Fisherman's Friends

We started our current season last September but in the light of the Coronavirus Pandemic we decided to can what remains of our programme. I write notes for every film we screen and some people even read them. For the sake of completeness I'll post them all over the next few weeks as I currently have no plans to go anywhere.

I'd not seen this film at the cinema, but it was quite fun: certainly a good way to bring an audience back to our film club after the summer break.

Fisherman’s Friends

UK 2019          112 minutes

Director:          Chris Foggin

Starring:            James Purefoy, Daniel Mays, Noel Clarke and Tuppence Middleton

“Fisherman's Friends is a formulaic but thoroughly amiable and upbeat British comedy with a flavour of Ealing Studios and The Full Monty about it. The plot which the screenwriters have cooked up seems almost an afterthought. The singing fishermen came first. The Fisherman’s Friends really were signed by a major record label, had a top 10 hit, and turned into a full-blown media sensation. The film takes considerable liberties with their story, but fans of extra mature Cornish cheddar won’t be complaining.”

Geoffrey McNab

While visiting a Cornish village on a stag weekend Danny (Daniel Mays) a London music executive is tricked buy his boss (Noel Clarke) into trying to sign a group of local fishermen who sign sea shanties. As he struggles to gain the respect and enthusiasm of the group he is drawn deeper into their traditional way of life and this makes him re-evaluate his own integrity and what success actually means.

The film declares that it is “based on a true story”, but the reality is that Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft, the writers and producers of the film, saw the group Fisherman’s Friends performing on TV, optioned their life rights and then created their own story. The real life story of the group is more mundane: radio presenter Johnnie Walker bought two of the group’s homemade CDs while on holiday in Cornwall and then his manager travelled to Port Isaac to meet them and then negotiated a recording contract worth £1 million for them. A very different view of the contemporary Cornish fishing industry can be seen in Mark Jenkin’s Bait (2019), which Peter Bradshaw described as “an episode of EastEnders directed by F W Murnau” and which Mark Kermode has hailed as one of the defining British films of the decade.

Nick Moorcroft has written a number of successful British comedy films including St Trinian’s (2007) and St Trinian’s: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold (2009,) and more recently the romantic comedy Finding Your Feet (2017). Chris Foggin has worked on a films as diverse as My Week with Marilyn (2011), The Iron Lady (2011) and Effie Grey (2014) as an Assistant Director as well as performing a similar role in a number of high profile television programmes, but this is his first feature film as director.

Here's a link to the trailer:

Green Book

We chose to screen this as our AGM. I'd missed it at the cinema and was keen to see it as in terms of awards it had proved to be a bit of a sleeper. Having seen it I can report that I enjoyed it, but felt that there were other films that were more deserving of the Oscars for Best Film and Best Original Screenplay.

Here are my notes:

Green Book

USA 2019        130 minutes

Director:          Peter Farrelly

Starring:            Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali and Linda Cardellini

“It’s easy to discount the simplicity of Green Book in a way that many similarly and unfairly did when Hidden Figures broke out in 2016, sighing at the broad strokes used to tell a vital true story. But there’s a necessity in using a film of this scale to recreate a time not too long ago when black people were being regularly dehumanised and devalued in ways that were upheld by the law. Yes, this is entertainment pitched at a wide audience and is constructed in the most easily digestible way possible but it still serves a significant purpose to remind white audiences of the difficulties faced by those of colour.”

Benjamin Lee

Award and Nominations:

• Won Oscars for Best Film, Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali) plus Oscar nominations for Best Actor (Viggo Mortensen) and Best Editing
• Won BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali) plus nominations for Best Film, Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor (Viggo Mortensen)
• A further 49 wins and 85 nominations

In 1962 the African American classical and jazz pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) toured the Deep South of the USA with Italian American bouncer Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) as his bodyguard and driver. In view of the segregation and discrimination policies still in force at that time the pair use The Negro Motorist Green Book which details services and places relatively friendly to African Americans.

The screenplay for the film is co-written by Nick Vallelonga, son of Frank Vallelonga and is based on his interviews with his father and Shirley as well as letters that his father wrote to his mother. Nick Vallelonga did not speak to surviving members of Shirley’s family who were critical of Shirley’s portrayal in the film although Shirley himself had told him not to speak to members of his family and had himself approved both what Vallelonga included and excluded in terms of his life. Similarly some critics had an issue with the film’s depiction of race in that it seemed to propose a “white saviour” narrative, although director Peter Farrelly countered this by explaining that the film was:

"about two guys who were complete opposites and found a common ground, and it's not one guy saving the other. It's both saving each other and pulling each other into some place where they could bond and form a lifetime friendship.

In real life Vallelonga and Shirley remained friends until they both died within months of each other in 2013.

Director Peter Farrelly made his name by working with his brother Bobby to direct quirky comedies such as Dumb and Dumber (1994), There’s Something About Mary (1998), Me, Myself and Irene (2000) and Shallow Hal (2001). In addition to the films he has co-directed for cinema he has also written extensively for television and published two novels.

Green Book was initially given a limited release in the USA but following its Oscar nominations and other success during the awards season it was given a far wider screening which led into a significant increase in it takings, although Farrelly himself did not receive an Oscar nomination for Best Director. The film was also a surprise hit in China where its takings meant that it was the second highest grossing Oscar winner for best film after Titanic (1997). It was also recognised as one of the top ten films of the year by the American Film Institute.

Here is the trailer:

Bohemian Rhapsody

I'd read the bad reviews about this film and then I'd seen the numerous awards that it picked up - mostly by Rami Malek for his performance - so I was genuinely interested finally to see it.

I enjoyed it, but thought  that it offered a sanitised version of Freddie Mercury's life: it would take someone with the talent of Derek Jarman even to come close to a more authentic version, although I don't think that such a film would have received the approval of the rest of Queen let alone the finance needed to produce it.

Bohemian Rhapsody

USA 2018        134 minutes

Director:          Bryan Singer

Starring:            Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Gwilym Lee and Ben Hardy

“We can stipulate a few things about Bohemian Rhapsody. We can stipulate that it’s not a great movie. We can stipulate that, in many ways, it’s not even a very good movie. As a trite, often laughably clichéd biopic of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, an enterprise that should have been as daring and flamboyantly theatrical as its subject winds up being bowdlerized, Wiki-fied, distortingly compressed and unforgivably conventional.

And yet.

We can also stipulate that, despite the myriad shortcomings of its parts, the sum of Bohemian Rhapsody winds up being giddily entertaining, first as an exercise in so-bad-it’s-funny kitsch, and ultimately as something far more meaningful and thrilling. Every now and then, a film comes along that defies the demands of taste, formal sophistication, even artistic honesty to succeed simply on the level of pure, inexplicable pleasure. Bohemian Rhapsody is just that cinematic unicorn: the bad movie that works, even when it shouldn’t.”

Anne Hornaday, Washington Post

Award and Nominations:

• Won four Oscars including Best Actor (Rami Malek)
• Won two BAFTAs including Best Actor (Rami Malek) plus five other nominations
• A further 27 wins and 56 nominations

In London in the early 1970s aspiring musician Farrokh Bulsara (Rami Malek) learns that the lead singer of a band called Smile has left and so he auditions to take on the role: subsequently Bulsara changes his name to Freddie Mercury, the band renames itself Queen and the group begins its rise to global success. In the 1980s Freddie Mercury leaves the band to work on solo albums, but they reunite to perform triumphantly at the 1985 Live Aid concert. Prior to their performance Mercury reveals to his bandmates that he has contracted the HIV virus and intertitles at the end of the film state that he died from AIDs-related pneumonia in 1994.

Brain May and Roger Taylor were both co-producers of the film which had a long and complex production history involving, among other issues, a struggle over whether the film should focus on the story of the band or should be a more adult story focused on the life on Mercury. Initially both Sacha Baron Cohen and Ben Whishaw had been linked to the role of Mercury with Dexter Fletcher (whose previous work as director includes the musical Sunshine on Leith (2013) and the comedy Eddie the Eagle (2016)) to direct from a screenplay by Peter Morgan. In November 2015 Anthony McCarten, who had written the screenplays for both The Theory of Everything (2014) and Darkest Hour (2017), was commissioned to produce a new screenplay from Morgan’s outline and the film finally went into production in 2016. In addition to the complexities of its production history the film’s screenplay generated some controversy as a result of its depiction of some key events in the history of Queen in the wrong order, especially Mercury’s HIV diagnosis: it is generally accepted that he discovered that he had been infected between late 1986 and Spring 1987, and in reality he did not make the other band members aware of this until late in 1989.

Bryan Singer is credited as the film’s director although he was fired from the production with less than two weeks of principal photography left. Dexter Fletcher was recalled by the producers to finish the photography and complete the film although the credits list only Singer as director, with Fletcher’s role being relegated to that of Executive Producer. Fletcher is currently working on Rocketman, a biography of Elton John which has the tagline of being “based on a true fantasy”, a statement which hopefully will ensure that it escapes criticism for any elements that do not reflect the historical record.

Here is the trailer:

Some Like It Hot

Each season we aim to include one "classic" film that has a significant anniversary, and this year we selected Some Like It Hot: it was a unanimous decision.

I'd actually seen the film on a big screen once before where it reinforced my belief that you do not really appreciate a film until you see it on a big screen. It was good to have this opportunity to re-acquaint myself with this true classic.

Some Like It Hot

USA 1959        116 minutes

Director:          Billy Wilder

Starring:            Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon

Award and Nominations:

• Five Oscar nominations including Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Jack Lemmon) Best Director, Best Cinematography (Black and White) and one Oscar win (Best Costume Design, Black and White)
• BAFTA award for Best Foreign Actor (Jack Lemmon)
• A further eight wins and eight nominations

“Some Like It Hot is effortlessly fluent, joyous and buoyant: a high-concept comedy that stays as high as a kite, while other comedies flag. ‘Nobody’s perfect’ is the last line. Wilder, Lemmon, Curtis and Monroe come pretty close.”

                                                                                                            Peter Bradshaw

Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) are musicians in Chicago, and when they accidentally witness a gangland killing they board a train bound for Florida disguised as Josephine and Daphne, the most recent recruits of an all-girl jazz band. Their cover is perfect until Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe) falls for Josephine and an elderly playboy (Joe E Brown) takes a shine to Daphne.

The idea of two men disguising themselves as women to join an all-girl band was borrowed from a 1951 German film called Fanfares of Love (Fanfaren der Liebe) which itself was a remake of a 1935 French comedy called Fanfare of Love (Fanfare d’amour). However Billy Wilder and his co-screenplay writer I A L Diamond had the inspired idea to add a gangster subplot to the main story both as motivation to keep the musicians on the run as well as allowing themselves as filmmakers to make witty references back to Hollywood gangster films of the 1930s. On its re-release in 2014 Peter Bradshaw hailed the film as “the best remake in movie history” and the screenplay received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

The casting of the main roles is superb and from the perspective of today it is difficult now to imagine other actors in the roles, but at one time Wilder had hoped to cast Frank Sinatra in the film and earlier on had even thought about a double act of Bob Hope and Danny Kay. Additionally with Marilyn Monroe in great personal distress during the making of the film Wilder had Mitzi Gaynor on standby to take over the role, but without Monroe the chemistry of the central roles would have worked nowhere near as well.

The film opened to positive reviews, with eminent critic Dilys Powell praising all the performances and also commenting on the transgressive subject matter, describing it as “a farce blacker than is common on the American screen [that] whistles along at a smart, murderous pace”. The film subsequently received six Oscar nominations (and won one) and since then has never fallen out of favour with either the public or critics. In 2000 the American Film Institute selected it as the top comedy in its 100 Years… 100 Laughs poll, a BBC poll of 253 films critics in 2017 chose it as the best comedy of all time and in 2005 the BFI included the film in its list of the 50 films you should see by the age of 14.

In recent times it has been possible to identify the transgressive nature of the story more clearly. In Have You Seen, his epic introduction to 1000 films, eminent film historian David Thomson highlights this new perspective:

“I suspect, literally, that no one knew that the film was a gay breakthrough. If they had guessed, they would have taken fright. But here is another film from the late fifties that blows up every convention it can see and discloses miracles in the explosion. Everybody’s perfect.”

The overwhelming and ongoing success of Some Like It Hot is considered to be one of the final nails in the coffin of the Hays Code which since 1930 had defined what was acceptable content for films produced in the USA, although the code itself was finally abandoned only in 1968, a year which saw the release of films as diverse as The Producers, Rosemary’s Baby and Barbarella.

Here is a link to the trailer:

The Little Stranger

I'd seen this film at the cinema and suggested that we screen it, and it definitely went down well. I think that anyone who saw it expecting a ghost story would have been disappointed, but in terms of atmosphere, pace and performance it was superb.

The Little Stranger

UK 2018          111 minutes

Director:          Lenny Abrahamson

Starring:            Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson, Will Poulter and Charlotte Rampling

“The haunts of childhood are revisited in this oppressively macabre ghost story, set in the miserable austerity of late-40s Britain and in some ways a metaphor for the nation’s complex sense of sacrificial loss. … The Little Stranger is fluently made and really well acted, particularly by Ruth Wilson, though maybe a bit too constrained by period-movie prestige to be properly scary.”

                                                                                                            Peter Bradshaw

In the summer of 1947 Dr Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) is called to visit a patient at Hundreds Hall. He knows the place well as his mother once worked there as a maid but now the place is in decline and its three inhabitants - Mrs Ayres (Charlotte Rampling), her daughter Caroline (Ruth Wilson) and son Roderick (Will Poulter) - feel that the house is haunted by the ghost of Mrs Ayres’ first daughter who had died in childhood.

The film is based on the Booker-nominated novel by Sarah Waters. Despite the theme of her story Waters had not initially intended to write a ghost story: rather her intention had been to explore the rise of socialism how the fading remnants of the gentry dealt with losing their legacies. In this regard her decision to set the story in 1947 is crucial: the Labour landslide of 1945 allowed Attlee’s government to launch the NHS in July 1948. However both novel and film, which Mark Kermode accurately described as a “ghostly story” rather than a “ghost story”, carry echoes of classic ghost stories of the past including The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson; other critics have also commented on their debt to novels (and films) as diverse as Rebecca, Brideshead Revisited and even The Great Gatsby.

All of Sarah Waters’ novels have historical settings and, with the exception of the most recent (The Paying Guests), have been adapted for either television or film. Fingersmith, a complex crime novel set in Victorian England, was memorably adapted by the BBC with a cast that included Sally Hawkins and Imelda Staunton; more recently award-winning South Korean director Park Chan-wook created a critically acclaimed and commercially successful film adaptation of the same book called The Handmaiden in which he transferred the action to colonial Korea in the 1930s.

Lenny Abrahamson is an Irish film director who began his career making commercials before directing independent films about people living on the fringes of Irish society. His film Frank (2014) (which also starred Domhnall Gleeson) a road movie set in Britain, Ireland and the USA received its premier at the Sundance Film Festival and he followed this with the film adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel Room (2015) which received Oscar nominations for Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and for Brie Larson as Best Leading Actress, although during the ceremony only Larson won an award.

Here is a link to the trailer:

La Ch'tite Famille

This film was a complete surprise to me - and  very pleasant one.

I'd borrowed the DVD to watch the film before we decided to screen it and for a moment was surprised to notice several of what I took to be typos in the subtitles: it took me several minutes to realise that the subtitles were trying to replicate the bizarre accents of the Ch'tite family.

La Ch'tite famille

France 2018     107 minutes

Director:          Dany Boon

Starring:            Dany Boon, Line Renaud, Laurence Arne and Valerie Bonneton

“Picard is a langues d'oïl dialect of the Indo-European language family spoken in the northernmost part of France and southern Belgium. … Picard is referred to by different names as residents of Picardy simply call it Picard, but it is more commonly known as chti or chtimi in the more populated Nord-Pas-de-Calais (Romance Flanders around the metropolis of Lille and Douai, and northeast Artois around Béthune and Lens). … As of 2008, Picard native speakers amount to 700,000 individuals. Since its daily use had drastically declined, Picard was declared by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) a "seriously endangered language".”

                                                                                                            Wikipedia

Valentin Duquenne is a famous and successful designer of furniture who claims to be an orphan as he is too ashamed to admit that he is the son of working-class scrap metal dealers from northern France. When his family arrive in Paris, on the pretext of wanting to celebrate his elderly mother’s birthday with him, his true identity is revealed and then, after a traffic accident causes him to lose his memory, the Ch'ti in him returns.

Dany Boon is a French comedian and a film maker who has appeared successfully on both stage and screen. His native region is the Nord-Pas-de-Calais and after he had made his name through his sketches and one man shows in 2003 he made a whole show in the dialect of ch’ti which although subtitled became a bestseller throughout the whole of France. In February 2008 he released Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, a comedy based on prejudices held about the region, which became the highest grossing film of all-time at the French box office.

La Ch'tite famille is not specifically a sequel to Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis: Boon’s own description is that it is “closer to a spin-off project”. On its opening weekend in France it topped the French box office and grossed $16,739,183. 

Here is a link to the trailer:

The Bookshop

This film was an unexpected pleasure. I'd not read the book but I'd seen the reviews, wanted to see the film, but it disappeared from general release before I managed to catch it.

The presence of Bill Nighy in a film always brings in an audience, although some people are still in recovery from having seen The Limehouse Golem.

Here are my notes:

The Bookshop

UK 2017          113 minutes

Director:          Isabel Coixet

Starring:            Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy and Patricia Clarkson

Awards and Nominations:

• 14 wins including Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Bill Nighy) and Best Actress (Emily Mortimer)
• A further 32 nominations

“The Spanish film-maker Isabel Coixet brings an interesting, unsentimental detachment to this odd tragicomedy of provincial life. She refuses the familiar grace notes of comedy and sugary romance in favour of something more awkward and angular.”

Peter Bradshaw

In 1959 Florence Green (Emily Mortimer), a young widow, decides to risk everything by moving to a sleepy seaside town where she opens its first bookshop. By stocking novels like Lolita and Fahrenheit 451 she opens the eyes of the local residents to the best of modern literature and gains the support of reclusive bachelor Edmund Brundish (Bill Nighy) but her actions incur the wrath of the influential and ambitious Mrs Gamart (Patricia Clarkson) who plans to use the bookshop premises to set up an arts centre. The uncredited narration is by Julie Christie.

The film is an adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1978 novel which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The almost twenty year chronological gap between the setting of the novel and its composition allowed Fitzgerald the perspective to create a story driven by the conflict between small town nostalgia fixated on heritage and an emerging metropolitan liberal progressiveness that in terms of bookselling would culminate several years later in the prosecution and acquittal of Penguin Books for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover. However looking at the film at the current moment it is possible to see the story from another perspective, this time political, in that many Brexit supporters espouse a nostalgia for a past that never existed while many Remainers share a liberal and Eurocentric mindset.

Coixet directed the film from her own screenplay, and in an interview about her work to date she declared that she helps “untangle films from their national context, … clearing the path for thinking about national film from different perspectives”; in this case she has changed the perspective of the story by using locations in Northern Ireland to represent Fitzgerald’s fictional Suffolk coastal town. Throughout all her films she identifies recurrent themes of “emotions, feelings, and existential conflict” although both the setting and time in which The Bookshop is set ensured that for this film her characters repress their emotions and button down their feelings.

All of Coixet’s films have a distinct visual style (she works as her own camera operator), she works in both Spanish and English and she has also acted as a producer for films directed by others; as such within Spain she is regarded as a Catalan auteur. She began her career in advertising where her clients included such global brands as BMW, Renault and Ikea before moving into cinema, although continuing to make commercials through her own production company. On its release in Spain The Bookshop received both a positive critical response as well as great public success. The film received it premier outside of Spain at the 68^th Berlin International Film Festival.

Here is the trailer: