Voyage of the Damned

Forget Titanic or even A Night to Remember and watch Doctor Who instead:

A Modest Proposal

We screened Tim Burton's film of Sweeney Todd before I started this blog: I've always enjoyed Burton's films, I like Sondheim's music and found the combination irresistable.

Last week I saw Sweeney Todd on stage in London, with Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton in the leading roles: it was a completly different interpretation but once again quite brilliant.  And then I had my brilliant idea: use the show as the vehicle for yet another TV talent show, with the offer of a role in the show as the prize. 

I still need to work out the details and come up with a snappy title, but the barber's chair that deposits Sweeney's victims into the cellar below would be a brilliant way for the unsuccessful candidates to exit.

For anyone interested, here's the trailer for the Tim Burton version:

...and here's the trailer for the current stage show:

The Help

And as the day approaches when the clocks will spring forward into Summer Time, here are my notes for our last screening before the AGM in June:

The Help

USA 2011                    146 minutes

Director:                      Tate Taylor

Starring:                        Allison Janney, Bryce Dallas Howard, Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain, Mike Vogel, Octavia Spencer, Sissy Spacek, Viola Davis

 Awards and Nominations

• Won Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer).
• Three Oscar Nominations including Best Picture, Best Actress (Viola Davis) and Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Chastain).
• Won BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer)
• Four BAFTA Nominations including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress (Viola Davis) and Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Chastain).
• Won Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
• A further 37 wins and 46 nominations.

“Let's clear those caveats out of the way first.  The Help is a broad southern melodrama that implicitly frames the push for racial equality as the tale of oppressed African-Americans who are given their voice by a lone white do-gooder.  Its moral universe is rendered in bright cartoonish strokes while its feisty journalist heroine is conveniently allowed to float free from the mores of a culture (specifically 1960s Mississippi) she has lived in all her life. Viewed as an airbrushed, Dettol-heavy fairytale, however, it's rousingly effective.”

Xan Brooks

Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (Emma Stone) is a young white woman who returns to her home in 1960s Mississipp, during the Civil Rights era with aspirations of a career in journalism.  She befriends Abileen Clark (Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer), two black maids and) and decides to write a controversial book from their point of view (their white employers refer to them merely as "the help"), exposing the racism they are faced with as they work for white families.

 The film is based on Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel which was rejected by 60 literary agents before publication when it then spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List.  Thee book has strong autobiographical echoes of Stockett’s own life as Stocket was brought up in Mississippi by a black housekeeper and she based the character of Minny on her friend Kathryn Stockett’s who subsequently won many awards, including an Oscar and a BAFTA for her portrayal.  

The film is directed by Tate Taylor from his own screenplay.  He was a school friend of Stockett and he optioned the film rights to her book before it was even published.  His first film as director was a low budget comedy called Pretty Ugly People; with The Help he managed to secure Oscar nominations for three of the actresses and a win for Octavia Spencer.

Here's the trailer:

One Day

Another month and another film... Here are my notes for this week's screening:

One Day

UK 2011                      108 minutes

Director:                      Lone Scherfig

Starring:                        Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, Jodie Whittaker, Ken Stott, Patricia Clarkson, Rafe Spall, Romola Garai

 “In a season of movies dumb and dumber, One Day has style, freshness, and witty bantering dialogue. Anne Hathaway is so attractive that she would be advised to sometimes play against type (the eyeglasses she wears at the beginning are a bit over the top).  Jim Sturgess contributes the film's most versatile performance, one that depends on exact timing and control of the balance between pathos and buffoonery.  It's a decent night at the movies, if however a letdown after An Education, the previous film by Lone Scherfig.”

Roger Ebert

Upper class Dexter (Jim Sturgess) and working class Emma (Anne Hathaway) graduate from the University of Edinburgh on 15^th July 1988; they spend the night together but decide to remain just as friends.  The story then follows their respective lives on the same date over the next twenty years. 

The film is based on the award-winning novel of the same name by David Nicholls.  He worked as an actor for a number of years before writing several number novels as well as a number of TV and film scripts.  His screenplays include adaptations of two his novels: Starter for 10 (2006) and One Day (2011). 

 In the book the unusual structure of following the protagonists on just one day over a twenty year period works well, although in the film it is possible to see this just as a gimmick.  However as author of both the original novel and the screenplay there must be a reason for its retention and in The Guardian film blog David Cox proposes an interesting theory:

“Emma and Dex throw away what should have been the prime of their lives. He wraps himself up in coke and self-love; she hides herself in her own cocoon of denial. The book's annual audit anatomised their folly in meticulous detail. Their wasted years were mercilessly ticked off and the course of their delusion was unerringly charted until they were subjected to deserved punishment.

This is the chronicle of wasted youth, rich in emotional nuance and period detail, that the book's snapshots encapsulated so tellingly. In the film's necessary haste, they reveal only blurry banality. Perhaps this key element of the book could have been conveyed through some means other than annual snapshots in a way that would have been more compatible with a two-hour film. Perhaps not.”

There was also criticism of Anne Hathaway’s Yorkshire accent, with one critic describing it as all over the shop (“Sometimes she's from Scotland, sometimes she's from New York, you just can't tell.”).  Anne Hathaway subsequently claimed that she watched Emmerdale to help her as she found the accent “a challenge”.

 Lone Scherfig started her career in Denmark, but she gained worldwide fame when she directed the internationally successful An Education in the UK.

Here's the trailer:

Midnight in Paris

These are my notes for this week's screening:

Midnight in Paris

USA 2011                    100 minutes

Director:                      Woody Allen

Starring:                        Adrien Brody, Carla Bruni, Kathy Bates, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Tom Hiddleston

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for four Oscars including Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
• Another 39 nominations, including a BAFTA nomination for Best Original Screenplay and 11 wins, including a Golden Globe for Best Original Screenplay.

“This is Woody Allen's 41st film. He writes his films himself, and directs them with wit and grace. I consider him a treasure of the cinema. Some people take him for granted, although Midnight in Paris reportedly charmed even the jaded veterans of the Cannes press screenings. There is nothing to dislike about it. Either you connect with it or not. I'm wearying of movies that are for "everybody" — which means, nobody in particular.  Midnight in Paris is for me, in particular, and that's just fine with moi.”

Roger Ebert

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a disillusioned Hollywood scriptwriter who while visiting Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and future parents-in-law finds that the city has revived his desire to become a serious novelist.  While walking through the city late one night Gil is picked up by a mysterious antique Peugeot that takes him back in time to the 1920s where he meets Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Cole Porter. In subsequent trips to the past he also travels back to the 1892, where he meets Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Degas.  Gil rejects an offer from a girl he meets to stay in the past but his trips back in time help him resolve what to do with his life in the present.   

There are many modern films with a time travel theme with the Back to the Future trilogy and Groundhog Day being the most successful.  In Allen’s own, extensive catalogue, there are certain similarities to The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) in which an actor steps out of a film and falls in love with a girl in the audience.  However Philip French also suggests that Allen has been influenced by Victor Sjoestroem’s silent film The Phantom Carriage (1921), the favourite film of his idol Ingmar Bergman, in which a ghostly coach travels round town at midnight picking up the dead. 

Since 2000 Woody Allen has worked extensively in Europe with European casts where his films have included Match Point (2005) and You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010), both of which were filmed in the UK and the award-winning Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008) which was filmed in Spain.

Here's the trailer:

Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy

Here are my notes for this week's film which we're screening on Thursday:

Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy

UK 2011                      127 minutes

Director:                      Tomas Alfredson

Starring:                        Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberpatch, Kathy Burke, Mark Strong, Tom Hardy and Toby Jones

Nominations and Awards

• Three Oscar Nominations including Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay
• 11 BAFTA nominations including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor (Benedict Cumberpatch and Tom Hardy), Best Supporting Actress (Kathy Burke) and Best Adapted Screenplay
• A further eight wins and 27 nominations

“The genius of Alfredson's film is that despite the fabulously evocative period detail (you can smell the stale cigarette smoke lingering in the yellowing wallpaper) and the pervasive cold war dread, this adaptation of John le Carré's well-loved bestseller is not about spies at all. Just as Let the Right One In presented a surreptitious study of repressed childhood anger disguised in the garb of a neo-gothic vampire tale, so Tinker Tailor buries its central theme of male distrust, duplicity and anxious misidentification within the labyrinthine twists of an international counter-intelligence yarn.”

Mark Kermode

George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is called out of his enforced retirement to identify a Soviet mole who has infiltrated the upper reaches of the secret service.

The film is based on John Le Carré’s 1974 thriller which was famously adapted for television in 1979 with Alec Guinness playing Smiley.  Le Carré had been so impressed by Guinness's performance that he based his characterisation of Smiley in subsequent novels on Guinness.  Oldman was initially diffident about taking the role because of the long shadow cast by Guinness, but he had the support of Le Carré himself, who simply advised him to return to the character described in the novel and use his imagination.  The film also includes casting in depth for many of the supporting roles, with actors of the calibre of John Hurt, Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberpatch playing relatively minor parts.

The TV version had seven episodes to unravel the labyrinthine plot so with the constraints of a feature film the screenwriters had to adopt a different approach, as scriptwriter Peter Straughan explained:

“The adaptation ... involved a kind of mosaic work.  Some long sequences would remain intact ... but in other cases we would take a line or an event from one place in the narrative and move it elsewhere, shifting the fragments around endlessly until it felt right.  The goal was to create a new version of the narrative which would bear a close family resemblance to the source material, but have its own cinematic personality.”

Following the international critical and commercial success of this film there have been stories in the press that Oldman is interested in playing Smiley again in a film of Smiley’s People, Le Carré’s sequel to Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy and once again memorably filmed for TV with Alec Guinness in the title role.

Here's the trailer:

Dickens Bi-Centenary

I decided to celebrate the Dickens bi-centenary in style: by watching the Doctor Who story in which Dickens appears.  Simon Callow plays the great man and there is the added bonus of Eve Myles playing the psychic maid.  The script is by Mark Gatiss, and in a typical stroke of genius Russell T Davies managed to link Gwen from Torchwood to Gwyneth when he brought the characters from Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures into The Stolen Earth.

For anyone missing Doctor Who, here's the trailer: