20/08/2016

Now on BBC News, a Talking Movies Sports Special.

Hello, and welcome to Talking Movies.

In today's programme, as the Olympic Games draws

to a close, we look at how cinema has often used this international

sports extravaganza as the backdrop to explore a wide range of issues.

And we also revisit a much loved Olympic sports from which shines

a light on a country overlooked by mainstream movies.

And, as the Olympics come to an end, blockbuster season will shortly be

So we are reviewing the season's highs and lows on finding out

what you, the public, mode of it all.

Plus two of the smallest pictures to have seen the light of day

All that and more, in this edition of Talking Movies.

Historically, many films have used the Olympic Games not just

to explore the sporting extravaganza itself,

but also to cast a light on a wide range of issues.

Everything from anti-Semitism to racism, to matters of gender

and terrorism have been dealt with in different Olympic

Talking Movies has been exploring this trend.

To many, one of the greatest movies to use the Olympic Games

as a backdrop is the Oscar-winning Chariots Of Fire.

It's set in the early 1920s, with a story that touched on among

other things anti-Semitism, as do the German Olympic Games

Set in 1936, which also deals with gender issues.

And Race patrolled the racism confronting

four-time gold medal winner African American Jesse Owens,

Where is it that Olympic Games themed films so often turn

Because I think the Olympics are heightened, it's international,

so it just sets the scene for all kinds of drama to play out,

and all kinds of issues to be discussed.

But just how accurate are these films which are often

The athletes of the Israeli team are being held prisoner...

Munich, released in 2005, directed by Steven Spielberg,

begins with the Palestinian militant group Black September holding

athletes hostage at the 1972 Munich summer Olympics.

Former Israeli agent Juval Aviv, whose story is said to have inspired

Munich, maintains the film is precise in its portrayal of events.

Although I spent time with Spielberg discussing a lot of it,

When I finally saw the movie - I had a special screening for myself

and my family - I went through two boxes of tissues.

Because it was really going back and reliving the whole of it again.

Irrespective of their factual accuracy, some of these

issue-oriented Olympic Games films still have topical relevance.

Chariots Of Fire depicted a form of polite or gentleman's

anti-Semitism, existing in a world where discrimination

Gentleman's anti-Semitism is maybe not as both on and maybe not

Gentleman's anti-Semitism is maybe not as brazen and maybe not

as violent in its manifestation, but at its core it is as ugly

Low-level bubbling of anti-Semitism in the film is equitable with what's

happening now in terms of anti-Islamic

Do these films, which often deal with some quite urgent problems,

make a difference, or are they just dismissed as entertainment?

One of the main ways in which these pictures can make an impact

Munich got a lot of people talking, it certainly was

Certainly many people either never knew or had forgotten about what had

It's one of the best movies about the global war on terror,

even though it was about an event that happened earlier.

Claims are also made for Chariots Of Fire, and it sparked

The message in these Olympic Games related films

Chariots Of Fire is probably not remembered for its depiction

of gentleman's anti-Semitism, but much more because of its

MUSIC: Chariots of Fire Theme by Vangelis.

Films about the Olympics also offer

an opportunity to direct global attention to nations often

Two decades ago, Hollywood discovered one of the greatest

underdog sports stories of all time, in a place that no one expected.

If you were a child in the early 1990s, you will immediately

recognise this joyful refrain from Cool Runnings,

a hit film based on the true story of the first Jamaican bobsled team.

The plot is an amalgam of winning formulas.

A heart-warming fish out of water comedy,

It follows a team of Jamaican sprinters, who,

after missing out on the chance to represent their country in track

and field, turn to the bobsled in a last-ditch effort to make

They recruit a disgraced American bobsled coach,

played by John Candy in one of his last roles,

To the words "Give up" mean anything to you?

The film remains the second highest grossing Olympic

And its success is due to the effectiveness

They Jamaican bobsled team feels like the apotheosis

But what separates Cool Runnings from other forms of its kind

is its heavy dose of Caribbean flavour.

In fact, the film is one of the most prominent depictions

of Jamaican culture ever to hit the silver screen.

A fact not lost on the Jamaican born director of a new documentary,

The Price Of Memory, which explores the legacy of slavery

The movie was telling a very Jamaican story in a way that

Before, Jamaica would be a location in a movie.

Like, you know, people from Hollywood, Tom Cruise

or whoever, would be on vacation somewhere or in love somewhere,

and a Jamaican would be somebody giving them a drink or an extra.

But with this one it was a film that's telling a Jamaican story,

it's about that struggle to achieve some kind of success.

Before that, most of the time people would see Jamaica, the rastas,

or a reggae movie like Rockers, The Harder They Come and so on.

But this wasn't about positions, it was about regular people.

And these regular people were athletes.

So I think it showed a broader image of what Jamaicans could be.

You need winter as in igloos and Eskimos and penguins and ice?

The athletes in the film face numerous challenges.

They are unaccustomed to the freezing cold weather,

and they can't afford a decent bobsled for training.

They also face subtle racism from the Olympic establishment,

who refuse to take their bid for athletic achievement seriously.

Cool Runnings opened here in New York in October of 1993,

and in the years since it has earned a significant legacy.

Olympians of a certain age frequently cite the film as an early

inspiration for their dreams of athletic excellence.

A Swedish skier even carried in his pocket an egg

during his trial run in Sochi, just like one of the characters

But not everyone is convinced Cool Runnings deserves its accolades.

It's one of those weird cultural oddities that's

A movie about a Jamaican bobsled team.

There have been a million romantic comedies where, you know,

There's one movie in which John Candy

played the world's unlikeliest bobsled coach.

And a bunch of all actors that no one heard of before

or since, you know, played the odd bobsled team.

And because of this sort of accumulation of oddities,

And we live in a sort of been at a where memorability equates

And we live in a sort of time where memorability equates

equates to quality - that's just not so.

Even if Cool Runnings seems to some more of a novelty

than a piece of fine cinema, it may be remembered as one

of the last Olympics themed movies to be a genuine blockbuster.

It's not a profitable job these days.

With the lead up to this year's Olympics tainted

by scandal and criticism, from Russian doping to sewage-

Cool Runnings does feel like a relic from a more optimistic era,

when the Games represented the best athletics had to offer.

Now we go to look back at blockbuster season

as it draws to a close, both the highs and lows.

To be honest, blockbuster season 2016 hasn't the greatest.

But what were some of the favourites bringing in the crowds?

We sampled opinion is on the streets.

Oh, this summer I saw Captain Fantastic, I thought

To discuss blockbuster season more fully, I enlisted the help of screen

Crush editor in chief and film critic Matt Singer.

One film that has done really well is Captain America,

why has that been drawing people in, do you think?

Well, I think Captain America movie did well because number one,

it's the latest Marvel movie and all of Marvel's movie so far

And it really delivered in the "More is more" department

There have been a lot of familiar sequels this year.

Have any films broken new ground at all?

I'm struggling to think of one, I mean I think what's gone wrong

is you see a lot of sequels that people don't really want.

That's where the formula seems to have kind of faltered.

Sure, people want to see another Captain America,

and I think they're want even for the most part a new Star Trek,

but then you get into things like Independence Day: Resurgence,

do people want to see another Independence Day especially

Do people really want to see another Snow White and the Huntsman movie,

but without Snow White and just the Huntsman?

Do people really want to see another Snow White and the Huntsman movie,

but without Snow White and just the Huntsman?

I don't know that they necessarily did.

But there has been a female driven Ghostbusters, did that work?

You know, I like the Ghostbusters movie, Ghostbusters is something

that I grew up loving as a kid, and I found that

while they were a little too slavishly devoted to making

references and jokes and cameos to the movie,

a bit like when the new movie just let these women be funny together,

These are tumultuous times politically.

At any films played into that at all in the zeitgeist?

The villain in that movie, played by Idris Elba,

everything he represents spick spurt what's going on.

When he comes into contact with the enterprise crew,

he constantly remind them that the fact that they like to work

together, that there are diverse, that makes them with.

This idea that political unions, like the European Union,

are ultimately the things that will destroy us, that we need

to exclude outsiders, that we need to protect ourselves.

Those are the ideas that are at the centre of that movie,

around all the explosions and fights and chases.

The fear of death is what keeps us alive.

What about the biggest disasters of blockbuster season,

In terms of creatively, to be the biggest disasters have

been movies like The Legend of Tarzan which is another

movie that's actually done decent at the box office,

but for the life of me I could not understand who the audience

was for a new Tarzan movie that doesn't really do much

The Independence Day sequel was just dreadful.

And I was very excited for Suicide Squad, and to be

disappointment and one that feels like it was hacked to pieces

in the editing room and I'm not sure exactly what the process

of making the movie was, but it's a very disappointing,

very frustrating movie, in a season that's been

Do think that Hollywood studios are going to pay attention to what's

happened this summer, have a degree think about the strategy,

happened this summer, have a big rethink about

the strategy, and perhaps launch a new breed of films,

I'm very curious to see how Hollywood response to this summer,

I'm very curious to see how Hollywood responds to this summer,

because while there have been a lot of hits, I think there has been

a lot of general indifference if not outright antipathy towards a lot

If the summer of 2017 is like this one, the summer

of 2018 is not much better, they are good to have two come up

with some new ideas, because at the moment the old ideas

And now on to some smaller highlights of blockbuster season,

And now on to some smaller highlights of blockbuster season -

films at the other end of the spectrum, made modestly,

but didn't often get their fair share of the limelight

but that we here at Talking Movies covered.

First up is Under The Sun, a documentary co-sponsored

by North Korea, which didn't quite work out the way officials expected.

North Korean officials thought Vitaly Mansky was playing

by the rules when he shot the documentary Under The Sun.

The Russian film-maker was supposed to chronicle the life of a typical

But for Mansky, the behind-the-scenes reality

of life in North Korea was what he wanted audiences to see.

TRANSLATION: From the first to the last frame of the film,

Everything is staged, if you look closely.

So the only true thing about this film is this

is the actual family: mother, father and the girl.

According to Mansky, the family was given a script to follow.

The script was written by North Korean officials and each

Mansky says there were even handlers for his film crew.

TRANSLATION: There was control from the very first moment.

At the airport, passports were taken away.

The people who supervised us stayed with us at the same hotel.

And at the end of every day, we had to submit the footage.

But the footage he submitted to North Korean

TRANSLATION: During the short period between the end of the shooting

and going to the hotel, we had to find time and place

and opportunity to copy and delete the footage

Sometimes it was done in the bathroom.

The risk of Mansky's actions are not lost on him.

TRANSLATION: Months ago, an American student was arrested

in North Korea for the simple fact of taking a propaganda sign off

He was sentenced to 15 years in jail.

So you can imagine what their reaction was to what we've done.

Mansky is not the first film-maker to covertly film and smuggle footage

In fact, there are rogue citizen journalists who operate

But what makes Mansky unique is the fact that he was authorised

by the North Korean government, and managed to dupe officials

in spite of surveillance, by recording in between these

For Mansky, the film would prove that concern over Under The Sun

wasn't just unique to North Korea and Russia.

In fact, in 2014 a large-scale hack of the e-mails of Sony executives

was thought to be in retaliation for the company's release of a film

about North Korea called The Interview.

It has been reported that fear of similar

reprisal has caused at least one film festival in the US to drop

But when Mike Maggiore, the programmer at

New York's non-profit Film Forum saw the film,

He knew what he had to do. They took great risks begin this

back, and we had to share it with our audiences. I thought it was a

candid look at a society that has been hidden from Western eyes, and I

think what it shows us is that this is a society that is constantly

overwhelmed by a drive to be obedient and there is a propaganda

drilled into every citizen in the private and public spheres at all

times. In spite of its rocky beginnings, the film has been

nominated a time and 14 awards so far all over the world. Proving once

again that audiences are fascinated by what is working behind the

curtain. In an age when movies are consumed

on tablets and mobile phones there is a very different way of movie

watching. At least in India. It is the travelling cinema, mobile

cinemas that go to different rural communities. But it is a dying

tradition. As we discovered at a documentary shown at the Cannes film

Festival earlier this year. Two ended film makers put together this

documentary. They launched the film at the Cannes film Festival. More

than anything else, this is a documentary that shines a light on

the huge significance of cinema in rural India, by focusing on

travelling, mobile theatres. There used to be the only way for movies

to reach the villagers. And they were also significant --

significantly embedded in the cultural tradition of India. So

apart from being the exclusive vehicles in a sense of the

experience of the movies. -- they were also a part of the ritual that

families have been showing -- following for so many years. The

heyday of the travelling cinema 's is most definitely over. By one

estimate, nowadays they number in the single digits. The decline has

been hastened by digital technology, which has given communities

everywhere quicker access to movies. People can now access films not only

through DVDs but also through their mobile phones. Films find their way

into cellphones, and that is why people are drawn more to this

because they want to see the film is quicker than everyone else, so less

and less people are going to the travelling cinema 's. -- cinemas.

This documentary looks at the decline of travelling cinema is by

focusing on individuals affected by the industry's transition from old

celluloid projectors to their new digital counterparts. The film tells

the story of three custodians who are striving to preserve one of the

last travelling cinemas in the world. We encounter them at this

moment when their world is changing in a fundamental way, and the film

uses this as a lens to look at the associations that these custodians

have built with the families. Well, that brings this edition to a

close. We hope you've enjoyed the programme. Please remember you can

always reach us online: they can also find us on Facebook. From me

and the rest of the talking movies production team, it is goodbye.

A combination of big spring tides and gale