More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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11 February
It's not exactly an oral swagger, but an over-hasty, confidential familiarity - no, an overfamiliarity - from one who is making quite clear who's boss in the presenter / listener relationship, IF you let her (which she wants you to do, and almost assumes that you will).
Yesterday, she said as if it were an expletive, or, rather, admiration of someone's bum, Gorgeous piece!, then whiffled off into some - perhaps more scripted (and, to be honest, I do not know whether these presenters write their own material) - string of information. As ever, briskly, with almost unnecessarily precise diction, which reinforces the message I know what I'm talking about, you should listen to me.
Unfortunately, it's so forced, almost so desperate to be liked and to make ad libs full of her own opinions and 'personality', that, for me, it is an unsubtle stamp of would-be trustworthiness, not remotely the sort of underlying reassurance that is just inherent in, say, the style of Fiona Talkington.
Yet this Derham attitude is not her unique phenomenon, for Radio 3 seems 'to have bought into' this feminine style of clipped authority: to my mind, Suzy Klein is almost indistinguishable, save that she is the only person that I have heard using the word 'please' in such a barked way* that it is quite out of place in asking a performer being interviewed to answer whatever he or she is there to talk about:
It had echoes of a child begging for something that he or she knows is forbidden (or, at least, it's time has not yet come), but delivered not in quite such a wheedling way, but as if to ingratiate on some other level, but, not on her own behalf, but as the servant of the listening audience: it's as if she is a Jesus, pleading with the Father for forgiveness for the sinners on their knees before the cross - give them, I beseech thee, but the answer to this question in your almighty mercy...
End-notes
* And unnecessarily using it, to impart some sense of God knows what! - counterfactual humility?
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Saturday 11 February 2012
Friday 10 February 2012
Silky, smooth and satisfying
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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10 February
Yes, what does that describe (or purport to)...?
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10 February
Yes, what does that describe (or purport to)...?
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Wednesday 8 February 2012
The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 5)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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9 February
* Contains (almost nothing but) spoilers *
Probably full circle, and definitely the end of this group of postings, and to that alleged film The Future* (2011) and how, no less, it was sold to me by that clearly blasphemous publication, Picturehouse Recommends - sooner read Uncle Joe Stalin Rather Unequivocally Recommends**, and at least know where I stand and the permitted level of adoration!
I am confronted, once more, by that whole-page image of July*** (I think that the background has been edited out to make it more stark, as far as I recollect), leaning urgently out of the window as if - and this is the clever bit!? - some emergency is happening beneath her, and she is doing her best to intervene.
Rather than, when they both know that he should not be able to hear her (given where they both live), shouting nonethless - I forget what she does shout - to see if someone she has spoken to one the phone for the first time after all does. The image, as I say, suggests a crisis, because one wouldn't - unless Sophie (July) - go to the window with a hair-dryer and stick one's torso so emphatically out of it just to shout to someone who's not there, but it provides a great opportunity for the hair-dryer, a love-gift that has just been presented, to be pointed out of the window and suggest, in a phallic way, the direction of events and where her interest lies.
Redolent of that crazy connection that there is between teenage friends, who might try such a thing, rather than a woman of 35 trying to engage with an older man (Marshall) whom she probably didn't even meet when her partner Jason talked to Marshall and his daughter, and Jason, who had seen the drawing of the daughter's hamster (or whatever it was - possibly to raise funds for the animal welfare centre, possibly to line Marshall's pocket, as I don't recall, and don't intend to find out) bought it for Sophie.
The facing page is in two parts, the top about the film, the bottom about July. Here, mainly in order, are some quotations from what the write-up alleges (mostly, as if it were stating facts) from the top part, with a commentary as to why I take issue of them and believe that they built up a sigificantly misleading portrait of The Future:
July returns in typically charming fashion
I think that it’s very much a matter of opinion whether this film is charming – a Sundance jury might have thought it so, where a differently constituted one might not – and might not have found any real depths in this piece of work.
A film about confronting the stark realities of adulthood
Well, to be honest, this couple (meaning a pair of people, not an entity) does not have a clue about any sort of reality, and, if so, they have left it half their lives to address things that another generation does much younger than 35 (please see below - they are not a thirtysomething couple).
After weighing up all the pros and cons
I must confess that, aiming to skip the trailers, I missed the very opening minutes, and only met the three of them (including the cat, who confronts stark realities, for my money, far more meaningfully than Jason or Sophie does) when the humans have gone to collect the feline.
Only to be told that, allowing time for healing of the wounded (bandaged) paw, they must come back in twenty-eight days (or was it a month? I don’t care). They also learn that the thing that they have clearly been banking on, life-expectancy of six months, could be five years with love and care.
So whatever they weighed up offscreen to me, the two were never looking for a pet capable of surviving, but, frankly, an opportunity for short-term do-gooding, not a commitment to an animal’s life and well-being.
Of course, if they were wholly cynical (which they are too soft to be), they would go away, realize their mistake, and just call in to cancel the arrangement. But what arrangement? The clinic is crazy enough to say (words put into its mouth by July, and purely for reasons of the pretty thin plot) that it will put the cat down, after feeding and watering it for almost a month, if they do not show up – brilliant ethics for an animal shelter, and an insane way of spending someone’s money on sick or injured animals that you end up killing****.
[They] decide to take the next big step in their relationship: they are going to adopt a cat
As outlined above, they have no intention, at the outset, that this cat will be around very long – what big step? It’s more like an extended version of pet-sitting, with a limited duration. I do not know whether the clinic misled them initially, but they know that what they believed was wrong, and somehow, with a limited access to their own psyches, feel trapped with their previous decision. The write-up does not acknowledge any of this in:
But before they can bring their new pet back to their cost apartment, they will have to wait an entire month for the rescue centre to give them the all-clear
So, it’s hugely convenient that, when they expect that they are collecting the cat, they have a month in their questionably cosy dwelling (which may or may not be given a once-over by the centre) in which to regret being tied down – a bit like going to the dentist for an appointment for a filling, only to find that it is just one at which you are asked what sort of injection you’d like, and you have to come back another day for the filling.
With the big day marked on the calendar, our couple soon begin to fret over the consequences of their commitment
Yes, they fret straightaway about learning that it could be five years, but there is no actual commitment: they could pick up the phone and say ‘We’ve changed our minds’ – and let the centre kill the cat then and there? – is that the issue?
This mog’s going to tie them down; they will be trapped in a round-the clock routine for the next 10 years of their lives
It may be that what I missed is that this an HIV-positive LA cat, and thus that such a routine could be relevant, otherwise do these people really not know how capable cats are of looking after themselves? (They also, then, cannot have any friends who could do pet-sitting so that they go on vacation, and don’t know that, anyway, such help can be hired.)
Where ten years crept in from, I do not know, but Jason makes a rather fatuous speech that has been written for him to say that 5 years onto their 35 is 40, 40 is the new 50, and there’s nothing worthwhile in life then, so they are effectively dead now. Sadly, not very convincing, and even The Sophists of old came up with better reasons than that for the things of which they wished to persuade others: but it does need to allow those watching the film to believe these two credible, and their lacklustre thinking doesn’t do that.
[D]ay by day they drift apart. Until, that is, a moment of catharsis reunites their souls and reconnects them with their suburban world.
Funny, not in the film - of the same name - that I saw. Yes, they drift apart, but what is this cathartic moment supposed to be? Whatever it is, nothing reunites anybody's souls, and the rest is just fanciful padding!
Narrated by Paw-Paw (July herself putting on her best purr), The Future is a contemplative indie gem from one of American cinema's most enlightening free spirits.
So am I seriously being told that this film is enlightening? (And, yes, that was the cat's name, but, no, it doesn't narrate the film - it just narrates its own experience in the rescue centre of getting excited about going somewhere else and being happy, then reconciliation to not going there, then being killed, but there's an afterlife, so that's OK, and really contemplative, too!)
This may just be enthusiastic opinion, but it is making some pretty big claims, for July and The Future. In the section about her:
Like her films, she is understated, she is a citizen of a world far removed from the showy artificiality of Hollywood: the real world.
Oh, I think that I might vomit! It's not the studios' gizmos, hype and big budgets, so it must be good and appeal to those who prefer arthouse films - law of the excluded middle, again, for even if all Hollywood did = Bad, it doesn't follow that non-Hollywood = Good.
I end, speechless (at both ever having read this twaddle / seen the film), and feeling only that there is an enormous effort in this write-up to strong-arm me into why I should see / like it, viz.
Call her kooky or cute, but there is a truth in July's works that distinguishes them from other like-minded films. Without the slightest shade of pretence, The Future captures a tentative step along the potholed corridor towards middle age and an existential dead end*****.
End-notes
* Even Philip French (who he?) doesn't like it - he dismisses it in one outraged paragraph at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/nov/06/the-future-miranda-july-review.
** By the way, none of this 57 varieties stuff about which I've just piffled on (at, funnily enough, 57 alleged varieties) - one bloody tin of soup and, if you're lucky, you might be at the head of the queue when that one tin is on the shelf!
But it beats all this possibility for deliberation as to whether this bloody 18-month-cured prosciutto is better than a 12-month-cured packet of real Parma ham... Reminiscent of 'Should I see The Future, or save my pennies for The Artist?'?
*** With just the title top right in pinkish capitals, and some details of actors, director, etc., bottom right.
**** Perhaps Sophie and Jason are paying (even though they went there to collect the cat)?
***** There is another sentence, but I just don't feel the need to inflict it on both myelf or anyone reading this posting.
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9 February
* Contains (almost nothing but) spoilers *
Probably full circle, and definitely the end of this group of postings, and to that alleged film The Future* (2011) and how, no less, it was sold to me by that clearly blasphemous publication, Picturehouse Recommends - sooner read Uncle Joe Stalin Rather Unequivocally Recommends**, and at least know where I stand and the permitted level of adoration!
I am confronted, once more, by that whole-page image of July*** (I think that the background has been edited out to make it more stark, as far as I recollect), leaning urgently out of the window as if - and this is the clever bit!? - some emergency is happening beneath her, and she is doing her best to intervene.
Rather than, when they both know that he should not be able to hear her (given where they both live), shouting nonethless - I forget what she does shout - to see if someone she has spoken to one the phone for the first time after all does. The image, as I say, suggests a crisis, because one wouldn't - unless Sophie (July) - go to the window with a hair-dryer and stick one's torso so emphatically out of it just to shout to someone who's not there, but it provides a great opportunity for the hair-dryer, a love-gift that has just been presented, to be pointed out of the window and suggest, in a phallic way, the direction of events and where her interest lies.
Redolent of that crazy connection that there is between teenage friends, who might try such a thing, rather than a woman of 35 trying to engage with an older man (Marshall) whom she probably didn't even meet when her partner Jason talked to Marshall and his daughter, and Jason, who had seen the drawing of the daughter's hamster (or whatever it was - possibly to raise funds for the animal welfare centre, possibly to line Marshall's pocket, as I don't recall, and don't intend to find out) bought it for Sophie.
The facing page is in two parts, the top about the film, the bottom about July. Here, mainly in order, are some quotations from what the write-up alleges (mostly, as if it were stating facts) from the top part, with a commentary as to why I take issue of them and believe that they built up a sigificantly misleading portrait of The Future:
July returns in typically charming fashion
I think that it’s very much a matter of opinion whether this film is charming – a Sundance jury might have thought it so, where a differently constituted one might not – and might not have found any real depths in this piece of work.
A film about confronting the stark realities of adulthood
Well, to be honest, this couple (meaning a pair of people, not an entity) does not have a clue about any sort of reality, and, if so, they have left it half their lives to address things that another generation does much younger than 35 (please see below - they are not a thirtysomething couple).
After weighing up all the pros and cons
I must confess that, aiming to skip the trailers, I missed the very opening minutes, and only met the three of them (including the cat, who confronts stark realities, for my money, far more meaningfully than Jason or Sophie does) when the humans have gone to collect the feline.
Only to be told that, allowing time for healing of the wounded (bandaged) paw, they must come back in twenty-eight days (or was it a month? I don’t care). They also learn that the thing that they have clearly been banking on, life-expectancy of six months, could be five years with love and care.
So whatever they weighed up offscreen to me, the two were never looking for a pet capable of surviving, but, frankly, an opportunity for short-term do-gooding, not a commitment to an animal’s life and well-being.
Of course, if they were wholly cynical (which they are too soft to be), they would go away, realize their mistake, and just call in to cancel the arrangement. But what arrangement? The clinic is crazy enough to say (words put into its mouth by July, and purely for reasons of the pretty thin plot) that it will put the cat down, after feeding and watering it for almost a month, if they do not show up – brilliant ethics for an animal shelter, and an insane way of spending someone’s money on sick or injured animals that you end up killing****.
[They] decide to take the next big step in their relationship: they are going to adopt a cat
As outlined above, they have no intention, at the outset, that this cat will be around very long – what big step? It’s more like an extended version of pet-sitting, with a limited duration. I do not know whether the clinic misled them initially, but they know that what they believed was wrong, and somehow, with a limited access to their own psyches, feel trapped with their previous decision. The write-up does not acknowledge any of this in:
But before they can bring their new pet back to their cost apartment, they will have to wait an entire month for the rescue centre to give them the all-clear
So, it’s hugely convenient that, when they expect that they are collecting the cat, they have a month in their questionably cosy dwelling (which may or may not be given a once-over by the centre) in which to regret being tied down – a bit like going to the dentist for an appointment for a filling, only to find that it is just one at which you are asked what sort of injection you’d like, and you have to come back another day for the filling.
With the big day marked on the calendar, our couple soon begin to fret over the consequences of their commitment
Yes, they fret straightaway about learning that it could be five years, but there is no actual commitment: they could pick up the phone and say ‘We’ve changed our minds’ – and let the centre kill the cat then and there? – is that the issue?
This mog’s going to tie them down; they will be trapped in a round-the clock routine for the next 10 years of their lives
It may be that what I missed is that this an HIV-positive LA cat, and thus that such a routine could be relevant, otherwise do these people really not know how capable cats are of looking after themselves? (They also, then, cannot have any friends who could do pet-sitting so that they go on vacation, and don’t know that, anyway, such help can be hired.)
Where ten years crept in from, I do not know, but Jason makes a rather fatuous speech that has been written for him to say that 5 years onto their 35 is 40, 40 is the new 50, and there’s nothing worthwhile in life then, so they are effectively dead now. Sadly, not very convincing, and even The Sophists of old came up with better reasons than that for the things of which they wished to persuade others: but it does need to allow those watching the film to believe these two credible, and their lacklustre thinking doesn’t do that.
[D]ay by day they drift apart. Until, that is, a moment of catharsis reunites their souls and reconnects them with their suburban world.
Funny, not in the film - of the same name - that I saw. Yes, they drift apart, but what is this cathartic moment supposed to be? Whatever it is, nothing reunites anybody's souls, and the rest is just fanciful padding!
Narrated by Paw-Paw (July herself putting on her best purr), The Future is a contemplative indie gem from one of American cinema's most enlightening free spirits.
So am I seriously being told that this film is enlightening? (And, yes, that was the cat's name, but, no, it doesn't narrate the film - it just narrates its own experience in the rescue centre of getting excited about going somewhere else and being happy, then reconciliation to not going there, then being killed, but there's an afterlife, so that's OK, and really contemplative, too!)
This may just be enthusiastic opinion, but it is making some pretty big claims, for July and The Future. In the section about her:
Like her films, she is understated, she is a citizen of a world far removed from the showy artificiality of Hollywood: the real world.
Oh, I think that I might vomit! It's not the studios' gizmos, hype and big budgets, so it must be good and appeal to those who prefer arthouse films - law of the excluded middle, again, for even if all Hollywood did = Bad, it doesn't follow that non-Hollywood = Good.
I end, speechless (at both ever having read this twaddle / seen the film), and feeling only that there is an enormous effort in this write-up to strong-arm me into why I should see / like it, viz.
Call her kooky or cute, but there is a truth in July's works that distinguishes them from other like-minded films. Without the slightest shade of pretence, The Future captures a tentative step along the potholed corridor towards middle age and an existential dead end*****.
End-notes
* Even Philip French (who he?) doesn't like it - he dismisses it in one outraged paragraph at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/nov/06/the-future-miranda-july-review.
** By the way, none of this 57 varieties stuff about which I've just piffled on (at, funnily enough, 57 alleged varieties) - one bloody tin of soup and, if you're lucky, you might be at the head of the queue when that one tin is on the shelf!
But it beats all this possibility for deliberation as to whether this bloody 18-month-cured prosciutto is better than a 12-month-cured packet of real Parma ham... Reminiscent of 'Should I see The Future, or save my pennies for The Artist?'?
*** With just the title top right in pinkish capitals, and some details of actors, director, etc., bottom right.
**** Perhaps Sophie and Jason are paying (even though they went there to collect the cat)?
***** There is another sentence, but I just don't feel the need to inflict it on both myelf or anyone reading this posting.
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57 alleged varieties
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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9 February
If one of the breweries whose beer / ale you like started telling you that they once produced - but no longer produce - fifty-seven of anything, would you not, perhaps, feel short-changed by their range of six (or eight) in these modern times*?
And maybe fifty-seven doesn't just relate to soup, but to alphabetti spaghetti** (can you imagine such an abomination in Italy? though, if it did have real European currency, for some countries, such as Greece, a factory would have to produce the stuff in their own alphabet) - or was that a product of Crosse and Blackwell's***? - and baked beans, but I had always associated the claim with soup.
So how many soups are in the H---z range, and maybe I cannot rely on what the local Veran happens to stock - there must be a www.h---z.com to tell me...
Well, it's .co.uk, and clicking on soups takes me straight to Arsebook, which then offers general information and the circuity of a link back to .co.uk - such web-sites, which aren't any more navigable than many a river, are just not looking at for me to find evidence, not even of these (former) possible soups:
* Tobacco and Coriander
* Cream of Mouse
* Lamb and Beetroot (sure some Polish influence there!)
* Smoked Halibut and Rye
* Dust and Cobweb
In fact, I shall start a - wholly notional - series of detective novels called The Apsley Papers, with a suitably enticing range of 57 sub-titles, and list them all on your favourite retailing site(s):
The Apsley Papers: Remains found in a Gravel-Pit
The Apsley Papers: Killed by a Strontium Nitrate Spoon
The Apsley Papers: Impact of a Club
Then, I just wait for the orders to roll in, and produce copies to meet them - all very supply-and-demand led, all very last minute!
End-notes
* Oh, Chaplin again! A well-known pinko, of course, as the committee told us - see more here.
** Why do I not remember seriously making words with that stuff, not even not rude ones?
*** If they ever existed.
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9 February
If one of the breweries whose beer / ale you like started telling you that they once produced - but no longer produce - fifty-seven of anything, would you not, perhaps, feel short-changed by their range of six (or eight) in these modern times*?
And maybe fifty-seven doesn't just relate to soup, but to alphabetti spaghetti** (can you imagine such an abomination in Italy? though, if it did have real European currency, for some countries, such as Greece, a factory would have to produce the stuff in their own alphabet) - or was that a product of Crosse and Blackwell's***? - and baked beans, but I had always associated the claim with soup.
So how many soups are in the H---z range, and maybe I cannot rely on what the local Veran happens to stock - there must be a www.h---z.com to tell me...
Well, it's .co.uk, and clicking on soups takes me straight to Arsebook, which then offers general information and the circuity of a link back to .co.uk - such web-sites, which aren't any more navigable than many a river, are just not looking at for me to find evidence, not even of these (former) possible soups:
* Tobacco and Coriander
* Cream of Mouse
* Lamb and Beetroot (sure some Polish influence there!)
* Smoked Halibut and Rye
* Dust and Cobweb
In fact, I shall start a - wholly notional - series of detective novels called The Apsley Papers, with a suitably enticing range of 57 sub-titles, and list them all on your favourite retailing site(s):
The Apsley Papers: Remains found in a Gravel-Pit
The Apsley Papers: Killed by a Strontium Nitrate Spoon
The Apsley Papers: Impact of a Club
Then, I just wait for the orders to roll in, and produce copies to meet them - all very supply-and-demand led, all very last minute!
End-notes
* Oh, Chaplin again! A well-known pinko, of course, as the committee told us - see more here.
** Why do I not remember seriously making words with that stuff, not even not rude ones?
*** If they ever existed.
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Cheryl Cole's a friggin' Glaswegian!
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8 February 2012
Honest, she is - you just have to look at the bloke in the background, arms crossed, holding a microphone (her cousin, Donald), to know that we're back in her home territory of Sauchiehall Street...
Just time for an Arbroath smokie at Miss Cranston's Tea-Rooms!
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8 February 2012
Honest, she is - you just have to look at the bloke in the background, arms crossed, holding a microphone (her cousin, Donald), to know that we're back in her home territory of Sauchiehall Street...
Just time for an Arbroath smokie at Miss Cranston's Tea-Rooms!
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Tuesday 7 February 2012
Fiennes as Coriolanus - a touch of Anthony Hopkins?
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8 February
* Contains spoilers *
I did like the conception of where this film geographically and historically placed Rome and Antium, and I missed noticing who the person credited with screenwriting is, but which I now know was Ralph Fiennes' co-producer, John Logan. Those credits also made me aware that Fiennes had directed.
Leaving aside this notional carve-up between director and screenwriter as to who crafts what we see, since Logan and Fiennes were clearly in this together up to the hilt - a bit, maybe, like Aufidius and Martius - I really did feel that using news reporting (with a wonderful cameo and lovely verse-delivery by Jon Snow) and a modern setting didn't harm Shakespeare at all. He, like Bach, is a pretty tough bird, and, if it's done with love, it'll - probably - work.
As to this play, over the years I have engaged with it a few times, and - as I have remarked elsewhere - caught a young(ish) Toby Stephens in the role under the RSC at Stratford. Slippery though it is, I probably haven't locked horns with it since - and there is, which may have drawn Fiennes / Logan to it, a quality of otherness about the play, and about its title character, that is more like the so-called late Beethoven string quartets, if King Lear is a sort of Winterreise of the soul.
And yet, there, there is a connection, because I was struck, this time, how like Cordelia Coriolanus is: in Lear because, loosely quoting, Cordelia will not heave her heart into her mouth, the division of the kingdom proceeds, but proceeds all wrong, because Lear - who should know how much she loves him - is vain enough to want her to say so before everybody. An impossible stand-off, just as, with Coriolanus, his refusal to demean himself to fawn before the people leads to his banishment and joining with the Volscian forces against Rome. (So Cordelia and her husband's forces against those of Goneril and Reagan under their husbands.)
As with all of Shakespeare, he had his sources for this story (and I want to research them), but it was, with Lear, a given of his source that Cordelia cannot speak to secure her 'more opulent' share (I quote from memory) - it is not 'will not', but cannot: she is almost literally choked by the hypocrisy of his sisters in this absurd set-piece that Lear has arranged for her to fail at, though, if he looked into his heart, he would know that she loves him best.
All of this is so close to unlocking Coriolanus, and yet so far. It is not so much his mother's crazy upbinging - what happened to his father? it may be in the full text - as this constitutional inability to pander to people, to represent what is not as what is. Tragic weakness if you like, but he cannot do it, any more than Cordelia can, and he - for all his warlike strategy - plays straight into the hands of his enemies in politics (with both a big and small 'p').
As to whether Fiennes, with his deliberately - it seemed - restrained affect for the soldier when not in the height of battle (urging his men on to bloody, noble and glorious victory), but in the first key scene, before the grain stores, where she speaks so chillingly calmly to the mob - has caught the right note, others may judge differently. For me, though, there was too much a sinister air of Hannibal Lecter, or of Fiennes' recent role as Lord Voldemort, in that rather inward reading of the verse - beautiful, but too much with psycopathic undertones, which I honestly do not believe are there in the original.
Yes, Martius is a man torn in his allegiances, but who looks, most of all, to valour and honour (his mother's incalcation), not to killing or the thirst for blood for their own sake (however much we are reminded, again vividly in this film, of the opening scenes of Macbeth, and of Macbeth himself as some bloody slaughtering priest, blind to his own safety in service of his king and is foes - Macbeth, too, has a heart and conscience, and has to be mightily persuaded by his wife to kill Duncan, and that under their own roof).
So, I felt, that Fiennes' overlayering of an awkward man, ill at ease with social situations, with the icy qualities of speaking up to the other side in a stand-off and keeping his calm when an exlosive utterance of the lines could have been just as possible, just did not gel, except in the psycopathic personality, which I do not think is that of the real Coriolanus. He struggles to do what he believes in, consistent with his own limitations, but has only the awareness of what to do on the battlefield, not on the political field of human life.
Too much has been said about Fiennes' characterization, and something should be said of that of Gerard Butler as Aufidius, whose character's role has to run only the gamut from admiration to hatred to (in this version) a clearly homoerotic compassion for Coriolanus to envy and revenge, but which he ran nicely and smoothly enough, giving Fiennes the space to do what he needed to flesh out his notion of his own figure. Ultimately, nothing falls by that doubt about whether Fiennes has pitched Coriolanus the man right, and much could have been weaker if Butler, Brian Cox (Menenius), and James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson (as tribunes Sicinius and Brutus) had not been so reliably strong.
They gave the film the space to live, but the real honour must go to Redgrave for the half-mad Volumnia, who has had a part in making her son what he is - a man whose passions and whose dignity she can only half understand, but ultimately call on.
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8 February
* Contains spoilers *
I did like the conception of where this film geographically and historically placed Rome and Antium, and I missed noticing who the person credited with screenwriting is, but which I now know was Ralph Fiennes' co-producer, John Logan. Those credits also made me aware that Fiennes had directed.
Leaving aside this notional carve-up between director and screenwriter as to who crafts what we see, since Logan and Fiennes were clearly in this together up to the hilt - a bit, maybe, like Aufidius and Martius - I really did feel that using news reporting (with a wonderful cameo and lovely verse-delivery by Jon Snow) and a modern setting didn't harm Shakespeare at all. He, like Bach, is a pretty tough bird, and, if it's done with love, it'll - probably - work.
As to this play, over the years I have engaged with it a few times, and - as I have remarked elsewhere - caught a young(ish) Toby Stephens in the role under the RSC at Stratford. Slippery though it is, I probably haven't locked horns with it since - and there is, which may have drawn Fiennes / Logan to it, a quality of otherness about the play, and about its title character, that is more like the so-called late Beethoven string quartets, if King Lear is a sort of Winterreise of the soul.
And yet, there, there is a connection, because I was struck, this time, how like Cordelia Coriolanus is: in Lear because, loosely quoting, Cordelia will not heave her heart into her mouth, the division of the kingdom proceeds, but proceeds all wrong, because Lear - who should know how much she loves him - is vain enough to want her to say so before everybody. An impossible stand-off, just as, with Coriolanus, his refusal to demean himself to fawn before the people leads to his banishment and joining with the Volscian forces against Rome. (So Cordelia and her husband's forces against those of Goneril and Reagan under their husbands.)
As with all of Shakespeare, he had his sources for this story (and I want to research them), but it was, with Lear, a given of his source that Cordelia cannot speak to secure her 'more opulent' share (I quote from memory) - it is not 'will not', but cannot: she is almost literally choked by the hypocrisy of his sisters in this absurd set-piece that Lear has arranged for her to fail at, though, if he looked into his heart, he would know that she loves him best.
All of this is so close to unlocking Coriolanus, and yet so far. It is not so much his mother's crazy upbinging - what happened to his father? it may be in the full text - as this constitutional inability to pander to people, to represent what is not as what is. Tragic weakness if you like, but he cannot do it, any more than Cordelia can, and he - for all his warlike strategy - plays straight into the hands of his enemies in politics (with both a big and small 'p').
As to whether Fiennes, with his deliberately - it seemed - restrained affect for the soldier when not in the height of battle (urging his men on to bloody, noble and glorious victory), but in the first key scene, before the grain stores, where she speaks so chillingly calmly to the mob - has caught the right note, others may judge differently. For me, though, there was too much a sinister air of Hannibal Lecter, or of Fiennes' recent role as Lord Voldemort, in that rather inward reading of the verse - beautiful, but too much with psycopathic undertones, which I honestly do not believe are there in the original.
Yes, Martius is a man torn in his allegiances, but who looks, most of all, to valour and honour (his mother's incalcation), not to killing or the thirst for blood for their own sake (however much we are reminded, again vividly in this film, of the opening scenes of Macbeth, and of Macbeth himself as some bloody slaughtering priest, blind to his own safety in service of his king and is foes - Macbeth, too, has a heart and conscience, and has to be mightily persuaded by his wife to kill Duncan, and that under their own roof).
So, I felt, that Fiennes' overlayering of an awkward man, ill at ease with social situations, with the icy qualities of speaking up to the other side in a stand-off and keeping his calm when an exlosive utterance of the lines could have been just as possible, just did not gel, except in the psycopathic personality, which I do not think is that of the real Coriolanus. He struggles to do what he believes in, consistent with his own limitations, but has only the awareness of what to do on the battlefield, not on the political field of human life.
Too much has been said about Fiennes' characterization, and something should be said of that of Gerard Butler as Aufidius, whose character's role has to run only the gamut from admiration to hatred to (in this version) a clearly homoerotic compassion for Coriolanus to envy and revenge, but which he ran nicely and smoothly enough, giving Fiennes the space to do what he needed to flesh out his notion of his own figure. Ultimately, nothing falls by that doubt about whether Fiennes has pitched Coriolanus the man right, and much could have been weaker if Butler, Brian Cox (Menenius), and James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson (as tribunes Sicinius and Brutus) had not been so reliably strong.
They gave the film the space to live, but the real honour must go to Redgrave for the half-mad Volumnia, who has had a part in making her son what he is - a man whose passions and whose dignity she can only half understand, but ultimately call on.
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Written by a sixteen-year-old Mozart
Written by a sixteen-year-old Mozart : Evidence for time-travel and / or multiple selves
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 February (8 April, emphases and Tweet added)
Written by a sixteen-year-old Mozart : Evidence for time-travel and / or multiple selves
If you were like me, you'd imagine that Mozart proudly showing the score of his new string quartet to the five-year-old Mozart, while twenty-two-year-old Mozart looks on and yawns (or, probably, worse) - just a quirky turn of phrase from Jonathan Swain, who is presenting Through the Night on Radio 3.
And it interacts with a recent realization that the daytime schedule (by chance or design) is now dominated by female presenters, and those all of a certain age and apparent class - yes, there is Sean Rafferty still, hanging on in his very enjoyable spot on In Tune, and there is the excellent Donald Macleod following on (the less-excellent DM goes and picks grapes instead), usually straight after, with Composer of the Week.
Otherwise, though, it's Sara Mohr-Pietsch (2.5h), Sarah Walker (3h), then DM for 1h (for his first airing at noon), then, this week, it was Suzy Klein as, I think, both afternoon anchor and hosting In Tune in Sean's absence, which would be I don't know how many hours.
Where are the male presenters of that age isn't my question, but why, when one goes from SW to SM-P to SK to Katie Derham, the utter death-knell of my interest in listening (if I can help it), is there - what I may not be alone in finding - a gradient of irritation with their self-satisfaction?
Added lately to a more elderly posting, a comment that might sting the adherents or acolytes of some on @BBCRadio3 : http://t.co/vMBysCSKPP
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 8, 2015I confess that I mistook SK for the dreaded KD this week - it's something, for me, not far off the renowned oiliness of the Reverend Chadband in Bleak House, it's an expression of an opinion that goes beyond the bounds and tells me what I think (or should think) of what I have just heard, or what, in the case of something to be played or to be heard, what I will think.
Sorry, but I want to make my own mind up! I don't mind the odd 'Listen out for what the piccolo does in the opening of the slow movement, which might sound like a bird / which many have thought resembles a bird', but not being told piccolo = bird = fact. Music isn't like that, and, maybe, I resent the surface knowledge that seems to claim some sort of superiority, some sort of passport to understanding a piano sonata or a concerto - we all know that presenters are just presenters, but the ones whom I mention seem to have this edge of seeming to want to be too keen to tell you what's what in case you don't think that they're doing a good job.
That, I think, might be the underlying motivation - which I can understand, as few things are secure - but I perceive it as smugness, of glad-handing it with my mates Brahms or Bach, and - if you're lucky - Tag along with me and you might learn something. To which, without saying it or putting it into words (until now), I feel like saying: I welcome being told facts or details that might enhance my enjoyment, but Please don't teach your grandma to suck eggs.
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With apologies to Shaun...
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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7 February
I caught Shaun Jefford’s stylish film when it was first shown at Cambridge Film Festival (England) in 2010 – an impromptu adjournment to the bar before the screen was ready both gave everyone who still wanted one the chance to buy a drink to take in (a wonderful feature of the Arts Picturehouse cinema), and allowed informal contact with the director. That opportunity was extended by a Q&A, both after the screening, and back in the bar, so this review is informed by what he had to say.
[Through what must be some obscure weighting and / or averaging, and despite having topped the audience top 10 during and immediately after the close of the festival, Beijing Punk finished. (The top film had only three reviews, none written by an ordinary member of the audience, but all of which awarded five stars out of five.)
Although this is a creditable placing, it is not immediately apparent how one can understand its not having been higher still, when it had twenty audience reviews (including a 500-word one, on which this is based) on the festival web-site. By contrast with those of the top film, none of them had been written by those on the festival staff or its student reviewers, and all but one gave it five stars (the other being four stars).]
The enthusiastic first festival reviews alone made clear that Beijing Punk – the title neatly tells one everything to expect! – deserves a wider audience than many art-house documentaries, and, with the increasing identification of and also with its merits that it is gaining, it is likely to reach one. (That recognition is by no means just because, at one point, Shaun daily downed two bottles of Madame Pearl’s codeine-laden cough-medicine to get it made – although that obviously wins respect! – and I must return later to what has been called his ‘immersion’ in the totality of the life of the bands whom he features here!).
I call Shaun’s film ‘stylish’, because I see it as in the nature of punk rock that it has its own, specifically anti-establishment, style. It was Siouxsie’s distinctive sound, look and eye make-up, for example, that made me such an adherent (acolyte?) of The Banshees from the early days, along with her inescapably hip way of doing just about everything. Of course, her image was a unity with that of the whole band’s provocative lyrics, moody and suitably jolting harmonies (including edgy multiple-tracking), a strong drummer, and evocative lighting, both on stage and heightening atmosphere in videos. All those, amongst other things, were part and parcel of what made the songs’ delivery so effective, whether the doomed ‘Christine, the strawberry girl’, or the not-so-happy ‘Happy House’.
(For the benefit of those who might think that this review has simply gone off the rails, please try to trust, and without doubting, that there was more than a little echo of Siouxsie’s spirit – for want of a better word – in the girl drummer of featured band Hedgehog.)
Others would, responding to what ‘punk’ means to them, more naturally go to the more clearly raw and untamed (or even often untuned) sounds of punk, but this truly is ‘a broad movement’. For me, Don Letts is clearly right, in his documentary about this scene called Punk: Attitude, to home in on this question of the bands’ stance towards life, which is established by quoting key players talking about what punk is.
For this reason, I would argue that two-tone had just as much the attitude or spirit of this era as more aggressive or maybe threatening bands such as The Pistols or The Clash, and the times could, happily and largely without strain, embrace (or, more likely, those bands could) music as diverse as that of Madness, Blondie, Ian Dury and The Blockheads, and The Jam.
This apparent diversion from directly talking about Shaun’s achievement is actually to allow commentary on how it is that ?, Demerit and Hedehog are all a completely recognizable part of punk and yet still quite different from each other. What the bands, as groups and as their members, share is an attitude to the world that might loosely be called that of non-acceptance of the status quo and even of rebellion.
This is truly what brings a skinhead whose consumption of substances is phenomenal into the same arena as a hard-hitting female drummer, because the images of her with boxing-gloves and a furious look that is disquietingly hard to characterize further are in the same juxtaposition to the norm as his lifestyle. And where that comes out is in the protesting tone and lyrics of these bands’ music, whether they are high on life or on a mix of chemicals.
That means that you can, after all, be so much on the edge that you’re in the real centre, as there’s really an Einsteinian continuum that loops around on itself (not any sort of discworld). Saying that may, itself, seem literally eccentric (in its true sense of ‘out of the centre’), but I do believe that it’s just as much relevant to punk as to art and anti-art under the Dadaists or Surrealists: the essence of punk is not far from those origins in the post-war time of 1918 on, with the linking theme being not satisfied with the world as it is, and, more importantly, dissatisfied with everyone else for putting up with it.
After all, if it wasn’t André Bretton, poet and unchallenged spokesman of Surrealism, who said that the true surreal act is to take a loaded gun and go out into the street, shooting at random, it’s thereabouts. In that statement, there’s very much the feel of Lee, the lead-singer of one of the three bands with whom Shaun came into close contact - self-destructive and chaotic though he is, and despite what Lee puts into his body and ‘helps’ others to put into theirs whilst seeking to live as a skinhead in China, he’s obviously really just a pussy-cat. (After all, even cats fight, scrap, but eventually sleep.)
What matters most, though, about this film is not the bands’ lifestyles, or Shaun the worse for wear, or his often indisposed camera-man, but the music, which is so much in the punk idiom that one wonders that it was first caught so fully by trawling the Internet. For example, the drummer of Hedgehog is compelling in her playing, and though justly described as hitting really hard, is so truly in punk fashion.
Unlike the explosion of punk in the UK and US, though, there is no one to latch on, making money out of bondage-trousers or whatever, and, as far as I could see, no other media manipulators in the mode of those behind the Pistols would have scope for
doing that in China. The excellent music is what counts, and, despite underground sales of recordings, there’s no hope of a wider home audience.
Thanks for showing us, Shaun - if they want, maybe those bands can find unleashed fans elsewhere...
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
I caught Shaun Jefford’s stylish film when it was first shown at Cambridge Film Festival (England) in 2010 – an impromptu adjournment to the bar before the screen was ready both gave everyone who still wanted one the chance to buy a drink to take in (a wonderful feature of the Arts Picturehouse cinema), and allowed informal contact with the director. That opportunity was extended by a Q&A, both after the screening, and back in the bar, so this review is informed by what he had to say.
[Through what must be some obscure weighting and / or averaging, and despite having topped the audience top 10 during and immediately after the close of the festival, Beijing Punk finished
Although this is a creditable placing, it is not immediately apparent how one can understand its not having been higher still, when it had twenty audience reviews (including a 500-word one, on which this is based) on the festival web-site. By contrast with those of the top film, none of them had been written by those on the festival staff or its student reviewers, and all but one gave it five stars (the other being four stars).]
The enthusiastic first festival reviews alone made clear that Beijing Punk – the title neatly tells one everything to expect! – deserves a wider audience than many art-house documentaries, and, with the increasing identification of and also with its merits that it is gaining, it is likely to reach one. (That recognition is by no means just because, at one point, Shaun daily downed two bottles of Madame Pearl’s codeine-laden cough-medicine to get it made – although that obviously wins respect! – and I must return later to what has been called his ‘immersion’ in the totality of the life of the bands whom he features here!).
I call Shaun’s film ‘stylish’, because I see it as in the nature of punk rock that it has its own, specifically anti-establishment, style. It was Siouxsie’s distinctive sound, look and eye make-up, for example, that made me such an adherent (acolyte?) of The Banshees from the early days, along with her inescapably hip way of doing just about everything. Of course, her image was a unity with that of the whole band’s provocative lyrics, moody and suitably jolting harmonies (including edgy multiple-tracking), a strong drummer, and evocative lighting, both on stage and heightening atmosphere in videos. All those, amongst other things, were part and parcel of what made the songs’ delivery so effective, whether the doomed ‘Christine, the strawberry girl’, or the not-so-happy ‘Happy House’.
(For the benefit of those who might think that this review has simply gone off the rails, please try to trust, and without doubting, that there was more than a little echo of Siouxsie’s spirit – for want of a better word – in the girl drummer of featured band Hedgehog.)
Others would, responding to what ‘punk’ means to them, more naturally go to the more clearly raw and untamed (or even often untuned) sounds of punk, but this truly is ‘a broad movement’. For me, Don Letts is clearly right, in his documentary about this scene called Punk: Attitude, to home in on this question of the bands’ stance towards life, which is established by quoting key players talking about what punk is.
For this reason, I would argue that two-tone had just as much the attitude or spirit of this era as more aggressive or maybe threatening bands such as The Pistols or The Clash, and the times could, happily and largely without strain, embrace (or, more likely, those bands could) music as diverse as that of Madness, Blondie, Ian Dury and The Blockheads, and The Jam.
This apparent diversion from directly talking about Shaun’s achievement is actually to allow commentary on how it is that ?, Demerit and Hedehog are all a completely recognizable part of punk and yet still quite different from each other. What the bands, as groups and as their members, share is an attitude to the world that might loosely be called that of non-acceptance of the status quo and even of rebellion.
This is truly what brings a skinhead whose consumption of substances is phenomenal into the same arena as a hard-hitting female drummer, because the images of her with boxing-gloves and a furious look that is disquietingly hard to characterize further are in the same juxtaposition to the norm as his lifestyle. And where that comes out is in the protesting tone and lyrics of these bands’ music, whether they are high on life or on a mix of chemicals.
That means that you can, after all, be so much on the edge that you’re in the real centre, as there’s really an Einsteinian continuum that loops around on itself (not any sort of discworld). Saying that may, itself, seem literally eccentric (in its true sense of ‘out of the centre’), but I do believe that it’s just as much relevant to punk as to art and anti-art under the Dadaists or Surrealists: the essence of punk is not far from those origins in the post-war time of 1918 on, with the linking theme being not satisfied with the world as it is, and, more importantly, dissatisfied with everyone else for putting up with it.
After all, if it wasn’t André Bretton, poet and unchallenged spokesman of Surrealism, who said that the true surreal act is to take a loaded gun and go out into the street, shooting at random, it’s thereabouts. In that statement, there’s very much the feel of Lee, the lead-singer of one of the three bands with whom Shaun came into close contact - self-destructive and chaotic though he is, and despite what Lee puts into his body and ‘helps’ others to put into theirs whilst seeking to live as a skinhead in China, he’s obviously really just a pussy-cat. (After all, even cats fight, scrap, but eventually sleep.)
What matters most, though, about this film is not the bands’ lifestyles, or Shaun the worse for wear, or his often indisposed camera-man, but the music, which is so much in the punk idiom that one wonders that it was first caught so fully by trawling the Internet. For example, the drummer of Hedgehog is compelling in her playing, and though justly described as hitting really hard, is so truly in punk fashion.
Unlike the explosion of punk in the UK and US, though, there is no one to latch on, making money out of bondage-trousers or whatever, and, as far as I could see, no other media manipulators in the mode of those behind the Pistols would have scope for
doing that in China. The excellent music is what counts, and, despite underground sales of recordings, there’s no hope of a wider home audience.
Thanks for showing us, Shaun - if they want, maybe those bands can find unleashed fans elsewhere...
Monday 6 February 2012
The Guard on New Empress Magazine's web-site
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
If you saw The Guard (2011), or might get it on DVD, have a look here for a review (and maybe an Agent's comment):
http://newempressmagazine.com/2012/02/02/in-review-the-guard-dvd/
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
If you saw The Guard (2011), or might get it on DVD, have a look here for a review (and maybe an Agent's comment):
http://newempressmagazine.com/2012/02/02/in-review-the-guard-dvd/
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STOP PRESS: University of Padua, I mean Portsmouth, distances itself from Plymouth
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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7 February
Saddled Hodgkiss, the Chief Prelate of the university, has issued the following declaration:
(1) We, the university, and I, the Chief Prelate, are heartily Narked by people coming up and asking 'Where's Drake's Bar, then?'.
(2) Let it be henceforth known that:
(a) Such enquiry shall result in instant death;
(b) Death by Chocolate shall not be considered an equivalent penalty;
(c) The above stipulations shall apply equally to the mention, without good cause, of Padua (e.g. studying The Taming of The Shrew, wanting to dissect a few naked students, etc.).
(d) The university changes its longitude to place it 100 nautical miles to the east, and its postcode accordingly, to distance itself from any unfortunate misunderstanding.
(e) Fortunate misunderstanding shall still be welcomed, and may even result in the award of an honorary doctorship.
(f) There is no f, not around here, thank you very much!
(3) This convocation is hereby dissolved: the yoghurts are on me, and no making up words and seeing if I can find you out!
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
Saddled Hodgkiss, the Chief Prelate of the university, has issued the following declaration:
(1) We, the university, and I, the Chief Prelate, are heartily Narked by people coming up and asking 'Where's Drake's Bar, then?'.
(2) Let it be henceforth known that:
(a) Such enquiry shall result in instant death;
(b) Death by Chocolate shall not be considered an equivalent penalty;
(c) The above stipulations shall apply equally to the mention, without good cause, of Padua (e.g. studying The Taming of The Shrew, wanting to dissect a few naked students, etc.).
(d) The university changes its longitude to place it 100 nautical miles to the east, and its postcode accordingly, to distance itself from any unfortunate misunderstanding.
(e) Fortunate misunderstanding shall still be welcomed, and may even result in the award of an honorary doctorship.
(f) There is no f, not around here, thank you very much!
(3) This convocation is hereby dissolved: the yoghurts are on me, and no making up words and seeing if I can find you out!
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Fickbereit
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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7 February
I was trying to find out the source of the interest (which I see 'in the stats') in the posting Schlafzimmer.
Now that, in my list of top search-results from Google®, I have found the following, all has become clear:
Sie ist fickbereit und wartet auf dich
If only! - as if anyone could be kept in that state of readiness indefinitely...
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7 February
I was trying to find out the source of the interest (which I see 'in the stats') in the posting Schlafzimmer.
Now that, in my list of top search-results from Google®, I have found the following, all has become clear:
Sie ist fickbereit und wartet auf dich
If only! - as if anyone could be kept in that state of readiness indefinitely...
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Bucking fizzy
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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7 February
That's what it feels like sometimes, especially when you receive a grand e-mail, called Tankard Oil Delivery Confirmation (304503), and you truly wanted to know about delivery no. 304506, which Amanda Holden had placed. (All that when trying to place a reverse-charge call to the phallus below which Kafka's remains are allegedly interred.)
In Stretham, such matters are viewed more casually, and with an element of abandon, and many have a Gaol Scar from their encounters with liquefied fuel (a matter that they lightly brush off if anyone is foolish enough to remark on it).
'The brain,' Oscar Wilde used to quip, 'is a remarkable organ: some day, I must acquire one of my own!'. A strict Freudian, before his day, but then he came from Coward Isle, he mixed with 'the aisle crowd'*, and he rode low in his sidecar (get my meaning?!).
On another note, it can be said that his social drew from all manner of artists, and that anyone, if they chose, could have a cordial sew, or seek where Carol Dew is to be found. All too often, though, he laid an escrow upon jollity, and a drunken soldier would caw vainly in the night in search - ahead of his time - of Kafka.
So, from Elephant and Castle, head pretty much in any direction - you're bound to have a good time, and might even find The Cinema Museum!
End-notes
* Indeed, it is said that he would never enjoy cheese unless he could eat it with oat-cakes.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
That's what it feels like sometimes, especially when you receive a grand e-mail, called Tankard Oil Delivery Confirmation (304503), and you truly wanted to know about delivery no. 304506, which Amanda Holden had placed. (All that when trying to place a reverse-charge call to the phallus below which Kafka's remains are allegedly interred.)
In Stretham, such matters are viewed more casually, and with an element of abandon, and many have a Gaol Scar from their encounters with liquefied fuel (a matter that they lightly brush off if anyone is foolish enough to remark on it).
'The brain,' Oscar Wilde used to quip, 'is a remarkable organ: some day, I must acquire one of my own!'. A strict Freudian, before his day, but then he came from Coward Isle, he mixed with 'the aisle crowd'*, and he rode low in his sidecar (get my meaning?!).
On another note, it can be said that his social drew from all manner of artists, and that anyone, if they chose, could have a cordial sew, or seek where Carol Dew is to be found. All too often, though, he laid an escrow upon jollity, and a drunken soldier would caw vainly in the night in search - ahead of his time - of Kafka.
So, from Elephant and Castle, head pretty much in any direction - you're bound to have a good time, and might even find The Cinema Museum!
End-notes
* Indeed, it is said that he would never enjoy cheese unless he could eat it with oat-cakes.
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The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 4)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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6 February
* Contains spoilers *
Of course, it helps if those short write-ups are accurate.
These, taken from one of my local free newspapers (actually, the only one that now delivers), are not:
For anyone who has seen Another Earth (2011), it might be a struggle to justify the opening proposition 'Astrophysicist Rhoda kills most of a family* [...]', because, although, later on, the contents of her bedroom show an interest in outer space**, all that we know from the film is that, just before the accident, she has got a place at MIT***.
Here, nothing depends on the assertion, but, even if that's all that the place were concerned with, that doesn't make her an astrophysicist. What about the second half of the description, though?:
After discovering it's [sc. a mysterious giant planet] a duplicate of the earth, she tracks down victim John, befriending him without revealing their connection, while on a mission to discover the planet's mystery.
If I had read this first (rather than the spread from The London Standard), I think that I might feel misled by (a) the account of cause and effect, by (b) the language, and by (c) what is anterior to what...
Take another example from the same feature, in relation to My Week with Marilyn (2011), and at which the same criticisms can be levelled at the following excerpts:
* It's the height of Marilyn Monroe's fame - factually, was it? The sentence continues with:
* and her new husband Arthur Miller has to make a brief trip to Paris - well, I didn't register where he was going, or whether it was only briefly, but I am already unsure about this even if true, and of what relevance is it where Miller has to go...?
* I also didn't notice whether (as he was) the film says that Colin Clark was a graduate from Oxford, but he is said to:
* [s]pend [in Miller's absence] a week introducing the star to the joys of ordinary British life
Which is why one scene shows him taking her to his old school, Eton, where she is virtually mobbed, and leading into an unannounced visit to Windsor Castle, where he turns out able to gain access because his godfather is librarian there (or some such).
In both cases, and (apart from a picnic and some bathing - for one of them, inevitably, nude) we see them discovering nothing else (as far as I recall), hardly ordinary British life.
So the write-up has to be worth reading, even if one doesn't (as I don't) do more than glance at it, because otherwise it is a set-up for a film that is different (or even very different).
Not just because I like Woody Allen's work, some write-up - in Picturehouse Recommends, I think - meant that I expected to enjoy Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), so I was highly disappointed to find out what it was - and probably, because of that, have come down hard on it ever since.
To be concluded - promise!****
End-note
* A note of scrupulous accuracy amidst the rest?
** No, on second thoughts, that phrasing isn't felicitous, is it?! (Rhoda has the interest in outer space - the contents of her room do not, but they evidence hers.)
*** Did the person who wrote this even know what MIT is?
**** I mean that Part 5 will be the end of it, that is! - now available here...
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6 February
* Contains spoilers *
Of course, it helps if those short write-ups are accurate.
These, taken from one of my local free newspapers (actually, the only one that now delivers), are not:
For anyone who has seen Another Earth (2011), it might be a struggle to justify the opening proposition 'Astrophysicist Rhoda kills most of a family* [...]', because, although, later on, the contents of her bedroom show an interest in outer space**, all that we know from the film is that, just before the accident, she has got a place at MIT***.
Here, nothing depends on the assertion, but, even if that's all that the place were concerned with, that doesn't make her an astrophysicist. What about the second half of the description, though?:
After discovering it's [sc. a mysterious giant planet] a duplicate of the earth, she tracks down victim John, befriending him without revealing their connection, while on a mission to discover the planet's mystery.
If I had read this first (rather than the spread from The London Standard), I think that I might feel misled by (a) the account of cause and effect, by (b) the language, and by (c) what is anterior to what...
Take another example from the same feature, in relation to My Week with Marilyn (2011), and at which the same criticisms can be levelled at the following excerpts:
* It's the height of Marilyn Monroe's fame - factually, was it? The sentence continues with:
* and her new husband Arthur Miller has to make a brief trip to Paris - well, I didn't register where he was going, or whether it was only briefly, but I am already unsure about this even if true, and of what relevance is it where Miller has to go...?
* I also didn't notice whether (as he was) the film says that Colin Clark was a graduate from Oxford, but he is said to:
* [s]pend [in Miller's absence] a week introducing the star to the joys of ordinary British life
Which is why one scene shows him taking her to his old school, Eton, where she is virtually mobbed, and leading into an unannounced visit to Windsor Castle, where he turns out able to gain access because his godfather is librarian there (or some such).
In both cases, and (apart from a picnic and some bathing - for one of them, inevitably, nude) we see them discovering nothing else (as far as I recall), hardly ordinary British life.
So the write-up has to be worth reading, even if one doesn't (as I don't) do more than glance at it, because otherwise it is a set-up for a film that is different (or even very different).
Not just because I like Woody Allen's work, some write-up - in Picturehouse Recommends, I think - meant that I expected to enjoy Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), so I was highly disappointed to find out what it was - and probably, because of that, have come down hard on it ever since.
To be concluded - promise!****
End-note
* A note of scrupulous accuracy amidst the rest?
** No, on second thoughts, that phrasing isn't felicitous, is it?! (Rhoda has the interest in outer space - the contents of her room do not, but they evidence hers.)
*** Did the person who wrote this even know what MIT is?
**** I mean that Part 5 will be the end of it, that is! - now available here...
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Sunday 5 February 2012
Philip French rides (roughshod) again! - A summary
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 February
For those in a hurry, a digest of the main points of that posting (Philip French rides (roughshod) again!):
* Philip French claims that Francine Stock has 'borrowed' from Martin Scorsese a description of her book In Glorious Technicolor as 'a personal journey'
* This is not only ludicrous, because there is nothing distinctive about that phrase (it is arguably just a cliché), but it only appears on the dust-jacket, describing Stock and her book in the third person
* Much of what he does quote is from the book's five-page Prologue (hardly the most important thing about it), but he also comes up with a quotation of around thirty words, which, if it appears anywhere, would naturally appear there, but does not
* Nonetheless, after giving a fleeting idea of what the book is, French goes on to use the phrase and quotation to say why the book is not 'personal' (Stock does not assert that it will be - in that sense), the choice of films is not 'idiosyncratic' (it is never claimed that it is - quite the opposite, if one reads the Prologue properly), and why Stephen Hughes (who contributed to the book, though French claims that he is a co-author, for which there is no evidence) and Stock have not done something new at all
* By way of a close, French delights in a typo in his proof copy (doubtful whether he looked at the published book before publishing his piece?) - 'photagonist' for 'protagonist' - and, because of it, forgives Stock for something else from the dust-jacket, which he fails to put in context in a six-page section about fashion, which is in part of a chapter about Annie Hall (1977)
Can there be true joy in reviewing something that you haven't read (or watched) properly?**
End-notes
* Because of a typo?! Does Stock, then, moonlight as a typesetter?
** Certainly not in reading the review!
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 February
For those in a hurry, a digest of the main points of that posting (Philip French rides (roughshod) again!):
* Philip French claims that Francine Stock has 'borrowed' from Martin Scorsese a description of her book In Glorious Technicolor as 'a personal journey'
* This is not only ludicrous, because there is nothing distinctive about that phrase (it is arguably just a cliché), but it only appears on the dust-jacket, describing Stock and her book in the third person
* Much of what he does quote is from the book's five-page Prologue (hardly the most important thing about it), but he also comes up with a quotation of around thirty words, which, if it appears anywhere, would naturally appear there, but does not
* Nonetheless, after giving a fleeting idea of what the book is, French goes on to use the phrase and quotation to say why the book is not 'personal' (Stock does not assert that it will be - in that sense), the choice of films is not 'idiosyncratic' (it is never claimed that it is - quite the opposite, if one reads the Prologue properly), and why Stephen Hughes (who contributed to the book, though French claims that he is a co-author, for which there is no evidence) and Stock have not done something new at all
* By way of a close, French delights in a typo in his proof copy (doubtful whether he looked at the published book before publishing his piece?) - 'photagonist' for 'protagonist' - and, because of it, forgives Stock for something else from the dust-jacket, which he fails to put in context in a six-page section about fashion, which is in part of a chapter about Annie Hall (1977)
Can there be true joy in reviewing something that you haven't read (or watched) properly?**
End-notes
* Because of a typo?! Does Stock, then, moonlight as a typesetter?
** Certainly not in reading the review!
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Young 'lack attention for Dickens' (according to Yahoo! News)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 February
There is a huge range of comments on an article under this heading at:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/young-lack-attention-dickens-044309473.html
Claire Tomalin, the most recent biographer of Dickens, has attacked the educational system and its effect on young people's literacy (and Dr Christopher Pittard of the University of Portsmouth, where Dickens was born (Portsmouth, that is, not the university), also commented on the significance of these works*):
What Dickens wrote about is still amazingly relevant. The only caveat I would make is that today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.
As I say, there is a wealth of opinion about whether Dickens is - or should be - read, and, if he is not, why that could be...
To which I shall but add:
(1) Think of my attention span what you will, but, in an earlier generation (or two), I grew up in a house where there was a t.v. from when I was very small - my father's business was selling, renting and repairing them (which, for those renting, was covered by the rental charge) and radios.
(2) The quality of programmes when I was a teenager and now bears no comparison - how anyone could be compelled to watch, let alone pay attention to, some of the output that our multi-channelled world has given us is beyond me.
(3) I used to do my homework whilst watching t.v. (but, as my mother reminds me, that third ingredient of holding a conversation and still concentrating was beyond me), although I am sure that homework - as have 'A' levels - has become harder since.
(4) I have even read many a long novel, and, in one week at university, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones in full.
(5) Reading such a book, unless you have to do it to that timescale, is nothing to do with the so-called 'attention span' - your attention is not uniterruptedly on Bleak House for its however many hundred pages, which will depend on the edition, but you will read it as and when you can (or can make time for it). That simply is not an issue that relates to attention span, except to the obvious extent that, if one can only - given the best opportunity to do so (see point (6), below) - read a short section at a time, then covering the whole text will take longer, in terms of the accumulating intervals between such a section and resuming, and prove more disheartening to the reader: I'll never finish this!.
(6) Some, particularly the cheaper, versions of 'The Classics', such as Dickens, are such poor photographic reproductions of earlier editions that anyone would rightly struggle to read them: it should not take William Morris or Eric Gill to tell Ms Tomalin how important the choice of typeface and the design of a book are both to the enjoyment of reading, and, thus, to the likelihood that one will persist with the activity (especially if the book is long).
End-notes
* Dr Pittard's view is that 'while his novels have a very definite shape to them, there's a hidden structure which isn't comprehensible at first, they are more like the DVD boxset of their time', thereby, sadly, perpetuating the belief that this, not 'boxed set', is the correct term.
As to the university, this appears (but I might be wrong) to be the most noteworthy thing** in the news about it (since it ceased being known as the University of Padua):
29 Sep 2011 – A STUDENT naked calendar is facing the chop following complaints that unedited photos of girls were leaked onto a pornographic site.
You don't want an unedited photograph at any cost - if it hasn't been 'touched up', it really shouldn't be visible!
** SIlly me, I missed this, but I'll let you, dear reader, look yourself at:
New Chancellor for former University of Padua
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 February
There is a huge range of comments on an article under this heading at:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/young-lack-attention-dickens-044309473.html
Claire Tomalin, the most recent biographer of Dickens, has attacked the educational system and its effect on young people's literacy (and Dr Christopher Pittard of the University of Portsmouth, where Dickens was born (Portsmouth, that is, not the university), also commented on the significance of these works*):
What Dickens wrote about is still amazingly relevant. The only caveat I would make is that today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.
As I say, there is a wealth of opinion about whether Dickens is - or should be - read, and, if he is not, why that could be...
To which I shall but add:
(1) Think of my attention span what you will, but, in an earlier generation (or two), I grew up in a house where there was a t.v. from when I was very small - my father's business was selling, renting and repairing them (which, for those renting, was covered by the rental charge) and radios.
(2) The quality of programmes when I was a teenager and now bears no comparison - how anyone could be compelled to watch, let alone pay attention to, some of the output that our multi-channelled world has given us is beyond me.
(3) I used to do my homework whilst watching t.v. (but, as my mother reminds me, that third ingredient of holding a conversation and still concentrating was beyond me), although I am sure that homework - as have 'A' levels - has become harder since.
(4) I have even read many a long novel, and, in one week at university, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones in full.
(5) Reading such a book, unless you have to do it to that timescale, is nothing to do with the so-called 'attention span' - your attention is not uniterruptedly on Bleak House for its however many hundred pages, which will depend on the edition, but you will read it as and when you can (or can make time for it). That simply is not an issue that relates to attention span, except to the obvious extent that, if one can only - given the best opportunity to do so (see point (6), below) - read a short section at a time, then covering the whole text will take longer, in terms of the accumulating intervals between such a section and resuming, and prove more disheartening to the reader: I'll never finish this!.
(6) Some, particularly the cheaper, versions of 'The Classics', such as Dickens, are such poor photographic reproductions of earlier editions that anyone would rightly struggle to read them: it should not take William Morris or Eric Gill to tell Ms Tomalin how important the choice of typeface and the design of a book are both to the enjoyment of reading, and, thus, to the likelihood that one will persist with the activity (especially if the book is long).
End-notes
* Dr Pittard's view is that 'while his novels have a very definite shape to them, there's a hidden structure which isn't comprehensible at first, they are more like the DVD boxset of their time', thereby, sadly, perpetuating the belief that this, not 'boxed set', is the correct term.
As to the university, this appears (but I might be wrong) to be the most noteworthy thing** in the news about it (since it ceased being known as the University of Padua):
29 Sep 2011 – A STUDENT naked calendar is facing the chop following complaints that unedited photos of girls were leaked onto a pornographic site.
You don't want an unedited photograph at any cost - if it hasn't been 'touched up', it really shouldn't be visible!
** SIlly me, I missed this, but I'll let you, dear reader, look yourself at:
New Chancellor for former University of Padua
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Saturday 4 February 2012
Philip French rides (roughshod) again!
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 February
Not for the first time (By way of apology for never reviewing Sarah's Key (2)), I find Philip French's reviewing not just perverse, but wilfully at odds with the nature of the matter about which he is meant to be informing me. In the case that I shall go on to discuss, I think that it is, actually, just plain laziness.
In his review of In Glorious Technicolor, the book that Francine Stock brought out last year, in The Guardian, French takes much time in seven paragraphs not talking about the book at all (or, at any rate, telling us where Stock and her collaborator Stephen Hughes, both on The Film Programme (on Radio 4), and on the idea for the book and its content, are wrong to think that their book is needed):
* Paragraph 1 - Responses to films from Gorky and Kipling - both affected by, and writing about, films
* Paragraph 2 - Reminding us first, perhaps unnecessarily (and maybe even in a snobbish way!), that Stock is 'a former BBC TV current affairs reporter' (well, yes, but she left Newsnight in 1993, and people such as Paxman and she were by no means just reporters), French sets out his stall about what he thinks the book to be, and brings in Hughes*, before a quotation of more than thirty words** - this paragraph is where, as I will go on to say, French misses what Stock says that the book is
* Paragraph 3 - An exposition of the structure of the book (after French seems to have taken trouble to pin down another connection (this time in the Prologue), that of the evacuation of a cinema during Stock seeing Chinatown (1974), to the Guildford pub bombings, whereas Stock just mentions, to give necessary context, that she was sixteen when there was a bomb in 'an adjacent pub' (Prologue, p. 3), French has seemingly gone overdrive on being detective) - Stock takes three key films per decade for ten decades (and French cannot help reminding us, in comparison, how many films he has seen: 'a total of 30 pictures, the number shown nowadays in an average month to the London critics', but surely not pulling rank?)***
* Paragraphs 4 and 5 - An opening statement that Stock and Hughes are wrong, but nothing more about the book, just two paragraphs about what others have thought and written (surely not showing off learning, though!)
* Paragraph 6 - A continuation of this digression halfway down this paragraph eventually brings us back to the book, or, rather, how it appears and what is shown on the dust-jacket****), and some anecdote that Stock appears to have related about being at a screening of Avatar with James Cameron***** (although, flicking through the section under that title, I could not find it ('2000s Turning Inwards' , pp. 304 - 311))
* Paragraph 7 - A closing paragraph (complete with a terminal joke about the proof copy - how 'protagonist' became 'photagonist', but, to French's disappointment, was corrected, as it redeemed this: 'Stock does, however, repeat the canard that Clark Gable had a catastrophic effect on the underwear industry during the depression, when he appeared without a vest in It Happened One Night******), which otherwise imparts a little damning with faint praise:
Still, there is much to enjoy in this book, and nuggets of information on recent cinematic developments to be mined.
This, along with the following, is all that French wants to say that is positive:
[... D]iscursive discussions of her three chosen films, which are never less than intelligent, though rarely more than perfunctory until the last couple of decades
'Never less than intelligent' - what is that? Irony?
Right at the outset, French had tried to pin on Stock 'borrowing the title from Martin Scorsese's film centenary documentary and book, "a personal journey"', but, as ever (never judge a book by its cover, I mean dust-jacket), he is ascribing to her what does not appear in the book itself.
Even if there were anything distinctive (which there is not) about the phrase that he means, he is quoting from the inside front of the dust-jacket again:
In this fascinating, entertaining and illuminating book Francine Stock takes us on a personal journey through a glorious century of cinema, showing in vivid detail how film both reflects and makes our world.
A 'personal journey' with which French beats her is not even Stock's claim. Yes, she does say 'This book is an attempt to record snatches of the conversation that has been taking place between us and film for the past hundred years. It is also a very personal contribution to that discussion', and she does also say 'The reason for taking this idiosyncratic journey through a century of film is precisely to provoke argument and further exploration' (both from Prologue, p. 5), but that is nothing to do with Scorsese.
French, who too much limits himself to the contents of this Prologue, when not studying the design and wording of the dust-jacket (matters that, rather naively, he imputes to Stock), wants to say (in his third paragraph) 'In the event, it is not a deeply personal book' (before being personal and delving into where and when Stock saw Chinatown, as mentioned above), and 'And there is little that is idiosyncratic about her choice of films'. So he missed the paragraph above, where she wrote:
This book is neither a comprehensive history of cinema nor an attempt to extend the sometimes daunting territory of film studies. [...] The films selected here may not necessarily be the best of their kind or even personal favourites, although many are. Rather, they are films that exert a particular power [...]
So, no claim that the choice of film was idiosyncratic, no claim that this was a personal journey, and a supposed review that spends at least half of our time in reading it in talking about what French thinks that the book should have been. Others must judge how much he actually read, but he's certainly pretty familiar with that dust-jacket and the book's five-page Prologue at least...
For those whose attention span isn't up to Dickensian convolution*******, here is a summary of the above...
End-notes
* Whom he says is 'named as co-author on the title page but not on the cover', whereas the copy that I have, a first edition (not a proof copy), quite clearly states 'with Stephen Hughes' under Stock's name and in a type-size, even if the words already were not, that is inconsistent with an acknowledgement of co-authorship (and which is not claimed in the usual assertion on the imprint-page).
** The quotation is 'We had both searched without much luck for writing on the way cinema intersects with what you might distinguish separately as life: to us it seemed an endlessly fascinating and important aspect of cinema's history'.
Except that those exact words do not seem to appear in the book, unless I am mistaken, but rather 'How could something as patently artificial as film seem so real? We all know that what we see on a screen is not real and yet we experience it so intensely that it provokes a physical response. Might there be particular effects on our behaviour - both public and private? Ways in which we had become indoctrinated by this most seductive medium? Researching for a series on film some years ago, we hunted in vain for a book that tackled these ideas' (Prologue, p. 4).
*** However, she talks about much else, because the two-column index runs to fifteen pages, and talks about other films and their actors, directors, cinematographers and the like in relation to them.
**** With the issue of Hughes being co-author, French was talking about 'the cover', but he has now found the right word.
***** With what accuracy I do not know, French asserts that 'There are more references to James Cameron than to any other moviemaker'. (In the index, The Terminator (1984), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009) are all referenced, but only the last of these has its own titled section.)
****** Whether French took that point of criticism just from the inside front of the dust-jacket is open to question (and how a typo, for which Stock would have no responsibility, could make up for the offence to French's sensibilities is unclear), because it appears in context, in the section on Annie Hall (1977), in paragraphs about fashion and films ('1970s Just when you thought it was safe...', pp. 223 - 227).
******* In other words, a reference to the posting Young 'lack attention for Dickens' (according to Yahoo! News).
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 February
Not for the first time (By way of apology for never reviewing Sarah's Key (2)), I find Philip French's reviewing not just perverse, but wilfully at odds with the nature of the matter about which he is meant to be informing me. In the case that I shall go on to discuss, I think that it is, actually, just plain laziness.
In his review of In Glorious Technicolor, the book that Francine Stock brought out last year, in The Guardian, French takes much time in seven paragraphs not talking about the book at all (or, at any rate, telling us where Stock and her collaborator Stephen Hughes, both on The Film Programme (on Radio 4), and on the idea for the book and its content, are wrong to think that their book is needed):
* Paragraph 1 - Responses to films from Gorky and Kipling - both affected by, and writing about, films
* Paragraph 2 - Reminding us first, perhaps unnecessarily (and maybe even in a snobbish way!), that Stock is 'a former BBC TV current affairs reporter' (well, yes, but she left Newsnight in 1993, and people such as Paxman and she were by no means just reporters), French sets out his stall about what he thinks the book to be, and brings in Hughes*, before a quotation of more than thirty words** - this paragraph is where, as I will go on to say, French misses what Stock says that the book is
* Paragraph 3 - An exposition of the structure of the book (after French seems to have taken trouble to pin down another connection (this time in the Prologue), that of the evacuation of a cinema during Stock seeing Chinatown (1974), to the Guildford pub bombings, whereas Stock just mentions, to give necessary context, that she was sixteen when there was a bomb in 'an adjacent pub' (Prologue, p. 3), French has seemingly gone overdrive on being detective) - Stock takes three key films per decade for ten decades (and French cannot help reminding us, in comparison, how many films he has seen: 'a total of 30 pictures, the number shown nowadays in an average month to the London critics', but surely not pulling rank?)***
* Paragraphs 4 and 5 - An opening statement that Stock and Hughes are wrong, but nothing more about the book, just two paragraphs about what others have thought and written (surely not showing off learning, though!)
* Paragraph 6 - A continuation of this digression halfway down this paragraph eventually brings us back to the book, or, rather, how it appears and what is shown on the dust-jacket****), and some anecdote that Stock appears to have related about being at a screening of Avatar with James Cameron***** (although, flicking through the section under that title, I could not find it ('2000s Turning Inwards' , pp. 304 - 311))
* Paragraph 7 - A closing paragraph (complete with a terminal joke about the proof copy - how 'protagonist' became 'photagonist', but, to French's disappointment, was corrected, as it redeemed this: 'Stock does, however, repeat the canard that Clark Gable had a catastrophic effect on the underwear industry during the depression, when he appeared without a vest in It Happened One Night******), which otherwise imparts a little damning with faint praise:
Still, there is much to enjoy in this book, and nuggets of information on recent cinematic developments to be mined.
This, along with the following, is all that French wants to say that is positive:
[... D]iscursive discussions of her three chosen films, which are never less than intelligent, though rarely more than perfunctory until the last couple of decades
'Never less than intelligent' - what is that? Irony?
Right at the outset, French had tried to pin on Stock 'borrowing the title from Martin Scorsese's film centenary documentary and book, "a personal journey"', but, as ever (never judge a book by its cover, I mean dust-jacket), he is ascribing to her what does not appear in the book itself.
Even if there were anything distinctive (which there is not) about the phrase that he means, he is quoting from the inside front of the dust-jacket again:
In this fascinating, entertaining and illuminating book Francine Stock takes us on a personal journey through a glorious century of cinema, showing in vivid detail how film both reflects and makes our world.
A 'personal journey' with which French beats her is not even Stock's claim. Yes, she does say 'This book is an attempt to record snatches of the conversation that has been taking place between us and film for the past hundred years. It is also a very personal contribution to that discussion', and she does also say 'The reason for taking this idiosyncratic journey through a century of film is precisely to provoke argument and further exploration' (both from Prologue, p. 5), but that is nothing to do with Scorsese.
French, who too much limits himself to the contents of this Prologue, when not studying the design and wording of the dust-jacket (matters that, rather naively, he imputes to Stock), wants to say (in his third paragraph) 'In the event, it is not a deeply personal book' (before being personal and delving into where and when Stock saw Chinatown, as mentioned above), and 'And there is little that is idiosyncratic about her choice of films'. So he missed the paragraph above, where she wrote:
This book is neither a comprehensive history of cinema nor an attempt to extend the sometimes daunting territory of film studies. [...] The films selected here may not necessarily be the best of their kind or even personal favourites, although many are. Rather, they are films that exert a particular power [...]
So, no claim that the choice of film was idiosyncratic, no claim that this was a personal journey, and a supposed review that spends at least half of our time in reading it in talking about what French thinks that the book should have been. Others must judge how much he actually read, but he's certainly pretty familiar with that dust-jacket and the book's five-page Prologue at least...
For those whose attention span isn't up to Dickensian convolution*******, here is a summary of the above...
End-notes
* Whom he says is 'named as co-author on the title page but not on the cover', whereas the copy that I have, a first edition (not a proof copy), quite clearly states 'with Stephen Hughes' under Stock's name and in a type-size, even if the words already were not, that is inconsistent with an acknowledgement of co-authorship (and which is not claimed in the usual assertion on the imprint-page).
** The quotation is 'We had both searched without much luck for writing on the way cinema intersects with what you might distinguish separately as life: to us it seemed an endlessly fascinating and important aspect of cinema's history'.
Except that those exact words do not seem to appear in the book, unless I am mistaken, but rather 'How could something as patently artificial as film seem so real? We all know that what we see on a screen is not real and yet we experience it so intensely that it provokes a physical response. Might there be particular effects on our behaviour - both public and private? Ways in which we had become indoctrinated by this most seductive medium? Researching for a series on film some years ago, we hunted in vain for a book that tackled these ideas' (Prologue, p. 4).
*** However, she talks about much else, because the two-column index runs to fifteen pages, and talks about other films and their actors, directors, cinematographers and the like in relation to them.
**** With the issue of Hughes being co-author, French was talking about 'the cover', but he has now found the right word.
***** With what accuracy I do not know, French asserts that 'There are more references to James Cameron than to any other moviemaker'. (In the index, The Terminator (1984), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009) are all referenced, but only the last of these has its own titled section.)
****** Whether French took that point of criticism just from the inside front of the dust-jacket is open to question (and how a typo, for which Stock would have no responsibility, could make up for the offence to French's sensibilities is unclear), because it appears in context, in the section on Annie Hall (1977), in paragraphs about fashion and films ('1970s Just when you thought it was safe...', pp. 223 - 227).
******* In other words, a reference to the posting Young 'lack attention for Dickens' (according to Yahoo! News).
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Eric Morecambe and the evils of e-mail (2)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 February
I was going to come back to this topic of Eric Morecambe, and someone - to-day or yesterday - has been looking, so here goes:
A good deal of Eric Morecambe's stage business, however much of it was actually worked out by Eddie Braben* (rather than, spontaneously or otherwise, by him - as Ernie Wise made a fine art of looking taken aback and confused), revolved around the incongruous: in the Cleopatra play (as in every one of Ernie's plays), although we are in Ancient Egypt, his signature spectacles and no less sock-suspenders are undeniable and out of place.
With the item thrown into the air and caught in the bag, I believed - and still like to believe - that what is tossed up is real, but only leaves a trace by the noise that it makes entering the bag.
There are levels on which e-mail (or a text-message) isn't real, but it betrays its presence in the list of the contents of one's inbox. The phantom e-mail, the one that one could almost swear that one had written (or that one can swear did not reach one's inbox), but it just doesn't show up in the 'sent' folder, is not so far distant from Eric's stone - or coin.
Another incongruous aspect of e-mail is that a person can get so familiar, in a way that - one hopes - he or she wouldn't think (or dare?) to do face to face: e-mailers can burn their bridges, nail colours to their mast, or take pot-shots in a way that, if one could be divorced from the person to whom their messages are directed, would make one wish that they had, instead, made an about face, abandoned ship or sheathed their weapon.
In a way, these hostile - or unexpectedly amorous - exchanges seem, to some people's mentality, to have a different status (and that precisely because they are deemed to happen in that non-existent reality that some call cyberspace). It is as if, in due course, meeting the person to whom the things were written will somehow erase, unwrite, them, or as if both were undisclosed players in an on-line game who encountered each other. Or it's just a bit like - deliberately, who knows? - getting drunk and letting rip.
For what it's worth, my practice is to treat every e-mail that I write as if it were a letter - I remind myself that it could have the same consequences as a letter, and that it should only contain what I would be happy for a letter to contain, and I do so by pausing
* To put the date at the top, and
* Then by addressing the intended recipient properly: 'Dear Helen' or 'Hi, John!'
Whether I am right about the effect that this has (and whether it would work for anyone else - anyone else who hates getting an e-mail (or text-message) that could have been meant for a different person), I do not know, but I do it.
It is a gesture, just like hoping that the stone - or coin - that cannot be seen will land in my waiting paper-bag...
End-notes
* Whose eighty-second birthday falls on Hallowe'en.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 February
I was going to come back to this topic of Eric Morecambe, and someone - to-day or yesterday - has been looking, so here goes:
A good deal of Eric Morecambe's stage business, however much of it was actually worked out by Eddie Braben* (rather than, spontaneously or otherwise, by him - as Ernie Wise made a fine art of looking taken aback and confused), revolved around the incongruous: in the Cleopatra play (as in every one of Ernie's plays), although we are in Ancient Egypt, his signature spectacles and no less sock-suspenders are undeniable and out of place.
With the item thrown into the air and caught in the bag, I believed - and still like to believe - that what is tossed up is real, but only leaves a trace by the noise that it makes entering the bag.
There are levels on which e-mail (or a text-message) isn't real, but it betrays its presence in the list of the contents of one's inbox. The phantom e-mail, the one that one could almost swear that one had written (or that one can swear did not reach one's inbox), but it just doesn't show up in the 'sent' folder, is not so far distant from Eric's stone - or coin.
Another incongruous aspect of e-mail is that a person can get so familiar, in a way that - one hopes - he or she wouldn't think (or dare?) to do face to face: e-mailers can burn their bridges, nail colours to their mast, or take pot-shots in a way that, if one could be divorced from the person to whom their messages are directed, would make one wish that they had, instead, made an about face, abandoned ship or sheathed their weapon.
In a way, these hostile - or unexpectedly amorous - exchanges seem, to some people's mentality, to have a different status (and that precisely because they are deemed to happen in that non-existent reality that some call cyberspace). It is as if, in due course, meeting the person to whom the things were written will somehow erase, unwrite, them, or as if both were undisclosed players in an on-line game who encountered each other. Or it's just a bit like - deliberately, who knows? - getting drunk and letting rip.
For what it's worth, my practice is to treat every e-mail that I write as if it were a letter - I remind myself that it could have the same consequences as a letter, and that it should only contain what I would be happy for a letter to contain, and I do so by pausing
* To put the date at the top, and
* Then by addressing the intended recipient properly: 'Dear Helen' or 'Hi, John!'
Whether I am right about the effect that this has (and whether it would work for anyone else - anyone else who hates getting an e-mail (or text-message) that could have been meant for a different person), I do not know, but I do it.
It is a gesture, just like hoping that the stone - or coin - that cannot be seen will land in my waiting paper-bag...
End-notes
* Whose eighty-second birthday falls on Hallowe'en.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Friday 3 February 2012
Another successful search with Google®
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
4 February
It couldn't just have been hearing Mary Ann Kennedy to-night presenting a largely live show, the last of those that have been on during the week, from events at Celtic Connections (in Glasgow), but I was reminded a little while back of the name Shona Spurtle.
Now, I knew perfectly well what the name meant (to me) - and I will wager that it doesn't mean a whole lot to many others - but I didn't know if it was spelt Spirtle (as I don't remember paying any attention to when I could have seen it written). So, rather than putting into my search-box the name of where Shona comes from, I put in that spelling - setting a challenge.
Obscure though it is - but I might, although I doubt it, find a plethora of fan web-sites in my search-results - Google® knew what I meant, and has taken me straight there:
I now know that there is a clip on YouTube, and that someone liked the name enough to have it as a user-name to comment on a story connected with the Scottish Parliament.
Amazon®, ever ready to please, even claims to have a web-page called www.amazon.co.uk/spurtle, which won't be the laugh that I hope for it to be, as I think that I have clicked such advertising links before...
No, it turns out that I am wrong, for, although it looked like a page of ball-point pens, it is some sort of culinary stick - it could be a magic-wand, for all that I know! - in connection with porridge (the making of, I have to think, as I have no conception how (or why) one could eat that dish with something looking like this).
In any case, they go for nearly £5.00 (well, more than that with postage - is there a standard Amazon® charge for a spurtle?), the best ones boast of being made of beech* (how that can matter to anything?), and you can even buy a box of six. Plus there's a hardback book, but it's miserably not available, called Mrs Spurtle goes South, which, I think, precedes this other appearance as a name.
Bizarrely, there is even a double of the Wikipedia® web-page for the vehicle in which our Mrs (or Ms) Spurtle appeared. It is called Wikipeetia, and it claims to exist solely because 'you spelled someting wrong'**, so:
For your amusement, we've also included a copy of the entire Wikipedia article misspelled
Helpfully, as I am obviously a remedial case for making such an error (?), there is a link that will take me where I can learn to spell English, or just to the unprocessed Wikipedia® piece.
As yet, though, nothing to lure me to buy a recording that shows Siobhan Redmond's exploits as Shona, but she may have gone on to use that 'handle' on Arsebook® and Twitter®, both of which claim that Shona has a presence.
No, again I speak too soon (what a rich vein this is: or is that the - I kid you not! - Glayva talking?), because I can buy a pirate DVD, and there is a web-site with a quotation (and they don't even know where it's from!), which I shall use by way of an ending of all this - for want of a better word - craic:
You are a waster, Sebastian! You are a lying cheat! You are a fibster, a fabulist, an equivocating shim-shammer, a cousining cardsharp, a pathological mythomaniac, a yarner, a palterer who perjures, a whited sepulchre, a cantering serpent, a rat!
Yes, she likes him!
End-notes
* Then again, it is traditional for wash-backs to be made from pine, and not just any old pine, but Oregon pine. We are talking of - if you know what I'm talking about - a very conservative means of producing a drinkable spirit, where they reproduce the dents in the copper-stills, when they have worn so thin that they need repair.
That said, some have taken the view that this Oregon pine approach adds nothing to the all-important taste (too much liquid in there for too short a time to make a difference - except, perhaps, at the leve of homoeopathy), and have gone for stainless-steel vessels. Which you would have no way of knowing when you buy the product, unless you have visited.)
** This seems a tenuous reason to have gone to the trouble of having such a dual text (even if, in it, for example,the word not is turned into 'nto', in a restless attempt to misspell everything, whereas what is really presented is often enough just a meaningless rearrangement of the letters).
I cannot believe that the reason applies in all cases, since this is not the only time that I have looked at what is just the fourth page of search-results, and I do not reall seeing such a thing, although I am often enough searching for a name precisely because I do not know how it is spelt. However, I shall attempt to find the famous Helen Mirran... Well, it didn't surface in the first hundred search-results, but I now know that 66-year-old Mirren, the famous typing error, has - seemingly by her much-vaunted posing nude - earnt the title of having 'the sexiest body on [the] planet' (according to www.salon.com), and also wants not only to appear in Doctor Who, but to be the first female Doctor***.
*** Doubtless her part-time role appreciating art for MOMA (the Museuem of Modern Art in New York) fits her for such a role (I cannot wait for the first Cubist Doctor Who). In the commentary on a clip that she filmed for the museum, which I might have to resist watching (after such a write-up), we are told:
Truth be told, I’m a huge fan of the dame. In addition to being a fantastic actor, she’s beautiful, smart, and completely unpretentious. She’s an art lover, and she is especially enamored of the pioneering abstract paintings of Vasily Kandinsky, whose work is represented in MoMA’s collection and whose “Four Seasons” were very fortuitously on view on the day of her visit. [...]
Like these amazing works, Helen does not disappoint, and in this interview she talks passionately about her great love of painting—particularly her “lovely friends” the Kandinsky paintings—and about the connections between painting and her work.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
4 February
It couldn't just have been hearing Mary Ann Kennedy to-night presenting a largely live show, the last of those that have been on during the week, from events at Celtic Connections (in Glasgow), but I was reminded a little while back of the name Shona Spurtle.
Now, I knew perfectly well what the name meant (to me) - and I will wager that it doesn't mean a whole lot to many others - but I didn't know if it was spelt Spirtle (as I don't remember paying any attention to when I could have seen it written). So, rather than putting into my search-box the name of where Shona comes from, I put in that spelling - setting a challenge.
Obscure though it is - but I might, although I doubt it, find a plethora of fan web-sites in my search-results - Google® knew what I meant, and has taken me straight there:
I now know that there is a clip on YouTube, and that someone liked the name enough to have it as a user-name to comment on a story connected with the Scottish Parliament.
Amazon®, ever ready to please, even claims to have a web-page called www.amazon.co.uk/spurtle, which won't be the laugh that I hope for it to be, as I think that I have clicked such advertising links before...
No, it turns out that I am wrong, for, although it looked like a page of ball-point pens, it is some sort of culinary stick - it could be a magic-wand, for all that I know! - in connection with porridge (the making of, I have to think, as I have no conception how (or why) one could eat that dish with something looking like this).
In any case, they go for nearly £5.00 (well, more than that with postage - is there a standard Amazon® charge for a spurtle?), the best ones boast of being made of beech* (how that can matter to anything?), and you can even buy a box of six. Plus there's a hardback book, but it's miserably not available, called Mrs Spurtle goes South, which, I think, precedes this other appearance as a name.
Bizarrely, there is even a double of the Wikipedia® web-page for the vehicle in which our Mrs (or Ms) Spurtle appeared. It is called Wikipeetia, and it claims to exist solely because 'you spelled someting wrong'**, so:
For your amusement, we've also included a copy of the entire Wikipedia article misspelled
Helpfully, as I am obviously a remedial case for making such an error (?), there is a link that will take me where I can learn to spell English, or just to the unprocessed Wikipedia® piece.
As yet, though, nothing to lure me to buy a recording that shows Siobhan Redmond's exploits as Shona, but she may have gone on to use that 'handle' on Arsebook® and Twitter®, both of which claim that Shona has a presence.
No, again I speak too soon (what a rich vein this is: or is that the - I kid you not! - Glayva talking?), because I can buy a pirate DVD, and there is a web-site with a quotation (and they don't even know where it's from!), which I shall use by way of an ending of all this - for want of a better word - craic:
You are a waster, Sebastian! You are a lying cheat! You are a fibster, a fabulist, an equivocating shim-shammer, a cousining cardsharp, a pathological mythomaniac, a yarner, a palterer who perjures, a whited sepulchre, a cantering serpent, a rat!
Yes, she likes him!
End-notes
* Then again, it is traditional for wash-backs to be made from pine, and not just any old pine, but Oregon pine. We are talking of - if you know what I'm talking about - a very conservative means of producing a drinkable spirit, where they reproduce the dents in the copper-stills, when they have worn so thin that they need repair.
That said, some have taken the view that this Oregon pine approach adds nothing to the all-important taste (too much liquid in there for too short a time to make a difference - except, perhaps, at the leve of homoeopathy), and have gone for stainless-steel vessels. Which you would have no way of knowing when you buy the product, unless you have visited.)
** This seems a tenuous reason to have gone to the trouble of having such a dual text (even if, in it, for example,the word not is turned into 'nto', in a restless attempt to misspell everything, whereas what is really presented is often enough just a meaningless rearrangement of the letters).
I cannot believe that the reason applies in all cases, since this is not the only time that I have looked at what is just the fourth page of search-results, and I do not reall seeing such a thing, although I am often enough searching for a name precisely because I do not know how it is spelt. However, I shall attempt to find the famous Helen Mirran... Well, it didn't surface in the first hundred search-results, but I now know that 66-year-old Mirren, the famous typing error, has - seemingly by her much-vaunted posing nude - earnt the title of having 'the sexiest body on [the] planet' (according to www.salon.com), and also wants not only to appear in Doctor Who, but to be the first female Doctor***.
*** Doubtless her part-time role appreciating art for MOMA (the Museuem of Modern Art in New York) fits her for such a role (I cannot wait for the first Cubist Doctor Who). In the commentary on a clip that she filmed for the museum, which I might have to resist watching (after such a write-up), we are told:
Truth be told, I’m a huge fan of the dame. In addition to being a fantastic actor, she’s beautiful, smart, and completely unpretentious. She’s an art lover, and she is especially enamored of the pioneering abstract paintings of Vasily Kandinsky, whose work is represented in MoMA’s collection and whose “Four Seasons” were very fortuitously on view on the day of her visit. [...]
Like these amazing works, Helen does not disappoint, and in this interview she talks passionately about her great love of painting—particularly her “lovely friends” the Kandinsky paintings—and about the connections between painting and her work.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
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