Eddie the Eagle

This was a bit of a surprise: I missed the reviews of the film when it came out and based on the subject matter it did not appeal, but it was great fun.

It was our last film before Christmas so we chose something light. Everyone who came enjoyed it, no doubt helped by the mulled wine and mince pies.

Here are my notes:

Eddie the Eagle

UK 2016                      105 minutes

Director:                      Dexter Fletcher

Starring:                        Taron Egerton, Hugh Jackman, Christopher Walken, Iris Berben and Jim Broadbent

Awards and Nominations

• Won Truly Moving Picture Award at Heartland Film Festival
• A further three nominations, including a Teen Choice Nomination for Taron Egerton

“This Matthew Vaughn production is one of those cheerful Britcoms that celebrate the idea that we’re a bit crap and uncool as a nation, but carry-on-regardless spirit will see us through. In reality, you might regard it as a surreptitious hymn to innate national superiority: those Norwegians may have been mastering the sport since childhood, but a Brit armed with doughty innocence will only need a few months’ practice to emerge with honour.”

Jonathan Romney

Eddie Edwards (Taron Egerton) dreams of Olympic glory and takes up skiing so that he can take part in the Winter Games. While training in Germany he is taken on by Bronson Peary (Hugh Jackman), a former champion ski jumper who is now an alcoholic; Peary starts training his new pupil and uses various unorthodox methods to improve his skills. Eddie qualifies for the Olympics and at Calgary sets a British record with his ski jump.

The film is produced by Matthew Vaughn (director of Stardust (2007), Kick-Ass (2010), X-Men: First Class (2011) and Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014). He had been watching the film Cool Runnings (1993), a film about the Jamaican bobsled team at the Calgary Olympics, and wondered why no one made films like that anymore. Coincidentally Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards had participated in the same Olympics, and this might have been a catalyst for the film, although it bears little resemblance to the life of the real Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards who was warned that 90% of the story was made up. The character of Bronson Peary is entirely fictional.

Director Dexter Fletcher began his career as a child actor with a small role in Bugsy Malone (1976) and has subsequently appeared in many films and TV programmes, including Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) (which Matthew Vaughn produced) as well as Stardust and Kick-Ass. In 2012 he directed Wild Bill, his first feature film, followed by the highly successful musical Sunshine on Leith, which used music by The Proclaimers, in 2013.

Eddie the Eagle is a British/German/American production, with substantial funding from the German Federal Film Fund, and it received its world premiere at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.  Following its worldwide release the film grossed $46.1million including $12.8 million in the UK, which made it the highest grossing British film released in the UK in the first half of 2016.

Here is the trailer:

 

Hail Caesar (aka Hail, Caesar!)

This week we screened the most recent film from the Coen Brothers: Hail Caesar.

early on in our society's existence we screened Fargo (on the basis that it is mandatory for all film societies to show it at some point in their existence), but Hail Caesar was quite different: a screwball comedy set in 19502 Hollywood. It went down well, but some people were a little disappointed by George Clooney's role, as it was quite different from his more box-office friendly work. I enjoyed it very much.

Here are my notes:

Hail, Caesar!

USA 2016                    104 minutes

Director:                      Ethan and Joel Coen

Starring:                        Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and Channing Tatum

“The Coen brothers’ lovingly goofy latest comes on like a breezy flipside companion-piece to Barton Fink – a jaunt through the underbelly of old Hollywood which finds not the fiery hell of the tortured artist but the upbeat splash of synchronised swimming, On the Town toe-tapping and toga-wearing biblical balderdash. With a ramshackle plot that appears to have been cooked up after drawing deep on the Dude’s biggest bong, the film pinballs between awol movie stars, red-scare nightmares and Bikini Atoll bomb tests, while raising important questions of whether God is still angry (“what, he got over it?”), how to make a lasso out of spaghetti, and the secret of balancing a bunch of bananas on your head (it’s all in the hips, lips, eyes and thighs, apparently).”

Mark Kermode

In Hollywood in the 1950s Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) works for Capitol Pictures as a fixer whose role is to keep scandals relating to film stars out of the press. His current work load includes concealing the news that DeeAnna Morgan (Scarlett Johansson) is pregnant, rescuing alcoholic actor Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) from a group of kidnappers whose members include Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), an actor currently filming a musical comedy about sailors, and arranging for Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) to cast young singing western film star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) in the period drama he is directing.

In Hollywood the 1950s was the time of the Cold War and the Red Scare: its response was to create escapist entertainment: westerns, musicals with extravagant dance sequences, aquatic spectacles and Roman epics with massive casts. The Coen Brothers saw the films of this period on TV when they were growing up and commented:

“We loved that stuff. We just didn’t realise we were watching crap.”

For the purposes of this film they re-created their own versions of these films and for verisimilitude shot them on film rather than employing digital cinematography which they have used for their most recent films.

The Coen Brothers first created Capital Pictures for Barton Fink (1991), but Eddie Mannix was a real character, although his real life was far more sordid than depicted in this film: he used his network of contacts to cover up, among other things, Judy Garland’s drug use, Great Garbo’s bi-sexuality, and was even suspected of involvement in the murder of Superman star George Reeves. The Guardian contains a regular feature called Reel History which a historian rates films based on real events for both Entertainment and History. For the former it receives an A- but a fail for the latter. In mitigation the article contains    the following verdict on the film:

 “The Coen brothers have done an Eddie Mannix on Eddie Mannix, covering up all the darkest, dirtiest parts of his story to create a sparkling comedy. Everything you see on screen is completely historically inaccurate – but that’s the point. Hail, Caesar! can wear its fail grade with pride."

 Here is the trailer:

 

 

 

Harry Potter Actors

As a keen fan of Harry Potter (first the books and then the films) I'd always thought that the Staff Room at Hogwarts contained the cream of British acting talent.

I've now read an article, presumably insured by the imminent release of Fantastic Beasts, giving some substance to my assumptions:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/harry-potter-kept-a-quarter-of-the-u-k-s-top-actors-paid/

Judi Dench is the unofficial mascot of our film club, on the basis that whenever we screen one of her films we get a good audience, so it is interesting to see that she tops the list of successful actors who have not appeared (so far) in any Potter-related films.

I just wish that that result of the US Presidential Election had gone the way of fivethirtyeight's final forecast!

 

Bridge of Spies

This week we screened Bridge of Spies. I'd seen and enjoyed it at the cinema, but even so a second screening was even better.

My notes are as follows

Bridge of Spies

USA 2016                    141 minutes

Director:                      Stephen Spielberg

Starring:                        Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, Alan Alda and Austin Stowell

Awards and Nominations

• Won Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (Mark Rylance) and five further nominations including Best Film, Best Original Screenplay and Best Soundtrack
• Won BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor (Mark Rylance) and eight further nominations including Best Director, Best Film, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Cinematography and Best Soundtrack

“Steven Spielberg’s Cold War spy-swap drama Bridge of Spies is a movie of glorious craftsmanship, human sympathy and flair. It’s a consciously old-fashioned piece of Hollywood storytelling conceived in something like the heartfelt, ingenuous style of Frank Capra. Where once we had Mr Smith Goes To Washington — here we have Mr Hanks Goes To West Berlin.”

 

Peter Bradshaw

50 Best Films of 2015

(Bridge of Spies was number two)

 During the Cold War the CIA recruits insurance lawyer James B Donovan (Tom Hanks) to negotiate the release and exchange of Francis G (Gary) Powers (Austin Stowell), the pilot of a U-2 spy plane shot down over East Germany. Donovan travels to Berlin to negotiate the deal, offering as an exchange the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) whom Donovan had previously defended during his trial for espionage in the US.

Screenplay writer Matt Charman became interested in Donovan after reading about him in a biography of President Kennedy; after a meeting with Donovan’s son in New York he pitched his story to several studios, with DreamWorks choosing to buy it and then Spielberg deciding to direct. DreamWorks then brought in the Coen Brothers to revise Charman’s original script, although their work with Charman was collaborative, as Charman confirmed in an interview:

“[The Coen Brothers] were able to really punch up the negotiations on the back end of the movie, then they handed the baton back to me to do a pass after they did their pass, to make the movie just sit in a place we all wanted it to. The flavour they brought is so fun and enjoyable. It needed to be entertaining but truthful.”

 Inevitably for the purposes of the film the screenplay had to compromise with strict historical accuracy: the most significant of the changes is that it shortens the timescales of events which while increasing tension can give a misleading impression of the whole operation. However most reviewers accepted this departure from the historical record as inevitable, and the film itself acknowledges this by advertising itself as being “inspired by true events”.

The film is a US/German co-production and Spielberg used many actual Berlin locations for scenes that actually took place there, including the former Tempelhof Airport for Donovan’s arrival and the real Glienicke Bridge (the so-called “Bridge of Spies”) to film the prisoner exchange. For the latter location the German government closed the bridge to traffic for a weekend to allow filming to take place, and Angela Merkel visited the set to watch the filming.

On its release the film received many positive reviews and many nominations during the awards season, but it was Mark Rylance who won most of the film’s awards for his role as Rudolf Abel. He had already won Tony and Olivier Awards for his stage work in New York and London as well as several BAFTA awards for his TV work, most recently for his role as Thomas Cromwell in the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2015), and so this Oscar has allowed him to complete an uncommon “triple” win.

Here is the trailer:

 

Starter for Ten

We have been running our film club for ten years now and decided to use one screening to celebrate it: we provided prosecco and a special anniversary cake, but the challenge was to choose the right film.

we brainstormed all the titles we could think of with "ten" in them and discarded most of them as too obscure or just plain wrong. And then we thought of Starter for Ten, which was released the  year we started and in retrospect would have been a possible film to screen back then.

Never mind, I'm glad to have seen it at last and really enjoyed it.

Here are my notes:

Starter For Ten

UK 2006                      92 minutes

Director:                      Tom Vaughan

Starring:                        James McAvoy, Alice Eve, Rebecca Hall, Catherine Tate, Benedict Cumberpatch and Mark Gatiss

Awards and Nominations

• One win at the Austin Film Festival
• Three nominations including Best British Film at the Empire Awards

“A modest and very British movie (though co-produced by Tom Hanks), Tom Vaughan's Starter For Ten is a rite-of-passage comedy about the working-class Essex boy Brian Jackson's first two terms studying English literature at Bristol University in 1985. James McAvoy is amusing and convincing as the gauche Brian who leaves his old chums (Dominic Cooper and James Corden from The History Boys) back home on the estuary and is torn between two fellow students, the self-consciously sophisticated, middle-class Alice (Alice Eve), and the wry, politically active Jewish Rebecca (Rebecca Hall). Much of the action turns on Brian joining Bristol's University Challenge team (Mark Gatiss does a hilarious Bamber Gascoigne). Among the various scenes of humiliation two stand out, one very funny in the style of Lucky Jim Dixon's weekend at Professor Welch's home, the other truly painful.”

Philip French

 
It is interesting to look back at a film ten years after its release to see how the careers of its cast and production team have developed. Screenplay writer David Nicholls read English and Drama at Bristol University and turned to writing after struggling to make a career as an actor: he wrote several episodes of the series Cold Feet before writing Starter for Ten as a novel after another series he had been writing was cancelled. His subsequent work includes adaptations of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Great Expectations and Far From the Madding Crowd (starring Carey Mulligan) and among his novels is the award-winning One Day which he later adapted for the screen with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess in the lead roles. Director Tom Vaughan also studied at Bristol University and made his name as a director on TV working on several series of Cold Feet. Starter for Ten was his first feature film and since then he has worked regularly for both TV and cinema. His most recent work has been for the TV series Victoria, for which he has directed three episodes.

 James McAvoy was already a rising star in 2006 with lead roles in The Last King of Scotland (2006), Becoming Jane (2007) and Atonement (2007) to follow on closely from this film, but Rebecca Hall, James Corden and Benedict Cumberpatch were all at the start of their TV and film acting careers after early work on stage. Additionally although Catherine Tate had written and starred in her own TV series she made this film before she appeared with David Tennant as a Tardis regular in Doctor Who, and the multi-talented Mark Gatiss, having made his name in The League of Gentlemen had yet to write for Doctor Who, co-create Sherlock or become a familiar character actor with roles in programmes as diverse as Game of Thrones, Wolf Hall, Sherlock (where his portrayal of Mycroft had strong echoes of Peter Mandelson)  and The Coalition (where he actually played Peter Mandelson and memorably made his first appearance out of a cloud of smoke.).

 

Here's the trailer:

 

 

Eye in the Sky

I saw the trailer for this film long before its release and got completely the wrong picture: I thought it was promoting an action thriller and wondered what stars of the calibre of Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman were doing in it. As a bizarre coincidence I think I saw the trailer the day that the news of Alan Rickman's death was released.

And then I read the reviews, was sorry that I'd missed it in its first run in the cinema and was delighted when we scheduled it to run earlier this month.

My anticipation of the film was entirely justified and even though i had a fairly good idea how the story would develop there were whole sections when i found myself on the edge of my seat and almost forgetting to breathe.

Here are my notes:

Eye in the Sky

UK 2015                      102 minutes

Director:                      Gavin Hood

Starring:                        Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Alan Rickman and Barkhad Abdi

Awards and Nominations

• One nomination for Best Narrative Feature at Palm Springs International Film Festival

“Here, the South African director Gavin Hood assembles an A-list ensemble cast (including Alan Rickman in his last on-screen role) for a provocatively tense thriller that negotiates the moral minefields of its thorny subject matter in crowd-pleasing fashion.”

Mark Kermode

Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) is remotely commanding a drone operation to capture a group of dangerous terrorists in Nairobi. The mission suddenly escalates from a “capture” to a “kill” operation and the members of the military have to work with politicians and lawyers thousands of miles away from the action to gain their approval before they can strike.

The film has a complex production history, with Guy Hibbert’s screenplay being initially developed by BBC Films before Gavin Hood was appointed director and, subsequently, Colin Firth’s production company becoming involved to make the film. Firth himself planned to play the part of James Willett the UK Foreign Secretary, but the role was ultimately played by Iain Glen with Firth’s sole involvement being a credit as one of the film’s producers. Director Gavin Hood made the entire film in South Africa, but none of the four leading actors met up during the production: rather Hood filmed each of them alone to reflect their separate specific locations in the story. On its release the film received many positive reviews with critics commenting both on the cerebral spin it gave to the modern political thriller as well as the powerful acting of its cast.

Gavin Hood made his name with the South African drama Tsotsi (2005) which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film before moving to the US where his more commercial films have included X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) and the science fiction epic Ender’s Game (2013).

 

Here's the trailer:

 

 

 

The Wars of the Roses

Over the past week I've finally managed to catch up with the brilliant BBC adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry VI and Richard III plays, ie The Wars of the Roses.

I've seen Richard III several times (with Anthony Sher, Ian McKellen and Kevin Spacey playing the king): each was brilliant in very different productions: traditional, a fascist 1930s, and mid-Atlantic. However these were standalone productions and it is only when you see how Richard develops over the three parts of Henry VI that you can fully understand all the historical background. Having also recently visited Laycock Abbey which was used as a location it was interesting to see how well it worked on screen.

It was no surprise to discover that Benedict Cumberpatch was brilliant in the lead role, but the production had casting in depth with Judi Dench and many other superb actors in supporting roles.

However having watched it at a time when news of the US presidential elections is flooding media as I watched the plays I began to see a strange and unexpected counterpoint to the drama. And then this morning I read this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/opinion/sunday/shakespeare-explains-the-2016-election.html?_r=0

Years ago I read a book called Shakespeare Our Contemporary while studying A Level English. Now I know that Shakespeare will always be our contemporary.