One-dimensional approach?

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


27 September

I wish to follow up on what I wrote yesterday, now that I have seen another review, in the fourth edition of TAKE ONE: more like ‘Take that!’, plus a rapier-blow, but directed not at the reader, but the film-makers, and again, I feel, rather unnecessarily personally, rather too much ad hominem.

Oh, I’m sure that people can feel that way, feel disappointed by a film, but what is the point where restraint should be shown? I was openly critical of the Tartan Terror event, but I do hope that I did not give this impression in seeking to say that Peter Bradshaw and, probably, Hamish McAlpine also had tried to rely on native wit to get them through (as the phrase has, ‘winging it’) what could have been better planned. If I’d found myself saying what I wouldn’t do to Bradshaw even if he were on fire, I might wonder whether I had gone too far.

This review that I have just seen almost does appear to say that sort of thing, with what seem quite cutting remarks about getting back the money for the film in relation to where it came from. Not a matter of suppressing free speech, but I am quite surprised that TAKE ONE published this as it stood, as if it were self-evidently and uncontroversially true, despite three Festival screenings –attended by people who all saw things as this reviewer did?

Besides which, not explaining himself (i.e., without giving everything away, but giving examples), this reviewer imputes to the director and writer a fraudulent series of sleights of hand: he says that they try to divert attention from the plot holes by just cutting to a black screen.

(Another review, on the Festival web-site, unhelpfully talks about ‘plot holes the size of my ego’, but, even if that may suggest the scale of them (though they could be very small), I should like to have pointed out what they are. I had similar feelings about del Toro’s Don’t be Afraid of the Dark, but thought some might to know what, trying to be discreet, did not work for me.)

For me, a review that gives too many opinions without giving an understanding of how they were arrived at really says nothing that can be related to – I am sure that, through laziness, I have talked about someone’s beautiful acting or portrayal. However, if I cannot say in what the beauty consists, what was beautiful about the acting, have I said anything, anything better than saying that the acting was quite ptang, without ever defining ‘ptang’…?


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