Bridget Jones's Baby

This is our most recent screening. there was some debate, ie a quick chat, about whether it was too "popular" for our society, but there have been requests in the past for more "female friendly" films - I still remember Mama Mia with a shudder, although it was a profitable evening on the bar - so we went ahead with it.

I'd enjoyed the film at the cinema and found it even better on a second screening: there were some filthy lines I'd not picked up, knowing how the film was going to end made it possible to see the misdirection that the production team had carefully applied at key points, and I'd completely missed that Darcy's middle name was "Fitzwilliam".

I'm pleased to record that just about everyone enjoyed it - and once again we had good takings on the bar.


Here are my notes

Bridget Jones’s Baby

UK 2016                                  123 minutes

Director:                                  Sharon Maguire

Starring:                                   Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth, Patrick Dempsey, Emma Thompson, Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones

“This is a better Bridget than the last movie, The Edge of Reason, because it doesn’t feel the need to indulge shark-jumping setpieces like zipping off to Thailand. We stick in her old London manor of Borough and she’s still in the same old scuzzy flat, still working for a cable TV news company, where she has now improbably become a producer. This is pretty broad comedy we’re talking about: not Mrs Brown’s Boys-broad, but broad nevertheless. Yet the effect is achieved in the same way as the first movie. Basically, Bridget presides over a kind of coalition government of very good supporting turns which on aggregate enforce their chaotic comic rule over the audience. Just about.”

 Peter Bradshaw

Shortly after her forty-third birthday Bridget Jones (Renee Zellweger) discovers that she is pregnant but is only 50% sure who the father is: after getting drunk at a music festival she sleeps with a handsome stranger (Patrick Dempsey), and at the christening of a friend’s child she meets Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) again and they subsequently spend the night together. As her pregnancy progresses Bridget makes increasingly desperate efforts to obtain DNA samples from each man to confirm which of them is the father.

It is a truth universally accepted that a globally successful film must be in want of a sequel (or two). Thus the 2001 film of Bridget Jones’s Diary, from Helen Fielding’s bestselling novel was followed in 2004 by a looser adaptation of her novel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, with a screenplay by a team that included both Andrew Davies (whose work includes the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice that made Colin Firth’s name) and Richard Curtis. This too was globally successful and from 2009 there was discussion of a third film. Although Renee Zellweger and Colin Firth soon committed to the project, despite protracted negotiations over the screenplay Hugh Grant declined to take part. Thus the film finally went ahead without Daniel Cleaver and the screenplay, by a team that includes Fielding and Emma Thompson (who created a superb role for herself), goes back to Helen Fielding’s original columns in The Independent to produce a new story that introduces Jack Quant (Patrick Dempsey) as a rival love interest to Mark Darcy. Somewhat confusingly Helen Fielding has also just published a new novel Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries in which Daniel Cleaver, Hugh Grant’s character, plays a significant part.

On its UK release the film became the most successful romantic comedy ever. In terms of its overall performance in 2016 in the UK and Ireland it was the third most successful film of the year, being beaten only by Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. All three films are either sequels or spin-offs; this is perhaps indicative of the risk averse attitude of producers of big budget films.

 

Here's the trailer:

 

 

Suffragette

This film came out last year and I missed it, so I was delighted when we chose to screen it in January and it turned out to be well worth seeing.

I remember while I was studying A Level History the BBC screened a series about the Suffragettes called Shoulder to Shoulder. I'd already found the period interesting and so was hooked on the series. Inevitably the constraints of a feature film disallow extended narratives, so the story focuses on a fictional character, with the real figures in supporting roles.

I thought it worked really well, although it was a little unfair to Asquith's government as it did not mention any of the other pressures it faced nor any of its achievements (let alone the approach of war in 1914). Disclosure: if I had gone through to the second round of Mastermind my specialist subject would have been the life of  H H Asquith.

But enough of me: here are my notes...

Suffragette

UK 2015                                  106 minutes

Director:                                  Sarah Gavron

Starring:                                   Carey Mulligan, Anne-Marie Duff, Helena Bonham Carter, Brendan Gleeson and Meryl Streep

Awards and Nominations

• Won Best Actress (Carey Mulligan) and Best Supporting Actor (Brendan Gleeson) at the British Independent Film Awards plus nominations for Best Supporting Actress for Helena Bonham Carter and Anne-Marie Duff
• A further 12 wins and 12 nominations

“While Abi Morgan’s script for The Iron Lady parked politics in favour of personal appraisal, this altogether more polemical work provides a solidly researched and at times surprisingly grim primer on the years leading up to Emily Wilding Davison’s still contested act of self-sacrifice in 1913… Morgan intertwines socioeconomic detail with domestic melodrama as Maud [Carey Mulligan] leads us from the fringes of the fight to the firing line, her composite character providing a thumbnail sketch of collective oppression into which Mulligan breathes admirable individuality. Meryl Streep provides a fleetingly aloof cameo as Emmeline Pankhurst, rallying the troops from the balcony before disappearing into the night, but the real firebrand is Helena Bonham Carter as chemist Edith Ellyn, who provides the movement’s combustible spark.”

Mark Kermode

In 1912 Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan), a laundress becomes involved in the Suffragette movement led by Mrs Pankhurst (Meryl Streep), and after taking part in a protest is sent to jail. Her increasing involvement in the movement leads to the end of her marriage, and Maud takes part in further demonstrations culminating in a planned protest at the Derby in 1912, as a result of which Emily Davison (Natalie Press) is knocked down and killed by the King’s horse.

The film is based on historical events and although Maud Watts and her family are fictional it also portrays some historical characters. In 1903 Mr Pankhurst and her daughters had set up the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) to promote its aims of women’s suffrage through highly visible public campaigns. Asquith’s government had refused to allow a vote on the issue so the WSPU initiated a campaign of violence to publicise its aims, although many historians including Asquith’s biographer Roy Jenkins agree this “clearly damaged the cause”. The campaign led to jail sentences for many of those who took part and as a response the government passed the Cat and Mouse Act in 1913, to allow the release of those whose hunger strikes had made them ill, in an attempt to prevent the suffragettes from gaining public sympathy. This led to an effective stalemate and it was only the outbreak of war in 1914 that made Mrs Pankhurst end the campaign of militancy in order to support the government’s stance against the “German Peril”.

In 1916 the Speaker of the House of Commons set up a conference to examine electoral reform and in 1917 presented its report which included a recommendation for limited women’s suffrage. As Prime Minister Asquith had opposed women’s suffrage, but after being ousted by Lloyd George he now supported the idea. In1918 Lloyd George’s government gave the vote to women over the age of thirty and it was Asquith’s earlier reforms to the House of Lords during the struggle to pass the People’s Budget in 1909 and 1910 that helped its passage through Parliament.

Screenplay writer Abi Morgan started her career by writing for TV before moving into film where her work includes the screenplays for Brick Lane (2007), The Iron Lady (2011) and Shame (2011). Sarah Gavron started her career making documentaries, but kept return to narrative filmmaking because of her desire to tell stories. Her first feature film was Brick Lane (2007).

Suffragette is the first film to be shot on location in the Houses of Parliament.

 Here is the trailer:

 

 

Love & Friendship

I'm in catch-up mode: we screened this film at the beginning of last month but I'm only now getting round to updating my blog.

One of the advantages of this time of year is that there are so many good films on release as the awards season comes into view, but the disadvantage is that with everything else going on it means that other jobs have to slip.

The film was far better than I expected and VERY different from any other adaptation of a Jane Austen Novel that I'd seen either on TV or the big screen.

Here are my notes:

Love & Friendship

Ireland/Netherlands 2016         93 minutes

Director:                                  Whit Stillman

Starring:                                    Kate Beckinsale, Xavier Samuel, Chloe Sevigny, Morfydd Clark, Tom Bennett and Stephen Fry

Awards and Nominations

• 3 wins and 32 nominations, including Film of The Year, Best Adapted Screenplay (Whit Stillman), Best Actress (Kate Beckinsale) and Best Supporting Actor (Tom Bennett) 

“What audacity, what elegance! Here is a hilariously self-aware period comedy polished to a brilliant sheen. Whit Stillman was probably born to direct a Jane Austen movie. But he has found a new way of dramatising Austen – or just found a new Austen, an Austen who appears to have pre-emptively absorbed 21st-century satire and inoculated herself against it. This Stillman has done by lighting on an early, posthumously published novella, Lady Susan, bringing it to the screen, and renaming it after a quite separate piece of juvenilia, thus playfully echoing the classic noun balances of her more famous titles.”

Peter Bradshaw

Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale), a beautiful but penniless widow, comes to the estate of her in-laws to absent herself from the colourful rumours about her past dalliances. While staying at their estate she decides to find husbands for both her debutant daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark) and herself.

In her short life Jane Austen completed six novels: four of these were published to acclaim during her lifetime, two were published posthumously and all have been adapted many times for the stage, TV and cinema. Of these the most successful have been Andrew Davis’s superb TV adaptation of Price and Prejudice (1995), which gave Colin Firth the role of a lifetime as Darcy, Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995), with an Oscar winning screenplay by Emma Thompson and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995), which updated the action of Emma to contemporary Beverley Hills. But Austen had been writing from an early age and her Juvenila included the epistolary novels Love and Freindship (sic) and Lady Susan, and it is the latter work which Whit Stillman has adapted, although he borrowed the title (with corrected spelling) from the former.

The first three films which Stillman wrote and directed – Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998) – are all comedies of manners based on his own early life, and in a recent retrospective of his work it was suggested that his films all have a sort of costume drama sensibility, but without the costumes, and now with Love & Friendship he had made a costume drama, period dress and all. However Stillman rejected this view of his film:

"Love & Friendship doesn’t loom as a costume drama, because it’s a pretty funny comedy, so it’s really not what you might anticipate. It’s not Downton Abbey in any way, shape or form. There are a lot of very good English comic actors who have done the supporting parts and really shine… I love Jane Austen. I sort of wanted something of my own to work on between paid script writing assignments. It’s good that I had so much time with no producer or studio executive wanting delivery quickly because it’s an incredibly funny novella she wrote, but hard to read and hard to dramatize. It’s an epistolary form from the 18th century and there are all these very funny ideas and lines buried within. It’s kind of an inaccessible format and it was a long process of adaptation”

The film had its premiere at the 2016 Sundance Festival before going on release in the US in May 2016 and within three months it had taken over $18 million against an estimated budget of $3 million. It is early in the current awards season but in December 2016 at the Evening Standard Film Awards Kate Beckinsale won the award for Best Actress and Tom Bennett the award for Best Supporting Actor, and in The Guardian review of the Best Films of 2016 Love & Friendship appeared in sixth place.

Here's the trailer:

 

Eddie the Eagle

This was a bit of a surprise: I missed the reviews of the film when it came out and based on the subject matter it did not appeal, but it was great fun.

It was our last film before Christmas so we chose something light. Everyone who came enjoyed it, no doubt helped by the mulled wine and mince pies.

Here are my notes:

Eddie the Eagle

UK 2016                      105 minutes

Director:                      Dexter Fletcher

Starring:                        Taron Egerton, Hugh Jackman, Christopher Walken, Iris Berben and Jim Broadbent

Awards and Nominations

• Won Truly Moving Picture Award at Heartland Film Festival
• A further three nominations, including a Teen Choice Nomination for Taron Egerton

“This Matthew Vaughn production is one of those cheerful Britcoms that celebrate the idea that we’re a bit crap and uncool as a nation, but carry-on-regardless spirit will see us through. In reality, you might regard it as a surreptitious hymn to innate national superiority: those Norwegians may have been mastering the sport since childhood, but a Brit armed with doughty innocence will only need a few months’ practice to emerge with honour.”

Jonathan Romney

Eddie Edwards (Taron Egerton) dreams of Olympic glory and takes up skiing so that he can take part in the Winter Games. While training in Germany he is taken on by Bronson Peary (Hugh Jackman), a former champion ski jumper who is now an alcoholic; Peary starts training his new pupil and uses various unorthodox methods to improve his skills. Eddie qualifies for the Olympics and at Calgary sets a British record with his ski jump.

The film is produced by Matthew Vaughn (director of Stardust (2007), Kick-Ass (2010), X-Men: First Class (2011) and Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014). He had been watching the film Cool Runnings (1993), a film about the Jamaican bobsled team at the Calgary Olympics, and wondered why no one made films like that anymore. Coincidentally Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards had participated in the same Olympics, and this might have been a catalyst for the film, although it bears little resemblance to the life of the real Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards who was warned that 90% of the story was made up. The character of Bronson Peary is entirely fictional.

Director Dexter Fletcher began his career as a child actor with a small role in Bugsy Malone (1976) and has subsequently appeared in many films and TV programmes, including Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) (which Matthew Vaughn produced) as well as Stardust and Kick-Ass. In 2012 he directed Wild Bill, his first feature film, followed by the highly successful musical Sunshine on Leith, which used music by The Proclaimers, in 2013.

Eddie the Eagle is a British/German/American production, with substantial funding from the German Federal Film Fund, and it received its world premiere at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.  Following its worldwide release the film grossed $46.1million including $12.8 million in the UK, which made it the highest grossing British film released in the UK in the first half of 2016.

Here is the trailer:

 

Hail Caesar (aka Hail, Caesar!)

This week we screened the most recent film from the Coen Brothers: Hail Caesar.

early on in our society's existence we screened Fargo (on the basis that it is mandatory for all film societies to show it at some point in their existence), but Hail Caesar was quite different: a screwball comedy set in 19502 Hollywood. It went down well, but some people were a little disappointed by George Clooney's role, as it was quite different from his more box-office friendly work. I enjoyed it very much.

Here are my notes:

Hail, Caesar!

USA 2016                    104 minutes

Director:                      Ethan and Joel Coen

Starring:                        Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and Channing Tatum

“The Coen brothers’ lovingly goofy latest comes on like a breezy flipside companion-piece to Barton Fink – a jaunt through the underbelly of old Hollywood which finds not the fiery hell of the tortured artist but the upbeat splash of synchronised swimming, On the Town toe-tapping and toga-wearing biblical balderdash. With a ramshackle plot that appears to have been cooked up after drawing deep on the Dude’s biggest bong, the film pinballs between awol movie stars, red-scare nightmares and Bikini Atoll bomb tests, while raising important questions of whether God is still angry (“what, he got over it?”), how to make a lasso out of spaghetti, and the secret of balancing a bunch of bananas on your head (it’s all in the hips, lips, eyes and thighs, apparently).”

Mark Kermode

In Hollywood in the 1950s Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) works for Capitol Pictures as a fixer whose role is to keep scandals relating to film stars out of the press. His current work load includes concealing the news that DeeAnna Morgan (Scarlett Johansson) is pregnant, rescuing alcoholic actor Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) from a group of kidnappers whose members include Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), an actor currently filming a musical comedy about sailors, and arranging for Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) to cast young singing western film star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) in the period drama he is directing.

In Hollywood the 1950s was the time of the Cold War and the Red Scare: its response was to create escapist entertainment: westerns, musicals with extravagant dance sequences, aquatic spectacles and Roman epics with massive casts. The Coen Brothers saw the films of this period on TV when they were growing up and commented:

“We loved that stuff. We just didn’t realise we were watching crap.”

For the purposes of this film they re-created their own versions of these films and for verisimilitude shot them on film rather than employing digital cinematography which they have used for their most recent films.

The Coen Brothers first created Capital Pictures for Barton Fink (1991), but Eddie Mannix was a real character, although his real life was far more sordid than depicted in this film: he used his network of contacts to cover up, among other things, Judy Garland’s drug use, Great Garbo’s bi-sexuality, and was even suspected of involvement in the murder of Superman star George Reeves. The Guardian contains a regular feature called Reel History which a historian rates films based on real events for both Entertainment and History. For the former it receives an A- but a fail for the latter. In mitigation the article contains    the following verdict on the film:

 “The Coen brothers have done an Eddie Mannix on Eddie Mannix, covering up all the darkest, dirtiest parts of his story to create a sparkling comedy. Everything you see on screen is completely historically inaccurate – but that’s the point. Hail, Caesar! can wear its fail grade with pride."

 Here is the trailer:

 

 

 

Harry Potter Actors

As a keen fan of Harry Potter (first the books and then the films) I'd always thought that the Staff Room at Hogwarts contained the cream of British acting talent.

I've now read an article, presumably insured by the imminent release of Fantastic Beasts, giving some substance to my assumptions:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/harry-potter-kept-a-quarter-of-the-u-k-s-top-actors-paid/

Judi Dench is the unofficial mascot of our film club, on the basis that whenever we screen one of her films we get a good audience, so it is interesting to see that she tops the list of successful actors who have not appeared (so far) in any Potter-related films.

I just wish that that result of the US Presidential Election had gone the way of fivethirtyeight's final forecast!

 

Bridge of Spies

This week we screened Bridge of Spies. I'd seen and enjoyed it at the cinema, but even so a second screening was even better.

My notes are as follows

Bridge of Spies

USA 2016                    141 minutes

Director:                      Stephen Spielberg

Starring:                        Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, Alan Alda and Austin Stowell

Awards and Nominations

• Won Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (Mark Rylance) and five further nominations including Best Film, Best Original Screenplay and Best Soundtrack
• Won BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor (Mark Rylance) and eight further nominations including Best Director, Best Film, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Cinematography and Best Soundtrack

“Steven Spielberg’s Cold War spy-swap drama Bridge of Spies is a movie of glorious craftsmanship, human sympathy and flair. It’s a consciously old-fashioned piece of Hollywood storytelling conceived in something like the heartfelt, ingenuous style of Frank Capra. Where once we had Mr Smith Goes To Washington — here we have Mr Hanks Goes To West Berlin.”

 

Peter Bradshaw

50 Best Films of 2015

(Bridge of Spies was number two)

 During the Cold War the CIA recruits insurance lawyer James B Donovan (Tom Hanks) to negotiate the release and exchange of Francis G (Gary) Powers (Austin Stowell), the pilot of a U-2 spy plane shot down over East Germany. Donovan travels to Berlin to negotiate the deal, offering as an exchange the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) whom Donovan had previously defended during his trial for espionage in the US.

Screenplay writer Matt Charman became interested in Donovan after reading about him in a biography of President Kennedy; after a meeting with Donovan’s son in New York he pitched his story to several studios, with DreamWorks choosing to buy it and then Spielberg deciding to direct. DreamWorks then brought in the Coen Brothers to revise Charman’s original script, although their work with Charman was collaborative, as Charman confirmed in an interview:

“[The Coen Brothers] were able to really punch up the negotiations on the back end of the movie, then they handed the baton back to me to do a pass after they did their pass, to make the movie just sit in a place we all wanted it to. The flavour they brought is so fun and enjoyable. It needed to be entertaining but truthful.”

 Inevitably for the purposes of the film the screenplay had to compromise with strict historical accuracy: the most significant of the changes is that it shortens the timescales of events which while increasing tension can give a misleading impression of the whole operation. However most reviewers accepted this departure from the historical record as inevitable, and the film itself acknowledges this by advertising itself as being “inspired by true events”.

The film is a US/German co-production and Spielberg used many actual Berlin locations for scenes that actually took place there, including the former Tempelhof Airport for Donovan’s arrival and the real Glienicke Bridge (the so-called “Bridge of Spies”) to film the prisoner exchange. For the latter location the German government closed the bridge to traffic for a weekend to allow filming to take place, and Angela Merkel visited the set to watch the filming.

On its release the film received many positive reviews and many nominations during the awards season, but it was Mark Rylance who won most of the film’s awards for his role as Rudolf Abel. He had already won Tony and Olivier Awards for his stage work in New York and London as well as several BAFTA awards for his TV work, most recently for his role as Thomas Cromwell in the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2015), and so this Oscar has allowed him to complete an uncommon “triple” win.

Here is the trailer: