Some sort of insomniac response to Benedict C. as Alan T. ...

The beginnings of a review of The Imitation Game (2014)

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28 December

* Contains some spoilers *

This has the beginnings of a review of The Imitation Game (2014)

Section 1 of Alan Turing's paper is headed 'The imitation game', but its title is 'Computing machinery and intelligence', @ImitationGame...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 31, 2014

It was not the first visit to Bletchley Park (@BParkPodcast), but a friend who had not already been and who came to an excellent amateur production (at The ADC Theatre (@adctheatre)) of Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code was then taken there that same weekend : we easily agreed, seeing The Imitation Game (2014) together (@ImitationGame), that it could have given no such impetus, because it is best watched by someone knowing little about BP or Alan Turing (and unprepared to know more) :

One wishes to be wrong, but The @ImitationGame (2014) seems no more likely than Enigma (2001) to cause people to visit @BParkPodcast ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

It is fanciful in the extreme to show people trying to crack a code who not only have no notion what would / should happen, if they did so, but who are also – in consequence, and as if such decisions could would be left to them – left squabbling about what to do.

Not only that, but it is presented as if, finding out in the middle of the night on the edge of what is now Milton Keynes in the early 1940s, that someone’s mother is about to be eaten by a shark on a remote beach, one can simply summon up a passing shark-hunter (via the offices of the beneficent Steven Spielberg, no doubt)…

-> Falsifying facts in The @ImitationGame about Turing's war, the bombe machine, Hugh Alexander, etc. does not even serve a good story ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

-> Justified by the 'twisted genius' slant (e.g. of A Beautiful Mind (2001)), to hell with how, with whom and when Enigma was broken ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

-> Just to make out that Turing - alongside Mark Strong (as a creepier Jeremy Northamthan Enigma's (2001)) - decided who lived or died...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

Some film-posters make more fanciful claims than others :

Only by oddly defining 'British' (or 'film') is @ImitationGame 'The best British film of the year' (poster), @dimensionsmovie - Mr.Turner ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 27, 2014

The worst thing about the film (because there were not just half-a-dozen codebreakers, and only one woman amongst them) was also a source of the best : Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) reaching out to what he found kindred in Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), and the sense of their valuing and encouraging (the best in) each other.

Though, that said, it did feel as if one had been there before, with the premiere of Dimensions : A Line, A Loop, A Tangle of Threads, at Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) in 2011… :

Not uniquely, @dimensionsmovie, but more than a little reminded of Stephen and Annie by @imitationgame (2014)...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 27, 2014

Period touches in Graham Moore's script for The @ImitationGame - such as KeiraKnightley (as Joan Clarke) three times exclaiming O My God ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

Of course, depressing a key on an Enigma machine, and seeing the correlate light up, beats The @ImitationGame, too : http://t.co/7gOTiDec2v
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

Of course, the film has a number of good things about it, from Alexandre Desplat's score settling down nicely, after seeming too prominently like the tappings of Morse Code (even if he is made to over-egg the sentiment at the end ?), to evoking in miniatures the horrors and hypocrisy of Sherborne, but they feel in the significant minority.

Quite a fun, knowing review, from Michael Phillips at @chicagotribune, of The @ImitationGame... : http://t.co/C1t1WrovKh
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

Geoff Pevere, in The @globeandmail, is also quite interesting about The @ImitationGame : http://t.co/y7GCR57CBt
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

So the friend (a former animator) had the same reservations about the doom-laden flights / convoys in impossibly tight formations - that they were designed to have an instant content for those who know nothing about The Second World War, and sought thereby to make a virtue of their alien look and qualities* :

Oh, and the CGI in The @ImitationGame and what, despite achieving period costume / scenes (as people flee The Blitz), it inaptly connotes !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014

End-notes

* Almost as if machines themselves were waging war, whilst, quite clearly in the editing, we have counterpointed the quiet, calm Turing (supposedly infuriating everyone's patience by being unnecessarily fastidious), but biding his time to rob such machines of their brutal power with a different sort and class of machine...

Yawn ! (Facile sub-Matrix juxtaposition to enliven any in the audience who are uninformed about Turing (and who he was for our times) with a subliminal notion of those things, i.e. that he is Neo to Agent Smith's machine-world...)


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

Fifteen fine festival films

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17 December


Simply put, five favourite films from each of the last three Cambridge Film Festivals (in alphabetical order, ignoring 'The')...


That said, the list has now been enhanced by These are some of my favourite things..., which teases out some of the common themes for you



As if I am not There (2010) - from 2011


Black Butterflies (2011) - from 2011


Dimensions (2011) - from 2011


Eyes on the Sky (2008) (Catalan) - from 2013


Formentera (2012) (German) (Festival review) - from 2012


The Idiot (2011) (Estonia) - from 2012


Kosmos (2010) - from 2011


Marius (2013) (shown with Fanny (2013) - from 2013


The Night Elvis Died (2010) (Catalan) - from 2012


Postcards from the Zoo (2012) (Festival review) - from 2012


The Redemption of the Fish (2013) (Catalan) - from 2013


The Snows of Kilimanjaro (2011) (Opening film) Festival review - from 2012


The Taste of Money (2012) - from 2013


Tirza (2010) - from 2011


Upstream Color (2013) (Young Americans) - from 2013


That said, the list has now been enhanced by These are some of my favourite things..., which teases out some of the common themes for you

About time for another Curtis film ?

This is a critique of About Time (2013)

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13 September (revised, in case too hard on Curtis, 16 September [revisions in bold-face])

* NB Pretty spoilery *

This is a critique of About Time (2013)

It is inevitable that a film that features time travel will remind of other such films that do, such as Back to the Future (1985), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), or Dimensions (2011) (a truly independent production, set in Cambridge), and also invoke the likes of Lola Rennt (1998) (in English, Run Lola Run) and Sliding Doors (1998).

Those films have an internal logic, and they tend to try to keep to it. With About Time (2013), Richard Curtis is either cavalier with that logic, or just careless. A writer and director who introduces the sight-gag of a discovered off-stage band, which is not only worthy of Woody Allen, but definitely taken from one of his films (probably Bananas (1971)), shows that he does not hesitate to use something that does not chime with character or mood to get a laugh.

One can therefore use either theory to explain why the logic that Curtis chose to employ is handily overlooked (or ignored). Admittedly, some of the audience will not notice, but, with a very artificial piece of stage-machinery, one is running the risk of not undermining the others’ enjoyment, if it creaks so noisily.

Our protagonist Tim (Domnhall Gleeson) has a maybe older sister (he is 21, but her age seemed unclear) called Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson) whose life has become unnecessarily burdened, so he reckons on taking her back to when she picked up that burden. Apart from the fact that nothing has suggested that the male-only gift of doing so (by clenching one’s hands in the dark and thinking of that moment) allows passengers on one’s coat-tails, there is no obvious reason why Tim needs to take an older Kit Kat to that point : at his leisure, he could have gone back on his own, and contrived to distract her from the undesired encounter.

As it is, the first re-take is disastrous, and then the whole thing proves to have been so, because Tim’s baby has changed sex, the reason for which, relating to the chance nature of the moment of conception, Tim’s father then explains (though not, as becomes telling later, how he knows). ‘Remedying’ the change to the past that has already made is not explained, but the model of time travel that has been shown before (as when Tim regrets not giving a girl a New Year's kiss, or humorously wishes to rescue the opening night of Harry’s play) seems to have been that, when one revisited the past, what stemmed from it no longer exists, almost as if the new version of events has been recorded over it.

If that were not so, Tim would be able to pick and choose between different versions of events, and not have to shoo the extravagance of a band away when things have gone well. He would also not have to re-live the intervening time, which we see him do to seductive effect. Then again, when he goes back to just before midnight on New Year's Day, he simply returns from that moment and goes back to see his father...

So maybe Kit Kat and he would not both have had to re-live the time that had passed from New Year’s Eve, if one way of approaching this 'gift', then, may be to change a variable, and see what happens, another to do the same, but travel forward to the same point in the future in the expectation that nothing has changed.

That said, Tim tries changing several weeks' worth of dynamic between Kit Kat's friend Charlotte and him - the humour of the situation, i.e. that he still does not win her love, is allowed (and used) to gloss over the fact that going to Charlotte's room partway through her stay at his parents' house is hardly going to leave everything else unchanged.

For just seeing Tim not being natural because he knows things about Mary (Rachel McAdams), e.g. that she is a fan of Kate Moss (or even her name), that she knows that she has not told him proves how difficult that would be just for an hour or two. The time travel becomes a sort of alibi where, because one knows too much from what happened the time before, it tends to sound dodgy, like an excuse.

Yet the bigger sin against Curtis’ own logic is when Tim decides that he will have a different person do something important for him, and tries several friends in the role : for him to have done so, he would, again, have had to go right back to when he first asked the original person, and that, too, would impossibly unravel too much else, quite probably that exact baby’s conception (again).


That said, Curtis does not, after all, seem to mean us to take the time travel that literally, because the end of the film shifts into a more ‘preachy’ mode of using it reflectively, to go back over and cherish each moment / count one’s blessings, and seems to want to turn what went before more into a fable, if not downright disown it.

Indeed, Tim’s closing voice-over makes one think that a documentary about awareness has been tacked on, invoking the wisdom of some celebrated homily. (The quiet lyric of a Nick Cave song in the soundtrack even begins ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’.) It feels as though Curtis is using the medium of this film to try to pass on a weighty Socratic message about living a good life – and dying well – even if he may be out of his league…

With Richard Curtis, the similarities to his other films do not hide : Hugh Grant running across Notting Hill in that self-titled film is echoed here by Tim, there is a wedding and a funeral (of sorts), and we have the awkwardness of the main character, as if no Curtis leading man can be anything other than acutely and Britishly self-conscious. (The difference being that running a bookshop maybe requires less tact, discretion, charm than being a successful barrister.)

Without the self-consciousness, there would be little need for the family secret that Tim’s father (Bill Nighy) passes on to him - with it, blurting out to Mary’s parents about their sex-life would be so commonplace that Tim would ever and exhaustingly be clenching his fists to undo things. Again, to the extent that the film works through humour, the comedic effect is put before stable characters.

Thus, if one of his friends is to be believed, Tim is sexually experienced, but he behaves like a virgin, and, in the summer following his twenty-first, has a crush on Kit Kat’s friend Charlotte (Margot Robbie), calling her ‘my first love’. The friend may just be being embarrassing, but, when Tim is counting his blessings and how he has been served that day, the price of his sandwich order rises from around £4.40 (when he is in a rush) to some £6.20 (stopping to appreciate the woman’s smile), and there have been other reasons already to doubt this scripting.

However, unless you credit that counsel at the Criminal Bar are just like actors and can throw themselves into their brief (we also see Tim with modest quantities of paperwork, and never working into the night to master his brief), Tim has hardly the best foundation for good court advocacy, to the extent that it requires some thinking on one’s feet. (Quite apart from the fact that, at Tim’s age, he would at best be newly called to The Bar, if not in pupillage.)

Talking, for a moment, of Tim’s parents, one must feel sorry for the role that Lindsay Duncan is given of a tea-making, picnicking mother who is somewhat gauchely forthright, for, although Tim clearly takes much of his character from her, a highly urbane Nighy is given a much more fleshed-out part, and steals – or comes close to stealing – the important scenes between Gleeson and him.

The cast is good, and gives of its best, with McAdams, Gleeson, Robbie and Joshua McGuire (as Rory) standing out, but ‘the depth’ of the writing does let them down : Nighy is the only one who feels rounded, whereas Gleeson’s utterances too often make one just cringe, and enough others are stock (Curtis) characters.

Tim’s mother has been mentioned, but there is also the uncle (nicely played, though, by Richard Cordery), the playwright Harry (likewise Tom Hollander), the clumsy friend Jay (with no stereotypical suggestion, one can be sure, of inbreeding)… Tim goes back in time just to be with his father, who is reading Dickens, and Nighy reads a passage to Gleeson.

Maybe an attempt at Dickens with time travel is a bit, overall, what About Time feels like – no disrespect to the novelist !


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

The latest on Dimensions

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24 February

New Empress Magazine's on-line content has beaten me to posting the news that Dimensions (2011) has won a prestigious award, which I had first by e-mail from Ant Neely (with the following image).



NEM's coverage is available at:

http://newempressmagazine.com/2012/02/23/dimensions-has-gort-it-say-boston-sci-fi-judges/#more-2393


Helen Cox, who wrote the item, has - understandably - a soft spot for the film, and may even have seen it as many times as I, since, at NEM's third quiz night - as ever in Bermondsey - there was a screening laid on for the first fifty to sign up as participants (because Shortwave Cinema only seats fifty-two).

She mentions two festivals, but Ant told me a while back that there is a third - looking back, I see that, then, he asked me not to mention it, so I'm not doing so...


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A survey / summary

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22 December

Whether it really means that they were of interest (or someone just told someone else to look), I have no idea, but the list of postings with the most page-views (since the blog's inception) is:


No. Posting

90 Dimensions: Through the looking-glass of time? (2)

75 Unlimited dimensions

57 Nicola Malet at The Tavern Gallery (Meldreth)

41 The man who believed in flicker-drive

9 The Physics of Poetry

6 A tribute to times past

6 An appreciation of L'enfance du Christ

6 New dimensions on Dimensions

5 Blogging at the Tate (from 4 September)

5 Dimensions to-night


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Dimensions - another screening (in Cambridge) (2)

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20 October

As to Wallingford, I quote directly from http://dimensionsthemovie.com/:

Next chance to see the film is at a preview screening at the Wallingford Corn Exchange in Oxfordshire on Nov 4th. If you know anyone in the area, please tell them! http://www.cornexchange.org.uk/

The Cambridge event is, indeed, on Tuesday 22 November from 10.00 to 1.00 (a morning event, not a late-nighter, this time). The current Arts Picturehouse booklet (p. 22) lists it as a 'Contemporary British film industry event: producers and audiences', with the further subtitle 'Funding and producing an independent British film:

Sloane U'Ren (Art / Set Director on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Being John Malkovich and Ant Neeley [sic], composer of Six Feet Under, will discuss their current production Dimensions, a period sci-fi drama shot on location in Cambridgeshire.

NB However, given that this listing is on a spread headed 'Cambridgeshire Film Consortium Education Events' (there are details of the consortium in a column on the same page as quoted from above), and that it is under a banner reading 'Education events for schools and colleges' plus 'Suitable for a/as/undergraduate film/Media Studies / Cost £3.50 accompanying teachers free', it may be that others are not encouraged to attend...

Maybe I shall enquire?


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Dimensions - another screening (in Cambridge) (1)

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20 October

Some will know that, on 4 November, Dimensions hits (hit?!) Wallingford, in Oxfordshire, which I believe that I read about on the film's web-site...

But, and I really should check the date, on 22 November the film (through the Arts Picturehouse, or at least the mention is in its latest booklet of what's on) is being screened for the fourth time in Cambridge, its home city, and I shall provide details here, just as soon as I can (possibly or otherwise - six impossible things before breakfast, etc.)!

As I recall, Sloane and Ant will also be talking about how to make such a film (or any full-length film) without (the usual) funding - if their names are not already familiar to you, then you have been caught napping on the job of jeeping (?) abreast of this blog, and need to remedy that omission, whilst you can, by reading some earlier postings (if you can find them amongst the plethora of dross).


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Dimensions: Through the looking-glass of time? (2)

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25 September

Here, now (wherever 'here' and 'now' actually are), are the 500 words that have been submitted to the Festival web-page for Dimensions and, as a comment on a piece about the film in Cambridge News, to that newspaper / web-site:


Although it is received wisdom that ‘I can’t be in two places at once [or at the same time, in a variant]’, not only is that usually just an excuse, but it also might not stand up to examination in the light of developments in cloning.

All that apart, more or less, the immense popularity of Dimensions, which has seen it (after having screenings in Screens 2 and then 1) shown again this afternoon meant that I could go through the wormhole of watching again: I know that the phrase does not sound favourable, but this is my review, and I am in a whimsical mood, in no way intended to detract from viewing twice to see what happened to something that I thought fine the first time.

Why did I think it fine? It is an extremely intelligent film that uses the concept and theory of time-travel to say something about what I described in my Festival blog as longing. I still think that it is longing, not just obsession – I think that one can be obsessed about something (e.g. my head being cut off by Jackie Chan) that (unless we are being psychoanalytical), on the face (pun intended!) of it, one does not long for, and long for something that does not obsess one.

I said that it is longing for something that one cannot have or that may not do me any good. In this film, that turns out not to be true on either count, and also to involve a paradox. The events are separated by a period of fifteen years, but, in some respects, the characters seem unchanged, seem stuck in some childish ways (as we all probably are – now who wants to play the psychology card, after all!), seem full of what I want to call longing. (I call it longing not only because I can’t use the German word Sehnsucht, and, because of the connotations, I don’t want to use yearning.)

I asked a question about that at the premiere – the younger actors had had a chance to speak to their counterparts (and vice versa). What I find myself thinking, this time around, is that there is a generational as well as a dimensional character to all that we see, a temporal distortion that, as much as Alice’s worlds reinterpret the present from which she enters Wonderland or the other Looking-Glass House, ripples (a key word in the script) as water, particles or time do with their differing wave-fronts. Which is why Ant Neely’s brother’s house on the river at Cambridge is such a benefit to and feature of this film.

This Cambridge-driven film – Ernest Rutherford split the atom here in 1917, which was then done under both his direction and controlled conditions in 1932 - buzzes with that innovation, but buzzes in the direction of feelings, and Olivia Llewellyn’s acting beautifully embodies the spirit of a bright and clear academic mind, seeking to help Henry-Lloyd-Hughes (as Stephen) achieve his brilliant aims.


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Dimensions: Through the looking-glass of time? (1)

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24 September

Although it is received wisdom that ‘I can’t be in two places at once [or at the same time, in a variant]’, not only is that usually just an excuse, but it also might not stand up to examination in the light of developments in cloning.

All that apart, more or less, the immense popularity of Dimensions, which has seen it (after having screenings in Screens 2 and then 1) shown again this afternoon meant that I could go through the wormhole of watching again: I know that the phrase does not sound favourable, but this is my review, and I am in a whimsical mood, in no way intended to detract from viewing twice to see what happened to something that I thought fine the first time.

Why did I think it fine? It is an extremely intelligent film that uses the concept and theory of time-travel to say something about what I described in my Festival blog as longing. I still think that it is longing, not just obsession – I think that one can be obsessed about something (e.g. my head being cut off by Jackie Chan) that (unless we are being psychoanalytical), on the face (pun intended!) of it, one does not long for, and long for something that does not obsess one.

I said that it is longing for something that one cannot have or that may not do me any good. In this film, that turns out not to be true on either count, and also to involve a paradox. The events are separated by a period of fifteen years, but, in some respects, the characters seem unchanged, seem stuck in some childish ways (as we all probably are – now who wants to play the psychology card, after all!), seem full of what I want to call longing. (I call it longing not only because I can’t use the German word Sehnsucht, and, because of the connotations, I don’t want to use yearning.)


I shall have to finish this review later, so this is a stub (as Wikipedia would call it)…


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A dimensional hyperlink

Follow us… into other dimensions, that is!

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22 September

A bold (untutored!) attempt to create some sort of interface, portal or wormhole (or any combination of the three, i.e. portal / wormhole, interface / portal, etc.) between this blog and the official web-site for Dimensions - or am I really making a (probably virtual) cup of sweet tea, suitable to give to someone in shock?

(If so, a couple of rounds of thickly buttered toast would be a good accompanying dish, but 'With or without Marmite®?' is the important question...)


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Dimensions to-night

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21 September

If I can remember my question (please see below), which I have been formulating (a) unusually in advance of the screening, and (b) so necessarily without knowing what I might really want to ask, once I have seen Dimensions, it might be (because I might ask someone other than Ant Neely and something else):

For all that we know - or think that we know - about life and the world, they can prove (or seem to prove) counter-intuitive, so I ask, given that Ant wrote the film, whether that made writing the music harder, easier - or just different.

As some say, Watch this space!

Festival publications (1) - a comment (or two)

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10 September

Restraining the impulse to bring an eye trained in consistency too closely to bear, I shall just observe concerning TAKE ONE that:

* The Camera That Changed The World + Dont [sic] Look Back are on on as follows (not as stated, p.5): Monday 19 September at 3.30 p.m.

* The interview with Dimensions' director Sloane U'Ren is compelling (p. 1)

* There are other screenings than those listed of Tomboy (p. 4 - also on Friday 16 September at 12.45 p.m.) and Red State (p. 5 - also on Tuesday 20 September at 11.00 p.m.)

* Hugh Paterson's account of the 'forest screening' of Robin Hood was fun, and I look forward to making the film's acquaintance again in the Great Hall at Trinity

* Silent Running is being screened at 10.30 p.m. on Saturday 24 September (not in the morning)

* It would be good to apply 'a house style' to the presentation, outside of reviews and interviews, of dates and times


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Festival publications (1) - update

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9 September

Well, a link hasn't appeared that takes you to a PDF file (or the like) of TAKE ONE, but there's now a list of three entries

http://www.cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk/review/take-one/

which reference some of the ones that I picked out before, and which should (if the links were functioning) take you on to read more:


Interview
Sloane U’ren, Director of Dimensions: A Line, a Loop, a Tangle of Threads

There’s no room for regret in a world without time travel. If you can’t quantum leap, you must make your own luck – and if you can’t afford to follow your dreams, sooner sell your home than your soul. Read more


Special Feature
Meet the Dutch Master: JOS STELLING

He may not be a household name here in the UK, but Dutch director Jos Stelling has endearingly developed his directorial style since childhood in such a way that his films exude their own personality. Read more


Review
Hold the Front Page!

Some journalists will do anything for a story. Whilst the plot of ACE IN THE HOLE is lent an unexpected topicality by press events in the US, that is not the only reason it makes for such an excellent and prescient movie experience 60 years after its original release. Read more

If critic Top Ten lists are to be believed, CITIZEN KANE is the greatest achievement of the film medium so far, the very pinnacle of cinematic perfection. Read more

Time enough for travel

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9 September

After Ant Neely kindly alerted me to one of them, I have made time to view some of the dimensions of Dimensions on youtube: so far (and I may stop here - see below), I've seen the trailer, an interview with Ant, and also with Olivia Llewellyn - not, I gather, that one should wish one's life away (or maybe ask to be back where things were different), but it's all making me wish that 21 September were closer, as this whole project looks really inventive and enthused by a small group of people working hard to making it happen.

There are going to be so many good things at the Festival in-between, so that, although finding time for blogging seems pressed now, it will seem com-pressed then, I'm sure that I'll make it. Do I, though, have to brush up on Everett, the 'many universes' theory, and quantum mechanics whilst I still have the chance, or can I rely on my sketchy memory of such things...? (I'm guessing not!)

Festival publications (1)

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9 September

As well as the very well-presented Festival brochure (thanks to Tony Jones and his team), full of interesting information about what is showing, when, where, and what it will cost*, and available at the Picturehouse (or to download as a PDF file on the home-page) or at:
http://issuu.com/camfilmtrust/docs/cff31_brochure?mode=embed


there is also TAKE ONE, an eight-page A5 booklet, the first issue of which I found had come out to-day (and also available at the Picturehouse - or should I refer to it as Festival Central?).

I think that it is going replace the Festival Daily from previous years, and will appear less frequently (but I undertand that the on-line reviews are still going to be added every day).

As I have not yet found the text of the booklet on the Festival web-site**, I shall attempt to give a flavour of it later in lieu of a link, but can say for now that, amongst other things, it mentions:

* Dimensions (the whole inside front cover)

* Ace In The Hole (a half-page with Citizen Kane)

* Information about Jos Stelling (with a large photo) and the screening / Q&A

* Robin Hood (a full page - already shown under Films in the Forest, and now to be screened in Trinity College)

* The Camera That Changed The World (two-thirds of a page)


More of TAKE ONE (issue one) in due course - and, if there is one, a link... (now below**)



*Again, I recommend the Festival passes. For staff and customers alike, it was all a bit confusing at first, but it can now be stated: passes are on sale for £25, £50 or £75 (the last one is Blue, so I guess that the other two, in order, are Red and White, but just as easy to specify the value, I think), and you then receives that amount of credit.

Credit can only be used on festival screenings, so it is important to estimate accurately (not too much, not too little) how much will be spent overall. The chosen credit is stored on a card to spend by buying tickets, which (in addition to the discount from Picturehouse membership) gives, respectively, 20%, 25% and 30% off the ticket-price.

With the Blue card (and probably the £50 card, because some information appears contradictory), the holder also gets free tea and coffee at the bar, which - although not free beer - cannot be bad!


**Well, it's supposed to be there, and it has its own web-page, but it isn't just now:

http://www.cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk/review/festival-daily-online/

New dimensions on Dimensions

8 September


I've just found that one of the films mentioned in the last posting has its own web-site, which might prove interesting to explore:

http://dimensionsthemovie.com/2011/08/23/cambridge-film-festival-dates/

Popular items

8 September


There was no need to guess that - as the Festival web-site announces has happened - the opening film would sell out, but also:

* Black Butterflies has been lifted out of the German strand into the main listing of features

* Gerhard Richter: Painting has been moved out of the screen that it was in (Screen 3, the smallest) into Screen 2 (the middle-sized screen) for the screening that I booked

* Dimensions, for which there was little choice when I came to book (and had to, because the other screening gave rise to a clash), has also sold out


A useful feature to keep an eye on, and it would be even better if a section of that web-page gave an alert when tickets are selling fast for a particular film or one (if more than one) of its screenings...

Those CFF events (so far...)

7 September

Thursday 15

4.45 Ace In The Hole

8.00 Opening film: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (sold out)

Friday 16

12.45 Tomboy

3.15 Rembrandt Fecit 1669 (Jos S.)

8.00 The Illusionist (Jos S.)

11.00 The Day The Earth Caught Fire - decide on the night

Saturday 17

12.45 Jess + Moss

3.00 Black Butterflies

8.15 Jos Stelling in Conversation (Q&A)

10.30 Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark

Sunday 18

3.15 No Trains No Planes (Jos S.)

5.45 White White World

8.15 Burnout

Monday 19

1.00 Bombay Beach

3.30 The Camera That Changed The World + another

5.45 A Useful Life

10.30 Sympathy For Mr Vengeance - decide on the night

Tuesday 20

8.15 Drive

11.00 Red State - decide on the night

Wednesday 21

3.15 As If I Am Not There

8.15 Dimensions (sold out)

11.00 Wild Side - decide on the night

Thursday 22

12.30 The Seventh Seal

11.00 Bullhead - decide on the night

Friday 23

3.30 Jo For Jonathan

6.00 The Nine Muses

8.15 Gerhard Richter: Painting

10.30 Red White & Blue - decide on the night

Staurday (?) 24

12.30 Kosmos

8.00 Tyrannosaur

10.45 Guilty Of Romance - decide on the night

Sunday 25

3.15 Sleeping Beauty

6.00 Surprise Movie (probably sold out)

8.30 Closing film: The Look