More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 February
* Contains spoilers *
Of course, it helps if those short write-ups are accurate.
These, taken from one of my local free newspapers (actually, the only one that now delivers), are not:
For anyone who has seen Another Earth (2011), it might be a struggle to justify the opening proposition 'Astrophysicist Rhoda kills most of a family* [...]', because, although, later on, the contents of her bedroom show an interest in outer space**, all that we know from the film is that, just before the accident, she has got a place at MIT***.
Here, nothing depends on the assertion, but, even if that's all that the place were concerned with, that doesn't make her an astrophysicist. What about the second half of the description, though?:
After discovering it's [sc. a mysterious giant planet] a duplicate of the earth, she tracks down victim John, befriending him without revealing their connection, while on a mission to discover the planet's mystery.
If I had read this first (rather than the spread from The London Standard), I think that I might feel misled by (a) the account of cause and effect, by (b) the language, and by (c) what is anterior to what...
Take another example from the same feature, in relation to My Week with Marilyn (2011), and at which the same criticisms can be levelled at the following excerpts:
* It's the height of Marilyn Monroe's fame - factually, was it? The sentence continues with:
* and her new husband Arthur Miller has to make a brief trip to Paris - well, I didn't register where he was going, or whether it was only briefly, but I am already unsure about this even if true, and of what relevance is it where Miller has to go...?
* I also didn't notice whether (as he was) the film says that Colin Clark was a graduate from Oxford, but he is said to:
* [s]pend [in Miller's absence] a week introducing the star to the joys of ordinary British life
Which is why one scene shows him taking her to his old school, Eton, where she is virtually mobbed, and leading into an unannounced visit to Windsor Castle, where he turns out able to gain access because his godfather is librarian there (or some such).
In both cases, and (apart from a picnic and some bathing - for one of them, inevitably, nude) we see them discovering nothing else (as far as I recall), hardly ordinary British life.
So the write-up has to be worth reading, even if one doesn't (as I don't) do more than glance at it, because otherwise it is a set-up for a film that is different (or even very different).
Not just because I like Woody Allen's work, some write-up - in Picturehouse Recommends, I think - meant that I expected to enjoy Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), so I was highly disappointed to find out what it was - and probably, because of that, have come down hard on it ever since.
To be concluded - promise!****
End-note
* A note of scrupulous accuracy amidst the rest?
** No, on second thoughts, that phrasing isn't felicitous, is it?! (Rhoda has the interest in outer space - the contents of her room do not, but they evidence hers.)
*** Did the person who wrote this even know what MIT is?
**** I mean that Part 5 will be the end of it, that is! - now available here...
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Showing posts with label Rhoda Williams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rhoda Williams. Show all posts
Monday, 6 February 2012
Saturday, 7 January 2012
There is another Earth – and, wow, up there with Solaris! (terminal posting)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 January
* Contains spoilers *
I must have been quite dim when I saw Another Earth. (We say 'He is bright', 'She's so dim', as if the intensity of a light is all that matters, when, of course - as any photographer or cinematographer will tell you - it has other qualities.) It's just that I was musing to myself why, when Rhoda was wandering around, largely at night, the other Earth that was being talked about on the night that she, by trying to look at it out of the window whilst driving, killed the wife and child of John Burroughs seems so improbably huge - if it appeared that big, it would either have to be enormous (and so not a mirror Earth) or very close, many times nearer than the moon (with which, maybe for technical reasons, it seemed to appear).
The less-dim may have realized the symbolic nature of its size, reflecting - almost in an expressionistic way - the depth of Rhoda's guilt. As I have said, the probable cannot be pressed too far with this film, or it would not have taken scientists four years (the term of Rhoda's prison sentence) to try communicating with the other planet. And, as John Burroughs asks, when he is arguing against not escaping from Plato's cave and knowing the truth, would its inhabitants be calling it Earth 2, as those on his were.
His initially unselfish response to learning that Rhoda has won the prize of a trip to Earth 2 is not what we expect, and, when he comes to appreciate that he doesn't want her to go, we have not expected her to tell him the truth about why she came there. (We know that she is a bright girl, who had a place to go to MIT before her foolish act (and which of us has not done foolish things in a car and got away with it?), and her quick-wittedness came out in thinking of the explanation that she had called to offer a free trial of a cleaning service, faced by the awfulness of telling John the truth - and then in claiming to come from Maid in Haven, which, of course, sounds almost like something else, the thing that maybe John comes to believe her to be.)
The final unselfish act - again, a complete surprise to me - was giving John her flight-ticket, and again I was being slow. (I've talked about Rhoda's quick-wittedness - what makes us turn extremes of a spectrum into pejorative terms?) I knew that she had given him a family photograph, and that she had told him that the latest theory was that Earth 2 became visible when its synchronicity with this planet broke, but I did not know then that the flight-ticket was also being given, or why John, with the views expressed before (which may have been an intellectual cover, of course, for his real feelings), would have wanted it.
I came to understand, as I meditated on the apparent hugeness of Earth 2, that, if the theory were right, then it might be that, on that otherwise hitherto identical planet, the accident hadn't happened, and John could see his family again (whatever the other John Burroughs might think).
Whether others 'got all of that' as the film played out, I don't know, but it has in no way spoilt it for me to have been reflecting on what I could not follow...
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 January
* Contains spoilers *
I must have been quite dim when I saw Another Earth. (We say 'He is bright', 'She's so dim', as if the intensity of a light is all that matters, when, of course - as any photographer or cinematographer will tell you - it has other qualities.) It's just that I was musing to myself why, when Rhoda was wandering around, largely at night, the other Earth that was being talked about on the night that she, by trying to look at it out of the window whilst driving, killed the wife and child of John Burroughs seems so improbably huge - if it appeared that big, it would either have to be enormous (and so not a mirror Earth) or very close, many times nearer than the moon (with which, maybe for technical reasons, it seemed to appear).
The less-dim may have realized the symbolic nature of its size, reflecting - almost in an expressionistic way - the depth of Rhoda's guilt. As I have said, the probable cannot be pressed too far with this film, or it would not have taken scientists four years (the term of Rhoda's prison sentence) to try communicating with the other planet. And, as John Burroughs asks, when he is arguing against not escaping from Plato's cave and knowing the truth, would its inhabitants be calling it Earth 2, as those on his were.
His initially unselfish response to learning that Rhoda has won the prize of a trip to Earth 2 is not what we expect, and, when he comes to appreciate that he doesn't want her to go, we have not expected her to tell him the truth about why she came there. (We know that she is a bright girl, who had a place to go to MIT before her foolish act (and which of us has not done foolish things in a car and got away with it?), and her quick-wittedness came out in thinking of the explanation that she had called to offer a free trial of a cleaning service, faced by the awfulness of telling John the truth - and then in claiming to come from Maid in Haven, which, of course, sounds almost like something else, the thing that maybe John comes to believe her to be.)
The final unselfish act - again, a complete surprise to me - was giving John her flight-ticket, and again I was being slow. (I've talked about Rhoda's quick-wittedness - what makes us turn extremes of a spectrum into pejorative terms?) I knew that she had given him a family photograph, and that she had told him that the latest theory was that Earth 2 became visible when its synchronicity with this planet broke, but I did not know then that the flight-ticket was also being given, or why John, with the views expressed before (which may have been an intellectual cover, of course, for his real feelings), would have wanted it.
I came to understand, as I meditated on the apparent hugeness of Earth 2, that, if the theory were right, then it might be that, on that otherwise hitherto identical planet, the accident hadn't happened, and John could see his family again (whatever the other John Burroughs might think).
Whether others 'got all of that' as the film played out, I don't know, but it has in no way spoilt it for me to have been reflecting on what I could not follow...
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Thursday, 22 December 2011
There is another Earth – and, wow, up there with Solaris! (part posting)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
23 December
Something doesn’t have to be plausible to be genuine, human, warm and engaging, and elements of Another Earth are not plausible*, but that didn’t matter.
If I had earlier followed up, as I intended, the newspaper’s and Sundance’s recommendation to see this film, I could have given it the ‘watch it again and see if it matters / works’ test. However, this was the last screening most locally to me, so no another Another Earth for me just yet…
One thing to have known from a second screening might have been whether there were clues in the first 20 to 30 minutes that I missed that it was going to develop and build so dramatically. That said, there was nothing about it to say ‘Cut your losses, this isn’t going anywhere’, it’s just that it gave the impression of being unexceptional, which, start to finish, it certainly isn’t. (It would have take a cussed ‘This isn’t what it was cracked up to be!’ to walk out.)
Another would have been to know when Brit Marling’s luminous quality as Rhoda Williams first came through, because, again, I had the expectation from the write-up that the actress / co-director / co-producer was striking and her performance revelatory, which she and it are. For what she reveals, she sometimes also conceals, but there was a subtly amused tone to her response to what John Burroughs (played by William Mapother - a curious alternative to cartography!) was saying to her.
... To be continued - in another posting
* They are minor things, but criminal rehabilitation, both in prison and on parole, would have involved seeking to apologize to the victims of the crime or, as the case might be, being directed to stay away, because saying sorry wouldn’t be welcome.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
23 December
Something doesn’t have to be plausible to be genuine, human, warm and engaging, and elements of Another Earth are not plausible*, but that didn’t matter.
If I had earlier followed up, as I intended, the newspaper’s and Sundance’s recommendation to see this film, I could have given it the ‘watch it again and see if it matters / works’ test. However, this was the last screening most locally to me, so no another Another Earth for me just yet…
One thing to have known from a second screening might have been whether there were clues in the first 20 to 30 minutes that I missed that it was going to develop and build so dramatically. That said, there was nothing about it to say ‘Cut your losses, this isn’t going anywhere’, it’s just that it gave the impression of being unexceptional, which, start to finish, it certainly isn’t. (It would have take a cussed ‘This isn’t what it was cracked up to be!’ to walk out.)
Another would have been to know when Brit Marling’s luminous quality as Rhoda Williams first came through, because, again, I had the expectation from the write-up that the actress / co-director / co-producer was striking and her performance revelatory, which she and it are. For what she reveals, she sometimes also conceals, but there was a subtly amused tone to her response to what John Burroughs (played by William Mapother - a curious alternative to cartography!) was saying to her.
... To be continued - in another posting
* They are minor things, but criminal rehabilitation, both in prison and on parole, would have involved seeking to apologize to the victims of the crime or, as the case might be, being directed to stay away, because saying sorry wouldn’t be welcome.
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