Frost/Nixon

These are the film notes for tonight's film. For once I have actually seen the film I am writing about rather than having to rely purely on research.

Frost/Nixon

US 2008 (122 minutes)
Director: Ron Howard
Starring: Frank Langella and Martin Sheen

Awards and Nominations
Nominated for 5 Oscars, including Best Motion Picture, Director, Actor in a Leading Role (Langella) and Adapted Screenplay (Peter Morgan).
A further 10 wins and 36 nominations

In 1977 former US President Nixon agreed to a series of TV interviews with David Frost which he hoped would rehabilitate his reputation with the American people after the scandal of Watergate. At this point in his career Frost was better known as a chat show host than a serious interviewer, and he realised that in order to sell the interviews to sceptical US television companies he needed Nixon to admit his role in the Watergate scandal rather than merely pad the interviews with endless anecdotes of life in the White House and details of foreign policy successes.

The film is based on the play of the same name by Peter Morgan, which was staged in London and New York with both Langella and Sheen in the same roles. The original interviews that Nixon gave to Frost are available on DVD, and inevitably a number of Nixon’s biographers have identified several inaccuracies in the screenplay: Nixon did not make any late night calls to Frost, Nixon had carefully planned his “confession” about Watergate, and the interviews were in no sense the epochal event in the history of politics that the film suggests.

Sheen has worked with Peter Morgan previously when he played Tony Blair on TV in The Deal (2003) and in cinema in The Queen (2006), and is due to play Blair for the third time in The Special Relationship from another script by Peter Morgan that examines Blair’s relationship with Bill Clinton. Initially Peter Morgan was scheduled to direct as well, but has now handed over the this role to Richard Loncraine in order to write the screenplays for Hereafter, a supernatural thriller that Clint Eastwood will direct as well as the next Bond film – Bond 23.

Ron Howard has demonstrated an amazing ability to mix critical and commercially successful pictures in a career as a director which has lasted for more than 30 years: he made his name as a director with commercially successful films such as Splash (1984) and Cocoon (1985), but subsequently directed critical successes such as Apollo 13 (1995) and A Beautiful Mind (2001). He followed the critical and commercial success of Frost/Nixon with Angels and Demons (2009), a sequel to his film of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2006), once again with Tom Hanks in the lead.

Let the Right One In / Låt den rätte komma in

These are the film notes from last night's screening. The film was just as good as everything I had read suggested it would be, and I await the American remake already in production with trepidation.


Sweden 2008
Duration 114 minutes
Director: Tomas Alfredson
Starring: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson and Per Ragnar

Awards and Nominations
56 wins
11 nominations

Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is a 12 years old Swedish boy who dreams of revenge against the local bullies. He meets and falls in love with Eli (Lina Leandersson), a peculiar girl who can’t stand the sun and in order to come into a room needs to be invited. She gives Oskar the strength to hit back at the bullies, but when he realises that she has to drink other people’s blood to live he’s faced with a difficult question: how much can love forgive.

The first vampire film appeared in 1909 and in the hundred years since then there have been many others. The greatest of the silent versions was F W Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) – based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula story but with the vampire portrayed as the hideous creature from European folklore rather than Bram Stoker’s Byronic creation – and with the coming of sound Bela Lugosi played Dracula in a series of Hollywood films in the 1930s. Hammer Horror resurrected Dracula in 1958 with Christopher Lee playing the aristocratic vampire in a total of eight films. Since then there have been many stories which have continued the tradition of portraying the vampire as an alluring sex symbol starring actors as diverse as David Bowie, Catherin Deneuve and Tom Cruise. In the most recent manifestation of this tradition Robert Pattinson is playing a vampire who consumes only animal blood in a series of films based on the best-selling Twilight novels by Stephanie Meyer.

However Let the Right One In sits firmly within another sub-genre of vampire films that links directly back to Max Shreck’s vampire in Nosferatu, a creature whose sole desire is to feed on the blood of others. Other films within this tradition include Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979), with Klaus Kinski as the vampire, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1979) and the more recent 30 Days of Night (2007) in which a group of vampires attack an Alaskan town as it enters a thirty day period without sunshine.

The film is based on the novel of the same name by the Swedish novelist John Ayvide Lindqvist, who also wrote the screenplay for the film. Lindqvist is a devoted Morrissey fan and the title of his novel refers both to the song Let the Right One Slip In as well as the tradition in vampire lore that prevents a vampire from entering a house unless invited. The film received widespread international critical acclaim on its release and also won numerous awards. As a result of its success at various film festivals the rights to an English language remake were sold before its theatrical release, and it is currently in production with Matt Reeves as director. Alfredson has concerns about the remake saying that “remakes should be made of movies that aren’t very good, that gives you the chance to fix whatever has gone wrong”, while Lindqvist is excited that Reeves will produce his own adaptation of the original novel rather than merely remaking the original film so that the end result could be quite different.

Vicky Christina Barcelona

We are screening Vicky Christina Barcelona on Thursday 8th October. Here are the film notes:

Vicky Christina Barcelona

US/Spain 2008 (96 minutes)
Director: Woody Allen
Starring: Javier Bardem, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz

Awards and Nominations
Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Penelope Cruz)
Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy
A further 18 wins and 27 nominations

While visiting Barcelona Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Christina (Scarlett Johansson) meet Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a famous artist, and begin a relationship with him, not knowing that his ex-wife (Penelope Cruz), with whom he had a tempestuous relationship, is about to come back into his life.

Allen sets the film up as a worldly-wise study of what remains after passion has dissipated, the type of film that Eric Rohmer has produced so well; but as Phillip French has noted its premise of American girls being bowled over by European culture the film also echoes the core plot of Three Coins in the Fountain (1954). The cast is truly international with British actor Rebecca Hall affecting a perfect American accent and two Spanish actors who are equally at home in Hollywood as well as in Spanish cinema. However it is the Spanish actors who won praise for their performances, with Javier Bardem receiving several nominations as Best Supporting Actor and Penelope Cruz winning several awards, including an Oscar, as Best Supporting Actress.

After nearly two decades of producing a string of classic films like Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hannah And Her Sisters (1986) and Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989) in and around in New York Woody Allen moved to Europe, where his films had always been more successful, and began a new phase in his career. In London he produced Match Point (2005) which was well received and whose cast included Scarlett Johansson and followed this with Scoop (2006), which received mixed reviews and which as yet to be released in the UK, and Cassandra’s Dream (2007). From the UK he moved to Spain and Vicky Christina Barcelona marked a return to the form that produced Match Point, although it is unlikely that he will ever return to the form that produced a series of classics in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Woody Allen’s next film is Whatever Works (2009), set in France and he is currently working on what IMDB calls his Untitled Woody Allen London Project, which is scheduled for release in 2010.

Michael Palin

I went back to Oxford on Saturday for "one-off" Gaudy to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the foundation of Brasenose: a chance to meet up with old friends, revisit old haunts and enjoy what I hoped would be a memorable dinner in College. The sky was a brilliant blue and cloudless, the old stone glowed in the sunshine and the city seemed almost mythological: reflecting the shared memories of those attending the Gaudy rather than the mundane reality of the place I come to shop on an irregular basis.

As I made my way down Turl Street a woman stopped me: she had just seen Michael Palin in a DJ, and as I was also wearing a DJ she wanted to know what was going on. I explained about the BNC500 celebrations and this seemed to satisfy her curiosity. She was about to move on, but then turned back to me.

"Excuse me for asking, but are you famous?"

I thought about it for a moment.

"Not yet... but I'm working on it."

Good Bye Lenin!

These are the film notes for this Sunday's screening:

Germany 2003
Duration 121 minutes
Director: Wolfgang Becker
Starring: Daniel Bruehl, Kathrin Sass and Chulpan Khamatova

Awards and Nominations:
Nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Foreign Language Film
A further 31 wins and 14 nominations

Just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall Christiane Kerner (Kathrin Sass), an ardent supporter of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany, falls into a coma. After eight months she regains consciousness but her doctors warn her son Alex (Daniel Bruehl) that any further shock could be fatal, and so Alex and his sister make increasingly desperate attempts to hide the evidence of the sudden arrival of capitalism in East Berlin, pretending instead the East German regime remains in power.

As Alex desperately attempts to deceive his mother he resorts to media distortion and emotional blackmail to co-opt people into his schemes and to compel them to act against their principles. These are the tools that the East German regime used to control the general population - as shown so brilliantly in The Lives of Others (2006) – but here Alex’s sole motive is his love for his mother. Alex even manages to create an alternative history of Germany in which the West is cracking up and the generous East opens its borders to accommodate refugees from capitalism, but eventually his deception unravels and Christiane learns the truth about what has really happened.

The film shows that for some Germans the reunification of their country happened too quickly, with the loss of some of the good elements of East Germany as well as the bad. As Alex points out, in the false TV shows he creates East Germany is having the end it deserved rather than the end it got.

The film includes an apparent anachronism in that a t-shirt worn by one of the characters appears to picture the green glyph pattern from The Matrix – a film which did not appear until 1999. However in a deleted scene on the DVD the character, an amateur film maker, tells Alex about an idea for a film where people were enslaved by machines to produce energy while trapped in a computer dream world – a film in which characters live in a simulated reality. The film also contains references to 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange and the flying statue of Lenin echoes a scene with the flying statue of Jesus in La Dolce Vita.

Liberty in the Age of Terror

Last night we went to hear a talk by A C Grayling - a brilliant lecture in defence of civil society and enlightenment values. I always read his articles in The Guardian and other sites and I've just ordered the book (plus its predecessor which is the story of of the struggle for liberty and rights in the modern West) from my favourite on-line retailer.

After the talk Grayling took a series of questions including one about the future of print media. In his view the mainstream press is under huge pressure from the internet; he described the growth of blogging as giving people access to the biggest lavatory wall ever built in order to express their opinions, with at least 95% of what is published online being worthless.

It is not for me to comment on the value - or otherwise - of this blog. I hope that it will reflect the hard work by members of our committee to get our film club up and running: we have fun choosing our films and it's a pleasure to see a new film or revisit an old favourite. But I can't help remembering the warning words from Alan Bennett in Forty Years On:

"When a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, then the writing is on the wall".

The Reader

Here are my film notes for our next screening:

UK 2008
Duration 124 minutes
Director: Stephen Daldry
Starring: Kate Winslet, David Kross and Ralph Fiennes

Awards and Nominations
Won Oscar for Best Actress (Kate Winslet)
Won BAFTA for Best Actress (Kate Winslet)
Won Best Director (Stephen Daldry) in Evening Standard Film Awards
A further 10 wins and 25 nominations

In Germany in the late 1950s the teenage Michael Berg (David Kross) has an affair with an older woman Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) who then disappears. Years later Hanna reappears as a defendant in a war crimes trial based on her actions as a guard in a Nazi concentration camp. Michael, who is now studying law, realises that Hanna is keeping something secret which, if she chooses to reveal it, could save her from jail. During Hanna’s lengthy jail sentence Michael (now played by Ralph Fiennes) communicated with her by sending her recordings of great works of literature.

In the two decades since reunification Germany has examined its recent history in a series of internationally successful films like Downfall (2004), The Lives of Others (2006) and Goodbye Lenin (2003). The Reader is part of this same analysis of German history: it portrays Hanna’s trial for war crimes in the 1960s, but eschews any flashback to the events themselves that would allow the viewer to decide on her guilt or innocence. Thus the questions it raises are the extent to which ordinary Germans share responsibility for the Holocaust and other atrocities of the Nazi regime, and how this responsibility affects subsequent generations. As one of the survivors says to the adult Michael when he meets her in New York “What do you think these places were – universities? What are you looking for? Forgiveness for her or to feel better about yourself?”

The film is based on the 1995 novel by the German writer Bernard Schlink that became a best-seller in both Germany and the US. The screenplay is by David Hare who had previously worked with Stephen Daldry as screenwriter for The Hours (2002), but who has also shown a strong interest in this period in plays and films like Licking Hitler (1974) and Plenty (1985). Hare rejected the long internal monologues that Schlink had included in the novel and, more significantly, changed the ending so that Michael begins to tell the story of Hanna and him to his daughter, explaining this decision as follows:

“It’s about literature as a powerful means of communication, and at other times as a substitute for communication.”

It was Schlink himself who insisted that the film be shot in English rather than German as he felt that it posed questions about living in a post-genocidal society that went beyond the time and locations of wartime Germany, and he worked closely with Daldry and Hare to choose locations for the film.

The casting brings deliberate echoes of other films that have dealt with the Germany in the Second World War: Ralph Fiennes played Amon Goeth, the commandant of a labour camp in Schindler’s List (1993) while Bruno Ganz, in the role of Michael’s tutor, gave an unforgettable portrayal of Hitler in Downfall. However it was Kate Winslet who won most praise – and awards - for her performance: after a record number of nominations in 2009 she won the Oscar for Best Actress.