Three Tweets [maybe more ?] about Woman at War (2018)

Three Tweets [maybe more ?] about Woman at War (Kona fer í stríð) (2018)

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

16 May

Three Tweets [maybe more ?] about Woman at War (Kona fer í stríð) (2018)

A film that leaves #UCFF in need of a @Laphroaig - #womanatwarfilm - does not necessarily do so in a good way :

Not least during #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek, it isn't - properly understood - 'Hilarious and heartwarming' at all [as, one sees, @vulture appears to have described it] pic.twitter.com/k1dYzc9Dyz

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 16, 2019

A publicity poster for a paperback edition of Jordan B. Peterson's 12 Rules for Life - which had only been photographed for the purposes of ironically critiquing yet more fostering of the illusion of individualism (no better than many a cult ?) - now proves apt for other reasons. pic.twitter.com/MNpqA6y8Cd

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 16, 2019

Superficially similar to Rams (Hrútar) (2015), with its sororial element / rootedness in the Icelandic landscape, this film mixes the mayhem that comes from mistaking who Roger O. Thornhill is with the dual identities of Salt (2010) and comes up with something disturbingly dark.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 19, 2019

Postlude (with TAKE ONE) :

Meanwhile, over at https://t.co/mu8pD8p7oe, a discussion at @TAKEONECinema !

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 21, 2019

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Gary Oldman and John Hurt answer some questions

This is some sort of account of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) and its Festival Q&A

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

15 September

As did the director and the writer of the screenplay, after the screening [of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) on Festival opening night]


* Contains spoilers *

It was heartening to hear someone else say that following the plot didn't matter to enjoying the film, and, although I did not really see any of the t.v. series, to agree that recreating the atmosphere of the early 70s was a good thing to witness. (Oh, I did my best to follow the plot, but, in all honesty, I was put off early on by remembering 'Spies' from Fry and Laurie, with, respectively, their own Control and Tony: 'Control, I hear Firefly's been taken', etc.)

That apart, and other irrelevant thoughts that came into my head (about agents and double-agents in relation to much-inferior products such as Salt), I congratulated myself on realizing what had really happened to one character (if only by twigging that it had to be the case with someone of Mark Strong's billing), and seeing the significance of how regimes in all sorts of workplace can change for the worse.

Looking for secret folders and smuggling them out reminded me of Kate Winslet implausibly getting away with it in Enigma, but, for the life of me, I couldn't understand why John Hurt's flat would not have been stripped of the vast assembly of material there (unless it was, despite being transported elsewhere for Gary Oldman's Smiley to look through, just some unrelated hobby of his): it is the first thought on Colin Firth's mind to get to another character's property first and take things from it, when he is reported killed.

What counts, though, as came out in response to the question that I put to Gary Oldman (and others) at the end, is what the characters are experiencing at their deepest level, which, for Smiley, was felt as his wife's infidelity: I had asked what scene (or series of scenes) was central not to the story, but to his experience of the emotional core of the film, and this seemed to be how it would feel, in the circumstances, to need to hear another's account of becoming involved with a woman, what she meant to him, and what he would do to seek to protect her.

Not bad for an opening night!