Once a month – or more often if we feel we are fielding a particularly strong programme – we invite you to stay back after the feature, have a glass of wine with us, and shoot from the hip on the topic of that week’s main feature.
You can join us to watch the film that night before Film Club, or if you’ve seen it earlier in the week and fancy getting involved you’re welcome to turn up when the film finishes to join in.
Discussion is wide-ranging. To date we have deconstructed Inception at length (and still failed to reach consensus!), constituted an ad hoc Jeff Bridges fan club, and debated violence in cinema and roles for women. Each month’s film takes us in new and interesting directions. Why not join us? Look out for the Lexi Film Club logo on the programme.
Tue, Apr 26; Thu, Apr 28. Q&A and film club with director, Joanna Hogg, Apr 26
“A testing, beguiling, beautiful film.” Tom Seymour, Little White Lies
With her directorial debut, Unrelated, Joanna Hogg announced herself as a filmmaker with a distinctive vision, and her specialist subject is upper-middle class English family life. Hogg, herself the product of affluent Middle England, is highly literate in the unspoken dialogue of these relationships, and of the subtle bonds that ensnare even the members of an unhappy family. The premise in Archipelago is a family holiday on the Scilly isle of Tresco. They are gathered to send-off the son who is going off to pursue a dream of ‘Service’ in impoverished Africa. Celebration gradually cedes to internecine arguing as doubt, jealousy and vulnerability take hold. Hogg is understanding enough of her subject, though, not to leave all fractured, and she shows how, ultimately, the family bonds will surmount the differences. If for no other reason, see this film for a perfect storm of a scene in which the daughter sends her meal back! Throughout, the performances – from Tom Hiddleston, Kate Fahy and Amy Lloyd – are richly restrained and complex, revealing verities in the mundane.
Having paid her dues in mainstream television, as film director Hogg is compellingly fresh in her mise en scene. The camera is ‘pitched’, and remains unmoving as characters wander into – and out of – shot. With the camera as voyeur, much takes place tantalisingly just out of shot. Some of the most revealing developments are seen and not heard, while other scenes feel inconsequential as Hogg adds layer upon layer to her characters. Interiors are rigorously unlit, filmed only in available light, while the naturalism of the performances allows for excruciatingly awkward pauses in the fractured dialogue. Allow yourself to relax into the vocabulary of the film and you will find it the work of a wonderfully mature and original film maker!
We are very pleased that Joanna Hogg will be joining us after the screening on the 26th. We can think of no better subject for April’s Film Club; we hope you’ll agree.
Tue, Apr 26; Thu, Apr 28. Q&A and film club with director, Joanna Hogg, Apr 26
“A testing, beguiling, beautiful film.” Tom Seymour, Little White Lies
With her directorial debut, Unrelated, Joanna Hogg announced herself as a filmmaker with a distinctive vision, and her specialist subject is upper-middle class English family life. Hogg, herself the product of affluent Middle England, is highly literate in the unspoken dialogue of these relationships, and of the subtle bonds that ensnare even the members of an unhappy family. The premise in Archipelago is a family holiday on the Scilly isle of Tresco. They are gathered to send-off the son who is going off to pursue a dream of ‘Service’ in impoverished Africa. Celebration gradually cedes to internecine arguing as doubt, jealousy and vulnerability take hold. Hogg is understanding enough of her subject, though, not to leave all fractured, and she shows how, ultimately, the family bonds will surmount the differences. If for no other reason, see this film for a perfect storm of a scene in which the daughter sends her meal back! Throughout, the performances – from Tom Hiddleston, Kate Fahy and Amy Lloyd – are richly restrained and complex, revealing verities in the mundane.
Having paid her dues in mainstream television, as film director Hogg is compellingly fresh in her mise en scene. The camera is ‘pitched’, and remains unmoving as characters wander into – and out of – shot. With the camera as voyeur, much takes place tantalisingly just out of shot. Some of the most revealing developments are seen and not heard, while other scenes feel inconsequential as Hogg adds layer upon layer to her characters. Interiors are rigorously unlit, filmed only in available light, while the naturalism of the performances allows for excruciatingly awkward pauses in the fractured dialogue. Allow yourself to relax into the vocabulary of the film and you will find it the work of a wonderfully mature and original film maker!
We are very pleased that Joanna Hogg will be joining us after the screening on the 26th. We can think of no better subject for April’s Film Club; we hope you’ll agree.
In a flurry of coincidences and reversals, the late-life divorce of Alfie and Helena affects all around them. Alfie rebounds into marriage with a high maintenance ex-prostitute while bereft Helena finds great comfort in spiritualism and clairvoyance. Folly and dodgy marriages aren’t confined to the older generation, though; the couple’s daughter toys with infidelity while her husband, a blocked writer, appropriates the unpublished novel of a dead friend. Then he discovers that reports of his friend’s death were a trifle premature…
This is Woody Allen’s fourth film set in London and by all accounts he is finally getting it right. Allen’s sophisticated comedies of manners rely on an intimate understanding of people and place, something which has been lacking up until now. This fluid farce has a mouth-watering ensemble cast - Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin and Anthony Hopkins, with Naomi Watts, Frieda Pinto and the much-praised Gemma Jones - and it stylishly wraps up in one neat little package ideas about romantic fate, and yearnings for Other and Better. These are not new themes for Allen, but his typically wry musings on relationships always delight!
From Feb 18th; Lexi Film Club on Weds, Feb 23rd, following the 19:30 screening
“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.”
So begins Charles Portis’ book, True Grit, in the voice of 13 year old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld). Young Mattie vows “an eye for an eye” after the murder of her father by low-down skunk Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). She hires the meanest rattlesnake of a US Marshall she can find, one Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), to act as the agent of her vengeance. Cogburn in turn recruits similarly perfidious LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) to help, but their plans to ditch the girl and claim the reward go awry as blood-thirsty Mattie sticks closer than a burr over classic Western terrain, leading – of course – to wild and lawless Choctaw country…
Therein you get the flavour of the piece – part homage, part parody. But by all accounts this is the Coen brothers showing respect for a change: respect for the venerable Western; respect for the cult book on which the film is based; respect even, perhaps, for their own mature film making skills. Whereas so many Coen bros films are distinguished by their tang of cynicism, True Grit radiates affection as it chortles at its own enjoyment of the genre. Boasting a literate script and glorious cinematography, the greatest triumph is the performances. Hailee Steinfeld is a modern American Gothic as blood-thirsty Mattie, and Jeff Bridges brings a nastiness to the role that the Duke in the 1969 original would’ve envied. So, sidle on over to the bar for a shot of red eye, kick those boots off, and hunker down for more fun than a possum shoot!
OSCAR UP-DATES: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Jeff Bridges), Best Supporting Actress (Hailee Steinfeld), Best Adapted Screenplay, + 4 nominations in technical categories
127 Hours tells the incredible true story of American adrenaline junkie Aron Ralston, who in May 2003 was forced to cut off his own arm after becoming pinned in a deep crevasse in Utah. Danny Boyle’s (Slumdog Millionaire) film is at once sincere, faithful and unapologetically authentic in its visceral recreation of events. James Franco (Eat, Pray, Love) delivers a career-best as Ralston, capturing the desperation of the situation while conveying his intensifying existential crisis. The film has moments of great pain and anguish but, shot in Boyle’s trademark idiosyncratic style, it is also a triumphant, never-say-die morality tale with bags of energy and inspiration. Actor and director have both never been better!
Are you a fan of Danny Boyle, who has been making film waves since Trainspotting, or would you welcome the chance to look more closely at man-of-the-moment Franco’s multi-faceted career? Join us on Tuesday, 25th January after the film for the Lexi Film Club, a chance to join fellow enthusiasts over a glass of wine.
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