More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 October
If it's a classic Mark Twain (although such things as the Feast of Fools and the framing device of The Taming of the Shrew foreshadow him), then the scouser chosen should have the chance to be Pitt in return.
Whatever happens, I think that Pitt should be under Terene Davies' direction as to how he can play what he apparently wants to be - either that, or thator Alexei Sayle.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
A bid to give expression to my view of the breadth and depth of one of Cambridge's gems, the Cambridge Film Festival, and what goes on there (including not just the odd passing comment on films and events, but also material more in the nature of a short review (up to 500 words), which will then be posted in the reviews for that film on the Official web-site).
Happy and peaceful viewing!
Thursday 11 October 2012
The Turnip Prize II
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 October
There has already been such an enormous amount of interest in the previous questions posed on these pages that I have agreed to post some further ones from readers and to see if I can find out some answers when I make it down to the show...
1. Is it true that everyone working on this part of the show wears a Ronnie Laing mask?
2. The prohibited actions didn't mention laughing - was that an oversight?
3. Is it general admission or allocated seating?
4. The prohibited actions didn't mention farting - was that an oversight?
5. Can other sorts of vegetable be taken into the screening, then?
6. I've heard that, too, about the masks, but aren't they from images from all different times in Laing's life?
7. If you watch the film twice, do you get Air Miles?
8. The prohibited actions didn't mention scratching (oneself, others or the seat) - was that an oversight?
9. I've heard that it's allocated seating, but the seat is allocated to you, depending on whether you screen for schizoid tendencies, schizophrenia, etc. Is that right?
10. Can people obtain verification, if it is needed, that, although they were at the Turner Prize show, they didn't attend a screening of All Divided Selves?
11. Can they still obtain such verification, even if they did actually attend one?
12. The prohibited actions didn't mention yawning - was that an oversight?
13. Does the death penalty still apply to anyone who mentions the word 'documentary' in connection with the film?
PS Hey! This sounds like an almost interesting approach to a film about a hisorical subject (taken from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/5307532/Luke-Fowler-stories-upside-down-and-inside-out.html) :
Your eyes have barely focused on the tousled head of the composer Cornelius Cardew, when the image on the screen dissolves into footage of winter foliage that skitters in and out of focus. Newspaper cuttings concerning Cardew's early death (in a hit-and-run accident) are presented floating in space like elements in some miniature sculptural installation.
This is documentary film-making according to Luke Fowler, one of the hottest names in contemporary British art, winner of the inaugural Derek Jarman Award for artist film-makers, whose first major retrospective has opened at the Serpentine Gallery in London. In Fowler's best-known film, Pilgrimage between Scattered Points, which tells the story of English composer Cornelius Cardew, interviews are presented deliberately out of synch, subjects appear suddenly upside down, interspersed with apparently random imagery.
Apart from the random imagery, why has the canon of invention dwindled?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 October
There has already been such an enormous amount of interest in the previous questions posed on these pages that I have agreed to post some further ones from readers and to see if I can find out some answers when I make it down to the show...
1. Is it true that everyone working on this part of the show wears a Ronnie Laing mask?
2. The prohibited actions didn't mention laughing - was that an oversight?
3. Is it general admission or allocated seating?
4. The prohibited actions didn't mention farting - was that an oversight?
5. Can other sorts of vegetable be taken into the screening, then?
6. I've heard that, too, about the masks, but aren't they from images from all different times in Laing's life?
7. If you watch the film twice, do you get Air Miles?
8. The prohibited actions didn't mention scratching (oneself, others or the seat) - was that an oversight?
9. I've heard that it's allocated seating, but the seat is allocated to you, depending on whether you screen for schizoid tendencies, schizophrenia, etc. Is that right?
10. Can people obtain verification, if it is needed, that, although they were at the Turner Prize show, they didn't attend a screening of All Divided Selves?
11. Can they still obtain such verification, even if they did actually attend one?
12. The prohibited actions didn't mention yawning - was that an oversight?
13. Does the death penalty still apply to anyone who mentions the word 'documentary' in connection with the film?
PS Hey! This sounds like an almost interesting approach to a film about a hisorical subject (taken from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/5307532/Luke-Fowler-stories-upside-down-and-inside-out.html) :
Your eyes have barely focused on the tousled head of the composer Cornelius Cardew, when the image on the screen dissolves into footage of winter foliage that skitters in and out of focus. Newspaper cuttings concerning Cardew's early death (in a hit-and-run accident) are presented floating in space like elements in some miniature sculptural installation.
This is documentary film-making according to Luke Fowler, one of the hottest names in contemporary British art, winner of the inaugural Derek Jarman Award for artist film-makers, whose first major retrospective has opened at the Serpentine Gallery in London. In Fowler's best-known film, Pilgrimage between Scattered Points, which tells the story of English composer Cornelius Cardew, interviews are presented deliberately out of synch, subjects appear suddenly upside down, interspersed with apparently random imagery.
Apart from the random imagery, why has the canon of invention dwindled?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Wednesday 10 October 2012
The Turnip Prize I
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 October
I have already seen on Tate Britain's web-site that Luke Fowler's film, All Divided Selves (2012), has published screening-times for his entry for The Turner Prize (on which the Evening Standard has given an overview).
I'm assuming that they have built a cinema-room in the show in which it will be projected, but do all (or any) of these rules apply? :
1. No latecomers admitted
2. No popcorn, fizzy drinks or noisy sweet-papers
3. Only bona fide appreciators of the genre of artists' films allowed in
4. Any screening not containing a full quota will be cancelled
5. No petting
6. Anyone found with a root-vegetable about their person will be ejected
7. No whispering to your companion when you cannot follow what is happening (or what the title means)
8. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, except in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
9. Anyone found with closed eyes during a screening will be given The Alex Treatment
10. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, even in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
11. Anyone who betrays any knowledge of the subject of R. D. Laing, the man, his thought and his psychiatric practice will be encouraged to believe that they really have a very busy day and cannot spend ninety-odd minutes in a screening
12. No heavy petting
13. Friends of the film-maker will not be allowed entry (on the grounds of protecting them from getting the impression that they, too, are famous artists)
NB Now that I have found out, I should acknowledge that The Turnip Prize has existed for some years - www.turnipprize.com is its web-site.
STOP PRESS - now more at http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-turnip-prize-ii.html
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 October
I have already seen on Tate Britain's web-site that Luke Fowler's film, All Divided Selves (2012), has published screening-times for his entry for The Turner Prize (on which the Evening Standard has given an overview).
I'm assuming that they have built a cinema-room in the show in which it will be projected, but do all (or any) of these rules apply? :
1. No latecomers admitted
2. No popcorn, fizzy drinks or noisy sweet-papers
3. Only bona fide appreciators of the genre of artists' films allowed in
4. Any screening not containing a full quota will be cancelled
5. No petting
6. Anyone found with a root-vegetable about their person will be ejected
7. No whispering to your companion when you cannot follow what is happening (or what the title means)
8. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, except in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
9. Anyone found with closed eyes during a screening will be given The Alex Treatment
10. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, even in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
11. Anyone who betrays any knowledge of the subject of R. D. Laing, the man, his thought and his psychiatric practice will be encouraged to believe that they really have a very busy day and cannot spend ninety-odd minutes in a screening
12. No heavy petting
13. Friends of the film-maker will not be allowed entry (on the grounds of protecting them from getting the impression that they, too, are famous artists)
NB Now that I have found out, I should acknowledge that The Turnip Prize has existed for some years - www.turnipprize.com is its web-site.
STOP PRESS - now more at http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-turnip-prize-ii.html
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Allen Italian
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 October
Allen's right, you know! Just look at how great these titles look translated :
* Misterioso Omicidio A Manhattan
* Crimini E Misfatti
* Una Commedia Sexy In Una Notte Di Mezza Estate
* Harry A Pezzi
* Il Dormiglione
* Prendi I Soldi E Scappa
* La Maledizione Dello Scorpione Di Giada
* Basta Che Funzioni
* Incontrerai L'Uomo Dei Tuoi Sogni
* Provaci Ancora Sam
But I don't know where they were going with this one (unless conjured up after a cult viewing of the desperation that is Withnail and I) :
Io E Annie
Turning Sweet and Lowdown into Accordi E Disaccordi is, to me, a little mystifying, too.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 October
Allen's right, you know! Just look at how great these titles look translated :
* Misterioso Omicidio A Manhattan
* Crimini E Misfatti
* Una Commedia Sexy In Una Notte Di Mezza Estate
* Harry A Pezzi
* Il Dormiglione
* Prendi I Soldi E Scappa
* La Maledizione Dello Scorpione Di Giada
* Basta Che Funzioni
* Incontrerai L'Uomo Dei Tuoi Sogni
* Provaci Ancora Sam
But I don't know where they were going with this one (unless conjured up after a cult viewing of the desperation that is Withnail and I) :
Io E Annie
Turning Sweet and Lowdown into Accordi E Disaccordi is, to me, a little mystifying, too.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Damaging or harming?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 October
The other day, when I heard that someone was reported to have harmed a painting by Mark Rothko, it did sound quite right - maybe one can harm the natural world, so there is no need for a living creature, capable of being harmed, but would one's first choice for damage to an artwork be that it had been harmed?
The person accused of the act, which he denies was criminal damage, was mentioned on the news again, his name one of many with which Ian Skelly had difficulties to-night. This time the man was said to have damaged the Rothko, which gives rise to this stupid thought :
Could a piece of art be damaged, but not harmed, if the damage were done in the right way? For, what if the damage actually, objectively (in art-critical terms), improved the piece, and, maybe, the living artist approved of it : no point, then, in restoring the work to how it had been before.
Actually, although I do not think that history claims that the fracturing to Duchamp's so-called Large Glass was deliberate, it was a ready-made that he adopted (i.e. rather than making the thing over again from new). But, of course, what Richard Hamilton did in the 60s was to make a re-creation of the work, and, not least as he could not have got the glass to fracture in the same way, it resembles its pre-facture appearance.
Hamilton's piece is on display at Tate Modern, and I take issue with the fact that the label does not draw attention to the fact that the original, some 40 years younger, is in Philadelphia or some such. That said, Duchamp approved what Hamilton had done (and, probably, Hamilton had his agreement before setting out), and I think that he went further, which was to say that, by signing it, it stood for the original for all purposes. My issue? You would only know that, if you knew it, and, if a friend, who had seen the original, asked you what you thought of the cracked glass, you would shake your head, not remembering any.
Finally, on this and as to Francis Bacon, the same Tate advised that he was such a keen reviser of his work that it had had to refuse permission for him to borrow key canvases from its holding : it knew very well that what Bacon would have returned would have been different works from what had been borrowed! If the works were in Gerhart Richter's private collection, no one would deny his right to the practice of overpainting earlier works, but might question his judgement, if not artistic integrity (which is abundant from the film Gerhard Richter : Painting (2011)).
If Bacon had broken into the Tate, with the assistance of one of his lovers, and worked on some canvases, would be have harmed them, by causing them to appear differently from the image in the catalogue and what people would expect to see if they wished to view what Turnage called Three Screaming Popes? Or would he have damaged them, but without harming them - and who knows what glories the Tate presented us from seeing to surpass what we have?
In the extreme case of Van Gogh, we might wish to say that his artistic legacy was not safe with him - but do we have a right, as an inheritance gives us, to remember someone for works that he would have destroyed. And so into, sadly, the moral debate about Max Brod and Franz Kafka, which I generally find rather sterile.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 October
The other day, when I heard that someone was reported to have harmed a painting by Mark Rothko, it did sound quite right - maybe one can harm the natural world, so there is no need for a living creature, capable of being harmed, but would one's first choice for damage to an artwork be that it had been harmed?
The person accused of the act, which he denies was criminal damage, was mentioned on the news again, his name one of many with which Ian Skelly had difficulties to-night. This time the man was said to have damaged the Rothko, which gives rise to this stupid thought :
Could a piece of art be damaged, but not harmed, if the damage were done in the right way? For, what if the damage actually, objectively (in art-critical terms), improved the piece, and, maybe, the living artist approved of it : no point, then, in restoring the work to how it had been before.
Actually, although I do not think that history claims that the fracturing to Duchamp's so-called Large Glass was deliberate, it was a ready-made that he adopted (i.e. rather than making the thing over again from new). But, of course, what Richard Hamilton did in the 60s was to make a re-creation of the work, and, not least as he could not have got the glass to fracture in the same way, it resembles its pre-facture appearance.
Hamilton's piece is on display at Tate Modern, and I take issue with the fact that the label does not draw attention to the fact that the original, some 40 years younger, is in Philadelphia or some such. That said, Duchamp approved what Hamilton had done (and, probably, Hamilton had his agreement before setting out), and I think that he went further, which was to say that, by signing it, it stood for the original for all purposes. My issue? You would only know that, if you knew it, and, if a friend, who had seen the original, asked you what you thought of the cracked glass, you would shake your head, not remembering any.
Finally, on this and as to Francis Bacon, the same Tate advised that he was such a keen reviser of his work that it had had to refuse permission for him to borrow key canvases from its holding : it knew very well that what Bacon would have returned would have been different works from what had been borrowed! If the works were in Gerhart Richter's private collection, no one would deny his right to the practice of overpainting earlier works, but might question his judgement, if not artistic integrity (which is abundant from the film Gerhard Richter : Painting (2011)).
If Bacon had broken into the Tate, with the assistance of one of his lovers, and worked on some canvases, would be have harmed them, by causing them to appear differently from the image in the catalogue and what people would expect to see if they wished to view what Turnage called Three Screaming Popes? Or would he have damaged them, but without harming them - and who knows what glories the Tate presented us from seeing to surpass what we have?
In the extreme case of Van Gogh, we might wish to say that his artistic legacy was not safe with him - but do we have a right, as an inheritance gives us, to remember someone for works that he would have destroyed. And so into, sadly, the moral debate about Max Brod and Franz Kafka, which I generally find rather sterile.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Monday 8 October 2012
Guinness in different glasses
A short appreciation, from old review-notes, of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 October
A short appreciation, from old review-notes, of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
Somehow, when a restoration by the Britifish Film Institute (would that they could be known as that, not as BFI!) was released last year, I failed to turn a few notes from seeing Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) into a review. Here ‘tis now…
One cannot argue with the description of this film, in Picturehouse Recommends, having 'the most articulate and literate of all Ealing screenplays'. It is not just dialogue, but Louis Mazzini's (Dennis Price's) sinister narration and how he delivers it as if what he planned and did is the most reasonable thing in the world, wherein, of course, lies the wonder of the piece. If the film gets you to laugh quite naturally at children dying of diphtheria (and their mother dying, too), then that is skilled writing, but even the best writing depends on delivery, and that of the principals is impeccable.
For me, the fact that Alec Guinness transforms himself into eight varyingly inbred members (including one woman) of Mazzini’s mother’s family is the lesser thing, and it is in this connection that I have alluded to it in my review of Holy Motors (2012) (for anyone who believes that even the resources of the limousine suffice, and not a great deal of assistance beside would be needed, is deluding him- or herself). The costume is not the least part not only of the impersonations, but of the whole film, most notably for the two leading ladies:
The character parts are cute, but it is Mazzini interacting with these crucial women that counts, Joan Greenwood as childhood chum Sibella Holland, and Valerie Hobson as Edith d’Ascoyne, the woman whom he has widowed and in favour of whom Sibella just becomes something on the side. The planning just gets a little too clever for its own good, and Mazzini ends up tried before his peers (who are peers), under the darting eyes of Hugh Griffith, and brings us crucially back to a document that he has written whilst telling his tale, and which could unwittingly end up as his confession.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Sunday 7 October 2012
A roaming view
This is a review of To Rome with Love (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 October
This is a review of To Rome with Love (2012)
Few people might expect so much dialogue in Italian with English sub-titles from To Rome with Love (2012), even after seeing Midnight in Paris (2011) - I hope that the fact will not put off members of a typical Allen audience who are maybe less used to following text and action together in this way, either by their telling friends to avoid the experience, or by having it as a mental reservation for his next release.
(I could speculate as to how the Italian dialogue was arrived at, because it does not quite seem as if Allen wrote the sub-titled speech and it was translated into Italian, but something more complicated than that, and maybe Woody's Italian is much better than mine and he worked on writing the Italian parts of the screenplay.)
A traffic-policeman, balletically directing the thronging vehicles high on a tub in their centre, first introduces us to two of the couples in the stories that we will see, and then thankfully, unlike the narrator in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), leaves us to our own devices. He, himself, is a device, because he purports to be able to see what he shows us from his vantage-point, and he is competing to be important to us.
Moreover, he is a symbol for Allen in exactly bringing the four stories before us beautifully in one timescale, all of them humorous, but all of them, despite the humour, nonetheless serious in some way. One story takes place in a single day, another in a week, and the remaining two in probably two or three weeks, but they begin and end together, and we are never worried that time is running more quickly for someone than for someone else, which is the film’s real triumph, that we can accept what we see so easily because the different lines are woven together, but are separate, happening in their own universe.
We first meet Hayley, an American woman spending the summer in Rome and falling in love with the first Roman whom she asks directions, Michaelangelo. (And, yes, in another strand, Allen gives us Leonardo.) Later, her parents (Judy Davis, being waspish as Phyllis, and Woody Allen being one of his typical creative roles as Jerry) meet his parents, and so begins the most bizarre story of Michaelangelo’s father Giancarlo giving an operatic performance under Allen's bizarre direction. This should not be spoilt, so do not imagine what will come better as a surprise - and even did fine the second time around. Allen calls his film to Rome, and he shows us himself going there, both as an actor (and hating the turbulence), and to bring us there with him.
Pure Italian is used to tell the tale of Milly and Antonio, newlyweds from Pordenone who came to Rome for a honeymoon and a new life with Antnonio’s relatives' company, if only he had something in common with his aunts and uncles! Enter a wish to impress them with a new haircut for Milly, Penélope Cruz as the fortuitous Anna, and chance encounters with the cast of a film, allowed by the running joke of directions to anywhere being endlessly complicated and losing Milly further and further, but somehow bringing her having lunch in the same restaurant with actor Luca Salta as Cruz hilariously stands in as Milly (but - fear not - all ends well!).
Cruz being who she is not, and performing the role so delightfully that she steals virtually every scene, is part of what the story, equally deliciously portrayed by Roberto Beningi, of Leopoldo Pisanello (another painter’s name) is about : suddenly, everyone wants to know all about Pisanello, a little as he had wished, and is whisked off to answer questions about what he had for breakfast. He does not get used to all the attention, all the desire to know his opinions, and comes to see it as a curse. When it has gone, this take on modern celebrity mixed with Warhol’s notorious pronouncement leaves Pisanello a little bereft by the change, and he has to satisfy himself that he once had a chauffeur and people knew who he was.
The last story has an on-screen American narrator in older architect John (Alec Baldwin), who is not ever visible to more than one person (more or less), trying most of the time to share his wisdom with the younger architect Tim, and thereby giving us a great deal of amusement in his ironic comments and predictions, and ultimately proving right when Tim has decided to follow his romantic feelings. Baldwin finds an on-screen equal in the acting presence of Ellen Page as the bewitching Monica, who draws Tim despite what he or John can say to the contrary.
The film is thoroughly charming, but my hesitation is whether two strands in Italian is taking things too far for some potential viewers. It ends with a competing claim, from a man who emerges from behind some shutters near The Spanish Steps, to see everything from where he is, and, a bit like Beckettt ('Oh the stories I could tell if I were easy', from Moran's part of Molloy), the offer to tell some of these stories some other time.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Thursday 4 October 2012
Brad and Angelina consider changing names (according to AOL®)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
4 October
That's just a bit silly, isn't it?
So we have to contemplate calling him Angelina, Angelina Pitt, whereas she comes Brad, Brad Jolie...
About as crazy as Fairbanks and Pickford calling their place Pickfair!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
4 October
That's just a bit silly, isn't it?
So we have to contemplate calling him Angelina, Angelina Pitt, whereas she comes Brad, Brad Jolie...
About as crazy as Fairbanks and Pickford calling their place Pickfair!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Monday 24 September 2012
Fly Australian Airlines to nowhere
This is a Festival review of Holy Motors (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
This is a Festival review of Holy Motors (2012)
* Contains spoilers *
If you want to see Kylie play a cameo as an airline hostess*, you’re clutching at straws, and would be better off queuing for one of her stage-shows than watching Holy Motors** (2012): if you watched the film first, you’d have no desire to hear her version of any other song. The other song was just mawkish dross about time, regret and the past – or was that Kylie’s song instead / as well, and trauma has bereft me of remembering ?
I have Tweeted that Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and Subway (1985) meet in a mortal embrace, and it is a fight that kills off the best of both, leaving a facile scene in a warehouse-sized garage at the end that was apt to make the ritual close of t.v.’s The Waltons seem profound. It did not even visually convince that so many similar vehicles had been assembled, not least since they insisted on drawing attention to their artificiality by flashing their brake-lights.
Could anything worthwhile have preceded such a banal ending, little better than imputing significance to the fact that the vital club in Enter the Void (2009) is called – wait for it! – The Void? A few moments did, but only a very few in the whole 115 minutes, comprising : an erotic dance; a building that I could swear owes something to the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright (but I could not spot it in the credits); the bizarre pastiche of a beauty, a beast and a photographer; the first of several humorous grave-stones; and a terrific interlude (called such), in which a gathering group of musicians, centred on an accordion ensemble, processed around a large church.
After then, and despite some intrigue concerning a crime and its ritualized repetition, it was a decline, not just musically, as a continuation of the episodic. Simply put, there was simply almost no interest in how (or even why) it all hung together, and it became, if possible, less and less significant. It was as if a premise of The Matrix (1999) that, when plugged in, Neo, Trinity and the others, can enter the machine-world had been stretched out to become some sort of secret, kept to the end.
I would happily have walked out of Holy Motors, at around the point that I describe, but, as my friend did not evince the desire to leave, I stayed so that we would have both seen all of it to discuss afterwards. He thought it a sort of purgatory for M. Oscar, I thought it a purgatory for me in this parade of the pointless, and that any notion that it meant more than the following quotation*** was vain speculation (though I was, also, reminded of Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd):
As the gom yawncher man passed me I recognized him as the man in the broken-rimmed hat who'd spoken to me in the underground when I was on my way home from Istvan Fallok's studio with electrodes all over my head.
'Hello,' I said.
'Nimser vo,' he said.
'You weren't talking like that the other day. How come?'
'I must've been somebody else then.'
'How's that?'
'Economy. You have a little chat with a stranger now and then, right? So do I, so does everyone. How many lines has the stranger got? Two or three maybe. There's really no need for a new actor each time, is there?'
'So you play them all.'
'The same as you.'
'What do you mean?'
'Yesterday you were the conductor on the 11 bus and you also did quite a nice little tobacconist in the Charing Cross Road. Actually London hasn't got that big a cast, there's only about fifty of us, all working flat out.'
'Are you writing a novel?'
'Novel-writing is for weaklings,' he said, and moved on.
After which, not only go to [to come], for an unfavourable comparison with The Night Elvis Died (2010), but here for a further conceit
End-notes
* I have never heard the male equivalent called ‘a host’.
** Surely a take-off of the Batman dialogue.
*** From The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban, Pan Books (Picador), London, 1988, p. 56.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Saturday 22 September 2012
Vertiginous Hitch
This is a Festival review of Vertigo (1958)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
22 September
This is a Festival review of Vertigo (1958)
* Contains spoilers *
When the Jimmy Stewart / Alfred Hitchcock collaborations that had been quickly taken out of circulation were released again in the mid-1980s, I went to see two or three, certainly Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958). I remember not being much struck by either, the former because I found its device - as it assuredly is meant to be - so limiting, the latter because I just did not get it, and the suddenness with which some films from that era ended, with the words 'THE END' and the studio logo coming up, did not help.
Yesterday, watching Vertigo for the first time since then, I found myself coming at it with the eye of someone who loved Chinatown (1974), and found much that links the two, including a way of viewing that had me questioning who was the client and what had Stewart John 'Scottie' Ferguson been engaged to do and why. The key scene, for this way of thinking, was not at Gavin Elster's office, but the next one, at Ernie's, and questioning for whose benefit it was that Scottie was there, in terms of who was identifying whom.
Thereafter, having postulated that Scottie was the one to be seen by Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak), it was easy enough to see him being led a dance, even to the extent of her, more than once, taking a parking-space that left him pulling in where no space existed. When she threw herself into San Francisco Bay, she then did so knowing that Scottie was there. (How all this connects with the foundation novel, D'Entre les Morts, I do not know, but research may tell me without having to look it out.)
In the meantime, it is the way of thinking that relates to Chinatown that interests me. Both films have secrets, a crime, someone pretending to be someone else and in whom a third someone should not fall in love, and all end with the death of that someone. In Vertigo, the private investigator (or PI) as a means to an end not known to him is hardly new*, but we are immersed in his pursuit such that we can be blinded to the fact that he has been blinded and bought a story.
To be continued
End-notes
* In a way it goes all the way at least back to Jonah, with texts such as Sir Gawain, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and G. K. Chesterton's The Man who was Thursday in between.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Friday 21 September 2012
More like Pirandello
This is a review of V.O.S. (2009), as screened at Cambridge Film Festival
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
20 September
This is a review of V.O.S. (2009), as screened at Cambridge Film Festival (@Camfilmfest) 2012
V.O.S. (2009) (which denotes that it is the original version, but with sub-titles, i.e. not dubbed) was introduced as a film within a film, taken from a play within a play (which is by Carl Lopez), but it is more like Pirandello than anything else, with Brechtian Verfremdungseffekte thrown in for good measure, plus a hint of Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry.
For the four principal characters do not have - are not shown to have - any existence outside of the film, and though they are stepping in and out of the role as scenes are played out (and envisaged, in discussion, as having taken or to take a different course), it's as though their life is on the set or lot, which makes the experience of watching a lot like that of seeing Nine (2009) or Dogville (2003).
Woody Allen is even mentioned by Clara (Àgata Roca), the pregnant partner of Ander (Andres Herrera) who is seemingly writing the film as it goes, as if it were a linear process that leads up to the scene that we see at the beginning : one audience review that I have seen recently at Cambridge Film Festival critiques an accent as if were less convincing at the beginning of shooting and that that fact is necessarily reflected in where the scene appears within the film.
What does the suggestion that the actors have a life beyond the parts that they play add, when doors that we have been shown into a hospital theatre are later revealed as a mock-up, but then have figures dressed for a procedure emerge from them and appear to be received by the crew as if they are real surgeons or the like? As far as I could see, it merely put a layer of doubt as to whether any of the scenes played out have any status, which is something that Allen has explored, for example, with the use of a chorus (in Mighty Aphrodite (1995), with the alternative realities of Melinda and Melinda (2004), and in Harry or Stardust Memories (1980).
That said, the story of how Ander and Clara become a couple is still an engaging one, because it shows how they have interacted with Vicky and Manu, and it is not as if Allen has just done it all before. Those who are interested can read more in Variety.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Jarman and jerking-off
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
21 September
You might or might not like Jarman's style of working, and I couldn't make it all the way through Jubilee (1978), but he was patently a film-maker.
At Cambridge Film Festival last night, All Divided Selves (2011) and the demeanour of its director, Luke Fowler, gave a very different impression from that made by Jarman, and the film did not seem much like a film, and the artist - as all artists tend to do - tried, although his language kept tripping him up*, to distance himself from the idea that his work said something or had a message.
The message that All Divided Selves had consisted almost entirely of Laing talking, often enough with visuals, about psychiatric conditions and his personal and cultural background, plus some others talking with or about him, his theories and psychiatry in general. As it is not difficult to pull quotations out of Laing's works, let alone footage, that says something pertinent to us and to now, then there may be no great merit in having done so, even if you have embellished the enterprise with bits and pieces that you have shot.
Conclusion : Would I prefer to have the chance to see Tacita Dean's FILM 2011 from Tate Modern's Turbine Hall again and have it substitute for my memory of Fowler's film? Yes!
End-notes
* He seemed not to want to say 'illustrative', but nonetheless kept saying it, so drawing atention to a word that he purported to eschew.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
21 September
You might or might not like Jarman's style of working, and I couldn't make it all the way through Jubilee (1978), but he was patently a film-maker.
At Cambridge Film Festival last night, All Divided Selves (2011) and the demeanour of its director, Luke Fowler, gave a very different impression from that made by Jarman, and the film did not seem much like a film, and the artist - as all artists tend to do - tried, although his language kept tripping him up*, to distance himself from the idea that his work said something or had a message.
The message that All Divided Selves had consisted almost entirely of Laing talking, often enough with visuals, about psychiatric conditions and his personal and cultural background, plus some others talking with or about him, his theories and psychiatry in general. As it is not difficult to pull quotations out of Laing's works, let alone footage, that says something pertinent to us and to now, then there may be no great merit in having done so, even if you have embellished the enterprise with bits and pieces that you have shot.
Conclusion : Would I prefer to have the chance to see Tacita Dean's FILM 2011 from Tate Modern's Turbine Hall again and have it substitute for my memory of Fowler's film? Yes!
End-notes
* He seemed not to want to say 'illustrative', but nonetheless kept saying it, so drawing atention to a word that he purported to eschew.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Thursday 20 September 2012
Images arbitrarily made interesting
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
21 September
Many people will have chosen to see the film All Divided Selves (2011) because it concerns Ronnie Laing, not because the director, Luke Fowler, is a candidate for The Turner Prize.
They will not have been disappointed to see some footage from when Laing became famous, and maybe from before, and they will have kept with his voice when it was heard alongside seeing material interposed between it and visuals of him speaking: sometimes we cut away from him to that material, sometimes we only heard his voice (perhaps because the recording was just audio, perhaps not). The interest, though, was not in that material, and it could even have been the test-card for all that it mattered.
Laing we saw at many ages, and with varying style of dress, but we always knew that it was he, and, once we heard him speaking and saw his lips move, we knew when we had his words being spoken. As to anyone else in the film and who they were, nothing told us, and only original captions - apart from what seemed a new inter-title regarding Esterson - told us two or three times what community we were being shown, so we might have had Thomas Szasz on the screen and not have known it.
So, yes, we hear Laing talking and being interviewed, but what the film offered as a polemic, as Fowler called it, might have been better achieved by a reading of select passages from Laing's publications, or by reading Adrian Laing's biography of his father. Plus there's Mike Moran's one-man play about Ronnie...
More on this topic here and a review, from the Berlinale, in The Hollywood Reporter here
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
21 September
Many people will have chosen to see the film All Divided Selves (2011) because it concerns Ronnie Laing, not because the director, Luke Fowler, is a candidate for The Turner Prize.
They will not have been disappointed to see some footage from when Laing became famous, and maybe from before, and they will have kept with his voice when it was heard alongside seeing material interposed between it and visuals of him speaking: sometimes we cut away from him to that material, sometimes we only heard his voice (perhaps because the recording was just audio, perhaps not). The interest, though, was not in that material, and it could even have been the test-card for all that it mattered.
Laing we saw at many ages, and with varying style of dress, but we always knew that it was he, and, once we heard him speaking and saw his lips move, we knew when we had his words being spoken. As to anyone else in the film and who they were, nothing told us, and only original captions - apart from what seemed a new inter-title regarding Esterson - told us two or three times what community we were being shown, so we might have had Thomas Szasz on the screen and not have known it.
So, yes, we hear Laing talking and being interviewed, but what the film offered as a polemic, as Fowler called it, might have been better achieved by a reading of select passages from Laing's publications, or by reading Adrian Laing's biography of his father. Plus there's Mike Moran's one-man play about Ronnie...
More on this topic here and a review, from the Berlinale, in The Hollywood Reporter here
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
A lifeless lack of feeling
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
20 September
* Contains spoilers *
Totem (2011) is a film of relatively few words, but it arguably has relatively little to say. I wish that it were like Ali Smith's novel The Accidental, but it is not.
Fiona has advertised herself as a maid, apparently through the Internet, and, although she calls her mother as if from a sea-side resort (perhaps she has claimed to be on holiday), she has claimed that both her parents are dead, and that she is 23, which she does not often look. The family make fun of her at first, but that seems to dissolve as a motif when she does a passable pretence at being Keith Jarrett in solo-piano mode.
Otherwise, Claudia shows her how to clean, pushes her around (literally) a few times, and Fiona mutters to herself, when no one is around, about how they do not clean properly and are pigs. Later, when she had seemed to be going, but did not, she talks to herself in the same way, but it sounds more Biblical, maybe Isaiah.
Apparently based on a true story, the write-up in Cambridge Film Festival's programme makes it sound more doomy and laden with meaning than it is, and it is hard to see what, in what unfolds, needs or is made any more relevant by a factual basis. Nothing does happen, and we wonder why the resources of a film needed to be devoted to what is the territory, at best, of a short story.
PS As I left, not wanting the embarrassment of the Q&A (but also having something else to do), I heard one couple saying how they had been trying to work out who the characters were in relation to each other, another firmly decided that it was a dysfunctional family, that beloved phrase of yore that means not a whit, which jut shows that some viewers will blame themselves for not following, and others put a label on it.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
20 September
* Contains spoilers *
Totem (2011) is a film of relatively few words, but it arguably has relatively little to say. I wish that it were like Ali Smith's novel The Accidental, but it is not.
Fiona has advertised herself as a maid, apparently through the Internet, and, although she calls her mother as if from a sea-side resort (perhaps she has claimed to be on holiday), she has claimed that both her parents are dead, and that she is 23, which she does not often look. The family make fun of her at first, but that seems to dissolve as a motif when she does a passable pretence at being Keith Jarrett in solo-piano mode.
Otherwise, Claudia shows her how to clean, pushes her around (literally) a few times, and Fiona mutters to herself, when no one is around, about how they do not clean properly and are pigs. Later, when she had seemed to be going, but did not, she talks to herself in the same way, but it sounds more Biblical, maybe Isaiah.
Apparently based on a true story, the write-up in Cambridge Film Festival's programme makes it sound more doomy and laden with meaning than it is, and it is hard to see what, in what unfolds, needs or is made any more relevant by a factual basis. Nothing does happen, and we wonder why the resources of a film needed to be devoted to what is the territory, at best, of a short story.
PS As I left, not wanting the embarrassment of the Q&A (but also having something else to do), I heard one couple saying how they had been trying to work out who the characters were in relation to each other, another firmly decided that it was a dysfunctional family, that beloved phrase of yore that means not a whit, which jut shows that some viewers will blame themselves for not following, and others put a label on it.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Wednesday 19 September 2012
Inside the family
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
19 September
* Contains spoilers *
Home for the Weekend (2012) (originally Was Bleibt) is not, for me, a film that bears comparison with Woody Allen’s Interiors, shot just before Manhattan. In the introduction, we were told that films do not often show the lives of the German upper middle-classes, and, although this film may do so, it does not, largely, do so in a novel way, as if what it shows were, in itself, enough.
Allen’s film, too, has a mother with a history of mental ill-health and siblings gathering at the family home, one of whom is more put upon by being local, but the highly-strung mother in his family has not simply stopped taking medication as Gitte has - which just seems forced in reinforcing the pat belief that the only problems are when people are not compliant. What, more importantly, is very unsympathetic is the language, typified by talking about Gitte going nuts, whereas my fantasy about Germany is that there is far more acceptance, not least within this class, of mental-health issues and how to support those with them than in Britain.
In this film, for all that the characters just react badly to the news that Gitte stopped her medication, none of them seems either to appreciate her not wanting to be drugged so that she has no feeling, or that their concern at what she has done lacks any obvious meaning if they then go on to reveal that they have just been humouring her. She already feels that they have been pretending, and that she has no important say in anything, but it makes little sense to confirm it at this time.
We see the brothers angry and physical with each other over who is to blame for their mother, but they ultimately move on quite quickly to fulfil themselves away from home, which, sadly, seems to send the message that Gitte had been holding them back, and she is remembered largely as a source of recrimination between father and son. Allen's three sisters seem a little less slow to forget...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
19 September
* Contains spoilers *
Home for the Weekend (2012) (originally Was Bleibt) is not, for me, a film that bears comparison with Woody Allen’s Interiors, shot just before Manhattan. In the introduction, we were told that films do not often show the lives of the German upper middle-classes, and, although this film may do so, it does not, largely, do so in a novel way, as if what it shows were, in itself, enough.
Allen’s film, too, has a mother with a history of mental ill-health and siblings gathering at the family home, one of whom is more put upon by being local, but the highly-strung mother in his family has not simply stopped taking medication as Gitte has - which just seems forced in reinforcing the pat belief that the only problems are when people are not compliant. What, more importantly, is very unsympathetic is the language, typified by talking about Gitte going nuts, whereas my fantasy about Germany is that there is far more acceptance, not least within this class, of mental-health issues and how to support those with them than in Britain.
In this film, for all that the characters just react badly to the news that Gitte stopped her medication, none of them seems either to appreciate her not wanting to be drugged so that she has no feeling, or that their concern at what she has done lacks any obvious meaning if they then go on to reveal that they have just been humouring her. She already feels that they have been pretending, and that she has no important say in anything, but it makes little sense to confirm it at this time.
We see the brothers angry and physical with each other over who is to blame for their mother, but they ultimately move on quite quickly to fulfil themselves away from home, which, sadly, seems to send the message that Gitte had been holding them back, and she is remembered largely as a source of recrimination between father and son. Allen's three sisters seem a little less slow to forget...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Tuesday 18 September 2012
Once bitten...
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
18 September
(Or more than one use for a collar...)
To say that Dax Shepard's film Hit and Run (2012) is playful makes it sound terribly fay, but it has a veneer of being some other kind of film, which deliberately gets chipped or smoothed away (a bit like Gerhart Richter with his layers of paint showing through, as the upper one(s) are squeegeed and scraped).
I'm choosing playful, because ironic and post-modern irony have been just about done to death by over- and misuse (not, I am sure, starting with Alanis Morisette), but I could just as well emphasize that this is part of Tarantino's legacy, but that it is a strange junction between his film-making and the ethos and feel of something like Friends.
In itself, that needs some explanation. There is a lot of shouting in the film, but it abates as soon as it began, whereas human-beings do not just calm down when faced with the voice of reason. Even people who, one might reckon, have reason to do something brutal just seem to settle for money, not revenge. Irrespective of the references that I have given, what this film most resembles is Wacky Races, not least with the cars and their stunts, the chasing around in circles, the burnt rubber, the high-octane exhaust used to disguise onward movement and choke the opposition.
Anyone who mistakes Hit and Run for something with a more serious golf-club to grind in another's face is missing the point, and this is typified by a woman (Kristen Bell) taking a shower who, when told by her partner (Shephard playing Yul Perrkins) that the engine has been lifted clean out of his Lincoln overnight, asks if there is anything that she can do.
Laughing at crap psychology and the foibles and hypocrisy of others may wear a bit thin at times (the same woman, Annie Bean (sic) who forbad doing violence when they are being tailed, because so proud of her doctorate in conflict resolution, seems suddenly not bothered that Yul's father is beating someone around the head with a shovel), but the film delivers on the level on which I understand it should be taken.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
18 September
(Or more than one use for a collar...)
To say that Dax Shepard's film Hit and Run (2012) is playful makes it sound terribly fay, but it has a veneer of being some other kind of film, which deliberately gets chipped or smoothed away (a bit like Gerhart Richter with his layers of paint showing through, as the upper one(s) are squeegeed and scraped).
I'm choosing playful, because ironic and post-modern irony have been just about done to death by over- and misuse (not, I am sure, starting with Alanis Morisette), but I could just as well emphasize that this is part of Tarantino's legacy, but that it is a strange junction between his film-making and the ethos and feel of something like Friends.
In itself, that needs some explanation. There is a lot of shouting in the film, but it abates as soon as it began, whereas human-beings do not just calm down when faced with the voice of reason. Even people who, one might reckon, have reason to do something brutal just seem to settle for money, not revenge. Irrespective of the references that I have given, what this film most resembles is Wacky Races, not least with the cars and their stunts, the chasing around in circles, the burnt rubber, the high-octane exhaust used to disguise onward movement and choke the opposition.
Anyone who mistakes Hit and Run for something with a more serious golf-club to grind in another's face is missing the point, and this is typified by a woman (Kristen Bell) taking a shower who, when told by her partner (Shephard playing Yul Perrkins) that the engine has been lifted clean out of his Lincoln overnight, asks if there is anything that she can do.
Laughing at crap psychology and the foibles and hypocrisy of others may wear a bit thin at times (the same woman, Annie Bean (sic) who forbad doing violence when they are being tailed, because so proud of her doctorate in conflict resolution, seems suddenly not bothered that Yul's father is beating someone around the head with a shovel), but the film delivers on the level on which I understand it should be taken.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Any time soon
This is a Festival review of Now is Good (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
18 September
This is a Festival review of Now is Good (2012)
The words of the film's title, Now is Good (2012), come as a reply when Tessa (skilfully played by Dakota Fanning) is asked on a date, and shortly before something unexpected happens. Knowing that she isn’t, she has been treating herself as if she were indestructible, much to the dismay of her father (Paddy Considine), who would have wanted her to persevere with having leukaemia treated.
He may no longer be seeking an answer that would save her for a while longer, but he has not given up thinking that things other than medical science may preserve her or that there is a sense in which he almost owns her remaining life. Much to her irritation, he is always trying to speak for her, whether to a radio-show host or the medical staff (and those people collude, as anyone who uses a wheelchair would tell you that they would).
However, tellingly, when Tessa asks the Macmillan nurse (with whom she had previously been a little abrasive, as if she represented not help for her, but an embodiment of what she was battling) what her last days have in store, they are alone. By contrast with her father, Tessa’s mother (Olivia Williams), from whom he is separated, does not seem much interested (though turns out to have her reasons for that appearance), and both parents ‘get to’ Tessa by failing to understand her needs and motivations.
Adam, the boy next door (who has had his own life affected by his father’s death in a crash), meets her when she stalks out with things from her bedroom wall that she wants burnt and starts putting them in the lit brazier of garden waste. Excellently played by Jeremy Irvine in dialogue that, of high quality throughout, reaches its peak of expressiveness when Tessa and he are talking, there is a sense of advanced maturity in Adam, which postponing study and acting as support to his mother probably has brought out in him.
The frailties that surround talking about and confronting death are fully explored (as when younger brother Cal, quite honestly, asks if they will go on holiday when Tessa is dead, because he doesn’t remember the previous trip to Spain), but, for all the tears that come at so many points in the second half, this is also a joyous film.
It makes you gasp at what people are capable of, as when Adam sets out to make Tessa famous, or surprises her by taking her up onto the cliffs. Tessa does not want to be thought of as brave, but she shows that she faith to reach out beyond and disregard the limitations of physical strength, and of the norms and mores that her father would have her obey.
Ol Parker has brought his own script beautifully to the screen, with cast and photography all of a piece in locating Tessa’s story in and around Brighton. And I think that it would be no less strong the second time, because the film is built around not what must happen, but about the relationships that make it something no longer to fear.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Monday 17 September 2012
Never go back
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
17 September
* Contains spoilers *
The film Postcards from the Zoo, in white letters on a black screen, five or six times gives us definitions (acknowledged to be from Webster's or from Wikipedia®) of terms such as translocation and reintroduction, and - as I realized - they relate to Lana's story as much to that of the animals of Ragunan Zoo.
That said, it is possible that the animals whom we see have been tamed in a way that many zoo-captives would not have been, for a young tigress enjoys being showered, and the sole giraffe (Jera) and the hippopotami seem unaverse to touch or to being fed from the hand. Although Jakarta is not known to me, someone in the screening to whom I spoke afterwards had visited the zoo itself, and rated it highly by the standard of others in Indonesia.
We do not know Lana's exact past, except from seeing pictures of a younger she, but she appears to have had no life outside the zoo, until she is captivated (pun intended) and led away by an appealing figure with a hint of Johnny Depp about him (Nicholas Saputra), who turns out happily to let her shoulder pushing a heavy handcart behind him.
Leaving the zoo with him may be the fantasy, and - to the extent that the zoo itself is highly symbolic - it may or may not happen, but, at any rate, he would only have needed, as he more or less does, to snap his fingers at her for her to follow him. (There are echoes of The Girl on the Bridge (1999), though Lana does not need rescuing in the same way, and maybe Gabor (Daniel Auteuil) has more to offer Vanessa Paradis as Adèle than is given to Lana in the role of assistant to this man of few words, however fetchingly she dresses to become his pair).
Whatever her connection to him, Lana then seems, when he departs, cut off from relating to the zoo, which she once loved: we painfully see her essentially motionless figure in scenes of activity, sensing that she is barely participating in or witnessing the life going on around her. The contact will get re-established, but it takes the massive dream equivalent of the elephant in the room to get her there.
Unlike being shooed out of Eden, it is as if the zoo itself transports Lana back to where her real life lies, and perhaps, in legends of Indira, we can find a further level of meaning. (In Strindberg's A Dream Play, it is Indra, whose daughter Agnes goes to Earth to experience life there.)
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
17 September
* Contains spoilers *
The film Postcards from the Zoo, in white letters on a black screen, five or six times gives us definitions (acknowledged to be from Webster's or from Wikipedia®) of terms such as translocation and reintroduction, and - as I realized - they relate to Lana's story as much to that of the animals of Ragunan Zoo.
That said, it is possible that the animals whom we see have been tamed in a way that many zoo-captives would not have been, for a young tigress enjoys being showered, and the sole giraffe (Jera) and the hippopotami seem unaverse to touch or to being fed from the hand. Although Jakarta is not known to me, someone in the screening to whom I spoke afterwards had visited the zoo itself, and rated it highly by the standard of others in Indonesia.
We do not know Lana's exact past, except from seeing pictures of a younger she, but she appears to have had no life outside the zoo, until she is captivated (pun intended) and led away by an appealing figure with a hint of Johnny Depp about him (Nicholas Saputra), who turns out happily to let her shoulder pushing a heavy handcart behind him.
Leaving the zoo with him may be the fantasy, and - to the extent that the zoo itself is highly symbolic - it may or may not happen, but, at any rate, he would only have needed, as he more or less does, to snap his fingers at her for her to follow him. (There are echoes of The Girl on the Bridge (1999), though Lana does not need rescuing in the same way, and maybe Gabor (Daniel Auteuil) has more to offer Vanessa Paradis as Adèle than is given to Lana in the role of assistant to this man of few words, however fetchingly she dresses to become his pair).
Whatever her connection to him, Lana then seems, when he departs, cut off from relating to the zoo, which she once loved: we painfully see her essentially motionless figure in scenes of activity, sensing that she is barely participating in or witnessing the life going on around her. The contact will get re-established, but it takes the massive dream equivalent of the elephant in the room to get her there.
Unlike being shooed out of Eden, it is as if the zoo itself transports Lana back to where her real life lies, and perhaps, in legends of Indira, we can find a further level of meaning. (In Strindberg's A Dream Play, it is Indra, whose daughter Agnes goes to Earth to experience life there.)
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Don't get too close
This is a Festival review of Intouchables (Untouchable) (2011)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
17 September
This is a Festival review of Intouchables (Untouchable) (2011)
An unlikely relationship, this one a real-life friendship taken as the basis for Untouchable (2011) (curiously, as Intouchables, plural in the French), has seen many a feature through as its underlying theme, whether DeVito and Schwarzenegger, Withnail and I (1987), or, as someone was overheard saying in relation to this film, Scent of a Woman (1992).
For all the difference in age, though, there is more of a sharing in both directions between François Cluzet as Philippe and Omay Sy as Driss, and that is what makes for broad fun, even if it does lead to the implausibility of one's first painting being sold for 11,000 euros by the other: Al Pacino is very much (pun intended) in the driving-seat for all his need for help from Chris O'Donnell.
Cluzet, looking at times like Dustin Hoffman, has a wickedly engaging smile (I cannot, surely, be remembering him from as far back as French Kiss (1995)) with which Philippe disarms any tension, more often than not when Driss has fooled him, rather than the other way. Sy has one, too, but broader, and Driss keeps a straight face to fool Philippe, although, with judgements that are quick to get to the heart of things, sometimes there is joke behind what he has said.
The selling of the painting is, if I remember right, an almost exact steal from Conversations with my Gardener (2007), but I do not mind that (although it has taken me an age to think where I have seen this done before), but what I cannot overlook, because I could not overlook it in the screening (overhear would mean something else), is the music. Not the classical music that Philippe has played to Driss on his birthday, or the number to which Driss dances so fabulously and gets everone on their feet, but the incidental music when it is not from songs:
It grated with me, in thinking that it was making me edgy without my noticing simply by playing on the piano with the same note or a few adjacent ones, rather than being a decent piece of film score and not drawing attention to itself with its limited range. That said, when it converted its skeletal self into an emotional theme near the end, it did work, despite the overtly romantic character, with the scene, and not against it.
The story remains, of course, a heartening one, as is the extent to which Driss shows not only that he has a better understanding of Philippe's psychology, but also that he is able to learn from Philippe and for the two men to find a common ground in fun, sex and flight.
Tweet away @TheAgentApsley
Sunday 16 September 2012
Who is Andy?
This is a review of Andy Needs his Milk (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
16 September
This is a review of Andy Needs his Milk (2012)
I know from asking him that Carl Peck hasn't read Barcelona Plates, a collection of short stories by Alexei Sayle (which I think that he published before appearing as a novelist), but something about the walk that Carl's mind works in his short Andy Needs his Milk chimes with the feel of many of those pieces, and with the meat of one in particular (whose title I must look up).
In Project Tridentfest's gig at Cambridge Film Festival, Carl said that he had taken as a starting-point the reported last words of Michael Jackson, and he wove from that utterance, in which he found a sinister ring, a tale that, even without considering the resonances, is both amusing and chilling. Looked at in figurative terms, we have a narrator blaming his extreme actions on an irrational desire to keep satisfied the insatiable, because we know, if we stop to think, that what he is telling us (for good and ill) is not verifiable.
Yet, even at a subsconscious level, we know that he has locked himself into a behaviour, and that, even if we can trust his account, it is a sort of victim mentality that has led him to appeasement just literally for a quiet life. The whole piece is carried off in a way that takes us with it, which is the point of connection with the Sayle pieces: creating an interior logic that beguiles us, simply because the presentation effortlessly makes us feel within the thinking looking out, however distorted and contorted it may be.
Scripting and directing the short, Carl even has a cameo role, but the whole project needed a solid player at its heart, and it has that in his casting of the narrator (who would get a credit, if I had a name), bringing off this fine balance between desperation and servility that is in the character / situation.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)