|
|  | |
| | | | |
| |
|
| Phone: 845-679-1002 | | FAX: 845-679-1019 | | Email: | | [email protected] | | US Mail: | | 84 Zena Road | | Kingston, NY 12401 |  |
|
|
|
|
|
| Calendar Girls | | Buena Vista Home Vid |  | | | | List Price: | $24.99 | | Our Price: | $20.99 | | You Save: | $4.00 (16.01%) | | | Release Date: | 04 May, 2004 | | Media: | VHS Tape | | | Availability: | Usually ships within 24 hours | | Average Review: |  Based on 46 reviews. |
|
| |
| | | Features: | | Description:
In the sensible yet elegant hands of actresses Helen Mirren and Julie Walters, Calendar Girls walks a fine line between sappiness and snickering and ends up both wonderfully funny and gently touching. When her best friend Annie (Walters, Billy Elliot) loses her husband, Chris (Mirren, Prime Suspect, Gosford Park) cooks up a scheme to memorialize him: They and their friends--all fiftysomething women--will make a nude calendar to raise money for the hospital where he died. The calendar becomes hugely popular, but the success may drive a wedge between the two women's friendship. Based on an actual event, Calendar Girls carefully balances the stories of several women as it follows the calendar's media explosion, becoming a surprisingly moving fable of loss, determination, and the perils of fame. And let's face it--Helen Mirren is one of the wittiest and sexiest women alive, clothes on or not. --Bret Fetzer | |  | | Similar Products
| | | | | | Customer Reviews
| | | Average Customer Review: Based on 46 reviews. | |  "Nude; NOT naked!"
Calendar Girls is a sweet and uplifting British comedy based on a true story. Set in the picturesque village of Napely, we meet 50-something best friends Chris (Helen Miren) and Annie (Julie Walters). They belong to the local Women's Institute, which is staid and traditional, and to them, boring and silly. (Their annual fund-raising event is selling a calendar with photos of jams and flowers.) When Annie's beloved husband dies from cancer, some of the club members decide to raise money for a new sofa in the hospital waiting room by selling a calendar featuring themselves in the (gasp!) nude.Helen Miren is great as the feisty and opinionated Chris, whose involvement alienates her family. Julie Walters is very likeable and sympathetic as the new widow. Ciaran Hinds, who has starred in many period films, has a small but good role as Chris' husband. Most of the movie is beautifully photographed in rural England and it is simply idyllic. This is in sharp contrast to the unsavory scenes filmed in Hollywood (when the ladies appear on The Tonight Show.) The story is heartwarming, but avoids being syrupy. The nude scenes are tastefully done, and played for laughs, as one would expect. The real calendar, by the way, has so far raised $1.6M for a new cancer hospital wing (and the new sofa). I heartily recommend this refreshing and well-made comedy. | | What a brilliant film!
It is very funny in the way that only British films can be. Rather than being laden with jokes, the characters and their situations provide the humour here. The main appeal of the film is the incongruity of a group of middle-aged ladies making a nude calendar for their Women's Institute with the hope of raising maybe £1,000. Although the characters and their personal
stories have been changed, this is based on a true story, and the ladies involved in the making of the real 'Alternative W.I. Calendar' gave their approval to the script (and even appear in a cameo as members of a rival town's W.I. group!). As well as fund-raising, the calendar has had two other important effects. It has modernised the image of the Women's Institute, thought for years to be rather old-fashioned, and helped alter people's
conceptions about the acceptability of older people's bodies. The film uses older actresses Julie Walters, Annette Crosbie, and Helen Mirren (and one younger, Celia Imrie) who laudably went topless for the photo shoot scenes.In real life, the calendars were a runaway success and have together with other linked efforts now made over half a million pounds to combat Leukaemia, but what will happen in the film? Will their efforts be defeated by family objections, administrative obstacles, lack of sponsorship, or jealousy? Watch and find out. The DVD is rather mean with extras, but the Naked Truth is a reasonable well made promotional type making-of feature, and a very short short (under seven minutes) Making Of the Calendar shows how the actresses were photographed to make the mock-ups of the calendars seen in the movie. There are four deleted
scenes which total about five minutes. I would have thought a director's commentary could have been included, and perhaps some more background on the differences between the real story and the movie, and something about the different locations (the Yorkshire countryside shown in the film is wonderful). | | a joyous comedy
One of the most delightful films of recent years, "Calendar Girls," a distaff version of "The Full Monty," is the true story of a group of middle-aged English women who became international celebrities when they designed and posed for a nude fundraising calendar that sold millions of copies worldwide. Julie Walters and Helen Mirren head a wonderful cast, with Walters as a woman whose husband dies of leukemia and Mirren as her best friend who comes up with the idea of the calendar as a way of both honoring his memory and raising money for the local hospital. The risk for any "feel good" comedy is that it will become cloying, coy or cutesy. Luckily, "Calendar Girls" boasts an enormously witty screenplay and first-rate performances by its highly gifted cast. Each of the "girls" is given her own unique personality so that we see them not just as a group, united in this inspiring endeavor, but as individuals working through their own personal demons on the rode to the project's completion. The women face the expected roadblocks and snafus in the form of "shocked," disapproving voices in the community, but their belief in the rightness of their cause brushes all such problems aside. This charming film provides more genuine, out-and-out laughs than almost any comedy of recent times. "Calendar Girls" is heartwarming, touching and inspiring - and what more could one ask from a "feel-good" film than that? |
| |
