Fargo

Apparently it is mandatory for every film society to show Fargo.  We fulfilled this obligation several years ago, and when I was researching for my notes I found the wonderful extract from a piece by David Thomson which I was able to quote in full:

 

Fargo

USA 1996       (98 minutes)

Director:          Joel Cohen

Starring:          Frances McDormand, William H. Macy and Steve Buscemi

 Awards and Nominations

Won                Oscar for Best Original Screenplay

                        Oscar for Leading Actress (Frances McDormand)

Nominated for five further Oscars

Won                BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay

Won                Best Director (Joel Coen)

Nominated for a further five baftas

Won                Best Director (Joel Coen) at Cannes Film Festival

Nominated for Golden Palm

An overall total of 49 wins and 19 nominations

In Minnesota a small-time business man with severe financial problems hires two inept hoodlums to kidnap his wife in an attempt to obtain ransom from his father-in-law.  However the plot goes murderously wrong and a heavily-pregnant sheriff arrives from Minneapolis to solve the string of unexpected deaths in her jurisdiction.

The film claims to be based on a true story, but in his introduction to the published screenplay Ethan Coen undermines this:

“The story that follows is about Minnesota.  It evokes the abstract landscape of our childhood – a bleak, windswept tundra, resembling Siberia except for its Ford dealerships and Hardee’s restaurants.  It aims to be homey and exotic, and pretends to be true.”

Subsequently it emerged that the Coens’ inspiration was a 1986 murder in Connecticut where a husband used a wood chipper to dispose of his wife’s body – the Coens moved the location to Minnesota because they had been born and brought up on the outskirts of Minneapolis. 
 
The film was launched to universal acclaim and secured many awards.  It has secured its place in cinema history and recently David Thompson included it as one of only three films released in 1996 in his book “Have You Seen?” A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films where he summarised its appeal as follows:

“Fargo is just 97 minutes long, compact and efficient (cost $7 million; earnings $24.5 million), a sort of “the gang’s all here” of American independent film, and a quiet knockout.  When the snow is that thick, you won’t hear a body or a Douglas fir fall, just the hush being underlined.  But the tonal range of the film is what is leaving puffs of breath in the air.  From one moment to the next this film is gruesome, bloody and “Oh no!” as well as so funny you wish those starchy voices would stop talking for a second.”

In a career of nearly 25 years the Coen brothers have produced a series of brilliant films that have been successful with both festival and multiplex audiences.  Fargo is arguably their greatest film and until No Country For Old Men (2007) it was their most successful in terms of nominations and awards.

 

In case you need any more encouragement, here's the trailer:

 

 

The Woman in Black

We seem to have established a tradition of showing a horror film around the time of Halloween.  In past years we've screen Let The Right One In and 30 Days of Night, and this year we're screening The Woman in Black.

 

My wife is a great fan of Susan Hill's writing and has seen the play (via school trips) more than a dozen times, so we decided to watch it at home.  We started the film quite late - inevitably - and were quite enjoying it.  Then just as we were getting to the scary part in Eel Marsh House there was a powercut.  Fortunately there was no rocking chair in a locked room upstairs and no visit from the Woman in Black herself.

 

Here are my notes:

 

The Woman in Black

UK 2011                      94 minutes

Director:                      James Watkins

Starring:                        Daniel Radcliffe, Ciaran Hinds, Janet McTeer, Roger Allam, Shaun Dooley, Sophie Stuckey

 “Her face, in its extreme pallor, her eyes, sunken but unnaturally bright, were burning with the concentration of passionate emotion which was within her and which streamed from her.  Whether or not this hatred and malevolence was directed towards me I had no means of telling – I had no reason at all to suppose that it could possibly have been, but at that moment I was far from able to base my reactions upon reason and logic.  For the combination of the peculiar, isolated place and the sudden appearance of the woman and the dreadfulness of her expression began to fill me with fear.”

Susan Hill: The Woman in Black

 Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe), a young solicitor, visits the remote coastal village of Crythin Gifford to obtain the paperwork to sell the remote, bleak and desolate Eel March House after the death of Mrs Drablow, an elderly client of his firm.  While staying at the house, Kipps sees the mysterious figure of a woman dressed in black and from letters he discovers he finds out who she is.  From the locals he learns that the appearance of the Woman in Black always leads to the death of a child.

 The film is based on the classic novel by Susan Hill which was previously filmed in 1989 with a screenplay by Nigel Kneale (of Quatermass fame), which has also been dramatised for the stage and has been running in London for more than 20 years.  The novel consciously echoes the style of the great ghost stories of M R James (one of the chapters has the title “Whistle and I’ll Come to You”), but the skillful adaptation by Jane Goodman, while retaining the key elements of Hill’s novel and remaining true to its spirit, reorders and compresses them to make them more immediate – and more chilling.

 The film received much publicity through the astute casting of Daniel Radcliffe in his first post-Potter role, with his performance as the young solicitor receiving generally good reviews.  It is also worth noting that the film is the most successful production to date of the relaunched Hammer Film Productions, the company dominated the horror film market from the mid-1950s to the 1970s with innumerable cycles of films featuring Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy. 

The Woman in Black has been the most successful Hammer film ever in the USA as well as the highest grossing UK horror film for 20 years. Hammer Films has subsequently announced that there will be a sequel to the film, currently called The Woman in Black: Angels of Death.  Susan Hill will provide an original story set during the Second World War: Eel Marsh House has been converted to a military mental hospital and the arrival of disturbed soldiers re-awakes its darkest inhabitant.

 

Here's the trailer:

 

 

The Descendants

Our plan was to screen The Descendants, but a mix up over the DVD meant that we had to screen an alternative.  The screening of a film with George Clooney had attracted a certain demographic, so we offered everyone a freee glass of wind and screened The American instead.

We will screen The Descendants at a later date, but here are my notes anyway:

The Descendants

USA 2011                    115minutes

Director:                      Alexander Payne

Starring:                        George Clooney, Amara Miller, Beau Bridges, Judy Greer, Matthew Lillard, Michael Ontkean, Nick Krause, Robert Forster, Shailene Woodley

Awards and Nominations

·         Won Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay and four further nominations including Best Director, Best Film and Best Actor (George Clooney).

·         BAFTA nominations for Best Film, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor (George Clooney).

·         A further 47 wins and 66 nominations.

“Nothing gives me more pleasure than to welcome a new film by the gifted writer-director Alexander Payne, especially as The Descendants, his first movie since Sideways eight years ago, is so good, and in so many ways.”

 Philip French

After his wife has been left comatose by an accident while water skiing Matt King (George Clooney), a rich landowner in Hawaii, discovers that she has been having an affair.  The accident forces him to face up to his responsibilities as a (failed) husband and father and he sets off on a scenic tour of his life.

The film received its first screenings at the Telluride, Toronto and New York film festivals and was then scheduled to have a limited release in December 2011.  However the positive critical response from its initial screenings resulted in its release date being brought forward.    The film subsequently appeared in many critics’ lists of the best films of 2011 and won many awards for George Clooney, Alexander Payne (as writer and director) and as Best Film.

 In his four star review of the film Roger Ebert was particularly impressed by George Clooney:

 “And George Clooney? What essence does Payne see in him? I believe it is intelligence. Some actors may not be smart enough to sound convincing; the wrong actor in this role couldn't convince us that he understands the issues involved. Clooney strikes me as manifestly the kind of actor who does. We see him thinking, we share his thoughts, and at the end of The Descendants, we've all come to his conclusions together.”

Alexander Payne made his name as Director/Screenwriter of films such as Election (1999), About Schmidt (2002) and Sideways (2004).  George Clooney lobbied Alexander Payne unsuccessfully for a part in this latter film, being turned down by Payne on the basis that he was too big a star for a role in such an ensemble cast.

	Here's the trailer:

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.