Best Films of 2013

It's the time of year when the critics have to sum up a year of film watching by producing their lists of Best Films.  Peter Bradshaw has come up with a suitable eclectic list: 

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/dec/06/peter-bradshaws-favourite-films-2013-braddies?CMP=ema_1046

I'm pleased to see that we have already screened some of his selections (Lincoln and A Late Quartet) and plan to screen others later on in the season (Blue Jasmine, Captain Phillips and Before Midnight).

I've decided to present an award for the best demolition job by a critic, and the following review of A Christmas Candle by Peter Bradshaw is a sure fire winner:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/dec/12/christmas-candle-review

Cinema Paridiso: Silver Anniversary

This is a fascinating article about the various versions of Cinema Paradiso:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/dec/09/cinema-paradiso-25th-anniversary

For many years it was just one of those films on my ever-growing "must see" list - until two years ago when we screened it at out film society.  Many of our regulars had seen it several times and a number of strangers travelled from far and wide to see it. When it was over I could understand why they were so keen to see it, and it's now on my "must see again" list.

I particularly liked the following quote from Stephen Woolley who originally distributed the film in the UK:

"Cinema Paradiso is a movie about memory, and for our generation cinema was a place to congregate, a magical place to let your imagination run free. The character of the cinemas of my childhood and youth were all different and special. Now it's all boxes, little long rooms, every cinema is the same, they smell the same, they have the same character, the sameness is the central quality. It's like air travel, it used to be an occasion, now it's a fast-food experience."
 

As a taster, here's the trailer:

Christmas Books: a Letter to Santa

This was on my Christmas list for last year:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/12/big-screen-movies-david-thomson-review

Clearly I had been good, as my copy duly arrived and it was jut as good as John Banville's review had suggested.

This year I've dropped some none-too-subtle hints for David Thomson's most recent book, this time reviewed by the brilliant Philip French:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/18/moments-movies-david-thomson-review

I will keep all my fingers crossed for the next few weeks...

A Late Quartet

This is a late post too - as we screened the film last night.

I'd wanted to see this as soon as I read the reviews and I was not disappointed: it was definitely one of the highlights of the season.  It also made me order a recording of Beethoven's String Quartets, and I'm currently working my way through these.

Here are my notes:

A Late Quartet

USA 2012                    105 minutes

Director:                      Yaron Zilberman

Starring:                        Catherine Keener, Christopher Walken, Mark Ivanir and Philip Seymour Hoffman

“A subtle, intelligent picture with a suitably resonant title, it quietly observes the internal dynamics of the Fugue String Quartet, an internationally acclaimed musical group founded and based in New York that has been playing around the world for 25 years. We encounter them as an entity, working together thoughtfully, a trifle self-regarding perhaps, and then we get to know them as individuals...  A Late Quartet is visually and musically rich. But above all there are the performances, individually and as an ensemble, and they're pitch perfect.”

Philip French

When cellist Peter Mitchell (Christopher Walken) discovers that he is in the early stage of Parkinson’s disease he breaks the news to the other members of the Fugue String Quartet.  This devastating announcement throws the quartet into confusion and they begin to consider their own careers as musicians in the face of an uncertain future.

The film, a first feature by documentary maker Yaron Zilberman, includes a great deal of chamber music, including Beethoven’s Opus 131, the String Quartet No 14 in C sharp minor, one of his Late String Quartets.  These were the composer’s last major completed compositions and are widely considered to be among the greatest musical pieces of all time.  In the film Peter gives a lecture on this string quartet to his students: he points out that the quartet has seven movements instead of the usual five and that Beethoven specified that it should be played attacca, i.e. with no pause between the movements.  He links the passing of time in both music and life by quoting the first ten lines of another quartet: Burnt Norton, the first part of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Opus 131 then becomes a key element in the dramatic structure of the film as the characters react to the news of Peter’s illness and rehearse for a concert that will include this piece.

The characters and the New York setting suggest that the territory of the film is close to that mapped so many times and so brilliantly by Woody Allen, but in its focus on classical music and mortality A Late Quartet is far closer to Michael Haneke’s award-winning Amour (2012) or Quartet (2012), Dustin Hoffman’s debut as a director set in a retirement home for musicians.

Here's the trailer:

Beautiful Lies

I've struggled a little to find out too much about this week's screening.  It's a French film, and to celebrate this we're serving cheese and wine, so hopefully no one will really notice.

Here are my - abbrevaited - notes:

Beautiful Lies / De vrais mensonges

France 2010                 105 minutes

Director:                      Pierre Salvadori

Starring:                        Audrey Tautou, Nathalie Baye and Sami Bouajila

 
When Emile (Audrey Tautou) receives an anonymous love letter from Jean (Sami Bouajila), she thinks it comes from an elderly admirer and so sends it on to her mother Maddy (Nathalie Baye).  Eventually Maddy learns that Jean is her secret admirer, and Emile has to play up to this to keep her mother happy.  But finally Emile has to tell them both the truth.

Pierre Salvadori made his name in France as a writer and director of romantic comedies, and had previously worked with Audrey Tautou in his 2006 film Priceless (Hors de prix), which he claimed had been inspired by Blake Edwards’ film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961).  In his review of Beautiful Lies in The Guardian Xan Brooks noted the plot’s echoes of Jane Austen’s Emma.

After initially working as a model Audrey Tautou became an actress, and after receiving critical acclaim for her first roles she gained international recognition for her lead role in Amelie (2001).  She has subsequently worked internationally in films as diverse as the British thriller Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and the Hollywood blockbuster The Da Vinci Code (2006) as well as appearing in major French films that included A Very Long Engagement (2004) and playing Coco Chanel in Coco avant Chanel (2009).

Here's the trailer:

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: