Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1467 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-02-09
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 105 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
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) loses her husband, Chris (Mirren) cooks up a scheme to commemorate 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 a true story, 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

DVD Description
Calendar Girls is a humorous and inspiring dramatisation of the true story of the Yorkshire Women’s Institute members who stripped for a charity calendar to raise funds for a local leukaemia unit, where a friends husband was treated until his death. Julie Walters plays Annie, whose husband dies of leukaemia and Helen Mirren plays her best friend Chris, the genius and driving force behind the calendar. The film also features roles from the hilarious Celia Imrie, Annette Crosbie, Penelope Wilton and Linda Bassett.

The film follows the loss of Annie’s husband, John, the spark of the calendar idea, their white wine fuelled photoshoot, the ensuing media frenzy as the world wakes up to Yorkshire’s very own calendar girls and the effects of their new found media fame on their friendships and families.

Special Features

• Deleted scenes
  
• The Naked Truth
  
• Creating the Calendar

DVD Technical Information:

• Running Time: 105 minutes approx.
  
• Subtitles: English, English for the Hearing Impaired
  
• Audio: Dolby Digital 5.1, English
  
• PAL
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
  
• Widescreen
  
• Region Code: 2
  
• Disc Format: Dual layer

Customer Reviews

Numbing

This film is mind numbingly tedious! Plotless titilation of the profoundly indifferent.

It's absolutely implausibly far too long cobbled together nonsense appealing to feminist ideology by presenting itself as some bra burning, or in this case removing, remedy to the place women find themselves in and it just does not work on any level!!

I'm off to burn my jockey shorts and do a calender for the British Legion.

Considerably bigger buns!
This is a hugely enjoyable film that balances old-fashioned prejudices with daring activism. The WI girls join up to raise money for a sofa for the relatives' room, at the hospital where one of their husbands was treated for leukemia, by posing nude for a calendar. The delightful gung-ho of the girls (especially Helen Mirren's Chris) is tempered by the grief of Julie Walter's character as she misses and pays tribute to her late husband (a moving, lovely performance by John Alderton) and the knock-on effects on members of the womens' families.

Many hilarious scenes are juxtaposed with sad instances of prejudice, the dangers of exploitation and the constant spectre of cancer that both scares the women and spurs them on.

This is a delightful film about a brave, canny, beautiful and downright inspiring group of women. There's more to WI life than making plum jam, baking a victoria sponge and weekly renditions of Jerusalem!

Good but could have been better
I do like this film but it is very, very American. Why ??

Did any of the classic Ealing comedies cater for Americans. Why do we do this so much.

Apparently Victoria Wood wrote a script of the same story but this one got made because it had an American part to it.

No doubt someone will make Wuthering Heights soon with Heathcliff going to America in his " missing" years.

Helen Mirren and Julie Walters are sooooo good in the film.