Showing posts with label Robert D Niro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert D Niro. Show all posts

Friday 20 December 2019

Frank, we did all we could for the man ~ Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci)

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


20 December







Need we really consider Joker (2019) as some sort of Scorsese film – or The Irishman (2019) as Scorsese’s contribution to the film universe of Marvel ? :



Meanwhile, in some other universe (when it is Phillips who grossly steals from Scorsese's films, but not in any way to justify the theft), does someone seriously suggest that the indebtedness is the other way around, in 'Why 'The Irishman' Is Scorsese's MCU Movie' !


[...]


Postlude :






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

Tuesday 5 September 2017

What more is Catalan cinema ?¹

What more is Catalan cinema ?¹ :


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


4 September (revised 4 October)

What more is Catalan cinema ?¹ :



It's the inevitable filmic follow-up to What is Catalan cinema ?... !


Three years ago, leading up to the third season of Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival [then in its 34th season], the question was posed What is Catalan cinema ? - in answering which, some of the defining features seemed to be :



Yet, as well as all these things (which, along with the Catalan films from 2012 to that date, are considered in more detail in What is Catalan cinema ?), succeeding seasons of Camera Catalonia have shown that the autonomous region in Spain called Catalunya – which, as with Scotland, some would see have a greater, independent status [highly relevant at the time of revising this piece...] – gives us cinema that :

* Remembers its history, right back to when Spain took control of Catalunya, in Claudio Zulian's (claudiozulian1's) thoughtful Born (2014) (@Bornfilm), reconstructing a few connected lives at the time of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), with Vicky Luengo a most desirable mistress to Josep Julien and the sister of Marc Martínez (Julien’s wealthy debtor, until Julien proves to back the wrong side in the war…)


* In the Catalan people, presents ones as reserved as the British, who - in two films that star the radiant Nora Navas (Tots volem el millor per a ella (We All Want What’s Best for Her) (2013) and L’adopció (Awaiting) (2015)) – manage to avoid talking to each other, but try to make happen what they assume should happen. In doing so, do they seem to lose sight of who is getting hurt, and for what real reason... ?



* Looks to literature such as Shakespeare, either in the feel - in Barcelona Summer Night (Barcelona, nit d'estiu) (2013) - of A Midsummer Night's Dream...


Or, in Hammudi al-Rahmoun Font's shocking telling of a classic tragedy, in Otel.lo (Othello) (2012) : 'OTHELLO is a cinematographic essay about power, desire, jealousy and deceit ; a thought on the boundaries between fiction and real life' (from IMDb)


Hammudi (with The Agent) at Cambridge Film Festival 2014

* Films as diverse as Ficció (Fiction) (2006), Fill de Caín (Son of Cain) (2013), and Menú degustació (Tasting Menu) (2013) are, in their quite different ways, further evidence² of flexibility in, and of creative thinking about, employing conventional elements of story-telling - and of both the expectations to which their nature gives rise and what writers and / or directors do to subvert them



* Or they do not subvert them - but surprisingly please, in Traces of Sandalwood (Rastres de sàndal) (2014) [this link is to TAKE ONE’s (@ TakeOneCinema's) review], with its Bollywood-infused tale of the (in)credulity of a loved and lost young girl, who is adopted into a Catalan family, and cannot believe that an Indian film-star knew her as a child - because she is her sister !


Aina Clotet, as Paula (Sita) - meeting her sister Mina (Nandita Das), and, later, reflecting on herself, and her identity


* Those living at the extremes of experience, in both Tots els camins de Déu (All The Ways of God) (2014) and El camí més llarg per tornar a casa (The Long Way Home) (2014)


Upper : Marc Garcia Coté in Tots els camins de Déu (2014)
Lower : Borja Espinosa in El camí més llarg per tornar a casa (2014)


* Adapts stage-plays very cinematically, whether Sílvia Munt [interviewed here], making a film of Josep María Sagarra's classic work El Cafè de la Marina (2014), or Ventura Pons of a contemporary writer in El virus de la por (The Virus of Fear) (2015)


Marina Salas in El cafè de la Marina (2014)


(Upper) Rubén de Eguia and (Lower) Albert Ausellé and Diana Gómez in El virus de la por (2015)

* Finally, documentaries by Catalan directors - although now listed in the Festival's main sequence (alphabetically with the others and the feature films) - tend to explore identity and connections to Catalan history, whether telling of the band-leader Xavier Cugat's career in film and music, during which he introduced Latin orchestration and rhythms to dance-music and Hollywood films and t.v. (although, which was probably little known, Cugat had been born in Catalunya, but had been an emigrée to Cuba with his family when young), in Diego Mas Trelles' Sexo, maracas y Chihuahuas (Sex, Maracas & Chihuahuas) (2016)


Or - in another realm of translocation - telling of how much better treated and regarded Americans of Afro-Caribbean descent were during their time in Spain (fighting the fascist forces of General Franco) than in the States - especially after going there. So #CamFF 2015 guest Jordi Torrent (with his co-writer / director Alfonso Domingo) showed in Héroes invisibles : Afroamericanos en la guerra de España (Invisible Heroes) (2015) [for which #UCFF interprets the sub-title as ‘The part played by Afro-Americans in The Spanish Civil War’], to the extent even that records that proved their participation hardly (were meant to) be available / survive





Ramon Lamarca (left), with Festival guest Jesús Monllaó (before the poster for Monllaó's
Fill de Caín (2013)) - by and courtesy of David Riley


Catalan cinema - to judge by the films that Camera Catalonia programmer Ramon Lamarca (pictured above) brings to Cambridge (and also the ICA (@ICALondon)) - is high-quality work that values its audiences enough to respect them :

Join us for the sixth year of a Catalan strand at Cambridge Film Festival, Camera Catalonia, to see why he and #UCFF give it due regard


End-notes :

¹ A deliberate nod to the inelegance of following up Analyze This (1999) with Analyze That (2002) (fairly criminally unwatchable, unless being very kind - for their other, better work - to Crystal and De Niro ?)... [Cristina Roures, pictured, is the Festival's Operations and Hospitality Manager (and, of course, is Catalan).]

² Camera Catalonia in 2012 (its first appearance at #CamFF) had included V.O.S. (2009), which is also – along with Ficció (2006) - the work of director Cesc Gay.




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

Tuesday 21 January 2014

Neither fish nor fowl

This is a review of American Hustle (2013)

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


16 January


This is a review of American Hustle (2013)

* Contains spoilers *



A Tarantino* could show us where this film starts and get us back there without it seeming the filmic equivalent of those 150 pages in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that are meant to be a night's reading and not interrupt anything : voice-overs at the opening from Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) and Irving Rosenfeld [field of roses] (Christian Bale) seem like rare occasions when we hear what [they say that] they are thinking, and they jar with the rest of the film, since there is no reason, at this moment, for the characters to be confessional (it is not as if they are telling their story to the man who caught them).

It even feels like a false moment of insight, not least since the title (as well as what we have seen) tells us that these people are bunco artists (one thing that the early part of the film establishes is Prosser's quick wit, when she can work out where Rosenfeld's account of part of his business is going more quickly than he can tell her), so one doubts that either really has a love of Duke Ellington (Prosser knows a track, and he finds it, with a jaw-dropping view of his crotch as he listens to it), because the film then shuts us out from any such revelation. Nothing about how we brought back to where they started in the film feels original, or that it had to be shown / narrated that way (except that a distraught Rosenfeld goes into the interior of the rotary-hanging space where he had arbitrarily had a whirl with Prosser), and this seems an obvious place where the film could have been tighter.

When we get to the meat of the action, with a surprised Jeremy Renner (as Mayor Carmine Polito), who seems unsure whether he is related to Elvis, Liberace or both, it feels not so much as though Rosenfeld has been lucky to have managed to extricate the FBI agent, Richie diMaso (Bradley Cooper), but rather that there was never a coherent plan in the first place, beyond a swanky hotel suite and some cash in an attaché case. Beyond DiMaso manipulating his boss (one really feels sorry for Louis C. K. as Thorsen) and hiring the rooms, he seems nothing to do with this, and, when he makes things go wrong, Rosenfeld (maybe because he has done his homework) is able to build up a link with Polito based on shared upbringing : one supposes, not just for the plot, that the sting has to be brought back on track, although it reflects on DiMaso that it needs it.

In all this, and what happens for most of the film, what role, does Prosser have (in her British incarnation of Edith Greensley), other than engaging and distracting the subjects' attention with her variously displayed breasts (and draped legs) ? We do not see her setting up the mark, a job that is exclusively taken by Rosenfeld in guiding DiMaso. Other than getting the really big hit at the end, she seems there to defy one to believe how many of these outfits could really have been left at one of Rosenfeld’s dry-cleaning outlets, and how she can freak DiMaso out by revealing that she is not British (except that he is fixated with his own beliefs).

The dynamic is only made interesting by the fact that she has led DiMaso on and got him so that he is desperate to sleep with her at the time of the revelation – obviously, it does not have to be spelt out, but it does not seem, to judge from their comments, any part of Rosenfeld’s and her plan, although it can coincidentally be exploited.

The answer is that it could be an approach of divide and rule : whilst Rosenfeld is working alongside and rubbing up DiMaso on one level, she is sizing up his seemingly unpredictable character from close up, stimulating and frustrating him, so that he will feel that he trusts her judgement better (and, crucially, forget that she is a poacher turned gamekeeper under compulsion). If that really is there is a plot-line, it is really rather submerged**, if it takes days of nagging at how and where, beyond sex, she is being employed in the film to find it...




The maverick agent is played for more fun and greater laughs by Mark Wahlberg (2 Guns, though he also has a boss to be reckoned with), and Hustle really takes itself too seriously : DiMaso talking to himself, as he muses whether Prosser should have had a bed and water, or whether he had planned that she should not, is grotesque as a throw-away. Even when we have (uncredited) Robert De Niro playing a decrepit but menacing gang boss Tellegio against a fake sheikh from Mexico with just a few phrases to his name, the tension in the scene (from De Niro’s sheer presence, and notwithstanding all those jokey roles that he has played of late) weighs against the humour, or seeing it as another Argo (2012), dangerous but cunning : here, it just seems dangerous, and how on earth do the Mexican’s few utterances really extricate them from anything ?

Almost the best sequence in the film originates from Jennifer Lawrence as Rosenfeld’s wife Rosalyn, having met a new mob boyfriend at the same do, and singing and dancing to ‘Live and Let Die’ whilst imagining his obliteration. The potential for conflict, particularly comedic, between Adams and Lawrence has largely been lost, and it is thrown back on the latter to play the part of revealing what she should not know and the others’ damage limitation. Rosenfeld may just have written her off as depressed and never leaving the house where he provides every comfort, and precious little keeps them together, but she shows no sign of a disposition to such a mood (for what it's worth, Wikidepia calls her 'his unstable wife Rosalyn', when DiMaso is far more unstable) when keen to go out and socialize with Polito and his wife.

If, for some, the film offers variety and a mix of moods, from another point it lacks cohesion, and, whilst some may not mind whether it inconsistently concerns itself with Prosser as Prosser, rather than as advancing the plot, it does not obviously show that there is a scheme behind the rather loose plot : planting a surprise when we have been lulled into a notion that all is just adrift is not exactly showmanship…


End-notes

* Much as it might want it, though, this film never has his deftness of touch, his boldness with structure and character.

** According to Wikidepia, it is not : Richie believes Sydney is British but has proof that her claim of aristocracy is fraudulent. Sydney tells Irving she will manipulate Richie, distancing herself from Irving




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

Sunday 24 March 2013

A working document : Silver Linings Playbook and its pros and cons with mental-health issues

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


25 March

First thoughts after just seeing the film, to be added to, revised, etc., as time and reading other comments permit

* NB Contains spoilers *


Preamble : I do not know about US mental-health or criminal law, but I do know about sections 37 and 41 of the Mental Health Act 1983 (as amended), where it used to be that, before the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office would receive psychiatric reports and decide whether someone could fully or conditionally be discharged from section. Such people had been found to have committed a criminal offence, but, because of their mental-health condition, were being held in hospital, not in prison.

What we are shown seems similar, though it is implausible that Pat’s mother could just turn up, sign a document, and take him home there and then (or, equally, that it would not be known beforehand that police officer Keogh had been allocated to supervise Pat (Bradley Cooper) in the community) : in the UK, the 1983 Act would only allow Pat’s mother to take him off even a non-criminal section by giving 72 hours in which the consultant could object to it on the basis that he would be a danger to himself or others.

As I suggest, a far cry - even if perhaps necessary to a plot where Pat's father does not even know that it is happening - from seemingly just 'bowling up' and getting Pat signed over...


Pros :

1. Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal (as Tiffany Maxwell) of someone with mental-health issues as straightforward and open, genuine, and not excusing what, in Pat, did not have to be that way.

2. That Pat (Bradley Cooper) responds to her, albeit just initially just by talking about medication at her sister's dinner table, because they share something.

3. That Tiffany is shown throwing back in Pat's face his hierarchy of craziness, where she is ‘worse than’ he, because she ended up being highly promiscuous for a while (after her husband has been killed when helping another driver), and where, as she tells him, he throws back in her face what she has trusted him with in friendship.


Cons :

1. Bradley Cooper’s portrayal (as Pat) of someone with mental-health issues who cannot control himself, and lacks compassion, tact and understanding, because he is the one with the history of undiagnosed bi-polar disorder, and the implication might be that those traits or behaviours are part and parcel of the diagnosis.

2. The notion that regular therapy would not only be available, but provided, in a medical culture so rooted to medication. (The therapy gets conveniently forgotten, once Pat encounters Dr Patel at a football game, as do the charges and consequences of what happens there, because the film presents him as doing nothing other than rehearsing with Tiffany and collapsing.)

3. The suggestion from Pat that he can recognize OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder*) in his father Patrizio just because he likes the remote-controllers in a certain arrangement, which is a regression even on Jack Nicholson's character in As Good as it Gets. Pat has been in a psychiatric unit for eight months, and so should know better, because (as suggested at point 5) he has got close enough to people to understand how they tick and feel.

4. The whole film, of course, has a bit of a feel that, just as Jack Nicholson in that other film 'just needed the love of a good woman to take him out of himself' (i.e. Helen Hunt), so Pat just needs to accept that he loves Tiffany and wants to care for her.

5. Danny (Chris Tucker) is shown as engaging, but with recurrent fixed thought-patterns that prevent his engagement with others. Nonetheless, Pat and he have a friendship, which must mean that Pat is capable of getting beyond his self-centredness(contrary to what point 1 in this list suggests. Danny has a pretty understandable desire to escape from the unit at Baltimore, but, when he is legitimately out (prior to which Pat, somehow, has been finding time to write to him), he is suddenly transformed into a with-it guy, making Pat jealous by demonstrating dance-moves with Tiffany - the transformation would have been interesting to know more of.

6. Putting points 4 and 5 in this list together, the message appears to be that mental ill-health arises from self-obsession, and that learning to focus one's attention on the needs and feelings of another is all that is needed as a cure. Which is about as true to the world of such conditions as bi-polar disorder as films like Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) are to psychiatric practice or Marnie (1964) is to breaking through a neurosis by finding 'the key'.


Watch this space !


End-notes

* Some people seriously believe, as someone with the condition once told me, that it stood for Obsessive Cleaning Disorder.

Tuesday 11 September 2012

Leopard Generate is selected

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


11 September

That'll be the name of my fifth novel (which I'll pay Will Self to ghost-write, if he could do anything quietly...), so remember - in a subliminal way - that you read it here first.

I am informed that an alternative modern-day pigmentation is undoubtedly purple, but do they mean purple? : looking at, being cruel, Damien Hirst's so-called spot-paintings (or a paint-card) convinces me that I don't know my puce from my eblow (elbow, even, as I am not 'licensed' to talk about e-blows before the watershed).


As to bringing back the semi-colon, I have just done it on Twitter - as with Peter M. and Michael P.*, it has spent its time out in the wilderness, can be welcomed back into the fold, and become the fatted calf (if it's half-lucky).

@OpiumBooks is now, as a good friend calls it, Twitterating (with) me : can't it get a bit dull just having titles on a topic less of interest to me (than ever it was) since, at the time of its release, seeing Robert de Niro wasting his life as David Aaronson** in Once upon a Time in America (1984)?

Which might take me to Inception (2010), but I had to leave last night's screening, so we won't go into that just now...

So I shall simply close with a comment (allegedly) made by Keith Lemon (or was it Keith Tangerine - or Grape?):

To be in a position to acquire this objective, I can invest hours in entrance of the mirror to get my look correct


Right on, baby - but don't give up Dave's job!***



End-notes

* Oddly, I tend to think of his surname as being Portaloo... (Didn't you realize that the product was called after a family name?)

** I had remembered his nickname as Toots (touch of Dustin there?), but Noodles seems plum crazy even now!

*** Whih is what, on the pattern of Russell Hoban's hugely affecting novel Riddley Walker, is the fate of that phrase, I deem.