Re: Movie Calendar Girls Free Download
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Calendar Girls is a 2003 British comedy film directed by Nigel Cole. Produced by Touchstone Pictures, it features a screenplay by Tim Firth and Juliette Towhidi, based on a true story of a group of middle-aged Yorkshire women who produced a nude calendar to raise money for Leukaemia Research (subsequently Blood Cancer UK) under the auspices of the Women's Institutes in April 1999 after the husband of one of their members dies from cancer.[3] The film stars an ensemble cast headed by Helen Mirren and Julie Walters, with Linda Bassett, Annette Crosbie, Celia Imrie, Penelope Wilton, Geraldine James, Harriet Thorpe and Philip Glenister playing key supporting roles.
Calendar Girls premiered at the Locarno Film Festival and was later shown at Filmfest Hamburg, the Dinard Festival of British Cinema in France, the Warsaw Film Festival, the Tokyo International Film Festival and the UK Film Festival in Hong Kong. It garnered generally positive reactions by film critics, who compared it with another British comedy film The Full Monty (1997). At a budget of $10 million it also became a major commercial success, eventually grossing $93.4 million worldwide following its theatrical release in the U.S.[2] In addition, the picture was awarded the British Comedy Award for Best Comedy Film, and received ALFS Award, Empire Award and Satellite Award nominations for Mirren and Walters, and a Golden Globe Award nomination for Mirren.[4]
Annie Clarke and Chris Harper live in the Yorkshire village of Knapely, where they spend much time at the local Women's Institute and with each other. When Annie's husband, John, is diagnosed with terminal leukaemia, Chris regularly visits them at the hospital.
Chris complains about the uncomfortable couch in the waiting room. After noticing a "girlie" calendar in a local mechanic's shop, she hits upon an idea to raise funds to buy a new sofa. She proposes producing a calendar featuring members of the Knapely branch of the Women's Institute discreetly posing nude while engaged in traditional WI activities, such as baking and knitting.
Chris's proposal initially is met with skepticism, but she eventually convinces nine additional women to participate in the project with her and Annie. They enlist Lawrence, a hospital worker and amateur photographer, to help with the project. The women are all quite shy, but they support each other, overcoming their fears.
The head of the local Women's Institute branch refuses to sanction the calendar, so Chris and Annie plead their case to the national congress of the Women's Institute in London. They are told the final decision rests with the local leader, who grudgingly agrees to the calendar's sale.
The initial printing of 500 quickly sells out and gains national and international media attention. The women are invited, all expenses paid, to appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in Los Angeles. Initially Chris is convinced to not go, to watch after her troubled teen by Annie, but a scandalous story about her in a gossip rag by a paparazzi-journalist causes her to follow them to L.A.
The publicity surrounding the calendar eventually takes a toll on their personal lives and, during a photo shoot, tension boils over, Chris and Annie angrily clash. Annie accuses Chris of ignoring her husband and son and the demands of the family business in favour of newfound celebrity; Chris believes Annie revels in her Mother Teresa-like status of catering to the ill and bereaved who have bombarded her with fan mail.
The film's fellow calendar girls include Georgie Glen, Angela Curran, Rosalind March, Lesley Staples and Janet Howd as Kathy, May, Truday, Julia and Jenny respectively.[7] Calendar Girls also cast Graham Crowden as Jessie's husband Richard, Belinda Everett as Cora's daughter Maya, Marc Pickering as Jem Harper's friend Gaz and Harriet Thorpe as WI president Brenda Mooney.[7] Gillian Wright appears as Eddie Reynoldson's lover, while John Sharian plays an American commercial director named Danny. In addition actors and actresses Richard Braine, Ted Robbins, Alison Pargeter, Angus Barnett, John Sparkes, Elizabeth Bennett, Christa Ackroyd, Matt Malloy, Patton Oswalt and John Fortune appear in short roles.[7] American television host Jay Leno appears as himself in the film during the ladies' visit to California; they also encounter the American heavy metal band Anthrax while relaxing by the pool.[7]
The fundraising phenomenon of the Calendar Girls was inspired by the death of Angela Baker's husband John Richard Baker, an Assistant National Park Officer for the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, who died from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a form of blood cancer at the age of 54 in 1998. During his illness, Baker's friends began to raise money, initially with the aim of purchasing a sofa for the visitors' lounge in the hospital where John was treated. Nothing could have prepared them for the way their original calendar took off. To date, they have raised over 3 million for Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research (now Blood Cancer UK), the UK's leading blood cancer charity.[8]
Since 2000, the Calendar Girls have produced calendars for 2004, 2005, 2007 and a recipe calendar for 2008 with their favourite Yorkshire recipes on the back of each month. Ten years on, they launched a 2010 calendar with a new set of full colour images and the aim of raising 2 million for Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research.[9] In addition, they have released a range of merchandise in aid of the charity throughout the years.[9][10]
Six of the eleven women who were pictured in the original calendar sold the rights to their stories, including Angela Baker, Tricia Stewart, Beryl Bamforth, Lynda Logan, Christine Clancy and Ros Fawcett. Screenwriter Juliette Towhidi first came across the story when she was shown an article in The Guardian, and she straight away took the idea to producer Suzanne Mackie. The two of them had been discussing ideas for a female-driven film for a while, and this struck them as the perfect project. They travelled up to Yorkshire together to meet the women, and were able to secure life story rights in the face of fierce competition, including from Hollywood. Towhidi then worked on multiple drafts of the screenplay, getting to know the women and developing the script over several years. In this time the film's working title switched from 'Calendar Girls' to 'Jam and Jerusalem' and back again. A first director was attached, but when he dropped out, so Nigel Cole, known for his screen debut Saving Grace starring Brenda Blethyn, was brought on board, quickly followed by screenwriter Tim Firth, who took over writing duties from Towhidi and worked on rewrites of the script up until production.
Filming took place in the summer of 2002. Whereas the actual Calendar Girls were members of the Rylstone Women's Institute, much of the film was shot in and around the village of Kettlewell in North Yorkshire, some ten miles away, which stood in for the fictional village of Knapely.[17] Additional locations include Buckden, Burnsall, Conistone, Ilkley, Settle, Linton, Malham, Skipton, Westminster and Ealing in London, and the beach in Santa Monica, USA.[17] The penultimate shot of lead characters Chris and Annie walking down a street was filmed in Turville. Interiors were filmed in the Shepperton Studios in Surrey.[17]
The pictures in the film-version calendar were taken by professional stills photographer Jaap Buitendijk.[18] Filming of the nude scenes took a week.[16] According to Cole, the actors were struck by group spirit when they met their real-life counterparts from the Women's Institute and experienced the supportive atmosphere that had got them all through the embarrassment of taking their clothes off to make a calendar.[16] That same spirit started to show on set, with the cast becoming determined to be nude, even when it was not requested for filming, including face shots.[16] While Cole and his team placed vegetables strategically for shooting, bits kept showing through and they had to reshoot several scenes.[16] However, a young man from digital remastering had to spend four weeks removing all the private parts in post-production.[16] The actors were very supportive of each other, with a bottle of champagne waiting whenever anyone finished their nude scene.[16]
Hollywood Records was announced as the distributor of the soundtrack album for Calendar Girls which featured sixteen songs, including "You Upset Me Baby" performed by B.B. King, "Sloop John B" by the Beach Boys, "The Way You Do the Things You Do" by The Temptations, and "Comin' Home Baby" by Roland Kirk and Quincy Jones. It was released on 9 December 2003 in the United Kingdom.[19]
In his review for The New York Times, Elvis Mitchell called "minty-cool" Helen Mirren and "deft" Julie Walters "a graceful pair of troupers" and "a sunny, amusing team." He described the film as "yet another professionally acted and staged wry-crisp comedy about British modesty [...] that gets its laughs, but seems increasingly out of date [...] When the biggest compliment you can pay a picture is that it is professional and not smug, there's a little something missing, like invention."[26] Manohla Dargis of the Los Angeles Times said the film "is closer in texture and consistency to individually wrapped American cheese than good, tangy English Cheddar. But even humble plastic-wrapped cheese has its virtues and so does this film [...] Chief among those graces are Helen Mirren and Julie Walters, two well-matched and criminally underused actresses [...] Although they have little to do but grin and bare it, Mirren and Walters are delightful company."[27]
In Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum, who graded the film B+, compared Calendar Girls with other British comedy films such as Billy Elliot and Saving Grace. She commented that "[It] is the first export from the light-comedy-steamroller division of the British film industry that avoids, for the most part, the kind of queasy class condescension such hell-bent charmers have relied on since unemployed steel-mill workers shook their groove thangs in The Full Monty."[28] Variety critic Derek Elley wrote that the film "delivers very likable, if sometimes dramatically wobbly, results". He found that "though the film is never dull, and playing by the cast is spirited, it's actually a surprisingly gentle movie [...] The humor has a typically British, offhanded flavor, and the essentially simple story plays more as a multi-character rondo on a single idea. For every laugh-out-loud moment, or eccentric touch, there are equal moments of reflection and pause [...] Despite an uncertain start in establishing a consistent comic tone, pic builds into an engaging, light character comedy, played somewhere between the Ealing tradition and contempo regional comedy."[29]
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