Starter for 10

2006
6.7| 1h32m| PG-13| en
Details

In 1985, against the backdrop of Thatcherism, Brian Jackson enrolls in the University of Bristol, a scholarship boy from seaside Essex with a love of knowledge for its own sake and a childhood spent watching University Challenge, a college quiz show. At Bristol he tries out for the Challenge team and falls under the spell of Alice, a lovely blond with an extensive sexual past.

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Reviews

ScoobyWell Great visuals, story delivers no surprises
Mischa Redfern I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.
Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.
Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.
lynchfilmlover This is a really nice film. I have just seen it for the 4th time. Set in 1985, it begins, however, when Brian is younger. Sat in front of the the TV with his Mum and Dad watching University Challenge. It sets up exactly what sort of person Brian is and what he wants to become. Mark Gatiss has an astonishing likeness to presenter Bamber Gascoine in these scenes that it seems you are watching the actual show! Action, soon moves to '85 and we learn that Brian's Dad had passed away 9 years earlier. It is here where the great soundtrack kicks in. Alright, a few of the songs came out after 1985 but we won't quibble too much about that. There are some great songs throughout the film from the likes of The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen, Tears For Fears, New Order, The Undertones, The Style Council and many more. There are at least four songs by The Cure too. All of which work well in the film. I very much like the allusion to how terrible it would be to become the sort of person who plays Kate Bush, then we here Brian listening to her very softly in scene on New Years Eve, with Rebecca.James Corden makes a brief appearance once or twice in the film. Dominic Cooper's journey as Spencer and how it affects other people plays well. Catherine Tate, even though she is only a few years older than James McAvoy in reality, comes across as a very lovely character in playing Brian's Mum. A special mention also to the wonderful Bendedict Cumberbatch who shines as the bitter, obnoxious yet likable Patrick. His journey is more subtle in the film but he becomes a better person too.Rebecca Hall and Alice Eve play, ironically, Rebecca and Alice, and here is the great subtleness of this film. Alice comes over very sweet and you find yourself loving her character to begin with. She is the archetypal blonde bombshell. She is, however, clever enough to answer the good questions on the quiz team and once again that is the subtleness of the film. McAvoy isn't your typical geek and Eve isn't your typical dumb blonde. Her character plays out as a bit of a reckless, sexual and fickle girl but very intelligent. You can't help being drawn to her in certain parts of the film. Rebecca is your alternative, political activist, sensible thinking and, i must say, very very attractive girl. Both in natural beauty, intelligence and personality. You, again, find yourself falling for her as well, but for different, better reasons!!! This, by the way was Hall's first feature film.The film follows the trials and tribulations of sorting a team for the filming of University Challenge, Brian's rising yearning for Alice, then Rebecca then Alice again. His studies suffer and he seems to get lost on his journey.Without going into too much detail, when Brian returns from Alice after the debacle of staying for New Year, he meets up with Rebecca and the scene when it is approaching midnight, and with only two minutes to go she asks him how they can waste time as they sit side by side on his bed, the tenderness and beauty of her approach to kiss him, and how they kiss, is really touching and feels very real.There are so many moments that are really lovely in this film like the importance of Brians' Dad's jacket to Brian, his learning curve about who he is and his journey, to name just a few. The moment on the date with Alice when he cries, talking about his Dad, on original viewing was a emotional moment, but having recently lost my Mother, i found this now very upsetting, yet beautifully played. The song "The Hurting" by Tears For fears works perfectly as Brian makes the earth shattering mistake with the question, near the end of the film. His shame and how he feels is really emphasised by that song. A great choice.The message of the film is as simple as this: No matter what mistakes you have made, it is what you do next that matters. You can't lock yourself away forever when you make a mistake or something bad happens. Having been struggling with grief lately, i gained the realisation that this is happening to me. It made me realise that the only person that can put things back on track, is me! It is funny how life experience can alter you feelings towards a film and can change what affect it has to you on later viewings.Once Brian, having shut himself away for a long while, faces his demons and returns to Bristol University, the first thing he does is search out Rebecca. Bumping into Alice on the way he quickly tells her it is not her he is looking for. Then, when he find Rebecca, and they talk, the sincere way he asks if she can forgive him for all his mistakes, the way she tells him he already knows the answer to that and the wonderful way they kiss once again, is just so beautiful. I have to say is one of the the most beautiful kisses i have ever seen on film. The way they are pressing themselves into once another and the way their lips touch and the gorgeous smile Rebecca gives as they kiss is really moving. It is like no one else matters and no one else is around them, even though they are surrounded by hundreds of people.This is a great, feel good movie. It won't blow you away but it will make you smile. A film i will watch again and again. Perhaps in a year it may have even more profound effect on me, when i am back on the road of my journey.
meebly I can't begin to explain why this film hit me the way it did, but I truly hated it as much as any in recent memory. I love the genre, and had never heard of the actors before this film, so I had no personal bias against any of them. But every minute of watching it made me feel cheated out of that 60 seconds.This was the first I'd seen of James McAvoy, who I'll admit has never done a movie I've liked (I think "Wanted" is one of the three worst superhero movies I've ever seen), and I did want to like him and his character. But all I wanted to do was slap him, hard and repeatedly.Every teen in the film is a glaring cliché, but mostly from mainstream films. Maybe the idea was to fill an art-house-aimed title with such clichés in hopes that few members of its audience patronized mainstream teen fare and therefore wouldn't be aware of all the contrivances. But even if you haven't seen a teen romantic comedy-drama since "Footloose", you're sure to pick up on many of the components of the standard high-concept formula of "Working class good guy misguided into falling for wealthy, self-centered beauty, discovers her shortcomings and his own in the process, realizes that ugly-duckling-turned-swan is who he should really care about, etc." As for the device that drives the hackneyed plot, it's a high-minded TV trivia competition for university co-eds rather than a sporting event, but otherwise all the usual ingredients are here. Somehow, though, they manage to work even more poorly in this film than in many Hollywood fluff pieces.Again, this critique is a lot more visceral than intellectual, but much as I hate to borrow from Roger Ebert, "I really, really, really HATED this movie!"
Jam_Man Just read the book of this film and then immediately watched the movie, and have to say the old cliché is right, the films isn't as good as the book.SPOILERS!!!! There are some key changes in the storyline which change the dynamics of some of the relationships.In the book Spencer is a good friend of his who tries to get him and Alice together and Brian unfairly shuns him after the fight thinking he was hitting on Alice. In the film Spencer is a slime ball who betrays him, when in the book she sleeps with Jackson and then sees another guy at university. Why David Nicholls felt he had to change the characters I don't know, pacing of the film I guess.Movie version Jackson really doesn't match up to the book version, he is painfully embarrassing in the book and much funnier than in the film, although I wonder how that would have looked on film.
James Hitchcock "University Challenge" is a long-running quiz show on British television, featuring contests between teams from different universities. The title of this film is taken from the catch phrase "your starter for ten…..", much used by the programme's original presenter, Bamber Gascoigne. I have an interest to declare as in the early eighties I myself appeared on the programme as a member of the team from Magdalene College, Cambridge. I am also familiar with Bristol University as, during the mid-eighties (the film is set in 1985/6), my then girlfriend Melissa was a student there.There has been a long literary tradition in Britain of novels about university life, although this has not always been reflected by the British cinema. There seem to be more films set in public schools; "Goodbye Mr Chips", "The Guinea Pig", "If….." and the two "Browning Versions" are all examples. The opening scenes of "Chariots of Fire" were set in Cambridge and those of the recent "Brideshead Revisited" in Oxford, although in neither case is academic life the real subject of the film. "Starter for Ten" is one of the few British films ("Lucky Jim" is another) to take university life as its main subject matter. (The subject has been much more extensively treated in American films).In form the film is a romantic comedy. The main character is Brian Jackson, a working-class boy from Clacton (a seaside resort in Essex) who wins a place at the prestigious Bristol University. From his childhood Brian has had a passion for knowledge and learning for its own sake, and this earns him a slot on Bristol's "University Challenge" team. The romance element is provided by the two girls in Brian's life, Alice and Rebecca, who have very different personalities. The blonde Alice (a fellow-member of the quiz team) is sexy and glamorous but also shallow and fickle and wildly promiscuous. Or at least she claims to be wildly promiscuous; there is perhaps a hint that her stories of having slept with just about every man who has ever crossed her path were invented to impress the easily-impressed Brian. The brunette Rebecca is less obviously glamorous (although the actress who plays her is in fact very attractive) but more sincere and genuine than Alice; like Brian, she has an interest in left-wing politics.Politics, in fact, play an important role in this film. Brian and Rebecca are seen demonstrating in favour of various fashionable eighties causes (anti-apartheid, nuclear disarmament, etc.), but even more important are the politics of social class. The working-class Brian often feels out of his depth among the more affluent students at Bristol such as Alice and Patrick, the captain of the quiz team who is played as a stuffy, pompous snob. Brian feels the need to remain in touch with his proletarian roots, especially his old school friend, Spencer, who cautions him not to become a "w*nker", by which he presumably means someone like Patrick. This, however, was one of the weakest aspects of the film. It is Spencer who is the real w*nker- an unpleasant and dishonest character, who sleeps with his mate's girlfriend and shamelessly confesses to benefit fraud and embezzling from his employer. Indeed, in the first scene in which he appears he throws a tape belonging to another boy into the sea, for no reason other than sheer devilment. I therefore found it rather disquieting, and patronising to all those who had to struggle with the problem of being unemployed during the eighties, that the scriptwriters seemed to treat Spencer as a working-class hero and the voice of Brian's social conscience.Some of the characters- Alice, Spencer and above all Patrick- were rather clichéd and one-dimensional, but James McAvoy was good as Brian, an engaging and very believable mixture of intellectual precocity and naivety, even though, at twenty-seven, he seemed physically too mature to be playing an eighteen-year-old. This was not, however, his best performance- that must be either "Atonement" or "The Last King of Scotland". The comedienne Catherine Tate gave a nicely judged performance as Brian's widowed mother and Rebecca Hall made Rebecca a likable heroine, even though she was a bit too intense for my tastes. Mark Gatiss gave a pitch-perfect imitation of Bamber Gascoigne, even though in real life there is no physical resemblance between them. There were some very comic moments, especially Brian's disastrous visit to Alice and her seriously weird parents, the sort of people who walk round naked in front of guests but can be surprisingly uptight in other ways.Much of the appeal of the film, at least for me, lies in its nostalgic recreation of the eighties, featuring not only the political causes of the era but also its fashions and hairstyles and, above all, its pop music, (even if some of the songs we hear were not released until after the date when the film is set). There are some similarities with "The History Boys", another film made in 2006 and also set in an educational establishment (in that case a grammar school) during the mid-eighties. (Dominic Cooper, who plays Spencer here, also appeared in "The History Boys"). I don't think "Starter for Ten" is quite as good as "The History Boys", in which scriptwriter Alan Bennett combined an often brilliant wit with some serious themes and sharp social observation, but it is an often amusing and generally enjoyable look at the Age of Thatcher. 6/10