More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 January
On this day, there are Two ‘cancer stories’ for the price of one on Yahoo !
But how do such news items even get to us ? :
And, when people comment (who might stand to lose... ?), where is the bias (sc. ‘the truth’) ? :
Other than Woody Allen famously saying (through characters in his films, i.e. in the script) Hey, don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with the person I love most ! [Annie Hall (1977), we also have this (from Sleeper (1973)*) :
Female doctor : What we have done, Miles, is highly illegal and, if we get caught, we’ll be destroyed – along with you.
Miles Monroe: Destroyed ? What do you mean… ‘destroyed’ ?
Male doctor : Your brain will be electronically simplified.
Miles : My brain… ? – (wistfully) it’s my second favourite organ…
To be continued…
End-notes
* Both films were co-written with Marshall Brickman, as Allen has sometimes done (even recently) with Brickman and others…
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
24 June
Piercing Brightness (2013) gives a leading role to Preston, known, amongst other things, as a railway interchange in Lancashire. Another two things that it is apparently known for is the largest population or density of Chinese people in the UK, and, probably unrelatedly, the highest incidence of reported UFOs. (I hesitate to suggest that the link may be that the former group give rise to the high number of sightings, but many an inferred causality has been based on as slender findings.)
Sufficient reason, one may suppose, to set a film concerned with extra-terrestrial life in this city. The resultant photography, around Preston’s buildings and in its natural environment, was strikingly beautiful, both in themselves and as suggestive of connections that were later made more evident. To be honest, too evident, and that mystery and beauty was swept aside in favour of a Doctor-Who-type plot-line and a race to the finish whose inexplicability could only be grounds for suspecting an opening for a sequel.
Though, honestly, they can spare their breath on selling us another one, as even a paper-thin rationale would not have us believe that an exploratory force on Earth would just have contented itself with knowing all about Lancashire, even if it did first arrive there, and then some members of that ‘Glorious 100’ (a bit too much as if something from Blake’s Seven ?) was assimilated in the population by having the facility to choose a human identity (and so, perhaps, become too enmeshed in Earth life (Park Life ?)).
If I wanted value for money from such a force, tasked with some nebulous aim of helping humankind evolve, I don’t think that I’d be content for them to ignore the rest of the planet and seek to achieve it from a former mill-town. Glorious 100, camped out in Preston when there is a world of culture and of forms of life, seems a bit like a rather feeble ill-thought-out given.
For, despite the words and images that we heard at a – forbidden – assembly of some of the hundred, nothing plausible was offered in explanation, when this was supposed to be the participants navel-gazing at what had become of their mission, when the obvious heckle would have been ‘Shouldn’t have started wearing clogs and keeping a whippet’ (with all due apologies for using that regional stereotype !)
When the plot was kept from being real, i.e. not riddled with the ‘Four thousand holes’ that The Beatles located nearby (in ‘A Day in the Life’), the film worked, with, for example, the curious pair in white (Jiang and Shin) rescued from being laughable as they strode across the square by the ever-circling presence of the hooded bikers, or their room, when they are first hosted by Naseer (, being whited out in an unnatural way. Sadly, maintaining intrigue was not part of Shezad Dawood’s purpose.
No, for it was for the gods from Mount Olympus to show their feet of clay by smoking, drinking, and, by smoking indoors, getting slung out. Slung out of a club that, if it had needed as many men on the door, might have had evidence of more than a smattering of fellow clubbers – unless this is deep social commentary on poverty and austerity, but that still doesn’t explain why a club would pay for a disproportionate level of security.
When this film tried too hard, with Chen Ko as Jiang swaggering or downing a large cocktail in one, one just engaged the thinking ‘This isn’t going to go well’, but did not really care, and, even then, not much happened, except his being the worse for wear. Likewise, when Warner (Paul Leonard) is chasing after Naseer with Maggie (Tracy Brabin) in the car, the pursuit is immaterial, because one does not know what he is seeking (or seeking to avoid).
And then, whether it was the aspect ratio of the copy or the projection, there was the issue with seeing the sub-titles, which first of all made it seem as if our duo was uttering the equivalent of figures to each other, and so it did not seem to matter what they were saying, whereas, when the first sub-title spanned two lines, the top line was legible – and earnest, but banal, in the way that seems to typify the communication of alien beings after the original Star Trek series. Jennifer Lim (Shin) did her best to invest her role with the moody character of a Servalan, but the trite nature of the dialogue, when looks were subverted by words, did for that pretence.
As the almost ever-present menace, though, the hooded bikers, because a purely visual element, provided tension and atmosphere, which scenes of Maggie and her colleague stumbling through thickets failed to deliver: ironically, the alien life, which – we were told at one point – had become so adapted to Earth that it had lost its true nature, is more striking when it just seems to be local youth amusing itself, whereas the scenes of supposed sightings lacked impact and any intensity.
At this level, the film did play with the question of whether we would recognize life from another world, if we saw it. However, Dawood and his writer Kirk Lake did so, generally, in a very clunky way, which made it seem to be trying no harder than Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) in creating a futuristic world with which we are meant to engage:
In fact, take that back, because, in that early film, Allen and his collaborator Marshall Brickman have two outstanding inventive conceits in the orb and the orgasmatron, not to mention the automated operating-theatre, the hilarious spooling scene, the equally hilarious scene with the inflatable suit, and Allen himself masquerading as a domestic robot, and baulking when he finds out what happens at the mender’s...
If Piercing Brightness had had a tenth of that energy in the plot, characterization and dialogue to equal the strong visuals, it could have been immeasurably better and matched its opening promise !
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)9 MarchNow, don't get me wrong, because Allen has written some great screen parts for women, but I'm thinking - as I do incessantly, thoughts feverishing racing around my head, trying to catch up with each other and sometimes crashing - about this collection Mere Anarchy yet again.What does he read (or hear) that he writes such things in these stories for his male characters to write (or say) about women*?:* The twin dirigibles that stretched her silk blouse to the breaking point* Hoping to revel in tableaux of raven-tressed sinners looking like they’d come directly from the pages of a Victoria’s Secret catalogue as they undulated, seminude, in sulphur and chains* Once she wiggled her award-winning posterior into the liftNot, by any means, that sex - particularly oral sex - hasn't always been a preoccupation since Allen's earliest films (such as Bananas (1971), Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), and Annie Hall (1977)), but maybe, despite the humour (which is maybe a bit too unsubtle), it's that it passes by quickly onscreen as cheeky, rather than as smutty or prurient...End-notes* There is another in this collection of around 18 pieces, but I have mislaid it: it must be resting in Father Ted's account, I think. (None is narratated by a woman.)
