Philip French

RIP Philip French:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/philip-french

I am a lifelong reader of The Observer and until his retirement one of the regular highlights of the paper was Philip French's film review.

It was from his writing that I began to learn that cinema can be much more than what is on at the local multiplex, that it has a history that constantly influences even the most anodyne of commercial releases, and that it is possible to write well about even the worst films.  he also had a brilliant sense of humour and could never miss the chance to work a cringe-making pun into an otherwise serious review.

He will be sorely missed!

A Little Chaos

I'm finally back on track in terms of writing my notes for films: the hours of daylight are getting shorter with a consequent reduction in the time I can spend on gardening leave - everything outside has never looked better.

This week's film is all about gardening, and I even managed to add a quote from Simon Schama to add an extra layer of cultural reliance.

Here are my notes:

A Little Chaos

UK 2014                      117 minutes

Director:                      Alan Rickman

Starring:                        Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Matthias Schoenaerts, Alan Rickman and Stanley Tucci

“Even before the first chateau [at Versailles] by Louis Le Vau, the park was made the setting for entertainments that catered to the king’s hunger for self-aggrandisement. Whether they were ostensibly performed in honour of military victories, the king’s latest mistress, or both, they used bodies of water as theatrical platforms on which spectacles that flattered his omnipotence could be performed.”

Simon Schama

Landscape and Memory

After being appointed by King Louis XIV (Alan Rickman) on a project in the gardens of Versailles Andre Le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts) employs Sabine de Barra (Kate Winslet), a woman with an unconventional sense of gardening, to help him complete the work.

Allison Deegan is an actor and wrote an initial version of the screenplay 17 years ago while on maternity leave.  She had admired Alan Rickman after seeing him on stage in Les Liaisons Dangereuses and sent an unsolicited copy of the screenplay to him; he responded favourably and announced that he wanted to direct it.  However despite his support his other work commitments, especially his ongoing role as Snape in the Harry Potter films, meant that the film had to wait.  Initially Deegan had written the role of Le Notre for Rickman, but the extended delay in its production meant that his age made him more suited for the role of Louis XIV, a character who perhaps echoed his responsibilities as director of the film.

On its release the film received generally positive reviews with Tim Robey in The Telegraph commenting:

“If you see only one film about 17^th century landscape gardening this year, it ought to be A Little Chaos, a heaving bouquet of a picture.”

Woman in Gold

We screened this film at the beginning of October. After reading the reviews I was not expecting too much - inevitably I have to write notes on films I have not seen - but in the event I was impressed.

The background to the film is the major crime of the twentieth century, but the film managed to make it personal, as well as shining a light on to an aspect of the Holocaust that is perhaps generally forgotten, but which still has an impact today.

Here are my notes:

Woman in Gold

UK/USA 2015              109 minutes

Director:                      Simon Curtis

Starring:                        Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Bruhl, Katie Holmes and Tatiana Maslany

Maria Altmann was gracious and warm, the kind of woman referred to in another era as a grande dame. Her face was lined, but her bright brown eyes still held a gaze of wonder.

“It is a very complicated story. … People always asked me, did your aunt have a mad affair with Klimt? My sister thought so. My mother – she was very Victorian – said ‘How dare you say that?  It was an intellectual friendship.’ ”

Maria looked up at a reproduction of Adele’s portrait on the wall, regarding her face thoughtfully.

“My darling,” she said finally, “Adele was a modern woman, living in the world of yesterday.”

Anne-Marie O’Connor
The Lady in Gold

 

Sixty years after she fled from Nazi persecution in Vienna an elderly Jewish woman, Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren) begins legal action to retrieve possessions that the Nazis had sized from her family. These include the painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (subsequently known as the Woman in Gold) by Gustav Klimt which after the war had been hung in an Austrian art Gallery. 

Maria Altman’s struggle to recover the Woman in Gold had already been told in a 2008 documentary film called Adele’s Wish as well as in a book called The Lady in Gold, and although inevitably there have been a few minor changes to the events of her life to make it work in dramatic terms the feature film has brought her story to a far wider audience.

Despite the success of Maria Altmann in the long and complex legal struggle depicted in the film even today in Austria the government is still displaying an irresolute attitude towards returning property stolen from their Jewish owners: Stephan Templ wrote a book that catalogued hundreds of Jewish-owned buildings seized by the Nazis that have never been returned to their rightful owners, and was subsequently found guilty of defrauding the state after omitting the name of an estranged aunt from a family restitution claim. His appeal against the sentence has received the support of 75 Holocaust historians from around the world against and an Austrian journalist who is also a Holocaust survivor commented:

“The only reason Templ was prosecuted is that he touched a nerve with his book, which reminded Austrians how they stole Jewish property”.

For Austrians Klimt’s painting of the Woman in Gold was part of their national identity, although other examples of his work in Austria did not survive the war. In1895 he had been commissioned to produce three massive paintings for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna, but a public outcry from political, aesthetic and religious groups meant that they were never displayed in this location, and in 1945 retreating SS forces destroyed all three paintings.

A Royal Night Out

After a quiet period during the Summer, at least in terms of our film club, we started our new season with A Royal Night Out - we hoped it would be a crown-puller, but we only managed a small audience although they were pretty thirty and bar takings were good.

In advance of the film I wondered if it was going to be a sequel to The King's Speech or a prequel to The Queen.  In the event it was neither, and although it was enjoyable with some good performances it was less real than the whole of the Harry Potter saga.

Here are my notes:

A Royal Night Out

UK 2014                      127 minutes

Director:                      Julian Jarrold

Starring:                        Bel Powley, Sarah Gadon, Emily Watson and Rupert Everett

 “…the Windsors are given a sitcom-style veneer of just-like-us approachability in A Royal Night Out – a largely fictional romp that plays as a slab of official palace history as rewritten by Enid Blyton. That may sound ghastly, yet Julian Jarrold’s film has cheerily naff charm in spades. Following the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret as they shed their regal cocoon, joining the great unwashed for the VE Day celebrations, it’s speculative history jauntily dressed as a cut-glass entry in the one-wild-night teen subgenre.”

Guy Lodge

In a broadcast speech to commemorate VE Day on 8 May 1945 Churchill said “We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing”: in London there were three days of uproarious celebration and in Buckingham Palace George VI (Rupert Everett) and Queen Elizabeth (Emily Watson) reluctantly agree that Princesses Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon) and Margaret (Bel Powley) might be allowed to have a night out on the town in the company of carefully selected chaperones.

The initial premise of the film is correct, but the development of the plot is entirely fictional: in 1945 Princess Margaret was only fourteen, the princesses went out in a group of 16 that included military protection, and rather than attending a party at the Ritz the princesses were allowed only to mingle with the crowds that filled the roads around Buckingham Palace.

Justin Jarrold began his career on TV where he directed an episode of Coronation Street before moving on to directing episodes of Cracker and Silent Witness.  After directing several TV films he made his cinema debut with Kinky Boots (2005), following this with Becoming Jane (2007) and Brideshead Revisited (2008).  His most recent TV work has included Appropriate Adult (2011), a dramatization of the life of Fred and Rosemary West, The Girl (2012), about Hitchcock’s relationship with Tippi Hedren while he was making The Birds, and the mini-series The Great Train Robbery (2013).  He is currently working on The Crown, a TV series about the royal family.

Boyhood

I still have to see this: I missed our screening, but have bought the DVD as the reviews made it look too good to miss.

Here are my notes:

Boyhood

USA 2014                    165 minutes

Director:                      Richard Linklater

Starring:                        Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke

 

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for six Oscars, including Best Film, Director, Original Screenplay, Supporting Actor (Ethan Hawke) and Supporting Actress (Patricia Arquette)
• Won two BAFTAs (Best Film, Director and Supporting Actress) and nominated for Best Supporting Actor and Original Screenplay
• A further 138 wins and 119 nominations

“Like the fabled Jesuit, Richard Linklater has taken the boy and given us the man. In so doing, he's created a film that I love more than I can say. And there is hardly a better, or nobler thing a film can do than inspire love.”

Peter Bradshaw

Over a period of 12 years, from 2002 to 20014 Boyhood depicts the adolescence of Mason Evans, a young boy growing up in Texas.  His parents are divorced: Mason and his sister live with their mother (Patricia Arquette) who subsequently remarries while, initially at least, their father (Ethan Hawke) is just an occasional presence in their lives.

Richard Linklater had long wanted to make a film that told the story of family relationships from the perspective of a boy over an extended period of time and without a completed script: for Boyhood he knew the basic plot points for each character as well as the ending, but otherwise wrote the script for each year’s filming to reflect the changes he saw in each character. He only filmed for three or four days each year, but the production team spent two months in pre-production and one month in post-production each year.  Once he had finished filming in 2013 Linklater named the film 12 Years, but then changed it to Boyhood to avoid any confusion with 12 Years a Slave.

In the 12 year shooting schedule for Boyhood Richard Linklater also directed eight other feature films that ranged from the directly commercial (Bad News Bears (2005)) to literary adaptation (Me and Orson Welles (2008)).  More significantly, he directed Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013) completing a trilogy starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy that had begun with Before Sunrise in 1995 and which revisited the same two central characters at different points in their lives, a common theme in many of his films.

Boyhood received its premier at the Sundance Film Festival and it was also entered in the Berlin Film Festival where Richard Linklater won the Silver Bear for Best Director.  On its commercial release the film received almost unanimous acclaim from critics from around the world and Sight & Sound, after polling more than 100 international film critics named it as the best film of 2014. The film also appeared on more “best of” lists for 2014 than any other film: it appeared on 536 lists and was in first place on 189 of them.

Here's the trailer:

 

The Grand Budapest Hotel

This is one of the few films we've shown this year that I actually saw in advance of our screening.  I'd missed it at the cinema and caught up with it on DVD - but it definitely repaid a second look, especially on our big(gish) screen.

Here are my notes:

The Grand Budapest Hotel

USA 2014                    100 minutes

Director:                      Wes Anderson

Starring:                        Ralph Fiennes, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe and Tony Revolori

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Film, Director and Original Screenplay, and won four Oscars
• Won BAFTAs for Best Original Screenplay, Best Soundtrack, Costumes and Production Design and nominated for six more including Best Film, Director, Leading Actor (Ralph Fiennes), Best Supporting Actor and Original Screenplay
• A further 95 wins and 110 nominations

“In some hands, this convoluted, labyrinthine narrative would end up a sprawling mess, but such is Anderson's storytelling discipline – informed and sustained by the precision of the cinematography and set design – that it never gets away from him. As Gustave skips from hotel lobby to prison camp, from railway carriage to drawing room, the architecture of this picaresque remains entirely lucid."

Andrew Pulver

 In its 1930s glory days the Grand Budapest Hotel, located in the Central European Republic of Zubrowka, is presided over by Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), the hotel’s devoted concierge.  Among his many other duties Gustave H. courts a series of elderly women, including Madame D (an almost unrecognisable Tilda Swinton), who flock to the hotel to enjoy his “exceptional service”.  Following the death of Madame D. Gustave H. attends her funeral: he suspects that she has been murdered and learns that she has bequeathed him a valuable painting in her will, but her family want it and her son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) will stop at nothing to get it back.

Wes Anderson wrote the screenplay from an original story he had co-written, but it was inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig, an Austrian novelist, playwright and journalist.  In the 1920s and 1930s Zweig was one of the most popular writers in the world but now he is best known for his novel Letter from an Unknown Woman, filmed in Hollywood by Max Ophuls in 1948.  Anderson’s inspiration for his story was Zweig’s 1927 novella Twenty Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (filmed in 1952 and remade twice since) as well as his 1939 novel Beware of Pity, filmed in Britain in 1946.

 

The film had its premier at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival where Wes Anderson received the Grand Jury Prize.  On it general release the film received excellent reviews with many critics commenting particularly on the performance of Ralph Fiennes (in a role written originally written for Johnny Depp) as Gustave H.  In a recent profile of Fiennes Anne Billson reviewed his film career to date and with regard to The Grand Budapest Hotel commented:

 

“His Gustave H., in Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, is probably the most likeable character he has ever played.  Amid the film's colourful assembly of caricatures, his fey but ferociously efficient concierge is full of regretful nuance, provides the film with its moral backbone, and heartbreakingly embodies the values of a lost epoch. It's a lovely performance.”

Marvellous

This was an unexpected treasure: I'd missed the film on TV, but we selected it following a rave review from one of our Members.  I enjoyed it very much: the stylised presentation (and occasional incursions by real people) well suited the slightly incredible story that was - mostly - true.

Here are my notes:

Marvellous

UK 2014                      90 minutes

Director:                      Julian Farino

Starring:                        Toby Jones, Gemma Jones, Tony Curran and Nicholas Grieves

Neil Baldwin (Toby Jones) has a life that is both ordinary and extraordinary.  He lives with his widowed mother (Gemma Jones) and despite his learning difficulties he begins his working life as a clown in a circus, becomes the mascot for Stoke City Football Club and also becomes a student liaison officer for Stoke University.

Neil Baldwin’s life story first appeared as an article in The Guardian which detailed his unexpected friendships with football managers, football players, referees, vicars, bishops, archbishops, politicians and celebrities.  The film reflects this diverse life by being put together as a scrapbook of Neil’s life and includes appearances by real characters (Neil himself, plus Lou Macari and Gary Lineker).

Toby Jones won rave reviews for his performance as Neil Baldwin.  He made his breakthrough playing Truman Capote in Infamous (2006) and has since appeared in films as diverse as Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy (2011) as well as the Harry Potter series where he provided the voice for Dobby the House Elf.  On TV he secured a Golden Globe nomination for his role as Alfred Hitchcock in The Girl (2012).

Julian Farino started his TV career by making documentaries before directing the BAFTA winning Our Mutual Friend.  In the US he directed episodes of the TV series Entourage, Big Love and Rome before directing his first feature film The Oranges (2012) which starred Hugh Laurie in his first leading role.

Here is the trailer: