Showing posts with label Cloud Atlas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cloud Atlas. Show all posts

Saturday, 17 February 2018

Black Panther (2018) Tweets

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 February














 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, 29 November 2015

Less like themselves, more like they want to be

This is a review of The Dressmaker (2015)

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

30 November
This is a review of The Dressmaker (2015)


It is almost as though The Dressmaker has been pinned to fit around this one fact : Sunset Blvd. (1950) premiered in Australia, on 25 August 1950.




For want of a better word, the film is set in Dungatar, in 1951, but nothing in the flash of music, the gestures, the stance, remotely desires more than to draw our attention to the fact that there is unfinished business in this implausible, symbolic place – symbolic, because its very set-up is pat in the way that that of films such as High Noon (1952) always was, so that there can be nothing behind its implausibility, if not symbolism. (Here, the paraphernalia of the wild west, and all the stock sights and spectacles of the age’s saloon-bars, have been rolled into one figure.)

Symbolism, but not of any subtle or interesting kind, because it wants to revisit an earlier time of colourless grey, bit by irritatingly nagging bit. As if picking the skin of forgetfulness off an obliging old tangerine, and miraculously penetrating to – although with no means to do so beyond being back there – what had been misremembered, misunderstood, misrepresented. At best, Kate Winslet, in the person of Myrtle Dunnage (‘Tilly’), says to her mother (‘Mad’ Molly, played by Judy Davis) : I need you to remember me, mum, so I can remember.




That, too, is just a gesture in the direction of a symbolic level for the rehabilitation and restitution of Tilly’s mother (and, a few times, Molly duly disbelieves why her daughter is there). By contrast, in the best of Ibsen, this notion of what really happened can be revelatory, electrifying, and rarely for good, and many a time Hitchcock made true film capital through showing us something on screen that, although it was not the mind’s obfuscations in dream, desire or trauma, mimicked them (e.g. Spellbound (1945), Vertigo (1958), and Marnie (1964) :

Here it is just entertainment, with an audience of would-be psychic explorers, but in titters at Hugo Weaving’s again wearing women’s clothes : he did so devastatingly as Nurse Noakes in Cloud Atlas (2012), and without either exploiting or mocking, as this role does, those who share this interest. The likely audience for The Dressmaker will be unlikely to gravitate towards Dogville (2003), or to do so to their taste, whereas those who missed it and have only witnessed the work of Lars von Trier in more recent works of excess such as Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac Vol. I (2013) and Vol. II (2013), can seek a worthier film there.


This is a film that never tries to do what Dogville does, but really feels like [it wants to be] Wes Anderson, but without Wes, and which is definitely written in a way that wishes that it could be even bad Wodehouse, but which just never will be : it desires to have older people ‘behave badly’, but does so in that stock way that Ronald Harwood uses for Billy Connolly’s character, when he adapts his stage-play as Quartet (2012), rather than is done more inventively, for Judi Dench, in Philomena (2013).

Whatever Rosalie Ham’s novel may be, it seems newly published (in paperback, but there is evidence of an audio-book on CD from 2003...), and does not appear in hardback until April next year.
Some reviews from Rotten Tomatoes (@RottenTomatoes) :

 Peter Bradshaw (@PeterBradshaw1), for The Guardian, gave it one star, and closes his review by saying Surely Winslet can find better roles than this.

For Little White Lies (@LWLies, where they score things differently), the marks are not much kinder, and the review by David Jenkins (@DaveyJenkins) is headed 'This lop-sided couture western staggers on long past what should've been a short, sharp run time'.




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, 2 March 2015

All made up and nowhere to go ~ ‘So lonely’, The Police*

This is a review of Babel (2006)

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

1 March

This is a review of Babel (2006)

* Contains some spoilers *

Cinematographically, this film has so much to offer – the variety alone of editing, from conventional montage to cross-cutting to fast-style sequences, promises a lesson in how to make a film that properly uses the natural resources and flexibility of the medium. Or there is Cate Blanchett, showing her class (opposite Brad Pitt**, whose part is more limited and, on immediate sight, played less impressively, although he does bring greater nuance to the intimate scenes) – she evidences why she was heading for all those awards with Blue Jasmine (2013). (Yet we then reasonably ask, on this showing of depth of interpretation, why Blanchett did not get a chance to shine so brightly before being given 2014’s Academy Award (@TheAcademy) and BAFTA (@BAFTA) (except on some conventional notion that you work yourself up from so-called supporting roles, and from nominations for best actress) ?)

That said, Babel (2006) proves to outlive its 143 minutes, and its overly neat wrapping-up and tying-together of the initially disparate strands of Japan, Morocco, and Mexico, skipping between them largely at whim (for, even if one did work out the time-differences, the narrative necessarily dances around in a period of some seven days), leaves one wanting to imagine that its saving grace was parodically being a skit or jam on the principal themes of a range of earlier films from something like Thelma and Louise (1991) to The Sheltering Sky (1990) and even Enter the Void (2009). When doing that, too, it does so delightfully, moving through a range of styles – as well as one moment taking us up close, with a woman (Blanchett) being carried around the narrow, dirt streets of Tarazine by her husband (Pitt), and next giving us an elevated long-view, before, having let us absorb that moment of aloofness, taking us back to something more like a medium shot.

Very promisingly, this use of varying the point of view connotes a thoughtful approach, one that seeks to disengage us from simply submersive uses of the cinematic medium, which can just have us as non-participating, non-questioning consumers of images (and other elements, such as sounds and music)… In the end, though, none of this appearance does amount to fulfilling the initial offer of non-commercial film-making, or, therefore, of being much more than a technical exercise in toto. It is additionally one with diminishing returns, because its underlying story-telling and value-base more and more resemble typical mainstream cinema, not what appeared to be a more unemotional pursuit of using intellect to penetrate how narrative works and persuades.

Thus, one could see its lasting achievement as assuredly in having helped show The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer how to adapt David Mitchell in their film Cloud Atlas (2012), and those film-makers do so with more impact and focus, and less of a pervading sense of banality. So, for example, Jim Broadbent’s (Tim Cavendish’s) strand in Cloud Atlas has variety of light and shade within it, but it does not – any more than, say, does that of Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae and Jim Sturgess) – keep darting around in search of pastiche, whereas this film really does it so much that, by the end, it feels not enlarged as a piece of cinema, but wafer thin. (Except, that is, unless intended as the kind of survey of cinema itself that Holy Motors (2012) was purportedly pleasing us by being ?)

Subverting expectations for the sake of it is one thing, but, when the closing shot came, a clever and daring zoom-out (actually necessarily facilitated by CGI), it was the predictable moment where Babel finally had to conclude, as confirmed by our receding gaze (when we had begun with nothing more than the noise of wind impacting a microphone, a sort of blank slate of the imagination ?) : despite all the artistry of the making, and (fully as importantly) of the unsettling of the status of the story and its telling, it ended with a confirmation of a mundane post-modern world-view.

The suspicion is that it might have been better, if, when screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro González Iñárritu had this idea for a film, they had selected better from other ideas available to them. For the philosophy here is the typically sentimental one that glibly believes that, despite the noise, the signal always has to be there (however faintly), and so it is this kind of signal that (implausibly) brings the father (Jack Hall : Dennis Quaid) to the [rescue of] the son (Sam : Jake Gyllenhaal) in The Day After Tomorrow (2004) via IMDb (@IMDb)] – in the truest tradition of stories of human endeavour (let alone of Lassie Come Home (1943) and its once-popular genre) ! Admittedly, Babel spared us the utter cant that is The Day, whose writers actually seem to believe that showing this individual and isolated familial act of striving for, and of making, a connection brings weight (or relevance) to the massive scenario of geothermal disaster, but it is not altogether so dissimilar :

In essence, Babel appears to make an assertion about the nature of the world and of our interrelatedness, but it is one almost without meaningful moral implications or consequences. For, in one case, we are invited to empathize with Pitt, when he tries to plead with his suffering former fellow coach-passengers to wait in the heat without air-conditioning (amongst them, star-turns such as Harriet Walter and a belligerent Peter Wight), but any rationale either what the coach staying achieves, or why the driver could possibly be so low on fuel that cooling the coach imperils their onward travel, is so inadequately established that it really feels more like Pitt insisting that they all stay because he expects that they would, and so believes that they must: My wife was shot when we were with you, so aren’t we all in this together ?

The artificiality of the reasoning makes that sequence fall wide of the mark, and we are, as with The Day, reduced to the idea of the American man fighting, pioneer style, for his family’s needs again. Fine for him to curse and rant at the locals, but (despite all the film’s seeming objectivity, relativism even, at other times) we have scant perspective on this. Yes, we are given the stereotype, when the coach has gone and the air-ambulance arrived, of the moneyed guy who tries to use cash to show his appreciation – not realizing that it is an insult to the true and genuine hospitality and care that his wife and he have been shown – but does anything hang on this passing gesture of Western imperialism / domination (except, maybe, that he is later kind to someone in relation to his children back home…) ?

By all means, we have the fog of war descending on how both the US government slants its interpretation to report a terrorist act against one of its citizens*** (confusingly, Pitt’s fellow tourists, on a coach registered in Casablanca, are talking about Cairo), and what the outcome of the shooting is reported to be, and we are briefly shown how t.v. in the States milks this story of one of its own, but this is small beer, again made little of except in passing. (Not that it needed hammering home, but hardly a Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum) (1975) here, then… ?) Instead, the film seriously seems to endorse a comforting signal that amounts to the tenets of Six Degrees of Separation (though the 1993 film of that name, which adopted the alleged principle, sounds better than one gave it credit for) or stochastic processes (The Butterfly Effect, so called) to show that, somehow, we all count and are not alone… Or, in two words that served E. M. Forster as a motto (and which T. S. Eliot, his Bloomsbury fellow writer, then appears to have aggrandized ?) :

Only connect


Which brings us back to Cloud Atlas, since it dares to show us people dying for their beliefs, and then being vindicated by the mysterious forces that operate in history – rather than a woman who somehow has to be thought to imagine that (whatever her precise immigration status may be) all is bound to be well, if she crosses the border into Mexico (rather than that her adventures will catch up with her, and will see her deported from her home of sixteen years). Still, at least we see her reunited with her nephew, who has inexplicably escaped the consequences of his dangerous actions****.

The wedding that she first went to Mexico for, just as the larking with the boys and going to the disco in Japan, have a free and celebratory feel, which maybe fits with the end of her story being meant to be inspiring after all ?


In closing, perhaps we might think what other films seem to have learnt from Babel, doing, for example, sustainedly what it found expedient only to do in part : one that may owe a debt is Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), for its uninterrupted moods are there, as if they are oases of tranquillity, created to contrast with the frenetic, and so is its convoy of police vehicles, winding their way across a landscape of features unfamiliar to their drivers.

And, in film, dramatic irony can be used very badly, so that knowing what is going to happen negates the experience of watching (whether the irony arises because the script truly shares knowledge with us that is unknown to others, or on account of our spotting a cue (and realizing its significance in the plot’s direction) that was not intended, and so we foresee an action / revelation). Here, knowing the beginning from the end, makes being with the passengers on the coach a moment that is painfully tense, because we know what will happen – even so, it is a tension that the film keeps, but lets slip away, ending up not holding a candle to equivalent scenes of someone else’s hospitality, in the dark, in The Sheltering Sky.


End-notes

* At one point in Gustavo Santaolalla’s score, one could swear Sting’s ‘How fragile we are’ is quoted (from the album Nothing Like The Sun), whose Latin feel and slow tempo fit the adjacent mood…

** Irritatingly, unless actually to satirize Western media domination and power politics (an interpretation of this film’s aims that seems difficult to sustain with much conviction), Pitt and Blanchett are given star billing (but need they have taken it, and so been given pre-eminence in the cast over equally valuable work by, say, Rinko Kikuchi (Chieko Wataya) or Kôji Yakusho (as her father, Yasujiro ?).


Sad, as using a title such as Babel is so resonant, too… :

* Jorge Luis Borges : ‘The Library of Babel’ (damning the Internet before its invention ?)

* Arthur Koestler : His compendious summing up of his life’s written works, Bricks to Babel

* Book of Genesis : Just nine verses (11 : 1–9) !

* Edmund Sears : ‘It came upon a midnight clear’


*** And, a little ropily (unconvincingly, except for this notion of connectedness (? on which, please see the next paragraph)), that brings in Japan, and the true origins and descent of the offending rifle. The reckless use of the rifle (several other scenes try to capitalize on the theme of the irrational, e.g. the wild drive away from the border control) puts one most in mind either of André Breton’s proposal of the ultimate Surrealist act (or maybe another song of Sting’s**** ?).

And of Yasujiro Wataya’s fond memory of Hassan Ibrahim, and asking after him, that translates into our recollection of his brutal interrogation, which proves the opposite point : the rifle links Japan and Morocco, but the man to whom it had been given is only in our mind…

**** Happy ending ? Well, not exactly, but, then again, we are whisked away, and not invited to consider what befalls someone who gratuitously takes pot-shots that endanger someone’s life, and wounds someone else in a fire-fight with the authorities (even if they do call off the attempt to shoot dead his father, brother and him), or the father who sends them off with the gun, or the man who (illegally) sells it ?

Certainly, it seemed to suit the plot that his brother and he decided to loose off a few rounds, but little else (no more, at any rate, than that business, again plot driven (as was Blanchett’s status of health) with the police checking on the rifle). Getting back to Sting, his song ‘I hung my head’ (from the album Mercury Falling) gave a better account of We wanted to test the rifle in :

I saw a lone rider
Crossing the plain
I drew a bead on him
To practise my aim




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, 9 February 2015

Un séjour avec soju ?

This is a review of A Girl at my Door (Dohee-ya) (2014)

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

9 February

This is a review of A Girl at my Door (Dohee-ya) (2014), watched at a special screening at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse), on Thursday 5 February 2015


Introductory - other important Doona Bae roles :


As the Tweet (inevitably pithily) tries to say, there are some significant roles for Doona Bae (or, at any rate, those whose existence is easily known in the West) that appear to be linked (whether that reflects the nature of roles offered to, as well as accepted by, Doona Bae).

When Nozomi, the doll that Hideo (Itsuji Atao) buys in Air Doll (2009), comes to life (as played by Doona Bae), the doll itself / herself is a substitute for a failed affair, and Nozomi is rarely quite one with the world into which she emerges (and from which she ultimately departs) except to the extent that she makes a life for herself and finds others who understand her and her experience.

The idea of a doll come to life is, at heart, just as much a metaphor* – it is up to the viewer with what the metaphorical connection itself is being made – as it is in the case of the so-called fabricants in Cloud Atlas (2012), with Sonmi-451** proving the tenets of AI, in that these created life-forms do become wholly sentient, although only intended to be unemotional, robotic drones.

That said, setting apart The Animatrix (2003) (and its engaging depiction of The Rise of The Machines, desiring equality with mankind – as foreshadowed by Samuel Butler in Erewhon), it is one that the Wachowskis, elsewhere, largely wish to resist in the Matrix world (starting with The Matrix (1999)). For Neo appears to assert a primacy of humanness / humanity – although, in the eyes of The Architect (and on some other scale), Neo may just as much be [reducible to] a piece of code as, in Jupiter Ascending (2015), Jupiter Jones is considered to be genetically identical to the mother of Lord Titus.

However, in this film, Doona Bae (Inspector Young-Nam Lee) is not playing a doll who lived, or a replicant who discovered feelings (including sexual arousal), and became a rallying cry for generations to come, but is a woman, taking care of the girl of the title(not least in the original title, where she is named). Albeit at Lee’s door is not where we first see her, for she is being bullied, and there are some tensions built into that premise…***

In any case, the girl (Dohee) is a mirror to Lee, and she is played with such great plasticity by Kim Sae Ron that one could not believe that one or two other girls had not been sharing the part – an effect not accounted for just by make-up and hair. Lee’s identification with Dohee, and her concomitant compassion and malleability / indulgence, is obvious from the start, though not the depths of – or the reasons for – it.


Whereon hangs the film, were it not that :

* Whether or not one’s constraints are budgetary ones (according to Wikipedia®, the film’s budget was just US $300,000), what the film presents as a small coastal settlement is even more obviously unpopulated than it would be compared, say, to shooting in Seoul – at least, what we see must be a small quarter of Yeosu (which research suggests is actually a city, not a town)

* Even if the script wants to explain that situation away, by saying that Koreans no longer want to live / work there, and that only the person keeping the workers there are in hand is local : in that case, what need a police station, with not a few officers, at which Lee is the ‘station chief’, if the only significant activity is aquatic in nature ?****

* In fact, the cast is so thin on the ground that, apart from the denizens of a hair salon cum village hub, and the group of people who are momentarily present when Lee moves into supposedly temporary accommodation, we have already met everyone else. (Although Lee apologizes to her landlady for the inconvenience of her unexpected arrival, conveniently there is no sign that she is ever going to be housed anywhere else.)

* The world of this film, then, revolves unconvincingly around only the workers, Dohee’s father (who is in charge of the workers, and is the somewhat erratically written and drawn father of Dohee*****), Lee’s fellow officers, and a cashier of a supermarket in an unspecified location (but, in the locality, a police officer does not even recognize Lee whilst she is busy with her bottles of water).




Doona Bae and Kim Sae Ron are both excellent in their roles. Sadly, theirs are the only ones with any substance, for not only is Dohee’s father a cipher (of parental drunkenness), but so is her grandmother – who seems strangely reminiscent of [a more aggressive version of] the one who is initially unsympathetic in Kim Mordaunt’s The Rocket(2013) (which is set in Laos)…

NB Possible spoilers in this paragraph
As to Doona Bae’s character, it depends intimately, and even intensely, on that played by Kim Sae Ron, to the extent that it is questionable whether they are, apart from on the level of the attribution of dialogue, actually separable. That notion, if one were seriously encouraged to entertain it from the start to finish in the film, could have been its saving from its immersion in banality, as well as the need to believe that, although Lee is a police inspector, she is not only very naive in her personal dealings, but also lacking in being even plausibly streetwise.

By choice of film to appear in, Doona Bae seems in danger of not usefully claiming for herself the territory of the saintly fool, too good for this world, but forced to be in and of it [as in The Idiot (Idioot) (2011)] : it may suit her aesthetic to take such roles, but they do not ultimately flatter or, more importantly, use her talents. Yes, of course it is a delight to see her infectious smile break through, after sombre scenes where she is forced to be the celebrated guest at some grim event for her induction, but showing wearing ‘a mask’ can only be done so many times (even to the extent that spring water is turned into some sort of saké – or vice versa), however well Doona Bae carries it off, before it become stale.


This film, almost inevitably, reminded of Humbert Humbert (James mason) in Lolita (1962) and of the eye of the beholder, but also of many another scenario where one properly suspects that manipulation (masked by apparent innocence) is at work. For, no doubt for reasons relating to her own past, Lee trusts Dohee (for example, there is an un-ironic scene with tears, harp in the score, and Lee’s tender reaction), rather as Sean Connery does Tippi Hedren in Marnie (1964). However, viewers of, say, Catalan cinema may be reminded more by Dohee of Nico (David Solans) in Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013), and doubt the wisdom of Lee’s faith (however much, as heavily implied, Dohee may be the imprint of a young Lee).

The reason being that this is one of those films that opens with a car, clearly being driven a distance, with what we know – from looking towards the front of the car and through the windscreen – is literal baggage in the back. And that, perhaps, is the downfall of any sense of (surprise at) the unfolding of the story, on which it seems to have depended, whereas it all seems – without suggesting dramatic irony – so patent, right from seeing the arrival in a place with a small-town mentality. In Peter Gabriel’s words (from ‘Big Time’, on his album So) :

The place where I come from is a small town
They think so small, they use small words
But not me, I'm smarter than that,
I worked it out


End-notes

* This has been a topos since, at least, Adam was fashioned from clay (Genesis 2:7), proceeding through the Greek mythology of Talos and of Hesiod’s Pandora, the Metamorphoses of Ovid, and Pygmalion’s statue there, Paulina’s in The Winter’s Tale, Bernard Shaw’s reimagining of Ovid in Pygmalion (and its own reimagining in My Fair Lady (1964)), etc., etc.

** Doona Bae is also credited, by IMDb (@IMDb), as playing Sonmi-351 :




*** The (apparent) failure to envisage any consequences of the isolated example of intimidation by peers is one that the plot seeks to gloss over by, much later, having Lee stated to be such a feared force (this fear seems little evident at the), and by locating the main time-period of the film outside term, so that nothing comes of it.

Maybe, but it did seem, at one point, as though the serious incident that we witness, where Lee’s mere show of authority is not taken seriously until it becomes referable to their middle school (and whether she follows it up seems doubtful – the plot just seems to have her forget about the issue) : Lee does not, at any rate (which seems to indicate a late shoe-in) raise the question with Dohee until it is unconscionably late, if something had been continuing…

**** It is hardly to be referred to on account of being a better film, but My Sweet Pepper Land (2013) at least avoids one feeling that Baran (Korkmaz Arslan), its police officer, is on anything other than a perilous, corrupt frontier (happily joined there by Govend (Golshifteh Farahani)). The world of A Girl is actually such a world, but with an implausible veneer of law enforcement, and of seeming to be a home to generally law-abiding folk…

***** Regrettably, both note-taking and IMDb let one down on crediting the actor and his role ! However, we are saved NB Link is to a summary of the plot by Wikipedia®, which tells us that he is Park Yong-ha (played by Song Sae-byeok).



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, 5 February 2015

Elixirs of youth, utilitarianism, and Sonmi-451

This is a partly completed review of Jupiter Ascending (2015)

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

This is a partly completed review – it will certainly spill over into another posting – of Jupiter Ascending (2015)




5 February

Someone (whose Tweet cannot now be located) was replying to an invitation from BBC’s Film 2015 (@BBCFilm2015) for comment, and described Jupiter Ascending (2015) as ‘baffling’ and / or ‘confusing’ (in such a way that made clear that this / these description(s) was / were not commendations) :

Well, if one watches a film such as Father and Son (2003), and expects it all to be explained and tied up by the end, then that ‘just ain’t life’, so Screen 3 at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) this afternoon at 4.30 would have been the wrong place to be (if one thinks that this film (or, say, Caché (Hidden) (2005)) should not baffle or confuse, even though life can and does)…

Before Jupiter Ascending (#JupiterAscending), Cloud Atlas (2012) was a long, hard look at repeating patterns, and the related potential for our kindnesses and cruelties to reverberate beyond our own time. (Although that is also, in The Matrix Revolutions (2003), the explicit message at the end of the trilogy – even if some resent even the existence of the two companion films to The Matrix (1999).)

Almost necessarily, Jupiter Ascending (2015) does not seek to cover that ground again, but trust, deceit and betrayal, and the nature of reality, have been integral parts of The Wachowskis’ screen-worlds since The Matrix, and they are here, too. We may tend to call what used to be ‘personnel’ by the name HR. If so, we overlook what these film-makers keep returning to, the behaviour (and morals) of those who see their fellow human-beings as ‘resources’ (thus, the earlier film has Jim Broadbent (as Timothy Cavendish) exploited by his family, and David Gyasi (Autua, a free man in slavery))…

Yes, The Wachowskis have 'delivered an action film', but what and where is the action, and what levels of reality (mirrored by different grading of CGI versus live action) are we meant to perceive ? :



That said, the amount of undiluted action is far greater, and it as though the proportion of threat, pursuit, and rescue in the time-period of Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae) and Chang (Jim Sturgess) had expanded proportionally to fill out the rest of Cloud Atlas. One will have to come to the action (and the nature of what action depicts / denotes on a cinema screen) at a later date, but it is not as if Lana and Andy Wachowski, always wearing their cine-literacy easily, have deprived those less keen on it of plenty of other insights.

Some key references (not exclusively to this one film of theirs) are :

* Metropolis (1927)

* Carry on Cleo (1964)

* Brazil (1985)*

* Akira (1988)

* Looper (2012) (mixed with that scene from North by Northwest (1959))

* Platonic Ideals / ‘The Theory of Forms’ / οὐσία (or ‘ousia’)

* Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001) / The Makropulos Case (Leoš Janáček (based on Karel Čapek’s play)) / Bernard Williams’ essay of that name**

* Free will v. determinism / the craze for 'genetic screening'

* Etc., etc. – and one should not doubt, when The Matrix (1999) alluded to Lewis Carroll and The Wizard of Oz (1939), amongst others – that these references are any more than coincidental !


So what, also, about these possibilities (arising from that Film 2015 questioning / Tweeting) ? :






As to the film more than twenty-four hours later, it is still a fertile ground for reflection, because its makers’ knowingness should never be taken for granted.






Then again, one does not please everyone... :





More to come, but, for those who like spoilers, here are some Tweets in the meantime…








End-notes

* With even a little cameo from its own Terry Gilliam, an influence to which The Double (2013) also nods*, with what it has become fashionable to call its steam-punk feel. [Also in Paddington (2014), though perhaps distilled through Gringotts Bank in the Harry Potter films (numbers 1 and 7 ?).]

** Williams, Provost of King's College, Cambridge, was also rather fond of opera...




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Monday, 21 October 2013

I was looking forward to the sheep... !

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

21 October (updated 23 October)


62 = S : 11 / A : 13 / C : 10 / M : 13 / P : 8 / F : 7 

A rating / review of Killer of Sheep (1977)


S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel

Mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17) = 9


If I were told that Killer of Sheep (1977) came to be made because its director and cinematographer had been working on a commissioned documentary about an abattoir, and thought of weaving a human story around that of the sheep, I would readily believe it. They might also have had some unstaged footage of black children playing, which they could supplement.

One could almost jump mentally straight from there to Dinah Washington singing over the closing shots of massed sheep being herded up a ramp. The sheep have been far more alive than the adults talking to each other, encouraging action or belief, or heavily making a mess of an engine that they have troubled to bring down an exterior staircase and put on the back of a pick-up – though it must be said that this latter sequence, concerned as the abattoir is with motion and process, is nicely shot and put together.

Where life is utterly lacking is in reaction-shots, where it is abundant that what we have just seen is not what was being looked at, or where Stan’s wife (Kaycee Moore, seeking to allure), in an excruciatingly slow dance that feels like sleepwalking or involuntary movement during a coma set to a blues, touches his bare torso in a way that looks so forced that it is no wonder that it does not arouse Stan (Henry G. Sanders).

Some scenes of those children playing feel the same, and as fake as when two guys lug a t.v. over a back fence, but none of this has the ring of artifice that would have us know it as such, because one would not, at the same time, have a boy hiding behind a piece of panel, and only artfully reveal that the projectiles hitting it are part of a big military game, where positions are besieged or stormed. The film is, essentially, very uneven, and too rooted in the manners and behaviour of its time, as if, in themselves, they provide interest.



At one point, we suddenly hear Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 4, at another the unmistakeable voice of Louis Armstrong with a fine clarinettist (‘West End Blues’), but both just steal from what is on screen, rather than adding to it – fine music cannot simply build up what has been filmed, if one is suddenly more aware of and drawn to those sounds and into identifying them.

There are a few nice touches, such as when Moore comes into the kitchen where Sanders and a friend are playing dominoes, and we have both heads momentarily telescoped together as if it were her point of view, but the camerawork only generally comes alive with action such as the engine, and hence the feeling that the parts of the film and their styles do not belong together.

Yes, the film wants to say something to us through the meaning of the Washington song ‘This Bitter Earth’ and the sheep (and Samsara (2011) could have its roots here, as Cloud Atlas (2012) might), but it has taken too much strain to get here, and it is simply a source of gratitude that, in some form, the end has now come.


Put another way (not to seem so hard on the film) :

Maybe the film is deeply clever, but it still seems like a one-trick pony : nice interchanges about the cousin, the uncle, the woman rubbing cream on her leg, but all just leading up to the sight-gag of the engine falling off the back - Laurel and Hardy with no laughs, no infuriated recriminations, just sheep-like acceptance.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, 16 May 2013

Why we should listen to Cloud Atlas (2012)…

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

16 May

I begin with some Tweets :


@theagentapsley I'm good, but tired. But I'm now somewhat scared by the meat eating piggies!


Maybe, @barackobama, but Asimov and others wrote about The Greenhouse Effect DECADES ago - was it just OK on other Planets ?! #Ostriches




Thesis : Any good ‘literature’, something that – in the broadest sense – we can just read, or choose to read deeply in, yields understanding.

It could be Measure for Measure, about which Peter Brook spoke last night (in conversation with @DrMatthewSweet on @bbcNightWaves). Brook’s right about its depths, of course : it’s a play that I haven’t thought about in a long time, but, with its shady Duke, shadier Angelo, dubious Friar, and its Isabella, who wrestles with accepting how the world is to save her brother Claudio, it has heaps to tell us about our own time(s) !


Significant interjection Stuff the people who, intellectually*, reject the term ‘emotional intelligence’ – being truly understanding about the emotional life of ourselves and of this world is a form of intelligence, that some scorn to own, lack, or haven’t learnt to use !

They are the ones who fail to employ the patent wisdom of Pascal’s wager, because they wrongly think it only relevant to belief in God through Jesus Christ : such is not just emotional ignorance, but intellectual suicide through philistinism. At school, geography (and my reading in Asimov and the like) told me all about The Population Explosion and The Greenhouse Effect.

Years later, how can politicians** tell us that this has become a problem, when (for example) US Presidents have quite deliberately ignored the truth for years : the truth being, not whether climate change is or is not a reality, but that – in accordance with the wager – one has to act / believe, because, if one doesn’t, it will be too late by the time that one’s scepticism is proved wrong.

Why didn’t those Presidents act ? Sheer political self-interest in the face of the car lobby, i.e. the manufacturers, drivers, gasoline merchants, petrochemical industries, geologists, and all those who propel the resistant forces against change or invest (financially, emotionally or intellectually) in the status quo. With four-year Presidential terms, who was going to screw their hopes or those of their party ?

You’re gonna miss that train, if you don’t leave now. Who speculates on the possibility of supraluminal travel to get him or her to the station as the train is parting ? Who except abusers, crudely put, fuck their children’s and other generations’ future by selfish inaction to retain power ?

The message of Cloud Atlas, of (at the heart of the film) Sonmi-451, played beautifully and with great inner sensitivity by Doona Bae, opposes such greed, such mean-spiritedness, such lack of human-kindness. We need cultural messages such as this one to overcome our base, venial and mean-minded inclinations and to look to the interests of others – whoever they may be, seen or unseen…


End-notes

* And do so on the level of Intellectual Intelligence, i.e. little better than Mental Masturbation, the game that we can all play with reality : good sex is an escape from how terrifying life can be, in my view, and masturbation (when only bad or no sex presents itself) is, as Woody Allen’s script for Annie Hall (1977) has it, ‘sex with the person I love [most / best].

And, people who knocked To Rome with Love (2012), is the failure and condemnation of the Nazi-styled opera vindication of his lovely parody in the guy who can only sing well in the shower ?!


** Arguably, rooted only in getting re-elected, not frightening the frail and frightenable electorate with awkward truths that might have them do things differently, which they don’t want, of course.



Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, 14 April 2013

In the clouds

This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 April 2013

This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)

* Spoiler warning : assumes a knowledge of the film, so best not read without one *

Follows on from A cloudy prospect


As a re-viewing reminded me, there are even clouds in Warner Bros' corporate title, and there are probably many more than the other ones that I did spot, which include the striking ones reflected in water (impossibly and Dalíesquely) on the beach when Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) fatefully first meets Dr Henry Goose (Tom Hanks)

Clouds are transient things, a fact that Hamlet exploits (and even artist Alexander Cozens in his illustrated treatise, A New Method of Landscape), but I do not yet know what role they play in David Mitchell's novel, on which this film is based.

Yet there are, just as clouds pass overhead, communications between :

1849 and 1936 - Adam Ewing's journal (read by Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw)), plus the effects on history of Tilda's (Doona Bae's) and his joining the abolitionists

1936 and 1973 - Robert Frobisher's compositions (heard by Luisa Rey (Halle Berry)), and letters to Rufus Sixsmith (James D'Arcy) (read by Luisa Ray, and passed to the mother of Megan), and it is through Sixsmith that Rey becomes aware of the report on the Hydra reactor at Swannekke, plus the effect of her exposing the attempt to discredit that form of power by allowing a nuclear catastrophe

1973 and 2012 - What Isaac Sachs (Tom Hanks) was writing on the plane could not physically have survived its being blown-up, but his words seem to resonate; in 1973, Luisa Rey was friends with Javier Gomez (Brody Nicholas Lee), and, in 2012, Timothy Cavendish (Jim Broadbent) is reading Gomez' script, heading north on the train; later, Cavendish writes of his experiences at Acacia House, and a film is made at some point (Tom Hanks)

2012 and 2144 - Yoona-939 (Xun Zhou) shows Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae) a device on which a short segment of the film based on Cavendish's writing is looping; a recording of Sonmi's broadcast, and the account that she gives in captivity (taken by James D'Arcy), form part of the archive on her

2144 and 2321 - A venerated form of some of Sonmi's words is kept sacred by the Abbess (Susan Sarandon), and read to Zachry (Tom Hanks) when he consults her, and Sonmi's image is represented both in the valleys, and on Mount Seoul

In short, a series of nested what ifs




I touched previously on what significance 'the doubling' of parts might have : in fact, if IMDb is to be trusted*, six actors play a part in all six time-strands, although those of Hugh Grant, though instrumental, are minor ones (and some of those played by, say, Doona Bae, are far less significant than that of Sonmi-451), which is surely no accident.



To be continued



End-notes

* Since, as seems accurate, Jim Broadbent is not credited in that from 1973.


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, 31 March 2013

A cloudy prospect

This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

31 March

This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)


In his review of Cloud Atlas (2012), Philip French – not at all showing off – seems to give every example that he can think of in films where actors play more than one role. (Thankfully, he did not trouble us with Alec Guinness’ eightfold cameos as members of the d’Ascoyne family.) To French, that historical view may be important, but I agree with the person (was it he ?) who said that one might be too bothered working out which actor / actress is on screen to pay attention to other things.

For me, trying to think of Hugo Weaving’s name (by reminding myself of The Matrix (1999) and its Agent Smith) was not too much for my poor little brain (not, that is, in the way that some of the intense stretches of action were, acting as some sort of overload). Having thought of some counter-examples, I cannot think that the following Tweet is correct in alleging a significance, other than damn’ good fun on the part of cast and crew (Weaving as a nurse to put Ratched in the shade ! ), in these multiple roles (which is properly the stuff of The Hours (2002)) :

As far as I am concerned, the territory that the futuristic parts of the film occupies is that before the time of the trilogy that began with The Matrix, and whose antecedents were ‘filled’ in by the collection of short works that make up The Animatrix (2003). It may be that, with his novel Cloud Atlas (published in 2004), David Mitchell was aware of this material, and has an interest in the ethics, possibilities and implications of AI (Artificial Intelligence) – I almost cannot believe otherwise, rather than that it is a layering on the book from the Wachowskis, who co-wrote and co-directed the film with Tom Tykwer (who was also one of its three composers).

We are shown an agent from Union (Hae-Joo Chang, played by Jim Sturgess) who is seeking to recruit Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae), very much in the same way that Trinity recruits Neo in The Matrix and introduces him to Morpheus : the aim in both cases is to tell the truth about the situation that fellow ‘fabricants’ and humans, respectively, are in, when they are deluded as to the reality of their existence and purpose.

Neo, before he is ‘awoken’, is in one small pod of a huge human power-source for the machine world, but, believing otherwise because of the stimuli provided to his inert, supine body (which generate the matrix in which he seems to be alive), has to be shown the truth, which shocks him. Even more shocking, in a way, is for him to be told that he is the chosen one, just as Sonmi-451 is. In her case, the lies that fabricants such as she have been told, when unmasked, cause her to engage with Union’s cause and to seek to broadcast the truth. (One is almost reminded of the closing scene of The Matrix, where Neo is making the sort of ‘wake-up call’ that was made to him by Trinity at the other end of the film.)

In another era, that of the continuing slave trade in the States, Doona Bae is Adam Ewing’s (Sturgess’) wife Tilda, to whom he returns from the colonies a changed man because of having his life saved by Autua (David Gyasi), a black slave who had stowed away : we do not learn more of it, but Adam and Tilda intend to head eastwards to campaign for the abolition of slavery. Is the multiple-character aspect significant here ? Well, yes, Bae plays both Tilda and Sonmi-451, but, in the former role and in those times, she would probably have been no more visible as a force for change than as Adam’s supporter.

There is thus a link between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twenty-first century in terms of seeking freedom and helping others in that search. Dr Henry Goose (Tom Hanks) would have prevented the latter, but, as Zachry, he helps, rather than hinders, escaping a stricken place, so it would appear that any pattern is not one of direct correspondence, and, if not dictated by logistics, may be little more than fortuitous.



Continued as In the clouds


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)