Showing posts with label Naomi Watts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Naomi Watts. 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)

Saturday 20 August 2016

Some remarks about Mulholland Drive (2001) (and Mulholland Dr. (1999))

Some remarks about Mulholland Drive (2001) (and Mulholland Dr. (1999))

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


19 August

Some remarks arising from a screening of Mulholland Drive (2001) at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, on Thursday 18 August at 9.00 p.m. (and about Mulholland Dr. (1999))


Nowadays, Nicolas Winding Refn¹ seems to want to go by the cypher above (which, one learns, one may not rightly call a monogram)...




However, is he, by curating some films that have influenced him, for participating Picturehouses (@picturehouses), showing that he is not a worthy heir to Igor Stravinsky... ?


Whoever’s work they really were (or were then thought to have been), it seems that Sergei Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky to turn some libretti and scores that he had from Naples and London, and which had been attributed to Pergolesi, into a ballet for his Ballets Russes. Again, whoever’s music Stravinsky’s Pulcinella (1920) was then thought to have been (or based on – and, not surprisingly, it does not appear that Stravinsky said otherwise), it has been known for at least the last forty years to be his adaptive reworking / re-composition of those originals (as well as being considered the first work of what is usually called his neo-classical period).









The relevance of alluding to Stravinsky above lies in a sentiment that, it seems (and in mutated forms), has been ascribed to, or adopted by, many since before T. S. Eliot, but which is here quoted of Stravinsky :

Igor Stravinsky said to me of his 'Three Songs by William Shakespeare', in which he epitomized his discovery of Webern’s music : ‘A good composer does not imitate ; he steals.’

Twentieth Century Music²



In fact, does NWR, commending films to us such as Mulholland Drive (2001) (which is arguably Lynch stealing from his own t.v. film and other antecedents), really just show that he has not dared to steal, only to imitate ?

In other words, is the faulty notion behind Nicolas Winding Refn Presents... this one ? That it is as if Stravinsky had not only done very little with the Pergolesi materials to re-embody them as his own, but had also, and without good reason, allowed those facts to be known before their time.

Whereas Stravinsky himself was too good a self-publicist¹ for that, and, first allowed the Pergolesi name ‘to stick’ by arranging the work (in collaboration with Paul Kochanski) for violin and piano, publishing Suite d'après des thèmes, fragments et morceaux de Giambattista Pergolesi (1925)³...



Postlude :










End-notes

¹ Interviewed by Danny Leigh (@dannytheleigh) for The Guardian’s Film section (@guardianfilm), in Nicolas Winding Refn: 'I bring the singular, the narcissistic, the high art', NWR told Leigh – seemingly inconsequentially, as Leigh’s next paragraph is about meeting him next in London, a year later – about a young man whom he found bleeding nightmarishly in urban Los Angeles, and whom, along with another man (already there), he attempted to help, but the man died (and He had never seen anyone die before) :

He told me this story a few weeks later, still in LA. I asked if he had felt emotional. ‘No,’ he said. Nothing ? ‘Strangely nothing.’ The next morning ? ‘Nuh-uh.’ He sipped juice through a straw. ‘But later,’ he said, ‘I was happy. Because I got a fucking great idea for a scene.’


² Twentieth Century Music : Its Evolution from the End of the Harmonic Era into the Present Era of Sound, Peter Yates. Random House, New York (1967). Pantheon Books, p. 41.

³ Later, as well as an eight-movement Pulcinella Suite (revised in 1965), he produced arrangements, in collaboration with Gregor Piatigorsky and Samuel Dushkin, respectively, called Suite italienne for cello and piano (1932-1933) and violin and piano (1933).




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

Monday 30 March 2015

My name sounds so much better when you say it ! ~ Josh

This is a review of While We’re Young (2014)

More views of or before Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


30 March (6, 7 April, Tweets added)

This is a review of While We’re Young (2014)




Whatever Noah Baumbach may have felt about Frances Ha (2012) when he had finished making it (in which Adam Driver (from this film) played Frances’ one-time flat-mate Lev), and whatever he may have felt when he knew how it had been / was being received, may have had no bearing on While We’re Young (2014) : one forgets the likely gestation of things (just as film-makers forget what we may notice about their technique), and unthinkingly wishes to see the next film as some sort of progression from what we previously saw.




For, if that were the reality of film-making, a linear succession of films (with no spurs, dead-ends, recursions), one would be tempted to say that this one is for whatever reason striving to be as little like Frances Ha as possible. That film has its nods, and, staying with Woody Allen, one now feels a touch of Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) at times, but also of all of these, too, at others (in alphabetical order) :




* Celebrity (1998) ~ Jamie Massey (Adam Driver) bears resemblances to Lee Simon (Kenneth Branagh), with his opportunistic, if unfocused, ambitiousness (and to that of Oscar Isaac (as Llewyn Davis) ? please see below)

* Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989) ~ Josh (Ben Stiller) is, occasionally, a little in the vein of the character of Lester (Alan Alda), other times that of Cliff Stern (Woody Allen)

* Deconstructing Harry (1997) ~ Here, Josh mirrors what happens to Harry Block (Woody Allen), which is also at the time of someone being ‘honoured’

* The Double (2013) ~ On which we begin to converge

* The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013) ~ Also played by Ben Stiller (as Walter), but on better form, and with a better version of this sort of ‘character-journey’ ?

* The Talented Mr Ripley ~ Please see next item

* The Way Way Back ~ Such seduction / attractiveness, but, from Sam Rockwell (Owen), in reverse, and not for ill and also in and through the retro feel / ethos (rather than, say, invoking the analogue / digital paradigm of The Matrix (1999)…)

** Turtle Diary* (1985) ~ Shamanistic initiations (in Russell Hoban's (@russellhobanorg's)novel, it was rebirthing, probably little included in the screenplay (one forgets), by Harold Pinter)


What, then, would a film look like that had fragments of these other films embedded in it ? Well, one that is trying to find how character can drive plot, perhaps, since Frances depends, as well as on her (Greta Gerwig’s) relationship with Sophie (Mickey Sumner), on the personality of Frances, in relation to that of others, and the film’s direction arises from it. While We’re Young has a much more obvious story-line, which those who could not relate to Frances were presumably missing…




In the event, though, structurally at the over-arching level this film does still resemble Frances (or, equally, Deconstructing Harry) : the bulk of the film is, relatively speaking, at the microscopic level, but the coda (here, with an explicit statement as to the passing of time) puts it in a macroscopic context. One may remember, likewise, how Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) concludes, where Mickey and Holly’s (Woody Allen and Dianne Wiest’s) union is blessed with an unexpected pregnancy or, even getting to that point, how their chance meeting in a record store is able to benefit both from the passing / healing of time, and by Mickey (who finds himself able to share it with Holly) having had an epiphany that has moved him on.

Films that do not do this (both Allen’s and those of others) may still do something that has a similar effect, i.e. of putting distance on what the rest of the film has depicted staying with Allen, and giving another example from his canon, To Rome With Love (2012) starts with the perspective of the traffic policeman, who comes out of his role (directing the traffic) to direct us into the film. After immersing us in the action, Allen ends it with the viewpoint of the householder in another dramatic Roman location, overseeing the Coliseum, who gently reminds us that the four strands of story that we have seen are just part of what he could tell us another time. (Other films may be less explicit in so doing, using part of the language of cinema itself, by slowly zooming in on our locale at the beginning, and then, nigh ritualistically, by taking us back out again by way of conclusion That's all, folks !)

What Noah Baumbach does with While We’re Young is to seek the same misdirection at the close as at the start (along with the literary red herring of Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder), coupled with whether faked or not a little piece of pure observation about where one generation puts itself in relation to another : how, in the face of the impact of technology*** (epitomized by such films as Her (2013)), sometimes the things that we have in common (as Joaquin Phoenix [Theodore Twombly] does with Amy Adams [Amy]) count for more than what might separate us, and so we are left with the incredulous gaze / expression of Naomi Watts.


Does the film try too hard to be more than one thing, and so dissipate its energies, because, by not being any one thing (arguably, since life itself is not any one thing), it ends up being not very much ? It certainly felt that it did, and it had stylistic features that made one question whether, when they appeared too obvious, they added not to feeling invited to relish the artisanal nature of the enterprise (and, with it, its status as a constructed reality), but, rather, that it was more amateurish in nature, and that Baumbach had employed techniques without (much) regard to what they would look like to those who saw (through) them :

* Such as the patent use of different people being in light and shadow, although in the same, ostensibly undifferentiated setting :




* Or the reaction-shots that foreground, bottom left or right (and extremely out of focus), what is sometimes no more than an impression of a sleeve or shoulder almost as if to parody notions of what a reaction-shot is supposed to include (required by 'industry standards' ?) so that one 'knows' that it is one, but to do so in such a way that, if it is not meant to resemble on the fly documentary footage (after all, this is the genre of the film within a film consistent with using that fast-pan onto Josh when he finds something on Google® ?), it looks incompetently done.

* Most curious of all, the scene at Lincoln Center when Josh confronts Jamie a wide, low long-shot that, looking dead, has absolutely nothing going for it, either in itself, or within the edit. Suddenly, it feels that someone unused to making the impact of a setting tell (such as the scene behind the windows) has stepped too far back, and lost the subjects... Or as if it had not been deliberate to take it to use it, it had to be used for want of anything better.


If, though, one just unquestioningly consumes what is exemplified above in viewing the film, maybe the result is that one just dips in and out of Josh’s life as a more likeable and less fractured type of Inside Llewyn Davis**** (2013), which, conceivably, is Harry Block (from Deconstructing Harry) with the softer features that Stiller has as Walter Mitty ?

So even if maybe for the wrong reasons (unless Baumbach is actually trying to please, and to work through theses for an elite about being mimetic in cinematic style / technique ?) this is a film that does / can get one thinking : it has a slow-burn of a response, which, for others, persisted, beyond the immediate three hours afterwards, following Under the Skin.

Yet, unlike that dismayingly dazzling ending, the one here could be seen (in the same way that Frances 'deals with her issues') as normalizing the paranoia / projection that Josh vividly gives us (and which, although we may be slow to believe that Stiller is a film-maker (let alone Watts), we buy into, it must be said which is the real power of the film), and endorsing a rather tame message that Time heals ?



End-notes
* Frances and Sophie did make one laugh, whereas one is aware that Josh (Stiller), Cornelia (Watts), Jamie (Driver), and Darby (Seyfried) are (being) amusing ?

** There is some speculation, here, about a re-make :



*** The cover-all word (along with technological advance) that indulges / excuses everything, and makes it seem acceptable to be drawn into having the latest ‘device’ (another such word), rather than dismissing it as gadgetry ?

**** Another point of contact with Adam Driver, who there is Al Cody, Llewyn Davis’ friend / fellow musician.




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