Showing posts with label Dirty Harry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dirty Harry. Show all posts

Sunday 10 May 2020

The 'Raindance' Tweets

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



11 May








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

Saturday 30 November 2013

The cable guy

This is a review of Channeling (2013), as shown at Bath Film Festival 2013

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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30 November (revised 3 December)

This is a review of Channeling (2013), as shown at Bath Film Festival 2013 (@BathFilm) and thanks to a complimentary ticket from the festival


89 = S : 15 / A : 15 / C : 14 / M : 16 / P : 14 / F : 15


A rating and review of Channeling (2013)



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)



The title of Channeling* (2013) is deliberately multivalent, meaning both the sense of He channelled his energies into archery, and putting something on a channel (so that others can see and hear it).

As director / writer Drew Thomas told us in answer to one of my questions, the family of whom Wyatt (Taylor Handley), Jonah (Dominic DeVore) and Ashleigh (Skyler Day) are the grown-up offspring is a dysfunctional one : one son travels from Yemen for a funeral, and is then (in his only real-time appearance) told off by the father for not being there in time. I had asked because, when we see him, as a younger man caught on home video, pick up a boy at whom he has barked orders, it is unclear what he did, but it smacked of abuse.

As with Ashleigh’s confessional moment on camera into the mirror, Thomas said that he had intended to portray a self-loathing that might lead someone to seek approval from ratings for their actions or choices (made or to be made). When we saw this system of rating manipulated in the night club, and indeed the events that had led up to it, the film did seem momentarily a bit insubstantial and trivial in a way that The Bling Ring (2013) is in spades, but it moved away from it, and this was something, perhaps a little self-indulgently, that Thomas almost did throughout the film of mining different genres for what they were worth before moving on, and a little too much at the risk of lacking cohesion.

Saying that, the dummy commercial that opens the film is funny, thought provoking, and satirical, with insights into where the world of Twatter and what I call Arsebook logically lead to – it plunges one straight into a counterfactual world that, as in Looper (2012), does not stray far from the things that we know in what it changes.

The moments of humour characterize the film, although we are not always sure that it is permitted to laugh, and it also expects us to do some work in piecing together what has happened in and following the pursuit sequence that we see. Whether it is the equipment that was giving us the audio or how it has been recorded that made the early dialogue hard to follow was unclear – it might partly have been ‘tuning into’ Wyatt’s accent (different from that of his brother, but then his brother is an army sergeant, and has been serving for a long time), or partly that, as in Top Gun (1986) (for example), those in situations of combat or other peril are not perfectly audible in their pressurized communication.

Not least since this is set in California and begins with a car chase, expectations of topping Drive (2011) spring to mind, but the excitement of the action on the road, and elsewhere, has been styled, Thomas told us, to be more like the era of Dirty Harry (1971) (he did not name that series of films) and of film noir. Just in these things (there was a feel of The Rockford Files or Starsky and Hutch, not least with the token black guy who is the IT whizz), there was already quite a mixture of feels, let alone with a gangland punishment (including a British-sounding baddie ?) that made one wonder if it was going to have equivalent scenes in Seven Psychopaths (2012) or – sticking with Colin Farrell – In Bruges (2008) in its sights.

Whether these disparate elements enhance or dissipate the film’s energies, I remain unsure, as it is all too true that many a science-fiction film sticks to type, whereas this one shows off its director’s literacy of references. It also has an enviable soundtrack, making an impact right with the opening commercial, and even a live band in the night club reminiscent of The Doors.

The other question that I asked relates to a film that I only saw once, but which teasingly plays with the question of free will versus determinism, which is Michael Douglas in The Game (1997) : appropriately ‘channelled’ by the festival’s founder**, Chris King, I asked Thomas whether the technology of people sharing their actions and following their ratings, which the film initially seems to be about, had come first, or whether the deterministic theme had always been what interested him most (it had). He had wanted to explore the ways in which people do not (or refuse) to take responsibility for what concerns them, and had seen a link with how people in the US use the technology of social media to arrive at an answer based on what others tell them.

If that Doors tribute was deliberate, maybe it leads off in some other directions : Maybe not the advocacy of mescalin and other mind-altering substances, though, in the film, we see tablets of what turns out to be called Oxy crushed and then snorted as if it were coke, but using the edge of the pervasive sort of mini-tablet as a straight edge to line it up.

Perhaps the Warhol-type being famous for fifteen minutes, and just doing things to get a higher number of followers, is a sort of intoxicant or tranquillizer, not unlike Marx’s ‘opiate of the masses’, not least when we see both what use the club bosses are putting participants’ behaviour to and how they control it ?

All in all, a thoughtful film, even if it may be too much of a rich blend of influences for the competing calls on our attention to allow us to settle down – though, since Thomas seems to have aimed at the feel that it has, and if it does still hold together, it may not be right (in a film about people taking responsibility) to imagine a film that he have made by suppressing some of those instincts***…


Postlude

Through fatigue and oversight, a few comments did not get formulated originally as more than notes, from which this text is developed :

Wyatt is not alone in his perilous exploits, for he has an accomplice (or whose side is she on ?) in Tara (Kate French). When Jonah tries to explore what his elder brother has been up to, Tara's allure is tangible, but her first reaction to Jonah using Wyatt's device and channel is hostile (a number of retorts to his attempts to speak, such as wishing him cancer).

Comparisons between the brothers are inevitable and deliberate, and, although we see that the professional soldier (Jonah) is tough, and can also drive, he is never going to be Wyatt (perhaps a pressure that he has always put on himself, helped by his father's attitude and actions).

Perhaps it is Tara's confusion, on all levels, that leads her to blow hot and cold towards Jonah, but she definitely starts by imputing blame : here, there seems to be a sort of fog of war about who people really are and who did what, which, in a digital age, when people do masquerade, and when the film explores the boundaries between what is real, what staged (and what predictable, what fixed), makes for even greater richness of reference.



Other questions from the Q&A

Had the Eyecast technology been patented ? Thomas seemed pleased enough not to have been sued, and did mention Google glasses (which, he said, make one look like a dork). He did not appear to have investigated whether it had any commercial possibilities.

Was Eyecast a real application (some would say 'app'), or had the screens that showed it been green-screened ? Yes, it is a real application, but, for technical reasons, some screen-shots had been re-done in post production.

Was Ashleigh meant to be sympathetic or irritating ? Thomas took it that the questioner must have found her irritating (which was confirmed), but answered by emphasizing her position as a person seeking approval (see main text, above).

Given the acts that people are performing or committing on a live channel, why were the police not - or slow to be - involved ? Thomas pointed to other works on film and t.v. where the police lag behind, and suggested that the same might be as true here. (The Agent Apsley wondered whether Eyecast had bought them.)



End-notes

* One ‘l’, because it is a US spelling.

** Who relayed questions through a microphone linked to the laptop for the Skype connection.

*** Just one likely flaw : when Jonah goes to Eyecast, gains access by his brother’s account name, and passes himself off as he, the assumption is that Wyatt never did what Ashleigh does and put herself on camera by reflection. (It could be that, given how the account has been used, that was never done.)




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

Friday 13 April 2012

The Last Staple

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


13 April

No, not, o true Tolstoyans, The Last Station, but Staple!


The simple question being: why cannot the stapler, a bit like the oil warning light, tell you when you are using the last of a row of what, gummed together, always looks like a lot of staples when you load it?

If it did, not only would you not go to staple a document - usually that document (and six copies of it) with which you need to rush out of the office - and fail and have to find one that is loaded, in all your frustration and anguish, but nor would your colleagues.

For everyone assumes, which is neither rational nor necessarily fair, that someone else, at a less pressing time, should have filled the stapler up, because he or she knew that he or she had just emptied it, instead of lazily using another.

Whereas, as I should like to suggest (and Dirty Harry would agree), none of us - and this is not meant to have gravitas, unless you choose to read a profound insight into it - knows when it is The Last Staple. (So I say nothing about Wise and Foolish virgins, and trimming wicks and filling with oil.)



End-notes

* Of which Bach treated in Cantata No. 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140.


Thursday 13 October 2011

Lack of Drive ?

This is a review of Drive (2011)

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


14 October

This is a review of Drive (2011)

* Contains spoilers *

It took me a long time to seek to work this one out:

The lack of impetus for a review that I have experienced comes from no lasting impression of Drive (2011), in terms of thoughts that arise from it. It's not that one cannot choose to think about it, because I can, say, summon Carey Mulligan's face and demeanour (as Irene) to mind quite easily, but there is nothing in superficially recalling the fact that I have seen this film that makes me want to.

As with seeking to review Drive, it's not exactly that I have to force myself to revisit it, but that the film just doesn't seek me out unbidden and remind me of it (unlike, dare I say it, Tirza? - or Dimensions?).

Not that I think that anything is necessarily wrong, or, indeed that this isn't a good film (or that I wouldn't watch it again), because, unless there is a long list to be critical about, I would not find it natural to write as much about most documentaries than about most feature films - but without implying any superiority of one type over the other. Not having anything to say does not mean much, as the film may be eloquent enough on its own account (as is Charlotte Rampling in The Look, for example).

What I will say is this: Dirty Harry; restraint erupting into violence; Clint Eastwood. Those are all things that echo, not so much through Ryan Gosling's performance as Driver, as the character himself. A review in the Festival booklet TAKE ONE, of which I was a little and (I hope) no more than gently mocking, drew attention to the fact that, although we (I?) could swear that we hear him called something, we do not: Ryan Gosling is credited simply as Driver. (By contrast, in 1971, Eastwood was the Harry of the film's title.)


Does the lack of a name say more than Driver's prepared speech? Definitely, the speech is where I came in with thinking of Harry Callahan and his famous 'Do I feel lucky?' spiel.(Moreover, Harry is relatively nearby in San Francisco, where he is seeking a gunman calling himself Scorpio: and what is the emblem on Driver's light-coloured jacket?) For anyone who knows Harry, I cannot believe his formulation would not have been a touchstone for Driver's own, either because, as with Travis Bickle, Driver has modelled a persona, or (or as well) because the film is nodding to that sort of territory:

We first hear the set speech (as a recalled voiceover) where Driver is very much in control, dictating the terms; when we hear it again, he is trying to pretend (to himself, as much as anyone?) not only that he is still in control, but also that he knows what he has let himself in for - which he (clearly) does not. (Though there has been a foreshadowing of the violence in the scene where he is accosted, when drinking in a bar, by someone who recognizes him as having driven for him: it had not gone well for that man's accomplice and him, but he is told quite clearly where to get off when he makes a proposition to Driver.)

But is the attempt to be in control linked to, and just an aspect (albeit a central one) of, the namelessness? I think that it may be (don't worry, this isn't a review of the Eastwood film - trust me!): Harry asserts himself, asserts the role of chance, in confronting another man with a weapon that may (or may not) be out of ammunition, but does so through a set pattern of words - a mantra, a prayer, it doesn't matter what it is, it works for him, and that is what it is intended to do. After Driver's second utterance of his speech, he is more and more on his own in making choices, planning, seeking to regain control, to protect and survive.

Whatever his life exactly has been before, he has survived with work in the garage and, relatedly, driving. Yes, he does different sorts of driving (and there is a neat misdirection with the scene where he is about to do a stunt, and is dressed in LAPD uniform), but there is no detail, no feeling of a life led other than by a cipher.


When Irene asks him, he says that he has recently moved to the - unfurnished, unpersonalized? - apartment around the corner from her, but, after a hesitation, he continues that he is not new to Los Angeles (as becomes evident - from where he works, and from how he knows where he is going when he drives). (Yet, with the stunning night views of the city, I almost feel that we know LA better than we do Driver.)

So is what the film wants to say that meeting Irene and her son Benicio changes his life? - and, not necessarily for the better, vice versa? He wants to help and protect her - but in his chosen way, which involves exposing her to an epsiode in the lift that will surely gain a life of its own. However, as things happen (not entirely outside his own making - a self-destructive streak, consistent with the nature of the night driving that he does?), he cannot be with her, cannot do any more than further conceal his identity and who he is.

Maybe, if anywhere, that's where there is scope to wonder: what does he really see in Irene, and what is his vantage-point? Yes, she seeks his company (and, in doing so, is not being strictly honest about what her intentions are and what is possible), and she would - might? - not have sought it, if she had known the truth about him. He does more than go along, clearly enjoying spending some time (the film is vague as to how much or for how long) with Benicio and her, and becoming aware that they may be exposed to risk.

Regarding the timing of the second time that we hear Driver's speech, and where everything really starts to change, he tells Irene that he had offered to help Standard, her husband. That may or may not be true, as Standard is shown playing a line in innuendo and low-level menace that suggests that he thought ill of Driver's recent attentions to his wife and son, and that appearance seems more consistent with his having 'suggested' that Driver should help Standard with his problems.

In any event, whether he is free or not to do what he does, he assuredly does it for Irene and for Benicio, not for Standard. Maybe it seems likely that he would, maybe it doesn't, but he does, and that is just another part of his unknowability: the tender (but quiet) times in Irene's company, contrasted with the explosions of violence. Maybe more of Travis, along with Harry, after all...?