What the heck is 'competition', Competition Commission ?

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31 August

If you've never heard of the MMC*, you might wonder what the Competition Commission does ?

Do they police the occasions when you came up for a brilliant new name for Frosties, but didn't win, or that holiday in Honolulu that they keep ringing me about ?

Well, this probably won't help : Imagine a town, Townchester, with a big branch of Tesco a few streets away from one side of the river, and an equally big branch of Asda in the same position on the other side. Imagine Asda decided that they thought that people were more interested in carpet, and devoted half of their floor-space to that instead of their normal range of goods.

So what has happened to competition in Townchester ? Asda, for whatever business or other reason, has effectively given Tesco a massive advantage, and could make its so very low prices creep up, because it knows that customers can less easily find all that they need at Asda.

But does the Competition Commission have anything to say about this ? I understand not, and it would take Asda to decide to sell up to Tesco altogether before, as I gather, The Office of Fair Trading might refer the matter to the Commission.

Does this make any sense ? In both cases, a market position lessens competition, but, unless I am quite wrong, the Commission won't oblige Asda to compete fully with Tesco, any more than it will, if Asda does as I say with 70% of its floor area, encourage Lidl or who knows what other supermarket retailer in to keep Tesco in check.

And does it nap ? A very big Sainsbury's has now opened in Bicester, but I am reliably informed (by a friend who lives there) that the competitive playing-field before then saw no fewer than seven, yes seven, Tesco branches in this one town.

Anyway, apply this 'thinking' to the business of cinemas, of projecting films for public exhibition, and Festival Central is threatened because Cineworld, which had a cinema already, now owns both : the Commission, from the lofty height of its great wisdom, records that there are membership schemes and a diversity between the type of films shown at each.

It records that state of affairs, but decides, I am told (by @MovieEvangelist), to take no account of it, irrespective of the fact that one largely could not see almost all of the films shown at Festival Central at Cineworld. It focuses (again, @MovieEvangelist informs me) on odd assumptions about what people would do if prices rose 5%, but has no wit to think that, if the cost of seeing films did increase that much, one would not, as it surmises, go to another cinema where one could not see the films that one chooses to view, but just not watch quite so many films - if the price of beer goes up, do I just consume as much, if my income has not kept pace, or have slightly fewer pints ?

It's obvious, but seemingly not to the Competition Commission. And membership : one pays a fee for membership at Festival Central, but then gets three free tickets, 10% of food and drink, and up to £2.00 off the price of almost all other tickets, all applicable across Picturehouse cinemas. One can just discount that, when Cambridge Vue, I gather, does not have such a scheme ? Cineworld has an unlimited subscription (@MovieEvangelist says), allowing the holder to see any number of films for a monthly payment - can that, too, just be ignored, if one wants to talk about ticket-prices ?

Whose interests, then, is the Commission protecting ? The one-off visitor to Cambridge who wants to see a film ? If the visitor likes world or independent cinema, and is a member at The Belmont, in Aberdeen, he or she can use those free tickets, or get something up to £2.00 off, plus the 10% discount, so why compare the straight price of, say, a matinee ticket at the Vue with that ?

Regarding supermarkets without their loyalty cards, discount vouchers, and three-for-two offers - would looking at the ordinary prices, without being able to cash in points on meals, holidays, probably cinema tickets, make sense ?

In the Commission's world, there is the possibility of the lessening of its arcane notion of competition, and it seems not to care that the consequence of believing that action probably must be taken, i.e. requiring Cineworld to sell one of the Cambridge cinemas, runs the risk of three cinemas showing pretty much the same films**.

If that is the desired outcome, then it is the desert that we have of multi-channel t.v., with no variety within the large number of channels, save that each one is a different channel, in terms of the quality and worth of content. Making big players bid to screen prestigious sporting fixtures just meant that the winners passed on the cost of their winning bid to the public - pay £Z to subscribe, or you don't see these events.

The public had these events more easily and less inexpensively available before. They have just had them sold back at the high price of subscribing, say, to Mr Murdoch's services.

Only beneficiaries ? : Mr Murdoch, the shareholders of his companies, the staff who encrypt and broadcast the events, allow the subscriber, both physically and by checking that he or she continues to pay, to watch, and the manufacturers of the technology that the subscriber needs, and their staff and shareholders.


What price a film festival ? Oh, a fanciful notion of competition has to be explored to protect the public from seeing the latest Woody Allen, world premieres, twenty documentaries (when Cambridge is not even primarily a documentary film festival)...

Thanks, and make me have to spend at least £13 on a Travelcard to London and then to have to pay the high admission fees of London Film Festival's screenings !


End-notes

* The Monopolies and Mergers Commission, replaced by the CC on 1 April 1999 (from memory).

** Of course, that is pure competition, rather than having this arthouse muck screened ! (Almost in the same way that Nineteen Eighty-Four has three massive powers vying for it.)


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

I counted them all out...

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29 August

Sadly, I do not have the skills of a Brian Hanrahan, but, going through the Festival's Main Features (that link takes one to where the PDF brochure can be downloaded), I made it twenty documentaries*, and there may be others (there and elsewhere) - in former times, which was not necessarily better save from a bean-counting perspective, they were listed in a separate section from the feature films per se, but now they mingle.

I think that I spotted a score of the DOC logos. I was looking, because, in one of our chats the other day, Festival Director Tony Jones said that emphasis is needed on how many one can see - over the 11 days, however exactly they may be spread, that is around two per day, after all, so one can see his point. (I always like to make space for three or four in the course of my Festival viewing, but, as with the whole Festival juggling cum three-dimensional crossword, compromise is inevitable.)

Tony is a nice, level-headed guy, and always makes time to talk to me. A few weeks back now, he and I chatted as we negotiated Parker's Piece in Cambridge**, and I learnt for the first time that Hawking was coming to the Festival, and about negotiations for getting Hawking people over from the States for it.

This most recent time, it was the documentaries, and also exactly what hard work for Festival stalwarts from the Arts Picturehouse and from his family (and from his son's circle) it had been to put on twinned screenings on Grantchester Meadows***. As I said to Tony, not wishing to diminish that effort and to remind him of his great enthusiasm for outdoor screenings, he wouldn't do it, if he didn't enjoy it.

The previous time, a little word that - whatever it may be, and I do not think that I am being indiscreet - Surprise Film 1**** is a World Premiere. Famously, no one knows (though @JimGRoss always guesses) what the film is / films are except Tony, and the projectionist only gets it / them just in time to do the necessary...

And I remember, last of all, coming out of Cell 211 (2009), and Tony wondering, even though he was pleased that I thought that it was a powerful screening, how it would stand for getting distributed. (If you follow that link, you will see (on IMDb) that the film, after all, did pretty well for itself.)



End-notes

* Sadly, I am an idiot, and failed to appreciate the music-documentary nature of the 33 1/3 strand, which makes the sum around thirty !

** For those who do not know it, click on this link, book yourselves some films, and get over to Cambridge to see this square of land, criss-crossed by paths, bicycles and foreign language students, and home to cricket- and football-pitches and the like on your own scenic walk from the station...

*** A real place, known to many by virtue of Fink Ployed.

**** Last year, there were two (for the first time ?), and the first of this year's is on Saturday 28 September.


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Gibberish comes to a home of academic excellence and parades as talking about 'competition'

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24 August

The following quotations are taken from the Provisional Findings Report of the Competition Commission, dated 20 August and called Cineworld / City Screen Merger Inquiry : Completed acquisition by Cineworld Group plc of City Screen Limited


In Cambridge, Picturehouse operates a three-screen cinema. There is a nine-screen Cineworld cinema and an eight-screen Vue cinema within less than 5 minutes’ drive-time. (para. 6.77)


Yes, that's all very well - you can be outside the Arts Picturehouse in a car and, from there, drive to Vue's premises, except that you cannot park immediately outside either of them. Being able to do that journey in less than five minutes ? Well, you would have to be very lucky with two major traffic-light-controlled junctions and two pelican crossings, and then you would be outside a cinema, momentarily, on a road where you cannot even stop.

Talking, then, of '20- and 30-minute drive-time isochrones' is then sheer nonsense - I might be able to drive to some prime location in London very quickly, but, if I cannot actually benefit from being there in and with a car, I would obviously not choose to drive there. One might do better, say, to compare being able to shop at Tesco in Royston (and park there) and then, within that timescale, getting to Morrison's in the town and being able to park - notional drive-times that have no element of practicability to them are meaningless. (I say that because when The Co-operative wanted to buy Somerfield stores, they either did not, or could not, buy what became the Morrison's.)


The report is not even consistent internally about what it means by 'travel', and so the following paragraph reads :

The parties’ survey showed that 81 per cent of Picturehouse Cambridge customers had travelled 30 minutes or less to the cinema from their home. This is consistent with our own survey, which also gave a result of 81 per cent. (para. 6.78)


This does not mean what it says, because the report is fixed on the idea of driving, as the subsequent text makes clear, but driving alone, not driving plus walking, or driving plus a parking-fee plus a smaller amount of walking. These factors might make, say, someone living in Stapleford more likely to cycle than even to get behind the wheel of a car - door-to-door transport at only the cost of effort, and with no extra time or cost, but still the journey-time.


This next paragraph beggars belief - you ask the people who would stand to benefit (by buying up one of the readymade sites) how they view Cambridge, and expect them to tell you the truth about their business plans, not playing down anything :

In addition, Curzon told us that although the demographics of Cambridge were attractive, there was too much competition under the control of Cineworld and it preferred to look at areas where there were more opportunities. Odeon considered Cambridge an attractive area, but the centre of Cambridge already had three cinemas, and it was not clear that there was enough demand to support another cinema. In addition, the city centre was tight and opportunities to enter consequently limited. Odeon [snip]. It was unlikely that Odeon would be able to open a cinema in the area in the next two to three years. If an opportunity arose, likely timescales for development were the next five to ten years. We therefore considered that timely entry in the Cambridge area was unlikely. We considered that competitive constraints on the parties would be weakened following the transaction and, on balance, that other factors at play in the Cambridge area would not defeat the lessening of competition. (para. 6.84)


So they play down how they can compete to encourage you to tell Cineworld to sell one of the cinemas, and then they just buy it. No matter whether the people who frequent these cinemas would want the films that Curzon or Odeon would show - they just get the chance to take over, because that's 'competition', even if it is a disservice to the present clientele.

Still, as long as someone watches some films or other, it doesn't matter much...


Or is that approach / logic more like that phrase of cutting off your nose to spite your face ?


And this little phrase was reported, and then ignored :

The parties also told us that demand in Cambridge could support another multiplex. (para. 6.83)


Are they trying to be clever, by saying that other chains might be drawn in, or not. It just hangs in the air - if they are right, then all the more reason for someone to gobble up whatever Cineworld is compelled to sell, because they can get rid of this home of the film festival and unprofitable arthouse rubbish, and put on solid blockbusters from noon to night !


And then there was something about surveying people and what they would do in the event of some percentage price-rise : if I wanted to watch, not the latest Batman caper, but, say, Samsara (2011), or Kosmos (2010), would I find either at Cambridge Vue or Cineworld ?

Rubbish in, rubbish out, in terms of asking a meaningful question ?


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Gala with a glitch

This is a Gala review of Underground (1928), screened in NFT1 at the BFI

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10 January

This is a Gala review of Underground (1928), screened in NFT1 at the BFI

Confession : I am not very practised (or confident) with how to view silent film :

* self-perpetuating lack of exposure to the field

* which means that my lip-reading* never gets better

* and disinclines me to make the effort to choose silent


For I find the concentration needed even greater than for a poorly subtitled film, where there is the anxious race to read and make sense of captions before the next ones come up (and, necessarily, the one in hand disappears).

None of this deterred me from this gala screening:

Catch Anthony Asquith’s beautifully restored Underground, a tale of love, jealousy and murder: bit.ly/WqdTmi
— BFI (@BFI) January 11, 2013

It had all the elements : a Q&A (and hosted by Francine Stock, to boot); the buzz of a first night at the BFI; in Underground, the restoration, by the BFI, of a film 85 years old; the involvement of silent-film musical interpreter Neil Brand, not as accompanying musician this time, but as composer of the score; and the tie-in with the 150th anniversary of the tube, with a film that almost made a character of its tunnels, staff, trains.

It brought out all sorts, from the train enthusiasts (there was one on the panel, with a looping presentation of stills) to, as it were, the silent crowd, and, of course, film buffs in general (into the latter two categories of which Brand and Stock** fitted, as did Bryony Dixon (curator at the BFI) and ?? Ben Thompson ?? (from the team of restorers)).

However, there were only two drawbacks, the minor one that, with a panel of four, each of whom had to be given a say, there was only time for five (it may have been four) audience questions, and the major hitch, which had Brand leaping from his seat and disappearing within minutes, which was that the soundtrack was no longer in synch with the projection (which, apparently, it had been earlier).

So, for example, an urchin playing on some sort of whistle was heard before he was seen. As Brand had, of course, carefully scored each moment of the 84 minutes, it was immensely distressing for him (hence his sudden exit to voice his concern), but it seemed from the apology at the end from the BFI’s director that there had been a lack of confidence that stopping the film would have allowed the problem to be remedied***.

I asked for a complementary ticket to allow me to see it as it should have been, because, although there was no doubt of the power and skill of the scoring (and of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s performance****), the concentration involved in hearing a soundtrack that did not match the visuals compounded my interpretative impairment.
That apart, it was a grand evening, and I was pleased to be able to talk briefly to Neil Brand again and offer my congratulations (and commiserations). This is why :

@bfi Othello's plot always strikes me as flimsy - #Underground has the power of an Iago figure heightened by realist obsession / great music
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2013

I had heard Brand talking to Sean Rafferty last year, on Radio 3’s late-afternoon programme In Tune (one could equally say early-evening, as I choose not to say ‘drive-time’), and was very interested both in what he had to say about the film’s dynamics, and to hear not only some of the music, but also how it had been composed. So I knew that Anthony Asquith, son of the prime minister of that name, had been the art director, I knew a skeletal amount about what the film dealt with, and I had heard Brand’s palpable enthusiasm for this commission.

I knew, therefore, that I wanted to see it, and, when I saw Brand at the Silent Film Festival (I only managed to see one film, though, where he had been playing with Mark Kermode’s band The Dodge Brothers) and then at Festival Central, I learnt that all the attention was focused on a likely release timed with the tube anniversary.

This film – including in its original sense - is terrific, and there is no doubt that the patient work of restoration, of composing the score, and of recording and tracking it has been an excellent use of resources. I want only to say enough about it that is consistent with leaving it to unfold to a new viewer, but showing what there is to be appreciated.

My Tweet will have alerted to the scheming and self-centredness of Othello, but (in no particular order) there is also, as Bryony Dixon put it, a love quadrilateral, a fight and other moments of tension, shots of trains and escalators in and around Waterloo tube-station, a magnificent chase, and a picture of the metropolis and a romantic trip to (as a member of the audience asserted, since no one knew) Hampstead Heath. What more could one want... ?


End-notes

* It is a useful adjunct to indistinct speech, as a clue (or cue) to what is being uttered, but a different proposition, I find, with no speech sounds. A film of this kind has few inter-titles (have they always been called that?), and for me, used as I am to the dialogue driving many a scene, there’s a frustration at not knowing what is said.

** Aurally, it has the ring of a partnership, warehousing, maybe, designer goods.

*** When I talked, at a later date, to Cambridge Film Festival director Tony Jones, he was confident both as to the nature of the problem, and how the technology caused would have made it not capable of easy remedy : he also seemed to know, but lost me in the detail of the technicality, how it should have been done, and so would not have been beyond repair on the spot.

**** Brand provided information about how the recording from a live performance at a screening last year, once the audience noise had been taken off, had to be intermixed with taping from that event’s rehearsal. Here, too, there had been a technical issue, because the frame-speed of the projection when the two had been recorded differed !


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Are Virginia and Sergei an unusual couple - kept apart from birth ?

This is a review, after a special screening, of What is This Film Called Love ? (2012)

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5 December

This is a review, after a special screening, of What is This Film Called Love ? (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

Even the presentation of the title What is This Film Called Love ? (2012) in the opening credits, contains a suitable ambiguity, because the last word (maybe even without a question-mark – I am unsure now) appears on a separate slide.

What I think that that subtlety does for me - of implying that there could be a comma before the word ‘love’- is to remind me to watch this as a film, not as an artifact. Its director, Mark Cousins, had just been telling the audience in Screen 2 at Festival Central on Sunday afternoon how he came to be in Mexico City with three days on his hands before a flight* : a situation to which he responded by deciding to film the basis of the film, and with the only outlay being laminating a photograph of Sergei Eisenstein (which made Eisenstein resemble, a little, both Harpo Marx and Dylan Thomas).

As a film, it is almost pointless (whatever the title may suggest**) to consider the precise genre, because, although we might later know that Cousins, filming both himself and the city, kept a notebook of his thoughts (as he told us), I think that he was asserting neither that the dreams represented were ones that he recalled having then (or ever), nor that this was a documentary in fictionalized form, and the film – as it should – speaks for itself.

Yes, we see clips from other journeys, travels, that Cousins had made, but there is using footage – itself almost necessarily what one selects to record (or have another record) – and there is editing it together with other material in a dream-sequence. When Cousins talked about Virginia Woolf in the Q&A, it was clear that he had been spending time with her writings, in particular her diaries***. Good lad! (My impression is that pitifully few people give Woolf any time, attention which did not seem to materialize with Cunningham’s The Hours and the 2002 film (or even with Orlando (1992), taken from a wonderfully anarchic novel), but might now that some pointless anniversary is slapping us in the face and telling us that she exists, a lively, passionate woman who wrote amazingly and was not just - as I have heard her dismissed - a depressive).

I had been wondering about the female narrator****, and now I realize that, modernity apart, it has a Woolfian quality to it, if not necessarily of Orlando itself, then of other significant works. And there were, with it, other qualities (even a probably quite deliberate echo of the sing-song woman vocalist / male narrator in that once deeply popular song ‘Tubthumping’ by Chumbawamba), amounting to a sense of familiarity with the delivery, the type of content, the message behind the voice being there.

The apparent purpose of the film is to show how the days available were spent (although the introduction gave the impression that, say, they fell between arrival on Wednesday and departing on Sunday, whereas the narration suggested a different placement within the week, which could just be because, off the cuff, Cousins forgot how the days fell). However, a degree of licence is implied, because there is a coherence to the narrative and its direction that might have been purely fortuitous if one had had, with no starting-point, to root around for what to do with a camera for 72 hours.

In the case of Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs, of whom I was reminded early on by being shown a block of ice (against which Eisenstein’s laminated image was duly rested) and who, unknown to Cousins, works in the city, the starting-point for one happening-like work is such a block : I am not sure whether Alÿs has done so more than once, but there is footage of him pushing and pulling it around all day until there is nothing of it left, which was sub-titled Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing. My point being that it is a rare thing, on demand, to be able to hit upon where to start - which is what Cousins chose to do - and not to make a false start.

As it unfolds, the film is not primarily about what Eisenstein did or saw when he was in the city, but partly, in conversation with him, it suggests insights to him into what he would not have known or witnessed then (though he may have had other ideas), all of which is in an endeavour to come closer to what he documented as having thought and felt. That Cousins, in trying to relate to Eisenstein’s word ‘ecstasy’, only came to a thought on his film’s day two that was with me on day one (from knowing the literal meaning), is neither here nor there, but it did give that element of dramatic irony, of seeing, as the viewer, a course of action not known to the protagonist (why ever we used that word deserves a blog posting in its own right, some day...).

What we were being shown did not feel self-revelatory, although it may well have been highly so (and I do not just mean the Billy-Connolly-style desert streak), because it had the forward momentum that I have mentioned above (which was only slightly lost in one dream, and in one long musing in bed before getting up, where it did feel that it could have been a fraction tighter). Cousins himself would have known precisely what each thing presented signified, whereas we could only guess at it through the narrative voices: as an outsider, I had been quite content that, rather than telling his own story of those days, he could have been acting in what he had fabricated. For, to me, it made no difference, although it is clear enough, at the same time, that he positioned the camera to do some press-ups, and must equally have feigned views of falling asleep or waking up.

As I say, none of this really matters, because it was, complete with the Woolfian twists right at the end (courtesy of, again, Orlando, and also of her short book Flush), not even where we ended up with the city and with leaving it, but of the triangular relationship over time between Eisenstein, Cousins and the camera, as commented on - as if from above - by the female voice.

To this already complex mix, P. J. Harvey (or Polly, as she is known to Cousins) brought two songs (I think that it was just two) that I found the most significant part of the audio, and I brought my own little feeling that I was part of it, having Tweeted Cousins when he was in Moscow that maybe he would find cherry-blossom at Eisenstein’s place of rest, since he had left a stone from a cherry there on a previous visit…


End-notes

* Probably fortunately, no one asked, and Cousins did not say, either how this had arisen, or why he did not strive to change the flight to an earlier one.

** And hearing a recording of Ella Fitzgerald sing the Cole Porter number from her version of The Cole Porter Songbook made me value her all over again.

*** Widower Leonard Woolf edited them to one length for A Writer’s Diary, as a full set, and as an intermediate length.

**** (Cousins is also a narrator, but a more interior one, of what he said and thought, although my impression, in recollection, is that one could not make an exact separation – it may be that he strays into ‘her’ territory, and vice versa.) A question was asked about why a woman narrating, with a suggestion as to why (other than something that is narrated near the end), but, sadly, I cannot recollect the idea clearly enough to document it.


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No! for Jonathan

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23 September

Well, I was glad to get to Festival Central from Murray Edwards (that event-satellite, where I shall go again to-morrow afternoon to reacquaint myself with Dimensions, and see how it does with the acid test of 'repeated viewability at a short remove' [or RVSR - a bit like RSVP, but not quite the same letters or in the same order...]) by 3.20, but, by 3.55 (after a start at 3.30), I was walking out of Jo for Jonathan:

Not much to say, and not wishing to be unkind, but the best thing about it was the music (and not even then, really), and learning that the joke about Americans, dollar-bills and snorting coke may have been to do with Franco-Canadian funding (the joke is at the expense of the Canadians). I regret (to have) to say that I was just bored by the (apparent) subject when I came to leave, and I simply no longer wanted to be in that black and darkened chamber with the film to find out where it and its Jo might go. No!

The bar, a beer, and the blog seem a much better combination, as (whatever Plato may have thought) many images projected with light (the sun) on the equivalent of a cave wall are not only a joy, but an instruction, in (and of) life...

FOUIART4202Y7

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15 September

If I'd been able to make a posting yesterday, it would have been about the very large free-standing display that greets one at the foot of the stairs to the bar at Festival central.

It's for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and has been there for a few days, making sure that one knows that this film is around - it includes huge images of Gary Oldman and his fellow cast in character, but against (and within) a pattern of (letters and) numbers, reminiscent of The Matrix, and, I'd almost swear, the original poster for Enigma. 'CULPHUNTERS' leapt out at me, as I mounted the stairs, and there are other utterances of similar significance, no doubt...