Cinema Club: An Education

Evening all.

We had another decent turn-out this afternoon for our society visit to the Arts Centre to see An Education, which seemed- on the whole- to be a hit with our members. Varsity was FULL AS, so we went to Bar Fusion (mostly. Where did you other guys go? Why?!).

Here’s my review of An Education. Remember, anyone who wants to contribute a review or article to this blog can do so! Just email it in to the society.

David

———————————
An Education (dir. Lone Scherfig, 2009) ****

reviewed by David Sugarman

A couple of years ago, The History Boys took a wry look at college students in the 1980s and their attempts to get into Oxford. And starred Dominic Cooper. Now, An Education details the story of a young woman in the early ’60s as she prepares for her A-levels. And stars Dominic Cooper. Where The History Boys struggled was in providing full characterisation for all the boys, a problem that An Education sidesteps by focussing on a single protagonist, Jenny (Carey Mulligan).
Jenny is offered a ride home in the car of David (Peter Sarsgaard), a young, roguish – and Jewish, a fact exploited to great hilarity in several scenes- fellow with no discernible occupation and a great talent for smooth-talking. Caught up in the moment, Jenny falls for David’s romantic, seemingly exotic life. David’s friends, the slick Danny (Cooper) and his ditzy blonde girlfriend (Rosamund Pike) reinforce the contrast between the apparent freedom offered by David and the boredom suffered by her teachers and parents.
Mulligan and Sarsgaard give admirably restrained performances in roles that could have become rather melodramatic, and both give a sense of great maturity, even if beneath the surface the characters are anything but mature. I think I laughed at pretty much every joke in the film, and while it drifted to a somewhat predictable conclusion, I’m happy to forgive An Education that fault.

Cinema Club week 7

An Education is a kind of coming-of-age thingy set in the ’60s and it has the guy who plays Mark in Garden State in it. Personally really looking forward to seeing this on Wednesday, I hope you all are coming.

Badly written post but there we are.

David

The ‘British Urban’ Cycle

Bullet Boy, Kidulthood, Adulthood, Rollin’ with the Nines; what do these films have in common? London, gangs, guns, crime and grime. If Ritchie’s movies are over-the-top Guns ‘n’ Geezers tripe. With a knowing smirk directed at the 1960s and more shallow postmodernism than you could shake a stick (or gun) at then the ‘British Urban’ Cycle is its antithesis.
With real locales, real characters, real stories and real concerns; the new breed of British crime film owes more to the late 1950s and early 1960s Kitchen-Sink drama than to any British crime film before it. London in these films isn’t even the East End. There’s no geezers running their manor from a backstreet pub. It’s kids in single-parent families living in North London just trying to get by. The parents lament their children joining gangs. These new criminals might not have the complete family unit but they have no need to turn to crime. They have material things (Nike trainers, Adidas tracksuits, BMXs) but crime is a sign of masculinity and brings honour, and respect, for your name.
So what are these films telling us? That London has a knife and gun crime problem, that gangs exist, that crime is about respect not money, that the pursuit of money is to facilitate the earning of respect, and that the only way to get that money is through dealing drugs, shooting thugs and not being taken for a bunch of mugs.
As longh as crime of this variety exists then the films will continue to follow. The four films mentioned at the top of this musing are (for my money) modern classics in the British crime genre. They are realistic, brutally violent and brutally honest. Performances are superb and they have encouraged the production of some the finest work in the grime scene. This may be the most important British crime genre cycle since the spivs.

Paz Bassra

Thoughts on British Cinema

“Apart from a brief upsurge of interest between 1942 and 1947, British cinema has been disparaged and depised for most of its existence.” (Murphy, 1997)
Why? When we have directors such as Lean, Powell & Pressburger, Carol Reed, Michael Crichton, Mike Hodges, Guy Hamilton, Ken Loach, Stephen Frears, Allan Clarke, Anthony Minghella, Mike Leigh . . . Actors such as James Mason, John Mills, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Stanley Baker, Albert Finney, Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, Clive Owen, Daniel Craig . . . Actresses such as Googie Withers, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren . . .
I could list more (set designers, producers, editors, scriptwriters) but you get the picture. The amount of genuine talent produced in these Isles surely means that some interesting and worthy cinema has been made. Murphy was writing in 1997 and a small increase of writing on Britsh cinema has occurred. Yet, this increase has neglected the contemporary British output. The academice journals pour scorn on Ritchie and Love (in contrast to the tabloid press and mainstream magazines) and somehow (unfathomably) Danny Boyle and Ken Loach’s work (post-1990) have been overlooked.
In all honesty, for a landmass as small as the United Kingdom we really punch above our weight with regards to quality work from our own national film industry and from what our expats provide for Hollywood. In this decade: Bond has been reborn and reinvigorated; Meadows has captured the spirit of lowlife England; Love and Ritchie have turned a profit; Minghella was reaching his zenith (sadly spoilt by his untimely death); Boyle has become one of the top 10 directors in the world; Gervais has wowed Hollywood enough to take him from TV to High Concept Blockbusters; Knightley has put the sex back into the period drama (sadly lacking since Margaret Lockwood); and, Statham has redefined what makes an action hero in the post-modern film industry.
It’s up to our generation to celebrate what Brits are bringing to cinema. It’s up to our generation to make british cinema; to make films that tell stories about our nation. It’s up to our generation to make sure that British cinema never dies.

Paz Bassra

REVIEW: Synecdoche, New York

Synecdoche, New York (dir. Charlie Kaufman, 2008) *****

reviewed by David Sugarman

The critically celebrated, Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, previously known for penning such startlingly original, surreal movies as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation. and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has made his directorial debut with what is simply the saddest film I have ever seen. Synecdoche, New York stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as theatre director Caden Cotard, a man plagued by the frailty of his body and his own emotional failings, attempting to do something worthwhile with his life. Receiving a MacArthur Genius Grant (which apparently do exist, though not to the same extent as Caden puts his), Caden decides to put on a new play, one which leads him to oversee the building of a scale-model of New York in a warehouse.

Kaufman’s film is both very funny and emotionally devastating. Hoffman is always fantastic, and has won an Oscar in the past, but that performance can surely have been no greater than his showing here as the tortured Caden. The supporting cast, which includes Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener and Michelle Williams as the major women in Caden’s life is outstanding all-round. Though the situation is possibly even weirder than the premise of Malkovich, and more meta than Adaptation., it is also even more moving than Eternal Sunshine. As Caden’s life slowly progresses (revealed through subtle alterations of costume and make-up, until you realise that 20 years have passed), bits and pieces of his life fall away, until… well. This film brought me closer to tears than any other in years. Which I applaud.

——————————
Synecdoche, New York is on at the Warwick Student Cinema on this Sunday, at 18:30 and 21:30. Please go and see it. It’ll make me happy if you do. This review contains no mention of two other Kaufman-scripted films: Human Nature, which was directed by Michel Gondry, and is not without its moments of genius but is largely underwhelming, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, directed by George Clooney. Which I haven’t yet seen.

David

edit: word has just reached me that Fox have cancelled Joss Whedon’s latest TV show, Dollhouse. While it wasn’t always consistent, Dollhouse was a very intelligent and entertaining show, and I’m sorry to see it go. Happily, however, it will be allowed to run for the remainder of its second season so Whedon can give it a decent ending, something that his previous Fox cancelletion (the vastly superior Firefly, possibly the best TV show I’ve ever seen) was denied.

REVIEW: Brick

Brick (dir. Rian Johnson, 2005) *****

reviewed by David Sugarman

Is there any genre with as poor a track record as the high school movie? Against that legacy is set this indie debut from film-school graduate Rian Johnson. Brick is a gem of a film, ingeniously mashing two of the most American of genres as high schooler Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) turns detective to investigate the death of his former girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin). In his investigation Brendan must navigate through a rogues gallery of drug dealers, informants, femme fatales and the school authorities.

Brick is my favourite film of all time. I expect I have seen it on more than ten occasions since I first saw it on TV in 2007, and each time I see it I love it even more. Each time I watch it I find something new to love: the local drug baron The Pin (Lukas Haas) and his fondness for Tolkien; his homicidal sidekick Tugger (Noah Fleiss) and his crew of identical wife-beater wearing thugs; and the self-obsessed quarterback, Brad Bramish, and his prize routine comeback of “Yeah?”.

There’s not much about Brick that is genuinely original as such, but the skill and confidence with which Johnson throws such disparate elements into play together equals more than the sum of its parts, and proves again and again that you just can’t beat a great script delivered by good performances. Johnson’s dynamic directorial style makes his Sundance award winning debut such a joy to watch that any attempt to define Brick solely by its genre really cannot accurately convey the tone of the picture. Fantastic.

Up In The Air

David

REVIEW: Everlasting Moments

Everlasting Moments (dir. Jan Troell, 2008) **

reviewed by David Sugarman

Sweden’s entry into the 2009 Academy Awards for Best Film in a Foreign Language did not make the list of nominees. I am not surprised. Sometimes films like Everlasting Moments catch some kind of critical zeitgeist and sweep the board, but there was no such luck for this stagnant, pompous portrait of family life in early 20th century Sweden.

The premise of the film is a rocky and apparently loveless marriage that seems to have been born entirely of the shared desire to own a camera, which is instantly put away and forgotten for years. When the wife, Maria, rediscovers the camera, she attempts to sell it, but is persuaded instead to do use it. Mostly the put-upon housewife uses it to pay the bills by charging her friends and neighbours for portraits, but the photography provides the one truly electric scene here, when Maria photographs the corpse of a child who has drowned for her friend. The movie is narrated by her daughter Maja, who was not present for 90% of the action and director Troell never attempts to explain how Maja knows what happens. Over the two-and-a-bit hours of its running time, Everlasting Moments shows its audience repeated incidents of domestic abuse perpetrated by the family’s patriarch, a boorish, philandering, idiot drunk of a man – one of the least sympathetic characters I have seen on screen- whose marriage we are asked to support. Actually, he’s probably the most interesting character in the piece. And he’s boring.

Walking out of the cinema, I heard countless elderly audience members praising this “lovely bit of social history”. Jan Troell’s film aims for grit and charm but manages instead to be both overly sentimental and soulless.

————————-

This film made me angry. Has anyone else seen it? I’d like alternative opinions.

David

REVIEW: (500) Days of Summer

(500) Days of Summer (dir. Marc Webb, 2009) *****

reviewed by David Sugarman

Right at the beginning of (500) Days of Summer, the narrator informs the audience that this is “A story of boy meets girl”, but “it is not a love story”. Marc Webb’s film does not detail a relationship that overcomes obstacles to unite its protagonists. Like Annie Hall and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind before it, (500) Days of Summer instead revisits moments from Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Finn’s (Zooey Deschanel) coexistence as colleagues, friends, and lovers in no particular order. Like those other two films, (500) Days does not insist that honesty and realism must go together, instead allowing surreal moments to flower unexpectedly: a full-on Hollywood musical mass dance number; a black & white cinema dream montage; and Tom’s little sister is exactly the kind of wise-beyond-her-years girl that Hollywood has always insisted exists.

One of the film’s crowning set-pieces (and one much discussed by critics) is one in which Tom attends a party thrown by Summer, after she has left him. In split-screen, one half of the screen shows Tom’s expectations, the other reality. Joseph Gordon-Levitt holds a very dear place in my heart through his role in the indie high school-noir Brick, and he’s a perfect fit for the likeable Tom, caught up in a dead-end job he has no interest in. Though he qualified as an architect, Tom now writes greeting cards, and it is here that he meets Deschanel’s Summer when she becomes his boss’s assistant. I think Deschanel is a good actor, though I can’t be sure; whether because of acting talent, or through sheer beauty, Zooey Deschanel simply radiates charisma. Both of the stars flourish with the aid of the brilliantly witty script. Although much of the film is infused with heartbreak, it is also riotously funny, and Geoffrey Arend is hilarious as Tom’s colleague and school-friend McKenzie. Despite the frequently downbeat tone of the film, (500) Days of Summer is constructed with such verve and aplomb that you’ll leave the cinema beaming.

———————-

OK? This is possibly my favourite film of the summer, I absolutely adored it. You can probably tell. If you’ve seen it, I hope you think my review does it justice. I know Paz disagrees with me entirely.

David

We Are The People

What do you make of Empire of the Sun? The band, not the book (excellent) or film (haven’t seen). Personally I find the singer’s voice a little irritating. Not sure why I brought that up…

Oh, yes. We are the people. “We” being your ever-loving exec, who are the people who will all be writing on this here blog. We will be posting our views on all sorts of things, including new and reviews, plus of course the latest society doings.

If you’ve got a piece you’d like to see up here in sparkly lights, just email it to us via the usual website.

The reviews should be formatted something like this…

Film Title (director, year of release) Score out of 5 stars!

[Insert your review here!]

I’ll post one of mine shortly.

Cheers, y’all.

David

(President)