Showing posts with label Enter the Void. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Enter the Void. Show all posts

Tuesday, 13 May 2014

Remembering Rita - with a Postlude

This is a review of Locke (2014)

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

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

This is a review of Locke (2014)

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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




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

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

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



Postlude

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

* The concentration on one seen character

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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


— BFI Player (@BFIPlayer) April 26, 2014

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

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

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

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

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



End-notes

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

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

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

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

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




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 3 August 2013

Only God forgives – so you’re dog-meat !

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

3 August

* Contains spoilers *


I doubt that one can look for morality in this tale of Only God Forgives (2013), no more so, say, than in Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi, or Ford’s ’Tis Pity she’s a Whore – not to say that there are not motivations, codes of behaviour, because there are, and it is their inconsistency with each other that leads to conflict, death, slaughter.

Slaughter is the word for it, in its purest sense – despatching a beast with some ceremonial, even if not with the supposed aim of the abattoir to be humane about what is done in the service of butchery. In others’ responses, I detect an air of if not revulsion, then distaste, in wanting to relish this film, not so much as if it were a guilty pleasure as if it were immoral to say that one had watched it – might or would watch it again…


I am unsure about whether that is right, whether there is a moral issue, and find myself wondering whether director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011), which has more propulsion from Ryan Gosling than here (where he plays Julian), is so far away : are we rooting for Gosling’s character Driver because he seems ‘selflessly’ to be risking his own well-being, life, future to protect Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her family, whom he comes to know and then she turns out to have a soon-to-be ex-convict husband ? That excuses the violence, the brutality that, bidden, seem to erupt from Driver, because it is in the knight’s service of a lady ?

We really know little about Driver’s inner life, however he has existed with his underpaid garage job and bare dwellings, because he seems to have no needs other than looking at and knowing Los Angeles and using that in the thrill of his night job – of course, we approve of him, because our film head allows us to reckon that the burglaries / robberies are of a faceless kind where there is no real victim, or, if there is a victim, then Driver is only the driver, and we want him to do what his name says, and get away.

And morality ? Is it really any more present in Drive than in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004), for, in a world where X is killing Y because of – or to avoid – the death of Z, we stand back, willing The Bride (Uma Thurman) on since she seems more sinned against than sinning. Whatever the history of revenge may be, and whether we choose to trace it back to Aeschylus or to Cain and Abel, the phrase an eye for an eye (and a tooth for a tooth is part of our culture :

Which is where we come to this film’s portentous-sounding title, which has the ring of being a Biblical / Shakespearean / classical text, but without identifiably* being one : do we watch the film, bearing in mind that there seems no evidence that anyone facing, as the case might be, severance, immolation or decapitation (a sort of one-armed bandit of death, if the ‘right’ line of three comes up), appears to be preparing to meet any sort of maker ? If we do, then I think that the issue of immorality disappears – no one here is seeking any sort of forgiveness, only a craven avoidance of death or other penalty.

But not quite everyone : when requested, the man who aided the failed ambush on the police in the eating-place / bar goes into a corner in the shadows and writes his excuse, which is read by Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), and then handed to one of his officers. We have no more notion than that of what the man has to say for himself, and there is then a moment of uncertainty until Chang acts – when he does so, the story moves on, and we do not know what effect, if any, ‘the excuse’ had… Except that, in this respect, the film is explicit about crime and punishment, so can we suppose that he received clemency (of some sort) ?

If by immorality it is not the downward spiral of retribution to which people object (which haunts A Midsummer Night’s Dream just as fully as it does the graphic bloodiness of Titus Andronicus, to which, to King Lear, and to the Sophoclean Theban trilogy of plays concerning Oedipus there is more than a shallow nod), but the tribal, self-appointed justice of the police through the offices of Chang, then I am at a loss to follow the argument or experience the feeling.

The echoes that I have mentioned are there, and I shall explore them at greater length in a separate posting, but musically, in tone, in plot, and in modes that essentially consist of stasis (fixed poses, unblinking gazes, etc.), slow motion (for example, slowly receding down or proceeding along corridors, as if of a maze) and sudden activity (Julian chasing Chang, Chang enacting vengeance, or Chang chasing the man whom he gives a Bob-and-Vic-type treatment) I was hugely put in mind of Enter the Void (2009).

As to music, I found it as unsubtle, because I was fully aware, say, that the only tension in the scene where Mai (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam) seems – if the scene happens in reality, not imagination – to be masturbating in from of Julian after tying his arms to a chair came from the chordal disharmony, which I mentally stripped away, and the visuals were devoid of it. Since, in these terms, the soundtrack was too much on the surface, too obvious, I could not help detaching it at other times, such as the early appearance of Kristin Scott Thomas as Crystal, Julian’s mother, and a moment that, better done, could have been laden with the significance that was sought. With Void, I could likewise not help being aware that the cinematic effect was largely created by an attempt to manipulate the viewer and create sensation that was lacking from the screen itself.

My recollection is of an over-indulgent sense of stasis in that film, connected largely with the use of drugs – as here, drug-induced crime leads to dislocation, mayhem, revenge, and I cannot claim, ever since Robert de Niro was shown stoned in Once Upon a Time in America (1984), to have found those under the influence a source of fascination, whether going ‘to meet the devil’ as Billy (Tom Burke) does, or sitting staring on a sofa. If either film sees itself as a meditation on death or the truths of life, it falls far short for me :

Void felt pretentious, and Only God feels too much like a mash-up to be more than pastiche, whether referencing (slightly) The Matrix (1999) and the film-world that influenced The Wachowskis in making it, or William Shakespeare’s bloodier moments, as well as the softer ones that we see in Julian, both in would-be revenger Hamlet, or in Macbeth, needing Lady Macbeth (equals Crystal ?) to stir him to the pitch where he can murder Duncan.

I believe that Only God is a step or two in the wrong direction from the impact of Drive, which impelled the viewer – this viewer found more in the naivety and yet, with it, un-guessed-at ferocity of Driver than in the sub-Freudian musings behind portraying Billy, Julian, Mai and Crystal.

Our film-maker may believe that he is using reflectiveness and moments of quiet to speak to us, but the techniques are so evident that, unless he intends an alienation to make us step back from the detail of the action and view it as a sort of ballet, as a sort of death-laden dance in the spirit of Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996), he simply fires up our critical faculties to unpick what plot there is and whether it hangs together. In that respect, a response very like that to Holy Motors (2012).


More to come


End-notes

* The Internet / Google does not help much here with a search, because it is laden with references to the film, but The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations does.


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Monday, 24 September 2012

Fly Australian Airlines to nowhere

This is a Festival review of Holy Motors (2012)

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

This is a Festival review of Holy Motors (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

If you want to see Kylie play a cameo as an airline hostess*, you’re clutching at straws, and would be better off queuing for one of her stage-shows than watching Holy Motors** (2012): if you watched the film first, you’d have no desire to hear her version of any other song. The other song was just mawkish dross about time, regret and the past – or was that Kylie’s song instead / as well, and trauma has bereft me of remembering ?

I have Tweeted that Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and Subway (1985) meet in a mortal embrace, and it is a fight that kills off the best of both, leaving a facile scene in a warehouse-sized garage at the end that was apt to make the ritual close of t.v.’s The Waltons seem profound. It did not even visually convince that so many similar vehicles had been assembled, not least since they insisted on drawing attention to their artificiality by flashing their brake-lights.

Could anything worthwhile have preceded such a banal ending, little better than imputing significance to the fact that the vital club in Enter the Void (2009) is called – wait for it! – The Void? A few moments did, but only a very few in the whole 115 minutes, comprising : an erotic dance; a building that I could swear owes something to the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright (but I could not spot it in the credits); the bizarre pastiche of a beauty, a beast and a photographer; the first of several humorous grave-stones; and a terrific interlude (called such), in which a gathering group of musicians, centred on an accordion ensemble, processed around a large church.

After then, and despite some intrigue concerning a crime and its ritualized repetition, it was a decline, not just musically, as a continuation of the episodic. Simply put, there was simply almost no interest in how (or even why) it all hung together, and it became, if possible, less and less significant. It was as if a premise of The Matrix (1999) that, when plugged in, Neo, Trinity and the others, can enter the machine-world had been stretched out to become some sort of secret, kept to the end.

I would happily have walked out of Holy Motors, at around the point that I describe, but, as my friend did not evince the desire to leave, I stayed so that we would have both seen all of it to discuss afterwards. He thought it a sort of purgatory for M. Oscar, I thought it a purgatory for me in this parade of the pointless, and that any notion that it meant more than the following quotation*** was vain speculation (though I was, also, reminded of Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd):

As the gom yawncher man passed me I recognized him as the man in the broken-rimmed hat who'd spoken to me in the underground when I was on my way home from Istvan Fallok's studio with electrodes all over my head.

'Hello,' I said.

'Nimser vo,' he said.

'You weren't talking like that the other day. How come?'

'I must've been somebody else then.'

'How's that?'

'Economy. You have a little chat with a stranger now and then, right? So do I, so does everyone. How many lines has the stranger got? Two or three maybe. There's really no need for a new actor each time, is there?'

'So you play them all.'

'The same as you.'

'What do you mean?'

'Yesterday you were the conductor on the 11 bus and you also did quite a nice little tobacconist in the Charing Cross Road. Actually London hasn't got that big a cast, there's only about fifty of us, all working flat out.'

'Are you writing a novel?'

'Novel-writing is for weaklings,' he said, and moved on.



After which, not only go to [to come], for an unfavourable comparison with The Night Elvis Died (2010), but here for a further conceit



End-notes

* I have never heard the male equivalent called ‘a host’.

** Surely a take-off of the Batman dialogue.

*** From The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban, Pan Books (Picador), London, 1988, p. 56.

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Thursday, 5 July 2012

What sort of beast is Dark Horse?

This is a review of Dark Horse (2011)

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

5 July

This is a review of Dark Horse (2011)


One is not exactly left, as David Lynch arranged in Eraserhead (1977), with a feeling of being uncertain what, if anything, has happened, and it's not quite the ending-after-ending impression left by how the Lord of the Rings trilogy winds up in and with The Return of the King (2003), and yet both elements are there: the latter promises resolution, the former confuses such a notion with presenting, amongst other things, a head being turned into an adjunct for pencils.

 As Lynch's film did, therefore, there is a questioning in Dark Horse of what 'a story' in a film is for, whether it is to satisfy and lead us, a bit like a classical sonata, from some sort of stasis into the turmoil of a movement in a minor key and back into the catharsis of the closing outer movement, or whether its roots are in the New Wave and before, which, in Buñuel's case, gave us, at the time time when the wave was breaking, the puzzle of The Exterminating Angel (1962).

 Just about anything has been fitted into that pattern of things going bad and turning good again, from 10* (1979) to You've Got Mail (1998) or, as I recall, One Fine Day (1996). Much more interesting is when Scorsese gives us, in After Hours (1985), a film that takes us back to where we began, but with an amazing and satisfying - not from moral or plot point of view of - artistic resolution, in a whizz around Paul Hackett's office. Or Gilliam - when he could still be gutsy - with that sickening moment inside the cooling-tower at the end of Brazil (1985).

 Subverting building up to an ending - or the expected ending - is one thing. Some view life as linear, and expect the beginning to be at the start. Others might prefer the sort of narration that Betrayal (1983), pretty close to the stage-play, gives us, and might relate more to a muddle of dream, day-dream, imagination, and sheer fantasy, such as, probably more convincingly than Dark Horse, films like Allen's Deconstructing Harry (1997) (or, for that matter, Stardust Memories (1980)) give us.

 Though I do not think that writer / director Todd Solondz is aiming at that here: this is not Thurber's Walter Mitty gone slightly more wrong, but has, as it develops, really far more resonance with something very different, a sort of US Enter the Void, but without certain embellishments.

 Rather implausibly, you might infer from trusting what I am saying, IMDb seeks to sum up this work in a sentence as:

 Romance blooms between two thirty-somethings in arrested development: an avid toy collector and a woman who is the dark horse of her family
Hell, if that were what this film is about, it wouldn't deserve the time of day! These are superficialities, substituting for an appreciation of what the film implies about the creation and distinegration of personality, hope and desire. It is possible that reviews are more on target than what I have quoted, but I don't think that I want to trust having to wade through many opinions that will just criticize this film for not being what it is not - if, though, they were misled by IMDb's said 23-word snapshot (probably little worse than many a trailer), perhaps it is fair for them to air their grievances there.

 Confused - probably stunned - as I was when I came out of Dark Horse and incoherently tried to formulate a response in talking to Jon, who was ushering, I gratefully received his affirmation of that feeling, and I shall, at some point, be following up his recommendation of Solondz's Happiness (1998)...

 This review is dedicated to Jon, with thanks
End-notes

 * Which, before Baywatch, might have been seen as exploitative (probably of Bo Derek), if it didn't arrive at a convenient moral ending.
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