Starter for 10 2006 123movies

Watch: Starter for 10 2006 123movies, Full Movie Online – 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. He’s smitten, and he carelessly manages to hurt the feelings of Rebecca Epstein, a friend whose politics and wit he admires. The Challenge finale is coming up; maybe Brian can redeem himself and still avoid being a prat..
Plot: 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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Ratings:

	6.7/10 Votes: 23,960
	90% | RottenTomatoes
	69/100 | MetaCritic
	N/A Votes: 336 Popularity: 12.249 | TMDB

Reviews:

Entertaining no-brainer
Starter For Ten (three stars)

Director Tom Vaughan Writer David Nicholls Stars Ian Bonar, Alice Eve, Rebecca Hall, Catherine Tate Certificate 12A Running time 96 minutes Country UK / USA Year 2006

Don’t let the pathetically weak opening scene – a flashback of a university applicant as a boy, watching University Challenge and guessing the answers – put you off. Starter For Ten actually manages to get better. Although nominally about qualifying to be on the TV famous game show, the film is really a light-hearted coming-of-age drama set in the 80s. It has convincing performances and a lovingly recreated period of Thatcher Britain, when corduroy was cool and Kate Bush was for intellectuals.

Working class Brian was not born clever – he has to work at it. Gaining entry to a posh university, he meanders through undergraduate days with a classic dilemma: do you fall in love with the intellectually attractive brunette or the blonde goddess? Karl Marx, Freud and John Lennon, like smoking hash and learning how to do blowbacks, are all part of the social landscape of what is trendy and what isn’t. Half way in, the film subject matter allows plenty of social commentary on the irksome British class divisions that penetrate romance, friendship and the University Challenge team.

Versatile Catherine Tate puts in an amiable performance as Brian’s ever supportive and cooing mother: she’s having an affair with the ice-cream van man (“you can hear him coming”). This enjoyable no-brainer of a movie is aided and abetted by a blistering 80s soundtrack with bands such as The Cure, Psychedelic Furs, Buzzcocks, Yazoo, The Smiths, Tears for Fears, The Undertones – and Kate Bush.

Starter for Ten is not searing drama, but it does make a pleasant and worthwhile trip down nostalgia lane. The characters are ones we can love and care about and the movie mostly avoids predictability and cheese. If “the most important questions in life are the ones we already know the answer to,” and are not exactly rocket science, the subject matter of Starter For Ten is a welcome and unpretentious antidote to the plethora of similar American teen comedies. If you like the music, it’s worth going for that alone.

The Age of Thatcher
“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

Other Information:

Original Language en
Runtime 1 hr 32 min (92 min)
Budget 0
Revenue 0
Status Released
Rated PG-13
Genre Comedy, Drama, Romance
Director Tom Vaughan
Writer David Nicholls
Actors James McAvoy, Alice Eve, Rebecca Hall
Country United Kingdom, United States
Awards 1 win & 3 nominations
Production Company N/A
Website N/A

Technical Information:

Sound Mix DTS, SDDS, Dolby Digital
Aspect Ratio 1.85 : 1
Camera Arriflex Cameras and Lenses
Laboratory DeLuxe (prints), Technicolor, UK (dailies)
Film Length N/A
Negative Format 35 mm (Fuji Eterna 250D 8563, Eterna 500T 8573, Reala 500D 8592)
Cinematographic Process Spherical
Printed Film Format 35 mm