Showing posts with label Woody Allen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Woody Allen. Show all posts

Friday 2 January 2015

A rag-bag of bits (not yet a review) about Tim Burton's Big Eyes (2014)

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 (Tweets added, 6 and 10 January)


* * *


There's a point where the latter, maybe, over-reach themselves in their enthusiasm for their story : is it worth telling just because true ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 18, 2015


* * *


Actually, it's gonna stay like this - mimetic of the dead weight to which probably ~250 souls were yoked... :




Introductory : Tim Burton and MDH Keane :







guilt / eyes on stalks / supermarket / confession
-> Dalí / Spellbound / David Lynch














Yes, she is in shadow – in the dark, till she leans forward with her portfolio to force out a pitch for this unsuitably demeaning job, a feeling hammered home by drawing back to show countless others painting that image on the head of a cot : oh, but no explaining how the cots all got in and out of that big room, once each one had been finished…

 And, hey, people seemed to have staple-guns in the late 1950s, and to use them to display posters on tree-trunks, so where were the (high-quality) transfers that, in this age - endlessly stressed to be of mass production à la Warhol (it’s a wonder that his ‘fifteen minutes’ utterance was not shoe-horned in !) - would have superseded most hand decoration ? The point being that there were impossibly too many workers (i.e. painters) to sustain whatever market for hand-decorated furniture there would likely have been…

So what is it, then, to draw back to show Margaret Keane amid so many fellow workers ? A momentary Hello to Welles’ The Trial (1962), or Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), which plays unnecessarily heavily, just for a moment, the ‘one amongst many’ card, the pathos / the destitution of Margaret’s position – and to hell with (as above) it makes any sense, because it is a sort of irresistible sight-gag, best resisted ? After all (in this joke of an interview), the boss of the furniture business could just as easily have said The job’s yours, but you’re just painting motifs on bedheads like everyone else :

 Why not ? Well, the film’s writers / makers are too busy thinking that everyone will have fun with their half-hearted telling of what is based on a true story, complete with opening endorsement (no doubt, if real, written for him by someone at The Factory ?) of Walter Keane from Warhol. In the scene in the gallery with Ruben (Jason Schwartzman, trying very hard with some very slim script pickings), where Keane loses him a sale and then fatuously implausibly proceeds to try to get Margaret’s and his work taken, it is just so that the two men can have a conversation about fashions in art.



When Walter opens his own gallery, which proves to be directly opposite where Ruben is, we have another limp sight-gag – and we were supposed to keep in mind, Tim Burton, the throw-away remark that (very occasional) narrator, journalist Dick Nolan (Danny Huston), makes about the nature of his writing in relation to this ragbag of a film (to signify a doubtful reliability) ?

 nature

 Gives us a break but even Clive James, calling one volume of his Unreliable Memoirs (and known to entertain), flags up the possibility of invented content more adeptly* - or Martin Scorsese (in an overlooked speech by Jordan Belfort at the opening of The Wolf of Wall Street), drawing attention to how, as he speaks, he can change the colour of the car that we see…



At root, the argument is : should we praise Holy Motors (2012) for (the fun of) its inter-textuality and reference, or say that it is an uninspiring sequence of essentially similar impersonations, tenuously linked, with casual, picaresque-style looseness, by who cares what ? Even if the mask at the near end, as all the white limousines are parked (and wink at each other), is, as is said, that from Eyes Without a Face (19??), so what… ?

 In this film (as, in many ways, with Wolf), Leos Carax is so gratuitously flashy that one mistakes it for no sort of naturalistic presentation (of whatever it is, Kylie or no Kylie with a comatose cameo...)








* * * * *









But, if it (instead) is homage, all is forgiven… ! :






End-notes

* Let alone the quips as to textuality, historicity and authorship throughout the trilogy Molloy / Malone dies (Malone meurt) / The Unnamable (L’Innomable) by the great Samuel Beckettt…




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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A hasty little response to the latest cancer stories [incomplete]

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)
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Thursday 28 August 2014

Don’t take my advice – I’m a major eccentric !

This is a review of Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

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

28 August

This is a review of Magic in the Moonlight (2014)
(one of Cambridge Film Festival 2014's Opening Films)


Woody Allen can never resist giving all the good lines to one character, and this time it is to Colin Firth (as Stanley Crawford), whom others close to him describe as a rationalist and caustic : sounding on Firth’s lips, the egotism of some characters that Allen has written for himself (e.g. Harry Block in Deconstructing Harry (1997)), and their disparaging or grudging excuses or views of others, seem refreshingly new.

The plot is not a complex one, and it would not easily hold off a fan of who-dunnits, but it plays with the familiar Allen type of a man whose (intellectual) opinion of himself gets in the way of his real enjoyment, a theme that goes right back to Love and Death (1975). Here, the tone is light, though calling it whimsical (as some have done) is not perhaps catching the right tone – and better describes To Rome with Love (2012) - but it benefits from the quality of having been caught on film (and cinematographer Darius Khondji has been working with Allen as early as Anything Else (2003)*), as crucially with the effect of day- as of moonlight.

Allen regularly revolves certain themes that mean something to him, such as magic (from Stardust Memories (1980) and earlier (and Radio Days (1987)? ) to The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) and Scoop (2006)) and a disbelief in clairvoyance (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)) or anything beyond the rational, and those come together here, with magician Crawford’s distrust of the powers of Sophie Baker (Emma Stone), egged on by his friend Howard Burkan (Simon McBurney).

Crawford is a sort of Benedict to Baker, as Firth was famously as Mr Darcy to Jennifer Ehle’s Elizabeth Bennet, and Firth carries this off perfectly, so much so at times (and with the film maybe a shade too long) that he is a little in danger of putting the others in the dark, even to some extent the redoubtable Eileen Atkins as Aunt Vanessa, let alone Baker : when we hear him discussed by members of the family where he is staying is not only a momentary absence from the screen, but also reinforces his nihilistic attitude (described as depression).

Nonetheless, we sense that he convinces himself more than others that he knows his own mind, and, in this sense, is a true Allen leading man, clinging to rationalism in order not to be adrift in the world – as we hear him, off guard, confessing to Baker his boyhood awe at the night sky. Criticize Allen, if one likes, for where the story is heading, but one would not be watching a film with such a title if not for it, and he gets us there with an ego more or less intact, as well as many a smile and an occasional hearty laugh along the way…


End-notes

* For which Carlo Di Palma, coming out of retirement, failed a medical, and so could not be insured by the studio.



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday 15 August 2014

@Film4's 100 Must-See Movies of the 21st Century - analysed (as a list)

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

15 August

What is a must-see film ?


Film4.com (@Film4) has recently compiled a list of what it calls 100 Must-See Movies of the 21st Century*



However, can it really be right that fourteen of them (which, after all, is around 1 in 7) were released in 2011 alone ? And, when some critics have hailed 2014 as an exceptionally strong year for cinema, is it justified that only Boyhood (2014) qualifies for inclusion ?

A survey last year, by Time Out Film (@TimeOutFilm), of The 100 best romantic movies was much more candid about how the selection had been carried out, which allowed your correspondent to analyse just how many (sc. how few) votes were needed for a film to appear in the top 10, let alone in the top 100 at all.

Analysis showed that, out of 101 respondents (from six categories), only 19 voted for Annie Hall (1977), but that voting still sufficed to secure it 4th place (not that it is not one of Woody Allen’s best films, of course). Much of the list’s pretence to authority (e.g. in the title of the list) then seemed to fall away ?



So how does this top 100 fare…

In decreasing order, starting with the highest-ranking year, one can see below, in every year since the turn of the century*, how many ‘top films’ – according to this list – were released (figures in bold face), with a cumulative percentage

Where the total number of films that has been selected in each year is equal, the number of films that featured in the top 50 (which is in parenthesis) has been used to determine the order of priority (otherwise they are left in date-order)



2011 – 14 (7) 14%

2013 – 12 (5) 26%

2001 – 9 (5) 35%

2000 – 8 (5) 43%

2004 – 7 (5) 50%

2002 – 7 (4) 57%

2009 – 7 (4) 64%

2003 – 7 (2) 71%

2008 – 7 (2) 78%

2005 – 5 (3) 83%

2006 – 5 (1) 88%

2007 – 4 (4) 92%

2010 – 4 (2) 96%

2012 – 3 (0) 99%

2014 – 1 (1) 100%



One can see quite clearly that 26% of films (slightly more than 1 in 4) were chosen from just two years (i.e. 2011 and 2013), and 50% from just five years (adding in 2000, 2001 and 2004). Is this why people have said that 2014 is a significant year for film, although there is only one film from this year – that they meant the year when films were in cinemas ?

Only 2010 significantly moves position, from 12th to equal 6th, on the basis of using the score for the top 50 instead (otherwise 2012 and 2014 swap places).


Top 20 by country (accounting for 12 countries), with a cumulative percentage

USA, as the country with the most films produced, is listed first, and, as it was the country of production of the top-listed film, 1 is given as the highest position scored (in parenthesis)

Where, for example, a film was a UK / US production (as with Gravity (2013), each country has been awarded one-half

Where the number of films is equal (1 or ½), the ordering is by the position in the list of the highest-ranked film (given by a figure in parenthesis)



Directors are noted who have two films in the top 100 (with the name, date and position of the films) : only Richard Linklater and Michael Haneke have two in the top 20

Joel and Ethan Coen are the only directors with two films in the list not to have one place in the top 20 (No Country For Old Men (2007) (at 25) and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) (at 69))

If the 300-film list had not been curtailed, how many more pairs (or trios) of directors might there have been... ?



United States - 8½ (1) 42.5%
3 : Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood (2007)
[also 45 : Punch-Drunk Love (2002)]

5 : Richard Linklater, Boyhood (2014)
[also 17 : Before Sunset (2004)]

10 : David Fincher, Zodiac (2007)
[also 30 : The Social Network (2010)]

United Kingdom - 1½ (4) 50%
4 : Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin (2013)
[also 41 : Sexy Beast (2000)]


France - 1½ (8) 57.5%
14 : Michael Haneke, Hidden (Caché) (2005)


Taiwan - 1 (2) 62.5%

China - 1 (6) 67.5%

Hungary - 1 (7) 72.5%

Japan - 1 (11) 77.5%

Spain - 1 (15) 82.5%

Germany - 1 (16) 87.5%
16 : Michael Haneke, The White Ribbon (2009)

Greece - 1 (18) 92.5%

Iran - 1 (19) 97.5%


Belgium - ½ (8) 100%



It has become clear that, when the introduction to the list says that it is ‘Drawn from 29 countries around the world’, although Mexico and Spain, which were co-producing countries of Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), could have added two to the total of 29 countries (but only one film), this has not been done in the list (as one establishes by having added all of the totals (below))



The rest of the top 50 (21 to 50) by country (which adds 10 countries, to make 22)


United States - 8½ (23)


France - 5 (28)


United Kingdom - 4½ (39)


Sweden - 2 (26)


Romania - 1 (22)

South Korea - 1 (24)

Thailand - 1 (27)

Russia - 1 (29)

Turkey - 1 (33)

Senegal - 1 (37)

Germany - 1 (47)

Australia - 1 (48)

Japan - 1 (49)


Mexico - ½ (21)

Spain - ½ (21)




Adding these totals gives the Top 50, together with a cumulative total


As above, where the number of films is equal (1 or ½), the ordering is by the position in the list of the highest-ranked film (given by a figure in parenthesis)


United States - 17 (1) 34%


France - 6½ (8) 47%


United Kingdom - 6 (4) 59%



Germany - 2 (16) 63%

Japan - 2 (11) 67%

Sweden - 2 (26) 71%


Spain - 1½ (15) 74%


Taiwan - 1 (2) 76%

China - 1 (6) 78%

Hungary - 1 (7) 80%

Greece - 1 (18) 82%

Iran - 1 (19) 84%

Romania - 1 (22) 86%

South Korea - 1 (24) 88%

Thailand - 1 (27) 90%

Russia - 1 (29) 92%

Turkey - 1 (33) 94%

Senegal - 1 (37) 96%

Australia - 1 (48) 98%


Belgium - ½ (8) 99%

Mexico - ½ (21) 100%



The cumulative total shows that the United States, the United Kingdom and France alone account for 59% of the top 50, with 41% (as calculated) spread between, and adding four further countries accounts for nearly 75% of the listing for 1–50

NB As co-producing countries, Belgium and Mexico would not have been counted by Film4 on this part of the list, nor, in the second part, would Ireland, South Africa or New Zealand (even though that entry is for three films)



The remainder of the top 100 (51 to 100) by country, with cumulative percentage


As before, where the number of films is equal (1 or ½), the ordering is by the position in the list of the highest-ranked film (given by a figure in parenthesis)


United States - 23 (53) 46%


United Kingdom - 16½ (54) 79%


Canada - 2 (56) 83%


Brazil - 1 (51) 85%

Italy - 1 (52) 87%

Argentina - 1 (61) 89%

Japan - 1 (71) 91%

South Korea - 1 (76) 93%

Denmark - 1 (94) 95%

France - 1 (98) 97%


New Zealand - ½ (53) 98%

South Africa - ½ (90) 99%

Ireland - ½ (95) 100%


The top three countries (USA, UK and Canada) account for 83% of the films in positions 51 to 100, and only ten other countries are accounted for in this part of the list



Nearly last, the full list (by adding the last two lists), with cumulative percentage


United States - 40 (1) 40%

United Kingdom - 22½ (4) 62.5%

France - 7½ (8) 70%

Japan - 3 (11) 73%


Germany - 2 (16) 75%

South Korea - 2 (24) 77%

Sweden - 2 (26) 79%

Canada - 2 (56) 81%


Spain - 1½ (15) 82.5%


Taiwan - 1 (2) 83.5%

China - 1 (6) 84.5%

Hungary - 1 (7) 85.5%

Greece - 1 (18) 86.5%

Iran - 1 (19) 87.5%

Romania - 1 (22) 88.5%

Thailand - 1 (27) 89.5%

Russia - 1 (29) 90.5%

Turkey - 1 (33) 91.5%

Senegal - 1 (37) 92.5%

Australia - 1 (48) 93.5%

Brazil - 1 (51) 94.5%

Italy - 1 (52) 95.5%

Argentina - 1 (61) 96.5%

Denmark - 1 (94) 97.5%


Belgium - ½ (8) 98%

Mexico - ½ (21) 98.5%

New Zealand - ½ (53) 99%

South Africa - ½ (90) 99.5%

Ireland - ½ (95) 100%



Where the single-country entries appear

The final study explores where the 30% (or fewer) of films that are not from the main countries represented come from : the listing above shows that there are sudden little runs, such as 48 / 51 / 52, 18 / 19 / 22 and 6 / 7 / 8 (that one includes where France’s top-rating film appears), where a country’s single film appears – other decades are dominated by the States and the United Kingdom’s productions, as listed below (with the number, in bold, of such films, and the films from other countries given, in italic and within square brackets, by placing)


0 – 10 6 : [2 / 6 / 7 / 8]

11 – 20 4 : [11 / 14 / 15 / 16 / 18 / 19]

21 – 30 3 : [21 / 22 / 24 / 26 / 27 / 28 / 29]

31 – 40 4 : [31 / 33 / 34 / 35 / 36 / 37]

41 – 50 6 : [44 / 47 / 48 / 49]


51 – 60 6½ : [51 / 52 / 53 (with United States) / 56]

61 – 70 9 : [61]

71 – 80 8 : [71 / 76]

81 – 90 9½ : [90 (with United States)]

91 – 100 7½ : [95 (with United Kingdom) / 97 / 98]



Looked at quickly, there appear to be runs of films not from the United States or the United Kingdom within the Top 10, and the fifth decade (from 41 to 50), and those decades have more films that are not from those countries

After the sixth decade (which is similar), a pattern sets in of almost all films being from the United Kingdom or the States. e.g. an almost uninterrupted run from 57 (in the sixth decade) through the next two decades, 71 to 80 and 81 to 90, to 94 : seemingly, only 4 non-US, non-UK ‘must-see’ films in a run of 39 films

We must pass it over to others to calculate what that might signify by way of selectivity…



End-notes

* Even it was actually on 1 January 2001, because 2000 was the last year of the twentieth century...




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday 10 June 2014

What is Catalan cinema ?

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

9 June (updated 20 August)

What is Catalan cinema ?

[Now, in 2017, with its own sequel : What more is Catalan cinema ?]



Update : click here to go to outlines of three Catalan films
at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 and links to reviews


In advance of the 34th Cambridge Film Festival (#CamFF via @camfilmfest), and also of a screening at London’s ICA (@ICA) on 27 June of El bosc (The Forest) (2012) (a film that had its UK premiere when shown at last year’s Festival¹ – as did three other Catalan films), here is a little look at where films like this come from – geographically, temperamentally, and emotionally…



Some may know that Barcelona, the second largest city in Spain, is the capital city of Catalonia – though it’s really, in Catalan, Catalunya – but forget Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) for giving you any more than an architectural montage to emulate that of Manhattan (1979) (or be a precursor to Woody Allen’s love-smitten depiction of Paris at Midnight from 2011…)²


But it probably may help little more to think of the inevitable Gaudí, let alone Juan Gris’ connections or – with the Catalan form of Gris’ adopted name and a birth-right to Barcelona – Joan Miró. Maurice Ravel (French, but with a Basque-Spanish heritage of a birthplace in territory somewhat distant from Catalunya, but likewise where France adjoins Spain), may give us some feel of Spanishness at times, but perhaps the quirky figure who provides a way in to this cinematic tradition is Salvador Dalí.

This blog-posting began with five ‘S’ key-words, and Dalí truly, as the phrase has it, ticks the boxes for all of them – and, with the infamous collaboration with Luis Buñuel in Un Chien Andalou (1928) (not forgetting L'âge d'or (1930)), is rooted in cinema. Dalí may have moved away from what Buñuel became a celebrated master of, but his showmanship and theatricality resembles aspects of film familiar, say, from the great Italian directors, and it is hard to believe that he has not been an inspiration in his home region.


Overview of Cambridge Film Festival's 'Catalan strand' in 2012 and 2013

Looking personally to the 2014 Festival (#CamFF), there is full confidence in Ramon Lamarca that he will have found and curated some powerful and challenging films, no doubt examining the nature of reality, or of the little-appreciated conflict that is The Spanish Civil War (Guerra Civil Española). As well as ending the life of poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, and providing the substance of Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, it not only tore Spain apart (with the help of General Franco’s allies in Germany and Italy), but has laid down a seam that underlies the history of Spain in our postmodern era, and which film-makers in Catalunya have been especially open to explore :

Directors such as Ken Loach, working with screenwriter Jim Allen in Land and Freedom (1995), have brought a British perspective on seeking to fight pro-fascist Nationalist forces, but Jesús Garay’s Eyes on the Sky (Mirant al Cel) (2008) delves less into the politics and the pointlessness of brother against brother, but rather, and very movingly, into the ‘visceralness’ of what it means to tick down to something that changes individual lives for ever : although Garay is from Santander, not Catalunya, again this is in the very North of Spain.

Set in the civil war like his film, but from the point of view of a landowner with pro-fascist leanings (or, probably more accurately, inherited anti-communist feelings ?), The Forest (El bosc) (2012), through its embodiment of place and with its vivid special effects, evokes another world, another dimension, from the perspective of which professed love and care can be examined, and in and through which a transformational and redemptive influence can operate. Similarly, in a way in the post-war period, and with packed Festival screenings, Black Bread (Pa negre) (2010) hits us right at its close with a boy’s realization of what his true position in life has been.

On another level, and in Venice, we again have finding the truth in The Redemption of The Fish (La redempció dels peixos) (2013), as Marc (Miquel Quer) tracks down his past, and is seduced and misled by the shapes, shadows and reflections of La Serenissima : so many of these films revolve historical and familial disputes and allegiances in a rich and productive way. In V.O.S. (2009), we have that theme translated into the playful and malleable notion of relation and relationships, in and out of making a film that crosses the barrier between ‘life’ and ‘film’ in a way as inventive and thought-provoking as Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). And, but one might need to read further with the links below to reviews on this blog, The Night Elvis Died (La Nit Que Va Morir L’Elvis) (2010) teases apart the layers of reality (not least with its quiet homage to Paris, Texas (1984))…


Here (out of the eleven films shown in 2012 and 2013 - UK denotes UK premiere) are links to this blog’s reviews of most of the films (with @THEAGENTAPSLEY's tag-lines, and additional key-words) :

2012 – Black Bread (Pa Negre) (2010)

A naturalistic, but haunted, story of a child’s perspective on betrayal, sex and anger

Civil war – Childhood – Respect – Reprisal – Poverty – Loyalty


2013 (UK) – Eyes on the Sky (Mirant al Cel) (2008)

Movingly mixing documentary, acting, and faux-documentary to dig into past pain

Bombs – Barcelona – Dante – Time – Heights – History


2012 – The Body in the Woods (Un Cos Al Bosc) (1996)

An unfolding with turns, twists and unprincipled practices

Sexual orientation – Investigation – Murder – Disguise – Corruption – Desire


2013 (UK) – The Forest (El bosc) (2012)

An account of a civil war through how the hated better-off classes fared

Magical realism – Twisted love – Collectivization – Other worlds – Symbolism – Unreal feast


2012 – The Night Elvis Died (La Nit Que Va Morir L’Elvis) (2010)

Finding the truth, when it is well hidden, by intuition and insight

Mental-health stigma – Friendship – Corruption – Blood – Unreality – Amnesia


2013 (UK) – The Redemption of the Fish (La redempció dels peixos) (2013)

Connectedness and disconnection, reality and illusion, in Venice

Contact – Closeness – Deceit – Truth – Reflection – Ripple


2012 – V.O.S. (2009)

A film within a film – or is one as real as the other ?

Acting – Film-making – Real time – Couples – Attraction – Meta-textuality


2012 – Warsaw Bridge (1990)

The whirl / ennui of yet another publishing event, and what it leads to

Connections – Publishing – Society – Glamour – Politics – Water


End-notes

¹ It had two screenings, at the second of which the film’s director, Óscar Aibar, was in attendance and answered questions.


² For one thing, Penélope Cruz (easily the best part of the film, and whose deserving an Academy Award (for María Elena) was undeniable) and her now husband Javier Bardem (by no means the worst), although Spanish, are not from what (since 1978) has been an Autonomous Community or ’nationality’ within Spain.

For another, according to the trivia of Wikipedia’s web-page for VCB, Allen had funding for a film to be shot in Spain, and so adapted a script that he had written years before, which was set in San Francisco : judge for oneself what Catalan (or even properly Spanish) feel one has from the film – and, more importantly, whether the character of Juan Antonio (Bardem) resembles a convenient stereotype of Mediterranean mores (to drive the plot in a rather Jamesian, ingénues-abroad way)…





Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday 28 May 2014

Mr Allen's not for fading...

This is a review of Fading Gigolo (2013)

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

27 May

This is a review of Fading Gigolo (2013)



Or even – O Brother, Where Art Thou ? ! – Turturro !

Fading Gigolo (201?) is a romp from John Turturro, doing a Woody Allen of writing, directing and acting – not as well crafted as Allen’s own triumphs such as Broadway Danny Rose (1984), and not quite mastering, say, the light and shade of that film*, but suffused with charm, wit, elegance, and seductiveness :

In fact, on that latter point, we feel as if we might be straying into the territory of Dangerous Liaisons (1988), with a strand of the plot whose rationale (albeit necessary) seems not wholly obvious. At other times, until they conveniently dissipate, it feels as if the Kafka-infused spirit of Scorsese in After Hours (1985) is upon us, mixed in with a bit of sectarianism from Witness (1985) for good measure.

Moving on, as these moments of menace – not least with a comic turn from Bob Balaban as Sol, trying a line of legal argument that does not appeal to his client – are momentary, there is much to like more in the way that the film has been put together : one can see Murray (Woody Allen), if one likes, as Cupid, as well as Bongo the pimp, to benefit Fioravante (John Torturro), but what matters is the immediacy of the cinematography, with features made of windows and the light coming through them, of objects and people seen through each other, or one foregrounding the other, or dwelling unashamedly on Sharon Stone’s or Allen’s face.

Likewise, two scenes with dancing are delightfully choreographed, with the characters and the moving camera, causing the background to shift behind, first, Torturro and Stone (as Dr Parker), and then Sofía Vergara (Selima) with him), and – in evocation of many a film, yet feeling fresh – against, through and into a carousel. Yet Torturro’s greatest resource is almost certainly Allen’s timing and acting – where maybe he has been more exacting with the 78-year-old, and required more takes, than Allen did of himself in, say, To Rome with Love (2012) (as Allen is notorious for calling it a day not to miss sport such as The World Series).

One says ‘almost certainly’, because Torturro’s own nuanced role as the less-shallow, slightly melancholoy one of the pair, is rather fine, and it has been written in such a way that the scenes with Allen and him largely fit them well. Vanessa Paradis, as Avigal, has an element of ‘the mysterious woman’ about her, which is refreshingly different from using Stone to remind us, in the guise of a dermatologist, of famous attire / poses from the likes of Basic Instinct (1992) : it is clear enough why Fioravante can perform for one, but fall for the other.


Ending on a light moment of flirtation, complete with a colourful orchid and a beverage being made that seems irrelevant, the film cements the central pairing in our mind, under their fictitious names, and gently points the lesson of friends looking out for each other. We have long forgotten the bookshop that had to close, but Murray, in keeping it going so long (even if it did give Fioravante some work), was clearly missing his métier all this time, with his skills of networking, smooth-talking and making deals – which, with Danny Rose, is where we came in…



End-notes

* Not that we equate The Mob with Brooklyn’s community of Hassidic Jews, who convene a religious court at the instigation of Dovi (Liev Schreiber – Ted Winter from Salt (2010))…




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday 14 March 2014

Paul : The distinction of being not just a bore, but a boor

This is a review of Midnight in Paris (2011)

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

This is a review of Midnight in Paris (2011)

People have, apparently, likened this film to Manhattan (1979), which they mean in a back-handed way, as saying that Allen has returned to form, but this view is wrong on two counts: Allen may have made occasional recent films (e.g. Match Point (2005)) that do not work (or only work clunkily), but he has never lost his form; and Midnight has almost nothing, opening montage excepted, in common with Manhattan (or, for that matter, Annie Hall (1977), the other chosen point of comparison – why choose two films made more than thirty years ago ?).

Taking each point in turn, there is nothing to be apologetic about in either Whatever Works (2009), perfectly suiting Larry David, or You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), although probably less successful for reasons of plot – Midnight is not a welcome recovery, but simply surpasses them both.

The wide situational and character sweep of Midnight is also nothing like that of Annie or Manhattan, which are arguably more like chamber music than this piece, which, if not a symphony, has clear claims on being a concerto.

In addition, it is not as if Paris has not been the backdrop before, unless people have already forgotten Everyone Says I Love You (1996), and it is common knowledge that Allen is truly American in feeling the French capital’s charm and attraction – just as he does London’s very different pull.


Midnight is not perfect, either, but there are some very good elements to it, some of which look back in the canon: for example, the lead character, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), has definite similarities, not just in mannerisms and pacing, with Kenneth Branagh as fellow writer Lee Simon in Celebrity (1998). Such figures, if not Allen-substitutes per se in the films in which he does not (choose to) cast himself, function in the same pivotal sort of way, and often have the pick of the lines. Taking that further, Lee, as does Gil, finds himself in an exciting new world that he does not know, but it is one of elitism and opportunity – Gil has opportunity, perhaps, but of a different kind..

The film feels very close to Allen’s short stories, and he very casually has Gil enter the world of the 1920s by being offered a lift, when he is lost, by a group of revellers in a vintage Peugeot: nothing overt in this transition, except for the bubbles in the champagne that they insist that Gil join them in drinking, and he is taken he and we know not where.

Thankfully, we can get away from regarding the scenario as magical realism (whatever it may be, though it little matters). For Gil not only gives us the benefit (probably partly because he is tired after an evening of wine-tasting, in which he favoured quantity over quality) of letting us be several steps ahead, but also because, just because of the dramatic irony, we can watch his reactions of disbelief more closely. (As the film goes on, they may, however, do Allen fewer favours : how few even know that Eliot’s initials stand for Thomas Stearns, let alone would blurt out the names ?)

Yes, it is just a given that this travel to the earlier decade happens, and that, although Gil can repeat the experience, he cannot explain it to anyone in his own time. (As is usual, e.g. Lucy first visiting Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.) Yet it is never just a shared magical assumption about the nature of the world, unless one includes the viewer.

The feel of the era is good, which, when this is not an art-historical recreation, is what matters, but Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) could still have had a chance to shine more with a less functional role (which may have fallen prey to editing): after all, Stein herself was no mere editor or midwife to other’s creations, and was just as much a character as Hemingway and Dalí, in particular, are shown to be. (As to whether she would have called them ‘crazy Surrealists’, one is less sure.)

With Adriana (Marion Cotillard), one is less sure whether it is that she gives Gil attention (which Inez (Rachel McAdams), though she is also sexy, seems less keen to do), as that she can claim Modigliani and Braque as lovers (in this film, at least), that draw him to her company : let alone the t.v. series, Goodnight, Sweetheart dealing with such a theme, it is at the centre of The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and Allen’s early story ‘The Kugelmass Episode’ (first collected in Side Effects).

As a parable of what one can and cannot have, Paris of the 1920s may be where Gil would have himself be, but he has not foreseen that it might not be everyone’s choice, and he finds himself making other choices for the future instead.

Where the film really does not work is with facts about the contemporary literary and artistic circles, and, if one were the ‘pseudo-intellectual’ whom Gil dubs the very irritating character of Paul (who is of a type whom Allen likes creating, and does so well*), one would have had them to hand in the screening :

Not that it matters, because it may be that all this is Gil’s imagination, and that he is capable of being confused about facts as even Paul (who apparently confounds the figures of Rodin’s wife and mistress, and then insists that the guide is wrong**): if so, then, as with a dream, or as with psychosis (the explanation offered by Inez for Gil’s behaviour and utterances), what he experiences is the product of his will and mind.

In a dream, it is just as much we who are in the dream, creating the people whom we meet, be they Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, or Papa Hemingway (obviously not then called that, but that is how Gil relates to the man whom he has met). One curiosity is that, except for the party to which Gil is first taken, everyone is dressed much more casually than photographs show was usual at that time. Another is that, when it comes to Buñuel, Allen has made him a rather sullen character, and with no suggestion, around the table, that Dalí and he are – or are to be – film-makers together (in Un Chien Andalou (1929). Largely as a private joke, because few might know the reference, Allen has Gil give Buñuel the essential details of the plot of The Exterminating Angel (1962) (which are also supposed to be dealt with in a scene within L’Age d’Or), but Buñuel rebuff him with very unreceptive questions about why that would or would not happen – as if he has not got a Surrealist bone in his body.

This does not seem to suggest that we believe that Gil is dreaming, even if what he experiences is a deep wish on his part, but rather that too much licence has been taken with showing this period, probably in an attempt not to confront an audience with the truth, that the free and easy Surrealists and other artists of the time were to be found in suit and tie.



End-notes


* E.g. Alan Alda as Lester in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). (Alda is also in Everyone Says.)


** However, it seems that Rodin did nothing as bourgeois as intending that either woman – let alone any of the others ! – could contemporaneously claim to be married to him: it was only after knowing Rose Beuret for 53 years that, in 1917, the year in which they both died (she just two weeks afterwards), they married.

By then, Camille Claudel, the other woman, had already been confined to a psychiatric unit for more than twenty years, following a breakdown when Rodin and she split up in 1898, and died there in 1943.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday 6 January 2014

The panther in our head

A rating and review of Another Woman (1988)

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

29 December (watched on DVD)

A rating and review of Another Woman (1988)


94 = S : 15 / A : 16 / C : 16 / M : 16 / P : 15 / F : 16



S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)

Woody Allen, as we all probably know, has been in analysis. In character somewhere, he quips that his analyst was a strict Freudian, so it was only after several weeks that he realized that the analyst had retired.

It must have occurred to him that maybe things intended for the analyst could be heard by someone else, and he has used the motif more than once, both pure, and in the intercepted instructions of David Ogden Stiers as hypnotist Voltan in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). (Something is also overheard in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), but not, probably, in the context of any sort of treatment.)

Yet the most prolonged handling is in Another Woman (1988), with Mia Farrow (according to IMDb, her character is called Hope : the two women discuss the Klimt painting of that name, at one point) audible to Gena Rowlands (Marion) in another apartment. Famously quoted, Burns tells us* :

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!


In due course, this is what happens to Marion, so Hope is then justly called, because Marion responds for the good to what she hears about what she learns about herself when she has contrived to make something of meeting Hope and ended up having lunch with her and making some discoveries. (As in Deconstructing Harry (1997), there is a therapeutic element behind what happens in the film, but without the vivacious humour of and in outlandish circumstance.)

The new space in which Marion has gone to work on her book gives her other unexpected insights into her life, experience and developments, and it is not unlike a womb, in which she can allow fatigue to overcome her and dream, for example, of Rilke's 'The Panther', the man who introduced her to it when she was at college, and what happened between them. Likewise, she recalls the youth of her brother Paul and her, and how both how viewed himself and she did was shaped by their father's opinions.

It is only, though, in hearing what the unknowing Hope says that there is a breakthrough, when she hears herself described by someone who had been going to therapy because of her feelings, but sees how locked up Marion. Maybe, for each of them, the other is the title's 'another woman', but really Marion has that gift of being seen as Hope witnesses her. Rowlands, whose life has intensely been that of the mind and has been defensive (even, as shown, to the part of being rude, or of seducing partners' attention away to her), transforms, and we appreciate the restraint that she has been under, which she has carried off to excellent effect, such that the intellectualized put-downs and self-deception seem faultless.

Farrow is the junior role, of course, but she is vital to how Rowlands' works, and she more than brings off embodying what, for us, is much of the time just a voice, and not even a voice allowed to approach us directly, since she has to come by means of and sound as if through an air-duct. And with that duct - when Marion calls around to the therapist and seeks to find out what has happened to her - there is almost a hint, in what is said, that maybe somehow she had been permitted this insight of which Burns writes, and that her live, until now, has been lived amongst shadows...

At the time of the over-praised Midnight in Paris (2011), not least in the light of the far greater achievement in Blue Jasmine (2013), there were ludicrous claims about a return to form : here, in Another Woman, is perfectly good evidence of form for which some were claiming to look back as far as Annie Hall (1977) for, and which I should have seen again before.


End-notes

* In 'To a Louse'.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday 1 November 2013

OBEs

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

3 November

Pass by, if you wish to read about royal honours, not Out-of-Body Experiences...


It is a curious term, if you think about it. As usual, the experimental psychologists think that they have got it licked - in the lecture where I learnt about The Rubber-Hand Illusion (sounds more like something in one of Woody Allen's characters' magic acts), I was also told about a woman who was having some pre-operative measurements made of her brain.

She had epilepsy, and, by stimulating parts of her brain, the surgical team wanted to establish that they were not going to deprive her of any important function when they came to remove material to prevent her fitting further. It so happened that they found that stimulating one part caused her to say that she was above her body, looking down on it. For whatever reason this part of the brain had not been identified before, the psychologists seem delighted that they have the brain to hold responsible for this 'experience'.


Not much of an experience, when people report far more than just being above themselves, looking down, but the lecture did not dwell on that possible criticism of this enthusiastic discovery. Of course, experimenters can see that stimulating this part of the subject's brain, when they know where the subject is (i.e. not above their body), causes him or her to report looking down from above, but do they non-scientifically assume it is not a real effect, by invoking a silent circularity ?

In other words, we can see that the subject is where he or she was, so it is just a function of the brain that reports that he or she is several feet in the air above the bed. If the subject were alone when a non-induced experience occurred, he or she would say that, if someone else came into the room when he or she was above his or her body, that person would see his or her body. So, true scientific investigation would have to carry out this experiment (it is my guess that it has not been carried out) :

1. By a shield at mid-body level, prevent the subject from being able to see the lower part of his or her body.

2. Place an easily identifiable object, e.g. a coloured square, on the bed, unknown to the subject.

3. Then stimulate the relevant part of the brain. If the subject can, when asked, report the presence of the object, one can only conclude, not that the brain generates the impression of that point of view, but that the self is actually put into that point of view.


Has anyone tested that ? Or did science confuse cause and effect, as so often ?


Maybe it has been done, or you want to say that it is a waste of time to do an experiment of that kind (though ones on ESP have been carried out enough), and maybe the person would never be able to see the object, because it is just a function of the brain to cause the illusion (can science say why, what use it would be ?). OK.

Do you recall the pivoting beds on board the USS Enterprise in Star Trek ? What if the person whose brain were to be stimulated got put in one of those first, so that he or she is near vertical before the brain is touched ? Where would that person report his or her self being then - upright facing 'the bed', or still above, looking down ?




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