Short films at Festival Central (6) - Friend Request Pending (2011)

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3 December

* Contains spoilers *

Director : Chris Foggin ; Writer / Producer : Chris Croucher

Friend Request Pending (2011) – the clue is in the title – brought together two of my least favourite things about life, Judi Dench’s acting and Arsebook, the former through too much exposure to dire situation comedies (which, for me, have also wasted the talents of Zoë Wanamaker, Geoffrey Palmer and Robert Lindsay), the latter on account of the tales of bad experiences from those known to me, which make sound anything that happens on Pratter / Splatter benign.

(I know that one should divorce oneself from such influences, but I didn’t, although I have somehow managed to shut off the Dench detectors for the latest Bond films.)

The premise, then, was not one that appealed: that I was to witness Dame Judi (ably assisted by Penny Rider*) employing her rudimentary keyboard skills in seeking to be a friend on Arsebook with a man whom she had just met, and Penny’s and her ideas of dating and of chatting him up on instant messaging (that all sounded a bit drunkenly implausible – not that they should have been drunk, but gravitating to a cocktail bar, where, one must infer, they must have managed to swap quite a means or two of contact** for her to be doing this messaging).

I grant you, translate the things of youth to someone of Victor Meldrew’s age, and the hilarity and japes in him getting it all wrong are an endless mirth factory. We are not in dissimilar territory here, for me, and it was where two noisy older women in the audience became raucuous, as if given permission, when Tim Healy (as the sergeant in Man in Fear (2011) had not.

What can I say, save that the ending had a J. R. Hartley quality to it, or of one of those good old British Telecom adverts (before they became BT, and more hard nosed), of warm, homely good-feeling? No, it couldn’t have preceded anything else in the bill of fare, and, yes, I did phase out a little, though all credit to Chris Croucher, who reported how he had pounced on Chris Foggin when the latter had let slip that Dame Judi had said that she wanted to be in a short, if he made one, and who showed how he had earned wings in the usual job of Assistant Director.


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End-notes

* Chris Croucher told us afterwards that Penny is a long-time mate of hers, who goes through lines for her and stands in when they are getting the shot and the lights right on set.

** Why do we talk about contact details ? The details are not of the contact that we have had, or will have, but the wherewithal to make it.



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Short films at Festival Central (5) - The Ellington Kid (2012)

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2 December

Director / Writer : Dan Sully

This short was almost the envy of Chris Croucher, writer / producer of Friend Request Pending (2011), in its brevity: Dan Sully and he were in agreement that some shorts are, as this one is, in the nature of – this wasn’t the language in which they discussed it – dealing with just conceit with a punch or knock-out line.

What it exemplifies is how easily, when a character is talking (in this case, Nathan (Charlie G. Hawkins) speaking to Beefy (Hammed Animashaun)), we can slip into adopting the images that accompany his or her words, as if the images – which is what cinema does – acquire a status of credibility, authenticity, by being shown. Yet we do not do that (at least, I hope not) when it is the same old VW ‘see film differently’ clips that purport to tell us how an aspect of Jaws (1975), Taxi Driver (1976) or The Silence of the Lambs (1991) came into being : they are being knowing in a different way, sharing the joke with us as it goes along that we might credit what is presented.

As writer / director in a shoot of, as I recollect, two days, Sully achieves a tight narrative in which we are totally sucked into what Nathan says, only to feel as foolish as Beefy when the ground is pulled from underneath him. (Or is it? There is a nice little hint at the end that there might have been some murderous truth in what he has been told.) As to the specific assertion that Nathan makes, I had anticipated it, then thrown it away – so much the better !


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Short films at Festival Central

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

28 November

Aline Conti presented six short films last night, some as short as five to seven minutes, which had been presented as an organized sequence under the umbrella The Joy of Six (which is also what a group of Cambridge poets have been calling themselves for many a year) by Soda Pictures and New British Cinema Quarterly.

In conversation with Conti first, and then answering questions from the floor, Dan Sully and Chris Croucher, the director and writer / producer, respectively, of the last two films, were present. They seemed to think of the choice 'a mixed bag', and, when asked, would not have been wished to be placed anywhere else in the running order.

That said, I thought that what connected the films was that they were all psychological in nature, and it was quite an anxious feeling to go where each was leading, and that few, except perhaps Friend Request Pending (2011), gave you an unnecessarily clear sense of who people were and what they were doing.

To do justice to each film, I will have a posting per film, to which the items in the listing below link (all now live - 3 December):


1. Long Distance Information (2011) (7:42)

2. A Gun for George (2011) (17:22)

3. Scrubber (2012) (20:56)

4. Man in Fear (2011) (10:50)

5. The Ellington Kid (2012) (5:00)

6. Friend Request Pending (2011) (11:58)



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