edward Rochester’s marriage to his first wife in the Caribbean.  The novel was also the inspiration for The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde, which involved a cunning plot by international villains using a prose portal to break into the novel and kidnap Jane Eyre and hold her to ransom....   

                                                                                                      

The screenplay for this new version is by the playwright and screenwriter Moira Buffini, who also wrote the screenplay for Tamara Drewe based on the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds.  Cary Fukunaga made his name with the American/Mexican film Sin Nombre (2009) for which he won the best director award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. 

Here's the trailer:

The Ghost

Here are my notes for our screening this week: 

The Ghost

UK 2010                      128 minutes

Director:                      Roman Polanski

Starring:                        Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall

Nominations and Awards

• Won Silver Bear (Best Director) at the Berlin Film Festival
• Won Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Ewan McGregor), Best Screenplay (Roman Polanski and Robert Harris), Production Design and Music at the European Film Awards
• A further 11 wins and 21 nominations

“The Ghost is Roman Polanski's best film since Tess 30 years ago, and as immaculately crafted a thriller as we're likely to see this year. It may not be in the very first rank of his pictures, of which Chinatown remains the peak. But in every respect it's a characteristic work, with echoes of those stories of intruders breaking into troubled relationships (Knife in the Water, Cul-de-sac), savvy innocents getting out of their depth (Chinatown), people losing touch with their own identities (Repulsion, The Tenant), and the operation of a malevolent fate in a world where, like Oliver Twist, the trusting hero of Polanski's last film, you need to be suspicious of the kindness of strangers.”

Philip French

Ewan McGregor plays an anonymous ghost writer hired to work on the dull memoirs of a former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) in order to justify a $10 million advance.  When he arrives in New England to begin work with Lang he discovers that his predecessor had died in mysterious circumstances, and then it seems that history might be about to repeat itself as he begins to discover alarming clues about Lang’s past in his predecessor’s notes.

 The film is based on the best-selling novel by Robert Harris, who also worked with Polanski on the screenplay which skilfully distils the complexities of the plot into a fast paced thriller.  In his novel Harris quotes Evelyn Waugh’s epigraph from Brideshead Revisited (“I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they”) but it is clear that the Langs are inspired by a recent British Prime Minister and his wife.  Pierce Brosnan gives a superb performance as Lang, and although he displays many of Blair’s characteristics he makes him a distinct character (quite unlike Michael Sheen’s uncanny impersonation of Blair in The Queen).  In a similar vein Olivia Williams turns Ruth Lang, despite her initial superficial resemblance to Cherie Blair, into a far more complex character.

Roman Polanski achieved international success with Knife in the Water (1962) and subsequently has lived and worked in the UK, the USA and most recently in Europe. In the USA his most successful film was Chinatown (1974) which received 11 Oscar nominations.  After leaving the USA in 1978 to avoid arrest he has lived and worked in Europe where his films have included Tess (1979), Death and the Maiden (1994) and The Pianist (2001), which won both the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Director. 

Following the success of The Ghost, which he shot in Germany with the bleak desolation of the North German coast standing in for Martha’s Vineyard, Polanski has recently directed Carnage, from the play God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, which was set in New York but which he filmed in studios in Paris.

Here's the trailer: