Who fêtes Gravity, not this masterpiece ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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12 January

A rating and review of All is Lost (2013)

99 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 16 / M : 16 / P : 16 / F : 17

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)

Less Homer than Beckettt, more Job than Ulysses



We may not formally know until before the closing credits, but Robert Redford in All is Lost (2013) is Our Man : in this, the film is deliberately not specific, because we know more the name of the yacht, the Virginia Jane, than that of its captain.

We see him as a resourceful man, but only after, and from eight days before, the note whose text we hear him read¹ – otherwise, he is a man of few words (and there is anyway no one to talk to, when his Mayday calls come to an abrupt end< because he is not the sort of person who verbalizes the solution that he is seeking to each of his problems. The consequence is that we have to watch him quite closely, because all in what he is doing may be a clue to his reasoning, whereas, if we do not concentrate in that way (and it isdemanding), all may be lost for construing the film – why is he fashioning that piece of wood, or deploying the life-raft ?

Contrast this with the parallel¹ drama of Gravity (2013), and space, unlike the ocean, scarcely seems silent at all, with Bullock who, when not trying to copy Houston in, is narrating her situation and despair, or even acting under the remote instruction of Clooney. Some want (rather pointlessly, as this is fiction, and may even be parable) to say that Redford should never have been there or not so ill equipped – maybe Redford is too silent and strong, but, in relief, she just seems even more unengagingly neurotic to have been let into space. (People want to read beyond the ikon and the other religious symbols displayed and infer some meta-narrative of heaven and earth, rebirth, or God knows what, but it is will hidden.)

Not Gravy - or whatever that film lacking 'it' is - though, @dimensionsmovie @guardian ! #GravityIsGravy
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2014

Redford is where he is (although he geographically is not, and the quality of the light seemed to give this away), and that is just a given – why, when in this modern era, or for what reason, are at best alluded to in his note (whose text we cannot refer to). Compared with the technical failures of depiction that can be levelled at Gravity, I believe that those of All is Lost are slight unless one is of a sea-going disposition, and have scant bearing : Our Man could have been lowered onto the vessel by angels mid-ocean for all that I care whether he should be where and how he is.

If these criticisms of All is Lost (2013) (http://t.co/PGOBy7mJWY) mattered, Gravity (2013) would be ruled out of awards hands down !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 10, 2014

I say this, because I am happy (‘happy’ is not the right word – I am actively engaged in wishing) to see what I am shown and not seek explanation as to why it is foolhardy or unlikely, because it is what it is. For it is not as if Redford’s character is the last one on earth who should not be where he is, or there how he is, as rescuers the world over will testify, whereas Gravity just sidesteps the question of whether Bullock’s character could not have been better trained and / or have better absorbed the right training and attitude in adversity, rookie or no – would someone who panicks so much ever be taken on by NASA as an astronaut?

Continuing the contrast, the same test of plausibility must be levelled at each situation and character : even if Our Man should not be where he is and how he is, he could have chosen his own destiny and simply set out, whereas Ryan Stone (Bullock) had to satisfy others that she had the right skills and the nerve to fly a mission. In my view, there is no chance that she would not have been weeded out an early stage.

She subsists on the level of standing for all of us, a sort of Everyperson. However, this is not an Assumption of The Blessed Virgin, so that she can intercede for all of us, but a bumbling person with a neurotic core, and the plot-line depends on the presence of weaknesses that would not be there. All is Lost shows a man reasoning his way through what faces him, and not without being disheartened unto death : no one else appears to be to blame for where we find him, though we all find ourselves in life somewhere from which prior circumstances and decisions (ours and / or those of others) brought us there…

Our Man may or may not represent us, but we identify with him (unless we are aggrieved seafarers who berate him as suggested), and it is the inhuman dumping / falling of a container, just as we duly see these behemoths not notice him, that, if not exactly creating his problems, compounds them. Is he a righteous man like Job and what happens him being given over to be tested ? Maybe, but we do not feel that he is a special man, given over to ill to see whether he curses God.

What befalls him also evokes Homer’s Odyssey (and in one of the themes of Alex Ebert’s music we have The Sirens brought to life, when he thinks of giving into alcohol and before he seems to become beset by them proper), but I think that the closer parallel is with Beckettt’s Job-like figure in his mime Act Without Words I, who is temptingly offered water that he cannot drink, shade that is withdrawn (Jonah 4 : 6 – 8 ?), and the like.

Finally, the male figure, despite being prodded to continue with further temptations with the game, just withdraws. Famously, Beckettt’s trilogy of novels** almost has as its motto the closing words of the third, You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on, and the spirit of perseverance, though it ebbs and flows, is there in the resilience of Our Man’s responses to his situation. Towards the end, it is as if there is the same desire, which is somewhere in Kafka’s writing****, just to lie down in the snow, regardless of the risk and fall asleep.

As to Redford, it is only the white sideburns that discredit the idea that he is younger than 77, and all power to him, if he is rightly reported as being seen doing himself what his character did – the intense close-ups show him lined, but he is still every inch a star, and with commanding presence and conviction in his work. The arc of Our Man’s experience has those qualities brought to it, so that we cannot rest, scarcely drawing breath, whilst what faces him remains in the balance : No film, for me, has been (no real pun intended) as immersive as this one since Cell 211 (2009) at Cambridge Film Festival in 2010.


End-notes

¹ Spoiler alert - from IMDb, this is the text of the note :

13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry... I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you knew this. In each of your ways. And I am sorry. All is lost here... except for soul and body... that is, what's left of them... and a half-day's ration. It's inexcusable really, I know that now. How it could have taken this long to admit that I'm not sure... but it did. I fought 'til the end, I'm not sure what this worth, but know that I did. I have always hoped for more for you all... I will miss you. I'm sorry.

² It is far lesser, despite its 11 nomination for BAFTA awards to this film’s one (for Sound)… - told this, a friend pithily opined Then they are shitheads.

As if I didn't know that #BAFTA nominations are stupid, All is Lost (2013) only gets one - for Sound !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 9, 2014

³ Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable.

**** Also suggested in the texts of Müller that Schubert set for Winterreise (which has been badly translated as A Winter’s Journey) : with Winterreise, as with this film, one has the feeling that the degradations of the physical journey are parallel manifestations of a disintegration of the soul or psyche.



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

The cable guy

This is a review of Channeling (2013), as shown at Bath Film Festival 2013

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

30 November (revised 3 December)

This is a review of Channeling (2013), as shown at Bath Film Festival 2013 (@BathFilm) and thanks to a complimentary ticket from the festival

89 = S : 15 / A : 15 / C : 14 / M : 16 / P : 14 / F : 15

A rating and review of Channeling (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)



The title of Channeling* (2013) is deliberately multivalent, meaning both the sense of He channelled his energies into archery, and putting something on a channel (so that others can see and hear it).

As director / writer Drew Thomas told us in answer to one of my questions, the family of whom Wyatt (Taylor Handley), Jonah (Dominic DeVore) and Ashleigh (Skyler Day) are the grown-up offspring is a dysfunctional one : one son travels from Yemen for a funeral, and is then (in his only real-time appearance) told off by the father for not being there in time. I had asked because, when we see him, as a younger man caught on home video, pick up a boy at whom he has barked orders, it is unclear what he did, but it smacked of abuse.

As with Ashleigh’s confessional moment on camera into the mirror, Thomas said that he had intended to portray a self-loathing that might lead someone to seek approval from ratings for their actions or choices (made or to be made). When we saw this system of rating manipulated in the night club, and indeed the events that had led up to it, the film did seem momentarily a bit insubstantial and trivial in a way that The Bling Ring (2013) is in spades, but it moved away from it, and this was something, perhaps a little self-indulgently, that Thomas almost did throughout the film of mining different genres for what they were worth before moving on, and a little too much at the risk of lacking cohesion.

Saying that, the dummy commercial that opens the film is funny, thought provoking, and satirical, with insights into where the world of Twatter and what I call Arsebook logically lead to – it plunges one straight into a counterfactual world that, as in Looper (2012), does not stray far from the things that we know in what it changes.

The moments of humour characterize the film, although we are not always sure that it is permitted to laugh, and it also expects us to do some work in piecing together what has happened in and following the pursuit sequence that we see. Whether it is the equipment that was giving us the audio or how it has been recorded that made the early dialogue hard to follow was unclear – it might partly have been ‘tuning into’ Wyatt’s accent (different from that of his brother, but then his brother is an army sergeant, and has been serving for a long time), or partly that, as in Top Gun (1986) (for example), those in situations of combat or other peril are not perfectly audible in their pressurized communication.

Not least since this is set in California and begins with a car chase, expectations of topping Drive (2011) spring to mind, but the excitement of the action on the road, and elsewhere, has been styled, Thomas told us, to be more like the era of Dirty Harry (1971) (he did not name that series of films) and of film noir. Just in these things (there was a feel of The Rockford Files or Starsky and Hutch, not least with the token black guy who is the IT whizz), there was already quite a mixture of feels, let alone with a gangland punishment (including a British-sounding baddie ?) that made one wonder if it was going to have equivalent scenes in Seven Psychopaths (2012) or – sticking with Colin Farrell – In Bruges (2008) in its sights.

Whether these disparate elements enhance or dissipate the film’s energies, I remain unsure, as it is all too true that many a science-fiction film sticks to type, whereas this one shows off its director’s literacy of references. It also has an enviable soundtrack, making an impact right with the opening commercial, and even a live band in the night club reminiscent of The Doors.

The other question that I asked relates to a film that I only saw once, but which teasingly plays with the question of free will versus determinism, which is Michael Douglas in The Game (1997) : appropriately ‘channelled’ by the festival’s founder**, Chris King, I asked Thomas whether the technology of people sharing their actions and following their ratings, which the film initially seems to be about, had come first, or whether the deterministic theme had always been what interested him most (it had). He had wanted to explore the ways in which people do not (or refuse) to take responsibility for what concerns them, and had seen a link with how people in the US use the technology of social media to arrive at an answer based on what others tell them.

If that Doors tribute was deliberate, maybe it leads off in some other directions : Maybe not the advocacy of mescalin and other mind-altering substances, though, in the film, we see tablets of what turns out to be called Oxy crushed and then snorted as if it were coke, but using the edge of the pervasive sort of mini-tablet as a straight edge to line it up.

Perhaps the Warhol-type being famous for fifteen minutes, and just doing things to get a higher number of followers, is a sort of intoxicant or tranquillizer, not unlike Marx’s ‘opiate of the masses’, not least when we see both what use the club bosses are putting participants’ behaviour to and how they control it ?

All in all, a thoughtful film, even if it may be too much of a rich blend of influences for the competing calls on our attention to allow us to settle down – though, since Thomas seems to have aimed at the feel that it has, and if it does still hold together, it may not be right (in a film about people taking responsibility) to imagine a film that he have made by suppressing some of those instincts***…


Postlude

Through fatigue and oversight, a few comments did not get formulated originally as more than notes, from which this text is developed :

Wyatt is not alone in his perilous exploits, for he has an accomplice (or whose side is she on ?) in Tara (Kate French). When Jonah tries to explore what his elder brother has been up to, Tara's allure is tangible, but her first reaction to Jonah using Wyatt's device and channel is hostile (a number of retorts to his attempts to speak, such as wishing him cancer).

Comparisons between the brothers are inevitable and deliberate, and, although we see that the professional soldier (Jonah) is tough, and can also drive, he is never going to be Wyatt (perhaps a pressure that he has always put on himself, helped by his father's attitude and actions).

Perhaps it is Tara's confusion, on all levels, that leads her to blow hot and cold towards Jonah, but she definitely starts by imputing blame : here, there seems to be a sort of fog of war about who people really are and who did what, which, in a digital age, when people do masquerade, and when the film explores the boundaries between what is real, what staged (and what predictable, what fixed), makes for even greater richness of reference.



Other questions from the Q&A

Had the Eyecast technology been patented ? Thomas seemed pleased enough not to have been sued, and did mention Google glasses (which, he said, make one look like a dork). He did not appear to have investigated whether it had any commercial possibilities.

Was Eyecast a real application (some would say 'app'), or had the screens that showed it been green-screened ? Yes, it is a real application, but, for technical reasons, some screen-shots had been re-done in post production.

Was Ashleigh meant to be sympathetic or irritating ? Thomas took it that the questioner must have found her irritating (which was confirmed), but answered by emphasizing her position as a person seeking approval (see main text, above).

Given the acts that people are performing or committing on a live channel, why were the police not - or slow to be - involved ? Thomas pointed to other works on film and t.v. where the police lag behind, and suggested that the same might be as true here. (The Agent Apsley wondered whether Eyecast had bought them.)



End-notes

* One ‘l’, because it is a US spelling.

** Who relayed questions through a microphone linked to the laptop for the Skype connection.

*** Just one likely flaw : when Jonah goes to Eyecast, gains access by his brother’s account name, and passes himself off as he, the assumption is that Wyatt never did what Ashleigh does and put herself on camera by reflection. (It could be that, given how the account has been used, that was never done.)


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