LGBTQ and the new world of F-Rated films (thanks to Holly Tarquini at Bath Film Festival) - a good fit ? (work in progress)

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8 March

LGBTQ and the world of F-Rated films : Read more below, and your comments are welcome – is it a good match for those who do not identify with polarity of gender, or see themselves as necessarily having a gender, etc., etc. ? (work in progress)

Not exactly for #IWD2017, but #UCFF keeps asking, when a film written or directed by a woman gets an @F__Rating, what does it say / mean ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 8, 2017

WATCH @hollytarq 10 min @TEDxYouthBath talk about the F-@F__Rating
Pass it on xhttps://t.co/psLCXn27nl
More:https://t.co/C1F0f5xQm6 pic.twitter.com/rFTyQd8VM6

— F-Rated (@F__Rating) December 6, 2016

As a result of the efforts of Holly Tarquini at Bath Film Festival (@BathFilm), a rating for films, F Rated, has not only been used at the Festival, and elsewhere, for a while (@F__Rating, but is now being adopted by IMDb.

Great news about @BathFilm @F__Rating as it's adopted by @IMDb - well done @hollytarq & team! 🤗https://t.co/xaPA30JCJr

— Theatre Bath (@TheatreBath) March 5, 2017

@THEAGENTAPSLEY @BathFilm @IMDb no very true. But still a big positive step I the right direction :-)

— Theatre Bath (@TheatreBath) March 5, 2017

IMDb, short for the International Movie Data-base (@IMDb), is both, as in the Bath area, amongst the Festival’s neighbours and one of its collaborators (and owned by Amazon, hence all those promotional banners / links to buy on Amazon…)

The fact that @IMDb's owned by @amazon is more obvious nowadays :

Looking at a film prompts you to buy a copy - a move to promote sales ? https://t.co/Dv8UzisSSL

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 6, 2017

However, confusion already exists, by virtue of people assuming – or being told, and not checking – that ‘F’ denotes ‘feminist’. Although the criteria for F-Rating clearly do not say this, and a film can be F-Rated simply by virtue of the fact that a woman directed or wrote it (or both), does whether an F-Rated film is then wrongly taken to be an endorsement of it or its values and ethos need due consideration - not least when IMDb / Amazon start F-Rating films in earnest ?

Conversely, a highly misogynistic film could ensure satisfying the @BechdelTestFest criteria - if the director's female, it gets @F__Rating.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 6, 2017

And, then, does the stipulation of a female director start posing questions, when it was Andy and Larry Wachowski (now, respectively, Lilly and Lana) who made The Matrix (1999), etc. [the IMDb biography for Lana Wachowski, compared with that for Lilly, has greatly submerged the birth-name] ? :

The Wachowskis and the various films of The Matrix (1999), @IMDb credits them as transitioned = @F__Rating as writer / directors

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 8, 2017

Conversely, a highly misogynistic film could ensure satisfying the @BechdelTestFest criteria - if the director's female, it gets @F__Rating.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 6, 2017

Finally, someone might present, say, as female, but may not identify with that / any gender = a right to opt out of @F__Rating, @BathFilm ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 8, 2017

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

The way you play cards !

This is a review of Dallas Buyers' Club (2013)

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11 February

This is a review of Dallas Buyers' Club (2013)

* Contains spoilers * : Best seen cold – you might even avoid the poster, which seems to suggest that it is about a car auction – so quit reading now

A harsh generalization, but a film that needs you to know what it is about beforehand is a failure – this one starts off where it ends, but rodeo is not what it is about, but a man who keeps losing consciousness and ends up in hospital with news that he is quick to reject as a mistake. He is quick to reject it, but not slow to find out all about it – we had taken him for some sort of a hick, with his trailer, so it is a surprise to find him, when his eyes will co-operate, deep in research down at the library.

Ron Woodroff may not have been quite like this, but Matthew McConaughey creates a compelling figure (and, as a fleeting headline suggests, he may have had access to Woodroff’s diary), even to the extent of being stick-insect thin at the start of the film. Yes, he is HIV+, and he is even told that he has full-blown AIDS and just thirty days to live, but that is where Woodroff’s considerable will to win, which had him excitedly take bets and then scarper when he lost the bet, begins to kick in.

Dallas Buyers Club : A definite and strong whole, but with elements reminiscent of Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Philadelphia, Lorenzo's Oil...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 10, 2014

The hospital will be one of our ports of call, and the four most important people are there together right at the start : Woodroff, Dr Sevard (Denis O’Hare), his junior doctor Eve (Jennifer Garner – IMDb can be a bit short on recording names, which one has heard in films, but does not recall), and Rayon (Jared Leto)*. (Everyone else, relatively speaking, is on the periphery of the narration, including Dr Vass, Richard Barkley, and Woodroff’s mate on the police force (ditto IMDb).)

The question that the film poses is this one : does one see more of Woodroff’s character, and beyond the man who calls Rayon (and others) a faggot when trying to be friendly at the hospital, because we spend more time with him, or because he is fighting the rules and the warped system to save his own life (and that of anyone else who can afford to pay to keep him afloat), and that brings out the best in him ?

When we first see him, he is using the charged and close atmosphere of a pen at the rodeo to have sex with two girls, which – as we are judging creatures – gives a negative indication of his attitudes, not least when he runs off with the stake-money (in a very quick-thinking way). And then he keeps collapsing, ends up in Dallas Mercy (ironic, as it turns out), and is confronted with the level of his T-cells and other test-results.

The incidental meeting - because of being in neighbouring beds - with drag-queen Rayon (for which Leto deserves an Academy Award for best supporting actor), whom he does not understand or want to be touched by, but plays cards with (pitiably badly, according to Rayon), is his prompt to realize that they have common needs, and to learn about the trials of the drug AZT. The dynamic of the film is not so much to make us approve of Woodroff in himself, but as battling the unfair and self-interested regulation of the FDA (Federal Drug Administration) on behalf the members of the buyers club that Rayon and he set up :

We admire him because he takes the risk of seeking to do all that he can for them, because it also helps save his life, but it is individually how he softens towards Rayon, and how Eve finds herself more and more out of step with her superior (and valuing what Woodroff is doing), that the film has its emotional core. Seeing him, with much neck and no small amount of humour, pretending to Barkley to be a priest, and spinning a yarn about how much medication he needs to take, is priceless, and the film is unobtrusively laced through with all sorts of comic touches.

A very different film, although it has the same transformational account of Joe Miller coming to change his view of Andrew Beckett, is Philadelphia (1993), because of how the film ‘feels’. Despite having HIV and AIDS in common, the parallel feels even less close than with Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1985), based on Manuel Puig’s novel, because, as already suggested, Leto’s portrayal gives a potentially weighed-down film the right amount of buoyancy. Yet in no flimsy or tokenistic way, and with the crushing poignancy of the scene when he goes to see his father at the bank and moves him to pity, not least by how he refers to Woodroff, an origin that he casually passes off, in handing over cash to Woodroff, as having cashed in a policy.

A really affecting moment in Dallas Buyers Club when Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) and Rayon (Jared Leto) shake hands, then embrace.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 9, 2014

Where, despite opportunistic Woodroff showing that he will happily have sex with one of the members of the club because he knows that he cannot infect her, we might feel that we are heading for an anodyne romance is with Dr Eve, but the film seems aware of that being too pat, and the closest that we really get to corny smooth-talking is when he buys her dinner - and that is fun, since it is so knowing. Medically, she sees that what he is doing is better than the AZT regime, and is won over by it, even if the FDA, changing the rules, stymie things. The politics of that, if not the subject of a film or two already, soon will be…

This is not a feel-good film, although accepting Rayon and obliging a former drinking buddy to shakes his hand is one of those moments where one embraces the feeling behind what Woodroff has done, and cringes at the means - just as much as his stealing Dr Eve’s pad of prescriptions, and how he responds on being challenged by Barkley that the names on the prescriptions are all members of the Dallas Cowboys. Yet, far more profoundly than a film like Gravity (2013)**, it is about adversity, the human spirit, and the capacity to reach out to others.


End-notes

* Plus it was really interesting to spot the name Griffin Dunne (as Dr Vass) in the credits…

** #GravityIsGravy on Twitter (the film lacks ‘it’).


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

Really shot in Wyoming !

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7 December

89 = S : 14 / A : 15 / C : 15 / M : 17 / P : 13 / F : 15

A rating and review of Nebraska (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)



* Contains spoilers *

It may not only be true of lesser films (well, not true of The Third Man (1949)), but Bel Ami (2012) fails at attempting to pass off London as Paris, and On the Road (2012) is a film that, as this one does, features landscape - just nowhere near, reading the credits, where the various journeys were supposed to be happening.

It is an interesting choice to present this film in black and white, because it really adds almost nothing to what we see except the views of the scenery, which are faultless. With Frances Ha (2013), it worked, it did enhance the film's cinematic qualities, but here - apart from the obvious suggestion that much of life in states such as Montana and Nebraska is being presented as lacking a dimension - it was only the fleeting longer shots in transit that benefited, but, then, so much that I would not have had the film any other way.

And this is a film that says something about acceptance, though that does not mean that I have to accept this highly inaccurate account of it from IMDb :

An aging, booze-addled father makes the trip from Montana to Nebraska with his estranged son in order to claim a million dollar Mega Sweepstakes Marketing prize


I see no evidence that David Grant (also unwillingly known as Davie / Davey, and played by Will Forte) is estranged from his father Woody (short for Woodrow, and acted by Bruce Dern), and it is he, rather than his brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk), who comes for him when he has been picked up by the police at the start. The other descriptions beg the question : what life has Woody led that he is as he is, and can his wife Kate (June Squibb) exculpate herself ?

The course of the film takes us to Hawthorne, where Woody grew up, and where there were at least two women in his life. One, sympathetically and with great naturalness brought off by Angela McEwan, is Peg, whose humanity is evident, and says that Woody knew that she 'would not let him touch all the bases' - by implication, the highly judgemental Kate, his wife (Squibb with great ease makes us dislike her), would. (There is a grim scene in the Lutheran graveyard (Kate is nominally a Catholic), where she calls a dead member of Woody's family a whore for having had sex from the age of fifteen.)

It is here that, bit by bit, we can piece together the influences that have worked on Woody, such as the death of a brother with whom he shared a room, being shot down in Korea when being transferred, and the age at which he and two other men from the town were sent to war, and how he returned from it. The laughter at Woody's expense seemed to have died down by this stage (and, in this respect, the film has the pattern of Philomena (2013)), but where it laid things on a little too thickly was with the vacant relatives, who, for example, are querying the journey-time from Billings, Montana, and even infect David with it, who asks Ross how he travelled over.

At Mount Rushmore (another place that Woody did not wish to see), in what he has to say about the monument not looking finished (which. with his critique, it did not), we are given the insight that how he relates to the world does not mean that he is ignorant and foolish, and, in his way, he just as much speaks the truth as he sees it as Kate does. (Indeed, we hear him dub other drivers idiots, and tell a mechanic that he is using the wrong wrench.)

I think that the script suitably covers objections to some of the things that happen for the purposes of the plot and which get us on the road, and that it works well enough as an exploration of the goals that we set, or expectations that we all have, without needing Woody's background and circumstances - the things that we think that we must have, when really something else (or lesser) might do.

In emotional terms, rather than those symbolic of setting out on a quest (and feeling that compulsion), the film resolves itself - and rights some wrongs - right at the end (even if we do not quite know how it can be done, and maybe it is a bit too pat). What is clear is that David has also been in need of healing from the childhood that he had where he is likened to a girl or a prince, and called beautiful - to assert himself, not least as he does, albeit with a fist, with Woody's former business partner Ed Pegram, and to believe in his worth.

The quest itself turned out to have to be completed, even if it was just to be told that it had not garnered anything except an ironic cap, but probably for other reasons by then. As for having to live with the disparaging Kate, nothing had changed that, and her threats of putting Woody in a home, and she had only defended him out of self-interest, both not to have relatives clamour for money, and to have him as her own victim - except that David certainly has more respect for his father, and in that there is hope...


As for the review on IMDb (by Steven Leibson) that calls this a hilarious comedy, well...

However, I quite liked Mark Kermode's review in The Guardian, so here it is (or gu.com/p/3yvcg/tf, if you wish to share).


There is now a little follow-up piece here...


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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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A field of view

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8 July

* Contains spoilers *

People who would find Tarkovsky ‘just boring’ won’t like – or ‘get’ – this film, as I know from glancing at a review on IMDb that churlishly gives it two stars. As if it has broken some sort of naturalistic promise that cinema makes, or one to be exciting (though this film is).

That review claims that being filmed in monochrome makes the English countryside look ordinary. It does nothing of the sort, and is filmed with a real sense of wonder – just look at the short where the four men are first walking down into the space to see why. (Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists are at work, claiming that it stole someone else’s idea.)

I don’t care – though I did stop to wonder – whether a mid-seventeenth century field would be as big as that*, but our sense of time and space are only as big as our capacity to believe that the four main actors have been transported out of the English Civil War to join O’Neill – the hedgerow is to the field as the wardrobe is to Narnia. Apart from a knowing Essex joke, Amy Jump gives us little in her able script to dislocate us, and, for all that I care, the men may be from some other age, though they speak a passably historical English.

I think that the mushrooms / toadstools are a red herring as a way o understanding this film. Again, I don’t much care whether such hallucinogenic fare was to be had (as who is not to say that this is an accident of this field), or whether hardened soldiers (or those living more closely to the land) would not be used to what they were eating. When, although Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) does not eat of it, the men adopt a stew that is already being made (presumably by O’Neil), many of the mushrooms that they add are unremarkable, except at the end, when they are of a more wild nature.

If they have any effect, it is to urge them in the effort to pull up a carved stake – but a stake with a life of its own, whereas my reviewer interpreted them as trying to plough the field – whereas hallucinogenics usually lead to heady inertia and contemplation. Of course, the action may not really have been taking place, as the way in which the stake reels them back in is somewhat magical.

Which brings me to the effects. Stunning in their overpowering intensity, they are at the heart of a film where one never know who is alive, who dead, and some lives are cheaper than others. Power, control, and what one will do to prevent evil are the themes on which this film muses, and it gives us no easy answers or ending.

Inevitably, it reminds of other things such as The Pardoner’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and it has a literary feel that complements the earthiness of a man noisily trying to excrete or of having his genitals inspected to see what ails him, which is also Chaucerian. That link, too, with C. S Lewis is quite strong, with the notion of whether one could have been away an age but no time has past, and of another place where all is played out.

This is a piece of cinema that has well been worth the wait, and which should repay another viewing – I can only guess at what impact it must have been made with those watching on Film 4, but I would not be surprised if they did not take a second look on a proper screen…


End-notes

* The issue of enclosure would probably not have borne on it as such, but this sort of huge field was brought to our landscape by mechanized agriculture and two hundred further years.


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Short films at Festival Central (3) - Scrubber (2012)

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29 November

* Contains spoilers *

Director : Romola Garria (although IMDb rightly credits her as Romola Garai)

Scrubber (2012) is, as the title is (and as A Gun for George (2011) is), an ambiguous piece of narration. In its literal sense, we see Jenny (Amanda Hale) scrubbing at the floor at one point; at another, when she is saying to a neighbour with whom she is leaving her daughter (Honor Kneafsey), she glosses over what she does by saying that she did work, and citing the house.

In what is the most lengthy of the shorts, though only a few minutes longer than George, there is playfulness shown between mother and daughter, for example with the shampoo beard, and, when we think that Jenny is alone, she has her next to her. Nonetheless, she is in the way, and Jenny leaves her with a relative stranger, rather than change her plans.

Particularly with the scrubbing, but also with reactions to situations where there is messiness, there are hints at a psychological dimension to Jenny’s actions. Yet, for all that she courts sexual encounter, we do not feel part of her motivations in the way that we are with Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), and we are quite precisely kept on the outside, although we might hypothesize that Jenny hates herself for indulging what she craves.

Whether we think that such is a cinematic portrayal of such a disorder, not bearing a proper connection with the experience of those who have one, must depend on our knowledge and understanding: it is nevertheless one that would bear being seen again.


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Is Izzard fizzin' ?

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27 October

According to Wikipedia®, and regarding Eddie Izzard :

In 2009, he completed 43 marathons in 51 days for Sport Relief in spite of having no prior history of long distance running


I probably couldn't even bring myself, except in a good cause, to eat what used to be called a Marathon for six out of seven weeks, so I have no notion how Monsieur Izzard managed that : maybe some account of it talks about the nasty effects on his health, or, at least, on his running-shoes...

What I was really serching the sacred annals for, and finding no mention of it, was a point of comparison for a statistic that IMDb gives at 5' 7" (or 1.70m), which led me to conclude:

1. The sort of person who routinely goes to IMDb for information about writers, actors and producers needs to know their height (it's probably sneaked from there onto Amazon somewhere).

2. The person consulting Wikipedia® may have other things on his or her mind, and, in Eddie's case, there is a lot to read - including the snippet included above.


But is it actually this, that Wikipedia® can get a bit fussy about these things with its end-notes and notes where a citation is needed, and so it doesn't want to say 5' 7" in case he's 5' 5" (or 5' 10")?


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Who's Who

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20 October

Now, for some reason, I probably had no notion of who might own IMDb (www.imdb.com), but, when an idle click on a link to jobs brought me to a page about eligibility to work in the States, and with links to Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, it all became a bit clearer.

We may know about offers of Twitter followers or Arsebook likes (wipes?) in return for a payment - and some people must be so desperate, as for sex, that they will pay for it - and it wouldn't be an impossibility, on that analogy, for such hired hands to vote a film up (or down), or even to make a user review seem more (or less) popular than it is. It would be quite easy to do that, let's say.

But it means that, if you think of buying, say, the DVD of Midnight in Paris (2011) from Amazon and want to look more widely than its own Amazon customer reviews, you're not actually seeing anything that's independent, and not under Amazon control, at IMDb...


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What sort of beast is Dark Horse?

This is a review of Dark Horse (2011)

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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.

Medium* comment: TULISA CROWNED WORLD'S SEXIEST WOMAN (according to AOL®)

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2 May

As I am sure that the authors of this item well know (i.e. it is tongue in cheek, but in such a way as to appear 'dumb'), this caption to the headline is an absolute non-sequitur:


Singer proves that sex tape scandal hasn't hit her popularity


No, and nor, with any relevant electorate, would circulation - and even rating - of the said tape**! (I wonder if it has an entry on IMDb...)

End-note

* As opposed to media.

** According to AOL® (again) on 4 May, Amanda Holden told Alan Carr that she watched it.


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Awaiting a report from - or about - Wallingford...

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5 November

Although I already had a ticket, my friend Chris couldn't join me on his way (sort of) from Grantham home to Bicester for a screening of Dimensions at the Festival, as it had already sold out.

However, he had a chance to catch up with it last night at the showing at the Corn Exchange in Wallingford. He was going to resist reading the review that I put on IMDb till afterwards, and I didn't hear from him after the screening, so I wonder where that has placed him.

Still, with ratings of 8.1 on IMDb, it has a good body of support behind it, and I've just found these goodies to look at, too:

Links to BBC Look East Behind-the-Scenes of Dimensions


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A posting that has lacked a title (until now)

More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


11 September

I was chatting to a man of the cloth earlier about films and the Festival, and he mentioned one (well, a pair of them) that had been given what I understand not to have been the smoothest ride by the Rotten Tomatoes web-site (well, maybe nothing new about that - the UK critics, for example, all wrote in a way that disappointed me about Sarah's Key), but which he thought worth a view: The Gods Must Be Crazy I + II.

As the Internet Movie Database, IMDB (www.imdb.com), also gives a voice for those who do not review films for a living, I have just casually looked up this title, and it seems that I might as well take him up on the offer of borrowing the DVDs some time...

To-night, though, is too soon, as I plan to delve into the backlog of home-viewing and catch up with Lars and the Real Girl in time for the release of Melancholia.


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