From The Archives...

We screened Volver in our first season, some time before I started this blog.

I have to own up to a massive whole in my film watching history: this was the first film by Almodóvar that I had ever seen, although I'd been aware of his work for many years.  Needless to say it blew me away and I now have my own copy of DVD as well.

this is one of the fist examples of me committing to produce notes on a film I had not seen.  Having just re-read the notes I hope they stand the test of time:

VOLVER/COMING HOME

Spain 2006, 121 minutes

Director:          Pedro Almodóvar

Starring:          Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura etc

Awards and Nominations:  

Cannes Film Festival: 

Winner:                                   Ensemble Cast (Joint Winners of Best Actress)

                                                Pedro Almodóvar (Best Screenplay)

Nomination:                            Golden Palm

Oscar Nominations:                Penélope Cruz (Best Actress in a Leading Role)

                 
BAFTA Nominations:            Best Film Not in the English Language

                                                Penélope Cruz (Best Actress in a Leading Role)       

Volver, which translates into English as Coming Home or Coming Back, is an intriguing melodrama inspired by the trash TV that is the soundtrack to its characters’ lives.  Penélope Cruz is Raimunda, a hard-working woman with a teenage daughter and a feckless, lazy husband.  With her sister Sole she tends the graves of her parents and visits her ailing aunt Paula, who is in the final stages of dementia.  There is a sudden act of violence which destroys Raimunda’s family life and a secret about her late mother Irene that emerges when Irene returns from beyond the grave to contact her astonished daughters.

Almodóvar is the most successful and internationally known Spanish filmmaker of his generation.  He started making films in 1980, but did not have his first international success until Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in 1988.  He followed this with Live Flesh (1997), based on a novel by English crime writer Ruth Rendell, All About My Mother (1999), which won an Oscar for Best Foreign film and a Best Director Award for Almodóvar and which has just been staged as a play at the Old Vic in London, and Talk To Her (2002) which won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.  All his films are marked by complex narratives, employ the codes of melodrama and use elements of pop culture and irreverent humour.  He describes Volver as a cross between Mildred Pierce, in which a career woman takes the rap for a murder that her daughter has committed, and Arsenic and Old Lace, which involves a pair of old ladies involved in homicide, and in it he somehow manges to connect the various narrative strands into a lucid pattern of generational conflict and female bonding that remains psychologically convincing.

Penélope Cruz gives a brilliant performance as Raimunda, and in a superb female ensemble cast Carmen Maura, outrageous star of Almodóvar’s earlier films, as Irene also stands out.  Penélope Cruz was deservedly nominated for a Best Actress Award for her performance, but not for the fist time the Cannes Jury decided to go one better: having decided that it was impossible to choose between all the performances, they uniquely awarded the Best Actress Award to the Ensemble Cast.

Here's the trailer:

How to write film notes

We have a couple of techies in our film club who set up the projector and sound system for each screening, and an accountant who is our treasurer.  As I'm neither technical nor an accountant I'm happy to leave all that to them: my job is to buy the wine, run the bar - and produce the film notes.
The challenge here is to produce some interesting notes about a film which (for the most part) I have not seen and to put in some form of context.  Once of the best films we have ever screened was Downfall, about the last days of Hitler in the bunker, although I did receive one complaint about a spoiler in the following notes:

DOWNFALL (DER UNTERGANG)

Germany 2005, 156 minutes

Director:          Oliver Hirschbiegel

Starring:          Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Juiliane Kohler and Ulriches Matthes

Awards and Nominations

• Oscar Nomination for Best Film Foreign Language Film, plus another 13 nominations and 14 wins.

In April 1945 the war in Europe is reaching its final stages, and as the Red Army approaches Berlin Hitler and his entourage take refuge in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery.  As Hitler celebrates his birthday he spends the final ten days of his life increasingly isolated from reality as he orders his entourage to uses non-existent battalions of the Wehrmacht to stage a glorious counter-attack.  While they are in Hitler’s presence his officers politely maintain this fantasy, but when they are alone there is just one topic of conversation: how best to commit suicide while Berlin burns around them.

 The script is based closely on information from Inside Hitler’s Bunker (2002) by Joachim Fest, a German historian of the Nazi period who was able to use material only recently made available from the archives of the former Soviet Union, as well as first-hand accounts of those who had actually been in the bunker with Hitler, including Albert Speer and Traudl Junge, who as Hitler’s secretary was able to provide a uniquely intimate perspective on the death throes of the Third Reich. 

In Germany the treatment of any aspect of the Third Reich is still a sensitive issue and Downfall broke one the last taboos in its depiction of Hitler by a German-speaking actor; until this point German films had only used newsreel film to depict Hitler.  In English language films on this subject there seems to have been a convention that a portrayal of Hitler requires classical training and Alec Guinness, Derek Jacobi, Anthony Hopkins and Alec McCowen have all given their own impersonation of the Führer.  However Bruno Ganz, who was actually born in Switzerland, has a German-speaking authenticity that blows away all earlier portrayals by showing that even in private Hitler shouted and raved: there was never a charming statesman or brilliant visionary.

Concern about the portrayal of Hitler ensured that the film received international coverage.  In the UK Ian Kershaw, a biographer of Hitler, commented:

“Knowing what I did of the bunker story, I found it hard to imagine that anyone (other than the usual neo-Nazi fringe) could possibly find Hitler a sympathetic figure during his bizarre last days. And to presume that it might be somehow dangerous to see him as a human being — well, what does that thought imply about the self-confidence of a stable, liberal democracy?

Of all the screen depictions of the Führer, this is the only one which to me is compelling. Part of this is the voice. Ganz has Hitler's voice to near perfection. It is chillingly authentic.”

 The film ends with a brief extract from the documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary in which an elderly Traudl Junge, one of the few survivors from the bunker still alive, speaks of her youthful infatuation with Hitler and recognises that her young age was no excuse for not asking crucial questions about either Nazism or its victims.  She died shortly after the release of the documentary and in one of her final interviews is reported to have said “Now that I’ve let go of my story I can let go of my life.”

Here's the trailer:

Happy Birthday Mr Shakespeare

I was going to post this yesterday but broadband issues prevented me from doing so.  However there is no documentary evidence of Shakespeare's date of birth, merely a record of a christening, so if if his birthday really was yesterday then this is a belated birthday celebration.

Yesterday I read a sonnet and tonight I've watched the trailer for The Shakespeare Code, one of the best episodes of Russell T Davies's rebot of Doctor Who:

This was an early episode in Series Three, and was screened just at the time that I was participating in the HP Film Blogging Contest.  One of the posts asked contributors to suggest remakes of old films using modern technology.  I suggested that the cast and crew of the then current series would be perfect as the The Shakespeare Code managed to combine Shakespeare himself, Harry Potter and the Marx Brothers (Groucho Marx, (as Rufus T Firefly) becomes president/dictator of Freedonia in Duck Soup) in an episode the combined both comedy and a superb story. 

It mist have worked, as just over a month later my wife and I flew off for a weekend at the Cannes Film Festival.

Titanic: for those who don't have time to see the film...

James Cameron's film of Titanic (in either its original or 3D versions) is a bladder-challenging 194 minutes.  But for anyone who wants a story about the Titanic and does not have more than three hours to spend there is an alternative: Every Man For Himself.

This is a novel about the Titanic by Beryl Bainbridge that follows the four days of the ship's maiden voyage overe 214 pages (at least it does in my paperback version).  The writing is brilliant and the special effects are superb.

This is the moment of collision:

"...suddenly the room juddered; the lights flickered and Ginsberg's cigarette case, whch sat at his elbow, jolted to the floor.  It was the sound accompanying the juddering that startled us, a long drawn-out tearing, like a vast length of calico slowly ripping apart.  Melchett said, "We're in collision with another ship", and with that we threw down our cards, ran to the doors, sprinted through the Palm Court and out on to the deck.  A voice called "We've bumped an iceberg - there it goes", but though I peered out into the darkness I could see nothing."

Philip Pullman has commented on the close similarity between novelists and film makers in that unlike a stage play you can direct the eyes of your watchers/readers, and reading a passage like this you can how true it is.

The final image in the book is breathtaking:

"Dawn came and as far as the eye could see the ocean was dotted with islands and fields of ice.  Some floated with tapering mast-heads, some sailed with monstrous bows rising sheer to the pink-flushed sky, some in the shapes of ancient vessels.  Between this pale fleet the little lifeboats rocked. ...  Beyond, where the sun was beginng to show its burning rim, smoke blew from a funnel."

The book won the 1996 Whitbread Novel Award, and in case you're interested the title of the book has a usage in the story quite different from what it might suggest given the subject matter.

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: