Frank, we did all we could for the man ~ Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci)

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20 December

To be watching for 207 mins in a venue that I didn't know before (my first time at @RoystonPictureP - not my last !), I tried to make sure of booking an aisle-seat (only to find that I mistook the layout...) :

It really was no endurance for me whatever, as Scorsese knows pacing.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 27, 2019

The scenes when Frank Sheeran (De Niro) is being honoured at a testimonial, and Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino) presents him with his award, may not be the chronological centre of The Irishman (2019), but – placing those scenes, on a re-watch – the rest of the film spirals out from there...

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 7, 2020

With much hindsight, this is where Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) sees that tempers and tensions spiralled out of control - for the film, it's where the Bufalinos' and Sheerans' road-trip and this other narrative converge, and the long haul of De Niro's performance richly pays off.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 8, 2020

¹ Although reacquiring the means to get there was just before @camfilmfest (agonizingly too close not to be thoroughly exhausted by then...)

² First seen at @RoystonPictureP, now run and programmed by Saffron S.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 7, 2020

Need we really consider Joker (2019) as some sort of Scorsese film – or The Irishman (2019) as Scorsese’s contribution to the film universe of Marvel ? :

Todd Phillips, in 122 mins, outstays his welcome and wastes his chances in Joker (2019), whereas Martin Scorsese (in his film-adaption of Charles Brandt's book) stays the course in the 209 mins of The Irishman (2019) (another film with Robert De Niro), and makes the run-time tell

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 21, 2019

Meanwhile, in some other universe (when it is Phillips who grossly steals from Scorsese's films, but not in any way to justify the theft), does someone seriously suggest that the indebtedness is the other way around, in 'Why 'The Irishman' Is Scorsese's MCU Movie' !


[...]


Postlude :

'Kathrine Narducci, Kevin O'Rourke, Jesse Plemons, Welker White, Stephanie Kurtzuba, Gino Cafarelli, Marin Ireland, Michele Cannon, and Robin Kerbis in The Irishman (2019)'

Their agents must have been working over time to secure such a pointless accreditation ! ;)

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 27, 2019

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I like beating people !

This is a review of The Armstrong Lie (2013)

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1 February

This is a review of The Armstrong Lie (2013)

* Contains spoilers *

One cannot help wondering whether writs (US) or claim forms (England & Wales)* will be flying over Alex Gibney’s film The Armstrong Lie (2013) (which takes its title from the headline of an article in L’Equipe [in English, The Team], ‘Le Mensonge Armstrong’).

The reason is given both by Armstrong’s litigious history, and the fact that, for example, accusations are made (even if made elsewhere before) about the connivance of the governing body’s officials with Armstrong about test-results that should have concerned them (more), the suggestion being that they gave those such as Armstrong a generous chance to come up with an explanation for positive findings : the film not only shows Armstrong presenting the cover-story that he had been prescribed a cream for saddle-sores whose use had caused him to register for steroids, but also how it is claimed, by those working with him, that, after hearing of the problem, they had trawled for a plausible excuse and found one in the cream (after which, presumably, a prescription being made out, as if on the relevant date, was the least of anyone’s worries).

Is though, in fact, the title The Armstrong Lie a partial misnomer, for, at least in part, the film revolves around (but never, maybe, centres on ?) all Armstrong’s denial that he doped, and on how he presented matters in a way favourable to him, as well maintaining the status quo, by such means as suing into submission those who spoke out ? Maybe reprehensible for a sportsman, who seems to have sacrificed friends Frankie and Betsy Andreu to defending his position, but all perfectly normal PR work of seeking to limit damage, one might cynically say, even if it does concern the emotive world of sport and the legendary feat of endurance that is Le Tour.

In fact, one could wager that the handling of what we might cause ‘the issue’ of illegal performance-enhancing drugs and even mid-race blood transfusions is probably textbook for the world of PR, and to place all the blame / responsibility on Armstrong, when, clearly, he had legal and medical advisers and so was not going to be short of the means and nous to employ advisers who could manipulate the media – the truth even – is short sighted. (In fact, as advisers, they would probably have urged on him such likely consequences, if he did not (and did not pay them for helping), as bans and litigation to recover payments that had been made, which the close of the film neutrally uses words on the screen (not, say, Gibney’s voice) to convey to us.

Imagine that this film were on an adjoining screen (as it probably was) to that showing the morally somewhat ambiguous portrayal of the world of the real Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) (or, for that matter, the fraudulent activity of American Hustle (2013), another film recently in this very Screen 3, and which more definitely makes entertainment out of a true story). About Wolf, a presumably responsible critic of the calibre of Peter Bradshaw (writing in The Guardian) wants to say :

The Wolf of Wall Street does not quite have the subtlety and richness of Scorsese's very best work, but what an incredibly exhilarating film: a deafening and sustained howl of depravity.


What is the moral relativism operative here ? The narrative of the exploits of a man (Belfort) who happily sold people with nothing to speak of (other than their savings – and some greed) stock of whose worth he had no concerns to claw his way back after the 1987 crash is being lauded for depravity**. Whereas Armstrong is castigated for what seems like having gone in too deep and with no way back (except that no one seems to have made him go in for the Tour de France again in 2009, when Gibney was making a film about him, a film that, despite / because of Armstrong’s coming third (and what then unfolded), had to be put on hold for four years).

Of course, Lance Armstrong is no Macbeth, but the words of Act 3, Scene 4 of Shakespeare’s play have a certain resonance [Macbeth has just had his friend Banquo killed by men to whom he lied about who had kept them in lowly positions (he claims that it had been Banquo) – what about Armstrong, as we were told, only agreeing to interviews with Frankie Andreu, of all people (see below, following the quoted Tweet), during the 2009 Tour and then making him wait every time as another chilling way of abusing a (former) friendship and rubbing it in Andreu’s face ?) :

[…] I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

In The Armstrong Lie (2013), Alex Gibney himself doesn't know what kind of film he is making, so what chance do we have ? Confusing / long.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 1, 2014

Never mind Andreu, though. Gibney makes it quite clear in his commentary that he was personally affronted at how he felt treated that Armstrong denied doping to him – as if Armstrong were honestly going to do anything else, when he had weathered such storms as The Andreus’ depositions (in front of whom they said that he told the truth about his treatments to the doctor with care of him), and then employed people who did not care what means they used to destroy their credibility (they did not know whether the doctor in the room at the time was male or female, what the room was like, etc.).

On the view that Armstrong was in so deep that he felt / was told that he had to continue denial, damaging testimony is heard in court, and a legal mind for hire will be used to defeat it, so Gibney was not going to be let into the truth. Equally clearly, from what he said, he felt that he should have known, so out of what motive has he made his film ?

As to the quality of the film itself, the best documentaries do not tell a story for effect in a distorted way, even if one acknowledges that they typically have scores of hours of footage to distil into 90 to 120 minutes – ‘a good bit’ simply has to be left out if it does not tell the story, not inserted with a shoe-horn, and it does not help to have too many strands to it. Here, Gibney seems to have been desperate not to lose too many of ‘the good bits’ from what he shot in 2009, before the film was interrupted, and so he has combined them with what came from 2013, but not necessarily to good effect.

Not necessarily, because one often enough cannot tell whether it is from the earlier or the later period that he is showing footage. When it comes to narrating / telling the route to the come-back Tour of 2009, it seems clear enough that Armstrong has had cancer at some point between 2005 (around the time of his seventh win) and the decision to race again. (This seemed to have been the testicular cancer that Armstrong describes ?) But Gibney does not trouble himself, in the structure and content of his film, to distinguish this period of having cancer from an earlier one, which, when one learns of it, makes one doubt whether one might have misunderstood why Armstrong had been out of competition from 2005 to 2009. Wrong-footing the viewer in that way achieves little.

A simple telling of the key facts and dates in Armstrong’s life would certainly have helped. Perhaps not everyone knew very much about Armstrong, so it might have included where and when he was born, because we only went to the footage of Armstrong as a sixteen-year-old in Texas quite a bit later on (when, in the words that head this review, he boasted his competitive and athletic nature)…

Of course, no film need be linear, but there is not a lot of point, for example, in editing one’s film in such a way that the concept of ‘the yellow jersey’ (le maillot jaune) is explained when it has already been introduced once or twice (and, at the time, with the seeming assumption that viewers knew what it meant) : as with editing text, defining something when it is first mentioned is the rule of thumb (unless, of course, one wishes to keep one’s audience waiting for a purpose). As to the substance EPO, perhaps we did not need a structure diagram on the screen or to have spelt out what it stands for (which Michele Ferrari could surely have done), but it was as nebulous as the jersey : eventually, the film told us that Armstrong and others, under Ferrari’s direction, were having injections, but Gibney was not that careful, again, to tell us enough about it before he came to the involvement of Ferrari, when it may have been too late.

How feature films are put together will be quite different, but there will be the same journey, in editing, of finding that a scene ‘does not work’ or has to be put later / earlier than envisaged, and, unless someone is to remain ambiguous as to identity, introduced in such a way that the viewer will remember who he or she is / what his or her name is. Makers of documentaries tend to imagine that, despite what else is going on in the soundtrack or on the screen, it suffices to say in a caption who someone is the first time that we see him or her. However, if I do not know that Bicycling is a magazine, defining the person on the screen in relation to it by its title does not tell me that he or she is a journalist in the field of cycling.

Along with the fact that the caption will only, at most, be visible for the length of the clip, this may not be enough for the audience not to be in doubt that they have seen this person before, but not to recall his or her significance in the story. The point is of general application to documentaries, but also relevant here : a happy medium between giving the person a caption every time (which is overkill), and also bearing in mind how and how frequently voice-over is to be used.

At root, one wonders a little why Gibney came back to this project. Even saying that, three hours after Armstrong’s appearance in interview with Oprah Winfrey, he was in front of Gibney’s equipment (according to a caption). Did he expect something from Gibney, and what did Gibney hope for ? As one could only tell from whether the content had to be pre- or post-Oprah, it was hard to place when Gibney had filmed him, and this constituted another part of the cloudiness of the story-telling – nothing against a story that throws out clues that cohere to explain something at 40 minutes in that was unclear after only 10, but this did not have the air of being that sort of film-making : it just was unclear what Armstrong said to Gibney, or did not say, three hours after appearing on t.v.

The film did have (thanks to Ben Bloodwell’s work) astonishingly beautiful ways of photographing cycling, whether a group of riders, at a distance, ascending an incline before a wondrous ridge, or some really inventive shots from closer to the action, and, for those not familiar with the madcap world of Le Tour and its carnival, it had these people unbelievably posting themselves in the cyclists’ way to get a picture (and no one stopping them doing it) ! What it did not have, despite these strong points, was an idea of where it was going and how the viewer would be taken along :

The film does not know whether it is a film about a man who doped, a man and his colleagues who decided to dope when everyone else was doping, a man who let a film-maker down, a man who betrayed friends and kept up his denial as long as possible, or even about cycling. If Gibney ever asked Armstrong why he risked exploding everything by going back in 2009, he shows no answer in the film, but (even in hindsight) it seems the key question to have put forward.

The only explanation that we have why, in the face of the allegations of the kind made L’Equipe (which even seemed to have changed its tune about Armstrong come 2009) and The Andreus, no one told the truth for so long is in simple, mantra-like repetition of the word omertà, which is not properly translated or put in context by Gibney’s film. On a literal understanding of that word of defiance, federal agents or police officers should not have broken ‘the code of silence’, whereas, in this film, of course they trumped it.

In conclusion, perhaps there, too, Gibney took for granted that his film and what he showed in it made sense and fitted together as a whole. It does not, and, along with the desire of the score to extract anxiety from moments too often and for too long, misjudges its effect just as directly as when a writer tries to proof his own work and is too easily satisfied that what he or she intended to write is what is actually being read, overlooking the typos, the missing or repeated words, or an edit of a sentence that leaves it incoherent.


End-notes

* The writ (or its County Court equivalent, the summons) has not existed for two decades, although the media still like to use the word : they misguidedly think that it sounds more stylish to say Z has issued a writ against B.

** Surely, part of the effect that Scorsese was seeking – after all, there was no way that, although he also makes documentaries, he was going to throw away the doubtful / would-be glamour and glitz that only treatment in a feature could give to the story.


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What does Rotten Tomatoes tell us about Wolf ?

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23 January


www.rottentomatoes.com is notorious for summarizing a critical review as 'fresh' tomatoes, a so-called glowing one as 'rotten' - one doubts that there is much human intervention in scanning the review, or at all beyond the star-rating and the closing words, and some would invoke what they have learnt to call an algorithm (even though all of computers and the Internet are algorithms at work).

That said, one can pretty quickly pick out some choice pieces of slating a film such as The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), or some pieces of enthusiastic endorsement that might be unsaid, if people had not embarrassingly already read them, and here are some quotations from the former category about this film :

By the way, the collector’s version of The Wolf of Wall Street, and if Scorsese gets wise the Director’s Version, will consist of just one scene. It is by far the best: it comes at the beginning and says everything crisply that doesn’t need to be shoutily repeated over and over. Matthew McConaughey, never better, has a shark-featured cameo as young Belfort’s first-day mentor. He is totally hilarious, a lean, airy-gestured, epigrammatic, mad-as-a-fox cynic and crypto-sociopath: just the man to ensure good order in Moneyville as the young striped shirts learn to get in formation with the striped coke lines.

Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

One can’t help but think the film’s early enemies were asking the wrong question. Scorsese and DiCaprio have argued that no approval of Belfort’s activities is implied. This is true enough. But both men are certainly experienced enough to understand cinema’s ability to allow decent people a little recreational paddling in vicarious immorality. Scorsese’s Goodfellas – whose grammar and rhythms Wolf apes – would not be nearly so entertaining if it concerned dishonest ice cream salesmen.

and

At times, the film seems almost Hobbitian in its inability to finish a scene that is already well past its natural lifespan. It’s not often one encounters a film that could, quite comfortably, lose an entire hour. But, clocking in at 180 minutes, Wolf is just that picture. It hardly needs to be said that it’s brilliantly edited and superbly acted – Jonah Hill is hilarious as Belfort’s slippery lieutenant – but the endless repetition would wear down even the most fervent Philip Glass fan.

Donald Clarke, The Irish Times ('fresh' for giving it three stars ?)

The Wolf of Wall Street, adapted from the autobiography by the disgraced stockbroker Jordan Belfort, looks back adoringly at the sort of cavalier corruption that precipitated the recent economic crisis. There is something intriguingly contrary, even foolhardy, about asking audiences to marvel at the high jinks and profligacy that have reshaped their world for the worse.

and

Scorsese frames Belfort like a rock god, placing the camera behind him as he delivers sermons to the whooping stooges who fill an office floor that stretches towards infinity. If the film aspires ultimately to be an indictment, then it is one with tiny love hearts doodled in the margins, which is no kind of indictment at all.

and

Any oxygen in the film comes from the softly electrifying Kyle Chandler as Patrick Denham, the FBI agent trying to bring Belfort to book.

Ryan Gilbey, New Statesman

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Who is this film about ?

This is a misguided review of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

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22 January

* Contains spoilers *

This is a misguided review of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Maybe it’s the season of empty films – they have content and length, but all that they tell you is that : humankind can survive adversity; given long enough someone can be suckered in a huge way; and people can believe that they have rights over another person and his or her life [and that is not only slavery] : they are virtually the plot of platitude.

When it comes to The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), we think that Martin Scorsese might mix things up a bit and confuse, but he gives us Jordan Belfort (Leonardo diCaprio), a character whom, we might remember, we have no more reason to believe than when he tells us that, with the $5,000’s worth of stock that he is offering, we will kill ourselves that we did not buy more : we even have reality change before our eyes, as he tells us that his car was that model, but in white, not red, adjusting the pictures to what he says happened. (Yes, there is a tie to reality, because the credits tell us that the film is based on Belfort’s book, but that never means very much.)

If we skip that opening sequence, when Belfort is adjusting live action to accord with what he says happened, we are simply ‘buying’ what he tells us, occasionally by voice-over, but largely by people, things, events just being on the screen, and Scorese surely gives us a big clue that we should reserve judgement. If not, it is just Jordan’s way, all the way. Think about his first day at work : the film does not dwell on his being told that he is pond life, but instead on a man who can pull rank on the person using that description and, rather improbably, invite Belfort to a bizarre lunch on the strength of the fact that Belfort did something unusual to get noticed in his application. Is this objective reality, or the world of Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man ! (1973)?

The time between then (and the advice given at lunch, including to have hookers, snort cocaine, and jerk off twice per day) and Belfort becoming a broker is passed over, but with the big thump of 1987’s Black Monday to bring him down, though not for long. And then there is the core of people with whom he surrounds himself, one (Jonah Hill as Donnie Azoff) for little better reason as to whether he could sell parasols in Spain than that he provides Belfort with a really good high – yes, natural enough that Belfort should want to set up his own concern, but why with these people, foisted on us as his characters ?

Think back thirty years to Once Upon a Time in America (1984) – or earlier films about the world of organized crime – and that same coterie of those trusted with the innermost details. Scorsese does not just want us to watch what is happening and lap it all up – is that the approach that he intends with Taxi Driver (1976), just that we should go with what happens and think that the actions of Travis Bickle deserve to be celebrated ?

We have Belfort talk shaven pubic hair with his father (and the older man wish that he were younger, although he likes ‘the bush’), and we are suckered if we take him snorting cocaine off a girl’s rear as any more than a parody of possibility, of maybe what did happen all so often in the world of brokerage, but is not told us to prove that it could and did happen, but what it meant that it happened.

At the same time, Scorsese is playing with us, if we want to feel respect for Belfort for once giving a cheque for $25,000 to a woman now working for him who needed the money, if we want to be energized by Shakespeare’s Henry V, the speech that Kenneth Branagh lionized to stir and inspire his troops, or if we want to feel that there is humour in the scene where he learns that his phone is bugged (in fact, nothing comes of that) and, having ingested some arcane substance shared by Azoff and him (for reasons that are unclear), drives home to get Azoff off the phone.

Belfort is not a (submerged) narrator who tells everything to his advantage (e.g. reversing the car with his young daughter in it into a post in an effort to get her away from his wife, who wants a divorce and the children), but the broad thrust of things is how we wants to tell them, such as (seemingly spontaneously) not doing a deal that will remove him for his company, but ending up doing those who work for it far more harm as a consequence so that he ends up with just thirty-six months’ incarceration – grand, impulsive gestures, but just because he can, out of some sense of freedom, of who he is.

Amidst the glitz, the sex, the drug-taking, the nudity, taking what one can when one can*, ripping someone off because one can talk them into what, with reflection, they would never do, does one seek for something else, or feel that one might as well have done the same, if everyone else was doing so ? So is it a film about Belfort’s character-type, or about all of us, if we could, if we dared, if we admitted that we wanted to ? If we have just watched it on the surface, the answer is there : we have dreamed and lived the life with Belfont, and what is the challenge to being implicated ?
Maybe the whole film is a plea in mitigation to the judge, saying how he had never heard such language before he started working on the trading-floor, and showing how his behaviour became provocative, coarse, abrasive?


Post-script

According to Matthew Toomey's review :

Brought to the screen by iconic director Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas, The Departed), The Wolf Of Wall Street has generated controversy. Detractors believe that the film glorifies Belfort’s actions given its many comedic scenes and its lack of a moralistic conclusion. That was certainly not Scorsese’s intention. He didn’t want audiences to leave the cinema feeling better and thinking that the problem has been solved. He “wanted them to feel like they’d been slapped into recognising that this behaviour has been encouraged.” The film’s final scene is haunting in that regard.


See here what others reviews say...



End-notes

* And yet Belfort, until Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie) unequivocally offers herself to him in sex that he pulls no punches in saying lasted only eleven seconds (until he had something in reserve), is on the verge of going home to his wife).


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