Showing posts with label On the Road. Show all posts
Showing posts with label On the Road. Show all posts

Monday, 19 August 2019

Animals (2019) - Good and bad (mainly, if anything, the latter)

Animals (2019) - Good and bad (mainly, if anything, the latter)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

19 August

Animals (2019) - Good and bad (mainly, if anything, the latter)


In brief :

First, and foremost, this is a film-festival film*, which, with Australian / Irish film-industry funding, has somehow obtained distribution

It may not have been made as a television film, but it could not even 'fill' Screen 3 at The Arts Picturehouse - not that there was no audience, but that Animals felt small, trying to occupy a space, and use silence and its funky score, in a way that just had no impact, and seemed effort with no result. It would work much better on t.v., with its bubbles of out-of-focus street-lighting, glitz, and characters / their positions, which often seem insubstantial

The moments with the wildlife (were they any more than rushes ?) were, so much more so than Dylan Thomas' stuffed fox, would-be portentous - or with a sickening literalism to Who were the animals here ?

 Good use of location (an establishing shot, and suitable noises of the sea and its birds, sufficed to make the interior of where Jim lived match that exterior)

 Fixation on masturbation and cunnilingus ?

We are to believe / credit that Laura 'is a writer', because she has a poster for Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own** to the left of the desk where she works (let alone, nearby, another image of Ginny)...


In detail :

 The film is well enough made and shot, but one takes those as given - although the real or seeming artlessness of an early Yorgos Lanthimos film, Kinetta (2005) may be an impediment to some (in a sense, it is meant to be one), it is part of the affect of the film, and heightens its worth : on the scale of Animals, those things about everything being in focus and lined up, etc., are absent, but that does not make Animals a better film, and Kinetta is arguably far finer despite and /or because of them.

On the Road (2012) scarcely did a worse job, with Sal Paradise, of convincing anyone that he was not only a writer, but also could even - just by soaking it up, and writing it down (i.e. typing onto the probably mythical continuous roll of paper) - self-referentially create what we were seeing :

Except that we know that Jack Kerouac was a published writer, whereas nothing that Laura does suggests that she writes / can write anything beyond note-like observations, and her decade-long pretensions, although the film may feel that we spent that long with them at times, are just irritating. Laura is Frances, in Frances Ha, but Frances (Greta Gerwig) has real emotional reasons why she cannot do what she actually can do, and Laura (Holliday Grainger) has over-indulgent people who listen to her talk about it instead.


[...]



End-notes :

 * Very often, 'film-festival films', once so viewed, stay viewed in that way (and with suspicion), and so are not thought of as commercial. Many films of this quality or better do not even get a screening at a significant film festival - a film's being distributed is therefore not, in itself, a measure of its worth.

 ** The book that, first delivered in two lectures at Cambridge (at Girton and Newnham Colleges), puts a case for why a woman needs space, let alone one who would write, who has to have one in which to do it : A Room of One's Own could almost have been the tag-line for the film ?




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 9 October 2017

On the Road - but with Wolf Alice (not Sal Paradise*)

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













[...]







End-notes :

 * The reference is to the narrator, in the film adaptation of Kerouac's novel, On the Road (2012)...


Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday, 29 April 2014

He’s bad at taking off clothes ; she wants it fast and for her to be passive

This is a review of Exhibition (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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30 April (updated 4 May)

* Contains some spoilers - major ones are marked in advance *

This is a review of Exhibition (2013)

Exhibition (2013) is centred on Liam Gillick and Viv Albertine, and, respectively, they are called H and D (for some reason). Only once, when she calls out to him from the other side of a locked door, do we seem to hear her say ‘Aitch’, and when she is later addressed by others, as she passes by the wine merchants or bar outside which they are standing, one could swear that they call her Lynn…

No matter (even if their label is maybe intended to tell us as much as if one were M, the other S). Albertine has no real history of appearing on film – and it shows. That said, it may partly be an encouragement from director / writer Joanna Hogg that is responsible for the fact that she is rarely convincing except when we are concentrating on her physicality : it is fictionalizing again, but maybe it is Hogg’s attempt to make raw and real a life together that, in this place*, has gone on for eighteen years.

We first see Albertine lying on a shelf (the pane frosted by her breath, maybe pretending to be a cat), then, at the end, around the corner of the room, and under the table, as a child might hide behind what overhangs. In between, there is acting, there is the certain kind of incoherence that comes with a ultra-realistic depiction and / or with shooting improvised scenes, and there is being a plausible artist : taking these in reverse order, it is fair enough that, as we are observing D, we should observe her doing a sketch of herself in the mirror, where the mirror becomes more and more central to the frame, and we never see the sketch. Yet, just as On the Road (2012) largely failed to establish Sal (Sam Riley) as a writer just by his saying that he was one, there has to be some basis for believing that D could have some sort of creativity to be an artist (whereas it is not almost until the end that we learn what sort of artist, and can feed that back into what has been shown).

As to improvisation, the scene, for example, where she does not want H to go out conveys only through elements of the dialogue why she is saying in a repeated, but largely ineffectual way, that it is too late** for him to go. One may be intended to infer more about her passivity from that (a passivity that has her, humorously fake a faint as a way of getting away from visiting friends – H and she almost seem to have no other friends, and she seems, from what he says, to have no other way of getting out of stifling situations – and which is the stuff of late nineteenth-century Russian literature, rather than twenty-first century Knightsbridge and Chelsea), but that is rather working, once the closing titles have rolled, to do the film’s job for it, when one could just as easily put it down to someone’s lack of experience (or ability).

In any case, the broadest difference between D and H, other than that she is all stripes (with a change of them, albeit limited) to his wearing black, is essentially that they have arrived in a none-too-unfamiliar rut of not being able to initiate sexual contact, and which they nevertheless try to do by buzzing each other on the intercom feature of the phone : at one point, she is seeking reassurance of his love, another time he is, unasked, offering it, but they seem to be out of sequence with each other.

Similar enough that they can have lived so long in this place (and both almost always wearing black sandals, even to go to their friends’ place), in this way, but at what cost ? Made similar to fit in, but it is his true nature to be excessively angry that someone has parked in his ‘private’ space, to the extent that he becomes Basil Fawlty and says that he should erect railings with a big sign on them saying ‘FUCK OFF’ – hers, whilst all this is happening, is to stay, but not really meaningfully interpose another viewpoint, and leave us with the impression of not much. (After all, if someone could cope with taking leave of friends early, he or she would not resort to pretending to have been unconscious.)

The crux of it all is where they live. Forgetting the little yellow vehicle, where he goes to, why, and for how long, and just concentrating on H’s words to D to ‘Enjoy it whilst you still can’, one interpretation might be that he has gone off for good to do whatever it is that he previously said that they should sell the house to do now that they can. He scarcely seems to have been anywhere more than overnight, and her almost petrified patrol around the place, making sure that all is locked, maybe leave us in doubt whether she is more afraid of him coming back in some state late at night than any other intruder : maybe she is like this at all such times, but it seems as though she does not know this experience (over-acting ?).



It is the closely observed feeling herself through the slot in the stool, inverting it, finding a way to rub her crotch on it that Albertine’s contribution has life – in its own way, and given that Nymphomaniac (2013) was meant to tease with its sterile sex (except really when Stacy Martin meets Jamie Bell), Exhibition is far more erotic. We may have to invent an explanation for how elements of D’s sexual apparatus are handily by the bed (unless H knows, and watches, if awake), and what they evoke if not pornographic imagery where the women, whatever else they wear, always wear heels, but there is no doubting the power of that scene.

The ultimate interpretation is that, for all that D tells a friend on a video-link that the couple who lived in the property before (the designers ?) lived there till they were eighty, she is not going to do anything to oppose H directing them to a sale (and just saying that she could not be there – obviously, the estate agents can – when people are talking about making changes is a last-ditch piece of passive resistance).

We will never know what the sale is for, just that the only things that she preserves are sex on her terms (even if it means physically offering herself to him when he desires it, but with the turn-off of not being mentally or spiritually present), and likewise talking to him about her work. The scene, real or dreamt, at The National Gallery nicely imitates Woody Allen, in such films as Stardust Memories (1980), with H trying to interview her on a stage, but she will only allow him to be a companion, my companion. At the same time, she watches them both from the audience, where the film, all too rarely, breaks out of the mould of depicting trivial action and inert interaction, showing them together in symbolic form.


* Interpretative spoiler *

As to an under-text, perhaps D has never wanted children (and has just been unable to conceive anyway), and sees herself in relation to fetishism, embodying a role in performance, and being observed. H certainly alludes to the fact that they have no children, not without some emphasis.

Perhaps pushing the sale through, as Lopakhin ‘saves’ the cherry orchard by having it cut down, is a bittersweet way of revenging himself on whichever it is of her involuntary childlessness, or choosing her career in art***. Certainly, an element of seeing the outside from the inside, complete with a manufactured soundscape that has some troubling elements (alongside bells that suggest a Sunday morning), stresses the presence of the property, and inevitably, as with the Chekhov, makes one wonder what life will / can be like without it - even if D has been offered an exhibition (about which H both tries to reassure and say that he knows best)...


End-notes

* It may not exist, but just be an amalgam of an exterior view (also seemingly seen from inside out), various interiors, and other looks out of windows. It suffices that it exists for and to us.

** * Contains spoilers * Perhaps not a recollection of a psychotic episode, but certainly reliving the fear of violence and / or the involvement of the emergency services.

Probably not unrelated to H's angry conversation with the man who has left his car in H's parking space - and how D relates to it. In her own difficult moments, she extricates herself by fainting, the exact opposite of his head-on attack. Keeping / selling the house is their time of testing ?

*** Their friends, horrified as they contemplate the house for themselves, say that they are artists, and it is a house for artists, but it is largely unclear what H’s art could even be.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 7 December 2013

Really shot in Wyoming !

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

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...




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday, 19 December 2012

Psychopaths - or just killers ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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21 December

* Contains spoilers *

It might be a cover-all - or a cop-out - to have psychopaths who are just crooks or who have some need to kill, or to have them interchangeably mixed up with 'the mental and deranged', yoking in anyone, indeed, who might have been in hospital, but I think that, as a product, Seven Psychopaths (2012), had no starting point for knowing what one is.

The States muddles up anyway the notion of psychosis and psychopathy, but there was nothing to suggest that this confusion was really responsible. Not that the film fared any better, in its own terms, as my various Tweets have suggested...


And now, at the risk of repeating the above, the review of Seven Sycophants :


There are many films, few as famous as 8½ (or even La Dolce Vita), where the film is about making a film (or the like), from Shakespeare-dervied and Cole-Porter-instilled Kiss Me, Kate (1958) to On the Road (2012) or recent Catalan film VOS (2009).

The makers of Seven Psychopaths must have believed – or wanted us to believe – that they were doing something new with the notion of a film that is either within, or which is, the film, but VOS is much more engaging and inventive, and Hit and Run (2012), for all its unevenness, had more laughs - or, rather, had laughs, rather than spaces for them, since I snorted just a dozen times through the course of the film, and six of them were purely in disbelief at the writers’ apparent estimation of my credulity.

The States has its own definition of what the word ‘psychotic’ means, denoting psychopathology (hence Hitchcock’s Psycho, whose Norman Bates kills woman for little reason other than that he can, and had a bad time with his mother), but this film used a very generalized notion of the latter concept, little more than the violent (and / or crazy) bloke in the local who famously ‘is a real psychopath’.

Perhaps for this reason of being confused (which can also be excused on the basis that it is a comedy), the poster had the tag-line ‘They give demented psychotics a bad name’, insulting though that would be to anyone in the UK with an experience of psychosis, and even though this film is funded by Film Four. Now I’m not saying that organized crime might not give opportunities for those who like killing or hurting people, or that it is really of any importance whether Marty (Colin Farrell) or Billy Bickle* (Sam Rockwell, who keeps trying to muscle in on the screenplay), understand what either a screenplay** or a psychopath is, because the clever conceit is meant to be that the film is writing itself or they are writing it as it goes, and so that doesn’t matter.

It then becomes conveniently irrelevant whether what Marty waves around in the desert is a draft of a script, whereas he was previously working on – and not getting very far on – an outline (and, in the only moment where he gives any evidence of writing or being a writer, had not got beyond writing ‘Ext.’ and another couple of defining characteristics of the opening of the scene).

Before that, a message being left for him asks for where what he is working on (as if he had never been required to pitch more of a concept than a numerical group of crazies to interest this unknown caller). Again as if, in a world where a writer writes his friends and himself in a film and they have no independent existence, anything can happen, not the realities of how, in the prominently displayed letters of ‘H O L L Y W O O D’ at the start, its studios work.

This might be for the rationale behind how, in successive shots, it is night and the Buick has just exploded, and then it is abruptly day and it is still on fire, i.e. that in some sort of meta-fictional world anything can happen, but that theme is played far more effectively in VOS, and without the sentimentality allowed here, but with distance : when Hans is with Myra, his dead wife, we have sad music and even a clarinet in its chalumeau register, and, later, plangent solo piano when we are asked to feel something for a dead or injured person.

Farrell’s part is to look shocked and, often enough, to drink to induce reactive amnesia, Rockwell’s to have a suppressed smile always playing rather irritatingly on his face (and be a very unlikely choice of friend), whereas Christopher Walken (as Hans***) is – almost literally – a wraith with a husky voice, with a twisted sort of humanity to match Marty’s.

Against all three, Woody Harrelson as Charlie Brooker is a scarcely mould-breaking combination of the seemingly ruthless and abusive leader, who, although his mouth is the vehicle for much maligning of races and creeds, is soppy about a dog. This is where the comparison with Hit and Run comes in, because Bradley Cooper’s Alex is a far more sinister gang-leader than Charlie, because, even if Charlie shoots Hans’ wife, he is allowed to drop his front far too soon, as if the writing is playing it for (non-existent) humour.

Irrespective of how many psychopaths the film does actually deliver, Billy appears to invoke and encourage danger and killing just for its own sake, or, supposedly, to help the plot along for his friend Marty. Claiming, as Marty does twice, that he is just Billy’s friend may seem an implausible passport to safety, but Farrell’s character has very little to offer, except non-violence and to be an anchor, except in the shade of Billy and to be known as his friend, who is the real originator and creative force, his passing marked by plangent piano…



End-notes

* Yes, you read that surname aright !

** That said, they are meant to be in film, that alleged industry, so they should, of course, know.

*** To me, not a very Polish name, even if meant to naturalize ‘Jan’.


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Thursday, 11 October 2012

Kraken crake

This is a Festival response to On the Road (2012)

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

12 October
This is a Festival response to On the Road (2012)

 * Contains spoilers *

 Two admissions, which ruin my credibility forever:

 (1) I declined the opportunity to see The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) because I had no wish to follow the journeys of an early Che - he could have been an early Woody Allen and it would have made no difference to the fact that, if I want a travel documentary (in the case of somewhere where I am not going to go), I will watch Michael Palin's antics, and I see the concept of a film rather differently. (As I did not see the film, obviously I do not know for sure what I missed. Accepted.)

 (2) I have never read On the Road (let alone any of Kerouac's other writings), though, when I decided to get around reviewing the film, which a friend and I saw, largely through his desire to do so, at Cambridge Film Festival, I looked out my copy of it. Therefore, anything that I find to quote from it will be just that - a phrase or passage that I find when flicking through it.

 I also have some insights about Jack K. from my friend, who has read it and more, namely the close identity between the narrators of these works and JK himself.
As the credits for On the Road (2012) tell you, scenery through which we are supposed to be following various travellers on various journeys is nowhere near where it was shot, but in another part of the States (or of Canada). Yes, unconvincingly London passes for Paris in the dire Bel Ami (2012) (quite apart from what we see in The Third Man (1949) or Amadeus (1984)), but that almost makes sense - we can have a sense of the monumentality or grandeur of parts of Paris, even if we are not seeing them.

 Certainly, they must have had reason, in this film, not to show the territories surrounding, say, Louisiana (to and from which we journey), but isn't the entreprise a bit hollow if whatever they do show has nothing to do with those places? I start with this point because, if one cannot say Great panoramas - I must go and see them myself some day, we are 'forced back' on the characters, and I honestly do not think that their desires and changes of heart run to a whole two hours 17 minutes worth of interest, but maybe 90 (with less need to show shots that were really somewhere quite different - I do not think that the list bore any relation to what we thought that we were shown).

 OK, my thesis is this - it's a nice safe bet to film some version of a well-known, successful book, because people have been satisfied enough with how it is put together working to have read it approvingly. Nothing new there, but, if one's choice lands on something that, to be done justice to, has to sprawl so much and maybe be pretty lacking in any story, is that the ideal project, unless one has a big shake-up with the text and portrays it radically differently? Yes, that might upset an author's estate, or even fans at grass roots, but would it be a better film, maybe even be a film?

 Given the acknowledged limitations, but in the light of talking to my friend and others as to whether the way that the text lies lends itself to taking it point for point as the basis for a film, what I have to ask (as I did) is what credibility Sal Paradise has, when we meet him, as a writer, or even simply what there is about him that would make someone, on pretty slight acquaintance, ask him to travel from New York to Denver to see him.

 Now we know, after the event, that On the Road the book resulted from this and all the other travels, and, when Sam Riley (as Sal) starts hitching, we see him scribbling is his small but somehow infinite note-book (as if the guys on the back of the truck with him would not have been more than a little interested and been likely to have parted their company).

 It may be little more than sexual when he is cotton picking, but there is even a sense that this Sal abandons his exteriority to his own experiences and actually feels them : frustrated though I was that I was being asked to believe in him as a writer when there had not even been so much as something being read aloud with his New York chums, I think that, by now, there might have been voiceover, maybe, of some of his writerly snippets (unless that only occurs later, when he actually starts writing, and he is reliving these moments).

 Set against now, where, unless I wanted to be scenic about it, I would take a flight to make this first journey of Sal's, I would still be less than impressed with Dean Moriarity to have had impressed on me that I needed to make a trip whose basis and necessity turn out, in the ever-casual way of intoxication beyond the means of alcohol passing for the common currency of life, to have dissolved, so that, no sooner there and with no thought of where Sal might stay, Dean has to go to Los Angeles (or some such).

 Just the first of a series of long, long journeys that seem to have the same capacity for their purpose to disappear more quickly than the destination can be reached. For me, none of it amounts to more than a few very blunt character traits and repressed feelings, which is where I arrive at a run-time around 90 minutes, because they do not merit more :

 Sal is flattered by Dean's interest in him, and Dean, for his part, talks up this man who, if he did not resemble (a little) Scottish saxophonist Tommy Smith (whose talent I know and value), actually seems to possess no qualities to justify it. It is all sublimated through Dean arranging girls (including his own partner, at a key point) for Sal to sleep with, and then noisily doing so himself.

 That holds true until (for money, and as he says to Sal he has done before) Dean has sex with the man who has been sedately driving them, and Sal witnesses it : not much guessing where his disgust with Dean and walking out on him at breakfast comes from. With a few twists and turns of sub-plots, and of Dean's various and far-flung women, that is pretty much the emotional core of all these lengthy wanderings, except that they always serve as a distraction from him ever knowing what on earth he wants, and all the signs, from how he chatted up Sal on first meeting, are that his own deeper desires from their 'relationship' (I only call it that because they virtually travel across the continent to say hello for ten minutes) are the same.

 However, the film decides to swallow its own tail by having Sal write the book that we are viewing, with a roll of paper that he makes and feeds into the typewriter. Apparently such a roll does exist amongst JK's effects, though its status as being how he wrote the book might be suspect, but we get back to the bogus demonstration of creativity, as if there has to be this infinite roll of paper to receive the limitless notes that we saw scribbled before, and the white-hot power of the process is such that nothing, not even puttting in a new sheet of paper and keeping the finished ones in order, must be allowed to interrupt it. Believe that idea of writing if you like!

 Clearly, things were taken from this film, but - from my position of majestic ignorance - I believe that a better film could have been made by taking the book as raw material, and not setting out depiction as if sacrosanct. And, blow me, I've still not opened the wretched text!
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