More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 October
The Agent is none the wiser, really, what this means: when he was told, during the Festival, that he now was this famous, he made some response, but not really to ask the question.
Yet it cannot alter the fact that he wrongly attributed, to Damon's co-writer and fellow actor Ben Affleck, the title role in Good Will Hunting*, so that has been remedied:
The Agent can now be as famous as someone whom he mistook for someone else... - which is what fame is all about, I guess: thinking that the person who is famous is the one whom we see
* But, at least, Affleck had been in - was a major part of and force behind - the film, he cavilled abjectly
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Sunday 9 October 2011
The (supposed) power of the written word
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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9 October
There must have been belief in such a power in the (sixteenth or) seventeenth century (I forget which), when (by reprehensible accident) the famous so-called naughty bible was printed, which, amongst the usual commandments, stipulated 'Thou must commit adultery'.
At long last, I have seen a copy of this bible, and I also read more about the penalty that was imposed upon the printer - all of which must be predicated on the understanding that people could not infer that the word 'not' was missing, and would therefore do what the instructions on the packet stated. (It would be intriguing to know if any case is recorded where a licentious spouse pleaded the wording of this bible in his or her defence!)
From this, I jump to a review of Tirza, which - if it needs saying - rather crassly describes Tirza's father as 'a loser, a confusing low moral guy who actually just used the excuse of finding his estranged daughter in order to get over the shames and the losses of his own life'. (In the rest of the review, we are told that Tirza is 'a very boring movie that I didn't find any depth in anything', and one which is 'mixed with the past and the present, the regret, the loss, the father and the prodigal daughter, the constant flashbacks and the confusing mix ups'.)
So how do we look at each other? Do we come down hard on the printer of the bible, as a loser, a low moral guy, or on the director, for producing this very boring movie? Or do we place any store in such formulations as 'there but for the grace of God', do we have what some might call 'compassion', others 'understanding' (but does it matter what we call it?)?
As for me, to read a review like this, posted from the country of the happy ending (NB its mainstream film industry) and of hard work turned into an inevitable fortune in a land of limitless opportunities, could I not justly say that all that is just utter hokum as far as most people's lives is concerned - and, even if it weren't, would it actually make anyone (lastingly) happier? So on what is this judgement of someone else as 'a low moral guy' predicated? Who is better than anyone else - and in whose judgement?
Unless, of course, you really do believe in 'the person of reasonable firmness', a fiction to excuse people, during what is laughingly called 'the troubles', from escaping the consequences of - what were thought of as - their own actions. Would I have liked, at the risk of reprisals towards me or my family if I didn't, to try to refuse to drive a car (which might very well have had a bomb in it - why was I being asked to drive it, if not?) into the centre of Derry and leave it there?
Well, the person of 'reasonable firmness', dead in a ditch with a bullet in his or her head, wouldn't have done, so why are you so such a 'low moral guy'?
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9 October
There must have been belief in such a power in the (sixteenth or) seventeenth century (I forget which), when (by reprehensible accident) the famous so-called naughty bible was printed, which, amongst the usual commandments, stipulated 'Thou must commit adultery'.
At long last, I have seen a copy of this bible, and I also read more about the penalty that was imposed upon the printer - all of which must be predicated on the understanding that people could not infer that the word 'not' was missing, and would therefore do what the instructions on the packet stated. (It would be intriguing to know if any case is recorded where a licentious spouse pleaded the wording of this bible in his or her defence!)
From this, I jump to a review of Tirza, which - if it needs saying - rather crassly describes Tirza's father as 'a loser, a confusing low moral guy who actually just used the excuse of finding his estranged daughter in order to get over the shames and the losses of his own life'. (In the rest of the review, we are told that Tirza is 'a very boring movie that I didn't find any depth in anything', and one which is 'mixed with the past and the present, the regret, the loss, the father and the prodigal daughter, the constant flashbacks and the confusing mix ups'.)
So how do we look at each other? Do we come down hard on the printer of the bible, as a loser, a low moral guy, or on the director, for producing this very boring movie? Or do we place any store in such formulations as 'there but for the grace of God', do we have what some might call 'compassion', others 'understanding' (but does it matter what we call it?)?
As for me, to read a review like this, posted from the country of the happy ending (NB its mainstream film industry) and of hard work turned into an inevitable fortune in a land of limitless opportunities, could I not justly say that all that is just utter hokum as far as most people's lives is concerned - and, even if it weren't, would it actually make anyone (lastingly) happier? So on what is this judgement of someone else as 'a low moral guy' predicated? Who is better than anyone else - and in whose judgement?
Unless, of course, you really do believe in 'the person of reasonable firmness', a fiction to excuse people, during what is laughingly called 'the troubles', from escaping the consequences of - what were thought of as - their own actions. Would I have liked, at the risk of reprisals towards me or my family if I didn't, to try to refuse to drive a car (which might very well have had a bomb in it - why was I being asked to drive it, if not?) into the centre of Derry and leave it there?
Well, the person of 'reasonable firmness', dead in a ditch with a bullet in his or her head, wouldn't have done, so why are you so such a 'low moral guy'?
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Cigarette-burns
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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9 October
* Contains spoilers *
Perhaps because of some residual squeamishness (despite the director wanting it to be there), the two films in the Festival (Kosmos and Sleeping Beauty) that I recall* depicting a cigarette-burn being given (or made - neither verb sounds quite right, because it is really 'inflicted') did so really very briefly.
Yet, as I was told (a fact intended to shock) in the context of training on child abuse and child protection (and so we are talking about a child's skin, not even an adult's), it takes more than a second for a burn to be made that leaves a lasting visible scar. (I forget how long: 1.3 seconds? 3 seconds? And searching for the term leads one discreetly just to search-results about damage to car upholstery or to carpets...)
*A topos that would not have been out of place in Abegebrannt (Burnout) or Tyrannosaur.
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9 October
* Contains spoilers *
Perhaps because of some residual squeamishness (despite the director wanting it to be there), the two films in the Festival (Kosmos and Sleeping Beauty) that I recall* depicting a cigarette-burn being given (or made - neither verb sounds quite right, because it is really 'inflicted') did so really very briefly.
Yet, as I was told (a fact intended to shock) in the context of training on child abuse and child protection (and so we are talking about a child's skin, not even an adult's), it takes more than a second for a burn to be made that leaves a lasting visible scar. (I forget how long: 1.3 seconds? 3 seconds? And searching for the term leads one discreetly just to search-results about damage to car upholstery or to carpets...)
*A topos that would not have been out of place in Abegebrannt (Burnout) or Tyrannosaur.
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Saturday 8 October 2011
Perspectives on boxes and bags
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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9 October
A carrier-bag can give rise to some strange, if related, thoughts. The one in question was given to me when I bought some books from Amnesty yesterday, which I later saw declared itself to have been made from a potato (I think).
From there, a short hop (which ignored the feeling that it was sturdier than whatever the ones from the shop that hardly ever helps are made from) to attempts to make CD boxes with little (a moulded tray glued to a fold-up card cover) or no plastic (the same thing, but with a slot into which the CD can be pushed home).
Which, because of the way that DVD boxes look, would be difficult to replicate with them – but is there any reason, other than convention, why they should be any other shape or size than a CD box? CDs and DVDs are visually indistinguishable, and many players will also work with the former, so are we really so incapable of knowing which we are looking at or buying that the box has to have (such) a different format?
Its only – slight – justification is that it bears a resemblance to a VHS box (the video being the predecessor of the DVD), but, of course, it does not contain something of those proportions to warrant it, but, rather, what could be, and needs as little packaging as, a CD. (And those proportions are largely observed by the boxes for BluRay® discs.)
Perhaps someone knows the answer… Perhaps the same person can, then, explain what appears to be the redundancy in the term ‘carrier-bag’.
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9 October
A carrier-bag can give rise to some strange, if related, thoughts. The one in question was given to me when I bought some books from Amnesty yesterday, which I later saw declared itself to have been made from a potato (I think).
From there, a short hop (which ignored the feeling that it was sturdier than whatever the ones from the shop that hardly ever helps are made from) to attempts to make CD boxes with little (a moulded tray glued to a fold-up card cover) or no plastic (the same thing, but with a slot into which the CD can be pushed home).
Which, because of the way that DVD boxes look, would be difficult to replicate with them – but is there any reason, other than convention, why they should be any other shape or size than a CD box? CDs and DVDs are visually indistinguishable, and many players will also work with the former, so are we really so incapable of knowing which we are looking at or buying that the box has to have (such) a different format?
Its only – slight – justification is that it bears a resemblance to a VHS box (the video being the predecessor of the DVD), but, of course, it does not contain something of those proportions to warrant it, but, rather, what could be, and needs as little packaging as, a CD. (And those proportions are largely observed by the boxes for BluRay® discs.)
Perhaps someone knows the answer… Perhaps the same person can, then, explain what appears to be the redundancy in the term ‘carrier-bag’.
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Attempting to address Tirza
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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9 October
* Contains spoilers *
Since I saw Tirza (my second viewing being on 21 September), I have thought about it on many days – unlike some, I would not choose to describe it as having haunted me, even though the visitations would be benign ones, but say that I have pictured scenes in it and their emotional force, or the latter through the former.
On a first viewing, I was less sure, because I am interested in the depiction of issues relating to mental health, and I wanted to be sure that I was still persuaded, despite knowing the end from the beginning: I am now convinced that I should read the novel, to see which is the more powerful work. In the meantime – in the face of a list of reading priorities - the essential triangle of Jörgen, looking for Tirza with Kaisa, remains highly evocative.
The pressures that have been on Jörgen become clear early on: staged redundancy, domestic abuse verging on a humiliating kind of violence, unforeseen loss of financial stability, and, amidst it all, overcompensating by trying too hard to be a good father. The list is not meant to be reductionist or exhaustive, and it is not one whose force Jörgen recognizes or understands (in its totality), but they are facts (from some of which he knows that he tries to escape through alcohol, which he calls a medicine for shame) - and all of us would react differently to any one of them.
If I had to say what the film is, I would end up with a phrase such as ‘meditative tragedy’. However, that term in no way gives expression to the ambivalent relationship between Jörgen and Tirza, his daughter; which, itself, is one that Kaisa, in another country (although she should be able to follow Jörgen, whether he speaks in Dutch or English), only knows about directly through him (and, probably also, because of what he does not say).
Tirza, although the film as named after her, is the absence at the heart of the film to - and through - which Kaisa and Jörgen relate, and around whom they navigate Namibia (whose scenery is beautifully portrayed, when we leave the confined atmosphere of Windhoek, and, even more so, the area where Kaisa lives). This is all very sensitively and thoughtfully done, with tremendous, and very inner, performances from Keitumetse Matlabo (as Kaisa) and Gijs Scholten van Aschat (Jörgen).
Early on, Jörgen says that he likes Kaisa, because he can talk to her – we may (as I did) not be sure how much she understands, but the scene in Big Mama shows perfectly that she has followed what has gone on, with, if it does not sound patronizing, wisdom and depth beyond her years. (It does not matter that she does not have much to say, because she does far more than speak lines.)
For she is no mere excuse for us to hear what is on Jörgen’s heart, hear his confession, as she would be in a lesser work that failed to think out the dynamics. Kaisa is the catalyst for much, if not all, that happens in this land to which Jörgen is foreign (and where, perhaps aware of the colonial past, feels his awkwardness and embarrassment): she senses his need, his literal need, when she says ‘Need company, sir?’, and she helps and guides him to find what he has buried in and from himself.
We are left thinking about her, left wondering what could have been, left remembering how it all unfolded – when that happens, and when it is still happening weeks later, a real piece of cinema has been made and witnessed. Thank you, Rudolf van den Berg, for bringing Tirza to the big screen!
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9 October
* Contains spoilers *
Since I saw Tirza (my second viewing being on 21 September), I have thought about it on many days – unlike some, I would not choose to describe it as having haunted me, even though the visitations would be benign ones, but say that I have pictured scenes in it and their emotional force, or the latter through the former.
On a first viewing, I was less sure, because I am interested in the depiction of issues relating to mental health, and I wanted to be sure that I was still persuaded, despite knowing the end from the beginning: I am now convinced that I should read the novel, to see which is the more powerful work. In the meantime – in the face of a list of reading priorities - the essential triangle of Jörgen, looking for Tirza with Kaisa, remains highly evocative.
The pressures that have been on Jörgen become clear early on: staged redundancy, domestic abuse verging on a humiliating kind of violence, unforeseen loss of financial stability, and, amidst it all, overcompensating by trying too hard to be a good father. The list is not meant to be reductionist or exhaustive, and it is not one whose force Jörgen recognizes or understands (in its totality), but they are facts (from some of which he knows that he tries to escape through alcohol, which he calls a medicine for shame) - and all of us would react differently to any one of them.
If I had to say what the film is, I would end up with a phrase such as ‘meditative tragedy’. However, that term in no way gives expression to the ambivalent relationship between Jörgen and Tirza, his daughter; which, itself, is one that Kaisa, in another country (although she should be able to follow Jörgen, whether he speaks in Dutch or English), only knows about directly through him (and, probably also, because of what he does not say).
Tirza, although the film as named after her, is the absence at the heart of the film to - and through - which Kaisa and Jörgen relate, and around whom they navigate Namibia (whose scenery is beautifully portrayed, when we leave the confined atmosphere of Windhoek, and, even more so, the area where Kaisa lives). This is all very sensitively and thoughtfully done, with tremendous, and very inner, performances from Keitumetse Matlabo (as Kaisa) and Gijs Scholten van Aschat (Jörgen).
Early on, Jörgen says that he likes Kaisa, because he can talk to her – we may (as I did) not be sure how much she understands, but the scene in Big Mama shows perfectly that she has followed what has gone on, with, if it does not sound patronizing, wisdom and depth beyond her years. (It does not matter that she does not have much to say, because she does far more than speak lines.)
For she is no mere excuse for us to hear what is on Jörgen’s heart, hear his confession, as she would be in a lesser work that failed to think out the dynamics. Kaisa is the catalyst for much, if not all, that happens in this land to which Jörgen is foreign (and where, perhaps aware of the colonial past, feels his awkwardness and embarrassment): she senses his need, his literal need, when she says ‘Need company, sir?’, and she helps and guides him to find what he has buried in and from himself.
We are left thinking about her, left wondering what could have been, left remembering how it all unfolded – when that happens, and when it is still happening weeks later, a real piece of cinema has been made and witnessed. Thank you, Rudolf van den Berg, for bringing Tirza to the big screen!
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Guilty of love or Guilty of Romance
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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9 October
* Contains spoilers *
One sounds rather better than the other, more mysterious. (Less accurate?)
The starting voiceover sounded as though details being given about district with the greatest concentration of love-hotels were in spite of boredom ('romance-hotels' doesn't sound quite right - and 'love', anyway, is a poor euphemism), but maybe it was just meant to sound a matter-of-fact tone, perhaps as a bid (they did regularly crop up, not usually successfully) to wrong-foot the viewer.
Maybe, having left only 70 minutes in, I am not in a position to judge, but this film just seemed like a whodunnit, and a not particularly interesting one (except for students of mutilation), but one with (attempts at) embellishments. Attempted, because the Effi Briest, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Kreutzer Sonata sort of neglected wife with a boorish husband (and / or otherwise unhappy marriage) was only one sort of springboard into this 'adventure' for Mitzuko, and it was neither followed up, nor very convincing (e.g. the absence of her pre-existing life, except when - exceptionally awkwardly - some friends are produced and invited around for tea).
The stupid husband seemed, from what I could judge from the subtitles, to be a celebrated writer, but actually, despite his airs, of Mills & Boon (perhaps where the romance comes in?), or maybe Alan Titchmarsh. (By contrast, Sleeping Beauty did not need an such excuse, and went straight in, not even via touting hot sausages in a supermarket, but with a proper waitressing job that was not enough to finance university and lifestyle.)
Then, along with that Australian film, we move off into the territory of Buñuel's Belle de Jour (frankly more challenging, after all these years (1967), than either), but only as a build-up for sexual liberation generally and, specifically, a cheap laugh about how doing a porno-shoot with a stud makes one better at offering hot sausages enthusiastically (those scenes, in themselves, were surely a surprise to no one, least of all Mitzuko).
And that leads us into the domain (no going back) of casual sex, dressing differently / seductively, and the love-hotels about which we were so carefully told before. After that, and an autopsy complete with maggots, a crime scene with violently coloured pink paint, and a sex-scene in a show with the odd paint capsule thrown in, does one care much about where it is going or, more importantly, how it is going there?
Well, I didn't, but I cared even less to hear what I am fairly sure was Wagner's Siegfried Idyll and Bach's works for cello accompany all this, and that, apart from not being interested in how it unfolded, was my main impulse for leaving. (Perhaps the incongruity would have been less for those who were unfamiliar with this, even so, admittedly well-known music, perhaps not, but it turned the switch to 'off' for me.)
Or was this really an attack on the culural imperialism and globalism of the western world, disguised as a film? Certainly, there was little evidence of the restaurant and retail chains that dominate most cities. Certainly, we were being shown a culture particular to Japan in the love-hotel. Certainly, the western music of the baroque and the nineteenth century was being challenged to stand up against the most graphically demanding of bedfellows (and thereby proved that Bach is not, after all, strong enough to survive any treatment, even if that of Jacques Loussier were not enough to demonstrate otherwise), so maybe...
Still don't care!
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9 October
* Contains spoilers *
One sounds rather better than the other, more mysterious. (Less accurate?)
The starting voiceover sounded as though details being given about district with the greatest concentration of love-hotels were in spite of boredom ('romance-hotels' doesn't sound quite right - and 'love', anyway, is a poor euphemism), but maybe it was just meant to sound a matter-of-fact tone, perhaps as a bid (they did regularly crop up, not usually successfully) to wrong-foot the viewer.
Maybe, having left only 70 minutes in, I am not in a position to judge, but this film just seemed like a whodunnit, and a not particularly interesting one (except for students of mutilation), but one with (attempts at) embellishments. Attempted, because the Effi Briest, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Kreutzer Sonata sort of neglected wife with a boorish husband (and / or otherwise unhappy marriage) was only one sort of springboard into this 'adventure' for Mitzuko, and it was neither followed up, nor very convincing (e.g. the absence of her pre-existing life, except when - exceptionally awkwardly - some friends are produced and invited around for tea).
The stupid husband seemed, from what I could judge from the subtitles, to be a celebrated writer, but actually, despite his airs, of Mills & Boon (perhaps where the romance comes in?), or maybe Alan Titchmarsh. (By contrast, Sleeping Beauty did not need an such excuse, and went straight in, not even via touting hot sausages in a supermarket, but with a proper waitressing job that was not enough to finance university and lifestyle.)
Then, along with that Australian film, we move off into the territory of Buñuel's Belle de Jour (frankly more challenging, after all these years (1967), than either), but only as a build-up for sexual liberation generally and, specifically, a cheap laugh about how doing a porno-shoot with a stud makes one better at offering hot sausages enthusiastically (those scenes, in themselves, were surely a surprise to no one, least of all Mitzuko).
And that leads us into the domain (no going back) of casual sex, dressing differently / seductively, and the love-hotels about which we were so carefully told before. After that, and an autopsy complete with maggots, a crime scene with violently coloured pink paint, and a sex-scene in a show with the odd paint capsule thrown in, does one care much about where it is going or, more importantly, how it is going there?
Well, I didn't, but I cared even less to hear what I am fairly sure was Wagner's Siegfried Idyll and Bach's works for cello accompany all this, and that, apart from not being interested in how it unfolded, was my main impulse for leaving. (Perhaps the incongruity would have been less for those who were unfamiliar with this, even so, admittedly well-known music, perhaps not, but it turned the switch to 'off' for me.)
Or was this really an attack on the culural imperialism and globalism of the western world, disguised as a film? Certainly, there was little evidence of the restaurant and retail chains that dominate most cities. Certainly, we were being shown a culture particular to Japan in the love-hotel. Certainly, the western music of the baroque and the nineteenth century was being challenged to stand up against the most graphically demanding of bedfellows (and thereby proved that Bach is not, after all, strong enough to survive any treatment, even if that of Jacques Loussier were not enough to demonstrate otherwise), so maybe...
Still don't care!
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Friday 7 October 2011
Contagion and what is contagious
This is a Festival review of the Surprise Film, Contagion (2011)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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8 October (Tweets added, 21 July 2015)
This is a Festival review of the Surprise Film, Contagion (2011)
I’m not imagining that I understand, not having looked at it, much about the spread of disease and its control. However, I cannot believe the following sort of scenario, without seeing some credible evidence that it makes real biological sense:
If a fox, detected in a chicken-run, drops something that it has been eating in its flight, and that food is not only palatable to the chickens, but is also infected with a virus that the fox has had, the chicken (or chickens) that eats its, merely by having eaten that food, will give rise to a fox/chicken-type virus (whose genotyping will show origins in both the fox and the chicken).
If the chicken is then, sadly, run over, its blood will be infected with the virus, and another species that comes into contact with it will (or could) contract the virus that it contains.
As I say, it may be that I know nothing about the matter, but this seems about as simplistic as thinking that, because certain foods contain more anti-oxidants than others, because anti-oxidants will react with and neutralize free radicals, and because free radicals can react with cells to give rise to ageing and cancer, eating those foods will reduce one’s liability to those undesirable effects.
-> It is gathered that the mechanisms both of initial infection and of its transference were criticized.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 21, 2015
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Thursday 6 October 2011
Gerhard Richter: Painting - less painting, than trying not to be disrupted painting
This is a Festival review of Gerhard Richter : Painting (2011)
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7 October
This is a Festival review of Gerhard Richter : Painting (2011)
* Contains spoilers *
Arshile Gorky’s wife reported, when he was still working in his New York studio, that she would see a canvas in one state, and, by the time that she awoke, it had been worked upon so much that it was largely unrecognizable. There are elements of this in what Gerhard Richter seeks to achieve in spite of the presence of those filming him at work, but that is the territory of this kind of work, and, really, it ought not to be too surprising (to which I shall return later).
Rather than wondering, rather pointlessly, whether Gorky would have allowed director Corinna Belz in when he was working, I can only profess admiration for Richter that, despite the fact that it was putting him off, he did not close down the access. That said, whether he would have welcomed – or, if given the choice, approved of – the temporal juxtaposition of how what he was working on looked at different moments, I do not know.
What I do know is that he loads the squeegee with paint, and then has to say that what he was about to do cannot be done then, because it will not succeed. Whatever Richter may ‘really’ be like, he gave the impression on camera of being a sensitive man, and he seemed unnerved that he had started preparing for something that was not possible, and which, one would like to think, he might not have done, if he had felt at ease. He did not, not when trying to work on his canvases.
Indeed, following on from that, if we invest an artist and his or her work with worth, then we have to leave him or her free to decide when a work is finished, and what is effective and what is not. And yet I am imagining that the moment when he white-washes over a grey composition may have left some who watched the film wishing that he had left it untouched: I can understand that, but I take the different view – that he created it, and he must be satisfied with it, if it is to bear his name.
His assistants, his wife, recognize the knife-edge on which the creative process is balanced at this stage, and say that, if they were to comment that they think that something is right as it stands, what they have said would be more likely to cause Richter to re-work it. Not out of perversity, I fully believe, but because, as the camera and crew do, the remark would interrupt and subvert the process.
Unlike artists who have their studios, and would, throughout history, delegate tasks to assistants, Richter’s was shown getting the paint ready, but the artist himself was even cleaning off his materials at the end of the session. He was, as he several times expressed in response to questioning (some of which was better and more artistically minded than other parts of it), clearly finding his way with the works, and we were told about how their current state had to stand up (as if to scrutiny, scrutiny of a most honest kind – and Richter believes in truth in painting) for several days: white-washing over was not something over which those in his entourage could regularly afford to be regretful.
As I say, the creation is the artist’s, and he or she is the one to find a way ahead. In the case, for example, of Joan Miró, he had the luxury of being able to re-work canvases decades later that were still in his possession, whereas the Tate refused, I think, Francis Bacon, access to some of his, because it did not want them – as it owned them – any different from how they were, and knew that that would be the result otherwise.
One observation, amongst many intelligent things that Richter said about his work (and it was also fascinating to see him about the business not only of planning out exhibition spaces in 1:50 scale, but to hear him pleading with photographers at the opening of a show who required just one more pose that they had so many shots already), was that a painting makes an assertion that does not bear much company: in the context of having to hang several pieces on each wall, and plan it all out, that seemed just as much a challenge as in the studio, with canvases making differing assertions in different ways about how they should work.
So the supremacy of each work’s voice, its statement, and, I would say, for the painter to decide what it is to say and when it is saying it. Then, for Richter, what he said that he valued was people adopting the attitude of those attending a gallery in New York, who would more freely, more honestly, say that they liked this group of paintings, but that the grey compositions were terrible. The point that he was making is he does not feel the polite comment that something is ‘interesting’, to which he is usually exposed, is that kind of genuine response.
As for me, I’m looking forward to spending time at the new exhibition at Tate Modern – and maybe to watching this film again there during the time that it is on.
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As if I am not There: from the claustrophobia of a concentration camp back to the outside world
This is a Festival review of As if I am not There (2010)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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7 October
This is a Festival review of As if I am not There (2010)
* Contains spoilers *
One usually gets so much of the feel of what a foreign-language film will be from the title that it has been given, and that can be misleading (or just a bad choice), so it is good to know that this one was intended. Obviously, such things should not carry too much weight, but there is the feeling in these words ‘How can this be happening to me? How can something so outside my experience be taking place?’
And this film shows a response to that horrible feeling of unreality. Any suggestion, as in another review that I have read, that it was just made to have some sort of gruesome residue of appeal that it does not really deserve is just so bizarre as not to merit any real further comment. Things on which this film relies happened (maybe to different people and at different times), and I really struggle to believe that anyone would think the film made just to exploit those people’s suffering.
It does not rejoice in that suffering, but shows how the small group of women with whom we end up managed – or chose to manage – in humiliating conditions after their menfolk had just been executed for no crime other than being men, and being from the wrong racial group.
No one depicts rape for its own sake, and here, in the case of Samira (Nastasa Petrovic), it is a vehicle for us to witness her seeking to absent herself from the brutal and disgusting way in which she is being handled – ‘treated’ is too genteel a word for it. And, of course, there are worse atrocities that could have been committed (and which are visited upon a young girl in a cruel parody of the Christian cross and what it is meant to symbolize), but, for Samira, recently travelled from home and family to a new place where she expects to teach and care for children, this must be unimaginable, unbearable.
When she expects to be raped again, but the soldier shown into her prefers to fall asleep next to her, there is a short moment of respite from the cruelty and dehumanisation, even though, as one of the women selected to satisfy the soldiers, she and they probably have better conditions than the others, with whom we lose contact until much later. For Samira, and for her increasing bravery, the decision comes to be that of staying a woman, of putting on lipstick, and not remaining the unwilling recipient of sex, but asserting her right to be a person, to reject the men’s belief in their right to strike and abuse her.
In what I read as a by-product of that assertion, she attracts the attention of the soldiers’ Captain (Miraj Grbic), and swaps civilized – but still meaningless – love-making, rather than enforced copulation at the hands of insensitive and brutish men who do not even view her as human. Within the constraints of that role (and in a fine performance), he shows Samira such kindness as he can, but it is all too undeniable – and, at several points, cannot be denied – that they both know that he has every power over her, and that he just chooses to give her some respect, the respect denied to so many of the others from her adoptive village.
The Captain seems partly drawn to her because she is educated, from Sarajevo, and believes in herself – in the ordinary course of the events that Samira could have had no knowledge of being about to unfold she would not have been there. When the painful physical and mental things that, for me, Nastasa Petrovic’s acting render totally compelling, with her face seeming like a window through which her disbelief and sense of degradation seem transparent, are over, she cannot even go back to her home city or her family, because it is all gone.
As if I am not There is a story that needs to be told, but it in no way has that sense of a worthy subject that has been attributed to it – to see where Samira, the woman at the beginning, has come from, to see what has shocked her, traumatized her, and the legacy with which she is left in another country, and with which she seems to take steps to come to terms, is such a powerful piece of individual heroism that it truly offers hope where it feels least likely.
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Wednesday 5 October 2011
The cosmos of Kosmos
This is a Festival review of Kosmos (2010)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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7 October
* Contains spoilers *
This is a Festival review of Kosmos (2010)
Kosmos is what he calls himself, when he is asked his name. He has previously saved the young woman’s brother, and he is delighted to hear her baying at him like a wolf, inviting him to follow her, to chase her. When he says that he is Kosmos, she says that she is Neptün, and I find myself thinking more of the seas, than of the planet. (Meeting the girl’s father, he gives a different name, but he is credited as Kosmos (Sermet Yesil), and she as Neptün (Türkü Turan.)
What we see is his visit to this indeterminate Muslim town in the snow, from when he arrives to when he leaves. All that we really know, as a foreign audience, is that he strays into areas where he should not be, that there are sounds of explosions, and that there is a border closed, which some would like opened, but which others say is just for their profit.
If we are trying to judge him, to see whether the words that he speaks when asked questions and which have a ring of teaching such as from the Koran or the book of Ecclesiastes, then we will find that he does things to disapprove of. (But don’t we all. He does not claim to be a great holy man, but answers people’s questions, and seems to seek to help.)
Ultimately, it is the disapproval, and the reliance that others have put upon him to cure as if it is without cost to himself (when we see at the start how he gives of himself to give life back to the boy whom he has rescued from the river), which cut short his time there. Some see him for who he is, but even the teacher, who sleeps with him, seeks to put her guilt on him – what he is looking for, he says, is love.
With Neptün, whether or not they sleep together, there is an unbridled energy and exuberance, a dance as of elemental forces such as their names suggest. Even his acts of healing, and what happens with natural phenomena (reminiscent of what Tarkovksy does in Mirror), suggest that he has a connection that others have forgotten about or overlooked, and which the girl sees in him more fully. The woman who places reliance in the medication Tralin® , an anti-depressant, seems at the opposite extreme, but he is nonetheless distressed for her.
The crash-landing of some sort of lunar module, which the authorities want hushed up, but which he has already seen, seem to herald a time when judgement turns against him, and he has to leave, although not without showing his care for those who are hurting. He leaves as he arrived, and, except when he is with Neptün, there is always an ambiguous quality about his anguish and about his joy, as if their being two sides of the same coin is very close to him.
This is a remarkable piece of cinema, and would invite me to see it again. What I would have to be clear about is not to do so to find out more about who Kosmos is, since we know only the time when he is with the people in this town and often have to guess at his motives or motivations, but to see how he is valued, to see what people see in him.
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Loops and strips
7 October
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
If, depending on how much it had cost, it had been a Festival wristband that secured entry to, and the seat of my choice at, any screening, it would have been something worth treasuring.
Even though it actually wasn't, and had just been (somewhat needlessly?) issued to those of us who watched Some Like it Hot on Grantchester Meadows (probably amongst other events), I kept it with me until beyond 25 September, in fact for almost a whole month, as some sort of talisman. It bore up after the Festival was over, even if I didn't, remarkably well...
The ceremonial severing of the band, lest I still be marvelling at its durability in a twelvemonth, is less evident than said durability, but such is the way of these things.
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A look at The Look
This is a Festival review of The Look (2011)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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7 October
This is a Festival review of The Look (2011)
There is not much to say about The Look, not because it is not good, but because it is worth watching, rather than talking about. A good documentary cannot be summed up (and, counter to this sense, I had been trying to remember the headings under which each section of the film falls), but has told or, as here, shown you something about the truth.
Even if the viewer has somehow never heard of Charlotte Rampling, I believe that he or she, quite apart from the fact that clips are shown from a number of her films, would want to go on to discover some of them. (Where I know her best from is Woody Allen’s misunderstood (at the time) Stardust Memories, where she was mad and desirable as Dorrie, and the first time that I had heard the term ‘basket case’ (one of Alvy’s voices describing her.)
The sections were headed with titles as large, but not actually as invading, as exposure, beauty, sex, death, life and two or so others: each was the introduction to Rampling in communion with someone whom she know, so, first, being photographed by and photographing Peter Lindbergh in an unfinished / unfurnished top-floor space in what was probably Paris, talking about what that meant to her and to him. Already, a very great entrée into hearing what Rampling said about herself and her look. Then talking to writer Paul Auster in a remarkable maritime location, etc.
The film had really one flaw, which was that it dragged towards the end: the sections at the end could just have been a little tighter, because I was not alone in finding that the attention was slipping. Indeed, one short scene, where Rampling has something and nothing of meeting up with one of her contacts (after an atmospheric call from a deli to try to arrange it), could just have been dropped all together. The judgement seemed to have been taken to include it, when it might better have been made to leave it out.
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Tuesday 4 October 2011
Bob Dylan is 70 (2)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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When I said previously that Dylan in Don't Look Back was 27, I meant 24.
The day after seeing it, I looked out David Hadju's positively 4th street, from which it seems most apt to quote from a letter dated 5 May that Joan Baez wrote to her sister Mimi from the Savoy Hotel:
Dearest Mimishka - I love you.
We're leaving Bobby's entourage. He has become so unbelievably unmanageable that I can't stand to be around him. Everyone traveling with him is going mad - He walks around in new clothes with a cane - Has tantrums, orders fish, gets drunk, plays his record, phones up America, asks if his concert tonight is sold out - stops all three limousines every morning to buy all the newspapers that might have his name in them. [...]
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
When I said previously that Dylan in Don't Look Back was 27, I meant 24.
The day after seeing it, I looked out David Hadju's positively 4th street, from which it seems most apt to quote from a letter dated 5 May that Joan Baez wrote to her sister Mimi from the Savoy Hotel:
Dearest Mimishka - I love you.
We're leaving Bobby's entourage. He has become so unbelievably unmanageable that I can't stand to be around him. Everyone traveling with him is going mad - He walks around in new clothes with a cane - Has tantrums, orders fish, gets drunk, plays his record, phones up America, asks if his concert tonight is sold out - stops all three limousines every morning to buy all the newspapers that might have his name in them. [...]
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Friday 30 September 2011
Missing reviews / scope for further reviews
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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1 October
I had an e-mail called Film Surprises & Favourites from the Festival team, which suggested that it is still possible to submit reviews. However, the pages for each film still resolutely say 'Reviews are currently closed for this film'.
I found no review (I have not yet written one) of Charlotte Rampling in The Look, but, also from the closing day, mine of Sleeping Beauty - by which I really do not appear to have been impressed - is there. Not so for Tyrannosaur from the preceding day, or Bullhead, from several days earlier...
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 October
I had an e-mail called Film Surprises & Favourites from the Festival team, which suggested that it is still possible to submit reviews. However, the pages for each film still resolutely say 'Reviews are currently closed for this film'.
I found no review (I have not yet written one) of Charlotte Rampling in The Look, but, also from the closing day, mine of Sleeping Beauty - by which I really do not appear to have been impressed - is there. Not so for Tyrannosaur from the preceding day, or Bullhead, from several days earlier...
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Thursday 29 September 2011
Traces of tragedy (2)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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29 September
Some suggest that the tragedy is Euripedes’ Electra, but, unlike that play, the woman killed her husband on her own, and has been punished for it. Moreover, this act is not in vengeance, nor is what happens to the former boyfriend. With so much changed, the claim that it is the same story is doubtful.
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29 September
Some suggest that the tragedy is Euripedes’ Electra, but, unlike that play, the woman killed her husband on her own, and has been punished for it. Moreover, this act is not in vengeance, nor is what happens to the former boyfriend. With so much changed, the claim that it is the same story is doubtful.
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Wednesday 28 September 2011
Traces of tragedy (1)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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29 September
* Contains spoilers *
I have read in both another review and in the Festival booklet that White White World makes use of ‘a famous Greek tragedy’, but I cannot see which one, if it is actually famous (or if it is Greek tragedy), has anything like this plot outline (not even if genders are switched). The existing review on IMDb gives the story.
There is nothing wrong with the improbable happening in such tragedies, but for someone not to know who the daughter of a former lover is – or even to have seen her before – when they live in such a small place is implausible (she may know who he is: in some scenes, we are invited to believe that everyone knows who he is and reveres him).
In any case, it does not stop him having sex, in a highly perfunctory way, early on with this bored, beautiful young woman, but, with his and her attitude to life, only the highly artificial state of affairs of only having met that night means that this activity could not happen until then. From the point where we learn who she is, the film lost credibility, and I could happily have not stayed for the end.
Doing so did not, I fear, gain me much (other than insights into drug-taking, callousness, and ways of provocatively using bank-notes). Amidst so many films that I had read about and chosen what to view from, I had forgotten which one this was – but, in any case, a film should speak for itself – and knew only that the characters would sing in character. They did so, but it was not an especial revelation, not the promised innovative fusion of film, opera, and a story from the ancient world.
As for the film’s claims to have a root in tragedy, that aspect passed me by, and I doubt that knowing of it would have enriched the experience. Certainly, there was more singing in tragedy than is given popular credit for, and the scene of mourning with the crowd had an effect – albeit a little ridiculous, given that it concerned the owner of a bar – of creating grandeur, of showing a collective voice. Sadly, I was little interested by then, and could but be amazed that the girl’s mother is again prepared to sacrifice her life for others who care so little for her.
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29 September
* Contains spoilers *
I have read in both another review and in the Festival booklet that White White World makes use of ‘a famous Greek tragedy’, but I cannot see which one, if it is actually famous (or if it is Greek tragedy), has anything like this plot outline (not even if genders are switched). The existing review on IMDb gives the story.
There is nothing wrong with the improbable happening in such tragedies, but for someone not to know who the daughter of a former lover is – or even to have seen her before – when they live in such a small place is implausible (she may know who he is: in some scenes, we are invited to believe that everyone knows who he is and reveres him).
In any case, it does not stop him having sex, in a highly perfunctory way, early on with this bored, beautiful young woman, but, with his and her attitude to life, only the highly artificial state of affairs of only having met that night means that this activity could not happen until then. From the point where we learn who she is, the film lost credibility, and I could happily have not stayed for the end.
Doing so did not, I fear, gain me much (other than insights into drug-taking, callousness, and ways of provocatively using bank-notes). Amidst so many films that I had read about and chosen what to view from, I had forgotten which one this was – but, in any case, a film should speak for itself – and knew only that the characters would sing in character. They did so, but it was not an especial revelation, not the promised innovative fusion of film, opera, and a story from the ancient world.
As for the film’s claims to have a root in tragedy, that aspect passed me by, and I doubt that knowing of it would have enriched the experience. Certainly, there was more singing in tragedy than is given popular credit for, and the scene of mourning with the crowd had an effect – albeit a little ridiculous, given that it concerned the owner of a bar – of creating grandeur, of showing a collective voice. Sadly, I was little interested by then, and could but be amazed that the girl’s mother is again prepared to sacrifice her life for others who care so little for her.
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Belt and braces : Kirk Douglas, to the rescue ?
This is a Festival review of Ace in the Hole (1951)
More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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28 September
This is a Festival review of Ace in the Hole (1951)
A long way back to before the Festival's opening film, but here goes:
* Contains spoilers *
Billy Wilder co-wrote the film, so it seemed well deserved to think of reviving Ace in the Hole, not just as part of a theme of journalism in film, but to see why the film might have lacked popularity. As to the pairing with the short (not so short) Wakefield Express about a newspaper of that name (and its production and that of four sister papers), I am less sure, and think that I would have preferred to go, without an introduction, straight to Kirk Douglas, as Chuck Tatum, talking his way into a job in Albuquerque.
(If the short had been screened second, there would have been a risk that that some might - I would have chosen to leave after the feature (but so be it), and, although I accept that accompanying films were part of the fabric of how films were shown even in my childhood, that is not a usual way with revivals.)
Chuck has been there a year when we see him next, and I failed to notice that now he has ‘gone native’ by adopting the local habit of wearing braces on his trousers, but also a belt. Everybody knows him, everybody knows his rants about the stultifying nature of small-town news. (Garrison Keillor may have seen this film: his narrator in Love Me reminds me of it, now that I – have a chance to – reflect.)
Rattle-snakes aren’t Chuck’s thing, unlike the sheriff where he ends up, but he is dispatched to a gathering in their honour: he does not get to the destination, but we have a flavour of it through the Sheriff Kretzer’s specimen (and its tastes in food), because he sees the meat in a news story of Leo Minosa, a man trapped underground, trapped because (since Leo interprets being imprisoned as punishment) he went there to plunder a native American burial-ground yet another time.
Leo trusts the journalist who pushed past authority to get to him, and believes that he is trying to get him out quickly, rather than realizing that Chuck is spinning out the story as part of a plan to get back into a job in New York (or Chicago). The plan works, but the curse is that the delay has brought about Leo’s inevitable death – by then, Chuck, sure of himself, has already taken off his braces, thereby transporting us to the proprietor’s office and his mockery of such means of playing it safe.
So, as the imagery has told us, Chuck has started playing without a safety-net, and, when he could seek assistance for himself, he delays – again, the theme of putting something off – too long, because he feels obligated to see that Leo is given the final rites. Still not tending to his needs, and, after both dismissing the crowd that has gathered in the preceding days and having failed to interest his New York boss in the story of his betrayal, Chuck goes back to Albuquerque with that story.
He had played the newspaper bosses off against each other to get what he wanted, but his self-destructive self stakes everything on a closing story behind the final one: having seemed unable to announce Leo’s death to the world as ‘a scoop’, he has declaimed the matter in public and told everyone to go, a scene perhaps reminiscent of Christ clearing the Temple (but, here, the idolatrous temple of his own making, and one that contains a body to prove it).
Not for the most pure of motives, he has resisted the advances of Leo’s wife Lorraine (with the suitable bewitchment of Jan Sterling), who really just wants something better than Leo, his family, and the run-down desert café that they run. She only did not leave earlier (as she does afterwards) because she, too, believes in Chuck’s persuasive rhetoric, but she does not want to have to play the grieving wife to help the rescue story. Misjudging it, Chuck pushes it too far, too far beyond what is safe, by trying to force Lorraine back into her role, because it is his role, not hers.
In the final analysis, he staked too highly. In spotting and creating a dramatic story, in exploiting (as he says in relation to the sheriff’s snake festival and the card-game there that Chuck forced him to miss), he thought that he had, in Leo, an ace in the hole, not a pair of deuces.
With whom (or what), then, has Chuck been playing poker that his seemingly winning hand has collapsed, and been shown for what it is? Is he really a tragic hero, and is that what made Ace in the Hole, for all that it is well written, something that also did not make the film itself a winner with an audience that does not seek that sort of ending?
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Daily diced parrot could help you slim
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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28 September
Anything in common with 'Four cups a day can leave women less depressed, says study' (from AOL's sign-in page)?
Maybe just that claims can be made without someone knowing or giving the basis for the assertion, and sometimes that is the experimenter(s): some people will know of the biology paper, written by the editor of the journal in which it was published, that went through the mathematics / physics of flight in relation to the bumblebee.
I read the paper at the time, and its (albeit unhappy) conclusion was that it seemed to have proved that the bumblebee could not fly.
Of course, though, it can (in a fashion) - the biologist had to revisit his calculations, and, having found that a factor, effect, coefficient or variable had been overlooked. I did not see what was written then, but the bumblebee - a great relief to it, I'm sure - was authorized to fly again.
Turning to these 50,000 nurses, of whom, presumably, 25,000 did not drink coffee at all, unless there was a whole range of amounts of coffee drunk on average by the coffee-drinking nurses, plus the ones who stuck to tea (or smoothies).
What sort of coffee?
* Filter coffee?
* Instant?
* A skinny decaffeinated cappuccino bought in from a nearby Starbucks®**?
* Turkish coffee (with two sugars)?
* A double espresso from a filling-station with a self-service machine?
If the reports that I have seen mean anything, it must have been coffee with caffeine, because someone is suggesting (although there is actually caffeine in tea) that it might be what makes those nurses experience (or report) depression less: that person may only have skimmed through the report, and I have just seen and heard the headline, when I need to get to read the report...
In the meantime, isn't there something special about nurses and their life-style? - and I don't mean the Carry on Nurse or pornographic stereotype. It's not unusual for them to work double-shifts (e.g. morning and afternoon, night and morning), and could do two of those with very little time in-between, such as arriving for a shift at 7.00 a.m., not finishing till 10.00 p.m., and having to do the same the following day.
Not a typical working-life, unless that has been adjusted for that factor, so, unless something was done to compensate, not the best sample, even though the size is a good one. What would the effect on influences (social, emotional, economic, personality, predisposition, prior experience of depression, etc.) be of such a lifestyle? - of the working life of a nurse anyway, with all that they are exposed to socially, economically, etc., in their actual work?
And coffee? People who do not drink coffee drink something else for al sorts of reason, and those who do drink it, drink it for all sorts of reason, but often to give themselves a kick or a boost. Could wanting a kick or a boost say more about those who drink coffee than anything else? And what about nurses who smoke? Nurses who smoke and who drink coffee, nurses who don't smoke, but drink coffee, nurses who don't drink coffee, but who smoke?
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** Which Garrison Keillor, in his novel Love Me, described that the narrator's partner and he did when they were 'slumming it' - and I tend to agree with that analysis.
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 September
Anything in common with 'Four cups a day can leave women less depressed, says study' (from AOL's sign-in page)?
Maybe just that claims can be made without someone knowing or giving the basis for the assertion, and sometimes that is the experimenter(s): some people will know of the biology paper, written by the editor of the journal in which it was published, that went through the mathematics / physics of flight in relation to the bumblebee.
I read the paper at the time, and its (albeit unhappy) conclusion was that it seemed to have proved that the bumblebee could not fly.
Of course, though, it can (in a fashion) - the biologist had to revisit his calculations, and, having found that a factor, effect, coefficient or variable had been overlooked. I did not see what was written then, but the bumblebee - a great relief to it, I'm sure - was authorized to fly again.
Turning to these 50,000 nurses, of whom, presumably, 25,000 did not drink coffee at all, unless there was a whole range of amounts of coffee drunk on average by the coffee-drinking nurses, plus the ones who stuck to tea (or smoothies).
What sort of coffee?
* Filter coffee?
* Instant?
* A skinny decaffeinated cappuccino bought in from a nearby Starbucks®**?
* Turkish coffee (with two sugars)?
* A double espresso from a filling-station with a self-service machine?
If the reports that I have seen mean anything, it must have been coffee with caffeine, because someone is suggesting (although there is actually caffeine in tea) that it might be what makes those nurses experience (or report) depression less: that person may only have skimmed through the report, and I have just seen and heard the headline, when I need to get to read the report...
In the meantime, isn't there something special about nurses and their life-style? - and I don't mean the Carry on Nurse or pornographic stereotype. It's not unusual for them to work double-shifts (e.g. morning and afternoon, night and morning), and could do two of those with very little time in-between, such as arriving for a shift at 7.00 a.m., not finishing till 10.00 p.m., and having to do the same the following day.
Not a typical working-life, unless that has been adjusted for that factor, so, unless something was done to compensate, not the best sample, even though the size is a good one. What would the effect on influences (social, emotional, economic, personality, predisposition, prior experience of depression, etc.) be of such a lifestyle? - of the working life of a nurse anyway, with all that they are exposed to socially, economically, etc., in their actual work?
And coffee? People who do not drink coffee drink something else for al sorts of reason, and those who do drink it, drink it for all sorts of reason, but often to give themselves a kick or a boost. Could wanting a kick or a boost say more about those who drink coffee than anything else? And what about nurses who smoke? Nurses who smoke and who drink coffee, nurses who don't smoke, but drink coffee, nurses who don't drink coffee, but who smoke?
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** Which Garrison Keillor, in his novel Love Me, described that the narrator's partner and he did when they were 'slumming it' - and I tend to agree with that analysis.
Tuesday 27 September 2011
One-dimensional approach?
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27 September
I wish to follow up on what I wrote yesterday, now that I have seen another review, in the fourth edition of TAKE ONE: more like ‘Take that!’, plus a rapier-blow, but directed not at the reader, but the film-makers, and again, I feel, rather unnecessarily personally, rather too much ad hominem.
Oh, I’m sure that people can feel that way, feel disappointed by a film, but what is the point where restraint should be shown? I was openly critical of the Tartan Terror event, but I do hope that I did not give this impression in seeking to say that Peter Bradshaw and, probably, Hamish McAlpine also had tried to rely on native wit to get them through (as the phrase has, ‘winging it’) what could have been better planned. If I’d found myself saying what I wouldn’t do to Bradshaw even if he were on fire, I might wonder whether I had gone too far.
This review that I have just seen almost does appear to say that sort of thing, with what seem quite cutting remarks about getting back the money for the film in relation to where it came from. Not a matter of suppressing free speech, but I am quite surprised that TAKE ONE published this as it stood, as if it were self-evidently and uncontroversially true, despite three Festival screenings –attended by people who all saw things as this reviewer did?
Besides which, not explaining himself (i.e., without giving everything away, but giving examples), this reviewer imputes to the director and writer a fraudulent series of sleights of hand: he says that they try to divert attention from the plot holes by just cutting to a black screen.
(Another review, on the Festival web-site, unhelpfully talks about ‘plot holes the size of my ego’, but, even if that may suggest the scale of them (though they could be very small), I should like to have pointed out what they are. I had similar feelings about del Toro’s Don’t be Afraid of the Dark, but thought some might to know what, trying to be discreet, did not work for me.)
For me, a review that gives too many opinions without giving an understanding of how they were arrived at really says nothing that can be related to – I am sure that, through laziness, I have talked about someone’s beautiful acting or portrayal. However, if I cannot say in what the beauty consists, what was beautiful about the acting, have I said anything, anything better than saying that the acting was quite ptang, without ever defining ‘ptang’…?
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27 September
I wish to follow up on what I wrote yesterday, now that I have seen another review, in the fourth edition of TAKE ONE: more like ‘Take that!’, plus a rapier-blow, but directed not at the reader, but the film-makers, and again, I feel, rather unnecessarily personally, rather too much ad hominem.
Oh, I’m sure that people can feel that way, feel disappointed by a film, but what is the point where restraint should be shown? I was openly critical of the Tartan Terror event, but I do hope that I did not give this impression in seeking to say that Peter Bradshaw and, probably, Hamish McAlpine also had tried to rely on native wit to get them through (as the phrase has, ‘winging it’) what could have been better planned. If I’d found myself saying what I wouldn’t do to Bradshaw even if he were on fire, I might wonder whether I had gone too far.
This review that I have just seen almost does appear to say that sort of thing, with what seem quite cutting remarks about getting back the money for the film in relation to where it came from. Not a matter of suppressing free speech, but I am quite surprised that TAKE ONE published this as it stood, as if it were self-evidently and uncontroversially true, despite three Festival screenings –attended by people who all saw things as this reviewer did?
Besides which, not explaining himself (i.e., without giving everything away, but giving examples), this reviewer imputes to the director and writer a fraudulent series of sleights of hand: he says that they try to divert attention from the plot holes by just cutting to a black screen.
(Another review, on the Festival web-site, unhelpfully talks about ‘plot holes the size of my ego’, but, even if that may suggest the scale of them (though they could be very small), I should like to have pointed out what they are. I had similar feelings about del Toro’s Don’t be Afraid of the Dark, but thought some might to know what, trying to be discreet, did not work for me.)
For me, a review that gives too many opinions without giving an understanding of how they were arrived at really says nothing that can be related to – I am sure that, through laziness, I have talked about someone’s beautiful acting or portrayal. However, if I cannot say in what the beauty consists, what was beautiful about the acting, have I said anything, anything better than saying that the acting was quite ptang, without ever defining ‘ptang’…?
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Monday 26 September 2011
Doors into other worlds
More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
26 September
Picking up where I left off, I assume that, if I have a brown, double-glazed, PVCu door it will not turn overnight into a red-painted steel door with no window - or an ostrich. (If it does, though, someone is playing a prank: which is what Gregor Samsa thinks in Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, or K. in The Trial.)
And the world routinely does not abuse our expectations. Some 35 years ago, my friend Roland imagined a moment involving a teapot (of a size suitable to sit on a tea-trolley, waiting for many to pour out their tea during a break, and for it to be available to them without any more delay than involved in the pouring).
When, instead of inclining the teapot to the cup, he (or the person whom he imagined) did the opposite, a magic is performed: wherein the tea nonetheless flowed, without the teapot being tipped, but, instead, the receiving vessel.
The comparison is with our world, which, despite the fact that a universe is supposed to exist in which every event occurs, continues to be very normal, and so Cindy Crawford (or a chinchilla - NB I am not suggesting that there is a link, and a chinchilla is more cute, of course) is never in my spare bedroom when I go in there looking for something, or Woody Allen (or my long-dead grandather) behind the counter at the Post Office.
Rather, things actually continue, rather boringly, as they are, and, if I lose something, I may not remember where it is (and it may have visited Neptune in the meantime), but it turns up consistently with where I eventually look for (or find) it, depending on whether I have a recollection of leaving it there, or because, by then, I am already looking for something else.
Why isn't the world, if it is just one of an infinite number of worlds where everything that could happen happens, one where more random events occur? If, when my order for a medium iced latte has been politely given and taken in Costa®, one possibility - out of my hands - for the fate of that coffee is for the same barista to throw it in my face, and get a promotion, not the sack.
And it cannot, can it, just be that we are so programmed - deterministically - to behave as expected (or that we exercise extreme self-control), because it just should happen that, if I go to put some money in the bowl of someone on the street, her dog is the one to choose to fish the money out and gives it back whilst she dozes, or a pilot just decides not to go anywhere and to order everyone off the aircraft once in a while?
An invitation to ask whether it all seems just a bit (a lot?!) too predictable to be simply one of an infinite number of worlds in which every event occurs - or do we chance to be in the most 'normal' one, where so many 'possible' outcomes resolve uncontroversially?
Or should I spend time elsewhere with Voltaire's Candide, and not ask at all?
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
26 September
Picking up where I left off, I assume that, if I have a brown, double-glazed, PVCu door it will not turn overnight into a red-painted steel door with no window - or an ostrich. (If it does, though, someone is playing a prank: which is what Gregor Samsa thinks in Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, or K. in The Trial.)
And the world routinely does not abuse our expectations. Some 35 years ago, my friend Roland imagined a moment involving a teapot (of a size suitable to sit on a tea-trolley, waiting for many to pour out their tea during a break, and for it to be available to them without any more delay than involved in the pouring).
When, instead of inclining the teapot to the cup, he (or the person whom he imagined) did the opposite, a magic is performed: wherein the tea nonetheless flowed, without the teapot being tipped, but, instead, the receiving vessel.
The comparison is with our world, which, despite the fact that a universe is supposed to exist in which every event occurs, continues to be very normal, and so Cindy Crawford (or a chinchilla - NB I am not suggesting that there is a link, and a chinchilla is more cute, of course) is never in my spare bedroom when I go in there looking for something, or Woody Allen (or my long-dead grandather) behind the counter at the Post Office.
Rather, things actually continue, rather boringly, as they are, and, if I lose something, I may not remember where it is (and it may have visited Neptune in the meantime), but it turns up consistently with where I eventually look for (or find) it, depending on whether I have a recollection of leaving it there, or because, by then, I am already looking for something else.
Why isn't the world, if it is just one of an infinite number of worlds where everything that could happen happens, one where more random events occur? If, when my order for a medium iced latte has been politely given and taken in Costa®, one possibility - out of my hands - for the fate of that coffee is for the same barista to throw it in my face, and get a promotion, not the sack.
And it cannot, can it, just be that we are so programmed - deterministically - to behave as expected (or that we exercise extreme self-control), because it just should happen that, if I go to put some money in the bowl of someone on the street, her dog is the one to choose to fish the money out and gives it back whilst she dozes, or a pilot just decides not to go anywhere and to order everyone off the aircraft once in a while?
An invitation to ask whether it all seems just a bit (a lot?!) too predictable to be simply one of an infinite number of worlds in which every event occurs - or do we chance to be in the most 'normal' one, where so many 'possible' outcomes resolve uncontroversially?
Or should I spend time elsewhere with Voltaire's Candide, and not ask at all?
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