More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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23 September
In the Q&A session after the screening of Staub auf unseren Herzen / Dust on our Hearts (2012), Stephanie Stremler (Kathi) described not only how Susanne Lothar (Chris) improvised with her and, when it came to the fight, only the cameraman was in the know, but also the film as a love story between Kathi and Chris, two women who had been left to bring up children on their own, but who had different ways about them.
I had postulated that Stremler, if one of her own parents were a therapist and tried to relate to her on the basis of being a patient, she would think it inappropriate, and asked whether she thought that Chris was trying to achieve that status all along – this is where she, although acknowledging that Chris is trying to gain control, talked of it as a love story.
If so, then a love affair that goes wrong, and seems likely, unlike what Fabian (Florian Loycke) says about his relationships, to result in severance. The flaw in it all is to believe that a mother such as this would only in the course of the short span that we see here come to impose her will on the welfare of her daughter’s child, let alone get her on the sharp side of her therapist’s desk.
Films sometimes do this – present us with a situation and / or a problem and invite us not to think whether it would have happened before, or rather pass over in silence the question of what the director and editor are choosing to show us is actually likely to be new. However, Midnight in Paris (2011), though, does not ask that of us, because it presents a totally new experience for Gil, whereas the allegedly naturalistic world of a film such as this seeks to achieve its impact by simply immersing us in interlocking lives.
Here, the impossibility of Chris as a mother cannot simply have emerged with a loud conversation on her mobile when he daughter is in the changing-room – she has always been like this, and all that is new is that her estranged partner has come back to Berlin from Cologne after many a year. He is clearly expected by Kathi, so is it really likely that the practicality of where, when he drives there (and he drives there with all of his life in the car), he will spend the night, or of telling or not telling Chris that he is back in Berlin, will have been overlooked until now ? And yet the film has Wolfgang have a meal with Kathi and Lenni with none of this resolved.
This is where a slice of life comes up against the exigency of a film, in 90 to 120 minutes (typically around the 90 mark this season), to show us an unfolding – if one had ever had a mother such as Chris, one would not simply be on an even keel of meeting / being in contact with her on a daily basis, and so the starting premise of the film is falsified. To get back to my question of Stremler – a therapist parent who tries to have a son or daughter as a client is straying so far from accepted norms as obviously to have a psychological disorder, and then we are in the realm of the paradigm ‘Shrinks are madder than those whom they purport to treat’.
I do not doubt for a minute that the film arose from the music-making and the real-life puppet theatre of Stremler and Loycke, and this level is the only one on which we can properly view the drama of this film, as of puppets in a life-or-death struggle such as in the synopsis of Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka – if the characters are place-holders for emotions or emotional responses, then the piece can work, because we can acknowledge the artificiality of the theatre, of the depiction. We do not grieve for the policeman killed by Mr Punch because the interaction, the violence of the emotion, is stylized, divorced by being in the province of the booth.
In this film, where the origins lie, the only true human feeling is between Fabian and Kathi. Everything else is froth, and even the notion that Kathi is being moved out by him from the flat that her mother has purchased is belied by no notion that Kathi was ever living there (the last that we see of any joint endeavour to make it habitable is the painting scene), as we only ever see her in her old property, missing Lenni. Much is claimed, but only, in real terms, by insulting our intelligence.
Post-script
As I left Festival Central, I saw the film's poster again, mother and daughter as decorators so ungeschickt (if we believe that a woman who can buy a flat would not pay someone to see to the décor for her daughter) that both have a big daub of clown's red paint on their nose, and a long streak of white on the face of Chris accentuates that look.
In a way, this image both confirms and denies my thesis that the figures can only be seen tokenistically, as puppets, because it demonstrates an awareness that they have the potential just to be seen as archetypes, but nothing else suggests that we were ever asked to see their actions and natures from that viewpoint, and so maybe it does not go beyond thinking that it would make good poster, easily forgotten.
Having written the review above, I am left feeling that I might be seen to have been too hard on the effort employed to make this film, because maybe it sins no more than many another, or because it was no great crime to have seemed to have promise. Except as to expression and choice of language, though, I do not feel that I need to offer excuses for a heartfelt opinion.
Post-post-script
Maybe we are meant to believe that it is the arrival of Wolfgang (Michael Kind), the father of Kathi, that precipitates everything : maybe Chris, despite signs to the contrary and when her hysteria that Wolfgang is around is based not on issues of domestic violence, but his having betrayed her with one of her friends, is supposed to be this way that we see with Kathi and Wolfgang purely on account of the trauma of his unexplained return from Cologne to Berlin...
I have already said why Wolfgang's arrival is problematic - unless we are meant to imagine that he loaded the car out of desperation and got out, not thinking of anywhere better to go than to his daughter. When he arrives, we have no idea who he is - an elder lover ? a friend ? - and there is nothing to suggest that him coming is anything other than expected, and that he has not been in regular contact with the person whom he is visiting (would Kathi really have concealed - been able to conceal - such contact from Chris ?).
No, I cannot think this through and make it work, which may be the flaw in improvising something that does not make sense beyond the boundaries of what is shown in screen.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Monday 23 September 2013
Sunday 22 September 2013
The Young Blackbird
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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22 September
Two films shown to-night deserve treating together, although not quite in the same category : one was a feature film, Blackbird (2013), the other what was described to us (using another reviewer's words) as 'cinematic non-fiction', Only the Young (2012).
The latter made good what the former tried to do, because it had a grasp that was too insubstantial of what it was about, other than portraying a small West-Coast community (in Dumfries and Galloway, I am told) and the notion of trying to preserve what made it was both by capturing things before they fell prey to loss of memory or death, and not allowing it to be taken over by impulses that might change it for the worse. Anyone who knows and loves Scotland would have been in such places, would have recognized the people, and felt that emotional pull - anyone who does not might feel out on a limb to understand it or the social and cultural influences.
Already, then, a sort of preaching that might only work to the converted (but maybe not). In any case, we are invited to look, in part, at this place through the eyes of Ruadhan (pronounced 'Rowan'), played by Andrew Rothney, and his brother Callum.
This is where the brilliantly made Only the Young comes in : where the two friends live with whom we spend much of our time (Garrison and Kevin), there is an abandoned mini-golf course, where the restaurant served steak but which must have proved not to be the right attraction to be supported by that place, and pools and even a water-flume in a back garden that have also, if not outlived their usefulness, then not been kept up. Even at this level, the comparison is clear : Ruadhan decks out and lives in a beached vessel, whereas the boys and their friends have taken over an abandoned property as a base.
His motives are different, and his relations other, because (whether he is a relative or just an older person with songs to pass on) Alec sums up his screwed-up narcissism just right, and my experience in mental health would see him not as someone whose desire to collect oral traditions (there is nothing to suggest that he does anything with them) and make his own world is helpful even for him. Kevin, Garrison, Skye and Kristen maybe have a worldview from their Grace Baptist background to contend with (although they seemed accepting of the idea that the elders would influence their choice of loved ones, and so 'shepherd' their lives), but they are living, developing, dealing with life's problems.
Blackbird has only rather falsely, at the end, a notion of moving on, of dealing with life. I say 'falsely' for two reasons : one that I do not believe that Ruadhan can simply progress, and without intervention, in the way that we are invited to believe, when what I see suggests that what is actually going to hold him back is a not being able to let go (where Alec is spot on) that is a well-established psychological disorder, and second that, even if that were not so, the riskily transformative moment that his brother brings about is the film's emotional high point, and everything just drains away from it.
If Ruadhan were the sort to give of what is precious to him to cock a snook at the forces of change (for me, that does not quite ring true), it just becomes a barb to prick him, just as the wishes for a job when he cashes a giro on the heels of Alec's pension), when his insulting gesture is looked at as a possible bonus. With, back at the other film, Garrison and Co., we have no such sense of easy answers, and that the answer to one's head is to remove the brick wall that one is banging it against, or, rather, it from striking distance from the wall.
So, Blackbird seems to understand, and even to make accessible, someone with a very confused personality (principally via Amy as the love-interest), but then leads us on with the idea that it is purely situational. From that perspective, I wish that it had not even bothered to try to share notions of what such a person might be like, and have far more warmth for the achievements of Only the Young, not unlike those of Bombay Beach.
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22 September
Two films shown to-night deserve treating together, although not quite in the same category : one was a feature film, Blackbird (2013), the other what was described to us (using another reviewer's words) as 'cinematic non-fiction', Only the Young (2012).
The latter made good what the former tried to do, because it had a grasp that was too insubstantial of what it was about, other than portraying a small West-Coast community (in Dumfries and Galloway, I am told) and the notion of trying to preserve what made it was both by capturing things before they fell prey to loss of memory or death, and not allowing it to be taken over by impulses that might change it for the worse. Anyone who knows and loves Scotland would have been in such places, would have recognized the people, and felt that emotional pull - anyone who does not might feel out on a limb to understand it or the social and cultural influences.
Already, then, a sort of preaching that might only work to the converted (but maybe not). In any case, we are invited to look, in part, at this place through the eyes of Ruadhan (pronounced 'Rowan'), played by Andrew Rothney, and his brother Callum.
This is where the brilliantly made Only the Young comes in : where the two friends live with whom we spend much of our time (Garrison and Kevin), there is an abandoned mini-golf course, where the restaurant served steak but which must have proved not to be the right attraction to be supported by that place, and pools and even a water-flume in a back garden that have also, if not outlived their usefulness, then not been kept up. Even at this level, the comparison is clear : Ruadhan decks out and lives in a beached vessel, whereas the boys and their friends have taken over an abandoned property as a base.
His motives are different, and his relations other, because (whether he is a relative or just an older person with songs to pass on) Alec sums up his screwed-up narcissism just right, and my experience in mental health would see him not as someone whose desire to collect oral traditions (there is nothing to suggest that he does anything with them) and make his own world is helpful even for him. Kevin, Garrison, Skye and Kristen maybe have a worldview from their Grace Baptist background to contend with (although they seemed accepting of the idea that the elders would influence their choice of loved ones, and so 'shepherd' their lives), but they are living, developing, dealing with life's problems.
Blackbird has only rather falsely, at the end, a notion of moving on, of dealing with life. I say 'falsely' for two reasons : one that I do not believe that Ruadhan can simply progress, and without intervention, in the way that we are invited to believe, when what I see suggests that what is actually going to hold him back is a not being able to let go (where Alec is spot on) that is a well-established psychological disorder, and second that, even if that were not so, the riskily transformative moment that his brother brings about is the film's emotional high point, and everything just drains away from it.
If Ruadhan were the sort to give of what is precious to him to cock a snook at the forces of change (for me, that does not quite ring true), it just becomes a barb to prick him, just as the wishes for a job when he cashes a giro on the heels of Alec's pension), when his insulting gesture is looked at as a possible bonus. With, back at the other film, Garrison and Co., we have no such sense of easy answers, and that the answer to one's head is to remove the brick wall that one is banging it against, or, rather, it from striking distance from the wall.
So, Blackbird seems to understand, and even to make accessible, someone with a very confused personality (principally via Amy as the love-interest), but then leads us on with the idea that it is purely situational. From that perspective, I wish that it had not even bothered to try to share notions of what such a person might be like, and have far more warmth for the achievements of Only the Young, not unlike those of Bombay Beach.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Saturday 21 September 2013
Outranking the Gosling film
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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22 September
Films with the word 'money' in the title have a ring to them, as in The Color of Money (1986) - or The Taste of Money (2012), one that I would call 'stylish' if that word were not closeted in a relationship with that of 'thriller'.
This film ends - as it began - with the recirculation of money, and what takes place in-between the appearance of two brittle pieces of furniture in an otherwise solid environment, the door to a strong-room and a large receptacle, never goes far from it (in one form or another). I may be quite mistaken that they seemed so obviously stagey, but I do not think so, and I am more tentative about the notion that they are meant to mark off the intervening feature as a conscious framing-device.
However, because the household, family and staff, at the centre of this film is shown with such style, and they live, dress, drink and relax with such fine things, I shall credit it with that notion, because I quite early found myself reminded of the passionate plays of Jean Racine in a way that I did not think that I could walk with when translated to this world - it felt a bit too much like Only God Forgives (2013) again, whereas The Taste of Money turned out to redeem the merit of using universal themes (and reprises a scene where a man who cannot box challenges another to a bare-knuckle fight, but this time with so much grace and beauty in the mise-en-scène).
Not nearly in such a self-conscious, parodic, almost moronic, way as in Winding Refn's latest, this piece of real cinema echoes the chamber plays of Strindberg, the vast, bloody tragedies of Aesychlus' Oresteia, and we follow the fate of the excellently played Joo Young-Jak (Kang-woo Kim) as a thread through the story - chance has a part to play in the unfolding of events, but nothing that is taken for granted, with every detail accounted for in how what someone knew but did not reveal comes to be known as his or her failure to speak.
An initial impression made it seem as though the film were requiring too much to be believed to be happening for the first time, but, as indicated, director Sang-soo Im was taking no indulgence from his audience for granted. Without anything being forced, everything had its place.
The monetary deals at the centre of what unfolds even mirror the real-life activities of a US corporation (Google and the World Brain (2013)), with the Google Books project cavalierly (though not without the assistance of those who should have opposed, or at least questioned what it was doing before giving it) seeming to break copyright and then seek to have its actions made good in accord with the principle that it was pursuing - we hear it said in this film's script that the outline of the deal will be made, and it is for the lawyers to sort out the niceties to make it happen.
Sometimes affectionately, sometimes mockingly, called Mr Joo, we see his journey from filling cases with cash to buy the freedom of the son of his boss, and contenting himself to smell the fresh notes rather than (as licensed) to pocket some for himself, to differing relations to power and money. This is a thoughtful and powerful film, whose strong visuals live on in the mind.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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22 September
Films with the word 'money' in the title have a ring to them, as in The Color of Money (1986) - or The Taste of Money (2012), one that I would call 'stylish' if that word were not closeted in a relationship with that of 'thriller'.
This film ends - as it began - with the recirculation of money, and what takes place in-between the appearance of two brittle pieces of furniture in an otherwise solid environment, the door to a strong-room and a large receptacle, never goes far from it (in one form or another). I may be quite mistaken that they seemed so obviously stagey, but I do not think so, and I am more tentative about the notion that they are meant to mark off the intervening feature as a conscious framing-device.
However, because the household, family and staff, at the centre of this film is shown with such style, and they live, dress, drink and relax with such fine things, I shall credit it with that notion, because I quite early found myself reminded of the passionate plays of Jean Racine in a way that I did not think that I could walk with when translated to this world - it felt a bit too much like Only God Forgives (2013) again, whereas The Taste of Money turned out to redeem the merit of using universal themes (and reprises a scene where a man who cannot box challenges another to a bare-knuckle fight, but this time with so much grace and beauty in the mise-en-scène).
Not nearly in such a self-conscious, parodic, almost moronic, way as in Winding Refn's latest, this piece of real cinema echoes the chamber plays of Strindberg, the vast, bloody tragedies of Aesychlus' Oresteia, and we follow the fate of the excellently played Joo Young-Jak (Kang-woo Kim) as a thread through the story - chance has a part to play in the unfolding of events, but nothing that is taken for granted, with every detail accounted for in how what someone knew but did not reveal comes to be known as his or her failure to speak.
An initial impression made it seem as though the film were requiring too much to be believed to be happening for the first time, but, as indicated, director Sang-soo Im was taking no indulgence from his audience for granted. Without anything being forced, everything had its place.
The monetary deals at the centre of what unfolds even mirror the real-life activities of a US corporation (Google and the World Brain (2013)), with the Google Books project cavalierly (though not without the assistance of those who should have opposed, or at least questioned what it was doing before giving it) seeming to break copyright and then seek to have its actions made good in accord with the principle that it was pursuing - we hear it said in this film's script that the outline of the deal will be made, and it is for the lawyers to sort out the niceties to make it happen.
Sometimes affectionately, sometimes mockingly, called Mr Joo, we see his journey from filling cases with cash to buy the freedom of the son of his boss, and contenting himself to smell the fresh notes rather than (as licensed) to pocket some for himself, to differing relations to power and money. This is a thoughtful and powerful film, whose strong visuals live on in the mind.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Redemptive washing
This is a Festival review of La redempció dels peixos (The Redemption of the Fish) (2013)
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21 September
This is a Festival review of La redempció dels peixos (The Redemption of the Fish) (2013)
The Redemption of the Fish (La redempció dels peixos) (2013)* had its UK premiere at the Festival to-night. As we learnt afterwards, it was filmed on almost no budget and was really only achievable because director Jordi Torrent (who was with us for a Q&A, along with lead actor Miquel Quer) has friends in Venice, where all the filming took place : avoiding the popular locations, and unbelievably having a three-week shoot in August, it did what was needed, but with a change of wind-direction and temperature that adorned the very final scene.
The film is stunning, not just because Venice is a glorious city, but because Torrent gave it the space to breathe and be itself, without the picture-postcard mentality that others might have brought to making a film there. It does not matter whether one's view is that Venice was the actor at the heart of this film, it fed the action, and the action subsisted so naturally there. I say that, because Venice is one of my loves, but the heart of the film is how it shows contemporary relationships and communication in this centuries-old place.
Quer (Marc) has gone to Venice from Barcelona for reasons that only became apparent with time, and, as he tries to follow a man when he closes a bookshop and leaves, he loses him in the confusion that is this city (and which twice, on a first visit there, caused me to stray into the Naval Dockyards and meet men with guns). (Here, there are hints of Don't Look Now (1973).) They had last seen each other when Marc was nearly two, because Paco, the other man, is his father.
An inner core of others who are connected with Paco peoples Marc's time there, and he comes into association with them, thinking (or maybe wanting to think) that there is a meaningful link between each of them and him. One tells him to look at how The Grand Canal divides the city into two fish, one of which is trying to eat the other - he is reminded that he used to say the opposite, or that he said that the fish represent other things, but he says that the Fish of Science is gobbling up the Fish of Ethics. Beautiful shots of the water, with buildings coming in and out of flux, had prefaced all of this, and, as Venice is La Serenissima and married to the sea, it had been a delight to realize that this unattainable, unmasterable place was our setting.
Saying little more about what happens or why, the film is a cinematic joy for its acting and for how it has been made (all, we were told, with available light, and a light crew of five or six) - Paco seems not to trust Marc or his motives, and maybe we do not like the feeling that Marc is on a mission at the behest of his grandmother and reporting back to her and to his girlfriend, but we grow out of relying on one, and into what brings Marc to find his father.
This represents the present high-point this year, and I hope to make it to the repeat screening at 10.45 a.m. on Sunday 29th September (the closing day of the Festival).
End-notes
* As an English title, it feels cumbersome, because is the fish what is redeemed, or is it what carries out the redemption ? Maybe that ambiguity is fecund, but I wonder whether something else might do better :
The Fish Swallows Whole, or
Venice the Redeemer
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Bits and pieces
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21 September (Revisited, 5 August 2015)
In the introduction, we were told that this feature, Pieces of Me (Des Morceaux de Moi) (2012) said a lot in ninety minutes, but I found myself ending up quite bored with it – not that I did not have sympathy with one sibling being treated worse than another, but I found the central character Erell (Adèle Exarchopoulos), even given her age (one guesses fourteen ?), irritating with her incessant videoing, and could not credit that more than one of her friends would not have told her to stop doing it long before. (Maybe it was meant to be set a few years back, but no youngster would use one of those monsters with a flip-down screen now.)
The video footage itself I found inconsistent, because some of it obviously was of a quality that matched the hardly new camera that Erell was using, and others seemed to have been shot with a decent lens and then, as if to pretend that she had taken it, degraded afterwards. If she really had not been filming her friends for long, it was remarkable how much she was allowed to put them on the spot, challenging the notion of what one would do if he did not, as he expected, die young, or another (who did actually tell her where to get off) as to why he would not kill a man, if asked to do so, given that he was willing to kill a chicken on request.
I had not been very impressed by the opening shot to self-camera, where she had envisaged her request being carried out to be cremated and then her ashes mixed well into a large bottle of vodka and drunk. A toxic drink that, perhaps, her family choked on with regularity, as she seemed to have nothing but accusations for them, and to be the tomboy – when not behind the camera – for her friends. As such a portrayal, it was classic, but the piece itself did not have many filmic credentials, apart from a few choice shots of flora and fauna.
I say nothing about a daughter’s feelings towards a mother with MS. Only that the former is supposed to be partly confused why the latter needs care (and, more importantly, whether she is not shamming), whereas regular trips to the hospital are not – with what one understands to be a typical course for the condition – cohesive with such early stages : the admission that we see seems to necessitate walking with a stick, when all that had been complained of before was fatigue. There was nothing, say, to suggest problems with motor control or balance. These things are queried from knowing what one has witnessed in others, but being open to hearing that The MS Society compliments this depiction. (Compare it with that of Martina Gedeck in Atomised (2006), who also has a degenerative condition ?)
The film is competent, but, other than much recrimination about why Sarah has been favoured over Erell, and left without any contact (such that her father had to be called to see whether he could identify a body as hers), and the associated rebelliousness of youth, it has relatively little to say : this is one of the rare occasions where watching a film on a t.v. screen would not have depreciated it at all.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
21 September (Revisited, 5 August 2015)
In the introduction, we were told that this feature, Pieces of Me (Des Morceaux de Moi) (2012) said a lot in ninety minutes, but I found myself ending up quite bored with it – not that I did not have sympathy with one sibling being treated worse than another, but I found the central character Erell (Adèle Exarchopoulos), even given her age (one guesses fourteen ?), irritating with her incessant videoing, and could not credit that more than one of her friends would not have told her to stop doing it long before. (Maybe it was meant to be set a few years back, but no youngster would use one of those monsters with a flip-down screen now.)
The video footage itself I found inconsistent, because some of it obviously was of a quality that matched the hardly new camera that Erell was using, and others seemed to have been shot with a decent lens and then, as if to pretend that she had taken it, degraded afterwards. If she really had not been filming her friends for long, it was remarkable how much she was allowed to put them on the spot, challenging the notion of what one would do if he did not, as he expected, die young, or another (who did actually tell her where to get off) as to why he would not kill a man, if asked to do so, given that he was willing to kill a chicken on request.
I had not been very impressed by the opening shot to self-camera, where she had envisaged her request being carried out to be cremated and then her ashes mixed well into a large bottle of vodka and drunk. A toxic drink that, perhaps, her family choked on with regularity, as she seemed to have nothing but accusations for them, and to be the tomboy – when not behind the camera – for her friends. As such a portrayal, it was classic, but the piece itself did not have many filmic credentials, apart from a few choice shots of flora and fauna.
I say nothing about a daughter’s feelings towards a mother with MS. Only that the former is supposed to be partly confused why the latter needs care (and, more importantly, whether she is not shamming), whereas regular trips to the hospital are not – with what one understands to be a typical course for the condition – cohesive with such early stages : the admission that we see seems to necessitate walking with a stick, when all that had been complained of before was fatigue. There was nothing, say, to suggest problems with motor control or balance. These things are queried from knowing what one has witnessed in others, but being open to hearing that The MS Society compliments this depiction. (Compare it with that of Martina Gedeck in Atomised (2006), who also has a degenerative condition ?)
The film is competent, but, other than much recrimination about why Sarah has been favoured over Erell, and left without any contact (such that her father had to be called to see whether he could identify a body as hers), and the associated rebelliousness of youth, it has relatively little to say : this is one of the rare occasions where watching a film on a t.v. screen would not have depreciated it at all.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Wednesday 18 September 2013
That's a classy address !
This is a review of Sunset Blvd. (1950)
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15 September 2013
This is a review of Sunset Blvd. (1950)
What the connotations were, in 1950, of an address in Sunset Boulevard, I do not know, but I am sure that Billy Wilder knew what his audience would think, and what specifically it signified to have one in the early ten thousands...
Both as Norma Desmond and in real life (Gloria Swanson was then the age of the former actress whom she plays), the end of what is often called The Silent Era partly caused a wane in her popularity in the 1930s. Here, though, Swanson – and Wilder with her – is capitalizing on her name, and I suspect that the photographs with which she decorates her still lavish home are from that home.
With Wilder’s amusing script, we have all the elements for us to be more knowing than William Holden, as Joe Gillis, and for the spooky Max, played delightfully by Erich von Stroheim, to put the wind up him – whether or not one believes that the corpse of Gillis is literally telling the story, or that we somehow hear what he has to say from his perspective, including narrating Desmond’s descent under the direction of Max, is neither here no there.
The strength of what we see unfold is how it is rooted in the fabric and how it brings the characters to life – as Gillis is beckoned into the palazzo, having symbolically lodged, without asking, his pride-and-joy white motor in one of its garages, his mind is already thinking of Dickens’ Miss Havisham. By contrast, the house comes alive, out of a slumber as if he is a Prince Charming to her Sleeping Beauty, and yet the lavishness of what is bestowed on him is not unlike what Pip thinks that he seeks after.
Here, the benefactress needs no guessing at, only how she could have preserved her wealth, and Gillis is no more grateful or moderate with what he is bought by her than Pip is with the attempts to make him a gentleman – in neither case does it prove what is really desired.
Whether we believe that the room over the garage becoming inoccupable is just convenient, or the house having its way with Gillis, it comes back to life with him there, and provides the means for what happens to unfold, even including Miss Desmond’s own vehicle, which Max seemingly effortlessly gets back on the road – the pool would not be there without Gillis, and Miss Desmond would not have a life outside the house without him.
In this house without locks, the doors come to resemble pairs of eyes (as Beckettt was later to play with in Film (1965), and even to ask Buster Keaton to play another serious role), and yet there are secrets, from turning, from Miss Desmond, by turning off the lights of the car when Gillis goes out in it.
What Pip turns out to want is Estella, and Gillis wants is Betty Schaefer and to work with her on a script. In Gillis’ case, he is not big enough to accept her gracious willingness to forget all that he has told her (although maybe he believes that she would not be able to do so, and that she is better off without him), but still thinks that he can give the relatively ageing star ‘the go-by’, after all that he has thrown in her face as fantasy.
The cameras and the lights show who is mistaken in thinking that she is still a star, as Gillis is forced to admit…
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Saturday 14 September 2013
High-class cinema comes to Childerley
This is a Festival review of Edward Scissorhands (1990)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
14 September (14 April and 22 July 2015, Tweets added)
This is a Festival review of Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Agents on location, watching the cinema from afar...
The Long Barn at Childerley Hall, which (apart from yesterday, when I went on the wrong day) I had last seen when the pairing of Northumbrian piper and fiddler Kathryn Tickell and the trio The Side rocked the place, to-night had the treat of bespoke cinema, courtesy of Tony Jones, the director of Cambridge Film festival, and his dedicated team.
Just in case it rains, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS @camfilmfest Plan B at Childerley Hall is in this gorgeous grain barn :)X pic.twitter.com/nJTL8KjHnb
— Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) September 10, 2013
This was not just any projector and a screen plus sound-system in a wonderfully atmospheric space with beams, decorative chairs, an extensive bar, and even very tasteful fairy-lights - the image was sharp, beautiful, warm and magic, so that the resolution of the long-shots almost took one by surprise, and one could hear every detail of the soundtrack. I should have expected nothing less from people with these credentials, but I loved them for it.
First up, unexpected I will warrant by many, was something to preface the billed film, Edward Scissorhands (1990) - another Tim Burton number in Frankenweenie (1984). Yes, the original, not the one released in 2012.
So a proper, old-fashioned programme, but with links :
* Winona Ryder is Edward's Kim*, and is the voice of Elsa Van Hesling in the 2012 Frankenw.
* Both works deal with, address or feature the situation of the outsider who can only be loved, if at all, by people being more than skin deep
* Who else to bring such an outsider from, or back from, another realm than Ben (Barret Oliver), a member of the Frankenstein family, and a Vincent Price at around 79, just a few years before the end of his life, and looking nothing like it ?
Tim Burton showing off a Halloween costume made by his mother, 1967. pic.twitter.com/0tSRicKbaQ
— History In Pictures (@HistoryInPics) July 22, 2015
* Nosy neighbours, to whom young Frankenstein feels obliged to account for his behaviour, and for whom Edward's arrival in an unnecessary bright yellow automobile is an instant source of fascination, intrigue, and fear
* One in pure monochrome, the other with two almost distinct colour-worlds, one being the washed-out one of Price as The Inventor on his eminence and Johnny Depp as the named work of creation**, the other a Dogville sort of a place, but with the distinction of largely pastel colours pushed to make Tobermory look drab, with hues so garish as almost to be fluorescent
A good night's viewing, with a nice role for a much younger-looking Alan Arkin, but perhaps one for Dianne Wiest that did not leave her much room to move - what was given to, and made of, by Depp, Ryder, Shelley Duvall, and Daniel Stern.
End-notes
* Nearly put Kim in Edward, but that did not feel right...
** Edward (even though we are shown how) is left in an explicably parlous state - more important to impart etiquette and poetry than the opposable thumb ? - unless one remembers the origins in Der Struwwelpeter, and what such thinking gave rise to in Haneke's The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band) (2009)
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Friday 13 September 2013
About time for another Curtis film ?
This is a critique of About Time (2013)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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13 September (revised, in case too hard on Curtis, 16 September [revisions in bold-face])
* NB Pretty spoilery *
This is a critique of About Time (2013)
It is inevitable that a film that features time travel will remind of other such films that do, such as Back to the Future (1985), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), or Dimensions (2011) (a truly independent production, set in Cambridge), and also invoke the likes of Lola Rennt (1998) (in English, Run Lola Run) and Sliding Doors (1998).
Those films have an internal logic, and they tend to try to keep to it. With About Time (2013), Richard Curtis is either cavalier with that logic, or just careless. A writer and director who introduces the sight-gag of a discovered off-stage band, which is not only worthy of Woody Allen, but definitely taken from one of his films (probably Bananas (1971)), shows that he does not hesitate to use something that does not chime with character or mood to get a laugh.
One can therefore use either theory to explain why the logic that Curtis chose to employ is handily overlooked (or ignored). Admittedly, some of the audience will not notice, but, with a very artificial piece of stage-machinery, one is running the risk of not undermining the others’ enjoyment, if it creaks so noisily.
Our protagonist Tim (Domnhall Gleeson) has a maybe older sister (he is 21, but her age seemed unclear) called Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson) whose life has become unnecessarily burdened, so he reckons on taking her back to when she picked up that burden. Apart from the fact that nothing has suggested that the male-only gift of doing so (by clenching one’s hands in the dark and thinking of that moment) allows passengers on one’s coat-tails, there is no obvious reason why Tim needs to take an older Kit Kat to that point : at his leisure, he could have gone back on his own, and contrived to distract her from the undesired encounter.
As it is, the first re-take is disastrous, and then the whole thing proves to have been so, because Tim’s baby has changed sex, the reason for which, relating to the chance nature of the moment of conception, Tim’s father then explains (though not, as becomes telling later, how he knows). ‘Remedying’ the change to the past that has already made is not explained, but the model of time travel that has been shown before (as when Tim regrets not giving a girl a New Year's kiss, or humorously wishes to rescue the opening night of Harry’s play) seems to have been that, when one revisited the past, what stemmed from it no longer exists, almost as if the new version of events has been recorded over it.
If that were not so, Tim would be able to pick and choose between different versions of events, and not have to shoo the extravagance of a band away when things have gone well. He would also not have to re-live the intervening time, which we see him do to seductive effect. Then again, when he goes back to just before midnight on New Year's Day, he simply returns from that moment and goes back to see his father...
So maybe Kit Kat and he would not both have had to re-live the time that had passed from New Year’s Eve, if one way of approaching this 'gift', then, may be to change a variable, and see what happens, another to do the same, but travel forward to the same point in the future in the expectation that nothing has changed.
That said, Tim tries changing several weeks' worth of dynamic between Kit Kat's friend Charlotte and him - the humour of the situation, i.e. that he still does not win her love, is allowed (and used) to gloss over the fact that going to Charlotte's room partway through her stay at his parents' house is hardly going to leave everything else unchanged.
For just seeing Tim not being natural because he knows things about Mary (Rachel McAdams), e.g. that she is a fan of Kate Moss (or even her name), that she knows that she has not told him proves how difficult that would be just for an hour or two. The time travel becomes a sort of alibi where, because one knows too much from what happened the time before, it tends to sound dodgy, like an excuse.
Yet the bigger sin against Curtis’ own logic is when Tim decides that he will have a different person do something important for him, and tries several friends in the role : for him to have done so, he would, again, have had to go right back to when he first asked the original person, and that, too, would impossibly unravel too much else, quite probably that exact baby’s conception (again).
That said, Curtis does not, after all, seem to mean us to take the time travel that literally, because the end of the film shifts into a more ‘preachy’ mode of using it reflectively, to go back over and cherish each moment / count one’s blessings, and seems to want to turn what went before more into a fable, if not downright disown it.
Indeed, Tim’s closing voice-over makes one think that a documentary about awareness has been tacked on, invoking the wisdom of some celebrated homily. (The quiet lyric of a Nick Cave song in the soundtrack even begins ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’.) It feels as though Curtis is using the medium of this film to try to pass on a weighty Socratic message about living a good life – and dying well – even if he may be out of his league…
With Richard Curtis, the similarities to his other films do not hide : Hugh Grant running across Notting Hill in that self-titled film is echoed here by Tim, there is a wedding and a funeral (of sorts), and we have the awkwardness of the main character, as if no Curtis leading man can be anything other than acutely and Britishly self-conscious. (The difference being that running a bookshop maybe requires less tact, discretion, charm than being a successful barrister.)
Without the self-consciousness, there would be little need for the family secret that Tim’s father (Bill Nighy) passes on to him - with it, blurting out to Mary’s parents about their sex-life would be so commonplace that Tim would ever and exhaustingly be clenching his fists to undo things. Again, to the extent that the film works through humour, the comedic effect is put before stable characters.
Thus, if one of his friends is to be believed, Tim is sexually experienced, but he behaves like a virgin, and, in the summer following his twenty-first, has a crush on Kit Kat’s friend Charlotte (Margot Robbie), calling her ‘my first love’. The friend may just be being embarrassing, but, when Tim is counting his blessings and how he has been served that day, the price of his sandwich order rises from around £4.40 (when he is in a rush) to some £6.20 (stopping to appreciate the woman’s smile), and there have been other reasons already to doubt this scripting.
However, unless you credit that counsel at the Criminal Bar are just like actors and can throw themselves into their brief (we also see Tim with modest quantities of paperwork, and never working into the night to master his brief), Tim has hardly the best foundation for good court advocacy, to the extent that it requires some thinking on one’s feet. (Quite apart from the fact that, at Tim’s age, he would at best be newly called to The Bar, if not in pupillage.)
Talking, for a moment, of Tim’s parents, one must feel sorry for the role that Lindsay Duncan is given of a tea-making, picnicking mother who is somewhat gauchely forthright, for, although Tim clearly takes much of his character from her, a highly urbane Nighy is given a much more fleshed-out part, and steals – or comes close to stealing – the important scenes between Gleeson and him.
The cast is good, and gives of its best, with McAdams, Gleeson, Robbie and Joshua McGuire (as Rory) standing out, but ‘the depth’ of the writing does let them down : Nighy is the only one who feels rounded, whereas Gleeson’s utterances too often make one just cringe, and enough others are stock (Curtis) characters.
Tim’s mother has been mentioned, but there is also the uncle (nicely played, though, by Richard Cordery), the playwright Harry (likewise Tom Hollander), the clumsy friend Jay (with no stereotypical suggestion, one can be sure, of inbreeding)… Tim goes back in time just to be with his father, who is reading Dickens, and Nighy reads a passage to Gleeson.
Maybe an attempt at Dickens with time travel is a bit, overall, what About Time feels like – no disrespect to the novelist !
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Thursday 12 September 2013
Coffee Choice
'Coffee Choice' : A 75-word story
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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12 September
'Coffee Choice' : A 75-word story
For Edana Minghella
Wiltshire lay behind him. As the wheels purred lightly, it receded reluctantly, and he yawned.
Tired already, so soon in ? Well, keep on - an espresso in 14 miles.
Yet what Coffee Choice served had scant cuore, no crema - a true, sugary graveyard ! Jo and Manvers Street had spoiled him...
He drove quickly. On the roundabout, he took his exit, accelerated on the slip-road, cruised.
As Swindon loomed, he knew leaving could be put off forever.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Saturday 7 September 2013
Immense beauty ?
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7 September
I believe that a viewer who approaches The Great Beauty (2013) as narration, not meditation, is missing its best qualities
Or
Un bel homme au charme irrésistible malgré les premiers signes de la vieillesse
Film-titles are problematic.
The title of The Way Way Back (2013) is meant to be provocative, so 'the problem' is systemically desirable from the point of view of the film-makers, their supporters, distributors, etc.
On my understanding, the original Italian title of La Grande Bellezza just means something like immense beauty*, or maybe, more loosely, very beautiful - and the film exquisitely, almost hyper-realistically, is beautifully composed, shot, edited.
Talking about the film in English under the name 'The Great Beauty' makes one think that someone of the kind of Claudia Cardinale is its unattainable star - if there is such an unattainable star, it is, as one will surely appreciate in and through the filming, Rome.
Yes, The Eternal City - and, yes, Una Grande Attrice, starring above all others in cinema from Roman Holiday (1953) to To Rome With Love (2012)**, with La Dolce Vita (1960) and others in between. But, most of all, Fellini’s Roma (1972) for an insight into Sorrentino’s vision for what this film could (or should) be / mean.
Who knows whether it is a riposte in any way to Allen’s opera-singing, showering undertaker, or his Cruz-realized cheery prostitute, but the worlds are worlds apart : they are, in fact, more the mainly well-heeled world of another Fellini, 8½ (1963), and Federico’s Guido Anselmi is a puzzler in the vein of Paolo’s Jep Gambardella. Whether he puzzles us is not the real issue, but how what he / life / Rome is puzzles him is his real – and our proper – concern.
Jep is not easily impressed, but we both see him cry, and reduce another to the need to escape the company in which he has just, so perfectly, so mercilessly, delivered humiliation. (For a moment, we think that she will outface him / them and stay. What does Jep expect, in this cruel attack on pretension and pompous self-inflation ?)
What he cries at, along with the daydreams, reveries, fantasies that he shares with Guido is at the heart of this film. Akin to Marcello Mastroianni’s mastery, Jep is brought to us to a tee by Toni Servillo as this man who is just as capable of demolishing as building up, a restless individual of talent, but little direction. He is not a Citizen Kane, but his roots do lie deep in what he cannot forget, and maybe few others know about - unlike Kane, Jep is alive, and he makes a confession to himself about how he lives – has chosen to live – at the conclusion of the film.
Comparisons with Warsaw Bridge (1990), screened in the Festival’s lovely Catalan strand in 2012, are also not inappropriate, would that overload had not stripped many memories of watching it – the nuances, the humour, the shallowness of society were all, I nevertheless know, all reminiscent. But Fellini informs so much more, and the man whom Jep has forced his novelette-authoring soul to embrace being is, although quite alien to him, all that he is left with when he cannot be other than he is (nothing to do with his age ?) :
He can hurt, but he can also heal. Perhaps we here see Jep attracted to what he is not able to be, and vice versa, because in some Jungian archetypical way they are complementary personalities, two sides of one coin…
The film is not an easy ride, but it is a phlegmatic one, not one that relies on linearity, literality, logic – just a shame that, as my Italian source confirms, the sub-titles are a poor reflection of the dialogue, on which, and not on whose rendering, I shall attempt to turn my attention next time around.
End-notes
* After writing that, I secured agreement from a convenient and friendly person with Italian credentials. (I have few.)
** I make no apologies for rating that film on a par with Midnight in Paris (2011), because the former is not that weak, nor the latter that strong, despite what is claimed about both.
*** Amazingly turned into Nine (2009) with the participation of the late Anthony Minghella.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 September
I believe that a viewer who approaches The Great Beauty (2013) as narration, not meditation, is missing its best qualities
Humbert Humbert
Or
Un bel homme au charme irrésistible malgré les premiers signes de la vieillesse
Film-titles are problematic.
The title of The Way Way Back (2013) is meant to be provocative, so 'the problem' is systemically desirable from the point of view of the film-makers, their supporters, distributors, etc.
On my understanding, the original Italian title of La Grande Bellezza just means something like immense beauty*, or maybe, more loosely, very beautiful - and the film exquisitely, almost hyper-realistically, is beautifully composed, shot, edited.
Talking about the film in English under the name 'The Great Beauty' makes one think that someone of the kind of Claudia Cardinale is its unattainable star - if there is such an unattainable star, it is, as one will surely appreciate in and through the filming, Rome.
Yes, The Eternal City - and, yes, Una Grande Attrice, starring above all others in cinema from Roman Holiday (1953) to To Rome With Love (2012)**, with La Dolce Vita (1960) and others in between. But, most of all, Fellini’s Roma (1972) for an insight into Sorrentino’s vision for what this film could (or should) be / mean.
Who knows whether it is a riposte in any way to Allen’s opera-singing, showering undertaker, or his Cruz-realized cheery prostitute, but the worlds are worlds apart : they are, in fact, more the mainly well-heeled world of another Fellini, 8½ (1963), and Federico’s Guido Anselmi is a puzzler in the vein of Paolo’s Jep Gambardella. Whether he puzzles us is not the real issue, but how what he / life / Rome is puzzles him is his real – and our proper – concern.
Jep is not easily impressed, but we both see him cry, and reduce another to the need to escape the company in which he has just, so perfectly, so mercilessly, delivered humiliation. (For a moment, we think that she will outface him / them and stay. What does Jep expect, in this cruel attack on pretension and pompous self-inflation ?)
What he cries at, along with the daydreams, reveries, fantasies that he shares with Guido is at the heart of this film. Akin to Marcello Mastroianni’s mastery, Jep is brought to us to a tee by Toni Servillo as this man who is just as capable of demolishing as building up, a restless individual of talent, but little direction. He is not a Citizen Kane, but his roots do lie deep in what he cannot forget, and maybe few others know about - unlike Kane, Jep is alive, and he makes a confession to himself about how he lives – has chosen to live – at the conclusion of the film.
Comparisons with Warsaw Bridge (1990), screened in the Festival’s lovely Catalan strand in 2012, are also not inappropriate, would that overload had not stripped many memories of watching it – the nuances, the humour, the shallowness of society were all, I nevertheless know, all reminiscent. But Fellini informs so much more, and the man whom Jep has forced his novelette-authoring soul to embrace being is, although quite alien to him, all that he is left with when he cannot be other than he is (nothing to do with his age ?) :
He can hurt, but he can also heal. Perhaps we here see Jep attracted to what he is not able to be, and vice versa, because in some Jungian archetypical way they are complementary personalities, two sides of one coin…
The film is not an easy ride, but it is a phlegmatic one, not one that relies on linearity, literality, logic – just a shame that, as my Italian source confirms, the sub-titles are a poor reflection of the dialogue, on which, and not on whose rendering, I shall attempt to turn my attention next time around.
End-notes
* After writing that, I secured agreement from a convenient and friendly person with Italian credentials. (I have few.)
** I make no apologies for rating that film on a par with Midnight in Paris (2011), because the former is not that weak, nor the latter that strong, despite what is claimed about both.
*** Amazingly turned into Nine (2009) with the participation of the late Anthony Minghella.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
We're literally not going to make it !
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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7 September
If - as you were - you were crossing the road, why use four syllables when there was no need to say literally at all ?
Some ironic, post-modern, sub- or post-ironic tic ? Or just clueless employment of the latest degraded word..
End-notes
* It was four, not elided to three.
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7 September
If - as you were - you were crossing the road, why use four syllables when there was no need to say literally at all ?
Some ironic, post-modern, sub- or post-ironic tic ? Or just clueless employment of the latest degraded word..
End-notes
* It was four, not elided to three.
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Thursday 5 September 2013
Empty vessels
This is a review of The Way Way Back (2013)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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5 September
This is a review of The Way Way Back (2013)
* Contains moderate spoilering, and a bit of swearing *
I defy anyone to dislike Sam Rockwell as Owen in The Way Way Back (2013)*. (I probably should not do too much defying, or I might end up like the film's odious Trent (Steve Carell), telling people who they are or what they think.)
As I Tweeted :
Anyone who ever had a pivotally inspirational figure in his / her life can relate to #TheWayWayBack: I found Sam Rockwell totally enjoyable.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 4, 2013
The odious Trent, possibly unconsciously, seems set on crushing Duncan, nicely brought about by Liam James - he is the sort of man that he is probably a bit like Reggie Perrin's CJ, in that he did not get where he is to-day without making bogus and manipulatively one-sided 'deals' with people.
Thankfully, the excruciating embarrassment of the characters sizing each other up at the Riptide, the holiday home from Trent's previous relationship, diminishes as Owen and Water Whiz (apparently a real place) hove into view. A little bit like Steve Martin being energized, but largely his own man, Rockwell is the dad whom Duncan does not have / no longer has, as puerile Trent cannot resist grinding Duncan with.
The water-park becomes that sort of home-from-home that we know so well all the way to Alice and her adventures via Dorothy and Kansas / Oz and even into a recent Thai film that was in my top three from last year's Festival, Postcards from the Zoo (2012)** (let alone Midnight in Paris (2011)).
Yes, we root for Duncan, and laugh with him, even despite him, and Owen is no saint, but he is humane, comfortable with himself (most of the time), encouraging. No more than that needs be said - watch the film, relish a world beyond the cringeing hypocrisy of people pretending, and find the punctuation-mark !
End-notes
* With its silent punctuation.
** The zoo is a sort of Eden, but Water Wizz is more flawed, although caring and compassionate, taking in Duncan as he is.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Wednesday 4 September 2013
Why can't people write 'commit / committed / commits suicide' ?
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4 September
According to those who know that suicide was once a criminal offence, using the word 'commit' to describe the action of carrying out suicide suggests that it is a crime.
The Suicide Act 1961*, in section 1, enacted as this Tweet says :
Aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring is what section 2 is concerned with, or as this Tweet says :
In essence, what I am trying to use a Tweet to say is this :
If section 1 makes clear that committing suicide is not a crime any longer, because of the passing of the Act, how can anyone construe the use of the phrase 'commit suicide' in sections 1 and 2 as saying that it is a crime (or that it suggests that it is) ?
Was Parliament really incapable of saying what it meant in 1961 ? If no one since the last few years thought that the phrase commit suicide suggested a crime was involved, why do we suddenly need to infer a conscience about what 'commit' + 'suicide' means fifty odd years later ?
Training courses once had it that people had to say thought-shower or some such on the basis that brainstorm was a term offensive to those with epilepsy or similar conditions - this was taught, that those using the word 'brainstorm' were, albeit unwittingly, hurting others. Except that other trainers, who worked with such people liable to be offended, said that it was nonsense, a myth - a myth that gave some trainers power over those attending their courses by making them seem wise...
I no more see any basis for saying that commit suicide is insensitive and needs to be avoided than in the case of brainstorm - it is an attempt to reclaim a non-criminalizing feel for suicide when it is, after all, an act in the way that bankruptcy is an act. People believe in debtors' prisons and in owing money as punishable by the criminal courts, but there is nothing that can be pointed to that suggests it, other than people not knowing what criminal justice and civil justice are.
If people believe that suicide is a crime, some religions may teach that it is, but I cannot see how an Act of Parliament that abolished a crime can be wrong in referring to the act of suicide as something that one commits, just as one commits an act of folly, an act of bankruptcy, an act of kindness.
Does anyone really believe committing a selfless act is a crime, because of the word 'commit' ? I honestly do not think so.
End-notes
* Its full title is 'An Act to amend the law of England and Wales relating to suicide, and for purposes connected therewith', but section 3 lets us shorten it.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
4 September
According to those who know that suicide was once a criminal offence, using the word 'commit' to describe the action of carrying out suicide suggests that it is a crime.
The Suicide Act 1961*, in section 1, enacted as this Tweet says :
Suicide Act 1961 : The rule of law whereby it is a crime for a person to commit suicide is hereby abrogated (s. 1), but crimes in s. 2 ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 5, 2013
Aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring is what section 2 is concerned with, or as this Tweet says :
1961 Act : s. 2(1) refers to 'an attempt by another to commit suicide' - s. 1 says it's not a crime, so how is 'commit' saying otherwise ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 5, 2013
In essence, what I am trying to use a Tweet to say is this :
If section 1 makes clear that committing suicide is not a crime any longer, because of the passing of the Act, how can anyone construe the use of the phrase 'commit suicide' in sections 1 and 2 as saying that it is a crime (or that it suggests that it is) ?
Was Parliament really incapable of saying what it meant in 1961 ? If no one since the last few years thought that the phrase commit suicide suggested a crime was involved, why do we suddenly need to infer a conscience about what 'commit' + 'suicide' means fifty odd years later ?
Training courses once had it that people had to say thought-shower or some such on the basis that brainstorm was a term offensive to those with epilepsy or similar conditions - this was taught, that those using the word 'brainstorm' were, albeit unwittingly, hurting others. Except that other trainers, who worked with such people liable to be offended, said that it was nonsense, a myth - a myth that gave some trainers power over those attending their courses by making them seem wise...
I no more see any basis for saying that commit suicide is insensitive and needs to be avoided than in the case of brainstorm - it is an attempt to reclaim a non-criminalizing feel for suicide when it is, after all, an act in the way that bankruptcy is an act. People believe in debtors' prisons and in owing money as punishable by the criminal courts, but there is nothing that can be pointed to that suggests it, other than people not knowing what criminal justice and civil justice are.
If people believe that suicide is a crime, some religions may teach that it is, but I cannot see how an Act of Parliament that abolished a crime can be wrong in referring to the act of suicide as something that one commits, just as one commits an act of folly, an act of bankruptcy, an act of kindness.
Does anyone really believe committing a selfless act is a crime, because of the word 'commit' ? I honestly do not think so.
End-notes
* Its full title is 'An Act to amend the law of England and Wales relating to suicide, and for purposes connected therewith', but section 3 lets us shorten it.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Saturday 31 August 2013
Any spaces
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
31 August
A debate arose about the use of the question-mark this lunchtime, except that it was only a debate in the modern sense : I received an explanation of how many screens, if one had been driving when sending Any spaces as a message, one would have had to go through to add the punctuation, whereas I had pointed out that the pithiness of some of the messages sent had bordered on abruptness.
As to a question-mark, clearly it had to be a question - although, had it started with a lower-case letter (some friends never use capitals), one might have wondered whether it was the tail-fragment - and clearly one also inferred the missing Are there.
Which brought us to what happens when a proposition is not, as almost in that case (it would actually have been Are there spaces ?), turned into a question by inversion, but by intonation :
You are coming as statement
You are coming ! as a form of imperative
You are coming ? as a question
Are you coming ? also as a question
Likewise :
You want that as statement
You want that ? as a form of derision in a question
You want that ? possibly, again, as a form of derision in a question, possibly not
You want that ? as a form of uncertainty, perhaps
Etc., etc. with several words stressed...
But :
Do you want that ? as a question
Do you want that ? as an intensified question
Do you want that ? as another intensified question
Do you want that ? as a third intensified question
Etc., etc. with several words stressed...
Questions, we take them for granted, but forming them can - rightly or wrongly - impart all sorts of meaning, without even considering adding another intensifying word such as 'really'...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
31 August
A debate arose about the use of the question-mark this lunchtime, except that it was only a debate in the modern sense : I received an explanation of how many screens, if one had been driving when sending Any spaces as a message, one would have had to go through to add the punctuation, whereas I had pointed out that the pithiness of some of the messages sent had bordered on abruptness.
As to a question-mark, clearly it had to be a question - although, had it started with a lower-case letter (some friends never use capitals), one might have wondered whether it was the tail-fragment - and clearly one also inferred the missing Are there.
Which brought us to what happens when a proposition is not, as almost in that case (it would actually have been Are there spaces ?), turned into a question by inversion, but by intonation :
You are coming as statement
You are coming ! as a form of imperative
You are coming ? as a question
Are you coming ? also as a question
Likewise :
You want that as statement
You want that ? as a form of derision in a question
You want that ? possibly, again, as a form of derision in a question, possibly not
You want that ? as a form of uncertainty, perhaps
Etc., etc. with several words stressed...
But :
Do you want that ? as a question
Do you want that ? as an intensified question
Do you want that ? as another intensified question
Do you want that ? as a third intensified question
Etc., etc. with several words stressed...
Questions, we take them for granted, but forming them can - rightly or wrongly - impart all sorts of meaning, without even considering adding another intensifying word such as 'really'...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Friday 30 August 2013
What the heck is 'competition', Competition Commission ?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
31 August
If you've never heard of the MMC*, you might wonder what the Competition Commission does ?
Do they police the occasions when you came up for a brilliant new name for Frosties, but didn't win, or that holiday in Honolulu that they keep ringing me about ?
Well, this probably won't help : Imagine a town, Townchester, with a big branch of Tesco a few streets away from one side of the river, and an equally big branch of Asda in the same position on the other side. Imagine Asda decided that they thought that people were more interested in carpet, and devoted half of their floor-space to that instead of their normal range of goods.
So what has happened to competition in Townchester ? Asda, for whatever business or other reason, has effectively given Tesco a massive advantage, and could make its so very low prices creep up, because it knows that customers can less easily find all that they need at Asda.
But does the Competition Commission have anything to say about this ? I understand not, and it would take Asda to decide to sell up to Tesco altogether before, as I gather, The Office of Fair Trading might refer the matter to the Commission.
Does this make any sense ? In both cases, a market position lessens competition, but, unless I am quite wrong, the Commission won't oblige Asda to compete fully with Tesco, any more than it will, if Asda does as I say with 70% of its floor area, encourage Lidl or who knows what other supermarket retailer in to keep Tesco in check.
And does it nap ? A very big Sainsbury's has now opened in Bicester, but I am reliably informed (by a friend who lives there) that the competitive playing-field before then saw no fewer than seven, yes seven, Tesco branches in this one town.
Anyway, apply this 'thinking' to the business of cinemas, of projecting films for public exhibition, and Festival Central is threatened because Cineworld, which had a cinema already, now owns both : the Commission, from the lofty height of its great wisdom, records that there are membership schemes and a diversity between the type of films shown at each.
It records that state of affairs, but decides, I am told (by @MovieEvangelist), to take no account of it, irrespective of the fact that one largely could not see almost all of the films shown at Festival Central at Cineworld. It focuses (again, @MovieEvangelist informs me) on odd assumptions about what people would do if prices rose 5%, but has no wit to think that, if the cost of seeing films did increase that much, one would not, as it surmises, go to another cinema where one could not see the films that one chooses to view, but just not watch quite so many films - if the price of beer goes up, do I just consume as much, if my income has not kept pace, or have slightly fewer pints ?
It's obvious, but seemingly not to the Competition Commission. And membership : one pays a fee for membership at Festival Central, but then gets three free tickets, 10% of food and drink, and up to £2.00 off the price of almost all other tickets, all applicable across Picturehouse cinemas. One can just discount that, when Cambridge Vue, I gather, does not have such a scheme ? Cineworld has an unlimited subscription (@MovieEvangelist says), allowing the holder to see any number of films for a monthly payment - can that, too, just be ignored, if one wants to talk about ticket-prices ?
Whose interests, then, is the Commission protecting ? The one-off visitor to Cambridge who wants to see a film ? If the visitor likes world or independent cinema, and is a member at The Belmont, in Aberdeen, he or she can use those free tickets, or get something up to £2.00 off, plus the 10% discount, so why compare the straight price of, say, a matinee ticket at the Vue with that ?
Regarding supermarkets without their loyalty cards, discount vouchers, and three-for-two offers - would looking at the ordinary prices, without being able to cash in points on meals, holidays, probably cinema tickets, make sense ?
In the Commission's world, there is the possibility of the lessening of its arcane notion of competition, and it seems not to care that the consequence of believing that action probably must be taken, i.e. requiring Cineworld to sell one of the Cambridge cinemas, runs the risk of three cinemas showing pretty much the same films**.
If that is the desired outcome, then it is the desert that we have of multi-channel t.v., with no variety within the large number of channels, save that each one is a different channel, in terms of the quality and worth of content. Making big players bid to screen prestigious sporting fixtures just meant that the winners passed on the cost of their winning bid to the public - pay £Z to subscribe, or you don't see these events.
The public had these events more easily and less inexpensively available before. They have just had them sold back at the high price of subscribing, say, to Mr Murdoch's services.
Only beneficiaries ? : Mr Murdoch, the shareholders of his companies, the staff who encrypt and broadcast the events, allow the subscriber, both physically and by checking that he or she continues to pay, to watch, and the manufacturers of the technology that the subscriber needs, and their staff and shareholders.
What price a film festival ? Oh, a fanciful notion of competition has to be explored to protect the public from seeing the latest Woody Allen, world premieres, twenty documentaries (when Cambridge is not even primarily a documentary film festival)...
Thanks, and make me have to spend at least £13 on a Travelcard to London and then to have to pay the high admission fees of London Film Festival's screenings !
End-notes
* The Monopolies and Mergers Commission, replaced by the CC on 1 April 1999 (from memory).
** Of course, that is pure competition, rather than having this arthouse muck screened ! (Almost in the same way that Nineteen Eighty-Four has three massive powers vying for it.)
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
31 August
If you've never heard of the MMC*, you might wonder what the Competition Commission does ?
Do they police the occasions when you came up for a brilliant new name for Frosties, but didn't win, or that holiday in Honolulu that they keep ringing me about ?
Well, this probably won't help : Imagine a town, Townchester, with a big branch of Tesco a few streets away from one side of the river, and an equally big branch of Asda in the same position on the other side. Imagine Asda decided that they thought that people were more interested in carpet, and devoted half of their floor-space to that instead of their normal range of goods.
So what has happened to competition in Townchester ? Asda, for whatever business or other reason, has effectively given Tesco a massive advantage, and could make its so very low prices creep up, because it knows that customers can less easily find all that they need at Asda.
But does the Competition Commission have anything to say about this ? I understand not, and it would take Asda to decide to sell up to Tesco altogether before, as I gather, The Office of Fair Trading might refer the matter to the Commission.
Does this make any sense ? In both cases, a market position lessens competition, but, unless I am quite wrong, the Commission won't oblige Asda to compete fully with Tesco, any more than it will, if Asda does as I say with 70% of its floor area, encourage Lidl or who knows what other supermarket retailer in to keep Tesco in check.
And does it nap ? A very big Sainsbury's has now opened in Bicester, but I am reliably informed (by a friend who lives there) that the competitive playing-field before then saw no fewer than seven, yes seven, Tesco branches in this one town.
Anyway, apply this 'thinking' to the business of cinemas, of projecting films for public exhibition, and Festival Central is threatened because Cineworld, which had a cinema already, now owns both : the Commission, from the lofty height of its great wisdom, records that there are membership schemes and a diversity between the type of films shown at each.
It records that state of affairs, but decides, I am told (by @MovieEvangelist), to take no account of it, irrespective of the fact that one largely could not see almost all of the films shown at Festival Central at Cineworld. It focuses (again, @MovieEvangelist informs me) on odd assumptions about what people would do if prices rose 5%, but has no wit to think that, if the cost of seeing films did increase that much, one would not, as it surmises, go to another cinema where one could not see the films that one chooses to view, but just not watch quite so many films - if the price of beer goes up, do I just consume as much, if my income has not kept pace, or have slightly fewer pints ?
It's obvious, but seemingly not to the Competition Commission. And membership : one pays a fee for membership at Festival Central, but then gets three free tickets, 10% of food and drink, and up to £2.00 off the price of almost all other tickets, all applicable across Picturehouse cinemas. One can just discount that, when Cambridge Vue, I gather, does not have such a scheme ? Cineworld has an unlimited subscription (@MovieEvangelist says), allowing the holder to see any number of films for a monthly payment - can that, too, just be ignored, if one wants to talk about ticket-prices ?
Whose interests, then, is the Commission protecting ? The one-off visitor to Cambridge who wants to see a film ? If the visitor likes world or independent cinema, and is a member at The Belmont, in Aberdeen, he or she can use those free tickets, or get something up to £2.00 off, plus the 10% discount, so why compare the straight price of, say, a matinee ticket at the Vue with that ?
Regarding supermarkets without their loyalty cards, discount vouchers, and three-for-two offers - would looking at the ordinary prices, without being able to cash in points on meals, holidays, probably cinema tickets, make sense ?
In the Commission's world, there is the possibility of the lessening of its arcane notion of competition, and it seems not to care that the consequence of believing that action probably must be taken, i.e. requiring Cineworld to sell one of the Cambridge cinemas, runs the risk of three cinemas showing pretty much the same films**.
If that is the desired outcome, then it is the desert that we have of multi-channel t.v., with no variety within the large number of channels, save that each one is a different channel, in terms of the quality and worth of content. Making big players bid to screen prestigious sporting fixtures just meant that the winners passed on the cost of their winning bid to the public - pay £Z to subscribe, or you don't see these events.
The public had these events more easily and less inexpensively available before. They have just had them sold back at the high price of subscribing, say, to Mr Murdoch's services.
Only beneficiaries ? : Mr Murdoch, the shareholders of his companies, the staff who encrypt and broadcast the events, allow the subscriber, both physically and by checking that he or she continues to pay, to watch, and the manufacturers of the technology that the subscriber needs, and their staff and shareholders.
What price a film festival ? Oh, a fanciful notion of competition has to be explored to protect the public from seeing the latest Woody Allen, world premieres, twenty documentaries (when Cambridge is not even primarily a documentary film festival)...
Thanks, and make me have to spend at least £13 on a Travelcard to London and then to have to pay the high admission fees of London Film Festival's screenings !
End-notes
* The Monopolies and Mergers Commission, replaced by the CC on 1 April 1999 (from memory).
** Of course, that is pure competition, rather than having this arthouse muck screened ! (Almost in the same way that Nineteen Eighty-Four has three massive powers vying for it.)
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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