More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
26 November
Before I Go to Sleep (2014) is that film at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF), which provoked an uncomfortable response afterwards from the persons questioned (the director / writer (Rowan Joffe), and the original novelist (Steve Watson)) - on a par with the following occasions when :
* A minister from the Home Office, at a launch event for the Community Legal Service, had to admit that making its information Internet based almost certainly meant that those who were most likely to qualify (those on low incomes and, as a likely subset, those also with disabilities) were least likely to be able to access it easily
* A composer, who had been commissioned to write a work in response to and for the same forces as a piece by Mozart, could not say – if Mozart had been plucked from history to meet him – what he would say to Mozart to explain his composition
A spoilery, stinging posting sets out some of the many ways in which the film’s plot fails so often to hang together, but it was then interesting to see, on the Rotten Tomatoes web-site, what even the positive reviews (the so-called ‘fresh’ ones) had to say about it…
Even the ‘Fresh’ reviews...
3* from Helen O’Hara, Empire Magazine
Perhaps it’s a limitation of the material, or overfamiliarity with the themes of the amnesia thriller, but you’re left wishing that the filmmakers hadn’t forgotten all that has gone before when approaching this.
3* from Stella Papamichael, Digital Spy
It's no wonder Christine is so confused about who she can trust, although there are times when she believes too willingly what she is told; often, when it's convenient for the plot. The verbal spills of information are always less interesting than the uncertainty and as the moment of epiphany draws closer, the truth seems less plausible. Consequently, what might have been a smart, insightful thriller is instead a creepy bedtime story.
3* from Allan Hunter, Sunday Express
The first half of the film is the strongest as Joffe retains a firm hold on the material, feeding us revelations that are like tiny explosions that completely change your sense of the story.
He also immerses us in Christine’s dilemma of trying to figure out what kind of person she is and what really happened before the night returns to steal away her memories all over again.
The second half is slightly less successful as the human dilemma gives way to the mechanics of the plot.
And these are people who give the film as many as three stars…
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Showing posts with label Rotten Tomatoes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rotten Tomatoes. Show all posts
Tuesday, 25 November 2014
Friday, 24 January 2014
What does Rotten Tomatoes tell us about Wolf ?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
23 January
www.rottentomatoes.com is notorious for summarizing a critical review as 'fresh' tomatoes, a so-called glowing one as 'rotten' - one doubts that there is much human intervention in scanning the review, or at all beyond the star-rating and the closing words, and some would invoke what they have learnt to call an algorithm (even though all of computers and the Internet are algorithms at work).
That said, one can pretty quickly pick out some choice pieces of slating a film such as The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), or some pieces of enthusiastic endorsement that might be unsaid, if people had not embarrassingly already read them, and here are some quotations from the former category about this film :
By the way, the collector’s version of The Wolf of Wall Street, and if Scorsese gets wise the Director’s Version, will consist of just one scene. It is by far the best: it comes at the beginning and says everything crisply that doesn’t need to be shoutily repeated over and over. Matthew McConaughey, never better, has a shark-featured cameo as young Belfort’s first-day mentor. He is totally hilarious, a lean, airy-gestured, epigrammatic, mad-as-a-fox cynic and crypto-sociopath: just the man to ensure good order in Moneyville as the young striped shirts learn to get in formation with the striped coke lines.
One can’t help but think the film’s early enemies were asking the wrong question. Scorsese and DiCaprio have argued that no approval of Belfort’s activities is implied. This is true enough. But both men are certainly experienced enough to understand cinema’s ability to allow decent people a little recreational paddling in vicarious immorality. Scorsese’s Goodfellas – whose grammar and rhythms Wolf apes – would not be nearly so entertaining if it concerned dishonest ice cream salesmen.
and
At times, the film seems almost Hobbitian in its inability to finish a scene that is already well past its natural lifespan. It’s not often one encounters a film that could, quite comfortably, lose an entire hour. But, clocking in at 180 minutes, Wolf is just that picture. It hardly needs to be said that it’s brilliantly edited and superbly acted – Jonah Hill is hilarious as Belfort’s slippery lieutenant – but the endless repetition would wear down even the most fervent Philip Glass fan.
The Wolf of Wall Street, adapted from the autobiography by the disgraced stockbroker Jordan Belfort, looks back adoringly at the sort of cavalier corruption that precipitated the recent economic crisis. There is something intriguingly contrary, even foolhardy, about asking audiences to marvel at the high jinks and profligacy that have reshaped their world for the worse.
and
Scorsese frames Belfort like a rock god, placing the camera behind him as he delivers sermons to the whooping stooges who fill an office floor that stretches towards infinity. If the film aspires ultimately to be an indictment, then it is one with tiny love hearts doodled in the margins, which is no kind of indictment at all.
and
Any oxygen in the film comes from the softly electrifying Kyle Chandler as Patrick Denham, the FBI agent trying to bring Belfort to book.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
23 January
www.rottentomatoes.com is notorious for summarizing a critical review as 'fresh' tomatoes, a so-called glowing one as 'rotten' - one doubts that there is much human intervention in scanning the review, or at all beyond the star-rating and the closing words, and some would invoke what they have learnt to call an algorithm (even though all of computers and the Internet are algorithms at work).
That said, one can pretty quickly pick out some choice pieces of slating a film such as The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), or some pieces of enthusiastic endorsement that might be unsaid, if people had not embarrassingly already read them, and here are some quotations from the former category about this film :
By the way, the collector’s version of The Wolf of Wall Street, and if Scorsese gets wise the Director’s Version, will consist of just one scene. It is by far the best: it comes at the beginning and says everything crisply that doesn’t need to be shoutily repeated over and over. Matthew McConaughey, never better, has a shark-featured cameo as young Belfort’s first-day mentor. He is totally hilarious, a lean, airy-gestured, epigrammatic, mad-as-a-fox cynic and crypto-sociopath: just the man to ensure good order in Moneyville as the young striped shirts learn to get in formation with the striped coke lines.
Nigel Andrews, Financial Times
One can’t help but think the film’s early enemies were asking the wrong question. Scorsese and DiCaprio have argued that no approval of Belfort’s activities is implied. This is true enough. But both men are certainly experienced enough to understand cinema’s ability to allow decent people a little recreational paddling in vicarious immorality. Scorsese’s Goodfellas – whose grammar and rhythms Wolf apes – would not be nearly so entertaining if it concerned dishonest ice cream salesmen.
and
At times, the film seems almost Hobbitian in its inability to finish a scene that is already well past its natural lifespan. It’s not often one encounters a film that could, quite comfortably, lose an entire hour. But, clocking in at 180 minutes, Wolf is just that picture. It hardly needs to be said that it’s brilliantly edited and superbly acted – Jonah Hill is hilarious as Belfort’s slippery lieutenant – but the endless repetition would wear down even the most fervent Philip Glass fan.
Donald Clarke, The Irish Times ('fresh' for giving it three stars ?)
The Wolf of Wall Street, adapted from the autobiography by the disgraced stockbroker Jordan Belfort, looks back adoringly at the sort of cavalier corruption that precipitated the recent economic crisis. There is something intriguingly contrary, even foolhardy, about asking audiences to marvel at the high jinks and profligacy that have reshaped their world for the worse.
and
Scorsese frames Belfort like a rock god, placing the camera behind him as he delivers sermons to the whooping stooges who fill an office floor that stretches towards infinity. If the film aspires ultimately to be an indictment, then it is one with tiny love hearts doodled in the margins, which is no kind of indictment at all.
and
Any oxygen in the film comes from the softly electrifying Kyle Chandler as Patrick Denham, the FBI agent trying to bring Belfort to book.
Ryan Gilbey, New Statesman
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Thursday, 12 April 2012
A deserved winner at Cannes (2)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
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!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
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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Sunday, 6 November 2011
By way of apology for never reviewing Sarah's Key (3)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 November
Here, in one place (I think that only three are on Rotten Tomatoes), are the works of criticism - some would say metacriticism - of the four reviews that appeared in the UK press...
OK! Then Nicholas Barber at:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/sarahs-key-111-mins-12a-2333119.html#disqus_thread
Who, just for the moment, seems to have disappeared my comment...*
And I can't find it on Rotten Tomatoes as a review...
End-notes
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 November
Here, in one place (I think that only three are on Rotten Tomatoes), are the works of criticism - some would say metacriticism - of the four reviews that appeared in the UK press...
OK! Then Nicholas Barber at:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/sarahs-key-111-mins-12a-2333119.html#disqus_thread
Who, just for the moment, seems to have disappeared my comment...*
And I can't find it on Rotten Tomatoes as a review...
End-notes
* Not even there in a saved copy of the web-page (as checked, including its source, on 18 March 2012).
Friday, 14 October 2011
The Hunter, one year on
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
14 October
I have been reminded of a film from last year's Festival, The Hunter (2010), whose main character, Ali Alavi, is played by its director, Rafi Pitts. At the time (a bit like Kosmos at this year's Festival), it seemed likely to be too subtle to be readily understood (though not quite as the film's official wording would suggest):
In an act of vengeance, a young man randomly kills two police officers. He escapes to the forest, where he is arrested by two other officers. The three men are surrounded by trees, the woods. They are lost in a maze, a desolate landscape, where the boundaries between the hunter and the hunted are difficult to perceive (edited for punctuation).
On the Rotten Tomatoes web-site (www.rottentomatoes.com), Jason Wood (in Little White Lies) is quoted as saying 'Seemingly destined to go largely under-appreciated, this is a work of precision and complexity'. (Given that someone - presumably by mistake - has posted a review of the film from 2011 of the same name on IMDb's web-page for this film (www.imdb.com/title/tt1190072), there is evidence of under-appreciation that it even exists as a separate entity!)
Looking at what both who Wood is (or appears to be?) in relation to the film's distribution and what has written (www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/theatrical-reviews/the-hunter-12001), he is clearly not going to give away exactly what happens or, more importantly, the rationale behind it. But there are two short sections (amongst others) that I think most worth quoting, the first for where the film is, the second for where it may have come from:
[...] And yet the film also feels incredibly universal. In its sense of intrigue, unrest and corruption in high places, it perhaps has more in common with a number of iconic American films of the 1970s.
[...] Minimalism has been a watchword for this confident, intelligent and distinctive filmmaker, and in his pared-down aesthetic, introspection and nominal dialogue Pitts exhibits echoes of Jean-Pierre Melville and recalls Walter Hill’s The Driver (edited for punctuation).
At the screening, I definitely felt as Wood does in the first quotation - it was a very intelligent take on those earlier films, with a good dose of redneck lawlessness thrown in for good measure.
As for the specific echoes that he identifies, I will need to consider them, and also to look at obtaining my own copy of The Hunter. What I will say is this, by way of indicating my own thinking about the film: what is it that we are told about how Ali's wife comes to be killed?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
14 October
I have been reminded of a film from last year's Festival, The Hunter (2010), whose main character, Ali Alavi, is played by its director, Rafi Pitts. At the time (a bit like Kosmos at this year's Festival), it seemed likely to be too subtle to be readily understood (though not quite as the film's official wording would suggest):
In an act of vengeance, a young man randomly kills two police officers. He escapes to the forest, where he is arrested by two other officers. The three men are surrounded by trees, the woods. They are lost in a maze, a desolate landscape, where the boundaries between the hunter and the hunted are difficult to perceive (edited for punctuation).
On the Rotten Tomatoes web-site (www.rottentomatoes.com), Jason Wood (in Little White Lies) is quoted as saying 'Seemingly destined to go largely under-appreciated, this is a work of precision and complexity'. (Given that someone - presumably by mistake - has posted a review of the film from 2011 of the same name on IMDb's web-page for this film (www.imdb.com/title/tt1190072), there is evidence of under-appreciation that it even exists as a separate entity!)
Looking at what both who Wood is (or appears to be?) in relation to the film's distribution and what has written (www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/theatrical-reviews/the-hunter-12001), he is clearly not going to give away exactly what happens or, more importantly, the rationale behind it. But there are two short sections (amongst others) that I think most worth quoting, the first for where the film is, the second for where it may have come from:
[...] And yet the film also feels incredibly universal. In its sense of intrigue, unrest and corruption in high places, it perhaps has more in common with a number of iconic American films of the 1970s.
[...] Minimalism has been a watchword for this confident, intelligent and distinctive filmmaker, and in his pared-down aesthetic, introspection and nominal dialogue Pitts exhibits echoes of Jean-Pierre Melville and recalls Walter Hill’s The Driver (edited for punctuation).
At the screening, I definitely felt as Wood does in the first quotation - it was a very intelligent take on those earlier films, with a good dose of redneck lawlessness thrown in for good measure.
As for the specific echoes that he identifies, I will need to consider them, and also to look at obtaining my own copy of The Hunter. What I will say is this, by way of indicating my own thinking about the film: what is it that we are told about how Ali's wife comes to be killed?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Sunday, 11 September 2011
A posting that has lacked a title (until now)
More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 September
I was chatting to a man of the cloth earlier about films and the Festival, and he mentioned one (well, a pair of them) that had been given what I understand not to have been the smoothest ride by the Rotten Tomatoes web-site (well, maybe nothing new about that - the UK critics, for example, all wrote in a way that disappointed me about Sarah's Key), but which he thought worth a view: The Gods Must Be Crazy I + II.
As the Internet Movie Database, IMDB (www.imdb.com), also gives a voice for those who do not review films for a living, I have just casually looked up this title, and it seems that I might as well take him up on the offer of borrowing the DVDs some time...
To-night, though, is too soon, as I plan to delve into the backlog of home-viewing and catch up with Lars and the Real Girl in time for the release of Melancholia.
Tweet away @TheAgentApsley
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 September
I was chatting to a man of the cloth earlier about films and the Festival, and he mentioned one (well, a pair of them) that had been given what I understand not to have been the smoothest ride by the Rotten Tomatoes web-site (well, maybe nothing new about that - the UK critics, for example, all wrote in a way that disappointed me about Sarah's Key), but which he thought worth a view: The Gods Must Be Crazy I + II.
As the Internet Movie Database, IMDB (www.imdb.com), also gives a voice for those who do not review films for a living, I have just casually looked up this title, and it seems that I might as well take him up on the offer of borrowing the DVDs some time...
To-night, though, is too soon, as I plan to delve into the backlog of home-viewing and catch up with Lars and the Real Girl in time for the release of Melancholia.
Tweet away @TheAgentApsley
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