Showing posts with label Mark Kermode. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark Kermode. Show all posts

Sunday, 3 September 2017

Some Tweets after a preview screening (plus Q&A) of The Limehouse Golem (2016)

Some Tweets after a preview screening (plus Q&A) of The Limehouse Golem (2016)

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

30 August
Some Tweets after a preview screening (plus Q&A) of The Limehouse Golem (2016) at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, on Wednesday 30 August 2017 at 6.20 p.m.






María Valverde, Sam Reid, Douglas Booth, Olivia Cooke, and Eddie Marsan







Douglas Booth and Mila Kunis in Jupiter Ascending (2015)

Douglas Booth is tremendous in the film – but he was tremendous (and very unpleasant) in Jupiter Ascending (2015), so it is hardly surprising, whereas Bill Nighy, although dependable, is rather unexciting, not least considering that screenwriter Jane Goldman, by promoting a minor part in the original novel Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem (by Victorian specialist Peter Ackroyd), created the role – as a Golem – from raw materials : what he does in the film, the book does not need from him at all...








 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, 8 August 2016

Tale of Tales (2015) [Il racconto dei racconti] : A few Tweets from Saffron Screen...

Tale of Tales (2015) [Il racconto dei racconti] : A few Tweets from Saffron Screen...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 August

Tale of Tales (2015) [Il racconto dei racconti] :
A few Tweets from Saffron Screen (@Saffronscreen)...






Salma Hayek as The Queen of Longtrellis [an unnecessarily literal translation, from her title in Basile's Neapolitan text ? - which we never hear]










Post-script :













 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, 5 December 2013

More Haneke than Buñuel ?

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

5 December

Jeune et Jolie (2013) was screened at The Little Theatre as part of Bath Film Festival 2013


How many reviews of Jeune et Jolie (2013) am I going to have to read where its uninspired writer references the completely irrelevant Belle de Jour (1967), just because - whatever the fit - it is the only film that, in each case, he or she can think of where a woman works as a prostitute ?

* Tim Robey* in The Telegraph

* Ian Freer in Empire

* James Mottram in Total Film

* Nigel Andrews in The Financial Times

* Andrew Nickolds at TAKE ONE

And so on...


Have they never seen Natalie (2003) or even Sleeping Beauty (2011), which have far more in common for how the topos is treated ? What, in fact, does a married woman with sadomasochistic fantasies have to do with a seventeen-year-old, who has just uncomfortably lost her virginity ?

Sooner that, though, than being smugly dismissive (Mark Kermode in The Observer) or claiming that Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013) is indisputably better (Brian Viner, Mail Online : Viner says that Jeune et Jolie 'is in no way a match for' the other film, but they are very different films, no more capable of being compared than Superman and Bambi just because both (of J&J and Blue) feature sex.


Reviewers tediously also want a motivation for what Isabelle does. As i** carps :

Ozon's motives in making this film are as inscrutable as those of his teenage heroine Isabelle (Marine Vacth) [...] who, for reasons Ozon doesn't even begin to make clear, decided to embark on a part-time career as a teenage prostitute

They see (as the quotation shows) the fact that no motivation is stated is a flaw, which it might be in a world of perfect rationality, but that is not our world. So, Nigel Floyd (for Film4) reports :

“I didn't really try and understand psychologically who [Isabelle] was," Vacth has said. "I wasn't interested in knowing exactly. And anyway I couldn't, because François didn't tell me anything about her psychology.” The second half of this statement is more revealing than the first. Given that their creative collaboration was so one-sided, it's not surprising that the film suffers from an atmosphere of uncontrolled, unrevealing salaciousness.


Has Floyd even seen the film, if he thinks it salacious, one might wonder.

All this business about motivation is ultimately a dead end, a red herring, and would have one interrogate Amour (2012), when Michael Haneke is on record here, and in relation to other films, that it is up to us how we view them, and there is no one way.

What more do we want, and why, than what the films tells us : that Isabelle's friend Claire and she were approached in the street (Claire previously alludes to this encounter in talking to Isabelle), and the man said his number. Do we need spelt out what impulse led Isabelle to follow up a man interested in her ? Obviously, most girls of her age would do nothing with it, but why should she not register the number and act on it ?


In fact, an answer to why she did is utterly boring, when the fact is that she did, and we see her approaching room 6598 where not her first client awaits her, but Georges, with nothing of what preceded. There is something seriously wrong with the idea of cinema-going if that does not suffice, and critics are unhappy not to be told more.


End-notes

* At least Robey goes on to make this (necessary) observation : 'The film makes more sense if you see it as a companion piece to Ozon’s last one, In the House, which had a 16-year-old male schemer insinuating himself into a series of power plays'.

** In the edition on 29 November 2013.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, 23 April 2012

What Bruno Bettelheim has to tell us about all sorts of stories

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

23 April

Some people (no names mentioned!) are quite dogmatic about what BB postulated about fairy tales:

It's a bit like being a strict Freudian* and - as Arthur Koestler expressed it in Bricks to Babel (1980) - filtering out everything that is inconsistent with your adopted (to be pretentious) Weltanschauung, so BB (probably quitely kicking and screaming, from what little I know of him) becomes the new God.

Thus adherents say that He Has Spoken, and henceforth Fairy Stories shall be hallowed, imbued with dark meanings, and with the purpose of helping us manage our difficult inner feelings by projecting them onto a story (no quibbles, no refund).

I think of this from hearing Debussy's familiar (though thankfully off the air for a while) L'Après-Midi d'une Faune (1894), and a decent explanation - for once - of its roots in Mallarmé's poem of 1865. It requires little invention to imagine sexual sublimation (of writer, reader or listener, though, for me, the lattermost remains a stretch, as does finding the text behind other works of Claude's): the faun can safely do - or dream of doing - what we can conveniently enjoy in him, and deny as being our desire.

Which brings us to yesterday's screening, accompanied by Neil Brand and Mark Kermode (why else was everyone there?) in The Dodge Brothers, of The Ghost that Never Returns (1929), the penultimate event in the 15th British Silent Film Festival, which was hosted by the Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, this year.

More to come...



End-notes

* Woody Allen's passing quip is my favourite, which goes something like During my time in therapy, my analyst retired - as he was a strict Freudian, it was only six sessions later that I realized.


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Sunday, 26 February 2012

Thank goodness for Faber & Faber!

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

26 February

Simply for this piece of drafting, which I spotted on the imprint page of Alan Bennett's Writing Home (Faber & Faber, London, 1995):

Alan Bennett is hereby identified as author of this work
in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988


That may not be sheer joy to you, but look at what is in the front of other books - until such time as I can explain myself...


Which seems to be now.

This is the more usual (if, I think, flawed) form of the notice under the 1988 Act, which in this case protects - thankfully - a rare talent*:

Mark Kermode has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work


The difference being that, according to this latter formulation, something - some prior act - other than the notice itself constitutes the assertion of the right to be identified as the author.

However, when I last attacked the Act in earnest - and probably s. 77 in particular - I could see no antecedent step envisaged by the legislation. So why this past tense of 'has asserted', and why the suggestion that, say, MK bellowed an announcement (which would still be an 'announcement', not an 'assertion') to that effect at daybreak in Parliament Square for seven days running?

Probably just foolish lawyers' caution, from which F&F wisely seems to have broken free - though I'd have to look at a few more of its titles to establish when, if I were that interested...


PS In fact, there is a more intriguing use of the second type of formulation quoted above that I have now found, which is in a Vintage Classics edition of Brave New World:

Aldous Huxley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work


Most people, I think, who know when the book was first published will be surprised by that statement (for Huxley, who was born in the tail end of the nineteenth century, died in 1963).

But not, perhaps, if they know the story that relates to Huxley's wife's and his belief in the possibility of extra-corporeal survival, and the story that is recounted about her attempts to make contact with him after he died...


End-notes

* For, and let's be honest, who else would want to lay claim to The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex (or The Boring, The Marginally Less Boring, and The Outright Tiresome), based on said author's tediously pedestrian account, in the first half of the first chapter, of collecting / buying cinema tickets for his daughter and him (which, so far, has taken up fourteen pages of my life)?

The cover of the book is loaded with plaudits: well, if (Empire), 'Film criticism is rarely [this] much fun', then Heaven help film critics; and, if MK (Sunday Times) has 'More opinions than Delia Smith has baking trays', then I not only fail to spot the relevance of the Delia-related comparison (unless she is cook-in-residence to that organ), but also think that I know where MK is best advised to shove such opinions (along with the trays)!


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)