#UCFF Tweets on Opening Night at Cambridge Film Festival : The new [Martin] McDonagh (work in progress ?)

#UCFF Tweets on Opening Night at Cambridge Film Festival : The new [Martin] McDonagh

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

20 October

#UCFF Tweets on Opening Night at Cambridge Film Festival :

The new [Martin] McDonagh (work in progress ?)

Dedicated, in gratitude for his BDI, to JLB

Laying your table :

Fighting sleep-deprivation, and simultaneously indicted and thus not wanting or able to concentrate, watching the new McDonagh* at #CFF41 definitely gave the promised existential crisis.

* Martin - it was John Michael McDonagh who directed Calvary (2014) (and The Guard (2011)).

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 22, 2022

Menu / ingredients-list / allergens :

Whether The Banshees** might finally blend them (or intended to ?), the dish's ingredients or spices may resemble :

* Craggy Island / Ripping Yarns

* The Truman Show / Seven Psychopaths

* Flann O'Brien / J. M. Synge

* In Bruges' eerie score

* The Guard ?

* Macbeth...

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 22, 2022

On top of tiredness, it fed unhelpful introspection / identification with Farrell's character*.

Hurriedly apologizing to my guest, I just had to 'bunk out' - as I usually say - of Screen 1 when and as I could* :

Getting back to my usual b&b and then 9hrs' sleep was far better !

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 22, 2022

* I dropped, but couldn't find, maybe just my extra-strong mints, and I'd already moved a bag and tipped over a double @Laphroaig through weariness - useful, though it felt tiresome at the time, as it would *not* have helped an involuntary raking through old indiscretions. :)

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 22, 2022

Spoilery stuff from the sous-chef or kitchen ? :

I'm with Mrs W, on this one, @everyfilmneil :

'Mrs W wasn't impressed - she thought it was too contrived and laboured'

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 24, 2022

NB * Spoilers * (mebbe ?) :

** Also not to be mistaken for Siouxsie*** ?

[It may help to know what banshees are (in folk-songs, probably little better than a visit from a nightingale ?)]

*** Then again, there might be referents here (and there)... :https://t.co/E1GC5DeK7v

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 22, 2022

Re-uniting the 'In Bruges' team would have needed Clémence Poésy, as well as Ralph Fiennes ?https://t.co/V1weEPyC6W https://t.co/S3Jtm1GgwI

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 26, 2022

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Is Billboards really a screenplay - and not a play-script ?

Is Billboards really a screenplay - and not a play-script ? [posting in development]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 January

Is Billboards really a screenplay - and not a play-script ? [posting in development]

Those who think Seven Psychopaths (2012) a great film can delight in that opinion. However, after the $15m that was spent on it (so it is estimated (as reported on IMDb)), the bosses at investors such as CBS Films, Film4 and BFI may have been less sure : in the US, it just made back what it is thought to have cost.

In that world, one could imagine Martin McDonagh, hawking pitches for a new film. He had tried a film that was very cinematic, and then had made this one, which dearly desired that some of Lynch had rubbed off on a tale of people who were not the people whom they seemed to be.

Maybe the inspiration was to make visual what one would never try to show on stage, these billboards : in a play, everyone would be talking about them, but they would be an off-stage trio of elephants.

Yet, as soon as you have them in a film, and in its title, the film-goers will know without needing to think (or question) that they are significant*, and a fierce Frances McDormand, pictured with them, can then import a #MeToo message that makes it a winner.


To be continued


* Missouri, and a made-up place there, being the other label on the tin : In Bruges, likewise, is going to be a film that is set in Bruges...

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Two laundromats near Staines, formerly Middlesex (in production)

Some premonitions, prognostications and precautions about the promise of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

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

11 January

Some premonitions, prognostications and precautions about the promise of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Meanwhile, and unrelatedly, cinemas have been abbreviating @3Billboards in their film-listings for reasons for space, on the one hand, but, on the other, filled their wall-space with banners - in which what look like huge storage-heaters, or flat-screen t.v.s, menacingly advance. pic.twitter.com/V79XY8vPcW

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 20, 2018

It is almost cunning that we are reminded that it is the writer and director of In Bruges (2008), and not - for some reason - of Seven Psychopaths (2012)

One is trying not to think of the films that had punctuation in the title and one regretted watching, @3Billboards, but an overly stage-like mis-en-scène and central performance spring to mind... :https://t.co/Bk2rxe67ay pic.twitter.com/rff4taK1iF

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2018

Apart from which, In Bruges (2008) was sheer brilliance, and yet next... ?https://t.co/qDtIEfrVeQ pic.twitter.com/9Pt0XtU9AM

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2018

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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