Film in Detail

Placed your bets for Sunday? Siding with home talent Gary Oldman as a spy in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy over Mexican actor Demián Bichir in immigration drama A Better Life? Or predicting triumph for Meryl Streep’s latest character metamorphosis as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady? Taking home a gold Oscar statuette is the ultimate dream of many actors, and we won’t miss tuning in to see who Hollywood honours this year.

The nominees for Best Actor and Best Actress (five in each category) are selected by those members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who were once actors and actresses themselves. The overall winner is then voted on by the whole Academy, made up of more than 6,000 movie professionals, who can join only by invitation. As most of them have strong ties to the Hollywood movie industry, Oscar results tend to favour American actors.

Occasionally a performance in a foreign film will make waves – as when French actress Marion Cotillard won an Oscar for playing singer Edith Piaf in 2007’s La Vie En Rose. Can Jean Dujardin win another French acting nod this year for heavily-tipped movie The Artist? As a nostalgic look at Hollywood’s silent era, the film is certainly geared toward winning the Academy’s hearts.

The Academy has awarded some of the most iconic performances in cinema’s history – from Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane in 1952 western classic High Noon to Liza Minnelli as dancer Sally Bowles in 1972 musical Cabaret and Michael Douglas in his often-quoted role as ruthless corporate executive Gordon Gekko in 1987’s Wall Street.

The formidably talented Meryl Streep has been nominated 17 times – more than any other actor – winning Best Actress for her harrowing portrayal of Polish concentration camp survivor in Sophie’s Choice and Best Supporting Actress in 1979 divorce drama Kramer vs. Kramer.

But the most Best Actress wins goes to Katharine Hepburn, an icon who often played strong-willed, independent women, and was awarded four.
One of these was for 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Considered daring at the time, it sees a white middle-class woman bring her black fiancé home in the face of racial prejudice.

Jack Nicholson has also dominated, earning 12 nominations over the years (for roles including an LA private investigator in 1974’s acclaimed crime noir Chinatown) and three wins. Less lucky is Irish actor Peter O’Toole, who’s had eight nominations (including his title-role performance in 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia) without ever winning.

You might not know the word, but you’ve seen hundreds of montages. If you’re watching a film about a sports team and see a couple of moments from each game, the opponents getting tougher and tougher, until at last we get to the day before the final and the music fades out – that’s a montage. Or it’s the last episode of an American TV drama, a song starts, and we see a few seconds of what each of the main characters are doing in their different homes, bringing everything that has happened that season together. That’s a montage, too. Or if you’ve put together bits of video and photos you’ve shot on your phone, stuck a tune under them and posted it on YouTube – that’s also a montage.

A normal scene in a film either happens in one place, or follows the characters as they move from one place to the next. A montage puts together shots or short sequences from different places or different times or both, often using music, sometimes a big speech, or just natural sound. It can let the filmmaker move time on quickly without skipping forwards. Or it can show us what cops and crooks are doing at the same moment. Or it can be used to illustrate an idea – cutting between a rich man wasting food and a poor family scraping together the tiny bit they have, for instance.

Montages date right back to the early days of film – they were by used by filmmakers including DW Griffith in the 1910s. In Russia in the 1920s, pioneering directors like Sergei Eisenstein in films such as October felt montages were the best way to show the radical ideas that they hoped would change the world.

In Hollywood, montages have more often been a way of telling the story without having the characters explain everything. They are great for showing a character going from tea boy to the top of a company using just a few shots. Or someone turning their life around: one of the most famous is the training sequence in Rocky: we see the title character, a boxer, struggling to run. He’s out of shape. Cut to him exercising in the gym. Then he’s running again, and all the time he’s getting fitter, and finally he’s racing up steps, and we know he’s ready to fight. We’ve learnt so much – and it’s taken less than three minutes.

But film directors often use montages in a lazy way. Bad imitations of the Rocky training segment turn up in almost every sports, martial arts or superhero film. Or how about the bit in a romantic comedy (Confessions Of A Shopaholic to name just one) when a character is given a whole new look, and we them popping in and out shop changing rooms trying on dozens of outfits?

For a perfect montage, it would be hard to beat the heartbreaking bit near the beginning of Up, in which the history of a long, happy marriage is told in just a few minutes with no spoken words. It’s almost a movie all of its own. And it shows why, used well, montages can be filmmaking at its best.
 

Circled by stars against a sunrise, the mountain-peak of Paramount’s logo is one of cinema’s most distinctive images. No wonder, as the studio is the oldest in Hollywood still in existence. Located on Melrose Ave, it’s  also the last major film studio to still have its headquarters in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles and this year Paramount celebrate 100 years of making movies.

Legend has it the mountain was first doodled by W. W. Hodkinson - known as The Man Who Invented Hollywood. After opening one of the first movie theatres in the US, he helped change the way films were made and shown when in 1914 he made a deal with producer Jesse L. Lasky and the Famous Players Film Company (founded 1912) to secure nation-wide distribution for their films

Lasky made the first feature filmed in Hollywood – 1914 silent western The Squaw Man, shot on borrowed money in a rented barn. It was the first movie-directing attempt of Cecil B. DeMille, a then-little-known but flamboyant stage director who was to become one of Hollywood’s most legendary filmmakers (he later made Academy Award-winning The Greatest Show on Earth).

Another Paramount co-founder, Adolph Zukor, believed in the power of stars, and from his Paramount signings emerged some of the first Hollywood celebrities.

Among the earliest was Clara Bow, who played a girl-next-door in love with a fighter pilot in 1927’s Wings - the winner of the first Best Picture Academy Award, and the only silent film to have ever won. Gloria Swanson also became big in the silent era but is now best-known for her later self-referencing role as a fading screen goddess in director Billy Wilder’s acclaimed Sunset Boulevard.

By the 1930s, the arrival of “talkies” (movies with sound) heralded the coming of Hollywood’s Golden Age and new stars to Paramount’s stable. Some are among cinema’s most enduring icons – from Mae West (She Done Him Wrong) to Marlene Dietrich (A Foreign Affair) and from Bing Crosby (White Christmas) to legendary comedians, the Marx Brothers (Duck Soup).

Paramount has kept up its success over a century. It’s the studio behind some of cinema’s all-time classics from Hitchcock (To Catch A Thief, Rear Window, Vertigo) to The Godfather, Roman Polanski’s acclaimed ‘70s noir mystery Chinatown, and several more recent blockbusters including Raiders of The Lost Ark and Star Trek.

When the trailers for One Day, based on David Nicholls’ hugely popular novel, first appeared a couple of months ago, fans had a great time debating a lot of aspects of the film. But almost all of them agreed on one thing: the American actress Anne Hathaway’s attempt at a Yorkshire accent was a truly horrible thing.

Now that might seem a bit surprising because when Hathaway played a British character before, in Becoming Jane (2007), she got big ticks all round. But it turns out that doing what we’ll accept as a 19th century middle-class accent is one thing, and sounding like she grew up in Leeds in the 1980s quite another. A hurt Hathaway has told interviewers she put a lot of work into getting it right – and there is no reason not to believe her – but the result isn’t fooling anyone who has walked the streets of West Yorkshire, and lots who haven’t.

Hathaway is not the first big star to have trouble with accents that belong to a particular patch of the British Isles. Maybe the most famous of all is Dick Van Dyke’s bizarre version of Cockney as Bert the chimney sweep in Mary Poppins (1964) (or ‘Mare-ee Bob-INNS’ as he says it). However, because Van Dyke sounds so amazingly wrong, his awful attempt at talking like a Londoner has become one of the fun things about a much-loved film.

In the early days after the arrival of the talking pictures in the late 1920s, no one was too worried about accurate accents. Finding movie stars who sounded as good as they looked was hard enough. With films like Lassie Come Home (1943) being shot in California, British accents came in a few basic varieties: clipped posh person, cheery servant, comedy Cockney, comedy northerner, impossible-to-understand Scot and the very Welsh Welsh used in How Green Was My Valley (1941). There was a problem, though, when films were sold on how realistic they were. In 1959’s Room At The Top was considered a shockingly honest look at the British class system. The film’s main character, though, was played by Laurence Harvey, who was born in Lithuania and raised in South Africa. In Room At The Top, he only occasionally gets within a couple of hundred of miles of a Yorkshire accent – but then the rest of the cast don’t do much better. Within a couple of years, though, British films were full of northern actors like Albert Finney and Tom Courtney using what were more or less their own accents.

That is why nowadays a truly bad accent clangs so much more. Scot Ewan McGregor can do a pretty decent middle-class southern English accent, but when he tries Yorkshire (Brassed Off) or east London, the results can break the audience’s belief in the film. And when you cast yourself as a Scottish national hero – as Mel Gibson did in Braveheart (1995) – shouldn’t you have an obligation to sound like you grew up in the country?

But maybe the truth is accents aren’t easy. When an actor as usually brilliant as Don Cheadle manages something so weird as his horrible Cockney accent in the Ocean’s Eleven series, we have a choice. We can either stop worrying about regional accuracy – everything in movies is made-up anyway! – or start blaming the bad casting that put an actress like Anne Hathaway into a very British, very time and place specific film like One Day.

More from FILMCLUB

>> On the Blog: We review One Day
>> Films by theme: Films of books
>> Film season: Welsh films

Ever since an atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima in 1945, the human race’s capacity to bring about its own extinction has had a massive impact on popular culture – not least in cinema.

In projects from the 1950s mutation movies, such as The Incredible Shrinking Man, to the 1999 comedy Blast from the Past and the Terminator franchise, filmmakers have repeatedly explored the themes of nuclear technology and its potentially devastating effects and abilities. While some use fact as a springboard for entertaining science fiction, others stick to sobering truths to educate and prompt debate. The latest must-see addition to the genre – the chilling documentary Countdown to Zero (2010) – belongs in the latter category, and has unsurprisingly created a buzz.

Delivering a history lesson-cum-wake-up call, it examines how the escalating nuclear arms race and the current, unstable world climate are making real-life nuclear disaster an increasing possibility. Not the easiest watch, granted, but a thought-provoking, eye-opener nonetheless.

Which is the same way you could describe two key films from the globally tense 1980s: the made-for-TV Threads (1984) and the heartbreaking cartoon, When the Wind Blows (1986). Categorized as kind of educational horror flicks by freaked out viewers at the time, they both imagine what would happen to ordinary folks in the event of a nuclear attack on Britain.

Back in the 50s, when nuclear peril first became a popular movie topic, this sort of graphic enlightening wasn’t necessary: after all, nuclear weapon tests were high profile, and memories of the atomic bombing of Japan were still relatively fresh. So what mainly hit the big screen was a wave of metaphorical fantasy flicks, merely drawing on nuclear reality. The original Godzilla (1954) remains a particularly enjoyable example of how public fear was exploited for fun, with its exciting narrative about an enormous, Tokyo-trashing reptile that’s been mutated by radioactive fallout.

Entirely realist movies were also released, however, among them the 1950 British drama Seven Days to Noon, in which an English scientist threatens to nuke central London if the government doesn’t stop its atomic weapons research. Later, iconic Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear (1955) became one of the earliest features to deal with the psychological impact of the Nuclear Age, with its unsettling tale of a foundry owner so terrified of nuclear war that he ends up in an asylum.

This more serious approach can likewise be seen in 1961’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire – a convincing disaster yarn whose global warming-type scenario gives proceedings a contemporary relevance, as nuclear blasts knock the world off its axis and send it spinning towards the sun.

In fact, escalating Cold War tensions meant few Sixties moviegoers could escape nuclear issues. The savage satire of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1963), for instance, nails the era’s paranoia, with its hilariously twisted account of a frantic political attempt to avert total annihilation after a nuclear strike is launched against Soviet Russia (a similar plot to 2000’s ambitious thriller re-make, Fail Safe).

Other classic examples include the cracking James Bond adventure Goldfinger (1964), which sees a villain planning to detonate an atomic device; and 1968’s fantastic, futuristic nightmare, Planet of the Apes, depicting an Earth ruled by apes because of nuclear war.

Artier types should also check out 1962’s haunting, landmark short, La Jetée. Using a series of still photographs, this inspiration for 1995’s Twelve Monkeys tells a post-nuclear apocalypse story of a man sent back through time to save humanity.

Contrary to what you may now think though, not all nuclear technology films are about bomb-created catastrophe and threats: The China Syndrome (1979) is one of the most gripping accident-at-a-nuclear-power-plant dramas, and especially pertinent following this year’s events in earthquake-stricken Japan.