Midnight in Paris

These are my notes for this week's screening:

Midnight in Paris

USA 2011                    100 minutes

Director:                      Woody Allen

Starring:                        Adrien Brody, Carla Bruni, Kathy Bates, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Tom Hiddleston

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for four Oscars including Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
• Another 39 nominations, including a BAFTA nomination for Best Original Screenplay and 11 wins, including a Golden Globe for Best Original Screenplay.

“This is Woody Allen's 41st film. He writes his films himself, and directs them with wit and grace. I consider him a treasure of the cinema. Some people take him for granted, although Midnight in Paris reportedly charmed even the jaded veterans of the Cannes press screenings. There is nothing to dislike about it. Either you connect with it or not. I'm wearying of movies that are for "everybody" — which means, nobody in particular.  Midnight in Paris is for me, in particular, and that's just fine with moi.”

Roger Ebert

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a disillusioned Hollywood scriptwriter who while visiting Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and future parents-in-law finds that the city has revived his desire to become a serious novelist.  While walking through the city late one night Gil is picked up by a mysterious antique Peugeot that takes him back in time to the 1920s where he meets Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Cole Porter. In subsequent trips to the past he also travels back to the 1892, where he meets Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Degas.  Gil rejects an offer from a girl he meets to stay in the past but his trips back in time help him resolve what to do with his life in the present.   

There are many modern films with a time travel theme with the Back to the Future trilogy and Groundhog Day being the most successful.  In Allen’s own, extensive catalogue, there are certain similarities to The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) in which an actor steps out of a film and falls in love with a girl in the audience.  However Philip French also suggests that Allen has been influenced by Victor Sjoestroem’s silent film The Phantom Carriage (1921), the favourite film of his idol Ingmar Bergman, in which a ghostly coach travels round town at midnight picking up the dead. 

Since 2000 Woody Allen has worked extensively in Europe with European casts where his films have included Match Point (2005) and You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010), both of which were filmed in the UK and the award-winning Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008) which was filmed in Spain.

Here's the trailer:

Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy

Here are my notes for this week's film which we're screening on Thursday:

Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy

UK 2011                      127 minutes

Director:                      Tomas Alfredson

Starring:                        Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberpatch, Kathy Burke, Mark Strong, Tom Hardy and Toby Jones

Nominations and Awards

• Three Oscar Nominations including Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay
• 11 BAFTA nominations including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor (Benedict Cumberpatch and Tom Hardy), Best Supporting Actress (Kathy Burke) and Best Adapted Screenplay
• A further eight wins and 27 nominations

“The genius of Alfredson's film is that despite the fabulously evocative period detail (you can smell the stale cigarette smoke lingering in the yellowing wallpaper) and the pervasive cold war dread, this adaptation of John le Carré's well-loved bestseller is not about spies at all. Just as Let the Right One In presented a surreptitious study of repressed childhood anger disguised in the garb of a neo-gothic vampire tale, so Tinker Tailor buries its central theme of male distrust, duplicity and anxious misidentification within the labyrinthine twists of an international counter-intelligence yarn.”

Mark Kermode

George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is called out of his enforced retirement to identify a Soviet mole who has infiltrated the upper reaches of the secret service.

The film is based on John Le Carré’s 1974 thriller which was famously adapted for television in 1979 with Alec Guinness playing Smiley.  Le Carré had been so impressed by Guinness's performance that he based his characterisation of Smiley in subsequent novels on Guinness.  Oldman was initially diffident about taking the role because of the long shadow cast by Guinness, but he had the support of Le Carré himself, who simply advised him to return to the character described in the novel and use his imagination.  The film also includes casting in depth for many of the supporting roles, with actors of the calibre of John Hurt, Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberpatch playing relatively minor parts.

The TV version had seven episodes to unravel the labyrinthine plot so with the constraints of a feature film the screenwriters had to adopt a different approach, as scriptwriter Peter Straughan explained:

“The adaptation ... involved a kind of mosaic work.  Some long sequences would remain intact ... but in other cases we would take a line or an event from one place in the narrative and move it elsewhere, shifting the fragments around endlessly until it felt right.  The goal was to create a new version of the narrative which would bear a close family resemblance to the source material, but have its own cinematic personality.”

Following the international critical and commercial success of this film there have been stories in the press that Oldman is interested in playing Smiley again in a film of Smiley’s People, Le Carré’s sequel to Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy and once again memorably filmed for TV with Alec Guinness in the title role.

Here's the trailer:

Dickens Bi-Centenary

I decided to celebrate the Dickens bi-centenary in style: by watching the Doctor Who story in which Dickens appears.  Simon Callow plays the great man and there is the added bonus of Eve Myles playing the psychic maid.  The script is by Mark Gatiss, and in a typical stroke of genius Russell T Davies managed to link Gwen from Torchwood to Gwyneth when he brought the characters from Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures into The Stolen Earth.

For anyone missing Doctor Who, here's the trailer:

Sarah's Key

Here are my notes for this week's screening:

Sarah’s Key / Elle s’appelait Sarah

France 2010                 110 minutes

Director:                      Gilles Paquet-Brenner

Starring:                        Aidan Quinn, Dominique Frot, Frederic Pierrot, Kristin Scott Thomas, Melusine Mayance, Niels Arestrup

Nominations and Awards

• Kristin Scott Thomas nominated for Cesar (Best Actress)
• One further nomination and two wins

Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas) is an American journalist investigating the deportation in 1942 from occupied Paris of more than 13,000 non-French Jewish émigrés and refugees and their French-born children to their deaths in Auschwitz.  A series of flashbacks depict the events from the perspective of a young girl who witnessed them and illustrates the willing, even enthusiastic involvement of the French bureaucracy in helping the Nazis.

The key historical event of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup are true, but the film itself is based on a novel by the best-selling French author Tatiana de Rosnay which became an international success.  Kristin Scott Thomas, who is bi-lingual, delivers her English dialogue with an American accent and speaks fluent French for the scenes set in France.

The French government declined to acknowledge any state complicity in the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup until 1995 when President Chirac apologised for the part that French policemen and civil servants had played in the raid.

Here's a link to the trailer:

Love's Kitchen

Tomorrow evening we're hosting a special event: a screening of Love's Kitchen with an introduction from the director James Hackin followed by a Q&A session afterwards.

I'd heard that the film did not do well at the box office - understatement - but I hadn't realised how bad the reviews were.  I've checked  out the usual suspects, ie Wikipedia, The Guardian and The Observer, but have struggled to find very much.

After much thought I decided on simple and straightforward statements of fact...

Here are my notes, much shorter than usual:

Love’s Kitchen
UK 2011                      xxx minutes

Director:                      James Hacking

Starring:                        Dougray Scott, Claire Forlani and Simon Callow

 Rob Haley (Dougray Scott) plays a headstrong, award-winning chef who goes into decline after his wife dies.  He decides to buy an ailing country pub in a rural paradise and, inspired by a meeting with Gordon Ramsay, manages to turn it into a successful gastro-emporium.  Then he begins to date Kate Templeton (Claire Forlani) daughter of a local squire who happens to be a successful restaurant critic.

 In addition to Scott and Forlani (who are married in real life) the film also includes well-known actors of the calibre of Simon Callow (playing a food critic clearly modelled on Keith Floyd), Peter Bowles (unsurprisingly playing the village squire) and Michelle Ryan as a kitchen assistant.

The film was shot in Letchmore Heath in Hertfordshire which, as Peter Bradshaw noted in his review in The Guardian, was also the location of the 1960 sci-fi classic Village of the Damned.

Here's a link to the trailer:

Water for Elephants - My Notes

After last week's struggle I managed to finish my notes.  I had not been looking forward to the film, but in the event it was better than several of the reviews had suggested.  There was a weakness in the central love triangle but whether this was due to casting or the script I'm just not sure.

Here are my notes:

Water for Elephants

USA 2011                    121 minutes

Director:                      Francis Lawrence

Starring:                        Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson and Christoph Waltz

 Nominations and Awards

• Robert Pattinson won Best Actor at the 2011 Teen Choice Awards
• A further six nominations

“There’s something endearingly old-fashioned about a love story involving a beautiful bareback rider and a kid who runs off to join the circus.  What makes Water for Elephants more intriguing is a third character, reminding us why Christoph Waltz deserved his supporting actor Oscar for Inglourious Basterds.  He plays the circus owner who is married to the bareback rider and keeps everyone else in his iron grip.”

Roger Ebert

As an old man Jason (Hal Holbrook) meets the proprietor of a small travelling circus that he has visited and reveals that he once worked in a circus and was present during one of the most famous circus disasters of all time.   The proprietor asks him to share his story, and he tells how as a young man (now played by Robert Pattinson) after the death of his parents in a car crash he drops out of veterinary school and joins a circus where he uses his skills to look after the health of the circus animals and becomes involved in a tragic love triangle with Marlena (Reese Witherspoon) and her husband (Christoph Waltz) the owner of the circus

The film is based on the best-selling novel by Sara Gruen with a screenplay by Richard LaGravenese who has written screenplays for more than 15 films, including The Bridges of Madison County (1995), The Horse Whisperer (1990) and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010).   However it is the involvement of Robert Pattinson in the film that attracted most publicity.  Following the global success of the Twilight series of films his involvement in Water for Elephants was an attempt to broaden his range beyond that of the brooding vampire.  He received good reviews for his performance of this film and stood his ground against the other two principal actors both of whom have won Oscars for their performances in earlier films.  Following the completion of the Twilight series he has played the lead role in Bel Ami (the first feature film from acclaimed stage directors Declan Donellan and Nick Ormerod) and is currently filming Cosmopolis directed by David Cronenberg.

Here's a link to the trailer:

Water for Elephants

We're screening this film on Thusday, but nothing I've read on it so far has made me look forward to seeing it, and I'm really struggling to produce any notes.

We've just agreed that our next two films after this week will be Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy and Midnight in Paris, and I can't wait: both of these were on my "want to see" list for 2011.