Avatar

We had our last screening after our AGM earlier this month.  Here are my notes:

Avatar


USA 2009 161 minutes

Director: James Cameron

Starring: Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang and Zoe Saldana

Nominations and Awards

• Won three Oscars (Art Direction, Special Effects and Cinematography)

• A further 41 wins an 63 nominations

“Avatar is not simply a sensational entertainment, although it is that. It’s a technological breakthrough. It has a flat-out Green and anti-war message. It is predestined to launch a cult. It contains such visual detailing that it would reward repeat viewings... It is an Event, one of those films you must see to keep up with the conversation.”

Roger Ebert

When his brother is killed, paraplegic Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) decides to take his place in a mission on the distant world of Pandora where he learns of to drive off the native humanoid Na'vi in order to mine for the precious material scattered throughout their rich woodland. Sully infiltrates the Na'vi people with the use of an "avatar" identity where he bond with the native tribe and falls in love with the beautiful alien Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). When Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) launches his plan to exterminate the Na'vi Sully has to take a stand and fight back in an epic battle for the fate of Pandora.

James Cameron began development of Avatar in 1994 and has planned to start filming after the completion of Titanic in 1997 but the necessary technology was not available for him to achieve his vision. He finally started developing is screenplay in 2006 and the film was released in December 2009. The official budget was $237 million, but other estimated have placed this as high as $310 million, with a further $150 million for promotion.

Avatar is the most expensive film made to date: Cameron deliberately cast relatively unknown actors in leading roles to reduce costs but needed a massive budget for special effects as he had developed new camera systems both to film in 3D and to allow motion-capture film making. The lead company for visual effects was Weta Digital in New Zealand who had been responsible for the special effects in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, but in order to complete the film on schedule Cameron also had to involve a number of other special effects companies, including George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic. Both Jackson and Lucas visited the set of Avatar to watch Cameron at work with his new technology.

The story includes a familiar mix of myths and archetypes and in essence transposes the themes of the traditional Western, especially those like A Man Called Horse and Dances with Wolves where the white hero takes the side of the locals against the supposedly civilised invaders, into outer space. In Aliens Cameron’s heroes were Marines fighting a war against vicious extra-terrestrials, but in Avatar, with deliberate echoes of both Iraq and Afghanistan, the Marines are the enemy and the aliens are the good guys.

Following the worldwide success of Avatar Cameron has signed with 20th Century Fox to produce two sequels.

Some Thoughts on Doctor Who and Gardeners' World

I have been  a lifelong fan of Doctor Who - I am old enough to have vague memories of the first episode - although it is only more recently that I have watched Gardeners' World with any degree of regularity as it is my wife who is the gardener in our relationship.

Fortunately we are both Doctor Who fans, although in her case I think it was more David Tennant as an actor rather than the character.  Hence there was some concern on her part when Tennant departed and Matt Smith took over the TARDIS.  This more or less coincided with the unexpected handover of the Gardeners' World baton from Monty Don to Toby Buckland where a quick and strictly non-scinetific poll, ie chats with a view close freinds over dinner, revealed an immediate loss of direction of the programme and lack of interest in the charisma free presenter.  Thus it was not entirely unexpected when Gardeners' World returned with Monty Don once more in charge. 

Could the same thing happen with Doctor Who?  I hope not: RTD is an impossible act to follow, and the way I look at it is that if we had not had the four series plus specials with RTD in charge then we would welcome the new incarnation with open arms.  It's not wrong: it's just gone off in another direction, just like Doctor Who has done throughout its history.

I love the steam-punk look of the series and from all the clips I've seeen so far the next story, from a script by Neil Gaiman, should be asbolutely magificent.

Any if you want advice on celery, then talk to the fifth Doctor

The Prophecies of Merlin

I've always enjoyed stories based on the legend of King Arthur (John Boorman’s film Excalibur was particularly good) and I've recently been watching the complete series of Merlin, the BBC’s brilliant re-imagining of the early years of Arthur, on DVD.


It’s a clever scenario, and it owes much to the success of other fantasy epics like the Harry Potter series and The Lord of the Rings, but it’s only in the past week that its contemporary relevance has occurred to me. One of the central stories across the episodes in the growing relationship of Arthur and Guinevere (or Gwen as she’s call here) in the face of their different positions in society: he’s a prince and she’s a commoner (in this case a serving maid to the Lady Morgana). Sound familiar?

It's easy to update the character of Merlin as a contemporary spin doctor/PR man, carefully guarding the Prince’s image, but does Buckingham Palace have cellars deep enough to conceal a dragon?

Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis

Here are my notes for our final screening of the current season:

Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis


France 2008 105 minutes

Director: Dany Boon

Starring: Dany Boon, Karl Merad and Zoe Felix

Nominations and Awards

• Nomination for Cesar for Best Original Screenplay

• Nomination for Best Film (European Film Awards)


Philippe Abrams (Karl Merad), a postal worker in southern France is banished to a town near Dunkirk for two years after falsely claiming to be disabled in order to secure a Mediterranean posting. To his surprise Philippe finds the town charming, but his wife refuses to join him. He decides to tell her what she wants to believe, that life in Northern France is wretched, but then she decides to join him in order to relieve his gloom...


The film broke nearly every box office record in France. By February 2010 more than 20.5 million had seen the film, thereby breaking a record that had stood since 1966. The film was also successful internationally and has spawned plans for a number of international remakes. In Italy Bienvenuti al Sud was released in 2010, with a plot concerning the relocation of a postal service manager from near Milan in northern Italy being relocated to Castellabate a small town near Naples in the south and with Dany Boon appearing in a cameo role.

There has also been discussion about an inevitable US remake, provisionally titled Welcome to the Sticks. There has been no firm announcement about casting or the plot, although there have been hints that the story may revolve around a multinational company.

The Sound of Music

We're screening the singalong version...

Here are my notes:

The Sound of Music


USA 1965 174 minutes

Director: Robert Wise

Starring: Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Eleanor Parker, Richard Haydn and Peggy Wood

Nominations and Awards

• Won five Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture

• A further 10 wins and 10 nominations


“The movie was the second collaboration of producer-director Robert Wise and screenwriter Ernest Lehman – they had killed West Side Story a few years earlier, which was a more serious crime than making The Sound of Music because the latter had always been brain-dead.”

David Thomson

Maria (Julie Andrews), a young novice leaves an Austrian convent to become a governess to the children of Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer), a Naval officer widower.

The film is based on the 1959 stage musical Rodgers and Hammerstein, which itself derived from two West German films: The Trapp Family and The Trapp Family in America. Originally the plan had been for a stage play about the Trapp family which included songs from their repertoire, but this quickly evolved into a full blown musical with all new songs which ran for more than three years on Broadway and which has enjoyed regular revivals since then. The film excluded several songs from the original stage show and included several new songs which have been retained in subsequent stage revivals.

The story of the musical makes significant changes to the real story: Maria Von Trapp was a tutor to just one of the children rather than a governess to the whole family; they lived in Austria for several years after their marriage and had two further children before going into exile; and when the family did go into exile it was by train to Italy, as Captain Von Trapp had Italian citizenship through being born in territory held by Italy after the First World War (and from a geographical perspective Switzerland does not share a mountainous border with Salzburg).

Robert Wise started his career an editor on Citizen Kane (1941) and then worked as assistant director on Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) before directing The Curse of the Cat People (1944) for Val Lewton. He directed several more horror films before he turned to noir with the thriller Born To Kill (1947) and his subsequent films encompassed science fiction (The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)), board room drama (Executive Suite (1954)) and historical epic (Helen of Troy (1956)) before he won his first Oscar for Best Director with West Side Story (1961). He preceded The Sound of Music with the terrifying horror film The Haunting (1963) and followed it with The Sand Pebbles (1966), which secured him an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. He carried on working up to the late 1970s where he directed the first Star Trek film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). He died in 2005.

Despite his ability to work in and master so many genres Martin Scorsese has argued that his choice of subject matter and approach still functioned to identify him as an artist and not merely an artisan who allowed a story that a studio assigned to dictate his style.

Me and Orson Welles

These are the notes for our screening this Sunday:

Me and Orson Welles


UK 2008 114 minutes

Director: Richard Linklater

Starring: Ben Chaplin, Christian McKay, Clair Danes, Eddie Marsan, Kelly Reilly, Zac Efron, Zoe Kazan

Nominations and Awards

• BAFTA Nomination for Best Supporting Actor (Christian McKay)

• A further three wins and nine nominations

“Me and Orson Welles is not only entertaining but an invaluable companion to the life and career of the Great Man.”

Roger Ebert

In 1937 Richard Samuels (Zac Efron) on a visit to New York meets Orson Welles (Christian McKay) who hires him to play the part of Lucius in a modern dress version of Julius Caesar that he is directing at the Mercury Theatre.

The film is based on real events, although its story comes from a novel by Robert Kaplow, who had seen a photograph of Orson Welles and a young man and wondered what the young man was thinking. The majority of the characters portrayed in the film are real people and it goes to great lengths to recreate the first night of what was for its time a radical version of Shakespeare’s play: the actors wear dark green uniforms and Sam Browne belts and salute with raised arms - all deliberately chosen to echo contemporary events in Mussolini’s Italy.

The film received many positive reviews with many critics selecting Christian McKay for his performance as Welles for particular mention. McKay had not previously appeared in a leading role on screen but had played Welles in a one-man show on stage in both the UK and USA. In his review Philip French commented:

“...at the end the show belongs to Christian McKay, the fourth and best actor to play Welles on screen. When we first see him the resemblance is merely passing, but after five minutes we think we're in the presence of the arrogant, irresistible young Orson himself, such is the accuracy of the body language, the facial expressions and above all that resonant voice, purring and booming. When after the first night curtain he asks, "How the hell do I top this?", the complexity of his future life flashes before us.”

Despite its New York setting Richard Linklater shot most of the film in the UK, both at Pinewood Studios and a number of locations including the Isle of Man where the Gaiety Theatre in Douglas was used for the inside of the Mercury Theatre.

Richard Linklater made his name with a series of independent films like Slacker, Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise that have non-formulaic narratives and seemingly random occurrences, which some critics have hailed as alternatives to contemporary blockbusters. His films also concentrate on philosophical talk rather than physical action, thus linking him with traditional European art house cinema. His next film will be Bernie, a black comedy based on the true story of the murder of a rich Texan widow in the 1990s.

Tamara Drewe

For once I'm actually ahead of myself.  We'll be screening Tamara Drewe on Thursday and I finished my notes last week.

Tamara Drewe


UK 2010 114 minutes

Director: Stephen Frears

Starring: Gemma Arterton, Dominic Cooper, Luke Evans, Roger Allam and Tamsin Greig

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for two awards

“Like the filthiest possible feature-length episode of The Archers, and with a tiny conceptual dash of Straw Dogs, Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel series Tamara Drewe has been converted into a fantastically mad and undeniably entertaining bucolic romp...”

Peter Bradshaw

Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton), a successful newspaper columnist, returns to the picturesque Dorset village of Ewedown where she grew up with plans to write a chick-lit bestseller. Her ex-boyfriend Andy (Luke Evans) has not moved away and realises that he is still in love with her, but Tamara begins a passionate relationship with Ben Sergeant (Dominic Cooper), a narcissistic rock star. The village also includes a writers’ retreat run by crime writer and serial adulterer Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam) who also takes a fancy to Tamara. Two young village girls, bored with their empty lives, sneak into Tamara’s house and use her computer to send an identical Valentine message to all three men.

The film is based on a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds which appeared first as a weekly strip in The Guardian before being published as a book. If the story sounds familiar it is because Simmonds has reworked Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd in a contemporary rural setting and has used the plot both to satirise the pretensions of literary life, a recurrent theme in her work, as well as to expose the crisis in the modern countryside, where people commit deplorable acts out of resentment and sheer boredom.

Stephen Frears (and screenplay writer Moira Buffini) have turned the story into another “State of the Nation” film that have featured regularly in Frears’ long career. Frears has made twenty feature films as diverse as My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity and The Queen, but as Philip French has noted he has shown an interest in certain recurrent themes and situations, including the taking of moral decisions in precarious situations, the secret manipulation of other people’s lives and the often unintended consequences of everyday actions.

Gemma Arterton’s first film appearance was as the Head Girl in St Trinians and her first role of significance was the Bond girl Strawberry Fields in A Quantum of Solace. She subsequently played Tess in a TV adaptation of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Immediately before Tamara Drewe she appeared in the blockbusters Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia, and she recently received rave reviews for her performance on stage in Ibsen’s The Master Builder at the Almeida.

Here's the trailer: