The Commitments

1991 - Dir: Alan Parker
Shown in FeckenOdeon 2 on 2nd August, 2013

The Commitments was Alan Parker's third film about pop music. His first, “Fame”, was a frothy coming-of-age-musical that made the most of its youthful enthusiasm despite a lacklustre script. The second, “Pink Floyd: The Wall”, was a depressive, insular, and angular pastiche of moody myth-making that was interesting mainly for people who fried their brains listening to "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" a hundred times too often. The Commitments sits somewhere in the middle: An engaging, open-hearted entertainment that pulls off two neat tricks. First, it's one of the few movies about rock-pop-soul music that seems to have the right idea about why and how bands come together, with some fine performances from rank amateurs. But more impressively, it finds some great humour in a setting that's defined by grinding poverty. That setting is North Dublin, where Jimmy Rabbite (Robert Arkins) is trying to simultaneously shrug off his parents' bad taste and the dole-driven life that surrounds him. The film is based on the first of Roddy Doyle's so-called "Barrytown Trilogy" about the lives of the Rabbitt family. The remaining two books, The Snapper and The Van were also made into films starring Colm Meaney as Jimmy Rabbitt, Sr.
The really weird thing about watching “The Commitments” now is that it is suddenly a period film. Not so much dated but capturing an era just before it disappeared. Real time-capsule stuff. Relics like video stores abound. And if you don’t get a wave of nostalgia when the price of a bag of chips gets mentioned, you probably weren’t alive in 1991.
As for the music, it propels the film completely in places powered by Andrew Strong’s blistering vocals - Andrew, son of Irish soul singer Rob Strong, was 16 when the film was made and got the part when he tagged along with his dad to an audition. This is his only film appearance but he continues to record and perform. In casting the band at the centre of what was his fourth musical, director Alan Parker auditioned over 3,000 musicians, picking the top 12. It's the old manufactured pop band trick, but Parker also manufactured his cast - 10 of the main players had no previous acting experience. Full performances of soul standards start to dominate as the film goes on culminating with three songs in their entirety towards the end. It’s an amazing latitude given to the material by Parker that is almost unthinkable today.

Lincoln

2012 - Dir: Steven Spielberg

Shown in FeckenOdeon 2 on 5th July, 2013

A HISTORY LESSON : Lincoln is an American film about an American hero. In case your knowledge of American history is as vague as mine, here is a basic primer:
Abraham Lincoln, a self-taught Illinois lawyer and legislator with a reputation as an eloquent opponent of slavery, shocked many when he overcame several more prominent contenders to win the Republican Party's nomination for president in 1860. His election that November pushed several Southern states to secede by the time of his inauguration in March 1861, and the Civil War began barely a month later. Contrary to expectations, Lincoln proved to be a shrewd military strategist and a savvy leader during what became the costliest conflict ever fought on American soil. His Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1863, freed all slaves in the rebellious states and paved the way for slavery's eventual abolition, while his Gettysburg Address later that year stands as one of the most famous and influential pieces of oratory in American history. In April 1865, with the Union on the brink of victory, Abraham Lincoln was shot and killed by the Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth; his untimely death made him a martyr to the cause of liberty and Union. Over the years Lincoln's mythic stature has only grown, and he is widely regarded as one of the greatest presidents in the nation's history.
LINCOLN ON THE BIG SCREEN
Abraham Lincoln has made more film appearances than Mickey Mouse...
● The first known motion picture based on Mr. Lincoln was 1908 film The Reprieve: An Episode in the Life of Abraham Lincoln. Directed by Van Dyke Brooke, the film shows Lincoln pardoning a sentry who fell asleep on duty.
● In 1914 D.W.Griffith’s epic “Birth of a Nation” depicted Lincoln’s assassination and the same director made a biopic in 1930 entitled “Abraham Lincoln”.
● In 1939 Henry Fonda played him in “Young Mr Lincoln” - a fanciful piece which had the young Abraham solving a murder that took place 20 years after his death.
● In 1940 Raymond Massey played him in “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” where the love life of the young Abe was brought to dramatic and colourful life.
● In the 1950s he made the transition to the small screen in episodes of The Readers Digest Teleplays and General Electric Theater.
● In the 1960s he appeared in “The Way the West Was Won” and featured in animatronic form in Walt Disney’s “Great Moments with Mr Lincoln” at the Worlds Fair - and he also time travelled into an episode of “Star-Trek”.
● In the 1970s he appeared in “The Muppet Show” and a Flashman film before going even further down market in the 1980s when he starred in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”. A biopic by Gore Vidal which paired him with Mary Tyler-Moore did little to salvage his reputation.
● It’s probably best to draw a veil over the next two decades -  suffice it to say that Abe appeared in Red Dwarf, Animaniacs, Histeria, Coneheads, Celebrity Deathmatch, Evil Con Carne, The Simpsons... and many, many more.
● He began the present decade in “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter” and one might have thought that his reputation may have been salvaged by tonight’s respectful and dignified film... but, never one to turn a job down, he’s accepted the title role in the forthcoming “Abraham Lincoln vs The Zombies from the Asylum”.

English Vinglish

2012 - Dir: Gauri Shinde

Shown in FeckenOdeon 2 on 17th May, 2013

“Here is a likable family comedy from India with its own air of innocence, and a boisterous cameo from Amitabh Bachchan. Former ad director Gauri Shinde makes her feature debut, and the star is Bollywood veteran Sridevi. It's very amiable, feelgood entertainment that goes down as well as the heroine's tasty ladoos.”
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
For a Bollywood comedy to receive a review, let alone a flattering one, in a British mainstream newspaper would have been unheard of a few years back - but here we are looking forward to a technically accomplished, cleverly scripted and highly enjoyable movie that has earned a box office return far in excess of anything the big American distributors can attain.
It’s a strangely topical tale when issues of immigration are high on the political agenda in the UK and when women are redefining their roles in Indian society. How do you cope when you find yourself in a foreign land unable to understand or speak the language? How do you cope with the unfamiliar social pressures from a freer society? The film tackles the issues with a light touch but the messages are there and may hit home harder for being delivered with a smile.
The star of this film, Sridevi, is remarkable for the fact that she hasn’t acted for 15 years. Her career was at it’s peak when she decided that her young family came first and took a career break. Her return to the screen was a big selling point and it’s fair to say that she didn’t disappoint her fans.

Lawrence of Arabia

1962 - Dir: David Lean - 3 hrs 40 minutes

Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 27th April, 2013

What a bold, mad act of genius it was to make "Lawrence of Arabia," or even think that it could be made. In the words 27 years later of one of its stars, Omar Sharif: "If you are the man with the money and somebody comes to you and says he wants to make a film that's four hours long, with no stars, and no women, and no love story, and not much action either, and he wants to spend a huge amount of money to go film it in the desert, what would you say?" The impulse to make this movie was based, above all, on imagination. The story of "Lawrence" is not founded on violent battle scenes or cheap melodrama, but on David Lean's ability to imagine what it would look like to see a speck appear on the horizon of the desert and slowly grow into a human being. He had to know how that would feel, before he could convince himself that the project had a chance of being successful.
T.E. Lawrence must be the strangest hero to ever stand at the centre of an epic. To play him, Lean cast one of the strangest actors in recent movie history, Peter O'Toole, a lanky, almost clumsy man with a sculptured face and a speaking manner that hesitates between amusement and insolence. O'Toole's assignment was a delicate one. Although it was widely believed that Lawrence was a homosexual, a multimillion-dollar epic filmed in 1962 could not possibly be frank about that. And yet Lean and his writer, Robert Bolt, didn't simply cave in and rewrite Lawrence into a routine action hero. Using O'Toole's peculiar speech and manner as their instrument, they created a character who combined charisma and craziness, who was so different from conventional military heroes that he could inspire the Arabs to follow him in that mad march across the desert.
Although it won the Academy Award as the year's best picture in 1962, "Lawrence of Arabia" would have soon been a lost memory if it had not been for two film restorers named Robert A. Harris and Jim Painten. They discovered the original negative in Columbia's vaults inside crushed and rusting film cans, and they also discovered about 35 minutes of footage that had been trimmed by distributors from Lean's final cut. To see it in a cinema, as we’re doing tonight, is to appreciate the subtlety of Freddie Young's desert cinematography - achieved despite blinding heat and the blowing sand, which worked its way into every camera. "Lawrence of Arabia" was one of the last films to be photographed in 70mm (as opposed to being blown up to 70 from a 35mm negative). We can now, thanks to further restoration work achieved through digital means, see it in 2013 exactly as David Lean meant us to see it in 1962.
● David Lean hoped to film in the real Aqaba and the archaeological site at Petra. Much to his regret, however, the production had to be moved to Spain because of cost overruns and outbreaks of illness among the cast and crew before these scenes could be shot.
● When production was moved to Spain filming did not resume for three months because writer Robert Bolt had been jailed for participating in a nuclear disarmament demonstration. He was released only after Sam Spiegel persuaded him to sign an agreement of good behaviour.
● Peter O'Toole is considerably taller and better looking than the real T.E. Lawrence (6'3" to Lawrence's real life height of 5'6"). Noel Coward is rumoured to have said, on seeing the premiere, "If he'd been any prettier, they'd have had to call it Florence of Arabia."

In Love with Alma Cogan

2011 - Dir.: Tony Britten

Shown in FeckenOdeon 2 on 19th April, 2013

 

The British film industry is good at things like this. Understated, gentle, well written, well acted and highly enjoyable. Unfortunately the people who control our major cinema chains and TV stations don’t agree. "In Love with Alma Cogan" had an excellent script and cast, got backing from the UK film Council and was shot and edited on time. The finished film was shown to universal acclaim at several independent film festivals and gained a major award at the Canadian International Film Festival and then..... nothing. The major distributors, cinema owners and TV programmers wouldn’t touch it. It wasn’t that they thought it was a bad film. It just didn’t fit into any of their categories. Despite the breakthrough of "oldie" films like "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" the big chains still take a great deal of persuading to show anything not aimed at the youth market. It’s possible that the fact that this film doesn’t contain posh theatrical Dames may have counted against it.... Matters are made worse by the fact that most commercial cinemas are in hock to American studios who loaned them money to convert to digital - whilst tying them into deals obliging them to show almost exclusively American films.

The producers did what Tony Hawkes ("Round Ireland with a Fridge") did and what many British film makers are increasingly having to do. They e-mailed small independent cinemas and film societies and asked them to give the film a showing. To date it has been seen in over 60 village halls, arts centres and small cinemas the length and breadth of the land. It’s not quite the same as a blanket circuit release but at least the people who worked hard to make this film have the satisfaction of knowing that it’s being enjoyed by an appreciative public.

The writer and director Tony Britton explains why he made this film:

Some time back, my son Oliver had come back to the UK for a winter visit and sitting on the Pier one windy November, eating fish and chips, insisted that I make a film about the Pier and Pavilion Theatre. A certified Los Angeles film nut, he was convinced that Americans would love this quaint setting and all I had to do was come up with a quintessentially British storyline. I had intended writing something for Norfolk resident Roger Lloyd Pack and the tale of Norman, the world weary boss of the Pavilion Theatre began to take shape. The title and main narrative literally came to me in the bath, just before going to see Roger perform Elliot's "The Wasteland" at the delightful Sheringham Little Theatre.

The Pier Theatre is real. The first recorded show on the pier was in 1905 and it continues to provide summer entertainment in the form of its famous "Seaside Special" show. Far from being on its last legs, it’s a great success and in 2005 the auditorium was extended to increase the capacity to 510.