Brooklyn

This is our next film. I'm really looking forward to it as we started watching it at home but it was late and managed to miss the second part. Fortunately we have now scheduled it for later this week.

Here are my notes:

Brooklyn

UK 2015                      112 minutes

Director:                      John Crowley

Starring:                        Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Domhnall Gleeson, Jim Broadbent and Julie Walters

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for three Oscars (Best Picture, Best Actress (Saoirse Ronan) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Nick Hornby))
• Won BAFTA for Best British Film and five further BAFTA nominations including Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress (Julie Walters), Best Adapted Screenplay
• A further 29 wins and 136 nominations

“What a moving, emotionally intelligent and refreshingly old-fashioned movie this is. The narrative may be perfectly situated in the early 50s, but the style of film-making harks back further still, to a time when “women’s pictures” were the backbone of popular cinema. Contemporary audiences raised on overblown spectacle and overwrought romance may have to recalibrate their reactions to appreciate the rich rewards of director John Crowley’s best film since 2003’s unexpectedly punchy Intermission. But for those enamoured of the 30s and 40s heyday of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck, Brooklyn feels like a breath of fresh air.”

Mark Kermode

 

A young Irish woman Ellis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) emigrates to New York City in search of a better life. Initially homesick, she begins to adjust to her new surroundings with the help of Italian-American Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen) with whom she becomes romantically involved. A family crisis then compels Ellis to return to Ireland where she meets Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson), and as a result she has to choose between two countries and the different lives they offer her.

Producer Finola Dyer read Brooklyn, the award-winning novel by Colm Toibin, after completing her work on An Education (2009). She felt that its story spoke to her on a personal level as her mother had emigrated from Ireland in the 1950s, and having met Toibin through a mutual friend he immediately granted her the film rights. Nick Hornby had produced the Oscar nominated screenplay for An Education and Dyer commissioned him to adapt Brooklyn for the screen.

Director John Crowley had read the book on its publication and agreed to take on the project after reading just 40 pages of Nick Hornby’s script. Crowley had himself emigrated from Ireland to London in his 20s and this was one of his main reasons for deciding to make the film. In an interview on its release he said he:

“…had emotional understanding from experience that could maybe help make this film not a period piece frozen in aspic, but could give it a directness that would resonate with a younger audience anywhere.”

At its premier at the Sundance Film Festival the film received a standing ovation and great critical acclaim, subsequently confirmed by the success of the film in the awards season. Following a bidding war for its distribution rights the film was released globally and to date has taken USD 62.1 million against its budget of USD 11.0 million.

After beginning his career directing stage plays in Dublin John Crowley made his name in the UK as an associate director at the Donmar Warehouse in London where he directed a filmed version of a short stage play by Samuel Beckett. He has subsequently worked extensively in theatre both in the UK and on Broadway. He made his feature film debut with Intermission (2003), a comedy drama set in Dublin and in 2007 won a BAFTA for Best Director for his film Boy A (made for TV in the UK but given cinematic release in the US).

It has recently been announced that Crowley will direct the film version of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Goldfinch.

Here's the trailer:

 

 

Florence Foster Jenkins

It's the beginning of our new season tomorrow. We always try to select a film that will be popular with our target audience so that they will come along and join for the year, and this time we have selected Florence Foster Jenkins.

Over the period that we have been running our club we've screened several earlier films by Stephen Frears including The Queen and Philomena. Our audiences enjoyed both of these very much and both screenings were well attended. Thus all being well we will have a large audience tomorrow.

I wrote my notes earlier today, and here they are:
 

Florence Foster Jenkins

UK 2016                      110 minutes

Director:                      Stephen Frears

Starring:                        Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, Simon Helberg and Rebecca Ferguson

“As Les Dawson proved with such precision, any fool can play the piano badly, but it takes real skill to play it brilliantly badly. Similarly, Morecambe and Wise knew that the perfect way to mangle “Grieg’s piano concerto by Grieg” was to play “all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order”. Now, to the august list of superbly maladroit comedic musicians we may add Meryl Streep, who takes centre stage in this very likable, frequently hilarious, yet still poignant tragi-comedy from director Stephen Frears.”

 

Mark Kermode

Despite her generally poor singing ability Florence Foster Jenkins (Meryl Streep) aspires to become an opera singer with the help of her husband St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant) and her pianist Cosme McMoon (Simon Helberg).

 Florence Foster Jenkins became a prominent cult figure in New York City musical circles from the 1920s to the 1940s, with eminent musicians as varied as Cole Porter and Enrico Caruso as her fans. She had initially trained as a pianist, but after an injury to her arm put an end to this she decided to use a substantial inheritance to resume her musical career as a singer. Initially she performed small recitals with attendance only by personal invitation and with music critics specifically excluded, but in 1944 she gave a public recital at Carnegie Hall.  The reviews of the performance were scathing and sarcastic, and shortly afterwards she had a heart attack and died.

Given the strange events of Florence Foster Jenkins’ life it is not surprising to find that it has provided inspiration for a number of plays and films. The most widely produced play is Glorious! which initially ran in the West End starring Maureen Lipman and which was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best Comedy; it has since been performed in more than 40 countries worldwide. The award-winning 2015 French Film Marguerite was also loosely based on the life of Florence Foster Jenkins although the main character was called Marguerite Dumont, a tribute to Margaret Dumont who had initially trained as a singer before becoming a comic foil to the Marx Brothers in so many of their films.

Recent films from by Stephen Frears have included The Queen (2006) starring Helen Mirren and Philomena (2013) starring Judi Dench. Both films were artistically successful, especially The Queen with Helen Mirren winning an Oscar and BAFTA among numerous other awards in the title role. Florence Foster Jenkins has only just been released in the US but it is reasonable to assume that it will appear prominently in the nominations during the forthcoming awards season.

 

Here's the trailer:

 

And here is Margaret Dumont:

 

The Universe of the Coen Brothers

Having finally caught up with - and very much enjoyed - Hail, Caesar this article about the universe of the Coen Brothers was fascinating:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/aug/22/coen-brothers-universe-john-turturro-big-lebowski-jesus-quintana

Hail, Caesar is definitely a film for our Film Club. And I still need to catch up with the TV version of Fargo.

Best Films of the 21st Century - so far...

This is brilliant: a survey of the best films since 2000:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/aug/23/mulholland-drive-david-lynch-21st-century-top-films-bbc-poll?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+main+NEW+H+categories&utm_term=187164&subid=105500&CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2_footer

I've yet to check how many I have seen, but it will be an excellent source of inspiration for our Film Society.

Donald Trump is fictional...

I loved this piece in the Guardian which identified several cinematic foreshadowings of the great man [irony]:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2016/aug/02/films-donald-trump-citizen-kane-gangs-of-new-york

Apart from Bill the Butcher, Charles Foster Kane, Howard Beale and Greg Stillson I can also see an echo of Trump in the character of Yorrick Kaine, a fictional escapee from the Bookworld,  in Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde.

 

Spectre

For our AGM we try to choose a popular film to attract people to the one meeting we need to have each year. After a disastrous first AGM which we scheduled AFTER a screening and which went on and on we now have the meeting first and then screen the film.

When we had chosen Spectre we had not realised that it was quite so long - so it was a late night. I enjoyed the film very mucht, and agreed with most of the reviews that I'd read, but felt that the escape from Blofeld's lair in the desert was a bit of an anti-climax after so many of the earlier magnificent set pieces.

Here are my notes:

Spectre

 UK 2015                      148 minutes

Director:                      Sam Mendes

Starring:                        Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Lea Seydoux, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw

Awards and Nominations

• Won Academy Award for Best Original Song
• A further seven wins and 23 nominations

“If nothing else, the spelling of the title should tip you off that this is a thoroughly English movie franchise. Bond is back and Daniel Craig is back in a terrifically exciting, spectacular, almost operatically delirious 007 adventure – endorsing intelligence work as old-fashioned derring-do and incidentally taking a stoutly pro-Snowden line against the creepy voyeur surveillance that undermines the rights of a free individual. It’s pure action mayhem with a real sense of style.”

Peter Bradshaw

James Bond (Daniel Craig) attempts to thwart the plans of Spectre to hijack a global surveillance network and discovers that the organisation, led by Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) was behind the events of the previous three films in which Craig has starred as James Bond. Familiar characters such as M (Ralph Fiennes), Q (Ben Whishaw) and Eve Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) re-appear along with Andrew Scott as Max Denbigh, the head of a rival to MI6.

Spectre is the twenty fourth James Bond film and the fourth starring Daniel Craig. The story is original, but incorporates source material from Fleming’s stories, most notably the character of Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz) whose father is a background character in the short story Octopussy. The screenplay reunites scriptwriters John Logan (who wrote Skyfall) and Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (who had worked on five previous Bond films) together with British playwright Jez Butterworth who had made uncredited contributions to Skyfall. The name SPECTRE comes from the novel Thunderball, but as Fleming had incorporated elements of an undeveloped film script into his novel this led to decades of copyright litigation, with the issue only being resolved in November 2013. It was this same dispute that allowed Sean Connery’s belated reprise of the role of Bond in Never Say Never Again (1983), in effect an updated remake of Thunderball (1965).

Sam Mendes had originally turned down the offer to direct Spectre after the success of Skyfall but he changed his mind as he found both the script and the long term plans for the franchise appealing. The film had a budget of $245 million making it the most expensive Bond film made, and it grossed $880.7 million, making it the second highest grossing Bond film after Skyfall and the sixth highest grossing film of 2015.

Sam Mendes has recently ruled himself out of directing the next Bond film and to date Daniel Craig has not confirmed that he will play Bond again. Amid the inevitable speculation about both director and leading actor one interesting potential choice of director that has emerged is Susanne Bier, who in addition to directing The Night Manager (2016) for the BBC had previously won an Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film for In A Better World. Some critics have suggested that Tom Hiddlestone’s performance in The Night Manager was an audition for the role of Bond, although in recent interviews he has downplayed the rumour.

Here's the trailer:

 

The Lady in the Van

This was the final film of our season. Fortunately the DVD release was just in time for us to show it.

Our history shows us that Alan Bennett (The History Boys) and Maggie Smith (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotels et al as well as Downton Abbey) have always been popular so the combination of the two was irresistible.

It was also a very good film, although not quite the comedy the poster seemed to imply.

Here are my notes:

The Lady in the Van

UK 2015                      104 minutes

Director:                      Nicholas Hytner

Starring:                        Maggie Smith, Alex Jennings, Jim Broadbent, Frances de la Tour and Roger Allam

Awards and Nominations

• Won Best Actress Award (Maggie Smith) at the Evening Standard British Film Awards
• Nominations for Best Actress (Maggie Smith) at the Golden Globes and BAFTA Film Awards

“Having come a cropper with his screen adaptation of The History Boys in 2006, director Nicholas Hytner here hits the high notes that distinguished his 1994 stage-to-screen triumph The Madness of King George.”

Mark Kermode

In the 1970s Alan Bennett (Alex Jennings) offers the temporary use of the drive to his north London house to a homeless woman (Maggie Smith). She parks her battered van outside his front door – and stays there for 15 years.

The film is based on Bennett’s 1999 stage play which itself derives from the piece he had written about Miss Shepherd in his book Writing Home, and it reunites many people who have worked with him over the years.  Maggie Smith appeared in A Private Function (1984), Bennett’s first screenplay for the big screen and created the role of Miss Shepherd in the stage version of The Lady in the Van. The play was directed by Hytner, who has directed all of Bennett’s recent stage work, mostly at the National Theatre.  Hytner and Bennett’s previous film was The History Boys (2006) and the principal cast members from this production, with the exception of Frances de la Tour who has a supporting role, appear in cameo roles in this film.

As a stage actor Alex Jennings has won three Olivier awards for his work, which has been mostly with the RSC or at the National Theatre.  Here he has worked many times with Nicholas Hytner and first appeared in a play by Bennett when he had a leading role in The Habit of Art.  He subsequently played Alan Bennett on stage in Untold Stories Bennett’s dramatization of one of his autobiographical sketches. He is a skilled mimic, and in addition to Bennett he has played characters as diverse as Prince Charles in The Queen (2006) and President George Bush in Stuff Happens, David Hare’s “history play” about the Iraq War, once again directed by Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre. 

Here is the trailer: