Cemetery junction

At last, a film about life assurance! According to Wikipedia this film was meant to be called "The man from the Pru" until Prudential read the script and decided it didn't paint life assurance in the right light! I rented this film on Lovefilm, and enjoyed it a lot. It was written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant - Gervais also has a supporting role in the cast. It is set in 1973 in a Reading suburb, and the period settings are all perfect - the music, the clothes, the hairstyles, even the wallpaper! It is the story of three mates in their early twenties finding their way in life. Freddie has secured a job at a life assurance company, to save him from working in the factory, and give him the chance to have a Rolls Royce in 20 years. Bruce works in the said factory and is an angry young man, with a poor relationship with his out of work Dad and a tendency to get involved in fights. Snork is a likeable misfit with some "interesting" self-designed tattoos and a deft way of turning off the girls, and works at the railway station. The three together have a close bond and the story is altogether very uplifting, and there is some grooovy dancing too! There are some amusing one liners such as "Freddie, stop listening to all this music by poofs. Put some Elton John on!" Ralph Fiennes and Emily Watson are very good as Mr & Mrs Life Assurance boss. Fiennes is remarkably like an unfunny Leonard Rossiter.

Le fate ignoranti

I saw this film a while ago at the cinema, but rented it again on Lovefilm.  However, the DVD was quite damaged, so it kept on stalling - grr!  Anyway, I still enjoyed seeing the film, directed by Turkish-Italian director Ferzan Ozpetek in 2001.  It is the story of Antonia (Margherita Buy), whose husband Massimo is killed in a car accident.  After the accident, Antonia discovers that Massimo has been having a seven year affair with a man, Michele (Stefano Accorsi).  Antonia is initially hostile towards Michele, and his circle of friends (who seem to spend a lot of their spare time hanging out at his lovely rooftop apartment in Rome!), but strong relationships soon develop.  It is an interesting and gentle film which I enjoyed a great deal.

Les Diaboliques

This 1955 French film, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, got off to a good start as the opening scene features a nice citroen 2cv van, and I like French classic cars a great deal. The film is a suspenseful thriller about the wife and mistress of a bullying school headmaster planning to jointly kill him. The tension is nicely paced during the film, with a pleasing denouement. There is a very sweet little announcement at the end of the film asking the viewers not to reveal the twist in the tale, so I won't! I went to see the film at the Curzon Mayfair, which is probably my favourite cinema in London.

Limitless

I went to see this at the delightful Cineworld Shaftesbury Avenue, where if you have a spare ten minutes before the film you can savour the ambience of the video games of the wonderful Trocadero centre. Anyway back to the film. Bradley Cooper stars as a thirtyish bloke in New York who is trying to be an author, without success, when he stumbles across some new illegal pills which make you hyper intelligent. His life unsurprisingly improves radically, but at some cost. Despite this slightly bizarre plot, the film had plenty of twists and turns and kept me interested throughout. Robert de Niro stars as a ruthless businessman.

Kendal Mountain Film Festival

I went to an evening of films from last year's Kendal Mountain Film Festival, being held in support of charity Porters Progress, held at the Royal Geographical Society.  Comfy seats, but no popcorn.  I am planning to go to the festival this year, and wanted to see what types of films are shown.  In total there were 11 films shown, varying from the six minute long MedeoZ to the 30 minute long Wild Water.  All of them had some elements of interest - mostly to do with the beauty / danger of the mountains, but I felt that some of them lacked real human interest.  For example, Wild Water had some stunnign footage of kayaking down some really extreme rivers, which to my eyes looked pretty death defying.  However, I didn't find the clips where the participants were talkign about their motivations to be particualrly interesting.  In contrast, I saw the film Blindsight at the London Film Festival a few years ago.  It profiled the attempt by blind American climber Erik Weihenmayer (who has summited Everst in addition to many other large mountains) to lead a group of blind and partially sighted Tibetan young people up a mountain beside Everest - to be fair it was a full length documentary and you really got to understand some of the the human stories, in addition to seeing some of the mountain beauty.

One highlight of the evening was seeing a film called The Swiss Machine (which won the award of Best Mountaineering Film at the festival last year) about Ueli Steck, who is a Swiss speed mountaineer, and has set the record for the ascent of the Eiger at 2hours 47 minutes.  Pretty awe inspiring but slightly mad too!  Another amusing one was "A short ski in the Hindu Kush" which profiled the attempt to go ski-ing in a remote part of Afghanistan - again quite zany, but inspiring as well - as the filmaker said herself, she is passionate about ski-ing, and it is importnat that people follow their passions!

Oranges and Sunshine

This is one of the most affecting films I have seen in many years.  It tells the true story of Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphreys who in the 1980s stumbled across the shameful deportation of up to 130,000 children from the UK to Australia in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. She starts by helping to reunite one woman with her mother and then goes on to set up the Child migrants trust, and essentially dedicate her career to this area.  The film is deeply moving at times, but is also gentle and restrained - for example there are very few portrayals of anger, despite the appalling way in which the children and their mothers had been treated (e.g. lots of children were told they were orphans when they weren't, and then were placed in childrens homes where they were essentially treated as slave labour).  There are several aspects of the story that are outrageous - e.g. it took 23 years for the British and Australian governments to apologise.  I saw the film at the BFI in London with my friend Hilary, and the screening was even further enhanced by a Q&A session hosted by the ever impressive Sandra Hebron of the BFI, and with the scriptwriter (Rona Munro), director (Jim Loach, son of Ken), lead actress (Emily Watson) and Margaret Humphreys herself.  I would very strongly recommend you go and see this film if you get the chance.  I know it features as part of the forthcoming Australian film festival at the Barbican centre in London, and then i guess it might come on general release.