Tweets from Cambridge Film Festival 2016 : @SnowdenTheMovie (2016)

Tweets from Cambridge Film Festival 2016 about Snowden (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

27 October

Tweets from Cambridge Film Festival 2016 about Snowden (2016)

Snowden, which has only closing credits, turned out to be the Festival's Surprise Film - with a brief recorded greeting from director Oliver Stone - at 11.00 p.m. on Thursday 27 October, in Screen 2 at Festival Central

If @SnowdenTheMovie (2016) had dared to be more counter-factual, or less respectful, we might have had something more like @MostWantedManUK.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 28, 2016

A Most Wanted Man (2014)

Snowden (2016) appears to, but does not, tell us very much about needing [to defy] a Big-Brother-like father-figure : Rhys Ifans' huge head. pic.twitter.com/tFSYZmqusm

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 28, 2016

As Snowden briefly plays a sort of Nick Leeson cameo, maybe a need to mention Rogue Trader (1999) - whether even its telling engages more... pic.twitter.com/DgVdiaff49

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 28, 2016

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

My lobby boy !

This is a review of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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3 March

This is a review of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

One of the few films that not only understands the difference between an immigrant and a refugee, but will make you laugh, about it – and much else :

Seen at @CamPicturehouse, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) is huge fun: great detail, and killer lines delivered perfectly by Ralph Fiennes !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 3, 2014

Maybe one should not be surprised, but Fiennes (Gustave H.) brings such poise to this role that we happily accept all the absurdity, and embrace this ludicrous confection of an edifice (of the striking pinkness of a battenberg), with all its bygone airs and attitudes, themselves a passing metaphor for life. Set in some fictitious mountainous region with insistent balalaikas, but place-names in German, the film frolics through the confusion arising from the death of a regular guest – I sleep with all my friends, says Gustave H. disarmingly (though to his cost) at the assembly of the relatives hearing her last wishes.

The old saying goes Where there’s a will, there are relatives, and many a Bond villain had less of a henchman than the deceased’s (Tilda Swinton’s, as Madame D.) offspring do in Willem Dafoe (Jopling), who casually throws the executor attorney Deputy Kovacs’ (Jeff Goldblum’s) prized possession out of the window (he, like Llewyn Davis, even likes to travel with it). The name of her son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) keeps up this tenuous Russian connection, but avoiding much imputation that his real wickedness is any more than heightened avarice, since real misdeeds are always best delegated.

The film is a romp, with, amongst other things, a deliberately over-complicated series of frames*, a series of sight-gags (for example, the old one of knocking on a huge door, and a small door opens), and crisply composed shots of alpine-type absurdities** (such as lifts and gantries that allow one access to a statue of a stag rampant). With many big names taking cameos, and a carefully crafted script, the film soars because of how Fiennes embodies Gustave H. and has comic timing that many on the stand-up circuit would die for :

F. Murray Abraham and Jude Law in their capacities* do the job, but the sheer lightness and deftness of touch of Fiennes is matchless. Of course, they are foils for him, as Tony Revolori is as young Zero (though not without his own visual expressiveness, and the running joke of telling Fiennes to stop flirting with his fiancée), but that in no way detracts from his achievement here, for the film would fall flat without the ebullience, charm and flair of Gustave H. The comparison is inexact, but imagine Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) without the bubbliness of Julie Andrews…


End-notes

* Tom Wilkinson is a revered writer (credited as Author), with a bizarre monument seen visited by a woman with a copy of his Hotel book (no author’s name on it), whose younger self (Jude Law as Young Writer) stays at the hotel and talks to and hears the story of the older Zero Mustafa (F. Murray Abraham), whose younger self (Tony Revolori) is a lobby boy at the hotel, in training under Fiennes.

** Ralph Fiennes, in the Q&A for The Invisible Woman, described himself as ‘obsessive’ – in this world that Wes Anderson has created, the attention to detail is minute.


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

Match Point re-made with a Macbeth split in two

This is a review of Cassandra's Dream (2007)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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2 November (watched on DVD)

This is a review of Cassandra's Dream (2007)

* Contains spoilers *

It was highly commercially successful, but that fact provides me with no reason to have liked Match Point (2005), whose flaws outweighed the Dostoyevskyian tones that it brought to re-entering the territory of Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989).

By contrast, I believe that Cassandra's Dream (2007) is not merely leaps, but bounds, ahead, and cannot relate to the admittedly many critics who pan this later film, thinking it a falling-off of quality from what I do not detect in the earlier film : it is not merely that we are willing Jonathan Rhys Meyers (as the Raskolnikov-like Chris Wilton) to get caught, but - despite Allen's valiant attempt at a plot with a twist - he would have done, and he failed to command my attention in the way that Martin Landau does (as Judah Rosenthal) sixteen years earlier.

Dream gives me many more things to like - Sally Hawkins as the older (?) brother Terry's (Colin Farrell's) wife Kate, a convincing portrayal of mental ill-health and of addictive gambling, the allure of Angela (Hayley Atwell) as the other brother Ian's (Ewan McGregor's) girlfriend and his vaulting, reckless ambition, a soundtrack by Philip Glass, a creepy, self-obsessed Tom Wilkinson (as Uncle Howard)...

A perfect crime to do the generous Uncle Howard a favour (generous, but at whose cost ?), but, just as Wilton is under the pressure of denying the voices of his victims in the night, it is really all too much, and what one has steeled oneself to (and still nearly does not do) will not allow one to rest : the two parts of the Macbethean psyche are divided against each other, and one seeks survival at the other's expense.

What the brothers wanted and gambled for they find themselves having never valued very much when the time comes, and, just as they did not heed Cassandra at the outset, so they do not at the close. The words of Uncle Howard, differently meant, could almost be hovering on the air :

In the end, all you have in this life that you can count on is family


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