Showing posts with label Stephen Fry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stephen Fry. Show all posts

Friday 23 January 2015

No cat got any cream

This is a slighting, bullet-point review of The Cat’s Meow (2001)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


23 January

This is a slighting, bullet-point review of The Cat’s Meow (2001)

Dared The Cat’s Meow (2001) on DVD, picked up some time in Fopp’s (@FoppCambridge’s) £2 section for traded-in items. Surprisingly, its attempt at 1924 pleased Den Eltern (the principal aim in buying it some while back and now showing it), but (not in any order) :

* The production-budget was so low that players of sax and banjo were clearly miming, not just the singer whom first we saw

* One never felt that one was aboard a vessel of remotely the size of the one shown in harbour or at sea – momentarily, from time to time, as an unconvincing impression of both movement and the insularity of the action

* In fact, one was all too aware that the interiors were stage-sets, and that action had to be kept indoors (perhaps not implausibly for November, were we not cruising from San Pedro, Los Angeles ?)

* That said, cinematically, director Peter Bogdanovich had avoided, with all the suitable help (of Steven Perros, with a credit for adapting his own stage-play), making it look like a filmed drama

* Yet its dialogue increasingly sounded like one, and it always owed much of its attempt to be a closed world to Murder on The Orient Express (1974) (though not musically, of course, which Sir Richard Rodney Bennett scored so expertly)

* It never claimed to be (based on) a true story, and had the usual disclaimer, but it still liked to give a different impression (with its prologue and postlude)

* It says much that Joanna Lumley was the best thing about it, but, with the ponderous attempt at significance in giving the closing voice-over (as we faded to black), also nearly the worst


William Randolph Hearst

* Eddie Izzard (@eddieizzard) was no Chaplin of interest, and Hugh Laurie (@hughlaurie) would have risen to the challenge better, as would even Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) in substitution for the dismal Edward Herrmann as WR (even if he looked alike) – and not just because of the obvious period link with Jeeves and Wooster

* It told its story well enough, but only with the sort of subtlety that takes in those who feel able to congratulate themselves on their insight into what is coming next on The Archers, so lights on faces in implausible or impossible places, and everything angled to oblige the eye to look in only the desired direction

* It is indicative why Bogdanovich was, prior to it, credited with TV movies (via IMDb (@IMDb)), and returned to them – this is just what The Cat's Meow most resembled...




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

Tuesday 22 October 2013

Mental-health in-fighting

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


22 October

There is a well-worn claim that a person with an experience of schizophrenia is called a schizophrenic, whereas a person who has cancer is not called a cancerist.

But we do call people diabeticshaemophiliacs, coeliacshypochondriacs, hysterics, alcoholics, etc., and half of those nouns relate to physical conditions.

Yes, it is nicer not 'to define someone' by reference to their health, but the cancer argument employed is a bogus one, not least since I believe that people do sometimes relate to hearing that someone has cancer on an irrational level, of its being karma / punishment, or as if the cancer is infectious, or the person can no longer be related to as a person, but as only a substrate for a deadly disease : dehumanizing the person, by only seeing him or her in terms of the spread - or remission - of the cancer(s). (In another posting, I suggested how mental ill-health is not different from, but exactly like, a broken leg.)

Some people object to the term service-user, saying that they did not choose to have mental-health services (they were cajoled, coerced, sectioned, medicated against their will, mistreated (when they were supposed, ironically, to be treated in the system's own terms)), others simply do not care, even if they have had the same experiences, and are not worried about a need to challenge use of the word.

In similar ways, some have a diagnosis thrust upon them, and struggle to feel content with someone else defining their experience in that way, whereas others, refused a service unless they have a diagnosis, embrace one, and feel that it validates.

Of course, that sense of validation, of finally being believed, could relate just as much to the situation of someone with what turns out to be a brain tumour, who succeeds in persuading someone to carry out a scan and whose findings account for their bizarre or troubling symptoms, previously discounted on supposed medical grounds.

Or there could be a person who is happy with his or her body-shape at 22 stone, and who rejects the notion of being obese - and, if it is not interpreted as a mental-health issue (with implications for a forced admission), but, say, as a lifestyle choice, he or she is free (subject to these irritating medical promptings) to do as he or she pleases with his or her body.

So, returning to the question of diagnosis, one person might be able to get help, because of a diagnosis, whereas a person, supported with a diagnosis of bi-polar disorder, might then be denied support, if it is claimed that it was a misdiagnosis and that he or she has borderline personality disorder (and vice versa, the latter likely to be a case where he or she is pleased with the new diagnosis, which he or she has probably been fighting to have recognized as 'a better fit').

And then there is so-called depression (because I believe that the word has outlived its usefulness - unless it can be 'reclaimed' - when too many people think that it just means being a bit sad, that the person described as being depressed is lazy, shamming, not trying as they would, and that they know what it means, when they do not). I took issue with @StephenFry likening depression to a meteorological cold front, which, like the wind, rain or snow, just is until it is over :

I honestly thought that having that debate might make people question whether low mood and negativity really just are, or whether some people might be helped - some of the time - by psychological intervention, as practitioners and writers such as Paul Gilbert want to say (e.g. Gilbert's self-help book, Overcoming Depression). Fry's message of waiting for the good days to come may work at one level, where crashing for two or three days may allow one to regroup and feel restored / revived, but what if that crashing could be avoided, or, at least, postponed to a less critical time ?

It is this polarity of the discussions in mental-health circles that frustrates me : Fry was no doubt wishing to be helpful, but seemed didactic in his statement, as if to the exclusion of the possibility that sessions with a psychologist might make an improvement such as described. Likewise, those 'saddled with' a diagnosis (and, maybe, poor or no treatment) seem to be at odds with those who, as suggested, might have had their beliefs about themselves confirmed by one.

When one person, wanting to feel safe from impulses to commit suicide (which I maintain is an acceptable expression), might benefit from feeling safe on an acute psychiatric ward, someone who is at a level of depression not just to be numbed to what is happening might equally experience it as too lively, too fuelled by the activity of those whose mood is at the opposite extreme to be a therapeutic environment - and they, too, might find each other's psychotic assertions frightening and disturbing, which is hardly likely to lead to peace and a lowering of anxiety.

Is a ward such as that, then, a microcosm of the flare-ups that the mental-health element of Twitter seems to accommodate, perhaps even invite or spark ? Or is it no different from any topic where feelings are running high on both sides ?




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

Sunday 12 May 2013

The Agent Apsley on depression

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


12 May

To open* :



Since I Tweeted this, I shall say more (to @stephenfry, or - as he may not - anyone who cares to listen) :



What did this refer to ? :

Depression isn't a straightforward response to a bad situation, depression just is, like the weather.


Where I saw it, it wasn't properly punctuated (unlike here), and no source was given (true elsewhere) :




Excuse the poor quality of another's reproduction of his letter, but it seems that he wrote something similar, just at more length, to someone called Crystal seven years ago (10 April 2006**), shown at http://missbeautifullydepressed.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/depression-is-like-the-weather/


But is Fry right, or do such analogies hamper us 'getting to grips with' the negative thinking, patterns of self-depreciation, and modes of cataclysmic reaction, which might make life better, in time ?


If I'm wrong - and Fry's right - then people like Wilhelm Reich with his cloud-busting*** just has no place in a world where a crap day is a crap day, but it will pass... Forget Reich, but, as some will also know, clouds can be seeded - and so, in this respect, we can manipulate when (and so where) rain will fall.

That doesn't destroy Fry's analogy : it's the message, though, of sheer helplessness that he seems to convey in :

In the same way that one has to accept the weather, so one has to accept how one feels about life sometimes.


You'd think that no one (who can afford to) spends the winter in (what they hope will be) warmer climes - or even just (with a car) drives out of the rain (or into it, for that matter).

Staying with this powerlessness of just waiting for things to get better, or just feeling myself going low and allowing it to happen, is not what I spent a dozen or so sessions with a psychologist for, or why I read parts of Paul Gilbert's book Overcoming Depression, about compassion, self-hatred, and the like. 

No, I believe that @stephenfry's message is a negative and unhelpful one for anyone and everyone to hear - I have experienced being able to seed (or bust) those clouds, and I want to escape from this meteorological notion of the inevitably of depressions and cold fronts, which is, as far as I am concerned, not 'reality', as Fry claims, but barometric.


End-notes

* Quoting the spirit of Words and Music, one of Beckettt's plays for radio.

** He seems to favour the ever-encroaching US format for dates... He also writes (about the weather) It isn't under one's control as to when the some [sic] comes out, but come out it will. One day.

*** An experience that Kate Bush alludes to in 'Running up that hill' (from the album Hounds of Love), probably drawing on Peter Reich's (Reich's son') book.


Thursday 9 May 2013

Stephen Fry on depression

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


10 May

It all started with this Tweet :




It sparked off :




And :





And - am I being quite reasonable ? - then :




Perhaps because I have lately disputed the common claim that mental ill-health isn't like a broken leg, which people can see - in my posting Mental ill-health is exactly like a broken leg !



Any thoughts, anyone ? Stephen Fry has (apparently)...


@theagentapsley Well I was speaking for/patronising myself actually.


Well, after Tony and Control, there's always that get-out, @stephenfry...




More here now...



Sunday 20 May 2012

What's the difference between a t.v. celebrity and a judge?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


21 May

If you start a song, both will quickly determine that they want you to stop, but the judge might even possess a good singing voice

One holds court and puts everyone else in their place, whereas the other fits hearing the case in around having a good lunch

When two judges meet socially, they talk about the latest play or film, and so do the celebrities, but bitching about who undeservedly got the role that they should have had

With a judge, that is the person who hears a case at trial, whereas the t.v. celebrity is just a case of being a trial to hear