There's nothing quite like a good feelgood film. In this top 10, we check out great British feelgood films including A Fish Called Wanda, Hot Fuzz and Withnail and I.
Thursday 1 July 2021
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory - the film Roald Dahl hated
Why did Roald Dahl hate Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?
The film was based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a 1964 children's novel by British author Roald Dahl. The story features the adventures of young Charlie Bucket inside the chocolate factory of eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was first published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1964 and in the United Kingdom by George Allen & Unwin 11 months later. The book has been adapted into two major motion pictures: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in 1971, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005. The book's sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, was written by Roald Dahl in 1971 and published in 1972. Dahl had also planned to write a third book in the series but never finished it.[1]
The story was originally inspired by Roald Dahl's experience of chocolate companies during his schooldays. Cadbury would often send test packages to the schoolchildren in exchange for their opinions on the new products.[2] At that time (around the 1920s), Cadbury and Rowntree's were England's two largest chocolate makers and they each often tried to steal trade secrets by sending spies, posing as employees, into the other's factory. Because of this, both companies became highly protective of their chocolate-making processes. It was a combination of this secrecy and the elaborate, often gigantic, machines in the factory that inspired Dahl to write the story.[3]
Source: Wikipedia
What about the film?
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is a 1971 American musical fantasy film directed by Mel Stuart and starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. It is an adaptation of the 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. The film tells the story of a poor child named Charlie Bucket who, after finding a Golden Ticket in a chocolate bar, visits Willy Wonka's chocolate factory along with four other children from around the world.
Filming took place in Munich from August to November 1970. Dahl was credited with writing the film's screenplay; however, David Seltzer, who went uncredited in the film, was brought in to re-work the screenplay against Dahl's wishes, making major changes to the ending and adding musical numbers. These changes and other decisions made by the director led Dahl to disown the film.[5][6] The musical numbers were written by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley while Walter Scharf arranged and conducted the orchestral score.
The film was released by Paramount Pictures on June 30, 1971. With a budget of just $3 million, the film received generally positive reviews and earned $4 million by the end of its original run. The film gained a cult following and became highly popular in part through repeated television airings and home entertainment sales.[7] In 1972, the film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score, and Wilder was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, but both nominations lost to Fiddler on the Roof. The film also introduced the song "The Candy Man", which went on to become a popular hit when recorded by Sammy Davis Jr. and has since been covered by numerous artists.
In 2014, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[8][9]
Source: Wikipedia
"Dahl himself would be exasperated over the 1971 film’s endurance. Though he was nominally billed as its screenwriter, his original adaptation was scarcely detectable beneath all manner of uncredited rewrites, and he was vocal in his disdain for the result, Wilder and all. His list of grievances was long: Dahl had wanted the arch British peculiarity of Spike Milligan or Peter Sellers for Wonka, he was unhappy with the film’s foregrounding of Wonka over Charlie, he resented plot alterations and additions that muddied the cautionary neatness of his original tale, and he wasn’t a fan of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley’s perky song score.
"An author not caring for a creatively divergent adaptation of his book is hardly a stop-the-presses scandal, of course. But after watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory for the first time since my own childhood, where it was a VHS staple of 1980s schoolrooms and friends’ houses, I’m inclined to think he had a point. Stuart’s film is an odd, clunky beast, built from separate parts – a bit of Dahl’s updated Brothers Grimm misanthropy, a lot of cuddlier trends in 1970s family entertainment, and fading fumes from Hollywood’s blockbuster musical craze of the previous decade – that fit together as elegantly as Lego, Meccano and Play-Doh.
"Stuart, a workmanlike film-maker hitherto best-known for documentaries and sitcom-like farces, directed it with a halting, gear-grinding rhythm and an erratic sense of pace: it’s a stately 45 minutes before Wonka even makes his first appearance, whereupon the film rushes through its fantastical factory set pieces with businesslike indifference."
Friday 18 June 2021
The Story of Escape to Victory
Filmed in Hungary, the film is based on the 1962 Hungarian film drama Két félidő a pokolban ("Two half-times in Hell"), which was directed by Zoltán Fábri and won the critics' award at the 1962 Boston Cinema Festival.
The film was inspired by the now discredited story of the so-called Death Match in which FC Dynamo Kyiv defeated German soldiers while Ukraine was occupied by German troops in World War II. According to myth, as a result of their victory, the Ukrainians were all shot. The true story is considerably more complex, as the team played a series of matches against German teams, emerging victorious in all of them, before any of them were sent to prison camps by the Gestapo. Four players were documented as being killed by the Germans but long after the dates of the matches they had won.
Escape to Victory featured a great many professional footballers as both the POW team and the German team. Many of the footballers came from the Ipswich Town squad, who were at the time one of the most successful teams in Europe. Despite not appearing on screen, English World Cup-winning goalkeeper Gordon Banks and Alan Thatcher were closely involved in the film, working with Sylvester Stallone on his goalkeeping scenes. Sports Illustrated magazine said "the game is marvelously photographed by Gerry Fisher, under second unit director Robert Riger."
Since the movie is set in the early years of the German occupation of France (probably 1941 or 1942), Pelé's character, Corporal Luis Fernandez, is identified as being from Trinidad, not Brazil. The Brazilians did not join the war against the Axis powers until 1943, with the Brazilian Expeditionary Force arriving in Italy in 1944. Similarly, Argentinian star Osvaldo Ardiles' character, Carlos Rey, isn't identified as being from any particular country (as Argentina was mostly neutral during the war), though it is generally thought that Rey was from either Mexico or Costa Rica.
Source: Wikipedia
What are the best movies about football?
There's Only One Jimmy Grimble - is it any good?
There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble concentrates on social outcast Jimmy (Lewis McKenzie), a fifteen-year-old who dreams about playing for Manchester City.
It mixes notions of the breakdown of the conventional family unit and social exclusion with coming-of-age, teenage romance and finding an identity. All the while, Jimmy tries to break into his school’s football team and possibly help it win the Manchester Schools Cup final. Ray Winstone and Robert Carlyle also star.
Discover More: The Beautiful Game: Top 10 Films About Football
Friday 11 June 2021
The best films about football
Football, or soccer as it is better known in the USA, has become one of the world’s greatest spectator sports for good reason. For while winning, whether it be a domestic championship, a cup or a continental trophy, is the ultimate “goal”, the journey getting there is an adventure worth living over and over again. It’s the very reason why being a football fan is so exhilarating.
"Football films always have a bit of a hard time. Ultimately, it’s probably because the world’s biggest movie market, the USA, doesn’t really care for football like the rest of the world. Then there’s the ever-present issue that people who enjoy football tend to be busy actually watching the football rather than visiting the cinema. Still, that’s not to say that good football movies don’t exist at all. There are a few gems that have popped up over the years. So, for all the times you’re not watching the World Cup but still need your football fix, we’ve put together of the best football films ever made. As with our romantic and horror movie guides, we looked at scores from Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and IMDB to find the football films with the overall highest average scores. Here they are in order from lowest to highest rated." [Source: Verdict]
"Eric Cantona, Pele and a golden retriever called Buddy feature in some of the most memorable movies about the beautiful game. A good sports movie is difficult to make – or, at least, difficult to find. The paint-by-numbers underdog tale of an unfancied team or player triumphing against all odds is all too common. Add to that the challenge of filming a convincing football match using teams of actors, and it can feel like finding a good football film to watch is more of a challenge than it’s worth." [Source: Goal]
Let's take a look at the best films about football.
Tuesday 8 June 2021
The Best British Documentary Films of the 2010
Documentarists have always had a duty to inform and been given the latitude to influence. But their most important role in an age of increasing media fragmentation is to hold up a mirror to society so we can see ourselves as we really are.
On Top 10 Films, film writer David Parkinson takes a look at British documentary film and the best examples to have emerged in the 2010s.
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