Lighting the Beacons

We saw that there would be a Diamond Jubilee Beacon being lit on the Downs above our village, so we decided to go and watch it being lit.

Needless to say the location we had found on the website was incorrect, but a large cardboard sign directed us several hundred yards up the road, where the cars parked on the verge made us realise that something was happening.

There was a small crowd present, some of whom had been present for the Silver and Golden Jubilee Beacons, and we waited together and looked out over the dark plains below.  There was a wonderful sense of timelessness there, a feeling that we were sharing in something that stretched back at least to the Armada - or even earlier as there are so many ancient earthworks in our area. 

We did our best to ignore the signs of 21st Century Berkshire, and as we watched we spotted several beacons spread out across the landscape beneath us.

At 10.00pm the signal was given for someone to light ours: there was a countdown, a flash of flame, and then a great cheer.

We drove home listening to the soundtrack of the beacon sequence in The Lord of The Rings:

My Week with Marilyn

It's our AGM early next month, and we've decided to screen My Week with Marilyn.

Here are my notes:

My Week with Marilyn

UK2011                       101 minutes

Director:                      Simon Curtis

Starring:                        Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Redmayne, Emma Watson and Judi Dench

 Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for Oscars for Best Actress (Michelle Williams) and Best Supporting Actor (Kenneth Branagh)
• Nominated for six BAFTAs including Best British Film, Best Actress (Michelle Williams), Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench) and Best Supporting Actor (Kenneth Branagh)
• A further 14 wins and 26 nominations

“In 1956, Marilyn Monroe came to Britain to make a movie at Pinewood Studios with Laurence Olivier. This was the tense and ill-fated light comedy The Prince and the Showgirl, scripted by Terence Rattigan, a film that became a legend for the lack of chemistry between its insecure and incompatible stars.  One was a sexy, feminine, sensual and mercurial diva.  The other would go on to make Some Like It Hot.  ... My Week With Marilyn is light fare: it doesn't pretend to offer any great insight, but it offers a great deal of pleasure and fun, and an unpretentious homage to a terrible British movie that somehow, behind the scenes, generated a very tender almost-love story.”

Peter Bradshaw

Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) is the Third Assistant Director on The Prince and the Showgirl which Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) is filming in the UK with Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) as both director and leading man.  Monroe has been accompanied to the UK by her husband Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott), but when he leaves her to return to the US she spends an intimate romantic week alone with Clark.  The film is based on a memoir that Colin Clark (son of Lord Clark of Civilisation and younger brother of Alan Clark, Conservative MP and famous diarist) wrote from the diaries that he kept about his time working with Olivier as a general dogsbody on The Prince and the Showgirl. 

Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh secured both critical praise and award nominations for their performances, but the film has casting in depth and includes established performers such as Judi Dench (as Sybil Thorndike), Julia Ormond (as Vivien Leigh) and Zoe Wanamaker (as Paula Strasberg, Marilyn Monroe’s acting coach) as well as relative newcomers such Eddie Redmayne (recently seen in Birdsong on TV) and Emma Watson (moving on from her role as Hermione in the Harry Potter films).

The screenplay is by Adrian Hodges who has worked extensively in television where, amongst his work, he has adapted two of Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockheart novels for TV as well as creating and writing episodes for Primeval and writing episodes for the BBC remake of Survivors.  Simon Curtis as director had worked extensively in theatre before making his television debut with Cranford.  He followed the success of this series with the widely acclaimed film A Short Stay in Switzerland, which starred Julie Walters in a true story of a woman who decided to take her own life in a Dignitas clinic.

Here's the trailer:

Films for the Jubilee

Everyone seems to be getting excited about the Cultural Olympiad linked to the Olympic Games (apparently they're happening in London and other venues around the country during the summer).  But to date I've not seen much about any cultural events to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee.

Following her success in Elizabeth Cate Blanchett returned to the role in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, which was set at the time of the Spanish Armada.  Despite a number of inaccuracies and liberties with history I enjoyed it very much and it went down well when we screened it for our Film Society.  On this basis I wonder if there is any mileage in Helen Mirren returning to the role of Elizabeth II in a sequel to The Queen.  In the first film Michael Sheen was uncannily brilliant portraying Blair in his early pomp, but I'd be struggling to cast either Cameron or Clegg.

Here are my notes for The Golden Age:  

ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE

UK, 2007 (114 minutes)

Director:          Shekhar Kapur

Starring:          Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen and Geoffrey Rush

Awards and Nominations

Oscars

Won                            Oscar for Best Costumes
Nominated                  Cate Blanchett (Actress in a Leading Role)

BAFTAS                     Four nominations, including Cate Blanchett for Best Leading Actress

A further three wins and seven nominations

In 1585 Catholic Spain, the most powerful country in Europe, is plotting to invade England and overthrow the heretic Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett).  Philip II has built an Armada and the execution of Mary Queen of Scots gives him the excuse he needs to launch it.  A combination of the naval skills of Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), Spanish miscalculation and the English weather allow a numerically inferior English fleet to destroy the Armada and save both Queen and country.

 In the four centuries since her death Elizabeth I has become a chameleon figure who can reflect the cultural and political concerns of the age which chooses to portray her – especially in films and on TV.  In The Sea Hawk (1940) Flora Robson portrayed Elizabeth vigorously defending her Kingdom against foreign invasion, a situation with obvious parallels to the events of the Second World War; in the early 1970s Glenda Jackson gave a performance with a distinct feminist flavour in Elizabeth R; and in Shakespeare in Love (1998) Judi Dench transformed Elizabeth into a drama-loving deus (dea?) ex machina who resolved the complexities of the plot, while at the same time providing Shakespeare with an abundance of source material for his future plays.  Elizabeth I has also appeared memorably in both Black Adder and Doctor Who.

Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of Elizabeth in Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) offers a very different view of the queen, but one which again has similarities with our own recent history.  The first film shows the real dangers that Elizabeth faces both during the reign of her half-sister and after gaining the crown herself, when she has to overcome attempts to dethrone her by disaffected courtiers as well as defeating external rebellions, eventually realising that in order to consolidate her power and retain the throne she needs to remain unmarried.  In the later film Elizabeth is still receiving suitors from across Europe, but at the same time Catholic powers in Europe are plotting to overthrow her: she survives an unsuccessful assassination plot by religious zealots and then unites her subjects by portraying herself as a moderate who will defend English Protestants and Catholics against the fundamentalist practices of the Spanish Inquisition that would follow a successful invasion by the Spanish Armada.

Shekhar Kapur has rejected claims that his film is anti-Catholic; he sees it rather as a conflict between Philip who had no ability to encompass diversity or contradiction and Elizabeth who had a feminine ability to do precisely that.  This perspective compels him to interpret history with a significant degree of artistic licence: in 1585 Elizabeth was 52, although the film shows her still receiving suitors; Fotheringay Castle, where Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded, is situated on the flat plains of Northamptonshire rather than on the banks of a picturesque loch; and Sir Walter Raleigh played only a minor in the defeat of the Spanish Armada.  In Alan Bennett’s memorable phrase this is histrionics rather than history, but it follows in a glorious tradition that we can trace back to Shakespeare.  Did anyone ever expect Richard III to give an accurate picture of pre-Tudor history?

Here's the trailer:

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.