Showing posts with label Marilyn Monroe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marilyn Monroe. Show all posts

Friday 5 October 2018

#UCFF Tweets about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

The #UCFF Tweets about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


5 October (updated 29 October)

The #UCFF Tweets about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)





This Tweet is about the contrast between blonde Naomi Watts (as Betty / Diane Selwyn) and Laura Harring (playing Rita and Camilla Rhodes) in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) :








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

Friday 23 November 2012

Thumbnails and icons - the language of crap ?

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


23 November

If you know anyone in the Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox traditions, and see their saints around the home in places that mean something to them, you might find it hard to relate those portable gilt pictures to the images on your desktop (so called, although it will often enough be the screen of a laptop, and, unlike any but the most exceptionally busy tops of desks, rarely seen), which link to My documents, Internet Explorer, or the Recycle bin (where there is little evidence of recycling - you can't even open the items in it without 'restoring' them, and who ever did more than take something out of a bin, not restore it?).

Now, I'll grant you that that rather uneasy word 'iconoclastic' has been with us in this world a very long time, but we never use it in its original sense, which is more akin to Cromwell's forces and the literal acts of de-facing, but more as a semi-Byronesque description of rocking the boat in a big way. Still, little explanation why these desktop images should be icons, any more than Madonna or Cher being 'a gay icon', or James Dean or Marilyn Monroe screen ones. (As I revise this, I find that my mind has done work for me, by bringing in what many an icon embraces - the Madonna and Child - by implication.)

Little explanation, unless you believe that, when terms were conceived for these purposes, the originators were laughing up their sleeves at the idea of everyone in the future talking about which version they were running. Just as if someone, in an alternative world, would be being urged not to click on an icon (or thumbnail), but, say, to touch a pussy, with different cats denoting what the swirly 'e' of Explorer or that stylized folder for documents (for some reason lying on its back) represent.

Maybe that fantasy's not true to whatever happened with these names, and I do quite like the word 'browser' (which people, though, little use), but what about these Chinese take-aways called things like Jade Gate, which I am led to believe directly translate to depicting the vagina ? Is that a big joke at everyone's expense ? And so, finally, to that Not the Nine O'Clock News sketch, with made up names for Thai food that sound like 'cock' and 'dick', and also the scene in Alas Smith and Jones where an approximation of the Javanese Gamelan is being played by our two: in one of the common bars' rests that are a feature of such music, Mel turns to Griff and simply says 'Is it me, or is this just crap ?', and then they carry on playing.


Friday 7 September 2012

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.




Wednesday 29 February 2012

Daniella Westbrook: 'Drugs Have Ruined My Looks' (courtesy of Huffpost)

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


1 March

Yes, well, there might be one pose chosen for this story where Daniella resembles an Emma Watson, but - unless I am hopelessly misinformed - she was never awarded the beauty contracts that come the ex-Potter star's way.

Or are we all supposed to be having amnesia and believing that she was some sort of raging beauty in her significant t.v. role in a family of crooks?

To flip the coin, Marilyn was, of course, never comfortable with the attention that came with her looks (and, needless to say, they were enhanced for lenses of all sorts), but it wasn't as if she said that she wished she could be plain once more - why did those Martians have to whisk her away and beautify her one day?

Maybe I'm being mean, but we all knew years back about Daniella and her septum, so why is this news?


Monday 6 February 2012

The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 4)

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


6 February

* Contains spoilers *

Of course, it helps if those short write-ups are accurate.

These, taken from one of my local free newspapers (actually, the only one that now delivers), are not:

For anyone who has seen Another Earth (2011), it might be a struggle to justify the opening proposition 'Astrophysicist Rhoda kills most of a family* [...]', because, although, later on, the contents of her bedroom show an interest in outer space**, all that we know from the film is that, just before the accident, she has got a place at MIT***.

Here, nothing depends on the assertion, but, even if that's all that the place were concerned with, that doesn't make her an astrophysicist. What about the second half of the description, though?:

After discovering it's [sc. a mysterious giant planet] a duplicate of the earth, she tracks down victim John, befriending him without revealing their connection, while on a mission to discover the planet's mystery.

If I had read this first (rather than the spread from The London Standard), I think that I might feel misled by (a) the account of cause and effect, by (b) the language, and by (c) what is anterior to what...


Take another example from the same feature, in relation to My Week with Marilyn (2011), and at which the same criticisms can be levelled at the following excerpts:

* It's the height of Marilyn Monroe's fame - factually, was it? The sentence continues with:

* and her new husband Arthur Miller has to make a brief trip to Paris - well, I didn't register where he was going, or whether it was only briefly, but I am already unsure about this even if true, and of what relevance is it where Miller has to go...?

* I also didn't notice whether (as he was) the film says that Colin Clark was a graduate from Oxford, but he is said to:

* [s]pend [in Miller's absence] a week introducing the star to the joys of ordinary British life

Which is why one scene shows him taking her to his old school, Eton, where she is virtually mobbed, and leading into an unannounced visit to Windsor Castle, where he turns out able to gain access because his godfather is librarian there (or some such).


In both cases, and (apart from a picnic and some bathing - for one of them, inevitably, nude) we see them discovering nothing else (as far as I recall), hardly ordinary British life.


So the write-up has to be worth reading, even if one doesn't (as I don't) do more than glance at it, because otherwise it is a set-up for a film that is different (or even very different).

Not just because I like Woody Allen's work, some write-up - in Picturehouse Recommends, I think - meant that I expected to enjoy
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), so I was highly disappointed to find out what it was - and probably, because of that, have come down hard on it ever since.


To be concluded - promise!****


End-note

* A note of scrupulous accuracy amidst the rest?

** No, on second thoughts, that phrasing isn't felicitous, is it?! (Rhoda has the interest in outer space - the contents of her room do not, but they evidence hers.)

*** Did the person who wrote this even know what MIT is?

**** I mean that Part 5 will be the end of it, that is! - now available here...


Thursday 8 December 2011

A matinee with Marilyn

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


7 November

A piece that I read about My Week With Marilyn recently – it might have been a review, but I don’t recall that it said anything other than about Michelle Williams – reported that its writer had to keep reminding him- or herself that Williams was Marilyn Monroe.

Well, having had the reservation that the person playing MM only superficially resembled her, I thought that I would have the same problem, but what the piece went on to say, was that Williams nonetheless captured her essence (for me, in this performance, a mix of vulnerability, insecurity, playfulness, unawkward sexiness, and a kind of naturalness, when not undercut by self-doubt): not succeeding in putting the piece out of my mind, I only momentarily doubted, because I could see that she wasn’t, that Williams was Monroe.

The film would not have been a whit better if she had been made to resemble Marilyn more (or, for that matter, Kenneth Branagh more like Sir Laurence Olivier) – the passing resemblance was quite sufficient, for those who can enter into a story, and has left me wanting to know more about Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), his book The Prince, The Showgirl and Me, and the diaries on which the credits say that the film was based. (The ex-lawyer in me ended up thinking how meaningful a disclaimer it was at the end to say that there was a true basis, but that some events and characters had been fictionalized, since one would have no way or knowing what was what.)

The special MM temporary exhibition at the American Museum at The University of Bath, Claverton, had made me aware of the frustrations had by those working on set with her, and Branagh caught that attempt at charm, thinly disguising tetchiness and even anger very well: I shall revisit the programme from that exhibition, and also attempt to see The Prince and The Showgirl, on whose filming this work was based.

Williams, Branagh and Judi Dench (as Sybil Thorndike), for whom I personally don’t usually have a lot of time, were all very strong, and those three characters in themselves caught the tensions, when Thorndike sticks up for Monroe against Olivier, one of just a series of tensions between those trying, Clark included, to understand Monroe best. Those triangles and other shapes worked very well to provide a background against which the central tension of the early days of Arthur Miller’s marriage to Monroe could operate, and which could in turn lead to the charming relationship with Clark, who twice rejects advice from others (maybe suspecting their envy, maybe just out of Old Etonian pride).

If there were any doubt, it is not that Clark, with his background, would have ‘run away to the circus’ of trying to get into the film world, but that he is such a decent specimen of humanity in spite of that education (of which we get two tasters): yet, as with Cyril Connolly, I need to be reminded that there the few who do not grow up cherishing the establishment, and they have become the Louis Malles of our world.

The snippets at the end didn’t say where Clark went next with his career, although it did with Some Like It Hot for Monroe and The Entertainer for Olivier, but only where he ended up, and how his book, in 1995, achieved international recognition. Yet I am under no illusions: I am interested in him (and also in what may survive of Olivier’s views) to know the roots of what I have seen in this film, and to witness that charm of which Williams has given such a full account in this well-scripted film, a fitting tribute to MM this year.



Just two quibbles, which in one case, if I am right, may be little more than a continuity error: when Clark is picked up at the studio by Roger Smith, Monroe's bodyguard (who has a hidden Marilyn), he necessarily leaves his car there, but I felt sure that it was shown driving from behind (unless it was the back of Roger's car) during their jaunt; the moment when Olivier is off with Clark for being invited to Monroe's house and wonders whether he could possibly make him a cup of tea before he goes makes a good contrast with an earlier scene, but, unless he is trying to make sure that Clark is on side, he is being far more friendly with him than seems likely in the wider scpe of things.