Famous Film Quotes as Charts

This is wonderful: the top 100 Film Quotes converted into charts and flow diagrams:

http://flowingdata.com/famous-movie-quotes-as-charts/

Somewhat inevitibly I like the entry for "Play it again" from Casablanca.

The Great Gatsby

With the holidays behind us we can re-start our Film Club screenings.

Our first film for 2014, in an attempt to pull in the punters, is The Great Gatsby.  It's been a bit of a struggle to produce the notes as I'm still getting used to the alarm clock in the morning, but I've just finished them and here thay are:

The Great Gatsby
USA 2013                    143 minutes

Director:                      Baz Luhrmann

Starring:                        Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Tobey Maguire

“So what of this 3D fourth screen version of The Great Gatsby?  It is, you might say, a story of three eggs.  The mysterious central character is the self-made Jay Gatsby, a millionaire bootlegger who in the summer of 1922 lives at West Egg, the township outside Manhattan on Long Island Sound where the nouveaux riches have built their mansions.  Across the bay at East Egg are the grand houses of the old-money people, among them the rich, brutal, Ivy League philistine Tom Buchanan, husband of the southern belle Daisy, whom Gatsby courted as an officer and temporary gentleman in the First World War.  After losing her to Buchanan because he was penniless, he now seeks to recapture her.  The third egg is Baz Luhrmann's curate's egg of a film, good and bad in parts, but mainly a misconceived venture. Luhrmann is a cheerful vulgarian and his movie suggestive of Proust directed by Michael Winner.”

 

Philip French

Awards and Nominations

• 11 wins
• 30 nominations

Despite the title, the film’s main character is Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) who is the unreliable narrator of Fitzgerald’s source novel as well as the catalyst who brings the enigmatic Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Daisy (Carey Mulligan) together again.  The film follows the structure of the novel by having Carraway as the narrator, but anchors it in reality by making him tell it in flashback as part of his treatment for depression and alcoholism just after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.  Luhrmann emphasis this literary conceit by makings words from the book float in the air around Carraway with some lines from the novel actually written on the camera lens.

 Many critics praised DiCaprio’s central performance as the millionaire bootlegger and some praised the vibrant energy of Luhrmann’s production, but as Scott Foundas pointed out in Variety:

“...what Luhrmann grasps even less than previous adapters of the tale is that Fitzgerald... was offering an eyewitness account of the decline of the American empire, not an initiation to the ball.”

With the sound track of the film Luhrmann follows the precedent that he set on Moulin Rouge in using deliberately anachronistic songs which nonetheless help to build up the atmosphere of the Jazz Age.  But Philip French notes several less obvious anachronisms in other details of the production:  it is unlikely that Nick could have read Ulysses while still at Yale as it was only published in Paris in 1922 while Rhapsody in Blue is performed at one of Gatsby’s parties two years before Gershwin wrote it.

The Great Gatsby has been adapted for the screen six times.  These include a silent version (now lost) and a 1949 adaptation that starred Alan Ladd as Gatsby as well as the more famous 1974 version (from a script by Francis Ford Coppola) that starred Robert Redford as Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy and Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway.  Additionally it has inspired ballets, musicals as well as several stage adaptations, including one in which the cast performed the full text of the novel in a production that lasted over eight hours.

 

Here's the trailer:

 

 

 

Best Films of 2013

It's the time of year when the critics have to sum up a year of film watching by producing their lists of Best Films.  Peter Bradshaw has come up with a suitable eclectic list: 

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/dec/06/peter-bradshaws-favourite-films-2013-braddies?CMP=ema_1046

I'm pleased to see that we have already screened some of his selections (Lincoln and A Late Quartet) and plan to screen others later on in the season (Blue Jasmine, Captain Phillips and Before Midnight).

I've decided to present an award for the best demolition job by a critic, and the following review of A Christmas Candle by Peter Bradshaw is a sure fire winner:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/dec/12/christmas-candle-review

Cinema Paridiso: Silver Anniversary

This is a fascinating article about the various versions of Cinema Paradiso:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/dec/09/cinema-paradiso-25th-anniversary

For many years it was just one of those films on my ever-growing "must see" list - until two years ago when we screened it at out film society.  Many of our regulars had seen it several times and a number of strangers travelled from far and wide to see it. When it was over I could understand why they were so keen to see it, and it's now on my "must see again" list.

I particularly liked the following quote from Stephen Woolley who originally distributed the film in the UK:

"Cinema Paradiso is a movie about memory, and for our generation cinema was a place to congregate, a magical place to let your imagination run free. The character of the cinemas of my childhood and youth were all different and special. Now it's all boxes, little long rooms, every cinema is the same, they smell the same, they have the same character, the sameness is the central quality. It's like air travel, it used to be an occasion, now it's a fast-food experience."
 

As a taster, here's the trailer:

Christmas Books: a Letter to Santa

This was on my Christmas list for last year:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/12/big-screen-movies-david-thomson-review

Clearly I had been good, as my copy duly arrived and it was jut as good as John Banville's review had suggested.

This year I've dropped some none-too-subtle hints for David Thomson's most recent book, this time reviewed by the brilliant Philip French:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/18/moments-movies-david-thomson-review

I will keep all my fingers crossed for the next few weeks...

A Late Quartet

This is a late post too - as we screened the film last night.

I'd wanted to see this as soon as I read the reviews and I was not disappointed: it was definitely one of the highlights of the season.  It also made me order a recording of Beethoven's String Quartets, and I'm currently working my way through these.

Here are my notes:

A Late Quartet

USA 2012                    105 minutes

Director:                      Yaron Zilberman

Starring:                        Catherine Keener, Christopher Walken, Mark Ivanir and Philip Seymour Hoffman

“A subtle, intelligent picture with a suitably resonant title, it quietly observes the internal dynamics of the Fugue String Quartet, an internationally acclaimed musical group founded and based in New York that has been playing around the world for 25 years. We encounter them as an entity, working together thoughtfully, a trifle self-regarding perhaps, and then we get to know them as individuals...  A Late Quartet is visually and musically rich. But above all there are the performances, individually and as an ensemble, and they're pitch perfect.”

Philip French

When cellist Peter Mitchell (Christopher Walken) discovers that he is in the early stage of Parkinson’s disease he breaks the news to the other members of the Fugue String Quartet.  This devastating announcement throws the quartet into confusion and they begin to consider their own careers as musicians in the face of an uncertain future.

The film, a first feature by documentary maker Yaron Zilberman, includes a great deal of chamber music, including Beethoven’s Opus 131, the String Quartet No 14 in C sharp minor, one of his Late String Quartets.  These were the composer’s last major completed compositions and are widely considered to be among the greatest musical pieces of all time.  In the film Peter gives a lecture on this string quartet to his students: he points out that the quartet has seven movements instead of the usual five and that Beethoven specified that it should be played attacca, i.e. with no pause between the movements.  He links the passing of time in both music and life by quoting the first ten lines of another quartet: Burnt Norton, the first part of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Opus 131 then becomes a key element in the dramatic structure of the film as the characters react to the news of Peter’s illness and rehearse for a concert that will include this piece.

The characters and the New York setting suggest that the territory of the film is close to that mapped so many times and so brilliantly by Woody Allen, but in its focus on classical music and mortality A Late Quartet is far closer to Michael Haneke’s award-winning Amour (2012) or Quartet (2012), Dustin Hoffman’s debut as a director set in a retirement home for musicians.

Here's the trailer:

Beautiful Lies

I've struggled a little to find out too much about this week's screening.  It's a French film, and to celebrate this we're serving cheese and wine, so hopefully no one will really notice.

Here are my - abbrevaited - notes:

Beautiful Lies / De vrais mensonges

France 2010                 105 minutes

Director:                      Pierre Salvadori

Starring:                        Audrey Tautou, Nathalie Baye and Sami Bouajila

 
When Emile (Audrey Tautou) receives an anonymous love letter from Jean (Sami Bouajila), she thinks it comes from an elderly admirer and so sends it on to her mother Maddy (Nathalie Baye).  Eventually Maddy learns that Jean is her secret admirer, and Emile has to play up to this to keep her mother happy.  But finally Emile has to tell them both the truth.

Pierre Salvadori made his name in France as a writer and director of romantic comedies, and had previously worked with Audrey Tautou in his 2006 film Priceless (Hors de prix), which he claimed had been inspired by Blake Edwards’ film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961).  In his review of Beautiful Lies in The Guardian Xan Brooks noted the plot’s echoes of Jane Austen’s Emma.

After initially working as a model Audrey Tautou became an actress, and after receiving critical acclaim for her first roles she gained international recognition for her lead role in Amelie (2001).  She has subsequently worked internationally in films as diverse as the British thriller Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and the Hollywood blockbuster The Da Vinci Code (2006) as well as appearing in major French films that included A Very Long Engagement (2004) and playing Coco Chanel in Coco avant Chanel (2009).

Here's the trailer: