Thursday 9th September 2010

6.30pm doors open for pre-screening drinks and nibbles

7pm film screens

Our next screening is ‘Brick Lane’ based on a book by Monica Ali. The book was controversial to some Bangladeshis living in London and then the making of the film added fuel to the fire with a group of local Bangladeshis threatening to disrupt the filming and burn the book. The filming then took place elsewhere but not before Germaine Greer weighed in and then Salman Rushdie retaliated to Germaine’s comments.

Read more about this on the Sydney Morning Herald’s archives http://www.smh.com.au/news/film-reviews/brick-lane/2008/03/20/1205602528332.html

Synopsis

At the tender age of seventeen, Nazneen's life is turned upside down. After an arranged marriage to an older man, she exchanges her Bangladeshi village home for a block of flats in London's East End. In this new world, pining for her home and her sister, she struggles to make sense of her existence - and to do her duty to her husband. A man of inflated ideas (and stomach), he sorely tests her compliance.

Told from birth that she must not fight her fate, Nazneen submits, devoting her life to raising her family and slapping down her demons of discontent. Until the day that Karim, a hot-headed local man, bursts into her life.

Against a background of escalating racial tension, they embark on an affair that finally forces Nazneen to take control of her life. Set in multicultural Britain, Brick Lane is a truly contemporary story of love, cultural difference, and ultimately, the strength of the human spirit.

**** "I thought I knew how this would end, but I was wrong."
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

***1/2 "... beautiful... an accomplished feature"
Margaret Pomeranz, AT THE MOVIES

Rated M 101 minutes UK English language

Trailers
http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s2178332.htm

http://www.madman.com.au/actions/catalogue.do?method=view&webChannelId=8&releaseId=9822

Heckle & Jeckle's squawk on 'Bliss'

"Bliss" was not quite blissful, perhaps if it had finished 30 minutes earlier it may have been. That, however, is one opinion, which may not reflect the Reels members, as Bliss received 4 stars in the starbox rating a little bird told me.

What was interesting was the reaction to many of our members after the screening, ‘what was so confronting?’ When it was first released in the 1980s Bliss had people walking out of cinemas, received an R rating and major distributors refused to screen the film. It then became an art-house classic.



We viewers in 2010 didn’t find Bliss confronting at all – well I can’t speak for all the audience – only about a dozen with whom I managed to have a chat. So much in the film was intimated, as opposed to being shown in great detail and today seems rather tame. One of our members thought that Harry was at heart a decent man, who was sucked into the vortex of vacuous human endeavours but then manged to escape the confines of concrete jungles and office cells.

What hasn’t changed over the years are the elements of the story about the human condition – greed, relationships, love, hate, seeking for true meaning of life, destruction of our environment, redemption.

Seeing the movie again after all those years has, however, made me want to go out and re-read the novel.

That's the squawk for now. Original squawkers will be back soon with their entertaining reviews.