Everybody needs a friend ~ Greta

A response to Greta (2018)

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

2 May

A response to Greta (2018)

Neil Jordan does 'lay it on a bit thick in places' in Greta (2018)...

Frankie (Chloë Grace Moretz) is from Boston, PA, and living in NYC, NY, for the first time, so Greta (Isabelle Huppert) must really be a lonely woman of a certain age who's suffered loss - whence black nails ? pic.twitter.com/Igk19FpSLz

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 6, 2019

Black nails : Just to raise doubts where Frankie should place her trust, her friend Erica (Maika Monroe) - a little more fittingly for her age and manner ? - also has black nails*.

It rates circa 7 / 10 (as it also over-relies not on the power of Huppert's screen-presence, but Javier Navarrete's use of v. high [or low - bowed db] string-tones), but Jordan deftly assimilates references such as Fatal Attraction (1987), Event Horizon (1997), The Future (2011).

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 2, 2019

Paint the black hole blacker

Now reviewed by @everyfilmneil, to much the same effect, at : http://everyfilmblog.blogspot.com/2019/10/328-greta-movie-review.html


End-notes :

* Or is the suggestion of some Lynchean dual-characterization (The Lost Highway (1997) or Mulholland Drive (2001)), where, on some level, Greta and Erica are the same person... ?


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

We’ll soon warm it up and get it feeling like a home - Pandora’s box, with a twist or two… (stalled / incomplete review)

This is a response to Hellraiser (1987), shown on 35mm at The Arts Picturehouse,

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

31 October

This is a stalled / incomplete response to Hellraiser (1987), shown on 35mm at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (CamPicturehouse), on Tuesday 31 October 2017 at 10.30 p.m.

Hellraiser (1987) was released thirty years ago, so this was a pretty impressive 35mm print from which it was projected at The Arts Picturehouse (CamPicturehouse) – photography, even when it is with moving images (cinematography), not still ones, remains about how light falls on the subject :

Existential pain began early, with maggots caught squirming, and we noticed skin-tones or light on faces less as a furious pace racked up. pic.twitter.com/MJqUcDibN9

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 1, 2017

Some sundry observations (an accreting list) :

* Ten years before Event Horizon (1997), the same pre-occupations with pleasure mixed with pain, and with oblivion : Julia (Clare Higgins), whose nature we know rather better by the time that she brings the first man (Anthony Allen) back to no. 55, probably does not belie the truth when she explains the room to which she has led him with I’ve always preferred the floor

* As to knowing natures better, it has been suggested, of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece , that Tarquinus Sextus (the rapist) and Collatine (the husband) are aspects of the same person : never was a truer word spoken of Larry (Andrew Robinson) and Frank (Sean Chapman)

* This is sure some stylish various on Rubik's Cube (first seen in 1974)...

Needless to say, we dare not show a real Lemarchand's box

* Jane Wildgoose, credited as ‘Cenobite Costumer Designer’, is clearly channelling less fetishwear than queer fashion and gender fluidity (before it was so called)

No, that *isn't* her POV shot of Pinhead (Lead Cenobite = Doug Bradley), but frankly it could have been :

We're drawn to what - and why ? ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 1, 2017

* Are there not also more than little hints, here, of Doctor Who, or Sir Gawayn and The Green Knight... ?

[...]


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

From the archive : Much-delayed review of Max Barton’s No Magic – performance 6 March 2010 !

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

12 May

As one who came to Cambridge’s ADC Theatre (Amateur Dramatic Club (@adctheatre)) that night clutching book 6 of Harry Potter (HP and the Half-Blood Prince), it was a distinct surprise – not to say ‘spooky’ – to find that the performance opened with Potter, and, within moments, Max Barton, as his own Harry, crying out Expelliarmus !.

In the flyer’s write-up, the play’s origins in Barton’s reading of Jekyll and Hyde are made explicit. However, for anyone with a background in the world of mental-health, they make one wonder whether, in his premise for the work, he has mistaken the symptomatology of multiple personality disorder (as it tends to be called, rather than split personality) for that of paranoid schizophrenia*.

In fact, the suspicion turned out to be justified, because, although it was suggested that Harry might have been hearing voices (as those with the diagnosis of schizophrenia commonly, but not invariably do (auditory hallucination)), there was great weight placed on the notion that he was acting under the name of Edward Catcher (we do not learn Harry’s surname) as a distinct personality, who has distinctly violent, even murderous, inclinations. [Touches of Hitchock’s Psycho (1960), not to mention Powell’s Peeping Tom from the same year ?]

As the drama unfolded, any belief dissipated (although it did occasionally revive) that Barton might have seen a more subtle parallel between Hyde and the apparent subject of his own work : it had been initally fostered by the fact that the programme notes, despite the flyer’s suggestion, did not mention Stevenson after all). There was also an increasing feeling that the seeming similarities with Sebastian Faulks’ novel Engleby**, itself clearly set in Cambridge, might be more than coincidental, and that maybe, when it came to the involvement of a lawyer in Harry’s unfolding case, implausibly so. Yet, Faulks’ novel, too, appears to have, as its proper subject personality disorder, its possible origins, and its public understanding.

Interestingly, in the scenes with the lawyer, and in Harry’s prior experiences at some unnamed Cambridge college, there was an allusion to the finding attested by an apparent body of research – the link, because skunk is a highly concentrated form of hash (specially cultivated for being stronger than the ‘traditional’ forms of hash), between its use and the onset of schizophrenia. Or, perhaps more properly, the sorts of psychotic experiences to which this label is frequently applied. What made this allusion relevant was the way in which Barton’s text appeared to suggest is that there might be a cynical manipulation of such research findings, by the legal profession, to exculpate the guilty from full responsibility for their crimes – a topic more fully and knowingly dealt with by Faulks’ eponymous Corpus graduate (Harry does not get to graduate).

The way in which No Magic and Engleby both fight shy of specificity are also, one can only believe, more than chance: Faulks renames a well-known pub in Bene’t Street, but, at the same time, makes it so clear, from the choice of alternative name, which one he is referring to, as one of Engleby’s largely solitary drinking haunts, that one wonders why he has bothered. Likewise, although Barton himself is at Cambridge, we are only told in a wry way that Harry is there, in a running joke, carried off to great effect by the cast. There is, though, no way of knowing at which college the 'real' Edward Catcher was an undergraduate (although, for no good reason, one suspects Fitzwilliam).



Postscript

If completed, this review would have dealt with the subjects whose headings follow, but the fact that it did not is why it is incomplete… [However, recollected comments, in square brackets such as these, have been added - there was some contemporaneous correspondence with Barton, which, when located, may provide more detail / confirmation] :


1. Blocking / staging
[The most vivid moment was one that reminded of the infernal scenes in What Dreams May Come (1998) (not to say Doré's illustrations of Dante), and the terror of Event Horizon (1997), in an effective combination of latex and lighting***]


2. Acting
[The principals were probably fine, with Barton as Harry****]


3. Ensemble
[Almost certainly generally tight enough, even if some scenes could have been dwelt on less in the playing]


4. Text
[As mentioned, there was a certain teasing coyness about where this place (Cambridge) might be, which suited the likely audience congratulating itself that it was 'in the know' - hard to remember now whether Barton's evocation succeeded, probably in the midst of in-jokes, in portraying a more recognizable Cambridge than Larkin did Oxford in his undergraduate novel Jill]


5. Further comments about pathology
[Only that the attempt to cover similar ground to Faulks also gave rise to somewhat cynical attempt to take down the whole justice system by association - a matter much in people's minds with Yewtree just now]



End-notes

* A useful confirmation can be found in the published diary of Phoebe Pluckrose-Oliver, who was the show's producer :

Last night I was up until 1am in the Homerton auditorium making 3.5m by 2m frames out of Lycra and scaffolding for the set we’ve devised for the play. [...]

The frames are an important part of the set for the play, which is called ‘No Magic’. Written by a second year student on my course, Max Barton, it’s about an undergraduate who develops paranoid schizophrenia.


** Hutchinson, London, 2007.

*** This aspect seemed to have attracted favourable comment from Nathan Brooker, the (more-timely) reviewer for Varsity (though issue 731 seemed to be having a dig and /or private joke with the last of its (festive) Predictions : Max Barton will resurrect his verse-comedy No Magic).

**** The resource of camdram.net is interesting...

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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