Song for Marion

It's the opening night of our new season tonight.  Traditionally we have chosen something popular to pull in the punters and persaude them to sign up to the rest of the season and tonight we are screening Song for Marion.

I know the film received good reviews, but it did not appear too high on my "to see" list - unlike Cloud Atlas which I cannot wait to see - but I'm prepared to be open-minded.

Here are my notes:

Song for Marion

UK 2012                      93 minutes

Director:                      Paul Andrew Williams

Starring:                        Vanessa Redgrave, Terence Stamp, Anne Reid, Christopher Ecclestone, Gemma Arterton

Awards and Nominations

• Three nominations at the British Independent Film Awards for Screenplay (Paul Andrew Williams), Best Actor (Stamp) and Best Supporting Actress (Redgrave)
• Winner of Audience Choice Award at the Nashville Film Festival

“This is a sweet-natured, charming, if modestly conceived picture, which is much better than Dustin Hoffman's recent oldie-song drama Quartet – more relaxed, more persuasive, and it actually delivers the all-important musical climax that Hoffman somehow managed to omit.”

Peter Bradshaw

Marion (Vanessa Redgrave) and Arthur (Terence Stamp) are a long-married lower-middle-class couple.  Although she is terminally ill she is an outgoing member of a local choir (“the OAPz”) run by a young music teacher (Gemma Arterton ), while he refuses to join the choir and is alienated from their son (Christopher Ecclestone).

Both Redgrave and Stamp started their film careers in the early 1960s and starred in some of the most iconic films of the era including A Man for All Seasons (1966) Blow-Up (1966) and Camelot (1967) for Redgrave and Billy Budd (1962), The Collector (1965) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) for Stamp although since then it has been Redgrave who has had by far the more illustrious career both in terms of the films she has made and the quantity of nominations and awards she has received. 

 Paul Andrew Williams made his name with London to Brighton (2006) a brutal thriller that Peter Bradshaw regarded as one of the best British films of the last decade and for which he received a BAFTA nomination for the Most Promising Newcomer in 2007.  He followed this by The Cottage (2008) and Cherry Tree Lane (2010), both of which were also thrillers.  Thus Song for Marion reflects quite a change to his work to date, and is the result of a new joint development programme funded by Pathe and BBC Films.

Here's the trailer:

Top Ten Most Pretentious Films

Anne Billson lists her top ten most pretentious films in The Daily Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-blog/10283912/The-Top-10-Most-Pretentious-Films.html

I haven't see any of them, but I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing - although one or two do look quite interesting....

Film Posters

This is a fascinating article in The Daily Telegraph about film posters

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-blog/10276992/What-a-film-poster-says-about-you.html

Once upon a time a poster could change the meaning of a quotation by the simple expedient of missing out the word "not" (as in "...not as good as his best films..).  Now the challenge is to identify the author/website/blogpost that offers the glowing review.

How to Write a Film Review

In an interview following his appointment as chief film critic for The Observer Mark outlines his approach:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/aug/17/mark-kermode-film-critic-observer

I particularly like his description of the role of the critic:

For Kermode, a critic should first "accurately describe a film and then ascribe it to the right school of film, before mentioning its tangential connections to other films. Beyond that, your opinion is opinion and my feeling is that you should be honest about that. I don't think the reader has to agree with you and I don't think a critic is there to tell you what to see. They are there to contextualise, to describe, to be passionately honest and entertaining."

New Film Critic for The Observer

The soon to be legendary Mark Kermode is to take over as film critic for The Observer when the legendary Philip French retires:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/aug/17/mark-kermode-film-critic-observer

Hooray!

Our New Season

I spent an enjoyable evening with the Film Club (aka Community Cinema) Committee selecting films for our new season.

Between us all we came up with a list that would enable us to schedule a screening every night (well until Doctor Who and Sherlock return there is nothing much to see on TV).  However we finally cam up with the following:

Song For Marion

Lincoln

 

 

 

Les Miserables

 



Hitchcock

Beautiful Lies

A Late Quartet

It looks like it's going to be a good Autumn...

The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema

This is a brilliant article by Martin Scorsese:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/persisting-vision-reading-language-cinema/?pagination=false

I particularly enjoyed his comments about what makes cinema (not film - or the movies) special:

What was it about cinema? What was so special about it? I think I’ve discovered some of my own answers to that question a little bit at a time over the years.

First of all, there’s light.

And then, there’s movement…