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.
We always plan to show a popular film for our AGM, but generally do not want to screen something tht would attract paying punters elswewhere in the season: hence we'd decided to replace Saving Mr Banks with The Book Thief, and when w discovered that this was not available we'd chosen Life of Pi - and I'd written the notes.
But no one had told our marketing guru and so we'd sent out a email advertising SavingMr Banks. We had a surprisingly good audience for a sunny June evening but we were not sure what they'd turned out to see, and so we had a vote and SavingMr Banks won. I enjoyed it very much and did not have to write any notes and if we do screen Life of Pi next season then I will have the notes ready.
Here's the trailer for SavingMr Banks:
On a silly note, I also like the re-cut trailer for Scary Mary Poppins:
And so we reach the end of another season and it's time for our AGM. We generally try to choose a film that is going to be popular and this year our choice is Ang Lee's Life of Pi.
Here are my notes:
Life
of Pi
USA 2012127
minutes
Director: Ang
Lee
Starring:Suraj Sharma, Tabu,
Gerard Depardieu and Rafe Spall
Awards and Nominations
Won
four Oscars including Best Director and Cinematography, and nominations
for seven further Oscars including Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay
Two
Golden Globe nominations including Best Film and Best Directior
A
further 52 wins and 70 nominations
“[Ang Lee’s]
magnificent new film is a version of Yann Martel's Booker
prize-winning novel, Life of Pi, adapted by an American writer, David Magee,
whose previous credits were films set in England during the first half of the
20th century, Finding Neverland and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.From its opening scene of animals and birds
strutting and preening themselves in a sunlit zoo to the final credits of fish
and nautical objects shimmering beneath the sea, the movie has a sense of the
mysterious, the magical.This effect is
compounded by the hallucinatory 3D, and in tone the film suggests Robinson
Crusoe rewritten by Laurence Sterne.”
Philip
French
The film is based on
the best-selling novel by Yann Martel, a fanatasy about an Indian boy called
Piscine (“Pi”) Patel who survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on
a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker as
his companion.The book became a global
best-seller – although many of its readers must have thought it was unfilmable.
Several other
directors had planned to direct the film before Ang Lee took on the project.The initial plan was for M Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) to direct, but after he
chose to direct Lady in the Water,
the studio discussed the project with Alonso Cuaron (HarryPotter and the Prisoner
of Azkaban and Gravity).He passed on the opportunity in order to
direct Children of Men, and there
were subsequently discussions with Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie and Alien Resurrection),
who began work on his own screenplay but made no further progress.In 2009 Fox Pictures finally hired Ang Lee to
direct, and although the projected budget of $120 million caused a further
delay, filming finally started in January 2011.
One of the costly
elements of the budget was Lee’s decision to film in 3D.He explained this choice in an interview:
"I
thought this was a pretty impossible movie to make technically. It's so
expensive for what it is.You sort of
have to disguise a philosophical book as an adventure story.I thought of 3-D half a year before Avatar was on the screen.I thought water, with its transparency and
reflection, the way it comes out to you in 3-D, would create a new theatrical
experience and maybe the audience or the studio would open up their minds a
little bit to accept something different."
The film opened to
widespread critical acclaim, with the review aggregator website RottenTomatoes stating:
“A
3D adaptation of a supposedly ‘unfilmable’ book, Ang Lee's Life of Pi achieves the near impossible—it's an astonishing
technical achievement that's also emotionally rewarding.”
Having recently watched Pacific Rim I agree with del Toro's comments about his film: it started with a climax and built up from there.
It's also good to see the mention of Night of the Demon.
I'd read about this and had to hunt it down, but it was definitely worth the search. I think it would have been far better if the monster had not appeared in the first scene: our imagination is always far more effective than anything a director can show - especially in a film that was made far before the pre-digital age.
The Woman in Black is another recent example where there is a significant delay before we see the monster/ghost - and the delay builds up the tension.
It also occurred to me that the final sequence at the station might be a deliberate echo/tribute to Night of the Demon.
Seven years go I attended the Cannes Film Festival for the first time. My then-employer was a major sponsor and each year there were a few tickets provided for employees. In most years the tickets were handed out after a ballot of interested parties - so there was little chance of winning - but this year the company decided to set up a blogging competition. I was one of the winners - and I haven't stopped yet.
The organising team were more keen to tell us about the logistics for the trip, but they could not answer my first question: what screening were we due to attend? So many films now regarded as masterpieces received their first screening at Cannes, but sadly what we saw was Les Chansons d'Amour:
I didn't manage to find a single review of it and inevitably it did not feature in any of the awards.
I still read all the reviews from Cannes avidly, and sometimes enjoy a good review of a bad film rather than a rave about a masterpiece. This year Peter Bradshaw's description of Graceof Monaco featuring performances so wooden that they were a fire risk made me laugh our loud several times:
I think it was Phillip Pullman who commented on the close relationship between novels and cinema, in that both genres have the ability to direct the viewer/reader to what the director/author wants to focus on - as opposed to the the theatre where the audience is free to concentrate on whatever it wants to.
Thus it's interesting to see such a range of novels in this list of the best adaptations:
It's difficult to argue with most of them, and I'm particularly pleased to see The Remains of the Day, which I thought was one of the best adaptations ever, on the list. It's also good to see the Harry Potter films as well as The Lord of the Rings trilogy included: both of these were epic in every sense of the word.
the only addition I'd like to make is to propose Notes on a Scandal, which is a brilliant version of an excellent novel that at first reading seems impossible to adapt.
I have David Thomson's Moments That Made the Movies on my shelf and I dip into it from time - it's that kind of book.
His slection of films is eclectic, although it does include the usual suspects. But what makes it intersting is the choice of image to represent each film. Some of them are truly unexpected. It's an excellent book
I enjoyed Star Wars and the two sequels in the original trilogy, but Doctor Who has always been my favourite sci-fi/fantasy saga - and the Doctor would have sorted out Darth Vader in two 45 minute episodes.
I'd read about the influence of Kurosawa on the story in previous articles and had also clocked the Casablanca reference (although I'd also thought there was a little of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe in it), but this fascinating article lists ten films that influenced George Lucas:
