Showing posts with label All is Lost. Show all posts
Showing posts with label All is Lost. Show all posts

Thursday, 28 November 2019

Up here is where it really matters [?] ~ Amelia Wren*

Responses to The Aeronauts (2019) [as seen at The Light Cinema, Cambridge]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

 27 November

Responses to The Aeronauts (2019) [as seen at The Light Cinema, Cambridge]






End-notes :

 * An amalgam of people, there was no Amelia Wren as such - to quote the IMDb entry for the film :

With [James Glaisher's] co-pilot aeronaut Henry Tracey Coxwell, they broke the world record for altitude on September 5, 1862. Coxwell is omitted from the film, and replaced with the fictional Amelia Wren.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 28 September 2015

The Martian (2015) : The science of deliberately piercing a hole in a space-suit...

At one time, probably an expanding group of Tweets about The Martian (2015)


More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 September

At one time, probably an expanding group of Tweets about The Martian (2015)













Some external links...

http://www.universetoday.com/77070/how-cold-is-space/

The AstroCritic: What 'The Martian' Gets Right About Astronauts




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday, 13 May 2014

Remembering Rita - with a Postlude

This is a review of Locke (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

13 May (Postlude added on 14 May, Tweet on 11 June)

This is a review of Locke (2014)

In Educating Rita (1983), Rita (Julie Walters) writes an incredibly short essay for her Open University tutor about staging Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. She says that Ibsen did not envisage it on stage, but to be sounds, and that, to accord with his stated wishes, it should be a radio play.



(Willy Russell’s original play itself was just a double-hander between Frank (Michael Caine) and Rita, but his own screenplay inevitably widened the portrayal out to involve other characters.) This film’s strength is also its weakness, in that it only shows us Ivan Locke, although he is surrounded by voices, real and imagined.)

One tends to feel the same about Locke (2014) as maybe Ibsen / Rita did about Peer, i.e. that its relatively minimal visual quality (not least if one has the same evening watched the stunningly alive colours of Advanced Style (2013)) made it less of a film than an audio-file with images – although some of the (largely fleeting) tension might have been lost in a play for radio, one imagines that there could have been compensating adjustments made elsewhere in text, music and sound-effects.

So it is that cars that come right up behind Locke (Tom Hardy) on the M6* seem to remind him of his father, to whom (whether or not he is alive) he seems intent to prove himself different, e.g. that he gets things done**, and that, although he is tempted to shirk what he feels that he should do and, as he puts it, carry on around the M25 to Dover (?)), he will not do so. As to the rest, apart from the amber lighting that is there so that we can see his face, and the illumination that his gaze sheds onto the back of the car (in the direction of his father), the rest is pairs, Morse codings, egg-shaped blurs of lights from other cars and from the buildings that edge the motorway :

All very arty as an embellishment to what would otherwise be Locke, in his car, sometimes doing 80 (although he says that there is a speed-limit), and doing very little when not snuffling, addressing his father and very occasionally being quiet except talking to the same rough half-a-dozen people, plus a few others. Except that the M1, which he gets onto from the M6 (though with not much evidence of that very distinctive junction), certainly does not have incessant illumination on either side of the carriageway, and we seem to see the same red elevated awning of a petrol-station at least twice more, and the credits tell us that the filming on location was in London :

Which means that the distorted lights that vary the darkness are as fully added in as the stunning shots of Earth that enliven watching Sandra Bullock clumsily floating around in Gravity (2013). They are so obviously there (and they are occasionally quite dramatic), that they are integral to the work that we see. Are we meant to accord the effect the benefit of taking it at face value, or see it as a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, to distance us from Locke himself ? Are we to credit that he fancies to himself that what he is about is a mercy dash, and so he has a thick jumper on, but the sleeves shoved up, because there is no time to stop ?

Something is up. Yet it is up in the way that film too frequently asks us to believe, where something is meant to be happening that has never happened before, and the film then comprises watching it unfold (maybe with the assistance of flashbacks, or other disjunctions in time and / or space)… As with Gravity, we might invest what we see with some significance, because it is new.

If, though, we do not, whether or not we mentally strip away the added visual elements, do we have a film even as striking as Enter the Void (2009), whose relative virtue is that it does not pretend that it is a slice of life that is unadulterated by music and by visual effects and a constructed sound-world ? Or does it, in this regard, resemble the unseen pair of characters Mitch and Murray in Glengarry Glen Ross*** (1993) (based on David Mamet’s play) in that, whether or not we know it, we suspect that we will no more see Bethan or what happens to Locke than we will them ?

Locke, however, delights in anonymity and keeping us uninformed. The ‘Home’ number on Locke’s hands-free device begins 01632, which the film is not alone in using for fictional purposes, for it is a UK area code [...] not in use and […] set aside for providing non-working, dummy phone numbers for drama, fiction and testing purposes. Yet the film studiously avoids other information :

* Locke mentions Croydon (or Crawley ?) to Katrina (Ruth Wilson), but he could never be heading there in the time that he estimates

* His son, stereotypically drawn back to the football match as if it is the new awkward topic to replace the weather, avoids mentioning another team / his own team

* Locke seems to say Argyll at one point, but he cannot have set out from somewhere near there (and the name of the place where the concrete is to be delivered seems fluidly indistinct**** ?)

* He has his boss Gareth’s number stored under Bastard (which is fair enough), but, apart from a rant at Locke, Gareth (Ben Daniels) seems powerless to do anything other than call Mitchell Dean[e] in Chicago and later report what he has been told to do : not much of a bastard, and the man whom they call ‘Chicago’ has a name that evokes Taunton Deane service-station on the M5 + Mitcheldean (in Gloucestershire)


Tom Hardy is not Welsh, and he does not at every moment sound Welsh (even to someone who shares his English background), although it can be disguised to some extent in the un-English stress-patterns that he is adopting. Then we have Gareth and Bethan as names of people who sound nothing but English, but is it another attempt to mislead ? In any event, Hardy is good, but Olivia Colman, as Bethan, has more to offer: she is somehow less hysterical than Katrina – but, then, she does appear to go to the theatre and read Beckettt.

Whereas Locke is just wrapped up in numbers, facts and codes, such as whether, in context, he has nine or ten years’ service, and it is only when he lashes out at his absent father (who, the film has us credit, is almost there at one point) that he feels any more than frustration that ‘my building’ might go wrong (shades of Ibsen again, in The Master Builder, with which there are a few parallels ?). He seems to care more about the concrete, as if it is a living thing, than much else.




Which is where the nub of the film lies, or it proves not to have much of one. Unlike the transcendental nature of Enter The Void, Locke feels banal, inconsequential – in Glengarry, so much more seems to be riding on what happens, yet here we have no notion that people will not be in a different mental mode overnight. And, for all the unwonted incaution of what Locke is about, it never rings true as any sort of clear breakdown (whatever, of course, a breakdown is) :

He may be depressed, but, if so the catalyst is unlikely to be the action that we see, but to inaction and self-recrimination along the lines of comparison with his father. It may be the early stages of a manic episode, and somehow everyone – Locke most of all – has overlooked that his seeming solidity lacks the infrastructure that he ironically busies himself providing in his work. Even if that is the intention, what this film encompasses is so slight, and the evidence of irrevocable damage to relationships (outside work) so uncertain, that it is in danger of popularizing impressions that may mislead.

The assertion also that there is a world of difference, for example, between ‘never’ and ‘once’ seems posture, convenient to bring in a binary, 0 or 1, dimension to life to match those coloured eggs that wink in the unreal darkness of night.



Postlude

One point of comparison has already been given in Gravity, but that is a film, frankly, that one has to agree ‘has the plot of a B-movie’, so what do we find if we turn our attention to All is Lost (2013) ? It has almost no speech, whereas Locke is really nothing but, yet points of connection are :

* The concentration on one seen character

* What Our Man (Robert Redford) faces is partly of his making by seemingly choosing to be where he is, though not for getting snagged and pierced by an abandoned container

* The need to travel on, whether to safety or what could be a new beginning

* Unfolding events that change the course or status of what has gone before


Any other links would probably be tenuous, but which is the stronger performance / script ? On both counts, it has to be Redford’s film, because the best engagement with Our Man is inferential, on the level of working out why he is doing what we see, since, of course he has no need to explain it to anyone (and a voice-over of him talking to himself would be dire).

If anything, Locke over-explains, and repeats itself : the son will always awkwardly divert to the game, the ‘pour’ will never be straightforward and risk ruin, and the reminders that Locke is on the road, and not heading home to sausages and beer (and his wife in the club shirt), will be hammered home. On this level and bringing in the near-solo Gravity again, Locke is a most unsubtle film, and Hardy is an onscreen equivalent of Clooney to Donal’s (Andrew Scott’s) offscreen Bullock (Donal panicks just as much as she does).

Special pleading for Gravity wants to say that Bullock’s Ryan Stone is a universal symbol for humanity and that it has a spiritual dimension, but what about here ? Film Eye’s complimentary programme tries to suggest, having quoted The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney about the look of the film, that :

The stream of car and road lights is mesmerising and seems to reflect Locke’s contemplation of his life and his predicament


Whatever Locke may have done before, he is now acting (or believing that he is acting) on principle to lay to rest the paternal spectre (and, as a curt mantra, he keeps saying to others – as if it exculpates him from responsibility – words to the effect I have no choice, whereas precisely the opposite is true, and it is only in the car on his own that his motivation, of proving himself to his father (and so proving the father wrong), is laid bare). We still have to ask the related question about this ‘predicament’, whether or not it is of his own making :

What effect does it have on us that some of these ‘car and road lights’ are added in, laid over what we see, which would otherwise actually just be a bloke in a car, making quite frequent phone-calls ? If we do not realize, then it is just a nice light-show, whose beauty and brilliance we will like, but come to take for granted as naturalism (although it is artifice). If, though, we have inferred what has been done, it is still not, as with Gravity, that we can necessarily see what is real / what fake, but the lights are then present to us with the knowledge that the basic image has been processed to have them there most of the time, and that it is more like some form of enhancement, of an allusion to hyper-realism. (But hyper-realism that is at its strongest when it is actually hiding behind semi-barked, serious utterances in a Welsh accent ? (Is the real notion of a joke something known to Locke, we might end up wondering…))

Thus, we come back to Enter the Void, and we come back to John Locke (1632–1704) – and this facetious Tweet :


— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 11, 2014

For Void’s hyper-reality is palpably artificial and never pretends to be otherwise, but it asserts that what we see is inhabiting other dimensions, which are apparent on drugs and in death (the old doors of perception theme, taken from Blake by Huxley, and from him by The Doors). Such a transcendent aspiration is given to Locke, but it is despite what he does and says, and, for example, it begs our indulgence that he has been with his wife Katrina long enough to have two teenage sons and yet does not have the remotest idea how to start to break something to her.

Instead (and attribute it to his being in shock, if you like), he twice prefaces how he has formulated what he wants to say with the very platitude that she latches onto, though both times she listens to him say it in silence. Clearly, something different is afoot this night, but is this naturalism, or is it symbolic – symbolic, say, in the way that the story is behind Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4, with its roots in Richard Dehmel’s poem of that name (the news broken there is different, but of a similar kind) ?


— BFI Player (@BFIPlayer) April 26, 2014

Could the vehicle in which Locke is travelling, under the influence of engaging with the philosophy of the other Locke and his arguments in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) that there are no innate ideas, be a sort of second womb where he, through his eyes and ears, becomes open afresh to sensory information ? We watch him turn these sense data into material on which to reflect in his journey and approach them from first principles…

Can Locke, as with Void, really be setting out general principles about life in the guise or medium of a film ? On one basis, it leaves uncertain the outcome of what we see befall Locke (though we did not know him before, for that matter), on another it has taken the simple footage of an apparent North to South journey and, by processing it, created colours and lights outside of reality, and maybe done so to impart truths on a symbolic level.

Somehow, it is hard to conceive that this is so (any more that it has the claims that Film Eye suggests to resemble Under Milk Wood) rather than it was just to make Locke look more interesting, but maybe it has been worth considering nonetheless...

Yet Film Divider's interview with Steven Knight, the film's director, certainly shows that the other Locke was part of his thinking :

He’s Lockean, as in the philosopher John Locke, he’s a rationalist and he tries to apply the theories of Locke, which would apply on a construction site, to the problems he’s now facing in life.



End-notes

* Locke appears to be one of these drivers who is wedded to the middle lane, so this will happen from those who do not think that he should be there.

** That remains to be proved, whether what he has managed to achieve at the wheel will come off flawlessly.

*** Or the two in Pinter’s The Dumbwaiter ?

**** Can it possibly be close to Home, so that Locke could then have left in the middle of the night to be there well ahead for the crucial time of 5.25 a.m. ? If so, how should it all have worked out, and, say, what reason did a file have to come to be in the car, rather than in the site office ?

There must be a site office (where Donal is being directed what to do), and Locke seems to had the relative luxury of its not being at a distance is the fact that it is relatively local what matters to him about it ? In any case, the holding company for the film is, appropriately, Concrete Pictures Ltd !




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Sunday, 12 January 2014

Who fêtes Gravity, not this masterpiece ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

12 January

A rating and review of All is Lost (2013)

99 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 16 / M : 16 / P : 16 / F : 17


S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel
9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)

Less Homer than Beckettt, more Job than Ulysses



We may not formally know until before the closing credits, but Robert Redford in All is Lost (2013) is Our Man : in this, the film is deliberately not specific, because we know more the name of the yacht, the Virginia Jane, than that of its captain.

We see him as a resourceful man, but only after, and from eight days before, the note whose text we hear him read¹ – otherwise, he is a man of few words (and there is anyway no one to talk to, when his Mayday calls come to an abrupt end< because he is not the sort of person who verbalizes the solution that he is seeking to each of his problems. The consequence is that we have to watch him quite closely, because all in what he is doing may be a clue to his reasoning, whereas, if we do not concentrate in that way (and it isdemanding), all may be lost for construing the film – why is he fashioning that piece of wood, or deploying the life-raft ?

Contrast this with the parallel¹ drama of Gravity (2013), and space, unlike the ocean, scarcely seems silent at all, with Bullock who, when not trying to copy Houston in, is narrating her situation and despair, or even acting under the remote instruction of Clooney. Some want (rather pointlessly, as this is fiction, and may even be parable) to say that Redford should never have been there or not so ill equipped – maybe Redford is too silent and strong, but, in relief, she just seems even more unengagingly neurotic to have been let into space. (People want to read beyond the ikon and the other religious symbols displayed and infer some meta-narrative of heaven and earth, rebirth, or God knows what, but it is will hidden.)



Redford is where he is (although he geographically is not, and the quality of the light seemed to give this away), and that is just a given – why, when in this modern era, or for what reason, are at best alluded to in his note (whose text we cannot refer to). Compared with the technical failures of depiction that can be levelled at Gravity, I believe that those of All is Lost are slight unless one is of a sea-going disposition, and have scant bearing : Our Man could have been lowered onto the vessel by angels mid-ocean for all that I care whether he should be where and how he is.



I say this, because I am happy (‘happy’ is not the right word – I am actively engaged in wishing) to see what I am shown and not seek explanation as to why it is foolhardy or unlikely, because it is what it is. For it is not as if Redford’s character is the last one on earth who should not be where he is, or there how he is, as rescuers the world over will testify, whereas Gravity just sidesteps the question of whether Bullock’s character could not have been better trained and / or have better absorbed the right training and attitude in adversity, rookie or no – would someone who panicks so much ever be taken on by NASA as an astronaut?

Continuing the contrast, the same test of plausibility must be levelled at each situation and character : even if Our Man should not be where he is and how he is, he could have chosen his own destiny and simply set out, whereas Ryan Stone (Bullock) had to satisfy others that she had the right skills and the nerve to fly a mission. In my view, there is no chance that she would not have been weeded out an early stage.

She subsists on the level of standing for all of us, a sort of Everyperson. However, this is not an Assumption of The Blessed Virgin, so that she can intercede for all of us, but a bumbling person with a neurotic core, and the plot-line depends on the presence of weaknesses that would not be there. All is Lost shows a man reasoning his way through what faces him, and not without being disheartened unto death : no one else appears to be to blame for where we find him, though we all find ourselves in life somewhere from which prior circumstances and decisions (ours and / or those of others) brought us there…

Our Man may or may not represent us, but we identify with him (unless we are aggrieved seafarers who berate him as suggested), and it is the inhuman dumping / falling of a container, just as we duly see these behemoths not notice him, that, if not exactly creating his problems, compounds them. Is he a righteous man like Job and what happens him being given over to be tested ? Maybe, but we do not feel that he is a special man, given over to ill to see whether he curses God.

What befalls him also evokes Homer’s Odyssey (and in one of the themes of Alex Ebert’s music we have The Sirens brought to life, when he thinks of giving into alcohol and before he seems to become beset by them proper), but I think that the closer parallel is with Beckettt’s Job-like figure in his mime Act Without Words I, who is temptingly offered water that he cannot drink, shade that is withdrawn (Jonah 4 : 6 – 8 ?), and the like.

Finally, the male figure, despite being prodded to continue with further temptations with the game, just withdraws. Famously, Beckettt’s trilogy of novels** almost has as its motto the closing words of the third, You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on, and the spirit of perseverance, though it ebbs and flows, is there in the resilience of Our Man’s responses to his situation. Towards the end, it is as if there is the same desire, which is somewhere in Kafka’s writing****, just to lie down in the snow, regardless of the risk and fall asleep.

As to Redford, it is only the white sideburns that discredit the idea that he is younger than 77, and all power to him, if he is rightly reported as being seen doing himself what his character did – the intense close-ups show him lined, but he is still every inch a star, and with commanding presence and conviction in his work. The arc of Our Man’s experience has those qualities brought to it, so that we cannot rest, scarcely drawing breath, whilst what faces him remains in the balance : No film, for me, has been (no real pun intended) as immersive as this one since Cell 211 (2009) at Cambridge Film Festival in 2010.


End-notes

¹ Spoiler alert - from IMDb, this is the text of the note :

13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry... I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you knew this. In each of your ways. And I am sorry. All is lost here... except for soul and body... that is, what's left of them... and a half-day's ration. It's inexcusable really, I know that now. How it could have taken this long to admit that I'm not sure... but it did. I fought 'til the end, I'm not sure what this worth, but know that I did. I have always hoped for more for you all... I will miss you. I'm sorry.

² It is far lesser, despite its 11 nomination for BAFTA awards to this film’s one (for Sound)… - told this, a friend pithily opined Then they are shitheads.



³ Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable.

**** Also suggested in the texts of Müller that Schubert set for Winterreise (which has been badly translated as A Winter’s Journey) : with Winterreise, as with this film, one has the feeling that the degradations of the physical journey are parallel manifestations of a disintegration of the soul or psyche.





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