The Wife

I wanted to see this film from the moment I read the review; I was not disappointed and enjoyed every minute. but then seeing it again, once you appreciate the full extent of the story allows you to appreciate it even more, especially the subtle brilliance of Glenn Close's performance.

Here are my notes:

The Wife

USA 2017        99 minutes

Director:          Björn Runge

Starring:            Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Max Irons and Christian Slater

Awards and Nominations:

• Oscar Nomination for Best Actress (Glenn Close)
• Won Golden Globe for Best Actress (Glenn Close)
• BAFTA nomination for Best Actress (Glenn Close)
• A further 11 wins and 16 nominations

““There’s nothing more dangerous than a writer whose feelings have been hurt.” The speaker is Joan Castleman, the charming, enigmatically discreet and supportive wife of world-famous author and New York literary lion Joe Castleman. It is a fascinating and bravura performance from Glenn Close, in this hugely enjoyable dark comedy from director Björn Runge, adapted by Jane Anderson from the novel by Meg Wolitzer. Perhaps it’s Close’s career-best – unnervingly subtle, unreadably calm, simmering with self-control. Her Joan is a study in marital pain, deceit and the sexual politics of prestige. It’s a portrayal to put alongside Close’s appearances in Dangerous Liaisons and Fatal Attraction. This is an unmissable movie for Glenn Close fans. Actually, you can’t watch it without becoming a fan – if you weren’t one already.”

Peter Bradshaw

Joan Castleman has spent her adult life sacrificing her own talent and literary ambition to support her husband Joe. She has ignored his numerous infidelities and excuses since they first met when she was his student and she has endured his bad behaviour for years, but when they learn that Joe has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature Jean has to confront the biggest sacrifice of her life.

The film is based on the 2003 novel by Meg Rosoff which tells the story as a first person narrative from Joan’s perspective. The screenplay by playwright, screenwriter and director Jane Anderson tells the story in a similar nonlinear fashion, interspersing scenes of the Castlemans’ journey to the award ceremony in Stockholm (including their attempts to avoid a writer who is keen to write a biography of Joe), with flashback scenes depicting their early life together and the beginnings of Joe’s literary success. In the flashback scenes Joan is played by Annie, Stark, Glenn Close’s real life daughter, and Joe is played by Harry Lloyd.

The Wife was screened at film festivals in 2017 but it was reported that it had been held back from general release until 2018 in order to give Glenn Close a better chance to win an Oscar nomination (which she subsequently did; she also has a BAFTA nomination and recently won the Best Actress Award at the Golden Globes). The critics were unanimous in their praise for Glenn Close’s performance, but many also gave credit to Jonathan Pryce for his supporting role. Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian included both Close and Pryce in his shortlist of the best performances of 2018.

Director Björn Runge is himself Swedish and in his native country he has worked as a director, screen writer, playwright and author; his films have won many awards in Sweden as well as receiving international acclaim, with Daybreak (2003) winning the Silver Bear and the award for Best European Film at the Berlin Film Festival. Despite the US and Swedish locations of the film much of it was shot in Glasgow and Dumfries in Scotland.

Here's the trailer:

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

We chose this film to start the New Year as we thought that we'd need something cheerful after the end of the Christmas festivities - and we were right.

I'd not been too impressed with the original Mamma Mia! when we screened it as it was essentially a filmed version of the stage show - although the Abba songs made it bearable. However the genius of this film was to engage Richard Curtis to produce the screenplay: freed from the constraints of the stage show he was able to produce a superb screenplay that combined elements of both prequel and sequel, which also somehow managed to bounce off each other.

When you start looking at the smaller details the story becomes entirely implausible, but for the 114 minutes of its screen time it isgreat fun.

Here are my notes:

UK 2018          114 minutes

Director:          Ol Parker

Starring:            Lily James, Amanda Seyfried, Meryl Streep and Cher

“Watching the original Mamma Mia! in 2008, I had something approaching an out-of-body experience. One minute I was a miserable critic; the next, everything had gone pink and fluffy. As I said at the time, never before had something so wrong felt so right. A decade later, this sequel-prequel hybrid (a surprisingly smart combination) produces similarly head-spinning results.”

Mark Kermode

Ten years after the events of Mamma Mia! The Movie Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is pregnant and will have to take risks in order to reopen the hotel that her mother Donna (Meryl Streep) had started. Meanwhile in a series of flashbacks the young Donna (Lily James) graduates from Oxford and sets off on a tour of Europe that will end up in Kalokairi where she decides to open a hotel.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a film that broke many box office records must be in search of a sequel, although in this case the search took ten years to reach the screen, although the chronological gap has allowed some significant events to have affected many of the main characters and to provide enough of a story to carry a further selection of ABBA songs (with Bjoern Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson having cameo roles in two of the musical numbers). The screenplay is by director Ol Parker (who had previously written The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) and both wrote and directed its sequel) from a story by Richard Curtis (writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999) and Love Actually (2003)) using characters created by Catherine Johnson for the original stage musical.

Clearly the extensive flashback sections of the screenplay need to be consistent with Donna’s back story about Sophie’s paternity from the initial film, but by setting the opening sequences at an Oxford graduation ceremony the screenplay firmly establishes Donna as an inhabitant of Richard Curtis’s rose-tinted version of England that provided the background to his film world. However in the sequences set in the present day the recent economic problems of Greece appear momentarily, albeit only as a plot device to bring most of the cast together at the reopened hotel for the final section of the film (although inevitably Cher flies in by helicopter).

The film enjoyed far more critical acclaim than its predecessor, with Mark Kermode giving it a five star review and commenting:

“Much has changed in the 10 years since Mamma Mia! challenged my ideas of “good” and “bad” film-making. I have certainly mellowed, and perhaps my critical faculties have withered and died. But I simply can’t imagine how Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again could be any better than it is. I loved it to pieces and I can’t wait to go again!”

On its release in the UK the film grossed $12.7 million on its opening weekend, making it the fourth biggest opening for a film in 2018. It was a global success, repeating the performance of its predecessor in Australia and Germany while also being successful in France, Poland, Switzerland and Croatia (where its location scenes were filmed). To date the film has a total gross of $393.7 million against a production budget of $75 million. 

Here's the trailer:

Goodbye Christopher Robin

I've had a soft spot for Winnie the Pooh ever since I red a brilliant article by Angela Carter that forensically summed up the differences between him and Paddington Bear. However until I'd seen the film (and then read up about AA Milne to prepare these notes) I had not been aware of his extensive career beyond Pooh.

Since this film came out I've also seen Tolkien and apart from their shared experience of the Battle of the Somme it's interesting to note how both writers, albeit in very different ways, used their writing to create a vision of a mythical wonderland.

Goodbye Christopher Robin

UK 2017          107 minutes

Director:          Simon Curtis

Starring:            Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie and Kelly Macdonald

“With its bittersweet interweaving of fact and fantasy, youthful innocence and adult trauma, this tale of the creation of a children’s classic could have been called Saving Mr Milne. Like Mary Poppins, Winnie-the-Pooh occupies a sacred space in our hearts and anyone wishing to co-opt some of that magic must tread very lightly indeed. Director Simon Curtis’s movie could easily have tripped (like Piglet) and burst its balloon as it evokes a dappled glade of happiness surrounded by the monstrous spectres of two world wars. Instead, it skips nimbly between light and dark, war and peace, like a young boy finding his way through an English wood, albeit one drenched with shafts of sugary, Spielbergian light.”

Mark Kermode

Awards and Nominations

• Best Supporting Actress Nomination for Kelly Macdonald at the British Independent Film Awards
•  A further two wins

After his experiences at the Battle of the Somme A A Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) finds it difficult to resume his writing career. He moves his wife Daphne (Margot Robbie) and their son Christopher Robin to a house in the country where he plans to write an anti-war book, but while taking his son for walks in the surrounding woods he begins to make up stories about the boy’s animal toys. The books are a great commercial success, but all this has a detrimental effect on Christopher Robin Milne who rejects his family and the earnings from his father’s writing and then enlists in the army during the Second World War.

Milne read Mathematics at Cambridge but while he was there also edited a student magazine, and after graduating made his living as a writer: he became a regular contributor to Punch (where he met the cartoonist E H Shepherd who was to provide the definitive illustrations for his children’s books) and his other literary output included at least 18 plays (including a stage adaptation of The Wind in the Willows), three novels as well as several screenplays for the early British Film industry. However despite their success at the time all this work has been entirely overshadowed by the success of the two books of stories for children about Winnie-the-Pooh and two associated books of nursery rhymes When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six; in 2002 Forbes magazine ranked Winnie-the-Pooh as the most valuable fictional character and in 2005 Winnie-the-Pooh generated revenue of $6 billion from sales of merchandising products.

The production team for Goodbye Christopher Robin bring some very different backgrounds to the film. The screenplay is by Frank-Cottrell-Boyce who among his other work for cinema has written five screenplays for Michael Winterbottom including Welcome to Sarajevo (1997) and 24 Hour Party People (2002); he also wrote the 2012 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, several award-winning novels for children and two recent episodes of Doctor Who. The soundtrack is by Carter Burwell who has worked extensively with both the Coen brothers and Martin McDonagh, and who among many awards and nominations has received Oscar nomination for the soundtracks he wrote for Carol (2015) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). Director Simon Curtis began his career as a stage director at the Royal Court where he worked as an assistant to Danny Boyle before moving into television where he made his name with the BBC adaptations of Cranford and Return to Cranford (2009). He made his cinema debut with My Week with Marilyn (2011) and followed this with Woman in Gold (2015).

Here is a link to the trailer:

http://21stcenturyfilmbuff.blogspot.com

The Post

I saw this film first at the cinema and there was no doubt that we should screen it at our club. The sight of the old hot metal printing presses give the film a specific historical link, but the story itself seemed depressingly contemporary.

The Post

USA 2017        116 minutes

Director:          Steven Spielberg

Starring:            Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Sarah Paulson, Ben Odenkirk and Tracy Letts   

“For all its period detail, however, this is an urgently contemporary tale, with Spielberg taking a break from preparing his forthcoming effects-heavy sci-fi thriller Ready Player One to turn The Post around in double-quick time. Hitting our screens as the current White House incumbent raves about news media being “the enemy of the American people”, The Post offers a reminder that “the founding fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfil its essential role… to serve the governed, not the governors”. The film-making may hardly be groundbreaking, but this story is more relevant than ever, and it is told with wit, precision and understated passion.”

Mark Kermode

Awards and Nominations

• Oscar nominations for Best Film and Best Actress (Meryl Streep)
• Golden Globe nominations for Best Film (Drama), Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Tom Hanks), Best Actress (Meryl Streep) and Best Score (John Williams)
• A further 18 wins and 92 nominations

Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) is the proprietor of The Washington Post and Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) is its editor. When Bradlee obtains the Pentagon Papers, classified documents revealing the true picture of 30 years of US involvement in the Vietnam War, he and Graham have to fight attempts by Nixon’s White House to prevent their publication.

The screenplay for The Post by first time screenwriter Liz Hannah appeared on the annual Hollywood Black List of most liked screenplays not yet produced, and was picked up by a producer who assembled the team of Spielberg, Streep and Hanks for the project, the first time that all three had worked together. Spielberg then brought in Josh Singer, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for Spotlight (2015), a film about journalists on the Boston Globe investigating the cover up of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, to work with Hannah as he had the on-set writing experience that she lacked. Spielberg himself halted pre-production work on another project after a casting setback and decided to direct the The Post himself, commenting "when I read the first draft of the script, this wasn't something that could wait three years or two years — this was a story I felt we needed to tell today”.

The film is essence a prequel to All the President’s Men (1976) about the exposure by Woodward and Bernstein of Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal, and in the final minutes of the film it explicitly acknowledges the link with a brief radio news report of the initial burglary at the Watergate Building. Bob Woodward has subsequently written books about every US President since Nixon and Fear, his book on Trump’s presidency, became a global bestseller on its publication. The events portrayed in the film are generally true, although the screenplay does downplay the role that The New York Times had in breaking the story while emphasizing The Washington Post’s subsequent involvement: it was The New York Times that first published the Pentagon Papers, set the stage for the legal battle between the press and the US government and then won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its work.

The Post was named as one of the top ten films of the year by both Time and the American Film Institute.

This is the trailer:

The Limehouse Golem

I have always enjoyed Peter Ackroyd's books, but for some reason I had never read Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. I saw the film at the cinema and then read the book, and was hugely impressed by the way the adaptation converted a novel with such a complex structure into such a superb film.

When we screened it we attracted a number of Bill Nighy fans, but they were somewhat surprised to see him, for once, in a dramatic role.

The Limehouse Golem

UK 2016          109 minutes

Director:          Juan Carlos Medina

Starring:            Bill Nighy, Olivia Cooke and Douglas Booth

“All the world’s a bloody stage in this gothic Victorian East End melodrama, splendidly adapted from a 1994 novel by Peter Ackroyd. A tale of theatrical murder drenched in the rich hues of classic-period Hammer, this gaslit treat sets Bill Nighy’s Scotland Yard detective on the trail of a grisly killer in 1880s London. Swinging between the ghoulish gaiety of the music hall and the grim stench of the morgue, the second feature from Insensibles/Painless director Juan Carlos Medina is a deliciously subversive affair, nimbly adapted by super-sharp screenwriter Jane Goldman and vivaciously played by an impressive ensemble cast.”

Mark Kermode

Awards and Nominations

• Three nominations including Best Film and Best Actor (Bill Nighy)

There is a serial killer – known popularly as the Limehouse Golem – who leaves notes written in his victim’s blood on the loose in Victorian London. Scotland Yard appoints Inspector Kildare (Bill Nighy) to investigate the case whose suspects include music hall star Dan Leno (Douglas Booth), Karl Marx (Henry Goodman), writer George Gissing (Morgan Watkins) and playwright John Cree (Sam Reid). When John Cree is poisoned and his wife Lizzie (Olivia Crooke) is accused of his murder Kildare believes that identifying Cree as the Limehouse Golem will save Lizzie from the gallows.

Screenwriter Jane Goldman has reconfigured the story of Peter Ackroyd’s novel to make it a police procedural and has elevated the role of Kildare, mentioned only briefly in the novel, into the central character but as in so many of Ackroyd’s books, both novels and non-fiction, London is also a major character. Ackroyd anchors this story in the reality of London’s history with its reference to the Ratcliff Highway murders, two attacks on separate families in 1811 that resulted in seven deaths: Thomas de Quincey famously wrote about the murders and Ackroyd has his murderer leave a series of clues in the text of this work in the British Museum. Beyond the British Museum are the streets of London and the world of the music hall and the film contrasts the washed out streets teeming with opium addicts and prostitutes with the brilliant and colourful world of the music hall which provides Londoners with a temporary escape from the drudgery of their lives. But within the world of the music hall nothing is quite as it seems as Dan Leno made his name as a female impersonator, Lizzie Cree performs dressed as a man, and love and death are always in close proximity. 

There had been plans to film the book for many years and the diverse list of potential previous directors includes James Ivory, Terry Gilliam and Neil Jordan. Originally it had been planned that Alan Rickman should play Kildare, but his illness forced his withdrawal and replacement by Bill Nighy, who plays a rare dramatic role. The film is dedicated to Alan Rickman.

Juan Carlos Medina made his name with the Spanish horror film Painless/Insensibles (2012). Since The Limehouse Golem his work has included two episodes each of the TV series Origins and A Discovery of Witches

Here is a link to the trailer:

Finding Your Feet

I'd missed this film at the cinema, but it was pretty good fun and went down well with the members: presumably a significant number are fans of Strictly Come Dancing.

Finding Your Feet

UK 2017          111 minutes

Director:          Richard Loncraine

Starring:            Imelda Staunton, Timothy Spall, Celia Imrie, David Hayman, John Sessions and Joanna Lumley

“This film could not court the grey pound more aggressively if it handed out free Saga holidays with every ticket. And yet, cynical as it undoubtedly is, there is a certain creaky charm to this tale of late-life second chances and senior dance classes. That charm is largely deployed by a game veteran cast. Headed up by Imelda Staunton as Sandra, the wife who discovers her husband’s infidelity just as she was hoping to enjoy their Ocado-delivered retirement, and Celia Imrie as Bif, her pot-smoking bohemian sister, the cast also includes Timothy Spall and a gloriously vampy Joanna Lumley. Spall and Staunton, in particular, are tremendous.”

Wendy Ide

Awards and Nominations

• Won Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Palm Springs International Film Festival

When Lady Sandra Abbott (Imelda Staunton) discovers that her husband (John Sessions) is having an affair she takes refuge with her bohemian sister Bif (Celia Imrie). Bif persuades her to join her dance class and here Charlie (Timothy Spall), Jackie (Joanna Lumley) and Ted (David Hayman) show her that her divorce might just give her a whole new lease of life and love.

Richard Loncraine studied at Art College before moving on to Film School and in his subsequent career he has worked extensively both in television and cinema. For the BBC his early work included Blade on the Feather (1980) and Brimstone and Treacle (1982), both by Dennis Potter and later on he directed the TV movies The Gathering Storm (2002), about the life of Winston Churchill (Albert Finney) in the years before the outbreak of war in 1939 and The Special Relationship (2010), from a screenplay by Peter Morgan, about the relationship between Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) and US Presidents Clinton and George W Bush.

For the cinema Loncraine’s films have been wide-ranging in style and include the period comedy-drama The Missionary (1982) which was written by and starred Michael Palin in his first post-Python film, Richard III (1995) a filmed adaptation of Richard Eyre’s National Theatre production set in the 1930s with Ian McKellen in the title role, and Wimbledon (2004), a romantic comedy set during the annual tennis tournament.

Here's a link to the trailer:  

Phantom Thread

The past twelve months have been busy and I have been involved in various other projects which have been time-consuming. The Film Club has continued and has gone from strength to strength, but I have been remiss in posting copies of the notes I produce on to this blog.

Over the next weeks I intend to get back to where we are now as we have just started our 2019-2020 season.

So to start with I am posting this almost a year late... Nonetheless the film was superb and I have subsequently bought the soundtrack which I listen to regularly.

Phantom Thread

USA 2017        130 minutes

Director:          Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring:            Daniel Day-Lewis, Lesley Manville and Vicky Krieps

  

“Paul Thomas Anderson’s best film since Punch-Drunk Love is another cracked romance with a masochistic streak and a strong fairy-tale underpinning. Set in post-war London, amid the insular world of 50s haute couture, Phantom Thread is an oedipal gothic romance, a tale of lost mothers and broken spells, with secret messages (“never cursed”) sewn into its gorgeously cinematic cloth. A swooning score, crisp visuals and paper-cut-sharp performances combine to conjure a poisoned rose of a movie, inviting you to prick your finger on its thorns and succumb to its weird, dark magic.”

Mark Kermode

Awards and Nominations

• Won Oscar for Best Costume Design plus Oscar nominations for Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis), Best Supporting Actress (Lesley Manville), Best Film, Best Director and Best Soundtrack
• Won BAFTA for Best Costume Design plus BAFTA nominations for Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis), Best Supporting Actress (Lesley Manville) and Best Soundtrack
• A further 46 wins and 85 nominations

In 1950s London designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) are at the centre of the British fashion industry of the period. Woodcock designs dresses for royalty movie stars, heiresses and debutants, and has had relationships with a string of women who have passed in and out of his life, but when he meets Alma (Vicky Krieps), a young waitress who becomes both his muse and his lover, he discovers that she has the potential to disrupt his entire carefully managed life.

Phantom Thread is the first feature film that Anderson has directed that is set outside of his native USA and his screenplay is an original story, although the character of Woodcock is loosely based on the British designed Charles James. The style of the film reflects the work that Alfred Hitchcock and Powell and Pressburger made during the period in which it is set and composer Jonny Greenwood, who has scored all of Anderson’s films since There Will Be Blood, reinforces the period feel with his soundtrack that has echoes of David Lean’s British films of the 1940s, especially Richard Addinsell’s work for The Passionate Friends (1949) and the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto that figures so memorably in Brief Encounter (1945).

Anderson started making films using a Betamax video camera at the age of 12. He spent two terms studying English at University before dropping out to begin his career as a production assistant on TV. He subsequently decided to make a short film as his “college”; the resulting short was successfully screened at the Sundance Film Festival and he later expanded it into Hard Eight (1996) his first full length feature. Anderson’s breakthrough film which won him both critical and commercial success was Boogie Nights (1997) set in the world of porn in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2007 he directed the critically acclaimed historical drama There Will Be Blood which among its many awards and nominations won Oscars for Daniel Day-Lewis in the leading role and Best Cinematography as well as being named as the best film of the current century by several critics.

Here's a link to the trailer: