Showing posts with label Steven Spielberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steven Spielberg. Show all posts

Saturday, 10 March 2012

What, if anything, can we learn from Project X?

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


11 March

To-night, I read Joe Walsh's condemnation of this film* on New Empress Magazine's web-site - at http://newempressmagazine.com/2012/03/in-review-project-x-2012/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewEmpressMagazine+%28New+Empress+Magazine+|+The+film+magazine+that+breaks+convention%29 - and it has prompted me to write the following (in addition to the comment made there):


What is the purpose of film?

Or does it have a variety of purposes, not all of which need be served at all - or not in the same scene?

I ask these questions, because Joe, in what he wrote, is clearly looking to what Project X might have been saying - but, in his not finding a 'moral arc', it neglects (did not seek?) to say - about responsibility and the consequences of our actions.

Reading between the lines of what he describes, I'm just guessing that the film didn't care** about anything more than a tokenistic reproof in the form of the simple slap on the wrist, which Joe, given what has gone before, finds inadequate.

Right, so what about Haneke's Funny Games (1997)***? The interview with Haneke that is included as 'an extra' on the DVD shows him saying two things:

(1) If one wants to stop watching the film, then it has served its purpose - and if one wants to watch it to the end, that is actually (he does not use these words) a less healthy impulse than saying that one has had enough.

(2) Relatedly, he reports what happened when Funny Games was shown at Cannes, at the moment when the mother, after her husband, son and she have been terrorized for a long time, succeeds in getting hold of the shotgun (some such gun) and kills one of the two teenagers. There was keen applause and acclaim from those present.

However, as they watched what happened, the other teenager swears a bit, rummages around for the t.v. remote-control, and - amazingly - winds back the action (as, in those days, one would a VHS cassette) to before his accomplice's killer gets the weapon, and ensures that she does not get near it a second time.

Cinematically, of course, that sequence is doing many things (as are the occasional addresses to the camera), but what concerns me is that it highlights the unremitting, unstoppable course of the reign that Tom and Jerry (or Peter and Paul - they have no real names) have over this family: they do what they do, because they enjoy it, and because they can.

I am not saying that there probably is any connection with whatever Project X may be, but neither film is going to make you feel at the end, as Spielberg almost invariably wants, gooey and that humanity has been redeemed - definitely not in Funny Games, where the pair of torturer killers just go on to further victims (whom they set up earlier).

In the same interview, Haneke is quite candid that his pair are stereotypes, his response to hearing reports that there were numbers of disaffected young people who committed such crimes for the sheer hell of it. In that case, then, really quite a straightforward 'moral arc', being the depiction of the ultimate absence of positive affect, unlike, say, Alex's journey through A Clockwork Orange (1971) (or, following the same actor, in O Lucky Man! (1973)).

Project X, I must infer, really is not in the same league, and sounds as though it is the vehicle - albeit a rather uncomfortable one - for jokes that did not pay off for Joe. So, essentially, the primary purpose of the film - even if it proves to have failed - is entertainment, and maybe a challenge in the form of being confronted with what the trio get up to.

Returning to Haneke for a moment, two of his films, Code Unknown (2000) and Hidden (2005), are related in being likely to provoke one of two reactions: either irritation that one is not being presented with a clear and unambiguous story, or seeing how he uses the medium to show what is uncertain or even unknowable about life, yet we have to - or are tempted to - fill in the gaps.

Which, of course, leads to 10 (1979), the impulse to pursue Bo Derek at any cost, just as Joe concludes that the message of Project X could be to say that similar abandonment of moral thinking is justified by the enjoyment to be had from one's actions.

In one film, though, the place that said Derek has occupied to the exclusion of Julie Andrews is seen for the mistake that it is (even if that realization on Dudley Moore's part may just seem a sop for all that has gone before), whereas it seems that Project X embodies a moral void, where maybe unnaturally rich and / or indulgent families overlook the excesses of the young (and I gather that they are quite excessive excesses).

Neither of these is a Pilgrim's Progress, neither a Crime and Punishment, and they do not bear further examination. But, in closing, they do make me think of this:

For all that Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck (unfinished at his death in 1837), however we come to approach it (e.g. through Berg's opera or Herzog's film), is, in study circles, routinely looked at as a piece of some sort of social archaeology (as Büchner studied the evidence of what had happened to the real Woyzeck in 1821), seeing the causes of Woyzeck's thoughts, and the actions resulting from them, in how he is treated as less than a person. (Black Swan (2011), more than 170 years later, appears to have very similar preoccupations, in considering how pressures can impact on an individual.)

Yet, in many ways, our psychiatric care in England and Wales often seems to struggle to comprehend those truths, which maybe the general public think self evident in Natalie Portman's portrayal, and that talking to a person and coming to understand his or her fears and concerns might be more humane than simply dosing up with haloperidol or the like: if you can imagine walking through treacle, or picture crossing a ploughed field and your feet gradually getting heavier and heavier, you will have some idea of what haloperidol does to a person and his or her self-worth.


End-notes

* I had previously satisfied myself that there would be 'no lasting benefit' from watching it, just by the cursory glance at a write-up that I recommend (in a mere five postings, beginning with The Future or How do you choose a satisfying film? (Part 1)): in this case, the 140 words or so in the booklet that the Arts Picturehouse produces every six weeks or so.

I deliberately use the phrase no lasting benefit, because, by text-message, I wished my friend Chris something to which the opposite applied when he was recently attending a conference in my home town.

He replied the following morning, wondering whether (since there is no such thing as 'an attendee') those words might apply in a different way from which it was intended to some of his fellow delegates: they would still be feeling, in all probability, every drop of how heavily they had been drinking, and doing so till 4.00 a.m.


** OK, I know that a film can't care or not care about anything (but it might have hurt feelings if it doesn't get shown very much), but a team of people put the thing together as a product and seek to market it for distribution - if that proves harder than it should be, the product gets changed (to the extent that it can be). The people who corporately bring the film into being and into circulation have intentions for it and how (pun intended!) it will be viewed.


*** I still find it bizarre that Haneke remade this film in English 10 years later, but I am referring to the original version (in German).


Monday, 23 January 2012

Peter Bradshaw dismounts from War Horse

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


23 January

Why quite at such length (six full paragraphs on 12 January), as some of Bradshaw's reviewing is distinctly on the 170-word side (OK, I am talking about the brevity with which, in comparison, he wrote - allegedly - dismissively about Sarah's Key!), for something that he really didn't like and gave two stars to, I do not know...

However, Bradshaw has done a decent job of demolishing Hobby Horse, I mean War Horse (whilst acknowledging what was good about The National Theatre production):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jan/12/war-horse-spielberg-film-review


Friday, 20 January 2012

Tired old nag of a film (1)

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


21 January

Anyone who may already haunt the web presence of New Empress Magazine will know that I have already been scathing about the premise, amongst other things, of Spielberg's latest, War Horse. (I think that I admitted there that I did not ever see Private Ryan, but truly never felt the need to do so.)

Well, I saw the trailer again in full and thought the same, but another NEM posting has softened my attitude to the origins of the piece, if not to the film itself, or to making a film of it, for two reasons: it still does not render it of any greater worth, to my mind, than the Disney true-life adventures that rather irritatingly punctuated my childhood, when I had most wanted from the week's Disney spot that evening was the adventures of Donald Duck or the like, but the esteemed British children's writer Michael Morpurgo had originally written it, and he had adapted it, in a highly successful way, for the stage.

So those, for me, are the parameters of the work, and, as for Spielberg's daughter - or somebody - loving horses and the play, that is really neither here nor there, except that you can be sure that (and no sour grapes, honestly), if I shared my liking for a very good pork-and-stilton pâté that I buy from my local farm shop, Steven wouldn't dreamwork up a treatment about the people who make it. The basis is a children's story, and so fits with much of what he directs, with its corny, schmalzy emphasis that somehow diminishes the big picture for the small story of some indviduals.

Oh, life is about individuals, and, in this and in Ryan, the idea of looking out for your mates in the theatre of conflict (why ever do we call it that?) is part of it, as in Band of Brothers (whose executive producers include, of course, the selfsame Spielberg and Ryan's own leader of a smaller such band, Tom Hanks), but not everything: militarily, sacrifices do need to be made, and deploying even eight men (at the risk of their lives) to save one man - for whatever reason - would have to be seen as one to be made an objective.

After all, the film of The Cruel Sea, as Simon Heffer has recently argued on Radio 3's late-night slot The Essay, tellingly depicts men in the water who think that they are to be rescued. However, the wider perspective is that it appears from sonar that a U-boat is underneath them, and dropping depth-charges, rather than saving them, has, hard though it is, to be the decision to make.

So, much as Matt Damon has become my mascot on these pages, he'd have to go. If children want to see a story about a horse, that's fine, but don't bother me with your take on it, Steven!