The Five Worst Films of 2014

With the papers being full of "best of" lists, this makes a welcome change: the five worst films of the year:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culture-review-of-the-year/11287705/The-five-worst-films-of-2014.html

I'm pleased to record that I haven't seen any of them. 

It's at moments like this that I'm glad that I'm not a full time critic...

The Love Punch

After the sublime Casablanca we screened The Love Punch as our last show before Christmas.

It caught the zeitgeist with the corporate raid and the loss of pensions as the raison d'etre for the plot, the cast were excellent and despite it being obvious from the first scene how it was going to end on the whole I enjoyed it.

Here are my notes:

The Love Punch

UK 2013                      94 minutes

Director:                      Joel Hopkins

Starring:                        Pierce Brosnan, Emma Thompson, Timothy Spall, Celia Imrie

“It really is completely absurd, and yet writer-director Hopkins carries it along at a canter... The accomplished cast do their considerable best. Likable fun.”

Peter Bradshaw

Despite their divorce Richard (Pierce Brosnan) and Kate (Emma Thompson) have an amicable relationship.  Richard is about to retire and when he learns that his pension fund has been frozen as his investment company is under investigation for fraud he and Kate decide to recover the money some other way.  With the help of a friendly couple (Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie) they travel to the south of France and plan to steal the diamond that Richard’s employer had given to his girlfriend.

 

Joel Hopkins was born in London but moved to the US to study at University.  He made his name with Jump Tomorrow (2001) which received good reviews on its limited release and was nominated for two British Independent Film Awards: the Douglas Hickox award for debut filmmakers and the Award for Best Screenplay.  He also won the BAFTA Carl Foreman Award for Most Promising Newcomer.

He met Emma Thompson while he was being considered to direct Nanny McPhee (2005) for which she had written the screenplay as well as starring as the title character.  After seeing her in a play with Dustin Hoffman he was inspired to write a film that reflected their interpersonal chemistry: the resulting film Last Chance Harvey (2008) was well received by critics.

Here's the trailer:



Casablanca...

We are about to celebrate our 150th screening.  No one is quite sure when it actually is as we have not kept records of a few ad hoc events, so by unanimous decision it will be this week.

In honour of this magnificent occasion there is only one choice: Casablanca...

So we have booked a jazz bad, will provide a three course Moroccan buffet and our house is full of cases of prosecco which I will deliver to the Village Hall on Saturday.

And we will of course be screening a film.  I had great fun scouring the internet for articles, and found a great quote by Roger Ebert.  I also found the Umberto Eco quote in an article, but I have the book of essays from which it comes on my shelf.

Here are my notes:

Casablanca

USA 1942                    102 minutes

Director:                      Michael Curtiz

Starring:                        Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Dooley Wilson

Awards and Nominations

• Won three Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay)
• Nominated for five more Oscars including Best Actor (Bogart lost out to Paul Lukas for Watch on the Rhine) and Best Supporting Actor (Claude Rains lost out to Charles Coburn for The More The Merrier)
• Ingrid Bergman was nominated as Best Actress for her role in For Whom the Bell Tolls

"Casablanca is The Movie. There are greater movies.  More profound movies.  Movies of greater artistic vision or artistic originality or political significance.  There are other titles we would put above it on our lists of the best films of all time.  But when it comes right down to the movies we treasure the most, when we are - let us imagine - confiding the secrets of our heart to someone we think we may be able to trust, the conversation sooner or later comes around to the same seven words:

"I really love Casablanca."

"I do too." "

Roger Ebert

The starting point for Casablanca was a script for an unperformed play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s: the inspiration for the play had been a visit that the writers made to a night club in the south of France where a black pianist played to entertain the French, Nazis and refugees although they set the play in Casablanca.  The official credits for the screenplay are for the Epstein brothers and Howard Koch, with uncredited contributions and rewrites from Casey Robinson as well as input from Michael Curtiz: the final result was a script where no one could remember who had written what.  Umberto Eco has highlighted this complex genealogy as one of the great strengths of the film:

“Thus Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology.  Made haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually against the will of its authors and actors, then at least beyond their control.  And this is the reason it works, in spite of aesthetic theories and theories of film making.  For in it there unfolds with almost telluric force the power of Narrative in its natural state, without Art intervening to discipline it.

...When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths.  Two clichés make us laugh.  A hundred clichés move us.  For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.”

 By 1955 Casablanca had earned $6.8 million, making it the third most successful of Warners wartime films, by 1977 it had become the most frequently broadcast film on US television, and in 1989 it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". 

Many later films have used elements of Casablanca: Bogart, Rains, Greenstreet and Lorre all appeared in Curtiz’s Passage to Marseille (1944), and To Have and Have Not (1944), with Bogart in it the lead, has many similarities to Casablanca.  In addition to Woody Allen’s Play It Again Sam (1972) in which Casablanca played a significant part, the film has also inspired many parodies, including the Marx Brothers’ A Night in Casablanca (1946) Neil Simon’s The Cheap Detective (1978), and a Looney Tunes cartoon version called Carrot Blanca (1995) in which Bugs Bunny plays the Bogart role.  Even the script has been a source of inspiration for artists: Michael Singer chose The Usual Suspects for his unwritten script as he thought it would make a good title, and David Thomson used the same phrase as the epigraph for his novel Suspects whose characters (among many from films of this period) include Ilsa, Rick and Captain Renault.

Everybody Comes to Rick’s was finally staged in London in 1992, when it ran for six weeks.

In case you haven't seen it, here's the trailer:

 

Stoker

We screened this last week.  Somehow I missed the film when it was on general release, and I when I started reading up on it to write my notes I thought it looked good.

I was not mistaken.

Here are my notes:

Stoker

USA 2012                    99 minutes

Director:                      Park Chan-wook

Starring:                        Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman and Matthew Goode

Awards and Nominations

• Seven wins
• 25 nominations

“The South Korean director Park Chan-wook makes an eye-catching English-language debut with his outrageous quasi-remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 thriller Shadow of a Doubt. Where Hitchcock's original injected a small drop of poison into picket-fence suburbia, Stoker stands proud as a full-blown gothic nightmare. ”

Xan Brooks

Following the death of India’s father, her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) who she never knew existed comes to live with her and Evelyn, her unstable mother (Nicole Kidman).  India (Mia Wasikowska) comes to suspect that this mysterious charming man has ulterior motives while at the same time becoming increasingly infatuated with him.

The script is by Wentworth Miller, best known as an actor in the TV series Prison Break (2005), although he submitted the script under a pseudonym, explaining later “I just wanted the scripts to sink or swim on their own”.  Miller described his story as “a horror film, a family drama and a psychological thriller”.   The title Stoker suggests a link to Bram Stoker, but in the context of the story Miller’s debt to Dracula lies more in the relationship between Charlie and India, echoing the corrupting influence that Dracula has on Lucy Westenra, rather than on any overt vampire references.  A more obvious source for Miller’s script is Hitchcock’s 1943 psychological thriller Shadow of a Doubt.   

In an interview Miller freely acknowledged this debt:  

"The jumping-off point is actually Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. So, that's where we begin, and then we take it in a very, very different direction”. 

 

He emphasises the point by giving India’s uncle the same name as that of Joseph Cotten’s psychopathic killer in the Hitchcock film.

This film is South Korean Park Chan-wook’s first English language feature, after making his name in South Korea as the writer and director of Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005), the so-called Vengeance Trilogy.  Oldboy won the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival where Quentin Tarantino, a great fan, lobbied hard for it to be given the Palme d’Or.

Here's the trailer:

 

The Lunchbox

I'm running a bit late with this: we screened The Lunchbox nearly a fortnight ago.

I'd been looking forward to it very much and realy enjoyed it: the Indian scenes were extremely atmospheric but the story itself is timeless: all I hope is that if there is an American remake then they do not give it a great big happy ending.

Here are my notes:

The Lunchbox (Dabba)

India 2014                    104 minutes

Director:                      Ritesh Batra

Starring:                        Irrfan Khan, Nimrat Kaur and Nawazuddin Siddiqui

Awards and Nominations

• Won Golden Rail (Critics Week Viewers Choice) at 2013 Cannes Film Festival, plus nominations for Golden Camera and Critics Week Grand Prize
• Nominated for Best Film at 2013 London Film Festival
• A further 21 wins and 30 nominations

 

“The Lunchbox is perfectly handled and beautifully acted; a quiet storm of banked emotions.”

Xan Brooks, The Guardian

The lunchbox that a young wife has prepared for her husband to bring romance back into their marriage is delivered by mistake to the wrong man, an elderly widower who is facing retirement.  The wife realises her mistake and sends the man a note to which he replies, and then they begin a regular correspondence through this unorthodox means of communication.

Ritesh Batra had started his career by writing and directing a series of short films, but in 2007 began to research the dabbawal, the famous Mumbai lunch delivery men, with the intention of making a documentary about them.  However the stories that they told him about their customers gave him the idea for this film and he started to write the script. 

The film was first screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013 where it received a standing ovation and won the Critics Week Viewers Choice Award.  After this Sony Pictures Classics picked up all North American rights for distribution, where it became 2014's highest grossing foreign film.  In India it was released on more than 400 screens and received widespread critical and commercial acclaim (and received many nominations and awards at Asian Film Festivals), but it unexpectedly failed to receive the Indian nomination for the Best Foreign Language Film for the 2014 Oscars.

 

Here's the trailer:

 

 

12 Years a Slave

This week we are screening 12 Years a Slave - one of the best films of 2013.

Here are my notes:

12 Years a Slave

 USA 2013                    133 minutes

Director:                      Steve McQueen

Starring:                        Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Cumberpatch, Lupita Nyong’o, Michael Fassbender, Paul Dano and Brad Pitt

Awards and Nominations

• Won three Oscars  - Best Film, Best Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley) and Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o), and nominated for six more, including Best Actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Best Supporting Actor (Michael Fassbender)
• Won two BAFTAs – Best Film and Best Actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and nominated for seven more including Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Michael Fassbender) and Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o)
• A further 212 wins and 193 nominations

“While it is not the role of critics to tell people which films to see and which to avoid (audiences make those decisions for themselves), let me begin by saying that if you have any interest in cinema – or, for that matter, in art, economics, politics, drama, literature or history – then you need to watch 12 Years a Slave."

Mark Kermode

In 1841 Solomon Northrop (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an educated black man born free in New York State, is tricked, drugged and sold into slavery in the South.  Here he initially becomes the property of the relatively benign plantation owner Ford (Benedict Cumberpatch) but later is sold on to the sadistic Epps (Michael Fassbender).  After 12 years he is rescued and finally is able to return to his family.

Northrop published his memoir of his time as a slave in 1853, shortly after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling novel about Slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and both books provided dramatic stories for the political debate over slavery that took place in the US in the years leading up to the Civil War.  Subsequently the book fell into obscurity until the 1960s when two historians researched Northrop’s story, retraced his journeys, and published a scholarly edition of the text that is still in print.

After the success of his film Hunger (2008) Steve McQueen had expressed an interest in making a film about “the slave era in America” with “a character that was not obvious in terms of their trade in slavery” but it was not until he was given a copy of Northrop’s memoir that he found his story:

“I read this book, and I was totally stunned. At the same time I was pretty upset with myself that I didn't know this book.  I live in Amsterdam where Anne Frank is a national hero, and for me this book read like Anne Frank's diary but written 97 years before – a firsthand account of slavery.  I basically made it my passion to make this book into a film.”

The film received almost universal acclaim from both critics and audiences for its acting, especially the performances of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender and Lupita Nyong’o, as well as Steve McQueen’s direction, the screenplay by John Ridley and its faithfulness to Northrop’s original memoir.

Steve McQueen began his career in the UK as a Turner prize winning visual artist whose work included numerous short films.  His first feature film was Hunger (2008), starring Michael Fassbender about the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike, and in 2011 he made Shame, once again starring Michael Fassbender as a sex addict whose life is turned upside down when his estranged sister reappears in his life.

The Book Thief

Tomorrow is the first proper screening of our new season and we will be showing The Book Thief.  I've not read the novel , but it's a film I've wanted to see for a while - despite the less than enthusiastic reviews. 

After binging on WW1 history books recently I've now moved on to Nazi Germany and after finishing The Origins of the Third Reich, which covered German history from unification through to 1932/33, the second volume - The Third Reich in Power - covers the period up to war in 1939.  The final volume The Third Reich at War covers the period from 1939 to the end of the Third Reich, and that is next on my reading list.  The books are all masterpieces of research and writing and put the whole terrible history of the rise of Hitler and the Nazis into fascinating context.

Hence this film has come along at an opportune time.

As I could few reviews that could offer  positive headline quotes I've selected a few anti-Nazi (and anti anyone else who burns books for political or ideological reasons) quotations instead.

Here are my notes:

The Book Thief

USA 2013                    131 minutes

Director:                      Brian Percival

Starring:                        Roger Allam, Sophie Nelisse, Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for Oscar for Best Score (John Williams)
• 3 wins for Sophie Nelisse 
• A further 4 nominations.

“Wherever books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too."

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)

 “You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police.  Yet in their hearts there is unspoken - unspeakable! - fear.  They are afraid of words and thoughts!  Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden.  These terrify them.  A little mouse - a little tiny mouse! - of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic."

            Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

In Nazi Germany Liesel (Sophie Nelisse), an illiterate young orphan is taken in by foster parents Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and Rosa (Emily Watson).  Liesel learns to read and after witnessing a Nazi book burning begins to steal books to read.  Her story is narrated by Death (Roger Allam) and he finally tells what happened to Liesel after she survived the war.

The film is based on the Young Adult novel of the same name by Australian author Marcus Zusak that was on the New York Times Best Seller List for more than four years.  However although a work of fiction the story is set against genuine historical events: from the time that it consolidated its seizure of power in 1933 the Nazis instituted book-burning campaigns against authors whose work was deemed subversive or which undermined Nazi ideology; Kristallnacht was a Nazi pogrom against Jews in both Germany and Austria in November 1938; and the Second World War broke out in September 1939.

Brian Percival started his career with the BBC where he directed several prestige projects including adaptations of North and South, The Ruby in the Smoke and The Old Curiosity Shop.  Since then he has worked for ITV where he has directed six episodes of Downton Abbey. The Book Thief is his first film. 

Here's the trailer:

And here's the sound track