London Film Festival is showing seven films featuring music from Music Sales:
Neds
Dir: Peter Mullan
Set in 1970s Glasgow, this film tells the story of a shy and intelligent young boy who, through a series of circumstances, turns into a NED – a non-educated delinquent. Attending a new school, he becomes increasingly violent and aggressive, all the while searching for a way out.
Featuring the song Bring Me Sunshine (Kent/Dee) and score by Craig Armstrong
The King’s Speech
Dir: Tom Hooper
The King’s Speech tells the story of the man who would become King George VI, the father of the current Queen, Elizabeth II. After his brother abdicates, George ‘Bertie’ VI (Colin Firth) reluctantly assumes the throne. Plagued by a dreaded nervous stammer and considered unfit to be King, Bertie engages the help of an unorthodox speech therapist named Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). Through a set of unexpected techniques, and as a result of an unlikely friendship, Bertie is able to find his voice and boldly lead the country into war.
Featuring the songs: Who’s Been Polishing The Sun (Gay), I Love You Truly (Bond/King) and Shout For Happiness (Blight/Hart)
Never Let Me Go
Dir: Mark Romanek
Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley) spent their childhood at a seemingly idyllic boarding school. When they leave the shelter of the school, the terrible truth of their fate is revealed and they must confront the deep feelings of love, jealousy and betrayal that threaten to pull them apart.
Featuring the song Count Your Blessings and Smile (Gifford/Cliffe/Formby)
Made In Dagenham
Dir: Nigel Cole
Sally Hawkins stars as Rita O’Grady, the catalyst for the 1968 Ford Dagenham strike by 187 sewing machinists which led to the advent of the Equal Party Act. Working in extremely impoverished conditions for long, arduous hours, the women at the Ford Dagenham plant finally lose their patience when they are reclassified as “unskilled.” With humour, common sense and courage, they take on their corporate paymasters, an increasingly belligerent local community, and finally the government itself. The film also stars Bob Hoskins, Miranda Richardson, Geraldine James and Rosamund Pike.
Featuring the song The Israelites by Desmond Dekker
The Arbor
Dir: Clio Barnard
Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar was the author of three raw and witty plays, including The Arbor, and the film Rita, Sue and Bob Too, drawing heavily on her experiences growing up on the notoriously deprived Buttershaw estate. She was also someone who led a short and often troubled life, dying of a brain haemorrhage, aged 29, while drinking in her local pub. Artist-filmmaker Clio Barnard, with a commission from Artangel, spent two years interviewing Dunbar’s family and friends, and these personal accounts form the backbone to this extraordinary film. Returning to Buttershaw some 30 years after The Arbor was written, Barnard uses multiple layers of storytelling to explore Dunbar’s creative work and her tragic family legacy. Actors flawlessly lip-synch the interview material to gripping, moving effect. Scenes from The Arbor are performed outside on the estate, watched by residents past and present, and TV documentary footage of Dunbar in the 1980s provides rarely-seen glimpses of the writer and her family. Barnard’s integration of fact and fiction is inventive and seamless, and though the impact is shattering, it is filled with compassion.
Music supervised by Music Sales Film & TV
The Trip
Dir: Michael Winterbottom
Follow two good friends in this hilarious road movie as they embark on a tour of the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales of Northern England, eating, chatting and driving each other crazy. The film stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.
Featuring music by Michael Nyman
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Dir: David Lean
Is this the shape of film restorations to come? The answer, probably, is – inevitably. A combination of punitive laboratory costs, conversion to high-definition projection in cinemas, and digital solutions to insoluble photo-chemical problems means that studios and archives are turning to the new moving-image technologies to rehabilitate their damaged vintage films. ‘Re-inventing the reel’, as it has been called. The purists are unhappy, but the results, in the right hands, can be both curative and spectacular. David Lean’s epic, allegorical blockbuster about the madness of war – recipient of seven Oscars and huge box-office returns, which led to a revived, American-financed British film industry – is such a case: a film with so many inherent problems that Sony-Columbia’s expert preservationist Grover Crisp could only address them digitally; the only way also to return the film to its original CinemaScope aspect ratio. Restored, with stunning clarity, at 4K resolution, Colonel Nicholson and his band of sick, starved, tortured, but undaunted POW bridge-builders now earn their place back on a big West End screen in a shape and colour not seen since the film’s premiere over 50 years ago.
Featuring music by Malcolm Arnold