Showing posts with label Penélope Cruz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Penélope Cruz. Show all posts

Tuesday, 6 September 2022

In a non-spoilery way, what can one say about the 'non-stop surprises' of Competencia oficial (Official Competition) (2021) ?

What can one say about the 'non-stop surprises' of Competencia oficial (Official Competition) (2021) ?

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

6 September


In a non-spoilery way, what can one say about the 'non-stop surprises' of
Competencia oficial (Official Competition) (2021) ?

Viewed at The Light Cinema, Cambridge










Something more spoilery and / or less Tweety may follow here...










Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday, 9 April 2019

There are homecomings, and there are homecomings...

Some Tweets in response to Todos lo saben (Everybody Knows) (2018)

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

8 April
Some Tweets in response to Todos lo saben (Everybody Knows) (2018), as seen at Saffron Screen, Saffron Walden, on Monday 8 April 2019 at 8.00 p.m.









Epilogue :




Or, to give the closing words to @everyfilmneil, from the final sentences of his review (at www.everyfilm.co.uk) :

 Farhadi has built a reputation through movies such as A Separation, The Salesman and my favourite of his films, The Past. Everybody Knows keeps up his tradition of keenly observed, tense drama. It helps that his most established cast to date are on great form.




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday, 30 July 2013

A good long look at Woody ?

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

30 July

A documentary doesn’t that takes as its subject a person’s career does not have to mention every date, every detail. However, if he or she has been pictured with the first person whom he or she married, there might be merit in mentioning, by way of commentary, the fact of being divorced at the time of talking about the next marriage / relationship, e.g. X had divorced his / her first wife / husband m years earlier. (Or it could be mentioned at the time of introducing the failed marriage, e.g. This youthful marriage only lasted m years before ending in divorce.)

Whereas a feature film might give us information and expect us to hold it, or to be provisional about whether it is true, so, of course, can a documentary, if it wants to include some references to a person (or thing) for us to ponder before it is explained who (or what) it is. Otherwise, it is just clumsiness and /or bad editing if we have not been disabused that the marriage last mentioned is no longer continuing.

In this film, the longer version of the documentary about Woody Allen that was released at the cinema last year, it does not matter that we see Louise Lasser, in clips from Bananas (1971), before knowing that Allen had been married to her, too, and that they had made the film after their divorce, but no one had bothered to tell us, in the way suggested, that Allen's first marriage had ended. (On a similar theme, Part 2 touches upon the fact that Allen and Mia Farrow had adopted children, but lived separately, although so close that they could virtually wave to each other from their homes, but without specifying that they were not, and had not been, married.)

Anyway, Part 1 of does not cover a whole lot of new ground, but has more facts about Allen's family, dwells for somewhat longer on how Rollins and Joffe made Allen a household name and on his t.v. performances, and, after telling the story of What's New, Pussycat ?, has comments from Allen, but often enough others (such as Mariel Hemingway, Tracy in Manhattan (1979)), on the films up to and including Stardust Memories (1980).


In reviewing the single-film cinema version, I pointed out that what Father Robert Lauder observed, with reference to clips (all of which therefore took up some time), as an insight had actually been stated by Allen himself about his work in the useful volume Woody Allen on Woody Allen : Fr Robert is still here (for some reason*), but not that sequence. Part 1 had taken us to 1980 in some 116 minutes (looking at more or less every film), so by no means halfway through Allen’s film career, but Part 2 did not proceed in the same way, which, when it had done so in the cinema, seemed like a desperate and doomed attempt to continue a film-by-film survey.

Instead, it made much of the peculiarities of Allen’s way of casting, and of scripts being supplied to actors by courier for them to read whilst the courier waited to take them back. Tantalizing quotations from Allen’s personal notes to a number of actors were made, with the text (whether or not typed) whisked across the screen (unless, one imagines, one paused them), and letters or notes laid over each other. Whether Allen minded this, one did not know, but doubted, as he took the view that auditions were awful and awkward, and assumed that everyone else would feel the same.

I cannot say for sure whether much more was said by Allen about the Mia Farrow separation and court-case, but he was no longer heard to say (unless I am thinking of the mention in Allen on Allen in the chapter on Bullets over Broadway (1994)) that he would have been happy for Farrow to play the part with which, instead, Dianne Wiest initially struggled (though she was to win an Oscar), and that everyone else thought him crazy to consider casting Farrow, when he says that he just saw it as a role that she could play.


Josh Brolin was allowed to stand as a dissenting voice about Allen’s direction being good, but even offset by Brolin’s co-star in You will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), Naomi Watts, saying that she had decided that Allen was the best director with whom she had worked. As to the question of coming to film in London and elsewhere in Europe, that was partly glossed over, except to say how difficult it is to film in New York and that Allen had nowhere left that he had not shot, and we were told that the appeal of Midnight in Paris (2011) was the life of the city at night, and (by Owen Wilson) that the title (which he said had been hit upon before the film was written) was the root of the film’s success.

From what I have heard and read, it had become less easy for Allen to film (or film as he wanted), but that was not the whole of it – also, as clips showed, Allen had filmed in places such as Paris and Venice in Everyone Says I Love You (1996) and, I believe, in Italy in Another Woman (1988). Culturally, his range of reference has always been very wide, and, as the film reminded us, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini were favourite directors, and that was surely no coincidence.


A surprising omission from talking about thirty-years of film-making in around 86 minutes (Part 2) was not to comment, in talking about Interiors (1978), how it marked the first film that Allen wrote and directed without appearing in it. In Allen on Allen, he said that he had never thought of casting himself in that film, but it appeared not to have occurred to director Bob Weide that, just as Allen did not fulfill his critics’ expectations with the type of film, they could not have failed to notice that he was not in it. No mention was also made of Allen’s appearances as an actor in others’ films, such as with Bette Midler in Scenes from a Mall (1991), which he had started doing in 1967 with the David Niven version of Casino Royale.

When Allen showed his lifelong typewriter and how he produces material, one could easily have missed his reference to having written all his articles in The New Yorker on it, not least if the viewer does not know the publication. In fact, Allen has published four collections of pieces, and also seven or eight of his screenplays have appeared (from Manhattan (1979) to Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and Interiors). Early plays were talked about, but really as a way of introducing Diane Keaton, when it should have been possible, in a few sentences near the end, to mention books like Without Feathers**, the number of plays and film appearances, and, indeed, how many films Allen had made (and acted in).

Attention was given to the box-office successes of Match Point (2005) and Midnight in Paris, but the film lacked an overview and a structure in Part 2. So we were shown clips from Shadows and Fog (1991), but not in the context of saying anything about the film, almost just to illustrate a character’s way of being by not being able to relate to a God. Likewise, the account (again with clips) of Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989) did not even make clear that chance conversation between Allen (as Cliff Stern) and Martin Landau (playing Judah Rosenthal) was at the heart of the film. Space was given to Allen saying that he found the darker story more interesting, and wished that he had made it without the character of Stern, but the crux of their interaction in the film was omitted from comment.

That said, although everyone (Allen included) was shown saying the word ‘compartmentalize[d]’ about Allen and how he worked throughout the Farrow break-up, and the film had the merit of people such as Letty Aronson (or even, in footage that Allen made, his mother) telling the story without any real narration, it needed it sparingly instead of just using quotation by clip. As it was, what got told about Allen, and what did not, in a two-parter that ran to some ninety minutes longer relied on what Diane Keaton, as a key figure, maybe said, or was asked, or was prompted to say, whereas my feeling is that Weide did not always show his own mastery of the material or the subject in what we saw, and I am not sure that that failure can be accounted for merely by the difficulty of turning, no doubt, hours of footage into a documentary of manageable length.

However, some clips, particularly towards the end, were very telling, and one had a lump in one’s throat in admiring all that Allen had done and excelled at. My wish is that, for those who knew his career and work less well, they could have known about the books, the other plays, the other films : as it was, fascinating though it was to be told that Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem had originated the dialogue in Spanish, translated it into English for the subtitles, and that Allen had had no idea at the time of shooting what they were talking about, giving a bit of time to the sheer body of Allen’s achievement would have said much more than showing that he trusted his actors.


End-notes

* I, for one, am far more interested in what Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe (his producers), Eric Lax (an Allen biographer), Richard Schickel (a film critic), Letty Aronson (Allen’s sister), and Dick Cavett (the well-known chat-show host and broadcaster) had to say, though I suspect that Cavett was given more opportunity in the cinema release.

** The omnibus The Complete Prose of Woody Allen, whose title was falsified by the appearance of Mere Anarchy, would scarcely have appeared without that being a significant part of what the public knows of his work.


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Sunday, 7 October 2012

A roaming view

This is a review of To Rome with Love (2012)

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

6 October

This is a review of To Rome with Love (2012)

Few people might expect so much dialogue in Italian with English sub-titles from To Rome with Love (2012), even after seeing Midnight in Paris (2011) - I hope that the fact will not put off members of a typical Allen audience who are maybe less used to following text and action together in this way, either by their telling friends to avoid the experience, or by having it as a mental reservation for his next release.

(I could speculate as to how the Italian dialogue was arrived at, because it does not quite seem as if Allen wrote the sub-titled speech and it was translated into Italian, but something more complicated than that, and maybe Woody's Italian is much better than mine and he worked on writing the Italian parts of the screenplay.)

A traffic-policeman, balletically directing the thronging vehicles high on a tub in their centre, first introduces us to two of the couples in the stories that we will see, and then thankfully, unlike the narrator in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), leaves us to our own devices. He, himself, is a device, because he purports to be able to see what he shows us from his vantage-point, and he is competing to be important to us.

Moreover, he is a symbol for Allen in exactly bringing the four stories before us beautifully in one timescale, all of them humorous, but all of them, despite the humour, nonetheless serious in some way. One story takes place in a single day, another in a week, and the remaining two in probably two or three weeks, but they begin and end together, and we are never worried that time is running more quickly for someone than for someone else, which is the film’s real triumph, that we can accept what we see so easily because the different lines are woven together, but are separate, happening in their own universe.

We first meet Hayley, an American woman spending the summer in Rome and falling in love with the first Roman whom she asks directions, Michaelangelo. (And, yes, in another strand, Allen gives us Leonardo.) Later, her parents (Judy Davis, being waspish as Phyllis, and Woody Allen being one of his typical creative roles as Jerry) meet his parents, and so begins the most bizarre story of Michaelangelo’s father Giancarlo giving an operatic performance under Allen's bizarre direction. This should not be spoilt, so do not imagine what will come better as a surprise - and even did fine the second time around. Allen calls his film to Rome, and he shows us himself going there, both as an actor (and hating the turbulence), and to bring us there with him.

Pure Italian is used to tell the tale of Milly and Antonio, newlyweds from Pordenone who came to Rome for a honeymoon and a new life with Antnonio’s relatives' company, if only he had something in common with his aunts and uncles! Enter a wish to impress them with a new haircut for Milly, Penélope Cruz as the fortuitous Anna, and chance encounters with the cast of a film, allowed by the running joke of directions to anywhere being endlessly complicated and losing Milly further and further, but somehow bringing her having lunch in the same restaurant with actor Luca Salta as Cruz hilariously stands in as Milly (but - fear not - all ends well!).

Cruz being who she is not, and performing the role so delightfully that she steals virtually every scene, is part of what the story, equally deliciously portrayed by Roberto Beningi, of Leopoldo Pisanello (another painter’s name) is about : suddenly, everyone wants to know all about Pisanello, a little as he had wished, and is whisked off to answer questions about what he had for breakfast. He does not get used to all the attention, all the desire to know his opinions, and comes to see it as a curse. When it has gone, this take on modern celebrity mixed with Warhol’s notorious pronouncement leaves Pisanello a little bereft by the change, and he has to satisfy himself that he once had a chauffeur and people knew who he was.

The last story has an on-screen American narrator in older architect John (Alec Baldwin), who is not ever visible to more than one person (more or less), trying most of the time to share his wisdom with the younger architect Tim, and thereby giving us a great deal of amusement in his ironic comments and predictions, and ultimately proving right when Tim has decided to follow his romantic feelings. Baldwin finds an on-screen equal in the acting presence of Ellen Page as the bewitching Monica, who draws Tim despite what he or John can say to the contrary.


The film is thoroughly charming, but my hesitation is whether two strands in Italian is taking things too far for some potential viewers. It ends with a competing claim, from a man who emerges from behind some shutters near The Spanish Steps, to see everything from where he is, and, a bit like Beckettt ('Oh the stories I could tell if I were easy', from Moran's part of Molloy), the offer to tell some of these stories some other time.


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