Before I Go To Sleep

I'd not read the book that this film was based on, and it would have been interesting to see how the novelist managed to conceal some of the more incongruous elements of the story.  As it was, the film was very entertaining g, with a real shock coming from the two male leads who were very definitely cast against type.

Here are my notes:

Before I Go to Sleep

USA 2014                    92 minutes

Director:                      Rowan Joffe

Starring:                        Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth, Mark Strong and Anne-Marie Duff

“...an enjoyable shaggy dog story with a twist that will leave you with the strange feeling that you've seen all this before, even if you can't quite remember where.”

 

Mark Kermode

Christine (Nicole Kidman) is a middle-aged woman who wakes each day with no memory of her life from her mid-20s onward, so every morning Ben (Colin Firth) has to tell her that he is her husband, she was in an accident, and as a result of this she is suffering from amnesia.  But one day while Ben is at work a call from Dr Nasch (Mark Strong) informs Christine about a camera on which she has been keeping a secret video diary.

The film is based on the recent bestselling novel by S J Watson, but the subject of amnesia has long been popular with film makers:  Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) is a classic Hollywood film while more recently in Memento (2000) Christopher Nolan tells the story of his amnesiac hero by interspersing black-and-white sequences that tell a chronological story with colour sequences in reverse chronological order (the DVD allows viewers to restructure the film so that they can see it with a conventional chronology). 

In his perceptive review of Before I Go to Sleep Mark Kermode also notes key similarities with the plot of Wolfgang Petersen’s Shattered, another film about an amnesiac:

“I don't know whether Joffe is familiar with Petersen's 1991 oddity but his film certainly seems to remember it well.”

Rowan Joffe is the son of director , best known for The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986), and the actress Jane Lapotaire.  After winning awards for his screen writing he directed his first film The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall for TV which won a BAFTA in 2009.  He followed this with his own adaptation of Brighton Rock (2011).  His other screenplay credits include 28 Weeks Later (2007) and the George Clooney vehicle The American (2010).

 Here's the trailer:

 

 

 

20 Feet from Stardom

I'm not sure what happened to January: I went back to work, we screened two films and now it's February.

20 Feet from Stardom was a great revelation and a brilliant film.  The subject of backing singers is rich for exploration, and it would have been possible to have constructed any number of dramas from the characters who appeared in it.

It was a worthy winner of the Oscar for Best Documentary.

Here are my notes:

20 Feet from Stardom

USA 2013                    90 minutes

Director:                      Morgan Neville

Awards and Nominations:

• Won 2014 Oscar for Best Documentary
• A further 17 wins and 18 nominations

“Such a great idea for a documentary, and such a surprise to realise that it has never been done before.  Morgan Neville's Oscar-winning film is about the backing singers who have lent their musical talents to many a star name's pop record.  Sometimes they have been acknowledged and appreciated, and sometimes not.  Sometimes they have been content with a supporting role, and sometimes not.  But once you accept the backing-singer role, it is very difficult to break out.”

Peter Bradshaw

Morgan Neville’s film received its premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival where it was acquired for nationwide release by Radius – The Weinstein Company and was also screened at many film festivals.  The film received nearly universal positive reviews with Rotten Tomatoes giving it an approval rating of 99%.

Morgan Neville began his career as a journalist before turning to film production in 1993.  He made a series of documentaries about various musicians and was nominated for three Grammys and followed these by the award-winning The Cool School about the birth of modern art in Los Angeles. 

Here is the trailer:

 

Best Films of 2014

This is the flipside of my previous post: the top five films of 2014:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culture-review-of-the-year/11287706/The-five-best-films-of-2014.html

Of these I've only seen 12 Years a Slave, but the rest are now on my "must see" list - more DVDs will be on their way soon.

The Five Worst Films of 2014

With the papers being full of "best of" lists, this makes a welcome change: the five worst films of the year:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culture-review-of-the-year/11287705/The-five-worst-films-of-2014.html

I'm pleased to record that I haven't seen any of them. 

It's at moments like this that I'm glad that I'm not a full time critic...

The Love Punch

After the sublime Casablanca we screened The Love Punch as our last show before Christmas.

It caught the zeitgeist with the corporate raid and the loss of pensions as the raison d'etre for the plot, the cast were excellent and despite it being obvious from the first scene how it was going to end on the whole I enjoyed it.

Here are my notes:

The Love Punch

UK 2013                      94 minutes

Director:                      Joel Hopkins

Starring:                        Pierce Brosnan, Emma Thompson, Timothy Spall, Celia Imrie

“It really is completely absurd, and yet writer-director Hopkins carries it along at a canter... The accomplished cast do their considerable best. Likable fun.”

Peter Bradshaw

Despite their divorce Richard (Pierce Brosnan) and Kate (Emma Thompson) have an amicable relationship.  Richard is about to retire and when he learns that his pension fund has been frozen as his investment company is under investigation for fraud he and Kate decide to recover the money some other way.  With the help of a friendly couple (Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie) they travel to the south of France and plan to steal the diamond that Richard’s employer had given to his girlfriend.

 

Joel Hopkins was born in London but moved to the US to study at University.  He made his name with Jump Tomorrow (2001) which received good reviews on its limited release and was nominated for two British Independent Film Awards: the Douglas Hickox award for debut filmmakers and the Award for Best Screenplay.  He also won the BAFTA Carl Foreman Award for Most Promising Newcomer.

He met Emma Thompson while he was being considered to direct Nanny McPhee (2005) for which she had written the screenplay as well as starring as the title character.  After seeing her in a play with Dustin Hoffman he was inspired to write a film that reflected their interpersonal chemistry: the resulting film Last Chance Harvey (2008) was well received by critics.

Here's the trailer:



Casablanca...

We are about to celebrate our 150th screening.  No one is quite sure when it actually is as we have not kept records of a few ad hoc events, so by unanimous decision it will be this week.

In honour of this magnificent occasion there is only one choice: Casablanca...

So we have booked a jazz bad, will provide a three course Moroccan buffet and our house is full of cases of prosecco which I will deliver to the Village Hall on Saturday.

And we will of course be screening a film.  I had great fun scouring the internet for articles, and found a great quote by Roger Ebert.  I also found the Umberto Eco quote in an article, but I have the book of essays from which it comes on my shelf.

Here are my notes:

Casablanca

USA 1942                    102 minutes

Director:                      Michael Curtiz

Starring:                        Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Dooley Wilson

Awards and Nominations

• Won three Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay)
• Nominated for five more Oscars including Best Actor (Bogart lost out to Paul Lukas for Watch on the Rhine) and Best Supporting Actor (Claude Rains lost out to Charles Coburn for The More The Merrier)
• Ingrid Bergman was nominated as Best Actress for her role in For Whom the Bell Tolls

"Casablanca is The Movie. There are greater movies.  More profound movies.  Movies of greater artistic vision or artistic originality or political significance.  There are other titles we would put above it on our lists of the best films of all time.  But when it comes right down to the movies we treasure the most, when we are - let us imagine - confiding the secrets of our heart to someone we think we may be able to trust, the conversation sooner or later comes around to the same seven words:

"I really love Casablanca."

"I do too." "

Roger Ebert

The starting point for Casablanca was a script for an unperformed play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s: the inspiration for the play had been a visit that the writers made to a night club in the south of France where a black pianist played to entertain the French, Nazis and refugees although they set the play in Casablanca.  The official credits for the screenplay are for the Epstein brothers and Howard Koch, with uncredited contributions and rewrites from Casey Robinson as well as input from Michael Curtiz: the final result was a script where no one could remember who had written what.  Umberto Eco has highlighted this complex genealogy as one of the great strengths of the film:

“Thus Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology.  Made haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually against the will of its authors and actors, then at least beyond their control.  And this is the reason it works, in spite of aesthetic theories and theories of film making.  For in it there unfolds with almost telluric force the power of Narrative in its natural state, without Art intervening to discipline it.

...When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths.  Two clichés make us laugh.  A hundred clichés move us.  For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.”

 By 1955 Casablanca had earned $6.8 million, making it the third most successful of Warners wartime films, by 1977 it had become the most frequently broadcast film on US television, and in 1989 it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". 

Many later films have used elements of Casablanca: Bogart, Rains, Greenstreet and Lorre all appeared in Curtiz’s Passage to Marseille (1944), and To Have and Have Not (1944), with Bogart in it the lead, has many similarities to Casablanca.  In addition to Woody Allen’s Play It Again Sam (1972) in which Casablanca played a significant part, the film has also inspired many parodies, including the Marx Brothers’ A Night in Casablanca (1946) Neil Simon’s The Cheap Detective (1978), and a Looney Tunes cartoon version called Carrot Blanca (1995) in which Bugs Bunny plays the Bogart role.  Even the script has been a source of inspiration for artists: Michael Singer chose The Usual Suspects for his unwritten script as he thought it would make a good title, and David Thomson used the same phrase as the epigraph for his novel Suspects whose characters (among many from films of this period) include Ilsa, Rick and Captain Renault.

Everybody Comes to Rick’s was finally staged in London in 1992, when it ran for six weeks.

In case you haven't seen it, here's the trailer:

 

Stoker

We screened this last week.  Somehow I missed the film when it was on general release, and I when I started reading up on it to write my notes I thought it looked good.

I was not mistaken.

Here are my notes:

Stoker

USA 2012                    99 minutes

Director:                      Park Chan-wook

Starring:                        Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman and Matthew Goode

Awards and Nominations

• Seven wins
• 25 nominations

“The South Korean director Park Chan-wook makes an eye-catching English-language debut with his outrageous quasi-remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 thriller Shadow of a Doubt. Where Hitchcock's original injected a small drop of poison into picket-fence suburbia, Stoker stands proud as a full-blown gothic nightmare. ”

Xan Brooks

Following the death of India’s father, her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) who she never knew existed comes to live with her and Evelyn, her unstable mother (Nicole Kidman).  India (Mia Wasikowska) comes to suspect that this mysterious charming man has ulterior motives while at the same time becoming increasingly infatuated with him.

The script is by Wentworth Miller, best known as an actor in the TV series Prison Break (2005), although he submitted the script under a pseudonym, explaining later “I just wanted the scripts to sink or swim on their own”.  Miller described his story as “a horror film, a family drama and a psychological thriller”.   The title Stoker suggests a link to Bram Stoker, but in the context of the story Miller’s debt to Dracula lies more in the relationship between Charlie and India, echoing the corrupting influence that Dracula has on Lucy Westenra, rather than on any overt vampire references.  A more obvious source for Miller’s script is Hitchcock’s 1943 psychological thriller Shadow of a Doubt.   

In an interview Miller freely acknowledged this debt:  

"The jumping-off point is actually Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. So, that's where we begin, and then we take it in a very, very different direction”. 

 

He emphasises the point by giving India’s uncle the same name as that of Joseph Cotten’s psychopathic killer in the Hitchcock film.

This film is South Korean Park Chan-wook’s first English language feature, after making his name in South Korea as the writer and director of Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005), the so-called Vengeance Trilogy.  Oldboy won the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival where Quentin Tarantino, a great fan, lobbied hard for it to be given the Palme d’Or.

Here's the trailer: