Seen at – or adjacent to – Cambridge Film Festival (its earlier, one-screen venue of The Arts Cinema)

Seen at (or because of) Cambridge Film Festival in the mid-1980s

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9 August

Seen at (or because of) Cambridge Film Festival in the mid-1980s

It was necessary to borrow Hugh Taylor’s copies of Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) programme-booklets from the early to middle 1980s (two of which, within Apsley Towers (@THEAGENTAPSLEY), are conveniently to hand), so one, almost necessarily, has not located ticket-stubs that could clinch whether one did watch any film, listed below as seen at around that time, at the Festival itself : hence ‘at – or adjacent to – Cambridge Film Festival’ in the title of this posting…

That said, one just knows as fact that one chose to see Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) in what, then, would have still been called a Festival gala performance (not ‘a screening’) : the Festival atmosphere – even then with enviably comfortable seats in the snug premises in Market Passage* – was so good, and one wanted to be part of it, rather than waiting for the film to come on release.

And, before anyone talked about ‘ear-worms’, that is what the catchy, jazzy principal theme of Hannah already was, on leaving the cinema after the credits, to both one’s fellow viewer (@AJRigbyTweet) and one's self (and for a number of days or weeks), courtesy of Dick Hyman’s arrangements, band, and leadership / playing**. The same had been true of the score of Broadway Danny Rose (1984), for which IMDb® (@IMDb) does give Hyman credit as the ‘music supervisor’ : the themes from both films have such a hook to them that one easily recalls them now. (However, at the time that when the Festival booklet had been printed, that film was said to be ‘unconfirmed’ (as may be legible, in the image below, in the column next to that for El Norte), so it did not have a date / time slot in the programme of events at the back, but was later confirmed and came on sale.)


All that being said, and for the two years in question (being those of the 8th and 10th Festivals, respectively), here was what was seen, if not at the Festival in 1984 and 1986, then as a result of it – in each case, the date and time are given simply of the first performance listed in the programme (except for Danny Rose, where one is having to guess when it would have ended by being shown) :

8th Cambridge Film Festival (15–29 July 1984)

Sunday 15 July

* 3.00 The Dresser (1983)

* 6.00 Swann in Love (1984)

* 8.30 El Norte (1983)

Thursday 19 July

* 6.30 The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum) (1975)


Saturday 21 July

* 2.00 Cal (1984)


?? Friday 27 July ??

* ?? Broadway Danny Rose (1984) ??


Saturday 28 July

* 1.30 Paris, Texas (1984) [referenced in The Night Elvis Died (La Nit Que Va Morir L’Elvis) (2010), and referred to in What is Catalan cinema ?]

* * * * *

10th Cambridge Film Festival (10–27 July 1986)

Thursday 10 July : Opening night

* 8.00 Mona Lisa (1986)

Sunday 13 July

* 6.30 Plenty (1985)


Friday 18 July

* 11.00 After Hours (1985) [How Time views After Hours (1985)]

Saturday 19 July

* 11.00 Sid and Nancy (1986)

Sunday 20 July

* 8.45 Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

* * * * *

Twenty-five Festivals later (this will be the 35th), Director of #CamFF
Tony Jones is still in charge

End-notes

* Which runs between Market Street and Sidney Street, when that separated Joshua Taylor from Eden Lilley (one fantasized that they were lovers, cruelly separated by Victorian parents. [Or later ? One thinks of the lyrics of ‘They Can’t Take That Away from Me’ – whose meaning Tommy Smith queried at The Stables lately…]).

Well, anyway, before that became bar / club land, and when, upstairs, had been Angeline’s, a lovely restaurant in which to be made very welcome, and luxuriate in continental cuisine.

Who - of a certain age - remembers this about Cambridge... ? [From the programme-booklet of the 10th @camfilmfest] pic.twitter.com/Z37HEJXmDS

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 12, 2015

** Although not credited by IMDb®, proving unreliable again (and making one doubt oneself and one’s memory, despite owning the soundtrack (on LP)).

*** Probably less famous than Hannah, although with Allen magic of its own, Broadway Danny Rose is a super film in monochrome : with Allen as Danny (an indulgent theatrical agent), his star turn Lou Canova (Nick Apollo Forte), Mia F. as Lou’s unsympathetic secret lover (whose life-or-death attitude Danny finds immediately and alarmingly frank), and gangsters, in the funniest shoot-out in a hangar that you will ever see !


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Mr Allen's not for fading...

This is a review of Fading Gigolo (2013)

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27 May

This is a review of Fading Gigolo (2013)

Fading Gigolo (2013) is a fun but hardly flawless film, with the hues of autumn and melancholy, and nice performances by Allen and Torturro.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 27, 2014

Or even – O Brother, Where Art Thou ? ! – Turturro !

Fading Gigolo (201?) is a romp from John Turturro, doing a Woody Allen of writing, directing and acting – not as well crafted as Allen’s own triumphs such as Broadway Danny Rose (1984), and not quite mastering, say, the light and shade of that film*, but suffused with charm, wit, elegance, and seductiveness :

In fact, on that latter point, we feel as if we might be straying into the territory of Dangerous Liaisons (1988), with a strand of the plot whose rationale (albeit necessary) seems not wholly obvious. At other times, until they conveniently dissipate, it feels as if the Kafka-infused spirit of Scorsese in After Hours (1985) is upon us, mixed in with a bit of sectarianism from Witness (1985) for good measure.

Moving on, as these moments of menace – not least with a comic turn from Bob Balaban as Sol, trying a line of legal argument that does not appeal to his client – are momentary, there is much to like more in the way that the film has been put together : one can see Murray (Woody Allen), if one likes, as Cupid, as well as Bongo the pimp, to benefit Fioravante (John Torturro), but what matters is the immediacy of the cinematography, with features made of windows and the light coming through them, of objects and people seen through each other, or one foregrounding the other, or dwelling unashamedly on Sharon Stone’s or Allen’s face.

Likewise, two scenes with dancing are delightfully choreographed, with the characters and the moving camera, causing the background to shift behind, first, Torturro and Stone (as Dr Parker), and then Sofía Vergara (Selima) with him), and – in evocation of many a film, yet feeling fresh – against, through and into a carousel. Yet Torturro’s greatest resource is almost certainly Allen’s timing and acting – where maybe he has been more exacting with the 78-year-old, and required more takes, than Allen did of himself in, say, To Rome with Love (2012) (as Allen is notorious for calling it a day not to miss sport such as The World Series).

One says ‘almost certainly’, because Torturro’s own nuanced role as the less-shallow, slightly melancholoy one of the pair, is rather fine, and it has been written in such a way that the scenes with Allen and him largely fit them well. Vanessa Paradis, as Avigal, has an element of ‘the mysterious woman’ about her, which is refreshingly different from using Stone to remind us, in the guise of a dermatologist, of famous attire / poses from the likes of Basic Instinct (1992) : it is clear enough why Fioravante can perform for one, but fall for the other.


Ending on a light moment of flirtation, complete with a colourful orchid and a beverage being made that seems irrelevant, the film cements the central pairing in our mind, under their fictitious names, and gently points the lesson of friends looking out for each other. We have long forgotten the bookshop that had to close, but Murray, in keeping it going so long (even if it did give Fioravante some work), was clearly missing his métier all this time, with his skills of networking, smooth-talking and making deals – which, with Danny Rose, is where we came in…



End-notes

* Not that we equate The Mob with Brooklyn’s community of Hassidic Jews, who convene a religious court at the instigation of Dovi (Liev Schreiber – Ted Winter from Salt (2010))…


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Sir, what are you doing in my house ?*

This is a review of Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) (2013)

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10 April (updated 13 April)

This is a review of Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) (2013)

If Xavier Dolan had put all the care and effort of his directing, adapting and acting in Tom at the Farm (2013) into selecting a text...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 10, 2014

If Xavier Dolan had done so, then his work might not have been in vain (unless he had taken another stage-work, August : Osage County** (2013), as a starting-point – though, by contrast, Dolan fully succeeds in not making Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) feel like a play***)…

For, whatever the play by (Michel Marc Bouchard) may have been, Dolan tries to make Tom a sub-Lynchian piece with a horrific undertow, with a vibration set off with Gabriel Yared’s high-frequency string-writing (and the start of a composed soundtrack that seems intrusive to the point of perversity), piccolo even, when nothing is on the screen that gives rise to spookiness, as Tom, arriving at the farm, explores it on his own – cows in a stall, barns and machinery do not resonate with fear, unless, perhaps, they are frightening in their otherness****. However, if one looks at the synopsis on the film’s IMDb page, it claims that Tom is in the grip of grief and depression.

Maybe… Yet, contrary to many people’s belief that it is invisible (Mental ill-health is exactly like a broken leg !), it can be traced in look, posture, demeanour (as was just being written about yesterday in reviewing the superb film The Past (Le passé) (2013)), and Dolan shows no signs, except smiling inappropriately, and a certain clumsiness in conversational pleasantries – which comes across just as a somewhat implausible gaucheness, given that he says that he has a significant role in advertising (of course, that may be a lie).

Not unreasonable for him to be feeling as IMDb describes, but a film should stand for itself, and not rely on any external data to the viewer, and the only fitting account for how Tom appears is that it could be a form of psychotic depression. Clues abound that there is more to what we see than is evident, from a car on a poster with Real Deal as the caption, to the name of the bar (sadly not caught in French (which is in the plural), but something of the kind The Real Thing, to Tom’s hosts disappearing (as if they had never been there), with no sign that they had ever been there.


Suffice to say that, if the whole film is to be interpreted as delusion, induced by a massive natural high, then we are nowhere near the journey from and back to the office in After Hours (1985) (with its inspired dazzling ending, though not the first thoughts for it). We do not even have the resonance of Julianne Nicholson (Ivy), departing from the farm. No, it is then as with The Truman Show (1998) – a paranoid idea about the world blown up into a screenplay, whereas Tom has pretensions of being another Sunset Boulevard [or, originally, Blvd.] (1950) (although actually, if not in its exact scenario, it smacks of Pinter's The Homecoming, with its brooding awkwardness).

One skips to the end, because, with Tom in Tom, one really only cares about – and then relatively little, in fact – what happens to him, which brings us inevitably to the status of what we have seen happening. Is it the psychiatric equivalent of a very bad trip – a Funny Games (1997) without the consequences or implications – and then do we have any reason to be interested… ?


To come, when time and strength permit, a spoilery posting that deals with the rest of the plot, failing which...

'Xavier Dolan's best film', Tom at the Farm (2013) ? Sadly, @indiewire, that just doesn't say very much about the others...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 1, 2014

End-notes

* A touch of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ – not really built upon in any obvious or coherent way, although Tom has such golden hair…

** Also set in a remote location in North America, and with some challenging family interactions, if of a different kind.

*** Spoiler alert Lee Marshall, at Screen Daily, agrees about the music, but comments instead about the adaptation :

Based on a stage play by Michel Marc Bouchard, who co-wrote the script with Dolan, Tom At The Farm betrays its origins in some overly pretty dialogue and a few scenes (like a tango dance in a barn) where you can practically read the stage directions.


**** Town Mouse and Country Mouse, maybe – given the contrasting setting at the end (apparently an amalgam) ?


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

How Time views After Hours (1985)

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1 June

This story had to be told - one way or another, although it was written for New Empress Magazine's issue (number 10), with the theme of Time in cinema, it resisted inclusion.

Finished, it would have looked at Eraserhead (1977) and seen whether Brazil and After Hours (1985) were both indebted to Lynch, but had gone in different directions with it (a bit like particles flying out from a sub-atomic collision)...


In late 1983, there proved not to be the sustainable will – or, with it, the money – for Martin Scorsese to make The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which he had also insisted had to be shot in Israel (adding to the cost). As he says in Scorsese on Scorsese (Faber & Faber, London, 1996 (updated version)), he sublimated his rage at the studio for thinking Christ ‘not worth the trouble’ (as Barry Diller at Paramount told him, apologizing for not saying before that they were pulling the plug) : he looked around for another film to make.

Not being able to see himself make either, Scorsese turned down Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Witness (1985), and so ended up, again, in the world of independent film with After Hours and, ultimately, with Fassbinder’s cameraman, Michael Ballhaus. Before then, a few things happened on the way…

In New York, Scorsese got to see a script that he liked. It was owned (i.e. they had the film option) by Griffin Dunne (Dunne played Paul Hackett, the male lead) and Amy Robinson (who had appeared in Mean Streets (1973), and was, with Dunne, a co-producer of After Hours). In his own words, Scorsese started reading it and really liked the first two or three pages. I liked the dialogue […].

This is where things got interesting, because Scorsese had apparently been told that it had been written by Joseph Minion in a class at Columbia University (and been given an A in the Graduate Film Program), whereas that seems not to have been the whole story.

Even I, as a fourteen-year-old, learnt the basic rules of plagiarism : even if others had not also decided to lift material for their essay from the introduction to our edition of Julius Caesar, which made ‘the borrowing’ obvious, one could not simply pass off something as one’s own, and had to cover one’s tracks. (Either that, or acknowledge one’s sources, of course*.)

In this case, as blogger Andrew Hearst reveals (linked from the film’s Wikipedia page), there was a radio monologue called Lies, written, performed and broadcast by one Joe Frank for NPR Playhouse in 1982. On Hearst’s blog, it can be heard in full, and runs to around 11 minutes, providing the broad synopsis for around the first one-third of After Hours.

One might just about be able to listen to it and not be spot the relation to After Hours if one had not seen it recently: were it not, that is, that bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights made of plaster of Paris are a bit of a give-away (even if a five-dollar bill flying out of the cash-cradle, and through the window, of a taxi and leaving Hackett without cash is not already). Where I cannot agree with Hearst, because what he writes does not take account of how screenplays get written and end up in production, is what he makes of the evidence.

Hearst writes ‘Minion’s IMDb credits are pretty thin after the early 1990s, so his career seems to have been really hurt by this, no surprise’. It is, of course, an easy assumption to make, but do we know that Minion was credited with the screenplay as the (willing ?) fall guy for someone else’s theft of the plot, because there appears to be nothing against which to check the story about the screenplay and the Columbia course ?

The real mystery is that anyone would attempt to pass off Lies in the guise of After Hours without changing some very significant details, some of the more obvious of which have been mentioned. Is it, so we are being encouraged to understand Minion, that we have to imagine him inexperienced and greedy, and so getting himself a bad name by miring the picture in the litigation that Hearst talks about ?

I have not looked for evidence of the court case, not just because it is so long ago (and I would not know where to look), but also since, if there had been an out-of-court settlement, only the fact of the case’s existence, which we probably suppose, would have been apparent. Scorsese, of course, makes no mention of the issue in interview, and even the injured Frank, according to Hearst, was being reticent to name the film that paid him off.

All that we have to hope is that he got a good settlement, because, comparing his performance and the film, it is all there, right down to the characterization of Rosanna Arquette (as Marcy), whom Hearst described as ‘interested and indifferent at the same time’. As for what happened to Minion, there seems to be a bigger elephant in the room than that :

Dunne makes a perfectly good, nervy Hackett, and the film gets good ratings on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, but, looking at Dunne’s career and judging it from IMDb’s page for him, he seems to have achieved more as director and producer than the rather bitty parts and t.v. work on the other side of the camera.

Yes, things happen - or do not happen - in a career quite unfairly, and maybe After Hours, as the Rotten Tomatoes figures show, had the critical appraisal, but insufficient popular appeal, to allow Dunne to move on from there.

Or maybe there was no moving on from a persecution-complex character such as Hackett, hounded by highly organized vigilantes within hours of visiting the area, giving off signals of being attractive to women, but dangerous, and ending the film dusty and dazed back at the office where he began it.

The all-too-often quoted opening words of ‘Burnt Norton’ from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets – which lose significance out of context – have a place here, in looking at what, if I am not mistaken, is a film directed by Scorsese that made too little impact on its release :

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.


I have not seen Dunne in anything else, but I am grateful to him for wanting to get this film made and being Paul Hackett, and I am sure that others will be for what he has produced or directed since.


End-notes

* Which I do not think that the film credits do with an even bigger theft, that of a story by Franz Kafka that he incorporated into the scene in the Cathedral in his unfinished novel The Trial (Der Prozess), where Josef K. is told a parable about the law, Vor dem Gesetz (Before the Law). The story is lifted straight into the film in the context of the bouncers to the club that Hackett needs to enter, and it feeds into the film's uneasy quality of persecution, witch-hunt and - although Dunne is not Jewish - maybe anti-Semitism.


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Scorsese directed, not dissected

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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17 November

on his bday, a thought onScorsese: he's unique yet NYNY is like Cukor,TaxiD is like Wenders,RagingB is like Welles,Mean Sts is like Pasolini
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) November 17, 2012

@markcousinsfilm And After Hours is like Kafka meets Woody Allen...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 17, 2012

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What sort of beast is Dark Horse?

This is a review of Dark Horse (2011)

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5 July

This is a review of Dark Horse (2011)

One is not exactly left, as David Lynch arranged in Eraserhead (1977), with a feeling of being uncertain what, if anything, has happened, and it's not quite the ending-after-ending impression left by how the Lord of the Rings trilogy winds up in and with The Return of the King (2003), and yet both elements are there: the latter promises resolution, the former confuses such a notion with presenting, amongst other things, a head being turned into an adjunct for pencils.

As Lynch's film did, therefore, there is a questioning in Dark Horse of what 'a story' in a film is for, whether it is to satisfy and lead us, a bit like a classical sonata, from some sort of stasis into the turmoil of a movement in a minor key and back into the catharsis of the closing outer movement, or whether its roots are in the New Wave and before, which, in Buñuel's case, gave us, at the time time when the wave was breaking, the puzzle of The Exterminating Angel (1962).

Just about anything has been fitted into that pattern of things going bad and turning good again, from 10* (1979) to You've Got Mail (1998) or, as I recall, One Fine Day (1996). Much more interesting is when Scorsese gives us, in After Hours (1985), a film that takes us back to where we began, but with an amazing and satisfying - not from moral or plot point of view of - artistic resolution, in a whizz around Paul Hackett's office. Or Gilliam - when he could still be gutsy - with that sickening moment inside the cooling-tower at the end of Brazil (1985).

Subverting building up to an ending - or the expected ending - is one thing. Some view life as linear, and expect the beginning to be at the start. Others might prefer the sort of narration that Betrayal (1983), pretty close to the stage-play, gives us, and might relate more to a muddle of dream, day-dream, imagination, and sheer fantasy, such as, probably more convincingly than Dark Horse, films like Allen's Deconstructing Harry (1997) (or, for that matter, Stardust Memories (1980)) give us.

Though I do not think that writer / director Todd Solondz is aiming at that here: this is not Thurber's Walter Mitty gone slightly more wrong, but has, as it develops, really far more resonance with something very different, a sort of US Enter the Void, but without certain embellishments.

Rather implausibly, you might infer from trusting what I am saying, IMDb seeks to sum up this work in a sentence as:

Romance blooms between two thirty-somethings in arrested development: an avid toy collector and a woman who is the dark horse of her family


Hell, if that were what this film is about, it wouldn't deserve the time of day! These are superficialities, substituting for an appreciation of what the film implies about the creation and distinegration of personality, hope and desire. It is possible that reviews are more on target than what I have quoted, but I don't think that I want to trust having to wade through many opinions that will just criticize this film for not being what it is not - if, though, they were misled by IMDb's said 23-word snapshot (probably little worse than many a trailer), perhaps it is fair for them to air their grievances there.

Confused - probably stunned - as I was when I came out of Dark Horse and incoherently tried to formulate a response in talking to Jon, who was ushering, I gratefully received his affirmation of that feeling, and I shall, at some point, be following up his recommendation of Solondz's Happiness (1998)...

This review is dedicated to Jon, with thanks


End-notes

* Which, before Baywatch, might have been seen as exploitative (probably of Bo Derek), if it didn't arrive at a convenient moral ending.