Viceroy's House

For the first film of our new season we chose this film: it fulfilled the basic selection criteria in that several of the committee had seen and enjoyed it. The added bonus was the presence in the cast of Hugh Bonneville: and we ended up with the best attended film since Mamma Mia - quite a few years ago.

The audience was thirsty so the bar had healthy takings and the film went down very well.

Here are my notes:

Viceroy’s House

USA 2016        103 minutes

Director:          Gurinder Chadha

Starring:            Hugh Bonneville, Gillian Anderson, Manish Dayal, Huma Qureshi and Michael Gambon

 “…I found myself increasingly gripped by Chadha’s handsome period drama – impressed by the accessibility of its history-primer narrative, entertained by its warm wit and occasionally boisterous charm, and moved by its melodramatic contrivances, which turn out to be more rooted in fact that one might imagine.”

Mark Kermode

In 1947 Lord Louis Mountbatten (Hugh Bonneville) has been given the task of bringing about the transition of India from its role as the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown to an independent state. As he and his wife Edwina (Gillian Anderson) oversee the complex process, clashes between the conflicting political and religious forces are resolved only by the partition of the country into two separate states; as a result of this there is a massive displacement of refugees who have to risk everything to seek sanctuary within their newly defined homelands.

Chadha’s objective for her screenplay was to tell the story of the shared history of India and Pakistan in the style of the British historical epic: thus she placed the Viceroy’s House at the centre of the story. Her plan was for an Upstairs, Downstairs approach that looked at life both in the state rooms and the servant’s quarters; for her it was important that the Indian characters were not marginalised, and thus she ensured that they would have equal screen time with the white members of the cast. Initially she was annoyed that Downton Abbey reached the screens while she was still planning her film, although its subsequent global success popularised her chosen genre and also gave her Hugh Bonneville to play the key role of the Viceroy. Chadha’s own family was affected by the partition of India and she reveals the details of their history in an epilogue to the film.

In addition to its dramatization of the complex politics of partition and its impact on the population the film also uses recent research that revealed Churchill’s responsibility for the chaos that resulted from his promotion of the establishment of a separate Pakistan as a strategic counter-balance to a left-leaning India. From a British perspective this division allowed Britain to retain influence in Karachi, an important port on the coast of the Arabian Sea and the capital of a country strategically located on the borders of Afghanistan, thus making it a vital counter to any threat of Soviet expansion southwards.

Gurinder Chadha was born in Kenya before moving to the UK with her family while still a young child. Her early work explored the lives of Indians living in Britain and drew on her own experience: her first film was the BAFTA nominated Bhaji on the Beach (1993) and she made her name internationally with her second feature, Bend It Like Beckham (2002), which also made a star of Keira Knightley. She followed this with Bride and Prejudice (2004), a Bollywood version of Jane Austen’s novel, which opened at Number One in both the UK and India. Viceroy’s House received its first screening at the Berlin Film Festival and has recently been dubbed into Hindi for release in India.

 Here is the trailer:

 

 

100 Greatest Comedies

At the current bleak moment in history - Brexit and Trump happening in the same year - it's good to be reminded of the better - and funnier - side of life.

Thus this survey of the 100 greatest comedies of all time is to be warmly welcomed:

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170821-the-100-greatest-comedies-of-all-time

The list of those consulted gives a broad perspective and it's difficult to argue with the films on the list, although it might be possible to question some of the positioning.

I think the top ten is pretty good and Some Like It Hot is an excellent choice for number one. I've seen and enjoyed many of the films in the top twenty but although I really enjoyed Young Frankenstein I would not have placed it above The Producers.

 

How we select the films we screen

One of the most difficult tasks we face in running a film society is actually deciding the films that we will screen. When we started the society we planned a whole season of "classics" and then abandoned it as our audience told us it was too esoteric for a village society. Even if a film has been commercially and critically successful it might not work if it has "language" in it: thus despite Ben Kingsley in a lead role Sexy Beast did not go down well.

In order to make our decisions now we have developed the idea of a "Highclere Film", i.e. a film that will appeal to our demographic. Thus anything with Dames Judi Dench, Maggie Smith or Helen Mirren will go down well. Likewise most films that are adaptations and/or period drama; on this bas Love and Friendship was a double whammy.

The only other criteria is that someone on the committee has to have seen the film: we all still bear the scars of 35 Shots of Rum: the film won many awards and had been well reviewed, but we were more than 10 minutes into the screening before we realised that we had not switched on the subtitles.

Thus a first step in the selection process is always to read review, and on this basis the following was a salutary warning:


https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2017/jul/03/the-house-film-flop-mariah-carey-will-ferrell-amy-poehler


This is definitely not a film for us to screen.

Lion

It was our AGM last night and we decided to screen Lion. Usually we hold the AGM earlier, but it was just as well that we had to slip things this year to fit in with committee holiday plans as the Village Hall is also used as a polling station. It was also useful that the hall had black out curtains as the sun did not set until well after 9.00pm.

I'd seen Lion at the cinema earlier in the year and had enjoyed it very much. However I found it far more rewarding on a second viewing, noting especially the subtle way in which recollections of his Indian life slow come back into Saroo's mind as he starts searching for his past.

Here are my notes:

Lion

Australia 2016  118 minutes

Director:          Garth Davies

Starring:            Sunny Pawar, Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, David Wenham and Nicole Kidman

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for six Oscars, including Best Film, Best Supporting Actor (Dev Patel), Best Supporting Actress (Nicole Kidman) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Luke Davies)
• Won BAFTAs for Best Supporting Actor (Dev Patel) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Luke Davies) and three BAFTA nominations including Best Supporting Actress (Nicole Kidman)
• A further 30 wins and 67 nominations  

“There are films against which one’s head puts up a fight until, finally, the heart simply wants what it wants. Lion is one. This sweeping, sun-baked account of a life fatefully divided in childhood between two countries and families risks applying a glib National Geographic gloss to a unique existential crisis, until its sheer blunt force of feeling takes hold and the tear ducts are unlocked. Its opening stages, vividly conveying young Saroo Brierley’s accidental separation from his Indian family and subsequent Australian adoption, are unimprovable, its terror and compromised relief written in the extraordinary gaze of eight-year-old Sunny Pawar.”

Guy Lodge

After falling asleep on a train Saroo (Sunny Pawar), a five year old Indian boy, finds himself lost on the streets of Calcutta, and after being adopted by an Australian couple (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham) he moves to Australia to begin a new life with them. Twenty five years later the adult Saroo (Dev Patel) begins searching for his birth family in India.

The film is based on the book that Saroo Brierley wrote about his adoption and subsequent rediscovery of his birth family. The first half of the films follows the increasingly desperate life of the young Saroo after he finds himself lost in Calcutta while the second half covers the adult Saroo’s search for his family from Australia using Google Earth to locate landmarks that he could remember. This unusual structure to the screenplay departs from the traditional “three acts” of setup, confrontation and resolution, although given the nature of the story it is difficult to see how else it could have worked so well. The critical acclaim for the film reflected this with Luke Davies’s screenplay, amongst its other successes, winning a BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay and a nomination for an Oscar in the same category (it lost to Moonlight (2016)).

Salman Rushdie commented on the film’s Oscar nominations: "I would like it to win in every category it’s nominated for and in most of the categories it isn’t nominated for as well”. He admitted that he had wept “unstoppably” while watching it and added that he was "frequently suspicious of Western films set in contemporary India, and so one of the things that most impressed me about Lion was the authenticity and truth and unsparing realism of its Indian first half. Every moment of the little boy’s journey rings true – not an instant of exoticism – and as a result his plight touches us all. Greig Fraser’s cinematography portrays the beauty of the country, both honestly and exquisitely.”

Lion is Garth Davis’s first feature film as director. He started his career as an award-winning director of commercials and short films before moving into television where he directed several episodes of Jane Campion’s Emmy and BAFTA nominated series Top of the Lake (2013). Following the global success of Lion, it was announced that his next film will be a biopic based on the life of Mary Magdalene.

 

Here is the trailer:

 

An additional benefit of us having screened the film is that I'm currently enjoying the box set of Top of the Lake. I  missed it while it was on TV but read the reviews, and after seeing two episodes I can see why it was so well received.

 

 

Cannes Film Festival

It was a shock to realise recently that it was actually ten years ago that I went to the Cannes Film Festival. my former employer was a major sponsor of the festival and the trip was the main prize in a film blogging competition.

It was the first time that I had tried blogging, but once I started I could not stop...

The prize included entry to one of the festival screenings: the event itself was quite amazing, in terms of black ties, long dresses and red carpets, but unfortunately the film we saw was not that good and did not appear in any of the critics' tips for an award.

However there was time t wander around some of the other events and I enjoyed a trip around an exhibition hall in which various films - presumably many of them unmade - were being heavily promoted. Clearly some things never change and in today's paper there was a big article about the current crop of wannabees:

 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/may/26/tsunambee-clowntergeist-and-haunted-airplane-bad-cannes-films-posters

Julieta

The last few weeks have been pretty busy, so this is an attempt to get up to date before the holiday period.

The clocks went forward at the end of March and experience of past seasons has shown that the audience for our screenings declines rapidly once the evenings get lighter: hence we scheduled one final screening for the last day of March. We had chosen Julieta the first subtitled film we have screened this season, and as we set up we wondered if anyone other than the committee would turn up. In the event there was no need to worry as we had an audience of more than 20...

I was pleased to finally catch up with the film as it had been on my "to see" list since I read the reviews. I've not read any of the stories by Alice Munro on which it is based so cannot comment on the authenticity - or otherwise - of the adaptation, but I very much enjoyed the film and thought that the unresolved ending was brilliant.

Here are my notes:

Julieta

Spain 2016       99 minutes

Director:          Pedro Almodóvar Pedro

Starring:            Emma Suarez, Adrian Ugarte, Daniel Grao, and Inma Cuesta

Awards and Nominations

• Nomination for Palme d’Or at 2016 Cannes Film Festival
• BAFTA Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film
• A further nine wins and 45 nominations

“Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, his most moving and entrancing work since 2006’s Volver, is a sumptuous and heartbreaking study of the viral nature of guilt, the mystery of memory and the often unendurable power of love. At times, the emotional intrigue plays more like a Hitchcock thriller than a romantic melodrama, with Alberto Iglesias’s superb Herrmannesque score … heightening the noir elements, darkening the bold splashes of red, blue and white.”

Mark Kermode

Antia abandoned her mother Julieta without warning 12 years ago and has not spoken to her since. As a result of a chance encounter which gives her news of her daughter, Julieta returns to her former home to look for Antia while at the same time reviewing the events that led to their estrangement.

The film is an adaptation of three short stories from the book Runaway by Nobel Prize winning author Alice Munro in which the same character appears at different stages of her life. Almodóvar is a great fan of Munro’s writing and earlier in his career had been interested in adapting the stories as his first English language film. He had discussed making the film in Vancouver, where Munro had based her stories, with Meryl Streep playing the main character at 20, 40 and 60 years old, but abandoned the project  as he was unhappy about filming outside of Spain and was uncomfortable about writing and filming in English. Years later he revisited the script but, at the suggestion of his production team, the film would be made in Spanish and set in Spain. He had originally intended to call the film Silence, the title of one of the short stories, but changed this to avoid confusion with Martin Scorsese’s historical drama Silence which was released in 2016.

 After the socio-political satire of I’m So Excited (2013) Almodóvar explained that Julieta was a return to drama and his “cinema of women”, but that the tone was different to his other feminine dramas such as The Flower of My Secret (1995) All About My Mother (1999) and Volver (2006). Despite the proposed involvement of Meryl Streep in his earlier attempt to film the stories Almodóvar now decided to cast two actresses to play the younger and older versions of the film’s protagonist. Almodóvar has often been inspired by classic Hollywood and European films and the double casting in Julieta is a homage to Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) in which two actresses play younger and older versions of the same character. The influence of Hitchcock is also visible in the film and its soundtrack has deliberate echoes of the Bernard Herrmann’s classic soundtrack for Vertigo (1958).

The film received its international premiere at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, where it was received warmly but did not win any awards. It subsequently received a BAFTA nomination for Best Foreign Language film (losing out to Son of Saul) but, somewhat controversially, was omitted from the shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2017 Academy Awards in Hollywood.

Here is the trailer:

 

A Street Cat Named Bob

This was a bit of a surprising choice for our most recent screening, as the reviews of the film, while respectable, had not pointed to anything exceptional in it. However I had not realised how successful the book had been and in the event we had one of our best audiences so far this season.

I've not read the book, but apparently the film makers made significant changes to some of the minor characters.  Nonetheless it worked well, and Bob, playing himself, was brilliant. From the credits I noticed that in total five cats played Bob: this was not immediately obvious, but there were a few scenes in which his ginger tabby markings seemed to move around a bit.

Here are my notes:

A Street Cat Named Bob

UK 2016          103 minutes

Director:          Roger Spottiswood

Starring:            Luke Treadaway, Joanne Froggatt, Anthony Head and Bob the Cat

“Dogs are plucky, loyal, lifelong companions. With cats, it’s sometimes just enough to make it through the night without getting our faces clawed off. That said, Bob, who appears as himself in this film (alongside six other ginger feline lookalikes), is a particularly gorgeous specimen. And Bob’s weapons-grade cuteness is almost enough to power this slight but warm-hearted film by Roger Spottiswoode (a veteran of the animal/human buddy movie genre, he also directed Turner and Hooch).”

Wendy Ide

 James Bowen (Luke Treadaway) is recovering from drug addiction and is trying to earn his living as a busker. When he finds an injured ginger cat (Bob the Cat) in his flat he takes it to an RSPCA vet for treatment and from that point on their two lives become intertwined.

The film is based on the book of the same name by James Bowen and Garry Jenkins. Bob used to accompany Bowen as he worked as a busker and videos of them appeared on YouTube, which led to an article about them in the Islington Tribune. The article was read by a literary agent who had been responsible for the UK publication of Marley and Me; she saw the potential in the story and introduced Bowen to the writer Garry Jenkins. Their subsequent book has sold over a million copies in the UK alone and has been translated into 30 languages.

Roger Spottiswoode began his career as a trainee editor and edited several early films by Sam Peckinpah. In the 1980s he moved into directing and in addition to Turner & Hooch (1989) his most notable films have included Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), with Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s science fiction action thriller The 6^th Day (2000).

Here is the trailer: