Starting with @PeterBradshaw1's @guardian 'review', some Tweets at and after Sheffield Doc / Fest about The Hard Stop (2016)

Some Tweets at and after Sheffield Doc / Fest about The Hard Stop (2016)

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

20 July

Starting with @PeterBradshaw1's @guardian 'review', some Tweets at and after Sheffield Doc / Fest about The Hard Stop (2016)

Sir @PeterBradshaw1 🌟🌟🌟🌟 review of #TheHardStop is a worthwhile read as it considers other sides to the storyhttps://t.co/Mrs0JC90XS

— The Hard Stop (@TheHardStop) July 14, 2016

As ever, @PeterBradshaw1 opinions - but not derived from the film, e.g. 'Henville was not, having evidently stayed out of the violence' ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 15, 2016

@Narcomania @PeterBradshaw1 we certainly went the direction of rehumanising through childhood friends Marcus and Kurtis

— The Hard Stop (@TheHardStop) July 15, 2016

The prosecution case (even though contested) on which Marcus Knox-Hooke was convicted appears misunderstood by @PeterBradshaw1 ? ->

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 15, 2016

-> There is scant delineation between what Rose suggests in his reporting and appearing to state facts about Mark Duggan ('a smalltimer').

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 15, 2016

Unclear, from 'the recovered gun belonged to a very serious criminal', what @PeterBradshaw1 says Rose has claimed ? https://t.co/hmdwogDW39

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 15, 2016

Next, engagement with the Every Film in 2016 review from Neil White (@everyfilmneil ~ http://everyfilmblog.blogspot.co.uk) :

-> Read @everyfilmneil's review (he says 7/10), and press for MPs to watch this film ? :https://t.co/ST6bRoTFFY https://t.co/HE0oyJ8eUW

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 20, 2016

More to come...


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

Splashes of beauty

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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3 November

Just realized : One of my favourite recent films, #LaGrandeBellezza (The Great Beauty) (2013) to-morrow at @CamPicturehouse at 1.00...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 2, 2015

Revisiting this film, and finding little that Peter Bradshaw (in the handed-out text of his review) says to illuminate it (although, at least, he just waffles, without wasting time telling the story), one is struck by the amount of death, as well as of life, in it (and by the unnecessary literalness with which it may have been viewed before) : death breaks through and, falsifying Jep Gambardella’s (Toni Servillo’s) standard, cynical take on funerals, forces him to feel something, and shows him doing so to Ramona (Sabrina Ferilli). Dream also breaks in*, and whereas it may have seemed discrete during previous viewings, there is probably more of a blurred, intermediate quality to much of what is shown, which may extend to whether flamingos really do flock and rest on Gambardella’s balcony, and a nun, said to be 104 years old and about to be sanctified, really does fall asleep on his floor ?

Likewise this conversation between her and Gambardella :

Sa perché mangio sempre radici ?

No. Perché ?

Perché le radici sono importanti.


[Does he know why she always eats roots (40 grammes per day, we are told, when she is in Mali) – because roots are important.]


In narration, Gambardella tells us that he has already, just after his sixty-fifth birthday, realized that he is no longer going to spend time on what he does not need to do – so, he disappears before Orietta can show him her photographs of herself, in which he had perhaps felt himself drawn to feign interest. What he seems to show genuine interest in, and to be moved by, is a photographic installation in an architectural space – instinctively, we may sense that what we see of the installation may have been virtually imposed on the space, but, as we track across the images, we can feel Gambardella’s connection with this theme (even if it might link with Orietta’s self-obsessed Facebook-oriented one ?), and its relation to the past.

Seeing a film of this quality again is itself an unfolding against one’s uncertain recollections of what comes next (just as Gambardella falters, trying to recall a precious memory), and we have our own Where does that scene fit in with… ? and When does Santa Maria appear… ?, partly tempered by what one remembers the central message to have been, and whether it seems different this time : does it all fit in, or is it only re-emerging in response to one’s memory ? Perhaps losing momentum only momentarily with the child-artist (which, this time around, is maybe one parody too far ?), and what had previously seemed magical in Stefano’s possessing, as a trustworthy person, keys to view Rome’s treasures by night, but which now seems part of Gambardella’s gift to the younger woman, to engage with her, and to show her his life.

Rome has really disappointed me ~ Romano

Whether one wants to see the ending of the film as looping on the beginning, and having (as Bradshaw suggests) teller converge on tale (as if Gambardella finally follows up his novel[ette] The Human Apparatus), seems immaterial, because we have seen hard-bitten Gambardella come to a realization about himself. We have been with him when he tracked down a man, Ramona's father, who had been kind to him, and seen him remember his formative moments and what matters (so that the past enters the present in a bar, and Romano, who says that Gambardella is the only person from whom he sees the need to take his leave on his departure, finds him just before a giraffe is made to vanish), and the coda, silent of speech, remains as strong and significant as before, coasting up to and past Castel Sant’Angelo.

Alongside and within all of this, the principal, gracious thematic material by Lele Marchitelli (which first colours the night-time tour of the palaces), and the use of Arvo Pärt’s My Heart’s in the Highlands and John Tavener’s The Lamb. These pieces of music are an immediate and necessary part of the conception of the whole : in those two settings (of Burns and Blake, respectively) – as well as opening the film a capella with David Lang's ‘I Lie’ (whose work we also hear in Sorrentino's Youth (2015)) – the voices cut through with rawness and intensity, and flood our hearts and souls with feeling.


End-notes

The most exquisite, dream-like image, partly because Gambardella's writerly life-style has him awake in the night, is an uncredited cameo-role for Fanny Ardant : he recognizes her personage as she passes, speaks her name, and she fleetingly acknowledges him, before passing on and away.

A serenity and poise at quite the other end of the scale from the vulgarity of the vibrant birthday-party, after which Gambardella asks not to be woken till 3.00 p.m., and from the Martini sign, which usurps both the sun's place, by rising over the remains of the party (and his editor's slumped form, who seems to have been overlooked, since she tries to alert people that she is there), and that of the moon, by looming over the head of the boulevard that he descends...


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

Batsqueak

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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12 October

Right now, I would edit a Wikipedia® page to say this:

Contrary to popular reckoning, a batsqueak is not a term for a noise emitted by one of our webbed, flying foes, but a sheer yoking together of words heard often enough together in the pretence that it is a noun.

Essentially, such things used to be done, at wearisome length (Finnegans Wake !), by Jimmy Joyce, but even he gave up on it, and the whole practice has only been resurrected by the secret Brethren of Bradshawites, who invoke it in the hope that you'll be so dazed that you do not twig that they have not, behind all this mucking around, got anything of any sense to contribute.

This entry is a stub - you can help make it a complete Bradshaw's by donating $10

Pipsqueak, anyone?


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KST / Bradshaw

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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This was meant to be a draft, for me to use to comment on what the great Messrs Bradshaw and French have 'made of' this film, but it seems to have gone live - whatever they have to say...


Philip French:

In Your Hands (aka Contre toi) is a subtle psychological thriller, the second full-length feature by the French writer-director Lola Doillon, but the first to be shown here. A claustrophobic virtual two-hander, it stars Kristin Scott Thomas as confident, childless divorcee Anna Cooper, a surgeon working in the obstetrics and gynaecology department of a prison hospital, and Pio Marmaï as Yann, a wild young man.In Your HandsProduction year: 2012Country: FranceCert (UK): 15Runtime: 81 minsDirectors: Lola DoillonCast: Jean-Philippe Ecoffey, Kristin Scott Thomas, Pio MarmaiMore on this filmAt the beginning Anna appears distraught but carefully controlled, running from a shabby suburban house to her smart Parisian apartment. The movie doesn't leave us long to wonder about her conduct. She goes to the police to report her abduction, and in a tensely developed flashback we learn that she has been held in a cellar by Yann, the vengeful husband of a patient who died during a Caesarean operation carried out by Anna. In this first part there's an emotional ebb and flow, the threat of violence and some physical conflict, as the two discuss the case and its emotional ramifications.In the second part, a delayed instance of the Stockholm syndrome, some mixture of guilt and sympathy seems to draw Anna to seek out Yann. A passionate affair ensues that is in its way as dangerous as the period of incarceration, possibly more so. The end is abrupt and not entirely satisfactory, but it's a convincingly performed and constantly intriguing film


Kristin Scott Thomas gives us another movie in a distinctive genre that she has made her own: modern day, no makeup, speaking French, transgressive sex. It's an intense and claustrophobic two-hander, well acted – especially by her – but frankly a bit of a shaggy-dog story with a faintly unsatisfactory ending. Scott Thomas plays Anna Cooper, a single professional woman living on her own in Paris and a bit of a workaholic. The name signals that, though a fluent and idiomatic French speaker, she is British but otherwise there is no back story. At the beginning of a rare holiday, Anna comes into traumatic contact with an intense figure: Yann, played by Pio Marmaï, and their encounter becomes a terrifying ordeal. The film begins intriguingly and promises much, with an interesting flashback structure which initially conceals as much as it reveals. But in its third act, the movie runs out of ideas and has no more to tell us. Set alongside Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long (2008) and Catherine Corsini's Leaving (2009), In Your Hands showcases of one of this country's most remarkable screen performers, a vividly intelligent presence – but it does not quite work. PB


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A deserved winner at Cannes (2)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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13 April

Thanks to the offices of Rotten Tomatoes, it is heartening to have found a worthwhile review of this film from Peter Bradshaw.

But he really doesn't look that young, any more than some of the jazzers or classical musicians, who show you how they looked ten years or more ago...


On the poster for the film, this comment* - from the London Film Festival - seemed pertinent:

Hugely impressive... confirms Ceylan's status as a master of cinema...Chekhovian in its piercing insights


End-notes

* In my scrawl, it looks like that of Geoff Archer** - of only the former name was I certain, and it should have been Geoff Andrew!

** Sure some Freudian thing going on!


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The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 3)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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26 January

A contact in the film world and I are agreed about Peter Bradshaw (we both experienced the so-called Tartan Error, I mean Terror, event at last year's Festival - http://www.cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk/films/2011/the-tartan-terror-hamish-mcalpine-in-conversation/ - and both walked out): Bradshaw has, perhaps not single handedly, talked up The Artist into a frenzy of screenings to cope with the demand.

Rule of thumb, then:

Bradshaw commends, run the other way! - fast: since you can run, but you can't hide, etc.


Not that it was at all excessive to say that he couldn't wait until he could see it again, but it adds a certain punch to the poster - and, in whomever's eyes, though it's only January (unless the person or organ meant December), it's 'film of the year'. A huge debate could ensue about whether critics 'talk things up', and, if so, why, but it won't...

I may already have said so, but - and admittedly out of context, as pure music, as which (for me) it failed (the Birdy album, which I revisited last night, did not) - I heard a number from The Artist, played on Radio 3 last week, and was not just a little (probably, 'take it or leave it' territory), but deeply unimpressed: I should check, as I didn't register at the details, who wrote the score**.


The inverse of the law (Bradshaw despises, sell your home to get a ticket) doesn't follow, but Physics tells us that it is unlikely to, quite apart from Logic and its famous 'excluded middle'***.


For those who can bear more, there is now more at Part 4 (and the promise that Part 5 will be the end of it!)...


End-notes

* I have since revisited the Growing Up album, and other numbers from when Gabriel's were PG1 to PG4 (although PG1, despite the infectious Solsbury Hill, is not one that I want to have as a CD), via the DVD of the Growing Up tour, and will have more to say...

** Courtesy of that noble (if not infallible) resource IMDb, I can report that it was one Ludovic Bourse (more at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0099753/), whose credentials, somehow, don't - on the basis of past film-work - compellingly strike me****.

*** Kelly Brook®, allegedly, has things to share about how to exclude that pesky middle, but, if so, she can start her own blog! (Having said that, if she were to drop me a line about Bird's use of the diminished seventh (or, even the Dorian mode), I'd make time to read it.)

**** Some, probably redundantly, would have finished that phrase with 'as impressive'...


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Peter Bradshaw dismounts from War Horse

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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23 January

Why quite at such length (six full paragraphs on 12 January), as some of Bradshaw's reviewing is distinctly on the 170-word side (OK, I am talking about the brevity with which, in comparison, he wrote - allegedly - dismissively about Sarah's Key!), for something that he really didn't like and gave two stars to, I do not know...

However, Bradshaw has done a decent job of demolishing Hobby Horse, I mean War Horse (whilst acknowledging what was good about The National Theatre production):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jan/12/war-horse-spielberg-film-review


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Experiences of Festival events

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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24 September

I shall (try to) be kind first, before being cruel – but, sadly, the latter is deserved.

Neil Brand’s voyage through and sample of the film music of Bernard Herrmann (Knowing the Score) was, despite the numerous technical hitches (most of which, as Neil suggested, can be blamed on the stubborn spirit of Bernie that we came to glimpse that afternoon): the on-screen presentation and the examples chosen were clear, Neil identifying the various instruments and effects as the clips ran (audio only for Psycho, with Neil talking us through the instrumentation for strings on screen) was instructive, and, above all, the enthusiasm for and energy involved in explaining the subject were patent.

Contrast that with an event called The Tartan Terror, and one is at the other end of the spectrum. When I came to write about this ‘evening’, which my friend Punyaketu and I decided to spend somewhere else (even in the face of some well-chosen segments from films distributed by Tartan: we saw part of Irreversible, Old Boy, and Man Bites Dog), I was reminded of James Naughtie in King’s chapel, supposedly interviewing another James, composer James MacMillan – as Naughtie made one well aware, he knew his interlocutor (or, more accurately, intended interlocutor) from other encounters, but, one hopes for MacMillan’s sake, not ones where Naughtie coasted, and dilated endlessly before asking questions that: were not worthy of the ticket-price that some had paid, did not leave them much space for the time that they, too, were supposed to have to ask questions, and seemed to leave the other James cold, too, though he did the best to enliven with his answers a session that was becoming dead on its feet.

Now, I wouldn’t suggest that prior consumption of alcohol played any part on either occasion, but Peter Bradshaw fell into exactly the same trap, snaring himself on the belief that, simply because something (not always very fluently – lots of ‘um’s and ‘uh’s, especially at the beginning) was coming out of his mouth, it needed to be said and said until he could think of nothing else to say.

Frankly, it does not matter whether this was billed as Hamish McAlpine (funnily, like MacMillan, another Scot, though I think that he described himself as a pretend one, after an introduction that was in danger of swallowing the whole night) in conversation or being interviewed, it was neither. It was self-indulgent and not interesting (or simply another case of the questioner forgetting why he is (meant to be) there), and, when McAlpine did (get allowed to) start speaking (after lengthy digressions or irrelevant anecdotes about being with directors at Cannes), Bradshaw was speaking affirmations (or even contradictions) into his microphone, rather than just letting the man who was meant to be his guest – and, after all, the focus of the event – talk in peace.

I gave it 1 out of 5, and had a much better conversation of my own somewhere else instead! (And I hope that poor McAlpine isn't left terrified to be invited to do anything else similar, where he might be given the opportunity to saw something...)