Recollections of [old] Adrian House - not, largely, 'the happy memories'

Recollections of [old] Adrian House - not, largely, 'the happy memories'

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

5 August

Recollections of [old] Adrian House - not, largely, 'the happy memories'

What even *is* The Main Hall at Fulbourn Hospital ?

Different times, different dances...#AreProwlersAGoodThing ?

Photo courtesy of our good buddy, @xa329. :) pic.twitter.com/PsOXyeMG6N

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 10, 2021

To be honest, the work of Roy Porter alone, in works such as these, long ago pointed the way to the need for full and proper revision of the worth of and need for sacred cows in this, as it were, field - people who never knew history excused themselves from 'learning from' it ? ! pic.twitter.com/vjUQBKJtVB

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 5, 2020

Friends, inside, helped me know who those 'good people' were :)

However, there was no point :

1) Sitting, except in the 'smoking' part of the patients' lounge, when I wanted their company

2) Being in the 'community' meeting*

3) Expecting anyone to walk around the grounds

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 5, 2020

** A perfect long bath-time, safely assured that the meeting would start on time, and with those who did not do likewise then in the meeting***

*** Winding patients up, but urging them to stay in the meeting, was the daily weekday sport - if they stormed out, they stormed out

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 5, 2020

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

Three Tweets about The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)

Three #UCFF Tweets about The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)

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

22 August

Three #UCFF Tweets about The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)*

Sasha Lane and Chloë Grace Moretz

Very gently, and in a different (but not unrelated) context, Cecilia Frugiuele's and her screenplay riffs on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Girl, Interrupted (1999) :

As with Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie's roles, 'an older hand' makes the situation more bearable ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 23, 2018

It must be for the individual viewer to decide whether Jennifer Ehle, as Dr Lydia Marsh, is as hateful and / or misguided as Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), but the group-therapy sessions at God's Promise are right on the nose :https://t.co/z44UzYN4jhhttps://t.co/kDeL6kc5HK

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 23, 2018

Desiree Akhavan, Chloë Grace Moretz, Sasha Lane, John Gallagher, and Jennifer Ehle

New trailer! https://t.co/hpzcNhsMLv

— Desiree Akhavan (@DesireeeAkhavan) August 27, 2018

End-notes :

* As viewed at The Little Theatre cinema [@LittleTheatreUK], Bath :

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

Not mastering The Master

This is a 'leave early' response (itself a response) to The Master (2012)

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

* Contains spoilers *

This is a 'leave early' response (itself a response) to The Master (2012)

Other than Melancholia (2011), I can only think of anything at the film festival in September that impressed me so negatively that it was 'a walker'.

To-day, to my unexpected surprise, it was The Master (2012), because I had no notion that I would not be there for the full trip. But I can concur with the person (whom I would credit, if I could recall who it was) who recently (courageously?) said that Brando in the trio of films about The Godfather (1972) gave a terrible performance, because who wants to hear someone mumbling.

Much in the same way, I was, by fifteen minutes in, totally antipathetic to hearing Joaquin Phoenix (Freddie Quell) talking out of the corner of his mouth*, and so rendering parts of the script unintelligible, not least with an already difficult accent. Not, in itself, maybe quite enough to ditch a film, but :

The depiction of servicemen with 'shattered nerves' was so one dimensional that this film, unaided, could put back the average audience's appreciation of the issues of mental ill-health by decades: the painful scene with the Rohrschach test, the travesty of the scene in the photography concession of a store, even the very early sexual exploits with the sand-woman on the beach as merry South Pacific (1958) / On the Town (1949) naval ratings career and cavort on the beach in their white caps

For me, far rather watch, again, Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), or even, flawed though it is for its concept of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), As Good as it Gets (1997). No, The Master may not have the job of convincingly depicting, as such, the reality of mental-health conditions, but it does not even come close to a plausible backdrop to its main action with this !

But I do wonder this: what could David Byrne have done with this, not just with Phoenix's role, but with directing the whole thing...


End-notes

* For the record, the left-hand corner.


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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
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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.


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