Showing posts with label Dolor y gloria (2019). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dolor y gloria (2019). Show all posts

Friday, 9 September 2022

Four Theses after dutifully watching the whole of Crimes of The Future (2022) : Crimes against remotely being cinematic (work in progress ?)

Four Theses after watching the whole of Crimes of The Future (2022) : Crimes against cinema ?

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

9 September

Four Theses after dutifully watching the whole of Crimes of The Future (2022) : Crimes against remotely being cinematic (work in progress ?)


Preamble :


This is about as cinematic as the whole film gets - and as much daylight
(From the opening shot, with Sotiris Sozos (as Brecken))


In preparing what follows for publication (e.g. checking such things as release-dates), it has become apparent that IMDb has been told to call Crimes of The Future (2022) Drama / Horror / Sci-Fi. (It obediently calls The Killing of A Sacred Deer (2017) Drama / Horror / Mystery.)

In fact, it is an indigestible, plasticized stew of (in chronological order*) such elements as :

* Doctor Who (1963 – 1989) [Especially The Troughton / Pertwee / Baker I years]

* Delicatessen (1991)

* Shadows and Fog (1991)

* Crash (1996) [Cronenberg's own, far superior film]

* Kinetta (2005)

* Raw (2016)

* The Killing of A Sacred Deer (2017)

* Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria) (2019)
* The French Dispatch (2021)



Four Theses (Review points proper)

(1) Only restrained by someone's recent Tweet** that one cannot justifiably comment on a film, if one walked out, it can now be said that, at 15-20 mins of 107, the impulse to leave Crimes of the Future then should have been taken.

(2) Without the names Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, etc., Crimes would be indistinguishable from an undistinguished film-festival submission, whose 'screener' one would keep pausing to shout incredulous injunctions or obscenity (as if one's dutifully tortured watch were the real drama ?).

(3) A film that is over-reliant on speech - rather than juxtaposition of scenes or narrative-jumps - as exposition, and (inter alia) shabby interiors*** in low light-levels against which to set Lanthimos-like conversations.

(4) It helpfully used up a free ticket at The Arts Picturehouse.


Courtesy of Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart (as The Eurythmics), there is, now, a synopsis [Eurythmics, Annie Lennox, Dave Stewart - Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) (Official Video)], to which #UCFF links here !







More to come... ?






Afterword :



End-notes :

* Titles with underscoring will, in due course, have links to #UCFF reviews - the film-references are not necessarily to films rated well.

** Obviously, as it was in the last week, not this Tweet, but it will do... :

*** As of, if not in, the derelict buildings in Athens that we see in establishing shots. (Occasionally, we are en plain air)




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Sunday, 11 August 2019

Almodóvar's Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria) (2019) : A first-blush response (yet - somehow ? - a work in progress)

Almodóvar's Pain and Glory (2019) : A first-blush response, after a preview screening

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

Almodóvar's Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria) (2019) : A first-blush response (yet - somehow ? - a work in progress), after a preview screening at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, on Sunday 11 August 2019 at 5.30 p.m.



 Early on, Pedro Almodóvar's Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria) (2019) might have resembled a re-make - not unwelcome ! - of Broken Embraces (2009)*, in more accessible form - with elements of 8½ (1963) and others of his films such as, most obviously, Bad Education (La mala educación) (2004), thrown in for good measure :

 However, in Pain and Glory, Almodóvar outgrows both those references, and a sly wink at Cinema Paradiso (1988) (not to this film alone), to bed in and then engagingly transcend such usual pre-occupations of his as betrayal, gay love, happenstance, and the physical body.


Enemies of Promise** ~ Others are the saboteurs - or is it the enemy within ?


Indulged, without the ostensible - if not actual - charm of Fellini's Guido Anselmi, Salva(tor)*** (Antonio Banderas) has been given the medical history (which he relates / narrates himself), if not necessarily of a hypochondriac, then, it is soon suggested to us, of someone who has neglected self and others. Yet he does not, or will not, attribute fault for his ills except to those others : in some measure, although the picture is exaggerated for effect, we could or should all be able to see where guilt has similarly held us back (and may even have become expressed in body and / or mind).


Salva is thus writ large so that we cannot but see both his condition, and how Almodóvar fleshes out its origins for the character at the same time as for us - indeed, as Fellini does, with Guido in 8½ (though this is not 8½, nor even Nine). (Or, equally, in Allen's tender tribute to the film, in Stardust Memories (1980), with Sandy Bates (Allen himself)**** ?)

RT img

Though perhaps, but without his bitter-sweet poignancy, there is actually a closer resemblance to Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo****) in Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza / (Immense Beauty) (2013), and to what - and how - Jep (re-)discovers about himself... ?


Caveat :

Admittedly, what follows is on the basis of having skipped The Skin I Live in (La piel que habito) (2011), having avoided being adversely reminded of the camp excellence of Alan Cumming (Sebastian Flight), Forbes Masson (Steve McCracken), Siobhan Redmond (Shona Spurtle) and Patrick Ryecart in the t.v. series The High Life (1994) by I'm So Excited ! (2013), and just plain cleverly missing a theatrical release of Julieta (2016). However, this is still a more cutesy - dare one say commercial ? - film than Broken Embraces and therefore something of a shock... (And, as with Yorgos Lanthimos, maybe the earlier films have more imaginative power and depth ?)




End-notes :

* It seemed that the ink was, as it were, no sooner dried on Match Point (2005) than its themes were re-worked in the grief- and guilt-ridden Cassandra's Dream (2007) - the latter of which, though far better, few seem to know...

** The title of a book by Cyril Connolly, which reminisces and reflects on British public schools, amongst other things.

*** Maybe wrongly, but one reads an irony into those called 'Saviour' in films, e.g. in Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano (1962).

**** Perhaps reassuringly, Ryan Gilbey (in RT [edn 24-30 August 2019, pp. 32-33]) 'touches the same bases' in The World of Cinema : the Fellini, Allen's Stardust and even Almodóvar's own Embraces...

***** Another 'Anthony', and St Anthony (presumably of Alexandria, not Padua - unless Salva is what / who 'is lost'?) indeed has a cameo in Dolor y gloria.




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