Hitchcock

Here are my notes for this week's screening:

Hitchcock

USA 2012                    98 minutes

Director:                      Sacha Gervasi

Starring:                        Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, James D'Arcy, Jessica Biel, Michael Stuhlbarg, Scarlett Johansson, Toni Collette

Awards and Nominations

• BAFTA,  Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Best Actress Nominations for Helen Mirren
• 12 other nominations

 “Many people, including his studio, Paramount, had warned against this project [Psycho]: the material threatened to be nasty and gruesome, without Hitchcock’s urbane and attractive people – you couldn’t cast Cary Grant as Norman Bates (and I doubt Hitch could have brought himself to murder Grace Kelly).  The shower killing and the looming mother seemed like exploitation, or Grand Guignol, as well as trouble with the censor.  With his agent, Lew Wasserman, Hitchcock persevered.  So long as he worked cheaply, using the crew from his television show, and staying in black and white, Psycho could be set up in a deal to make more money for Hitch than he had ever known before.”

David Thomson: The Big Screen

After the great popular success of North By Northwest (1959) many critics claimed that Hitchock (Antony Hopkins) was losing his edge and growing old.  Determined to prove them wrong he decides to make Psycho and his wife Alma (Helen Mirren) acts as his chief adviser, censor and muse.

The film, with a script by John McLaughlin, is based on Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, a fascinating factual study of the film’s creation, with both Hopkins and Mirren having great fun with their roles.  However for legal reasons the film shows no footage from the completed film and the director was even forbidden to shoot any footage at the location of the Bates Motel, which still exists on a Hollywood back lot.

Psycho was an immediate international success, and despite the critical acclaim for Hitchcock’s other films (with Vertigo (1958) being voted first place in Sight & Sound’s 2012 poll of the greatest films of all times,  when it displaced Citizen Kane from the position it had occupied since 1962) it is arguably his best known film.  To date it has generated three sequels plus the pilot for a failed TV series in the 1980s.  More recently in 1998 Gus Van Sant made a version of Psycho in colour that was an almost shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock’s original, and in 2012 a series called Bates Motel, set in contemporary Oregon and thus re-booting Hitchcock’s original story, was successfully screened in the US.

 

Here's one of the trailers:

 

 

 

 

And another one:

 

 

Gothic

With Halloween approaching The Observer has published a Top Ten List of Gothic films:

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2013/oct/25/10-best-gothic-films-mark-kermode

We're getting into the spirit of it later this week by screening Hichcock.  To get into the mood, here's the trailer for Psycho:

Les Miserables

We screened this last week and I haven't been able to get the songs out of my head since then!!!

Here are my notes:

Les Misérables

UK 2012                      158 minutes

Director:                      Tom Hooper

Starring:                       Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen

Awards and Nominations

• Won three Oscars, including Best Supporting Actress (Anne Hathaway) and a further five nominations including Best Film and Best Actor (Hugh Jackman)
• Won three Golden Globes (Best Film (Musical or Comedy), Best Actor (Hugh Jackman) and Best Supporting Actress (Anne Hathaway))
• Won four BAFTAs, including Best Actor (Hugh Jackman) and Best Supporting Actress (Anne Hathaway), plus five further nominations

“Like a diabolically potent combination of Lionel Bart and Leni Riefenstahl, the movie version of Les Misérables has arrived, based on the hit stage show adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel set among the deserving poor in 19th-century France, which climaxes with the anti-monarchist Paris uprising of 1832.  Even as a non-believer in this kind of "sung-through" musical, I was battered into submission by this mesmeric and sometimes compelling film, featuring a performance of dignity and intelligence from Hugh Jackman, and an unexpectedly vulnerable singing turn from that great, big, grumpy old bear, Russell Crowe.”

Peter Bradshaw

 The global success of the stage production of Les Misérables, which has been running in London since October 1985, quickly led to plans for a filmed version, with reports in 1988 that Alan Parker would direct the film, although by 1992 the production had been abandoned.  In was only after the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the show in 2005 that Cameron Mackintosh finally resurrected the idea of a film, and in 2011 it was announced that Tom Hooper, fresh from the global success of The King’s Speech, would direct from a script by William Nicholson. 

Tom Hooper brought production designer Eve Stewart and cinematographer Danny Cohen with him from The King’s Speech and also appointed Chris Dickens, who had won an Oscar and a BAFTA for his work on Slumdog Millionaire, as film editor.  The resulting look of the film, which combined both stylised and realistic views of Paris, drew its inspiration from nineteenth century French painters such as David, Delacroix and Gustav Doré, and secured BAFTA and Oscar nominations for both Costume and Production Design.

Hooper’s major innovation in filming the musical numbers was to have all the singing recorded live on set, with the performers listening to a pianist via earpieces and with the orchestration added later.  Most of the leading performers are able to sing well, with Hugh Jackman in particular having played leading roles in musical theatre.  Minor roles are played by performers who had played in various stage productions and include Colm Wilkinson (who created the role of Jean Valjean) and Samantha Barks who had performed the role of Eponine both in the West End and the Twentieth Anniversary Concert.  With almost all the dialogue set to music Hooper’s action allowed the entire cast to bring dramatic vitality to their performances.

In 2005 a BBC Radio 2 listener poll of Number One Essential Musicals placed Les Misérables at number one: in fact it took more than 40% of the vote.

 Here's te trailer:

Top Ten Romantic Movies

The Guardian has publishe a list of the top ten romantic movies:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/oct/07/top-10-romantic-movies

Casablanca, A Room with a View and  and Brief Encounter definitely get my vote. 

I'm not so sure about Hannah and her Sisters, but I suppose that not all Woody Allen's best films are romantic...

A Modest Proposal

If any film producers wish to use quotes from this blog to promote their films then I'm happy to agree subject to payment of a nominal fee.

In an extract from his new book on the role of the film critic Marc Kermode has picked up on the novel use of non-professional critics to puff a film:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/29/hatchet-jobs-anonymity-internet-kermode?guni=Keyword:news-grid

In the world of books I think the providers of such puffs are known as "quote whores".  The world of arts journalism is a rough and dangerous place.

Twelve Best Soundtracks

The Guardian has followed up the recent BBC series on soundtracks by nominating 12 of the best soundtracks:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/filmblog/2013/sep/18/twelve-best-film-soundtracks

It's good to see Howard Shore's soundtrack for The Lord of the Rings trilogy on the list, as it is music that I return to on a regular basis. 

However I was disppopinted not see see some of my other favourites on the list, particularly Michael Nyman for his early work with Peter Greenaway and Philip Glass for films such as The Hours and Notes on a Scandal.

Here are a few reminders:

 

Lincoln

This week we are screening a real historical epic: Lincoln.

Here are my notes:

Lincoln

USA 2012                    150 minutes

Director:                      Steven Spielberg

Starring:                        Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, Joseph Gordon-Levett and James Spader

Awards and Nominations

• Won two Oscars (including Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis) plus 10 nominations (including Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress (Sally Field), Best Supporting Actor (Tommy Lee Jones) and Best Music (John Williams)
• Won one BAFTA (Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis) plus nine nominations (including Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay)
• A further 57 wins and 95 nominations

 “Steven Spielberg has made more obviously entertaining and more emotionally seductive movies than Lincoln, but this is for him the most brave and, for the audience, most demanding picture in the 40 years since his emergence as a major director.  It's a film about statesmanship, politics, the creation of the world's greatest democracy, and it's concerned with what we can learn from the study and contemplation of history.  Spielberg and his eloquent screenwriter, the playwright Tony Kushner, handle these themes with flair, imagination and vitality, and Daniel Day-Lewis embodies them with an indelible intelligence as the 16th president of the United States.”

Philip French

 In January 1865 Abraham Lincoln is fighting to get the Thirteenth Amendment, which will abolish slavery once and for all, through Congress.  It is the final months of the Civil War and the passage of the Amendment will free all slaves, not just those freed under his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

The film is based on Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Spielberg had been considering a film about Lincoln since 1999 when Goodwin first told him what she was about to write.  Spielberg commissioned an initial script from John Logan with Liam Neeson (who had worked with Spielberg on Schindler’s List) to be cast in the title role.  However the project was delayed and when work began again in 2010 it was announced that Daniel Day Lewis had replaced Neeson and that Tony Kushner had taken over as screenwriter.

Tony Kushner considered Lincoln "the greatest democratic leader in the world" and found the writing assignment daunting because "I have no idea [what made him great]; I don't understand what he did any more than I understand how William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet or Mozart wrote Così fan tutte”.  Kushner struggled with his material and after producing an initial 500 page draft which covered four months of Lincoln’s life he finally decided to concentrate on just the two months during which Lincoln was focussed on the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

In a typically perceptive essay on History and Cinema Simon Schama speculates about films with historical subjects:

“If movie history is to get produced as box office with a conscience, it must serve one of two purposes: explain the Origins of Us or act as Augury of What Is to Come.  But this kind of history, whether designed as the genealogy of identity politics or a prudential political-investment service, seldom escapes the contemporary world that it claims to transcend.”

The chronology of the release of Lincoln clarifies its purpose.  It received its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on 8^th October 2012: a story of a lawyer who had adopted Illinois as his home state and who was elected president despite his lack of experience at a national level.  On 6^th November 2012 Americans re-elected Barack Obama as President:  another lawyer who had chosen Illinois as his home state, who had been criticised when he first campaigned for his lack of experience at a national level, and who had consciously launched his first presidential campaign at the Old Illinois State Capitol in Springfield where Lincoln had made one of his famous speeches.  

Here is the trailer: