Looks like we've got a war on our hands ~ William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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26 January

This is a response to Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Wes Anderson simply directs us in such a way that he has no need to show us the territory of Moonrise Kingdom (2012) on a map for us to know that it is representational, rather than actual - whereas, in a film that is not without other relevance, it is unhelpfully obvious to any attempt to read The Dressmaker (2015) literally that what is shown has scant sense of being a real place* [though this, for some clear reasons, is also not Dogville (2003)].

If you thought that it was unlikely that a police department would have a badge in the shape of the state of Missouri, that is not the most implausible and / or unreal aspect of @3Billboards... pic.twitter.com/lqKUxN13HY

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 28, 2018

However, one believes that there are better grounds for abandoning any pretence that Kate Winslet (Tilly Dunnage), returning to her mother Molly (Judy Davis), is not just a revenge-romp (if one that is dusted down with touches of fairy tale and cod psychology). In Billboards, invoking such fictions as 'When they diverted the highway' causes one to think of Psycho (1960), rather - excellently entertaining though it is – than of Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent : Travels in Small-Town America, but perhaps writer / director Martin McDonagh desires to operate on both levels ?

All this anger begets anger ~ Penelope (Samara Weaving)

If it were actually the premise of the film, it was pretty obvious from the title what the billboards would be doing. Even in terms of believing in the film and / or being asked to believe in what the film shows, likewise pinning too much (pun intended) on them cannot be done in literal terms** : people misquote what Hitchcock meant when talking about a MacGuffin, but, in that extended sense, the billboards certainly are one.

Or, rather, they patently are one, but McDonagh will have it that they are not one...

How 'How Three Billboards went from film fest darling to awards-season controversy' seems to miss the point, by talking about redemption, not about the world of the whole film... :https://t.co/qIji7AUUWb

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 12, 2018

Billboards that, moreover, are let out no sooner than they are found to exist, with no notion of what repair to them could be needed, and with the bill-posting itself mysteriously carried out well after nightfall ? Is any of this an invitation to believe it, outside of the film ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 12, 2018

So, having seen @3Billboards (2017), there's a sigh of relief, but forget the party-crowd, intent on laughing at anything that moves :

The humour is there, but not eliciting more than a snort, and the richness of it and the audacity are just not at the level of In Bruges (2008). pic.twitter.com/FVsWrczyxe

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 27, 2018

Some film-references :

* Calvary (2014)

* The Dressmaker (2015)

* The Hairdresser's Husband (Le mari de la coiffeuse) (1990)

As ever, Donald Clarke is well worth a read : 'Three Billboards’ is not suffering a backlash: some people just didn’t like it ~ https://t.co/sZfGzbTWLY

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 28, 2018

End-notes :

* According to Wikipedia®, the closest that we get with Billboards is Ebb, ‘an extinct town in St. Clair County, in the U. S. state of Missouri’.

** For example, as if although (and because) not rented out for the lengthy period of time found in the records of Ebbing Advertising Co. (and despite the obvious dilapidation [if one can have it, of something made of wood, not stone...] of the billboards themselves), the cogency of the installation is not going to need checking and repair before the resumption of an electrical supply. The conceit simply will not bear thinking of thus in those terms, if one had to imagine what would be an appropriate rental (rather than a figure and cash on the desk).


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

Manhood and Hawke

This is a review of Boyhood (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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17 August

This is a review of Boyhood (2014)

Boyhood (2014) at @CamPicturehouse, which some say is a one-trick pony - but how high will the pony kick, and would one watch again... ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 16, 2014

One does not watch such a film for breathtaking cinematographic insights (though there are some nice outdoor locations, not least at the very end), but for character development, set somewhere recognizably real : in its own terms, exploring Mason Evans, Snr (Ethan Hawke), through the story of Mason Evans, Jnr (Ellar Coltrane), it does not disappoint at all, and there are three moments where one has a lump in one’s throat at how a character is being appreciated by another.

That amongst significant moments of behaviour where people have lost their way, and got into blaming or being jealous of each other, which is the contrast in life. At the heart of all this, though – for all that it is talked about – it is not the most remarkable thing about the film that it was shot, for three or four days per year, over the course of twelve years, although it does allow one to see both Lorelei Linklater (his daughter as Mason’s sister Sam(antha)) and Coltrane age, and their faces and features mature. No, it is principally that of the closeness between father and son, and how the former allows the latter to see things from an older perspective.

At one moment, towards the end, younger Mason asks what the point of it all is, and receives the totally honest answer that no one knows and everyone is pretending. For those who have seen Sam Rockwell in The Way Way Back (2013), he is the humorous and intelligent father / mentor that we all identify as being enriching, and, at the best of times, there is that quality in Hawke’s remarkably penetrating acting.

So much so that one almost feels that Linklater has to introduce a distance, by pausing when Hawke meets Charlie Sexton (credited as Jimmy ?*) and they have a child, otherwise Hawke will steal the film.

Other things, such as the invidious position of a stepchild, are probably better addressed by Steve Carell in The Way Way Back than here by Linklater, but the point of it all is the same : that of holding one’s children firm when they need it so that they can have the confidence and belief that they deserve. Patricia Arquette’s* courage in taking her family out of an unsuitable situation (and the strength that her friend gives her) remind of a little 30-minute gem from Cambridge Film Festival 2013 (#CamFF), Avant Que De Tout Perdre (Just Before Losing Everything) (2013)…

Compared with the more fly-away Hawke’s, Arquette’s character roots herself in responsibility, and feels the challenges of life in providing for Sam and Mason. These words could almost have been written for one scene :

She'll take the painting in the hallway
The one she did in Jr. High

Words : Matthew Charles Rollings / Doug Crider

Suzy Bogguss seems to have made this meditative song, ‘Letting Go’, her own, and it has an obvious resonance with the unsettling feeling of impermanence and of relentless change, which sometimes feels too much for Arquette as a mother. Where we leave Mason, we feel that he will make mistakes, but that he has kept a regard for his parents and their nurture, and we are content for him to take the course and not to witness it further.

Boyhood (2014) is by no means a one-trick pony, @CamPicturehouse - knowing the trick doesn't matter, and it could easily be watched again...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 17, 2014

Linklater’s desire to make this film with an ageing cast is not, except as a feature film, a new departure, because the well-known Granada Television series Up (which has been broadcast on ITV and the BBC) has covered 49 years in following fourteen British children since the age of seven (in 1964), whereas Mason is six when we first see the shot of him that is used in the film’s promotion. (He may also already have known that he would make a follow-up to Before Sunrise with the older Julie Delpy and, again, Hawke.)

Just two minor, minor things that do not work : when Arquette is remarried, and we cut to a side-shot of her Compliance Officer husband, his face is making the wrong expression for the serious subject that he is addressing, and then we cut back. That and the father-and-son exchange about other Star Wars films, which felt very placed and stilted.

But with Hawke duetting with the harmonizing Sexton (on Hawke’s own songs), and the other ways that music is organic to the feel, one can keep all the tracks in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) – this is the soundtrack to buy.


Click here for a PS to Mr Linklater - some of the things that made actual boyhood so difficult, but which you will find no mention of in this film






End-notes

* IMDb, as it sometimes can, lets down massively by not providing the names of the characters : it lists Arquette as ‘Mom’ !


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

Empty vessels

This is a review of The Way Way Back (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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5 September

This is a review of The Way Way Back (2013)

* Contains moderate spoilering, and a bit of swearing *

I defy anyone to dislike Sam Rockwell as Owen in The Way Way Back (2013)*. (I probably should not do too much defying, or I might end up like the film's odious Trent (Steve Carell), telling people who they are or what they think.)


As I Tweeted :

Anyone who ever had a pivotally inspirational figure in his / her life can relate to #TheWayWayBack: I found Sam Rockwell totally enjoyable.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 4, 2013

The odious Trent, possibly unconsciously, seems set on crushing Duncan, nicely brought about by Liam James - he is the sort of man that he is probably a bit like Reggie Perrin's CJ, in that he did not get where he is to-day without making bogus and manipulatively one-sided 'deals' with people.

Thankfully, the excruciating embarrassment of the characters sizing each other up at the Riptide, the holiday home from Trent's previous relationship, diminishes as Owen and Water Whiz (apparently a real place) hove into view. A little bit like Steve Martin being energized, but largely his own man, Rockwell is the dad whom Duncan does not have / no longer has, as puerile Trent cannot resist grinding Duncan with.

The water-park becomes that sort of home-from-home that we know so well all the way to Alice and her adventures via Dorothy and Kansas / Oz and even into a recent Thai film that was in my top three from last year's Festival, Postcards from the Zoo (2012)** (let alone Midnight in Paris (2011)).

Yes, we root for Duncan, and laugh with him, even despite him, and Owen is no saint, but he is humane, comfortable with himself (most of the time), encouraging. No more than that needs be said - watch the film, relish a world beyond the cringeing hypocrisy of people pretending, and find the punctuation-mark !


End-notes

* With its silent punctuation.

** The zoo is a sort of Eden, but Water Wizz is more flawed, although caring and compassionate, taking in Duncan as he is.


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

Psychopaths - or just killers ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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21 December

* Contains spoilers *

It might be a cover-all - or a cop-out - to have psychopaths who are just crooks or who have some need to kill, or to have them interchangeably mixed up with 'the mental and deranged', yoking in anyone, indeed, who might have been in hospital, but I think that, as a product, Seven Psychopaths (2012), had no starting point for knowing what one is.

The States muddles up anyway the notion of psychosis and psychopathy, but there was nothing to suggest that this confusion was really responsible. Not that the film fared any better, in its own terms, as my various Tweets have suggested...


And now, at the risk of repeating the above, the review of Seven Sycophants :


There are many films, few as famous as 8½ (or even La Dolce Vita), where the film is about making a film (or the like), from Shakespeare-dervied and Cole-Porter-instilled Kiss Me, Kate (1958) to On the Road (2012) or recent Catalan film VOS (2009).

The makers of Seven Psychopaths must have believed – or wanted us to believe – that they were doing something new with the notion of a film that is either within, or which is, the film, but VOS is much more engaging and inventive, and Hit and Run (2012), for all its unevenness, had more laughs - or, rather, had laughs, rather than spaces for them, since I snorted just a dozen times through the course of the film, and six of them were purely in disbelief at the writers’ apparent estimation of my credulity.

The States has its own definition of what the word ‘psychotic’ means, denoting psychopathology (hence Hitchcock’s Psycho, whose Norman Bates kills woman for little reason other than that he can, and had a bad time with his mother), but this film used a very generalized notion of the latter concept, little more than the violent (and / or crazy) bloke in the local who famously ‘is a real psychopath’.

Perhaps for this reason of being confused (which can also be excused on the basis that it is a comedy), the poster had the tag-line ‘They give demented psychotics a bad name’, insulting though that would be to anyone in the UK with an experience of psychosis, and even though this film is funded by Film Four. Now I’m not saying that organized crime might not give opportunities for those who like killing or hurting people, or that it is really of any importance whether Marty (Colin Farrell) or Billy Bickle* (Sam Rockwell, who keeps trying to muscle in on the screenplay), understand what either a screenplay** or a psychopath is, because the clever conceit is meant to be that the film is writing itself or they are writing it as it goes, and so that doesn’t matter.

It then becomes conveniently irrelevant whether what Marty waves around in the desert is a draft of a script, whereas he was previously working on – and not getting very far on – an outline (and, in the only moment where he gives any evidence of writing or being a writer, had not got beyond writing ‘Ext.’ and another couple of defining characteristics of the opening of the scene).

Before that, a message being left for him asks for where what he is working on (as if he had never been required to pitch more of a concept than a numerical group of crazies to interest this unknown caller). Again as if, in a world where a writer writes his friends and himself in a film and they have no independent existence, anything can happen, not the realities of how, in the prominently displayed letters of ‘H O L L Y W O O D’ at the start, its studios work.

This might be for the rationale behind how, in successive shots, it is night and the Buick has just exploded, and then it is abruptly day and it is still on fire, i.e. that in some sort of meta-fictional world anything can happen, but that theme is played far more effectively in VOS, and without the sentimentality allowed here, but with distance : when Hans is with Myra, his dead wife, we have sad music and even a clarinet in its chalumeau register, and, later, plangent solo piano when we are asked to feel something for a dead or injured person.

Farrell’s part is to look shocked and, often enough, to drink to induce reactive amnesia, Rockwell’s to have a suppressed smile always playing rather irritatingly on his face (and be a very unlikely choice of friend), whereas Christopher Walken (as Hans***) is – almost literally – a wraith with a husky voice, with a twisted sort of humanity to match Marty’s.

Against all three, Woody Harrelson as Charlie Brooker is a scarcely mould-breaking combination of the seemingly ruthless and abusive leader, who, although his mouth is the vehicle for much maligning of races and creeds, is soppy about a dog. This is where the comparison with Hit and Run comes in, because Bradley Cooper’s Alex is a far more sinister gang-leader than Charlie, because, even if Charlie shoots Hans’ wife, he is allowed to drop his front far too soon, as if the writing is playing it for (non-existent) humour.

Irrespective of how many psychopaths the film does actually deliver, Billy appears to invoke and encourage danger and killing just for its own sake, or, supposedly, to help the plot along for his friend Marty. Claiming, as Marty does twice, that he is just Billy’s friend may seem an implausible passport to safety, but Farrell’s character has very little to offer, except non-violence and to be an anchor, except in the shade of Billy and to be known as his friend, who is the real originator and creative force, his passing marked by plangent piano…



End-notes

* Yes, you read that surname aright !

** That said, they are meant to be in film, that alleged industry, so they should, of course, know.

*** To me, not a very Polish name, even if meant to naturalize ‘Jan’.


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