This blog contains the notes that I write for the films we screen in our village film society together with other posts about films I've seen or film related articles and books that I've read.
I'm a bit behind schedule here as we screened this last week and soon I need to get to work on my notes for Once.
Anyway the film was excellent, and even though I knew that Captain Phillips would survive (not only was he played by Tom Hanks but he's also written a book - a bit of a spoiler really) there were whole sections when I kept forgetting to breath.
Here are my notes:
Captain
Phillips
USA 2013134
minutes
Director: Paul
Greengrass
Starring:Tom Hanks, Barkhad Abdi
and Catherine Keener
Awards and Nominations
Nominated
for six Oscars including Best Film, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best
Supporting Actor (Barkhad Abdi).
Won
BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor (Barkhad Abdi) and nominated for Best
Adapted Screenplay.
A
further 12 wins and 64 nominations.
“[Greengrass] has
shown us once again that mainstream cinema can be both visceral and
intelligent, grabbing the audience by the throat without ever cutting off the
oxygen supply to their brains.”
Mark
Kermode
In 2009 Somali
pirates attacked an American container ship, the Maersk Alabama, that Captain Richard Philips (Tom Hanks) is
piloting on a 10 day around the Horn of Africa and into bandit country.With the pirates holding the crew hostage
and negotiations going nowhere the US Navy plans to mount a rescue attempt.
The film is based on
the book A Captain’s Duty that
Richard Phillips wrote after his ordeal, with Sony Pictures quickly optioning
the film rights.Tom Hanks joined the
project after reading a draft of the screenplay from Billy Ray with Paul
Greengrass subsequently joining as director.Initially Ron Howard had intended to direct the film with Paul Greengrass
scheduled to direct Rush, but the two
directors swapped projects with significant rewards for both.
In his career Paul
Greengrass has specialised in the dramatisation of real life events as well as
his use of hand-held cameras.He began
his career making films for World in Action before directing The Murder of Stephen Lawrence and Bloody Sunday for TV before making his
cinema debut with The Bourne Supremacy
(2004) with Matt Damon in the leading role.He followed this with United 93
(2006) a film about the September 11 hijackings andafter The
Bourne -Ultimatum (2007) made Green
Zone (2010) about the Iraq War and once again starring Matt Damon.
On its release Captain Phillips received widespread
critical acclaim both as a film and for the performances of the main
actors.In The Observer Mark Kermode claims that Tom Hanks gives the
performance of his life Tom Hanks and comments on the “electrifying presence”
of newcomer Barkhad Abdi.
As any fule kno the real purpose of the internet is to disseminate pictures of cats - and thay also appear in many films
Thus I could not overlook this brilliant article by Anne Billson (tentatively linked to Inside Llewyn Davies which featured a prominent cat) listing the most memorable feline peformnances:
Another week and another screening: this time it's Silver Linings Playbook - a rom com with a difference.
Once again this is a film that has been on my "want to see" list, so it's good to be able to catch it at last.
Here are my notes:
Silver
Linings Playbook
USA 2012122
minutes
Director: David
O Russell
Starring:Bradley Cooper, Jennifer
Lawrence, Robert de Niro and Jackie Weaver
“Silver
Linings Playbook has a suitably upbeat title and several of the key
ingredients for a standard Hollywood "feelgood movie" – an oddball
hero returning home to make peace with his family, an encounter with a kookie
girl whom he ends up chasing through the festive, snow-flecked streets at
Christmas, a couple of public contests (a dance and a football game) on the
results of which the future depends. And
indeed the movie does make you feel quite good about humanity as the final
credits roll. But this is a David O Russell movie, his
sixth since 1994, and for him feeling good is the reward for completing an
emotional assault course.”
Philip
French
Awards
and Nominations
Won
Oscar for Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence) plus seven further nominations
including Best Film, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress
and Adapted Screenplay
Won
BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay and two further nominations (Best Actor
and Actress)
A
further 60 wins and 58 nominations
Pat (Bradley Cooper)
a former school teacher has just spent eight months in a psychiatric hospital
suffering from bi-polar disorder following a violent incident with his now
ex-wife.On his release he meets Tiffany
(Jennifer Lawrence) a young widow and despite his initial plan for a
reconciliation with his ex-wife Tiffany persuades him to be her partner in a
community dance competition and their relationship develops.
Throughout his career
David O Russell has maintained an oblique approach to the world as well as a
strong interest in dysfunctional families.He made his debut with Spanking
the Monkey (1994) a comedy about a middle-class lad who develops an
incestuous desire for his attractive invalid mother, and made his commercial
breakthrough with Three Kings (1999)
a thriller set in the Gulf War.His
previous film was The Fighter, a
biopic of the welterweight boxer Micky Ward and his rough Irish-American
background, with the film receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Film and with both
Christian Bale and Melissa Bale winning Oscars for their supporting roles.
His most recent film
is American Hustle, again starring
Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper as well as Christian Bale.The film was well received and has just
received 10 Oscar nominations including ones for Best Picture, Best Director,
Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress.
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 2013143
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 MoulinRouge 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.
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:
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:
