You never loved me. (Slight pause) You just loved how much I loved you.

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

21 September

This is less a review than an angry dismissal of mother ! (2017), by Darren Aronofsky, the person responsible for the direness that is Black Swan (2010)

Welcome to Aronofsky World - the Parade of Plaster-Saints !

If only by bullish self-confidence right to the end, employing very Freudian ideas (e.g. penis envy ?), does mother ! (2017) redeems itself. pic.twitter.com/lKWoGI2t1F

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 22, 2017

The same del Toro had the affront to present us with Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010), many of whose worst faults Aronofsky doesn't avoid. https://t.co/XqRGrNz6Nn

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 22, 2017

[Accreting list of] Film-references and other references :

* Alien (1979)

* August : Osage County (2013)

* Biedermann und die Brandstifter [The Fire-Raisers] ~ Max Frisch

* Das Schloß [The Castle] ~ Franz Kafka

* Der Prozeß [The Trial] ~ Kafka

* Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)

* Hysteria ~ Terry Johnson

* Melancholia (2011)

* On the Road (2012)

* Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

* The Baby of Mâcon (1993)

* ‘The Circular Ruins’ ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Just on the printed page, the dread that 'The Call of Cthulhu' gives rise to exceeds that of @MotherMovie by around a factor of 12... ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 26, 2017

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming@russellhobanorg uses it in Fremder

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 27, 2017

If only one could share @TakeOneCinema's enthusiasm ! :https://t.co/yt6aUB5iUI

Why didn't Aronofsky cease his labours on the 7th day... ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 22, 2017

One suspects that one would, again, benefit more by watching Hepburn and Tracy in Adam's Rib (1949) rather than doing any more than groan at Aronofsky's levering the topos into his Weltanschauung... (Yes, there was clearly - from the start - more to the relationship between Bardem and Harris than presented : it did not make for dramatic irony, but for the effect of an inept screenwriter, playing with 'big ideas'.)

Darren Aronofsky says “Mother!” is about climate change. He’s wrong: https://t.co/scn9DQtFEh pic.twitter.com/zKPQ4mOKKk

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) September 23, 2017

Luckily, almost everything can be found (without physically searching for the postcard that a friend sent), and this says more than 2h 3mins pic.twitter.com/gDgg3oKVoN

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 23, 2017

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

This is a farce that makes you think (according to The Guardian)

This is what the theatre says was written about Hysteria by Terry Johnson

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

7 September

This is what the theatre says was written about Hysteria by Terry Johnson

Johnson is best known to me as having written the play on which the film Insignificance (1985), directed by Nicolas Roeg, was based, but may also have directed the performance that I saw of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (taken from the novel), and almost certainly did that of Shelagh Stephenson's The Memory of Water.

I do not know Johnson's earlier play, but what do we have here ? : the fictionalization of a real meeting between the inventor of psychoanalysis and one of the world's most eccentric artists of the twentieth century. In Insignificance, Marilyn Monroe famously meets Albert Einstein (though I don't think that they ever did).

But this is not Michael Frayn with Copenhagen, Nils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Bohr's wife Margrethe circling like sub-atomic particles on the stage. Frayn's play is not exactly in the vein of scientific speculation (e.g. The Cambridge Quintet, and nor could Johnson's be imagined to be.

If you could see the last five to ten minutes before the first five to ten minutes you might simply not bother to watch what follows, it is as simple than that - any creative work that does not at least do what Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There to maintain the magic may not be worth the watching.

For does the play actually give rise to the thinking that is attributed to The Guardian? Not beyond thinking that three characters depicted might represent Freud's id, ego and super-ego in a dream, and that just is not that interesting. It is also not interesting that, at the end of his life, Freud might have contemplated again, and regretted having rejected the idea of sexual abuse in the infantile period as the basis of his patients' psychiatric problems - as I reflected on this conceit, I realized that I already knew of this rejection, and that the notion did not add very much.

A great advance on the play filmed as Insignificance? Not really.


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