More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
20 September
I was not really of an age to have known about Joy(ce) McKinney at the time that she rose to prominence, but, as the former Mormon who was used in the documentary Tabloid to explain various things remarked, what she said was one thing, what the Mormons said was another, and maybe what actually happened fell in the middle somewhere. Still, by escaping from the country and home, via Canada, she and her friend and accomplice Keith made fools of the British authorities (which perhaps explains why no application was made for their extradition).
Be that as it may, it is a curiosity of this subject that The Daily Mirror says that (as a result of what happened to Mirror Group Newspapers) it no longer has much of the evidence showing that she performed sexual services (although not intercourse) for money before meeting her ideal man, and that Joy herself says that a large amount of original material that proved the contrary was stolen from a vehicle of hers. She states that the material that the Mirror used at the time was faked, whereas its photographer says that he saw the negatives and prints, and the magazines in which the images appeared.
Altogether intriguing (and entertainingly, sometimes quite irreverently, presented), though nothing was as significant, for me, as the account of the cloning in South Korea of five puppies, all with sub-names from their beloved ‘parent’ Booger, and courtesy of some tissue from his stomach when he died. The practitioner who had performed the procedure said that he wasn’t playing God, because he wasn’t creating life – well, you could have fooled me, if that’s not what those Booger replicas were…!
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Monday 19 September 2011
Philipp and Philip
More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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20 September
I can only guess that the end of Philipp was meant to shock, but, as we had been in that location before, and I had thought then of what happens, it didn’t. I also didn’t feel that it necessarily fitted (although it could have done), and that what was a very well-played portrayal by Max Hegewald of acute embarrassment and pain at the pretences and stupidities of life (largely because of being at home with his parents) could have had some other resolution.
The scenes between Christa (Vanessa Krüger) and Philipp, when allowed to be themselves (and not involved in silly family rubbish at the ice-cream parlour, almost inevitably the place to go to with a new person in polite German society), are very telling, and went well, as a pairing, with snatches of intimacy in what followed, Above us Only Sky (Über uns das All).
I found the heart of Philipp there, and, by contrast, recalled only all too well how a significant birthday in my own life had to be spent with not only my family, but my parents’ friends, and their jokes, attitudes, etc. – I felt unsure whose birthday it was (whose needs are met by this coming-of-age stuff?), and, at a later stage in life (when leaving a job), really didn’t want it marked by a present that I didn’t want just because that was the protocol of moving on.
For some of us, such feelings of awkwardness stay part of life, and many other films in this festival feed into each other’s themes in this regard: Black Butterflies, Tomboy, and Tirza seem to do this, too. Philip Larkin, not with any great insight, enlivened a pretty unremarkable poem with his well-known opening line ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’.
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20 September
I can only guess that the end of Philipp was meant to shock, but, as we had been in that location before, and I had thought then of what happens, it didn’t. I also didn’t feel that it necessarily fitted (although it could have done), and that what was a very well-played portrayal by Max Hegewald of acute embarrassment and pain at the pretences and stupidities of life (largely because of being at home with his parents) could have had some other resolution.
The scenes between Christa (Vanessa Krüger) and Philipp, when allowed to be themselves (and not involved in silly family rubbish at the ice-cream parlour, almost inevitably the place to go to with a new person in polite German society), are very telling, and went well, as a pairing, with snatches of intimacy in what followed, Above us Only Sky (Über uns das All).
I found the heart of Philipp there, and, by contrast, recalled only all too well how a significant birthday in my own life had to be spent with not only my family, but my parents’ friends, and their jokes, attitudes, etc. – I felt unsure whose birthday it was (whose needs are met by this coming-of-age stuff?), and, at a later stage in life (when leaving a job), really didn’t want it marked by a present that I didn’t want just because that was the protocol of moving on.
For some of us, such feelings of awkwardness stay part of life, and many other films in this festival feed into each other’s themes in this regard: Black Butterflies, Tomboy, and Tirza seem to do this, too. Philip Larkin, not with any great insight, enlivened a pretty unremarkable poem with his well-known opening line ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’.
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Monday at the festival
More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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20 September
Four sessions (five films) to-day – should have been five, but I couldn’t count, and somehow hadn’t spotted, when booking, that one of them would be going in whilst another was still being shown, but which gives me £3.85 credit on my Blue Pass for another day.
Plus a hurry from the extravagance of seeing Douglas Fairbanks (from 1922) in and as Robin Hood in the Great Hall at Trinity (thanks to the indulgence of the college's Master and Fellows), to get back to Festival central for Tirza, of both of which more later. (Suffice to say that those who thought that they were dining in the hall, which was set up like a cinema when I arrived, must have been fed elsewhere.)
,
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20 September
Four sessions (five films) to-day – should have been five, but I couldn’t count, and somehow hadn’t spotted, when booking, that one of them would be going in whilst another was still being shown, but which gives me £3.85 credit on my Blue Pass for another day.
Plus a hurry from the extravagance of seeing Douglas Fairbanks (from 1922) in and as Robin Hood in the Great Hall at Trinity (thanks to the indulgence of the college's Master and Fellows), to get back to Festival central for Tirza, of both of which more later. (Suffice to say that those who thought that they were dining in the hall, which was set up like a cinema when I arrived, must have been fed elsewhere.)
,
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Sunday 18 September 2011
A Festival review of Abgebrannt (Burnout) (2011)
This is a Festival review of Abgebrannt (Burnout) (2011)
More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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19 September
This is a Festival review of Abgebrannt (Burnout) (2011)
To-night's screening was attended by director Verena S. Freytag*, and she spoke to the Festival's own Verena afterwards, and answered questions from the audience (which, it must be said, is a true privilege for a viewer).
Mine elicited that she had not intended to have a music soundtrack, but, having met a violinist (amongst other instruments that he plays) three times by chance in Berlin, and then learnt about him and his work, he composed for the finished edit. (I had felt that the score worked very well with the emotion of the changing scenes, and also adopted at least twice the simple motif of a quiet sustained note that abruptly heralded silence: the song whose lyrics I had thought might have been central from the start had not been.) I also gathered that the film had been edited from around 180 minutes to 102, with the result, Verena said, that the complexion of what happened after the initial location in Berlin had changed much.
As the other Verena commented, Maryam Zaree's performance as a hard-pressed mother (Pelin) was very strong, and I found that Tilla Kratochwil's Christa, for all that she seemed dominating and hidebound, gave her real scope for being near someone with different experiences and for them to learn from each other.
However, I am not quite sure that the trajectory of Pelin's story is really as set out in the Festival brochure (and I do not know where in life she may be heading at the close), but she certainly desires to change her position, if she can be allowed to do so - that is one of the very heartening things about this film, that we are shown her being given a chance, and also that healing and forgiveness can take place. Alongside those things, we also witness self-interest being a motivating force, and the fact that trying to shake off past ties brings new problems.
Thinking about the issues that lead to the family's seaside placement made me wonder whether the story could have fitted in the UK. The concerns portrayed would certainly have brought the same attention to bear on Pelin's behaviour as a mother, and she might, if very lucky, have had a social worker who was prepared to work with her to make things better for her children on the basis of a profession - and evidence - of a willingness to change. Even some sort of respite is sometimes possible (but maybe not so easily on the coast, because of funding), so this is not a scenario unique to Germany and not, say, Cambridge, but perhaps what it would miss is the especially German tendency of propriety about how life should be conducted.
That, however, is not what I shall take from this film: Maryam's expressiveness (and the fatigue with which she battles), her care, however wayward, for her children, her interactions with Christa, and her sheer exuberance when she breaks the rules and goes out dancing - oh, and her utter convincingness as someone who tattoes ('inks') others and believes in herself and in that sort of statement.
End-notes :
* Somewhat irrelevantly to remark, but someone who moved to Berlin has the same middle initial : he adopted it, as a sort of silent 'S', just so that he would have one...
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Sonnet 116
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19 September
A rather faltering reading of Shakespeare in class (which did not, as I recall, include the closing couplet) starts Above us Only Sky (Über uns das All). The poem was still unmistakeable, and highly relevant: 'Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds'. We end with shots, the last with the credits rolling, of the place where Sandra Hüller, as Martha, had expected to be, but on a different basis.
In-between, she finds plenty of alteration, together with confusion, mistrust and loss, and a mystery for which she seems (doomed) to find no answer (and we no answer as to how it could financially have been maintained so that she did not know). Her courage in all this is immense, her denial is evidence of great hope, and she carries and conducts herself with a real knowledge of her worth, and of not wanting inconsequential formalities and pleasantries that do no more than irritate her by their emptiness.
Yet, as we would, we do doubt her mental state, whether, if not actually dissociating and trying to project one person's identity onto another, then perhaps seeking solace where time should heal (as the sonnet again says, 'Love alters not with [time's] brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom'): such concern is at its closest in one scene, where she barks out orders, and forces what she insists should be done in a humiliating and damaging way. But not a way that reckons with love, not a way that remembers being told that it is actually easier to make an apology weeks afterwards, although it seems awkward, because it has already been accepted in that time.
The warmth of the joking, the bantering, links this to the most positive parts in the short film Philipp that was shown before: there is a shared life that cuts through trite sentiments such as 'it feels as though we've always known each other', and appears, even with seeming 'impediments', to be 'the marriage of true minds'. (Lovely, also, to see all this against the background of Köln (Cologne), which has a special resonance for me since a long time ago.)
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
19 September
A rather faltering reading of Shakespeare in class (which did not, as I recall, include the closing couplet) starts Above us Only Sky (Über uns das All). The poem was still unmistakeable, and highly relevant: 'Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds'. We end with shots, the last with the credits rolling, of the place where Sandra Hüller, as Martha, had expected to be, but on a different basis.
In-between, she finds plenty of alteration, together with confusion, mistrust and loss, and a mystery for which she seems (doomed) to find no answer (and we no answer as to how it could financially have been maintained so that she did not know). Her courage in all this is immense, her denial is evidence of great hope, and she carries and conducts herself with a real knowledge of her worth, and of not wanting inconsequential formalities and pleasantries that do no more than irritate her by their emptiness.
Yet, as we would, we do doubt her mental state, whether, if not actually dissociating and trying to project one person's identity onto another, then perhaps seeking solace where time should heal (as the sonnet again says, 'Love alters not with [time's] brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom'): such concern is at its closest in one scene, where she barks out orders, and forces what she insists should be done in a humiliating and damaging way. But not a way that reckons with love, not a way that remembers being told that it is actually easier to make an apology weeks afterwards, although it seems awkward, because it has already been accepted in that time.
The warmth of the joking, the bantering, links this to the most positive parts in the short film Philipp that was shown before: there is a shared life that cuts through trite sentiments such as 'it feels as though we've always known each other', and appears, even with seeming 'impediments', to be 'the marriage of true minds'. (Lovely, also, to see all this against the background of Köln (Cologne), which has a special resonance for me since a long time ago.)
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Omelette rescue
Omelette rescue
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18 September
Omelette rescue
If ever I should get disillusioned (pretty likely, unfortunately), I should remember Kath.
Her extreme kindness in taking pity on the fact that, having been left with just 30 minutes between film 1 and film 2, I was only going to have another 30 minutes before film 3 would begin - with the offer to order me a cheese-and-tuna omelette, which, complete with lettuce and lovely balsamic dressing, was waiting for me when I exited from White White World (2010). A very welcome thing to come out to from that individual experience !
Plus my change in a wonderful origami wallet. As I told Kath, 10 out of 5 !
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Don't be Afraid of This Film
This is a Festival review of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)
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18 September
This is a Festival review of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)
* Contains spoilers *
I gather that Guillermo del Toro liked the t.v. story from which Don’t be Afraid of the Dark was adapted. It was perfectly understandable, in view of what appears to interest him, that it attracted him, but he may not have stopped to ask himself whether it would please anyone else.
For, given that he co-wrote the script, and that Pan’s Labyrinth holds together in a way that, for me, this simply did not, I have to ask why there were so many flaws, and why, with such a poorly conceived script, the film was made at all. (There may have been flaws in the original, but that was no reason to recreate them.) It is probably enough just to list some, in no particular order:
· Unless invoking magic, a Polaroid® camera that very obviously has five singe-use flash-bulbs cannot keep taking flash photographs indefinitely (for no reason, we had a shot of a collection of cameras earlier on);
· The extensive injuries inflicted on Mr Harris could not have been construed as resulting from any accident – no one, for example, could get a puncture wound (from the screw-driver) in the back of his leg at the same time as multiple lacerations to face and hands, and it is utterly implausible that the extent of the injuries and their causes would have been missed, at the scene or in hospital (end of residence, end of film);
· Accepted that it is a given of this sort of film (whatever it may be) that people just act stupidly (and despite the attempt at a sinister twist at the end), it made no sense for Kim (Katie Holmes) to go to the library after seeing Harris, rather than rescuing Sally (Bailee Madison) first;
· Creatures that can move objects without touching them (Mr Harris again, e.g. the Stanley® knife) do not need the agency of those objects to turn off light-switches, etc.;
· Sally may have been shocked (but what by? by people bursting into the library, who, as ever, seem to take a quiet eternity to do so?), but why did she show her father a photograph, not the creature that she had not been too shocked to manage to squash?;
· And what suddenly persuades him to believe her, when nothing else has happened? I did not recall the trade name, but (at her tender age – the States and child medication again!) she is probably taking an anti-depressant, and so has to be disbelieved!
Trying to set aside questions of genre, making sudden loud noises does not constitute horror (or suspense), e.g. the gratuitous thump in the soundtrack when Mr Harris apprehends Sally when she first discovers the basement window. Later, when the pace of the attack has stepped up (as, of course, it could have done at any point), there is just overloading of the senses, achieved by pounding music, other chaotic loud sounds, and confused visual displays that are typical of any so-called action film, but which, if it is one's intention, do not make one afraid, but raise anxiety.
We suspect that no one will make it out alive - anyone doing so is a bonus (but the adults have behaved so foolishly when they had the chance before). As to what the ending moments suggest about Kim, who actually cares?
True, it did seem, at one point (when she has been tripped on the stairs: these clever rhesus-monkey-like creatures, knowing how to tension wire - not there later, when Sally comes down - and which way down the stairs she'd come), that Kim was suggesting Sally as their kill instead of her (and, yawn, there may be earlier ambiguities).
Yet she does rescue Sally, she may or may not be dead (or transformed), and, if she isn't dead, who was the creatures' required victim?
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Poem for another festival
More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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18 September 2011
Awake earlier than I should like, but not ready to finish my comments on Guillermo del Toro's latest 'work', I shall post another of my poems, written for a competition at The Proms run by Radio 3's 'cabaret of the word', The Verb.
I think that it will be clear enough what it's about, but, if not, I can provide explanation later:
Hedwig in the air
Hedwig’s dead, killed outright in her cage –
Not fleeing from the deathly curse,
Or up, o’erseeing the under-age
Potter boy, whose mind she’d sought to nurse.
Birds – maybe she, too – brought first tidings
Of magic, of spells, of the castle
Reached by express from secret sidings:
A place to talk for real in Parsel-
Tongue, to know a first happy Christmas.
She flew with greetings then, and maybe
Saw her death as sure as Icarus,
Or the kings in that heav’n-sent baby –
An epiphany on wings, soft, still
As angels’ singing, this owl they kill.
Copyright © Belston Night Works 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
18 September 2011
Awake earlier than I should like, but not ready to finish my comments on Guillermo del Toro's latest 'work', I shall post another of my poems, written for a competition at The Proms run by Radio 3's 'cabaret of the word', The Verb.
I think that it will be clear enough what it's about, but, if not, I can provide explanation later:
Hedwig in the air
Hedwig’s dead, killed outright in her cage –
Not fleeing from the deathly curse,
Or up, o’erseeing the under-age
Potter boy, whose mind she’d sought to nurse.
Birds – maybe she, too – brought first tidings
Of magic, of spells, of the castle
Reached by express from secret sidings:
A place to talk for real in Parsel-
Tongue, to know a first happy Christmas.
She flew with greetings then, and maybe
Saw her death as sure as Icarus,
Or the kings in that heav’n-sent baby –
An epiphany on wings, soft, still
As angels’ singing, this owl they kill.
Copyright © Belston Night Works 2011
Saturday 17 September 2011
Golden sands of time
This is a Festival review of Bombay Beach (2011)
More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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18 September (Tweets / tags added, 3 January 2015)
This is a Festival review of Bombay Beach (2011)
Bombay Beach (2011) (we had no explanation of the name, sadly) took a little time to get used to, because it seemed (perhaps unnecessarily?) raw in the early shots, and, of course, one has (gained) expectations that what is near the centre of the frame will be - or be put into - focus. (I'm assuming that editing the film with some footage that meets this description at the start was a deliberate ploy.)
In any case, what I quickly came to experience as a real joy, since it is a principle that I try to employ in my photography, was the use of available light (which must have caused some difficulties in places). The whole emphasis on lighting, and on the flatness that gives a distinct horizon at sunrise and -set, was a hallmark of this film, as was the naturalness with which people seemed to get about their business, and come to mean something to us in the (relatively) short time (compared with Alma Har'el) that we (felt that we) spent with them.
Before I went in, Tony Jones, director of the Festival, said that I would want to see the film again when it is on release generally, and he is right - from the sounds of it, as he hopes to have Alma in Cambridge, plenty of time to think up questions before then. Until that point, what I will think about, other than listening to some of my Dylan tracks, is the hope that there was in all that I was allowed to witness, and try to remind myself that it is a privilege to see others' lives.
That said, and nothing to do with how the film was made, but I couldn't help being shocked at how much behaviour is controlled (for) by medication in the States. A young boy, clearly given ritalin because of ADHD (now quite well known in the UK), but also being given an anti-psychotic, then put onto 600mg lithium (instead of the ritalin, unless I misrember), which is one-half of the typical sort of dose for a six-foot man (the exact dose depends on metabolism). As to an explanation to Benny's parents of possible side-effects, particularly for lithium toxicity in the bloodstream, that appeared lacking.
Well, and I'm sorry that I forget his name, but as the elderly guy says who recovers from a mini-stroke, and whose appetite for life and what it is worth were wholly infectious, Life is a habit. For Benny, I hope that he may be able to form a habit where he is not overmedicated to meet others' ideas of who he should be, and the film, in its crazy phantasy ending, offered us that vision.
PS Very much an after-thought, and not intended to detract from the above, but I could not understand the point of the intermittently present and vividly yellow-orange subtitles: at first, they seemed to stigmatize the would-be college student, as if just his diction were not clear enough (although it was), but then they appeared at other times.
Sometimes, during the interactions in the Parish household, they were a help to know what was being said. However, most of the time I did not see the need for them, but, because of how much brighter they were than usual, I could not avoid three effects: they spoilt the appearance of the film, they drew me to read them when I could perfectly well hear what was being spoken, and, because of that, I could not block them out, and so missed important detail on the screen. If I could have pressed a button on a remote-control to turn them off, I would have done, and been happier.
The documentary Bombay Beach (2011), released by @Dogwoof, has this page on @IMDb... : http://t.co/gFe3jzomi5
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 3, 2015If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Not waving, but drowning
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17 September
As expected, Liam Cunningham (as Jack Cope) was excellent in Black Butterflies, but Carice van Houten, playing poet Ingrid Jonker, was a revelation. To those in the know, she perfectly carried out a role that betrayed the traits of impetuosity, feeling abandoned, blaming others, promiscuity, drinking too much in order to feel safe and able to cope, and becoming overwhelmed by conflicting emotions, which characterize some common personality disorders (they would probably have called them neuroses then).
Yet, as is by no means inconsistent, her character was delightful, and she filled the screen with feeling, from seducing Jack, and showing the characters’ hunger for each other in the very beautiful sex-scenes, to hurling objects at him with extreme force. There are claims that she was had other lovers, but Eugene and Jack, the ones who are definite, both find her draining, as well they would. A force for life is hard to live with, after all.
Rutger Hauer as Ingrid’s father (eerily resembling my former university tutor facially) has a harsh love (eventually, on account of her alleged sleeping around, he dismisses her as a slut), likely to have been one of the things that contributed to how she reacts to life and, through doing so in later life, the three psychiatric admissions that we see (or hear of), the last of them leading to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Although it is not always true that people are never the same after it, she is damaged.
She is also damaged by the child whom she wished she had kept, and by the one fathered by Eugene, and which led her to desperate steps in Paris and that last admission. Whereas the film does not pretend to portray Ingrid’s life or that of others who were close to her faithfully, hearing Carice (and, against his judgement, her character’s father) read her verse will encourage a journey to look out her writing, not least given that is was allowed such a prominent place in the new South Africa.
Maybe the real Ingrid wrote on the walls, maybe she didn’t, but it set up a world in which desperate words written in the condensation in Paris were hurtingly real, and also tragically echoed her having made love to Jack in her old room at her father’s house (the old servants’ quarters), their bodies touching and mingling with her script.
Not exactly a love-story, through she clearly does love Jack (but cannot be ‘faithful’), but one about what it is to feel, love and live, and to write faithfully what one believes in, whatever the cost.
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
17 September
As expected, Liam Cunningham (as Jack Cope) was excellent in Black Butterflies, but Carice van Houten, playing poet Ingrid Jonker, was a revelation. To those in the know, she perfectly carried out a role that betrayed the traits of impetuosity, feeling abandoned, blaming others, promiscuity, drinking too much in order to feel safe and able to cope, and becoming overwhelmed by conflicting emotions, which characterize some common personality disorders (they would probably have called them neuroses then).
Yet, as is by no means inconsistent, her character was delightful, and she filled the screen with feeling, from seducing Jack, and showing the characters’ hunger for each other in the very beautiful sex-scenes, to hurling objects at him with extreme force. There are claims that she was had other lovers, but Eugene and Jack, the ones who are definite, both find her draining, as well they would. A force for life is hard to live with, after all.
Rutger Hauer as Ingrid’s father (eerily resembling my former university tutor facially) has a harsh love (eventually, on account of her alleged sleeping around, he dismisses her as a slut), likely to have been one of the things that contributed to how she reacts to life and, through doing so in later life, the three psychiatric admissions that we see (or hear of), the last of them leading to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Although it is not always true that people are never the same after it, she is damaged.
She is also damaged by the child whom she wished she had kept, and by the one fathered by Eugene, and which led her to desperate steps in Paris and that last admission. Whereas the film does not pretend to portray Ingrid’s life or that of others who were close to her faithfully, hearing Carice (and, against his judgement, her character’s father) read her verse will encourage a journey to look out her writing, not least given that is was allowed such a prominent place in the new South Africa.
Maybe the real Ingrid wrote on the walls, maybe she didn’t, but it set up a world in which desperate words written in the condensation in Paris were hurtingly real, and also tragically echoed her having made love to Jack in her old room at her father’s house (the old servants’ quarters), their bodies touching and mingling with her script.
Not exactly a love-story, through she clearly does love Jack (but cannot be ‘faithful’), but one about what it is to feel, love and live, and to write faithfully what one believes in, whatever the cost.
Another tribute to the past
More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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17 September
By popular request, another number from the back catalogues of The Spoonbill Generator:
Discredited in Birmingham
Your bland mosaics, weak and pale [Roland]
More like Bud than honest ale [fester]
More like chalk than wholesome cheese [Roland]
Not like health, more like disease [fester]
Just the ticket for the Tate [The Agent Apsley]
Your buckling sculptures, tired and stale [Roland]
More like water than like ale [fester]
More like flesh than good red fowl [Roland]
Not like a laugh, more like a growl [fester]
Just the thing to tickle Fate. [Roland]
Your tawdry frescoes, wan and quaint [fester]
More like puke than any paint [P]
More like frying-pan than fire [Roland]
Not good at all, but really dire [fester]
Just the kind of stuff I Hate! [Roland]
Your sordid etchings, smudged and faint [fester]
More like splurging than restraint [Roland]
Less than wholesome, quite absurd [The Agent Apsley]
Not quite first rate, more like third [P]
Just what I Regurgitate [Roland]
Yet your enamel's of the best [The Agent Apsley]
Not Faberge, but I'm impressed [fester]
Not quite thrilled, but more than glad [Roland]
It's more than good, it's not half bad [fester]
Really rather Second-rate! [Roland]
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
17 September
By popular request, another number from the back catalogues of The Spoonbill Generator:
Discredited in Birmingham
Your bland mosaics, weak and pale [Roland]
More like Bud than honest ale [fester]
More like chalk than wholesome cheese [Roland]
Not like health, more like disease [fester]
Just the ticket for the Tate [The Agent Apsley]
Your buckling sculptures, tired and stale [Roland]
More like water than like ale [fester]
More like flesh than good red fowl [Roland]
Not like a laugh, more like a growl [fester]
Just the thing to tickle Fate. [Roland]
Your tawdry frescoes, wan and quaint [fester]
More like puke than any paint [P]
More like frying-pan than fire [Roland]
Not good at all, but really dire [fester]
Just the kind of stuff I Hate! [Roland]
Your sordid etchings, smudged and faint [fester]
More like splurging than restraint [Roland]
Less than wholesome, quite absurd [The Agent Apsley]
Not quite first rate, more like third [P]
Just what I Regurgitate [Roland]
Yet your enamel's of the best [The Agent Apsley]
Not Faberge, but I'm impressed [fester]
Not quite thrilled, but more than glad [Roland]
It's more than good, it's not half bad [fester]
Really rather Second-rate! [Roland]
Friday 16 September 2011
Painting makes you healthy
This is a Festival review of Calvet (2011)
More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
17 September
This is a Festival review of Calvet (2011)
* Contains spoilers *
It cannot have been a coincidence that Rembrandt Fecit 1669 (1977) was timed in such a way that it could be watched back to back with Dominic Allan's film Calvet (2011), about the French artist of the same name, who lives in and discovered his calling in Nicaragua.
(However, I do have to take issue with the account, in the brochure, of Calvet as 'hardly inspir[ing] sympathy' on account of being '[t]attoed, pierced and heavily-built' - he had no more than two earrings on each side, his tattoes were not unusual for a man with a military background (apart, perhaps, on the back of his neck), and, as someone who would have known about exercise regimes from it, he was not out of shape.)
Given that I nearly walked out thirty minutes into the film directed by Jos Stelling (as I did, later in the evening, with The Illusionist (1983), having decided to try one of his later films), I know which I have more to say about. I have just looked at the IMDB web-site, and cannot disagree with any of these comments: 'obviously the director is fascinated by his subject but little of this passion manages to reach the audience', and 'the actors bear a awesome resemblance with the painter, but up to a point who cares?'.
Likewise, with me, Stelling had my attention, but lost my interest, and the other positive comments (about the visuals and the use of an old mirror) were about things insufficient to retain it. I'd really just have happily spent a few minutes reading some paragraphs that set out the facts and events that were presented in the film, e.g. Rembrandt was drawn to artefacts of all kinds in auction-houses, and not being able to afford them - or the effect that acquiring them would have on his family and household - appeared not to concern him, when, in themselves, he could see value, beauty and quality in them.
Calvet was a different proposition. I do not profess to have heard of him, and although, of course, I wish him well showing in New York galleries, one should not get the value of his art out of proportion, for he is not the Rembrandt of his age. It is almost the opposite to that artist's story, because there were periods of his life when Rembrandt seemed to squander the opportunities both that were offered to him in his career and that his family and those who cared for him sought to give him for close and intimate relationships. Calvet acknowledges having thrown away similar chances, but, through painting, fought back against the highly nihilistic and self-indulgent and self-destructive view of life that he had grown into.
The documentary was sensitive, gave a strong sense of all the locations to which Calvet's story took it, and employed a sparing, and so effective, use of time-lapse scenes to evoke differing moods. There is no doubt that Calvet's figure dominated it, either by the scale and coloration of his works, or by the way that he gave an account of himself. For some, though not for me, his repeated focus on the son, Kevin, whom he had deserted seemed a little too much as though it were public self-flagellation, and did not seem to acknowledge that Kevin's mother, Nathalie, had just as much been abandoned by him. (She only got a mention in the closing third of the film, when he goes to France in search of Kevin.)
In this, the film-maker was doing his job, letting his subject talk for us to make our own mind up. Afterwards, in the session that David Perilli led, I asked Dominic Allan whether there had been anything that Calvet told him that he had been unable to check. I was thinking not so much of the work that had brought him to the States on false pretences or those externally verifiable issues, but his extended time in the house in the cul-de-sac, where he had found that he could quell his rage against life and the hallucinatory voices that beset him by attacking the main wall, and then all the surfaces, with paint and any other material (he described burning wood to make charcoal) that he could muster.
Afterwards, Dominic clarified that the images that had been used in the part of the film where Calvet revisits the property were made before work was done on the property (and it was put in the state of repair in which we see it). They, therefore, were the surviving testimony to that time, and, for all the anger and self-disgust that were directed to a suicide of a highly torturing complexion (rather than mere death), they struck a chord, when I saw them, that spoke too much of an ordered rationale arising out of the chaos. Perhaps Calvet had painted before - and he says that he needs that discipline to keep him well - as I otherwise found it hard to understand such an eloquent redemption in art coming to him, when the sort of frenzy and panic that he describes would not have been the time for getting acquainted with painterly method and technique.
The contrast, finally, is with Rembrandt, played in his later years by a second actor, and seeming to paint on not to find or be with his family, but despite them. Not a paradigm of the artist (whether painter, musician or writer), but one that seems to intoxicate some, and to give a different form of contented life from that sought by Calvet.
Enough Stelling
More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
17 September
* Contains spoilers *
I wasn't sure as early as the introduction that Bill gave to The Illusionist that it had been such a good idea, and, less than halfway through, I decided that I would let no more of the evening disappear with morbid images, as I am quite capable of generating my own without any help - this is the primary advantage of the aisle seat (which, I hope, meant that I could vanish with the minimum of inconvenience to anyone else).
And, no, I don't now want to see the Q&A with the director on Saturday night (17 September), or the other of his films for which I have a ticket (on Monday, I think - Trains, Aeroplanes, or some such), so there will be some reordering of my priorities, and, I trust, some things will prove possible that clashed with this event and screening.
Now I will grant you - but what else could the audience do, settled down for two hours' viewing a little after 8.30, and, after all, we all have our own ideas? - that there was laughter at the slapstick, at the incongruous, at the utter weird awfulness of how these people (a family?) in a mill of some sort on the edge of a polder lived, but little of that amused me very much, because it was only superficial to the feelings of dread that lay hardly below the surface.
After all, I witnessed (the depiction of) someone being beaten up (for no very good reason), then taken away to a psychiatric unit (for no very good reason), plus various stomach-churning sequences in an indeterminate reality, the last of which determined me to depart as soon as a fresh scene started. So, as I realized later (by looking at the Festival brochure) I missed the additional delights of (amongst other things): the threat of brain surgery, and a suicidal father (who, I suppose, must be the one whom I took for a hanger-on or another brother).
Well, I was well spared those things, after all that I had seen. And it wasn't that there was 'no dialogue', but there were no subtitles - not quite interchangeable descriptions. All of which, with two mentions of the Breughels (in introducing this and the earlier film), made me wonder whether there was actually here another codified display of Netherlandish mottoes or proverbs such as Breughel the Elder was found to have shown with cake-tins on the roof, etc. All very Dutch, perhaps, but, if so, with limited scope for travel, I feel.
And the listing talks about the film having 'much sound and fury', to which the qualifying end of the quotation from Macbeth reads 'signifying nothing'...
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
17 September
* Contains spoilers *
I wasn't sure as early as the introduction that Bill gave to The Illusionist that it had been such a good idea, and, less than halfway through, I decided that I would let no more of the evening disappear with morbid images, as I am quite capable of generating my own without any help - this is the primary advantage of the aisle seat (which, I hope, meant that I could vanish with the minimum of inconvenience to anyone else).
And, no, I don't now want to see the Q&A with the director on Saturday night (17 September), or the other of his films for which I have a ticket (on Monday, I think - Trains, Aeroplanes, or some such), so there will be some reordering of my priorities, and, I trust, some things will prove possible that clashed with this event and screening.
Now I will grant you - but what else could the audience do, settled down for two hours' viewing a little after 8.30, and, after all, we all have our own ideas? - that there was laughter at the slapstick, at the incongruous, at the utter weird awfulness of how these people (a family?) in a mill of some sort on the edge of a polder lived, but little of that amused me very much, because it was only superficial to the feelings of dread that lay hardly below the surface.
After all, I witnessed (the depiction of) someone being beaten up (for no very good reason), then taken away to a psychiatric unit (for no very good reason), plus various stomach-churning sequences in an indeterminate reality, the last of which determined me to depart as soon as a fresh scene started. So, as I realized later (by looking at the Festival brochure) I missed the additional delights of (amongst other things): the threat of brain surgery, and a suicidal father (who, I suppose, must be the one whom I took for a hanger-on or another brother).
Well, I was well spared those things, after all that I had seen. And it wasn't that there was 'no dialogue', but there were no subtitles - not quite interchangeable descriptions. All of which, with two mentions of the Breughels (in introducing this and the earlier film), made me wonder whether there was actually here another codified display of Netherlandish mottoes or proverbs such as Breughel the Elder was found to have shown with cake-tins on the roof, etc. All very Dutch, perhaps, but, if so, with limited scope for travel, I feel.
And the listing talks about the film having 'much sound and fury', to which the qualifying end of the quotation from Macbeth reads 'signifying nothing'...
Tomboy - no more, no less
This is a Festival review of Tomboy (2011)
More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
16 September
This is a Festival review of Tomboy (2011)
* Contains spoilers *
A note on paedophilia: according to the approach to school or church nativity plays that says that anyone wanting to film them cannot, because they could be directly editing their own pornography, we should not have been shown this film in which Laure / Mikael (Zoé Héran) and her / his sister Jeanne (enchantingly played by Malonn Lévana, with a real 'knowing innocence') are shown writhing around, as children do, and even having a bath. What nonsense !
This film encapsulates so much about childhood that, one imagines, is unlikely to change (or to have changed from when Céline Sciamma was a child): pretending / pretence (that one is stronger / cleverer than one is or that one's parents have fascinating jobs or large amounts of money); knowing that something will not work out, but not caring to think it through; a sense of foreboding when something that has to happen is being put off; being surprised; humiliation; secrets (and secret hiding-places); threatening to tell one's mother or making a deal not to tell; being confronted with what one has done, etc.
Incidentally, the film has as its centre a girl who can convincingly pass herself off as a boy (sometimes with prosthetic help!), who does so, attracted to the group of boys seen near the outset of living in a new house, and proving to be as good a footballer and to match their physical strength in other respects. It really does not matter why she does this, what she thinks will happen when she has to join the fourth grade, or even that it may - or may not - be read as a desire to be a boy (and later a man), rather than accepted as one.
I think the latter, that Laure hasn't thought it through, but doesn't want to face what Lisa was told when she wanted to play football, that she thinks. She doesn't think through what deceiving Lisa will do to her feelings, she just - without much heed to the consequences, except when she might have been caught out squatting to urinate and wets her shorts - sets out to be a boy. She does it, and the way that she draws Jeanne into the whole affair is utterly engaging, as are the scenes in which they have fun together outside Laure's plans. As I said, so many scenes that capture the essence of childhood and the childlike, with the issue of the particular path that Laure is following as Mikael very much secondary for me.
Thursday 15 September 2011
Gary Oldman and John Hurt answer some questions
This is some sort of account of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) and its Festival Q&A
More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
15 September
As did the director and the writer of the screenplay, after the screening [of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) on Festival opening night]
* Contains spoilers *
It was heartening to hear someone else say that following the plot didn't matter to enjoying the film, and, although I did not really see any of the t.v. series, to agree that recreating the atmosphere of the early 70s was a good thing to witness. (Oh, I did my best to follow the plot, but, in all honesty, I was put off early on by remembering 'Spies' from Fry and Laurie, with, respectively, their own Control and Tony: 'Control, I hear Firefly's been taken', etc.)
That apart, and other irrelevant thoughts that came into my head (about agents and double-agents in relation to much-inferior products such as Salt), I congratulated myself on realizing what had really happened to one character (if only by twigging that it had to be the case with someone of Mark Strong's billing), and seeing the significance of how regimes in all sorts of workplace can change for the worse.
Looking for secret folders and smuggling them out reminded me of Kate Winslet implausibly getting away with it in Enigma, but, for the life of me, I couldn't understand why John Hurt's flat would not have been stripped of the vast assembly of material there (unless it was, despite being transported elsewhere for Gary Oldman's Smiley to look through, just some unrelated hobby of his): it is the first thought on Colin Firth's mind to get to another character's property first and take things from it, when he is reported killed.
What counts, though, as came out in response to the question that I put to Gary Oldman (and others) at the end, is what the characters are experiencing at their deepest level, which, for Smiley, was felt as his wife's infidelity: I had asked what scene (or series of scenes) was central not to the story, but to his experience of the emotional core of the film, and this seemed to be how it would feel, in the circumstances, to need to hear another's account of becoming involved with a woman, what she meant to him, and what he would do to seek to protect her.
Not bad for an opening night!
Tell the Truth (1)
More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
15 September
I wasn't expecting Wakefield Express, because I'd forgotten that it was on the bill (it was a while since I'd booked), and wasn't in the right mood for it.
But, although I wasn't in the right mood for anything, I still enjoyed the man with an interest in budgies who'd arranged for Mussolini's white horse to pull the carriage for some special occasion. In 1952, he was looking to a royal event, whereas the man who grew and smoked his own tobacco had in mind cheaper cigarettes.
It was good also to see linotype machines - not acknowledged as a trademark - in operation, and the means of producing a weekly local paper (or five) then. But maybe it didn't all fit together, with a lot of time spent on following a reporter on his posed rounds with the police, vicar and town hall staff, and then much material in between, which, however informative, interrupted the flow with details of the local area and the owners of the papers, before we came to looking at putting the paper together.
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
15 September
I wasn't expecting Wakefield Express, because I'd forgotten that it was on the bill (it was a while since I'd booked), and wasn't in the right mood for it.
But, although I wasn't in the right mood for anything, I still enjoyed the man with an interest in budgies who'd arranged for Mussolini's white horse to pull the carriage for some special occasion. In 1952, he was looking to a royal event, whereas the man who grew and smoked his own tobacco had in mind cheaper cigarettes.
It was good also to see linotype machines - not acknowledged as a trademark - in operation, and the means of producing a weekly local paper (or five) then. But maybe it didn't all fit together, with a lot of time spent on following a reporter on his posed rounds with the police, vicar and town hall staff, and then much material in between, which, however informative, interrupted the flow with details of the local area and the owners of the papers, before we came to looking at putting the paper together.
FOUIART4202Y7
More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
15 September
If I'd been able to make a posting yesterday, it would have been about the very large free-standing display that greets one at the foot of the stairs to the bar at Festival central.
It's for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and has been there for a few days, making sure that one knows that this film is around - it includes huge images of Gary Oldman and his fellow cast in character, but against (and within) a pattern of (letters and) numbers, reminiscent of The Matrix, and, I'd almost swear, the original poster for Enigma. 'CULPHUNTERS' leapt out at me, as I mounted the stairs, and there are other utterances of similar significance, no doubt...
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
15 September
If I'd been able to make a posting yesterday, it would have been about the very large free-standing display that greets one at the foot of the stairs to the bar at Festival central.
It's for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and has been there for a few days, making sure that one knows that this film is around - it includes huge images of Gary Oldman and his fellow cast in character, but against (and within) a pattern of (letters and) numbers, reminiscent of The Matrix, and, I'd almost swear, the original poster for Enigma. 'CULPHUNTERS' leapt out at me, as I mounted the stairs, and there are other utterances of similar significance, no doubt...
Tuesday 13 September 2011
Another poem
More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
14 September
Mainly since I can, here is another poem, this time written (for a competition) as a review in verse of a film, In a Better World:
* Contains spoilers *
A boy who played with pipe-bombs
Returning from his coldness
Copyright © Belston Night Works 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
14 September
Mainly since I can, here is another poem, this time written (for a competition) as a review in verse of a film, In a Better World:
* Contains spoilers *
Christian's Journey
A boy who played with pipe-bombs
Nearly kills his friend -
Christian's the bomber,
Saved by his friend's dad:
Elijah's not in pieces
(Though he thought him dead)
And, on the towering silo,
He need not seek his end.
Returning from his coldness
At his mother's death
(He'd made himself heroic -
His father's sternest judge),
The future is reopened,
The truth can be revealed,
And Christian learns of feelings
That his hate concealed.
21 August 2011
Copyright © Belston Night Works 2011
Monday 12 September 2011
Meditating about Lars
This is a review of Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
13 September
* Contains spoilers *
This is a review of Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
I am still musing about this film, not just because I delayed until to-night to watch the special features, and not even because of most of what was in them. So what causes me to continue to muse?
The answer may partly be in the title (as I don't think that 'the Real Girl' refers to Bianca), and where it locates this film. Undeniably, whatever the cast and crew say about her in the so-called featurette, it would not have worked if Ryan Gosling, too, hadn't been good - and he is very good.
In order not to meet the film head on, although I do not really believe that it has any hidden depths, I find myself thinking about the therapy sessions in Good Will Hunting: when I saw the film, nothing could detract from or diminish the fact that Matt Damon's character was there with that of Robin Williams on account of the improbability that - despite the obvious problems posed by the notation alone - he had just been able, in a casual way, not only to pick up advanced mathematical learning from blackboards, but also to become a highly competent practitioner. (The impudent memory that lingers is of the joke that is told about the old couple, when all is said and done.)
Or I reflect on A Beautiful Mind, and what that film wants to suggest about the nature of experiencing schizophrenia, and how it seeks to set academic life, honour and achievements against discordant behaviour. (One could go on to mention Shine, though some disputed that it dealt with mental illness as such.)
I continue musing, knowing that the film gets the viewer to credit certain things, but at the same time - largely - presenting such a utopian picture of acceptance and understanding of another's needs that, if there were any truth in it and it is not to make us feel better about what could be, we would not face so many struggles that seem bound up with life, but, rather, people would bend when they saw how we were hurting.
In a world where people sometimes label one another as 'needy', a word that laughably seems to suggest that the labeller has no needs, I rather doubt it...
Tweet away @TheAgentApsley
Spoonbill revisited
More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
13 September
A few days back, on an inspiration, I pasted in a poem from The Spoonbill Generator (to which I was one of the collaborators), and I thought that I'd just quote from my latest comment on that posting:
With perhaps one exception, I either knew all the contributors to that particular poem personally (one of them was the person who set up The Spoonbill Generator, which I urge you to look at - I believe that I have given a link to the web-site in my posting), or I knew of them through one of those people.
If you look at the whole of TSG, there are many poems that - one way or another - did not work, but this was a good mix of writers, many of whom had (as I had) long experience of The Generator and / or had written in a collaborative vein before.
It also just happened that the poem succeeded in giving rise to a common enthusiasm. Other poems are in TSG's Hall of Fame, and are marked out in the main listing of finished poems by five stars.
All poems were mediated through the webs-site, with each person participating - such were the rules - only able to add one line at a time, so one could think of a couplet, but never add it (except by telepathy!).
Sadly, The Generator has not been functional for some while...
Tweet away @TheAgentApsley
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
13 September
A few days back, on an inspiration, I pasted in a poem from The Spoonbill Generator (to which I was one of the collaborators), and I thought that I'd just quote from my latest comment on that posting:
With perhaps one exception, I either knew all the contributors to that particular poem personally (one of them was the person who set up The Spoonbill Generator, which I urge you to look at - I believe that I have given a link to the web-site in my posting), or I knew of them through one of those people.
If you look at the whole of TSG, there are many poems that - one way or another - did not work, but this was a good mix of writers, many of whom had (as I had) long experience of The Generator and / or had written in a collaborative vein before.
It also just happened that the poem succeeded in giving rise to a common enthusiasm. Other poems are in TSG's Hall of Fame, and are marked out in the main listing of finished poems by five stars.
All poems were mediated through the webs-site, with each person participating - such were the rules - only able to add one line at a time, so one could think of a couplet, but never add it (except by telepathy!).
Sadly, The Generator has not been functional for some while...
Tweet away @TheAgentApsley
Sunday 11 September 2011
News from the Festival
More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
12 September
The Festival web-site now carries the following programme change for the opening night:
TOMBOY * Plus Director! * Now Thu 15 7.45pm (not 7.30)
“One of the great films made by adults for adults… about children” – Little White Lies Film Magazine. TOMBOY treats the issue of sexual identity at an early age with vivacity, grace and intelligence. French director Celine Sciamma (WATER LILIES) will be joining us!
Good news, I guess, for those who didn't get - or didn't want - a ticket for the Opening Film!
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
12 September
The Festival web-site now carries the following programme change for the opening night:
TOMBOY * Plus Director! * Now Thu 15 7.45pm (not 7.30)
“One of the great films made by adults for adults… about children” – Little White Lies Film Magazine. TOMBOY treats the issue of sexual identity at an early age with vivacity, grace and intelligence. French director Celine Sciamma (WATER LILIES) will be joining us!
Good news, I guess, for those who didn't get - or didn't want - a ticket for the Opening Film!
A posting that has lacked a title (until now)
More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 September
I was chatting to a man of the cloth earlier about films and the Festival, and he mentioned one (well, a pair of them) that had been given what I understand not to have been the smoothest ride by the Rotten Tomatoes web-site (well, maybe nothing new about that - the UK critics, for example, all wrote in a way that disappointed me about Sarah's Key), but which he thought worth a view: The Gods Must Be Crazy I + II.
As the Internet Movie Database, IMDB (www.imdb.com), also gives a voice for those who do not review films for a living, I have just casually looked up this title, and it seems that I might as well take him up on the offer of borrowing the DVDs some time...
To-night, though, is too soon, as I plan to delve into the backlog of home-viewing and catch up with Lars and the Real Girl in time for the release of Melancholia.
Tweet away @TheAgentApsley
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 September
I was chatting to a man of the cloth earlier about films and the Festival, and he mentioned one (well, a pair of them) that had been given what I understand not to have been the smoothest ride by the Rotten Tomatoes web-site (well, maybe nothing new about that - the UK critics, for example, all wrote in a way that disappointed me about Sarah's Key), but which he thought worth a view: The Gods Must Be Crazy I + II.
As the Internet Movie Database, IMDB (www.imdb.com), also gives a voice for those who do not review films for a living, I have just casually looked up this title, and it seems that I might as well take him up on the offer of borrowing the DVDs some time...
To-night, though, is too soon, as I plan to delve into the backlog of home-viewing and catch up with Lars and the Real Girl in time for the release of Melancholia.
Tweet away @TheAgentApsley
Saturday 10 September 2011
Revisiting the horrific mask
Some comments on Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage) (1960)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 September
Some comments on Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage) (1960)
* Contains spoilers *
As there are no real developments on the Festival web-site, an afterthought on Eyes Without a Face (1960) : maybe the tenuous appearance of something to shock and disturb belies a deeper intention to amuse and divert.
After all, the dogs and how they are acquired (let alone what they are for) are passed off in a matter-of-fact way, but they do not bear the weight of examination, nor does why what is being shown done by one person at the opening needs two later on, save that we could not be misdirected that we are seeing a potential victim, rather than a perpetrator. Means of identification, too, may have been different fifty years ago, but, in the particular circumstances, it does not seem likely that a body's being established to be someone's relative could be as easy as it appears - and the thinking behind doing it does not seem to have been put it, because there is the inconvenient matter of a fiancé.
If this were viewed again, with all these elements (and, maybe, even the gruesome surgery) seen not as attempts to be plausible, but rather to tickle and titillate, how far would we then be from seeing this - as another casual critic has described it - as the greatest horror film ever, and instead as a jocular symphony played on the elements of the genre?
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Friday 9 September 2011
A tribute to times past : 'Big Custard', a multi-author work
More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 September
Big Custard
Warm in nutritious mulch, we germinate, [E Greejius]
And of ourselves we feed; some lesser fry [Roland]
Lie dormant still, by spring's alarm untouched, [P]
From summer’s bounty barred. Why, when the years [E Greejius]
Give notice of denial, may we not [Roland]
Like locksmiths turn our newest tumblers loose [P]
Upon the lawn, and, from a brimming jug [Roland]
Drown somnolence in alcoholic cheer [P]
And deep contentment? No; for when we strive [Roland]
To summon up the moon's most hoary face [P]
In stiff remembrance, clouded with remorse [Roland]
The merest hint of which would spell the end [The Agent Apsley]
Of time's imposture, all our withered shadows [P]
Die a-borning, pent beyond the veil. [Roland]
How best conjure, by faith, such fruitful yield [E Greejius]
When all around the land lies burnt and sere [TG]
with stagnant salt-pans, dearth's memorial. [E Greejius]
We strive, but striving know that we shall fail [TG]
In such endeavours as, when disavowed, [Roland]
Will tempt the feet of those who walk the waves [P]
In saviour's guise. Yet awe, in sighs of sleep [Roland]
Will cause our eyes to widen, noses flare [TG]
Like stallions in the dawn. Hope glimmers still [KT]
Though in another's eyes; and in defeat [Roland]
Our troubled curses make the sun turn pale [P]
Though not so pale, perhaps, as heretofore [Roland]
For, strengthened now by victims' blood, it turns [P]
In orbit caustic, shadowing a tryst [Roland]
A spiteful meeting at the coven's wrath [P]
Which heralds tragedy for this sad realm [TG]
Yet even so, the lily spares no scent [Roland]
Nor stints her sensual promise of cool joys. [E Greejius]
Not she, immune to treason nor to time [Roland]
And yet, still slave to him who comes to all [TG]
Forcing rash demands upon the soil [Grayman]
He warms, with finger gold and burnished thumb. [Roland]
When, through the decaying years, our barren [E Greejius]
Limbs upbraid the heavens' dial, and when [Roland]
Our weary hearts beat slower but beat sounder, [E Greejius]
Our shining, worn escapements lose their edge [Roland]
Keeping no glowing archive for our solace. [E Greejius]
This it remains, and the remainder thus [(trad)]
Itself engenders its own residues [E Greejius]
In sallow time's bewildered almanack [Roland]
Harbouring long-lapsed trysts to no good end; [E Greejius]
And when the key is turned, when all is known [Roland]
Of fecund or of sterile, quick or dead, [E Greejius]
When swings the final door, the fatal hinge [Roland]
Whhose groans betray the ravages of rust [TG]
Too long untended, and too far behind [Roland]
The reckonings of Tophet ... Ay! What then? [E Greejius]
Roof shall abase to floor, and floor to ground [Roland]
Before the pristine actuary-magus; [E Greejius]
His propehcy but piles of ruins [The Agnet Apsley]
Despite the ivy, ineffectual buttress; [E Greejius]
Tower shall slope to turf, pile fall to pond [Roland]
Leaf cling to leaf, concealing all the paths [TG]
Earth harbours; milk shall curdle in the byre [Roland]
Wine in the butt degrade to vinegar. [E Greejius]
In desolate lament , each lovelorn bleat [Roland]
Falls fallow on the thin unheeded air. [E Greejius]
And I, whom all betrayers have abjured [Roland]
In strict adherence to their solemn curse, [The Agent Apsley]
And thee, forever wandering, possessed [Roland]
By burden's knowledge of the ghost of time [P]
Dissembled quite; how shall we, sister, fare [Roland]
Together at the edge of temperance [P]
And on the very brink of sanity? [Roland]
I tremble quite, envisaging our doom [TG]
Swept, nameless, down the brackish torrent - yet, [E Greejius]
Some stain, by us impasted on the silence [Roland]
As 'twere th'embodiment of rime, [The Agent Apsley]
Shall print us immemorial as stones [Roland]
And when, at last, Time's palsied sands have run [TG]
Their paltry course, and 'neath the final dust [Roland]
The tigers of indifference repose, [E Greejius]
The muscled threat is but disguised [Grayman]
Anew, and rises yet again, an atom's breadth [Roland]
Away from penitence, the like of which [The Agent Apsley]
Was never dreamt by cranium of yore [Roland]
Even in ghostly ecstasy. Indeed, [E Greejius]
But for the haste of man, the tears would flow [The Agent Apsley]
In all-consuming torrent, washing out [Roland]
Life's thinnest crust onto the shore [P]
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 September
Nothing to do with the Festival, but anyway : 'Big Custard'
(A very unrepresentative sample from The Spoonbill Generator's 'Hall of Fame')
Big Custard
Warm in nutritious mulch, we germinate, [E Greejius]
And of ourselves we feed; some lesser fry [Roland]
Lie dormant still, by spring's alarm untouched, [P]
From summer’s bounty barred. Why, when the years [E Greejius]
Give notice of denial, may we not [Roland]
Like locksmiths turn our newest tumblers loose [P]
Upon the lawn, and, from a brimming jug [Roland]
Drown somnolence in alcoholic cheer [P]
And deep contentment? No; for when we strive [Roland]
To summon up the moon's most hoary face [P]
In stiff remembrance, clouded with remorse [Roland]
The merest hint of which would spell the end [The Agent Apsley]
Of time's imposture, all our withered shadows [P]
Die a-borning, pent beyond the veil. [Roland]
How best conjure, by faith, such fruitful yield [E Greejius]
When all around the land lies burnt and sere [TG]
with stagnant salt-pans, dearth's memorial. [E Greejius]
We strive, but striving know that we shall fail [TG]
In such endeavours as, when disavowed, [Roland]
Will tempt the feet of those who walk the waves [P]
In saviour's guise. Yet awe, in sighs of sleep [Roland]
Will cause our eyes to widen, noses flare [TG]
Like stallions in the dawn. Hope glimmers still [KT]
Though in another's eyes; and in defeat [Roland]
Our troubled curses make the sun turn pale [P]
Though not so pale, perhaps, as heretofore [Roland]
For, strengthened now by victims' blood, it turns [P]
In orbit caustic, shadowing a tryst [Roland]
A spiteful meeting at the coven's wrath [P]
Which heralds tragedy for this sad realm [TG]
Yet even so, the lily spares no scent [Roland]
Nor stints her sensual promise of cool joys. [E Greejius]
Not she, immune to treason nor to time [Roland]
And yet, still slave to him who comes to all [TG]
Forcing rash demands upon the soil [Grayman]
He warms, with finger gold and burnished thumb. [Roland]
When, through the decaying years, our barren [E Greejius]
Limbs upbraid the heavens' dial, and when [Roland]
Our weary hearts beat slower but beat sounder, [E Greejius]
Our shining, worn escapements lose their edge [Roland]
Keeping no glowing archive for our solace. [E Greejius]
This it remains, and the remainder thus [(trad)]
Itself engenders its own residues [E Greejius]
In sallow time's bewildered almanack [Roland]
Harbouring long-lapsed trysts to no good end; [E Greejius]
And when the key is turned, when all is known [Roland]
Of fecund or of sterile, quick or dead, [E Greejius]
When swings the final door, the fatal hinge [Roland]
Whhose groans betray the ravages of rust [TG]
Too long untended, and too far behind [Roland]
The reckonings of Tophet ... Ay! What then? [E Greejius]
Roof shall abase to floor, and floor to ground [Roland]
Before the pristine actuary-magus; [E Greejius]
His propehcy but piles of ruins [The Agnet Apsley]
Despite the ivy, ineffectual buttress; [E Greejius]
Tower shall slope to turf, pile fall to pond [Roland]
Leaf cling to leaf, concealing all the paths [TG]
Earth harbours; milk shall curdle in the byre [Roland]
Wine in the butt degrade to vinegar. [E Greejius]
In desolate lament , each lovelorn bleat [Roland]
Falls fallow on the thin unheeded air. [E Greejius]
And I, whom all betrayers have abjured [Roland]
In strict adherence to their solemn curse, [The Agent Apsley]
And thee, forever wandering, possessed [Roland]
By burden's knowledge of the ghost of time [P]
Dissembled quite; how shall we, sister, fare [Roland]
Together at the edge of temperance [P]
And on the very brink of sanity? [Roland]
I tremble quite, envisaging our doom [TG]
Swept, nameless, down the brackish torrent - yet, [E Greejius]
Some stain, by us impasted on the silence [Roland]
As 'twere th'embodiment of rime, [The Agent Apsley]
Shall print us immemorial as stones [Roland]
And when, at last, Time's palsied sands have run [TG]
Their paltry course, and 'neath the final dust [Roland]
The tigers of indifference repose, [E Greejius]
The muscled threat is but disguised [Grayman]
Anew, and rises yet again, an atom's breadth [Roland]
Away from penitence, the like of which [The Agent Apsley]
Was never dreamt by cranium of yore [Roland]
Even in ghostly ecstasy. Indeed, [E Greejius]
But for the haste of man, the tears would flow [The Agent Apsley]
In all-consuming torrent, washing out [Roland]
Life's thinnest crust onto the shore [P]
Festival publications (1) - a comment (or two)
More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 September
Restraining the impulse to bring an eye trained in consistency too closely to bear, I shall just observe concerning TAKE ONE that:
* The Camera That Changed The World + Dont [sic] Look Back are on on as follows (not as stated, p.5): Monday 19 September at 3.30 p.m.
* The interview with Dimensions' director Sloane U'Ren is compelling (p. 1)
* There are other screenings than those listed of Tomboy (p. 4 - also on Friday 16 September at 12.45 p.m.) and Red State (p. 5 - also on Tuesday 20 September at 11.00 p.m.)
* Hugh Paterson's account of the 'forest screening' of Robin Hood was fun, and I look forward to making the film's acquaintance again in the Great Hall at Trinity
* Silent Running is being screened at 10.30 p.m. on Saturday 24 September (not in the morning)
* It would be good to apply 'a house style' to the presentation, outside of reviews and interviews, of dates and times
Tweet away @TheAgentApsley
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 September
Restraining the impulse to bring an eye trained in consistency too closely to bear, I shall just observe concerning TAKE ONE that:
* The Camera That Changed The World + Dont [sic] Look Back are on on as follows (not as stated, p.5): Monday 19 September at 3.30 p.m.
* The interview with Dimensions' director Sloane U'Ren is compelling (p. 1)
* There are other screenings than those listed of Tomboy (p. 4 - also on Friday 16 September at 12.45 p.m.) and Red State (p. 5 - also on Tuesday 20 September at 11.00 p.m.)
* Hugh Paterson's account of the 'forest screening' of Robin Hood was fun, and I look forward to making the film's acquaintance again in the Great Hall at Trinity
* Silent Running is being screened at 10.30 p.m. on Saturday 24 September (not in the morning)
* It would be good to apply 'a house style' to the presentation, outside of reviews and interviews, of dates and times
Tweet away @TheAgentApsley
Festival publications (1) - updated update
More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 September
There is now a link to the actual pages of TAKE ONE, so I need say no more than Happy reading!:
http://issuu.com/camfilmtrust/docs/takeone-08.09.11?mode=embed
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 September
There is now a link to the actual pages of TAKE ONE, so I need say no more than Happy reading!:
http://issuu.com/camfilmtrust/docs/takeone-08.09.11?mode=embed
Festival publications (1) - update
More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 September
Well, a link hasn't appeared that takes you to a PDF file (or the like) of TAKE ONE, but there's now a list of three entries
http://www.cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk/review/take-one/
which reference some of the ones that I picked out before, and which should (if the links were functioning) take you on to read more:
Interview
Sloane U’ren, Director of Dimensions: A Line, a Loop, a Tangle of Threads
There’s no room for regret in a world without time travel. If you can’t quantum leap, you must make your own luck – and if you can’t afford to follow your dreams, sooner sell your home than your soul. Read more
Special Feature
Meet the Dutch Master: JOS STELLING
He may not be a household name here in the UK, but Dutch director Jos Stelling has endearingly developed his directorial style since childhood in such a way that his films exude their own personality. Read more
Review
Hold the Front Page!
Some journalists will do anything for a story. Whilst the plot of ACE IN THE HOLE is lent an unexpected topicality by press events in the US, that is not the only reason it makes for such an excellent and prescient movie experience 60 years after its original release. Read more
If critic Top Ten lists are to be believed, CITIZEN KANE is the greatest achievement of the film medium so far, the very pinnacle of cinematic perfection. Read more
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 September
Well, a link hasn't appeared that takes you to a PDF file (or the like) of TAKE ONE, but there's now a list of three entries
http://www.cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk/review/take-one/
which reference some of the ones that I picked out before, and which should (if the links were functioning) take you on to read more:
Interview
Sloane U’ren, Director of Dimensions: A Line, a Loop, a Tangle of Threads
There’s no room for regret in a world without time travel. If you can’t quantum leap, you must make your own luck – and if you can’t afford to follow your dreams, sooner sell your home than your soul. Read more
Special Feature
Meet the Dutch Master: JOS STELLING
He may not be a household name here in the UK, but Dutch director Jos Stelling has endearingly developed his directorial style since childhood in such a way that his films exude their own personality. Read more
Review
Hold the Front Page!
Some journalists will do anything for a story. Whilst the plot of ACE IN THE HOLE is lent an unexpected topicality by press events in the US, that is not the only reason it makes for such an excellent and prescient movie experience 60 years after its original release. Read more
If critic Top Ten lists are to be believed, CITIZEN KANE is the greatest achievement of the film medium so far, the very pinnacle of cinematic perfection. Read more
Thursday 8 September 2011
Time enough for travel
More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 September
After Ant Neely kindly alerted me to one of them, I have made time to view some of the dimensions of Dimensions on youtube: so far (and I may stop here - see below), I've seen the trailer, an interview with Ant, and also with Olivia Llewellyn - not, I gather, that one should wish one's life away (or maybe ask to be back where things were different), but it's all making me wish that 21 September were closer, as this whole project looks really inventive and enthused by a small group of people working hard to making it happen.
There are going to be so many good things at the Festival in-between, so that, although finding time for blogging seems pressed now, it will seem com-pressed then, I'm sure that I'll make it. Do I, though, have to brush up on Everett, the 'many universes' theory, and quantum mechanics whilst I still have the chance, or can I rely on my sketchy memory of such things...? (I'm guessing not!)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 September
After Ant Neely kindly alerted me to one of them, I have made time to view some of the dimensions of Dimensions on youtube: so far (and I may stop here - see below), I've seen the trailer, an interview with Ant, and also with Olivia Llewellyn - not, I gather, that one should wish one's life away (or maybe ask to be back where things were different), but it's all making me wish that 21 September were closer, as this whole project looks really inventive and enthused by a small group of people working hard to making it happen.
There are going to be so many good things at the Festival in-between, so that, although finding time for blogging seems pressed now, it will seem com-pressed then, I'm sure that I'll make it. Do I, though, have to brush up on Everett, the 'many universes' theory, and quantum mechanics whilst I still have the chance, or can I rely on my sketchy memory of such things...? (I'm guessing not!)
Festival publications (1)
More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 September
As well as the very well-presented Festival brochure (thanks to Tony Jones and his team), full of interesting information about what is showing, when, where, and what it will cost*, and available at the Picturehouse (or to download as a PDF file on the home-page) or at:
http://issuu.com/camfilmtrust/docs/cff31_brochure?mode=embed
there is also TAKE ONE, an eight-page A5 booklet, the first issue of which I found had come out to-day (and also available at the Picturehouse - or should I refer to it as Festival Central?).
I think that it is going replace the Festival Daily from previous years, and will appear less frequently (but I undertand that the on-line reviews are still going to be added every day).
As I have not yet found the text of the booklet on the Festival web-site**, I shall attempt to give a flavour of it later in lieu of a link, but can say for now that, amongst other things, it mentions:
* Dimensions (the whole inside front cover)
* Ace In The Hole (a half-page with Citizen Kane)
* Information about Jos Stelling (with a large photo) and the screening / Q&A
* Robin Hood (a full page - already shown under Films in the Forest, and now to be screened in Trinity College)
* The Camera That Changed The World (two-thirds of a page)
More of TAKE ONE (issue one) in due course - and, if there is one, a link... (now below**)
*Again, I recommend the Festival passes. For staff and customers alike, it was all a bit confusing at first, but it can now be stated: passes are on sale for £25, £50 or £75 (the last one is Blue, so I guess that the other two, in order, are Red and White, but just as easy to specify the value, I think), and you then receives that amount of credit.
Credit can only be used on festival screenings, so it is important to estimate accurately (not too much, not too little) how much will be spent overall. The chosen credit is stored on a card to spend by buying tickets, which (in addition to the discount from Picturehouse membership) gives, respectively, 20%, 25% and 30% off the ticket-price.
With the Blue card (and probably the £50 card, because some information appears contradictory), the holder also gets free tea and coffee at the bar, which - although not free beer - cannot be bad!
**Well, it's supposed to be there, and it has its own web-page, but it isn't just now:
http://www.cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk/review/festival-daily-online/
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 September
As well as the very well-presented Festival brochure (thanks to Tony Jones and his team), full of interesting information about what is showing, when, where, and what it will cost*, and available at the Picturehouse (or to download as a PDF file on the home-page) or at:
http://issuu.com/camfilmtrust/docs/cff31_brochure?mode=embed
there is also TAKE ONE, an eight-page A5 booklet, the first issue of which I found had come out to-day (and also available at the Picturehouse - or should I refer to it as Festival Central?).
I think that it is going replace the Festival Daily from previous years, and will appear less frequently (but I undertand that the on-line reviews are still going to be added every day).
As I have not yet found the text of the booklet on the Festival web-site**, I shall attempt to give a flavour of it later in lieu of a link, but can say for now that, amongst other things, it mentions:
* Dimensions (the whole inside front cover)
* Ace In The Hole (a half-page with Citizen Kane)
* Information about Jos Stelling (with a large photo) and the screening / Q&A
* Robin Hood (a full page - already shown under Films in the Forest, and now to be screened in Trinity College)
* The Camera That Changed The World (two-thirds of a page)
More of TAKE ONE (issue one) in due course - and, if there is one, a link... (now below**)
*Again, I recommend the Festival passes. For staff and customers alike, it was all a bit confusing at first, but it can now be stated: passes are on sale for £25, £50 or £75 (the last one is Blue, so I guess that the other two, in order, are Red and White, but just as easy to specify the value, I think), and you then receives that amount of credit.
Credit can only be used on festival screenings, so it is important to estimate accurately (not too much, not too little) how much will be spent overall. The chosen credit is stored on a card to spend by buying tickets, which (in addition to the discount from Picturehouse membership) gives, respectively, 20%, 25% and 30% off the ticket-price.
With the Blue card (and probably the £50 card, because some information appears contradictory), the holder also gets free tea and coffee at the bar, which - although not free beer - cannot be bad!
**Well, it's supposed to be there, and it has its own web-page, but it isn't just now:
http://www.cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk/review/festival-daily-online/
More melodramatic than horrific?
More views of - or at (and before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 September
Reactions to last night's special screening of Eyes Without A Face (1960) (screened because it is said to have informed Almodovar's latest, The Skin I Live In, whereas others whose comments I read had not had that unique benefit of seeing it on the type of screen on which it belongs - a real plus for Festival and other screenings):
I'm guessing that if you don't actually laugh at a film that isn't meant to be laughed at, but nonetheless snort from time to time and perhaps shake your head in disbelief (or inwardly sigh, or cringe) at what is being shown that it may not have worked (for you).
Well, it didn't for me, I'm afraid. From the start, Maurice Jarre may have been asked to conjure up a certain flavour with a tune that kept being used in connection with the latest victim, but, just as with what was depicted, it all seemed too whimsical. (That is with the exception of one sequence of scenes that - perhaps for no reason (see below, where I re-publish comments that I made on another web-site last night) - would have some in the audience averting or closing eyes of their own.)
In fact, still keeping that sequence apart, I was inescapably reminded of other features such as Thoroughly Modern Millie (not just because I delighted in Julie Andrews as a boy!) and all those adventures about Fu Manchu and his despicably beastly plots - OK, it's arguable that those films took from Eyes Without A Face and lightened the tone a little, and that I am reading that lightness back into the original, but I really don't think so. It really had the feel more of Arsenic and Old Lace, and of the others already mentioned, with the odd dose of chloroform knocking one person out for hours, and a sizeable thump over the head with a bottle having only a momentary effect.
But on to those other postings... (NB spoilers ahead!)
First, commenting on the graphic scenes, in response to someone who had liked 'the music, atmosphere, photography, the creepiness, the ending...', but not the detail of the police's undercover plot (which, true enough, had made no sense whatever), or the faked surgery:
'I thoroughly agree - just saw the film in a special cinema screening this evening.
'What I would go on to say is that, if you want to show something gruesome (and, yes, they defied expectations that the shot would cut away when what appears to be a scalpel appears to make an incision), it should look to the audience better than if you hadn't tried at all.
'Anyone who knows the fake knives with which actors regularly have their throats cut on stage wouldn't credit that this was remotely happening, whereas I (at least) still don't know how the infamous scene in Un Chien Andalou was done. After that moment, any notion that one is being presented with something shocking, rather than something that is meant to be shocking, has disappeared.'
Then on the character of Christiane (the daughter who has the eyes, but not the face to go with them), whom some had found 'enchanting', and 'beautiful in spirit', with her father being 'the real beast'. I expressed a contrary view (not, I hope, contrarily):
'I struggle to see how she is enchanting or any real moral contrast to her father (except facially, after she has been given another's face for at least the second time, and before that - skin-deep - beauty fades):
'We seem led, by her elaborately discovering where Edna is (it appears that she should not be there, and does not know anything about the operating-theatre, although she knows where the dogs are) and - not too intelligently or sensitively - flashing her deformed face at Edna just as she touches her and wakes her up, to the suggestion that she may not have know before how she has been operated on or what tissue has been used.
'That scene ends with Edna's scream (we don't know whether that is heard), and there is nothing to indicate what happens afterwards, but just that the surgery has still taken place (I believe that it is a scene of Edna in bed with bandages, leading to her escape and apparent jump (with, I think, another scream, though perhaps Christiane somehow doesn't hear it)).
'Whether, somehow, Christiane had not been complicit before, there can be no doubting now that she is fully aware that others are being maimed to benefit her. Even before that, she knows that some earlier victim's body (even if she does not know that she was a victim or the source of her facial graft) has been passed off as her own in burial.
'I do not find it convincing that she merely acquiesces in all this because of the strength of her father (her defiance in going off and finding Edna indicates otherwise), that she hides what she knows from herself because it is too awful to believe, or that her prying, as we are told, and finding her own death notice (or the order of service of her own funeral) really serves any useful purpose than confirming what the sharp-witted will already have surmised.
'Certainly, she moves as if she is some higher being, but she is no angel, and what she does by releasing the last victim (whatever will then happen to her), and letting the dogs and then doves out does not turn her into the carefree creature walking away from us with a bird on her finger that she appears.'
At any rate, my reactions to last night at 6.30 - really not sure, now, if I want to go through more of the same with Almodovar, not least as his Broken Embraces (2010) left me deeply unimpressed: again, I'm guessing that, if watching the film on DVD leaves you deriving more benefit from the deleted scenes (which, for my money, were far more inventive and funnier than the film itself - making one think that Pedro's own film must have been 'edited' in the way depicted in relation to the film within the film!), you were better off not going to the cinema to see it...
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 September
Reactions to last night's special screening of Eyes Without A Face (1960) (screened because it is said to have informed Almodovar's latest, The Skin I Live In, whereas others whose comments I read had not had that unique benefit of seeing it on the type of screen on which it belongs - a real plus for Festival and other screenings):
I'm guessing that if you don't actually laugh at a film that isn't meant to be laughed at, but nonetheless snort from time to time and perhaps shake your head in disbelief (or inwardly sigh, or cringe) at what is being shown that it may not have worked (for you).
Well, it didn't for me, I'm afraid. From the start, Maurice Jarre may have been asked to conjure up a certain flavour with a tune that kept being used in connection with the latest victim, but, just as with what was depicted, it all seemed too whimsical. (That is with the exception of one sequence of scenes that - perhaps for no reason (see below, where I re-publish comments that I made on another web-site last night) - would have some in the audience averting or closing eyes of their own.)
In fact, still keeping that sequence apart, I was inescapably reminded of other features such as Thoroughly Modern Millie (not just because I delighted in Julie Andrews as a boy!) and all those adventures about Fu Manchu and his despicably beastly plots - OK, it's arguable that those films took from Eyes Without A Face and lightened the tone a little, and that I am reading that lightness back into the original, but I really don't think so. It really had the feel more of Arsenic and Old Lace, and of the others already mentioned, with the odd dose of chloroform knocking one person out for hours, and a sizeable thump over the head with a bottle having only a momentary effect.
But on to those other postings... (NB spoilers ahead!)
First, commenting on the graphic scenes, in response to someone who had liked 'the music, atmosphere, photography, the creepiness, the ending...', but not the detail of the police's undercover plot (which, true enough, had made no sense whatever), or the faked surgery:
'I thoroughly agree - just saw the film in a special cinema screening this evening.
'What I would go on to say is that, if you want to show something gruesome (and, yes, they defied expectations that the shot would cut away when what appears to be a scalpel appears to make an incision), it should look to the audience better than if you hadn't tried at all.
'Anyone who knows the fake knives with which actors regularly have their throats cut on stage wouldn't credit that this was remotely happening, whereas I (at least) still don't know how the infamous scene in Un Chien Andalou was done. After that moment, any notion that one is being presented with something shocking, rather than something that is meant to be shocking, has disappeared.'
Then on the character of Christiane (the daughter who has the eyes, but not the face to go with them), whom some had found 'enchanting', and 'beautiful in spirit', with her father being 'the real beast'. I expressed a contrary view (not, I hope, contrarily):
'I struggle to see how she is enchanting or any real moral contrast to her father (except facially, after she has been given another's face for at least the second time, and before that - skin-deep - beauty fades):
'We seem led, by her elaborately discovering where Edna is (it appears that she should not be there, and does not know anything about the operating-theatre, although she knows where the dogs are) and - not too intelligently or sensitively - flashing her deformed face at Edna just as she touches her and wakes her up, to the suggestion that she may not have know before how she has been operated on or what tissue has been used.
'That scene ends with Edna's scream (we don't know whether that is heard), and there is nothing to indicate what happens afterwards, but just that the surgery has still taken place (I believe that it is a scene of Edna in bed with bandages, leading to her escape and apparent jump (with, I think, another scream, though perhaps Christiane somehow doesn't hear it)).
'Whether, somehow, Christiane had not been complicit before, there can be no doubting now that she is fully aware that others are being maimed to benefit her. Even before that, she knows that some earlier victim's body (even if she does not know that she was a victim or the source of her facial graft) has been passed off as her own in burial.
'I do not find it convincing that she merely acquiesces in all this because of the strength of her father (her defiance in going off and finding Edna indicates otherwise), that she hides what she knows from herself because it is too awful to believe, or that her prying, as we are told, and finding her own death notice (or the order of service of her own funeral) really serves any useful purpose than confirming what the sharp-witted will already have surmised.
'Certainly, she moves as if she is some higher being, but she is no angel, and what she does by releasing the last victim (whatever will then happen to her), and letting the dogs and then doves out does not turn her into the carefree creature walking away from us with a bird on her finger that she appears.'
At any rate, my reactions to last night at 6.30 - really not sure, now, if I want to go through more of the same with Almodovar, not least as his Broken Embraces (2010) left me deeply unimpressed: again, I'm guessing that, if watching the film on DVD leaves you deriving more benefit from the deleted scenes (which, for my money, were far more inventive and funnier than the film itself - making one think that Pedro's own film must have been 'edited' in the way depicted in relation to the film within the film!), you were better off not going to the cinema to see it...
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