The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Here are my notes for this week's screening.  As the film is set in India we'll be serving a selection of Indian snacks and beer to get the punters in the mood.

Despite some of the UK reviews the film seems to have been a sleeper hit, and we have had many requests to screen it, so hopefully we will have a good audience. 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

UK 2011                      118 minutes

Director:                      John Madden

Starring:                        Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Tom Wilkinson, Ronald Pickup and Dev Patel

 “How can I suggest what a delight this film is? Let me try a little shorthand. Recall some of the wonderful performances you've seen from Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy and the others, and believe me when I say that this movie finds rich opportunities for all of them.  Director John Madden ("Shakespeare in Love") has to juggle to keep his subplots in the air, but these actors are so distinctive, they do much of the work for him.”

Roger Ebert

A group of seven British ex-pats leave the UK to travel to the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a retirement destination for “the elderly and beautiful”, in India.  All the characters have their own reason for making the move, but the most urgent is that local prices make retirement possible for all of them.

In the first half of the 1980s there was a cycle of films and television productions about Britain’s preoccupation with India and its imperial history, ranging from the early Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust (1983), the TV series The Jewel in the Crown (1982) to David Lean’s epic version of A Passage to India (1984), all based on novels that explored aspects of the Anglo-Indian experience and life in the Raj.  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is also based on a novel (by Deborah Moggach), but one that explores the English experience of India in the twenty-first century, as a place of off-shoring, outsourcing and call centres.

John Madden made his name with the TV film Mrs Brown (1997) and the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love (1998), of which starred Judi Dench and Tom Wilkinson, before moving to Hollywood where his subsequent films have included Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) and more recently a thriller called The Debt (2011), which starred Tom Wilkinson with Helen Mirren.  He had originally cast Peter O’Toole and Julie Christie to play Norman and Madge before replacing them by Ronald Pickup and Celia Imrie, and subsequently confirmed that he had also considered Eileen Atkins and John Hurt for roles in the film.

 The film has not yet won any awards but there are rumours in the US of a likely nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Maggie Smith.

Here's the trailer:

 

The Artist

It's the beginning of the new season for our film club, and each year we try to start the programme with a screening that will pull in the punters.

This year we chose The Artist: it had long been on my "must see" list and I was not in the least disappointed.

Here are my notes:

The Artist

France 2011                 100 minutes

Director:                      Michel Hazanavicius

Starring:                        Berenice Bejo, Jean Dujardin, John Goodman, Malcolm McDowell, Penelope Anne Miller

 Awards and Nominations

• Won five Oscars including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Jean Dujardin), Best Original Score and Best Costume Design.
• Nominated for five more Oscars including Best Supporting Actress (Berenice Bejo) and Best Original Screenplay (Michel Hazanavicius)
• A further 109 wins (including Best Actor for Jean Dujardin at the Cannes Film Festival) and 68 further nominations.

“The Artist is a formally daring and sublimely funny movie about the end of silent movies in 1920s Hollywood.  It is itself silent and in black and white, with inter-titles and a full, continuous orchestral score.  Endlessly inventive, packed with clever sight gags and rich in stunningly achieved detail The Artist is a pastiche and passionate love affair to the silent age; it takes the silent movie seriously as a specific form, rather than as an obsolete technology, and sets out to create a new movie within the genre.”

Peter Bradshaw

In 1927 George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent movie star insists on casting Peppy (Berenice Bejo), an unknown dancer, in his next film.  Peppy becomes a huge star as talking pictures arrive in Holly wood, but George continues to make silent films and his career is ruined.  Eventually Peppy comes to his rescue and persuades the studio to allow her to make a musical with him.

Michel Hazanavicius had wanted to make a silent film for many years as a tribute to his heroes of the silent era, but he was only able to secure funding after the financial success of two spoof spy films that he directed.  He studied silent films to identify techniques to make his screenplay comprehensible without using too many intertitles and also calibrated lighting, lenses and camera moves to get the period look right.  The film was actually shot in colour and then converted to black and white, with a slightly lower frame rate than usual to mirror the slightly speeded up look of 1920s silent films. 

The film received its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival, initially out of competition but then moved to the competition a week before the Festival opened.  Subsequent to its success here the film won many awards around the world and also appeared near the top of many critics’ lists of the best films of 2011.

 Here's the trailer:

 

 

A warning to the curious...

Over the past few weeks I've been re-reading all of Jasper Fforde's novels and am currently enjoying The Woman Who Died A Lot, his most recent story Thursday Next. For reason to this see the precdeing entry.

However I think I must have been overdoing it - or rather I must have overdosed - as today I seem to have read myself into the Book World and ended up in the Well Of Lost Plots.  I did not spend much time there, but I was atleast able to take a few photos as evidence.

Hopefully the Men in Plaid cannot operate in the Outland.

I've started so I'll finish...

This is all my own fault.  I've always watched Mastermind and inevitably the thought that came to mind was: I could do that.

Then earlier this year I found the Mastermind website which contained a selection of quizzes, which I tried and found that I was in the top [n]% of the population, where [n] is a reassuringly small number.  There was also a link to follow if you wanted to apply to take part - so I followed it, filled in the form, and then forgot all about it.

Several weeks ago I had a call out of the blue from the production team: an invitation to  meet up so that they could ask me some questions.  I think I answered quite well, as within a week I had another call offering me a place on the programme.  There were some further exchanges while we hammered out the detail of my specialist subject choices, but eventually we finalised a list of three subjects that were OK.

For the first round my subject is the novels of Jasper Fforde:

http://www.jasperfforde.com/

I follow this with the life of HH Asquith:



And for the final I've chosen Doctor Who (2005 to the present):

And now the hard work begins as I'm slowly realising what I've committed myself to: as a first step I'm currently re-reading all of Jasper Fforde's novels  (always a great pleasure) and listening to as many of them as I can find as audio books while I'm driving.

In addition there are two biographies of Asquith on my desk, even as I write this, but I've decided not to start re-watching Doctor Who until nearer the time.

The likely timescales for filming are September, October and November but with no indication yet as to broadcast dates.

This is an ongoing project, so watch out for further updates.



Belated Thoughts on the Jubilee

In all the excitement of the Jubile I missed another opportunity to blog about Doctor Who.  In one of those spooky coincidences that seem to happen a lot (note to self: keep an eye on entropy levels) our current trawl through New Who we last week arrived at The Idiot's Lantern  which as any fule kno is set at the time of the Coronation.

Here's the trailer:

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: