The History Boys - one for Glaconman

[El Gordo]

GM - Some films are undoubtedly best seen on a big screen (Lawrence of Arabia, Paris Texas, Touching The Void spring to mind, and I'm sure there are tons more), but the sad fact is that 95% of movies I watch are on the small screen. There are huge swathes of the country where it's impossible to see a non-mainstream movie in your local cinema. So while it may be ideal to see films in the cinema, I have to put up with DVD/TV pretty much as standard.

Regarding The History Boys, it has to be said that I wouldn't have seen it if it hadn't been filmed, so I'm very glad it was. If my situation is a representave microcosm then I guess that's one answer to your question -- that it brings the work to a wider audience. I wouldn't take seriously the pursuit of awards as a reason to turn a play into a film, but commercial reasons? Yes, definitely. Why not? Unless a film maker is wealthy enough to amuse himself with vanity projects, I guess there has to be a commercial impetus behind film-making, even if this means just trying to avoid making a loss (rather than expecting to make a big profit).

The thing is, seeing it in the theatre would have been a quite different artistic experience from the film, and I just don't see what's wrong with that. I could also pick up the screenplay in book form and read that with enjoyment too. Supposing it had never been a play, but had been written for the cinema (and I don't know that it wasn't), then we wouldn't have been having this discussion.

I hesitate before saying this, but I just wonder if (given your recent excellent recommendations) you're currently in an English working class groove, and the History Boys represented a kind of irrelevant bourgeois decadence?

Maybe I'm not critical enough, but I think its absolutely possible to be enriched and entertained by Shane Meadows and by the writing of Alan Bennett, just as I can enjoy beer and wine -- even though I may well use different criteria to judge them by.

If I'm honest, sometimes I just want to be entertained and not particularly challenged. I suspect This Is England will be quite uncomfortable viewing, even though I'm sure it will be 'a good film', and I'll be glad to have seen it.