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20 April
Well, HM Queen Elizabeth II is an attendee, because (as is well known) she has those - called attendants, such as ladies-in-waiting - who attend on her.
However, if there is a royal screening or performance, Her Royal Majesty is no more than anyone else there an attendee just for attending it.
Likewise, with a conference: those who attend conferences are (conference) delegates, not attendees.
Picking up, now, where, a week ago, I left off - this sentence has been sponsored by the Royal Society for the Promotion of Commas! - I must turn to that implicit, and vexed (or, rather, misunderstood), question of pairs, as implied above:
I used the words 'attendee' and 'attendant' in the first sentence, and they are a pair, but not a Matching Pair in the way that, say, the legal terms mortgagor and mortgagee or warrantor and warrantee are*.
PROVIDED THAT one knows what one is talking about, one can infer what the pairs will be, which is why I have to go back and say what a mortgage is.
The word comes to us, from French, and literally means a dead glove, maybe even gauntlet: interesting though it would be, for me, to delve into what that origin is, it is just helpful to think in terms of the highly successful board-game Monopoly®, where mortgages are all part of the play.
So, if strapped for cash** (for example, because of landing on Mayfair when it has two hotels on it - and the owner of the hotels noticed before the next player shook the dice), or just because one wants to build said hotels and borrow the money, one can always mortgage the property / properties - to the value stipulated by the values on the game-card for it / them - to the bank to raise it. The property (or properties) is (are) the security for the loan.
Those who have played the game often enough will then know that the game-card(s), each one of which (in the game) is the title-deeds for the property (or properties), has (or have) to be turned the other way up. This act signifies two things:
(1) The player cannot, until the mortgage is redeemed (i.e. discharged), charge other players who land on it rent, etc. (so they get away scot free, as the phrase has it), because the table of what is ordinarily payable is on the other side of the card, which is now face down;
(2) More importantly, that the property (properties) is (are) no longer the player's to do with freely, within the rules (unless, of course, several more of the players in the game are bankers, in which case they make up their own rules!), as he or she wishes - the bank has its security for the money that was lent*** in it (or them), and, unless the player (perhaps as another banker) slily turns it back the other way up, hoping that no one will notice (as if people cheat at cards or in other games, even life), the mortgage needs to be redeemed first.
So what?, you ask, infuriated, bored, tired, or longing for a drink / death / redemption...
Well, the act of mortgaging is carried out by by the player who mortgages the property to the bank, so he (or she) is the mortgagor - and the bank, to whom it was mortgaged, is the mortgagee.
Exactly as with employer and employee, except that, with a mortgage, it may be less immediately obvious who is doing what, complicated by 'applying for a mortgage', the bank (or building society) 'making a mortgage offer', when was it really happening is somebody wanting a mortgage on certain terms, and the lender**** considering it all, and offering a mortgage, on those - or less good - terms.
The act of mortgaging remains what the owner of the property does. Which is obvious with a remortgage, because one knows, although one has a mortgage, who the owner is - it far less intuitively clear when the act of purchase of the property is simultaneous with mortgaging it to secure the loan (needed) to buy it.
Nonetheless, John Stuart Mill takes out the mortgage, mortgaging Black Acre to Z Building Society, and so is the mortgagor, never (in this case*****) the mortgagee.
Finally, though, other words do not pair up with -or and -ee (or, as with employer above, -er), but people (who should know better) try to make them: a bit like making an elephant co-habit with a porcupine in the hope that they will like each other and get married...
So we have, where we started, this crazy fiction that people who are at a conference or meeting are attendees - sometimes people may be 'in attendance', rather than 'present', but they are not attendees. Who, after all, is the attender, if they are? Well, they are themselves, I suppose...
Moving on to lender. Please, please do not be tempted by those who want to say that there is such a thing as a lendee - any more than there is any room for needing this stupid invention of tutee:
Table of Correspondences (non-exhaustive)
1. Borrower / Lender
2. Tutor / Student (or Pupil)
3. Donor of a power of attorney / Donee of the power
4. Buyer / Seller
5. Purchaser / Vendor
In a closing word, I shall say why I gave the last two pairs. There are a good few reasons:
(a) There is no Vendee;
(b) (No more than Buyee);
(c) The pairs don't mix - any more than the elephant and its 'spiky friend' above - and it is not My buyer is having problems with his vendor..., except in the sort of estate agency where your are definitely being charged too much commission;
(d) By inference, there are other real pairs that have not been mentioned, and where the one that lures may not exist - or mean what it seems!
A starter for ten:If someone who gives an assurance is a guarantor, who is the person who receives it? (Go here, if you want a clue...******)
End-notes
* One could go on, with legator and legatee, donor and donee...
** I have no notion where that came to us from, any more than - as mentioned in a conversation with friend Chris the other day - I have no truck with....
*** I quote the Order of Service:
Priest Some unfortunates would say 'loaned'
Congregation Verily, they are to be pitied
All Amen
**** If you hold 'lender', we will return to it later (D.V.).
***** Whereas, if John Stuart Mill's neighbour Virginia Woolf owns Blue Acre and needs some readies, she could mortgage it to him, and he would be a mortgagee.
****** Someone who says that he is someone else's Power of Attorney is actually telling you that he (or she) is a piece of paper!
(He or she is the donee of the power, but could also - as with the merged notion of solicitor / barrister in the States - be viewed as the donor's attorney.)
As if all that weren't enough...
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Friday 20 April 2012
Friday 13 April 2012
The Last Staple
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13 April
No, not, o true Tolstoyans, The Last Station, but Staple!
The simple question being: why cannot the stapler, a bit like the oil warning light, tell you when you are using the last of a row of what, gummed together, always looks like a lot of staples when you load it?
If it did, not only would you not go to staple a document - usually that document (and six copies of it) with which you need to rush out of the office - and fail and have to find one that is loaded, in all your frustration and anguish, but nor would your colleagues.
For everyone assumes, which is neither rational nor necessarily fair, that someone else, at a less pressing time, should have filled the stapler up, because he or she knew that he or she had just emptied it, instead of lazily using another.
Whereas, as I should like to suggest (and Dirty Harry would agree), none of us - and this is not meant to have gravitas, unless you choose to read a profound insight into it - knows when it is The Last Staple. (So I say nothing about Wise and Foolish virgins, and trimming wicks and filling with oil.)
End-notes
* Of which Bach treated in Cantata No. 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140.
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13 April
No, not, o true Tolstoyans, The Last Station, but Staple!
The simple question being: why cannot the stapler, a bit like the oil warning light, tell you when you are using the last of a row of what, gummed together, always looks like a lot of staples when you load it?
If it did, not only would you not go to staple a document - usually that document (and six copies of it) with which you need to rush out of the office - and fail and have to find one that is loaded, in all your frustration and anguish, but nor would your colleagues.
For everyone assumes, which is neither rational nor necessarily fair, that someone else, at a less pressing time, should have filled the stapler up, because he or she knew that he or she had just emptied it, instead of lazily using another.
Whereas, as I should like to suggest (and Dirty Harry would agree), none of us - and this is not meant to have gravitas, unless you choose to read a profound insight into it - knows when it is The Last Staple. (So I say nothing about Wise and Foolish virgins, and trimming wicks and filling with oil.)
End-notes
* Of which Bach treated in Cantata No. 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140.
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Thursday 12 April 2012
A deserved winner at Cannes (2)
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13 April
Thanks to the offices of Rotten Tomatoes, it is heartening to have found a worthwhile review of this film from Peter Bradshaw.
But he really doesn't look that young, any more than some of the jazzers or classical musicians, who show you how they looked ten years or more ago...
On the poster for the film, this comment* - from the London Film Festival - seemed pertinent:
Hugely impressive... confirms Ceylan's status as a master of cinema...Chekhovian in its piercing insights
End-notes
* In my scrawl, it looks like that of Geoff Archer** - of only the former name was I certain, and it should have been Geoff Andrew!
** Sure some Freudian thing going on!
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13 April
Thanks to the offices of Rotten Tomatoes, it is heartening to have found a worthwhile review of this film from Peter Bradshaw.
But he really doesn't look that young, any more than some of the jazzers or classical musicians, who show you how they looked ten years or more ago...
On the poster for the film, this comment* - from the London Film Festival - seemed pertinent:
Hugely impressive... confirms Ceylan's status as a master of cinema...Chekhovian in its piercing insights
End-notes
* In my scrawl, it looks like that of Geoff Archer** - of only the former name was I certain, and it should have been Geoff Andrew!
** Sure some Freudian thing going on!
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The Cabin in the Woods - with whom?
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12 April
Are young(er) people just supposed to be (more) naive, or why else is it that they people horror films?*
I say this as a response to reading what Darryl Griffiths has written about (or not written about) in an on-line review for New Empress Magazine, because it seems to be taken for granted either that Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Al Pacino and Meryl Streep do not get frightened, or that the cinema-going public does not want to witness it happening when they go away for a relaxing break together in a cosy holiday apartment at Tombstone Mansions.
Which is, in a way, why it is a pity that Guillermo del Toro's Don't be Afraid of the Dark (2010), a vehicle for Katie Holmes and Guy Pearce, is such a dud: I determined so in my review at Cambridge Film Festival, and imdb.com confirms it, with a rating of 5.6.
Never mind: I have insider knowledge, in the form of seeing what appeared to be rushes, that Meg and Tom are going full out for gore this year!
End-notes
* And, although that is not my typical choice of viewing, how did we, since - and probably well before - Scream (1996) or The Blair Witch Porject (1999), get where we are from the worlds of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Anthony Perkins?
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12 April
Are young(er) people just supposed to be (more) naive, or why else is it that they people horror films?*
I say this as a response to reading what Darryl Griffiths has written about (or not written about) in an on-line review for New Empress Magazine, because it seems to be taken for granted either that Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Al Pacino and Meryl Streep do not get frightened, or that the cinema-going public does not want to witness it happening when they go away for a relaxing break together in a cosy holiday apartment at Tombstone Mansions.
Which is, in a way, why it is a pity that Guillermo del Toro's Don't be Afraid of the Dark (2010), a vehicle for Katie Holmes and Guy Pearce, is such a dud: I determined so in my review at Cambridge Film Festival, and imdb.com confirms it, with a rating of 5.6.
Never mind: I have insider knowledge, in the form of seeing what appeared to be rushes, that Meg and Tom are going full out for gore this year!
End-notes
* And, although that is not my typical choice of viewing, how did we, since - and probably well before - Scream (1996) or The Blair Witch Porject (1999), get where we are from the worlds of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Anthony Perkins?
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Wednesday 11 April 2012
Statistics and the brain (2)
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12 April
And now I have followed on with this:
I'm also, now, wondering about this approach that is promoted to us, even in a context of putting a comment on a web-page as I am now doing, of avatars and profiles - it's almost as if, a bit like Voldemort putting a bit of himself here, a bit there, we are invited to inhabit these computer-generated objects and thereby be there for others to see and know, almost as if that will be there for ever and ever.
I shall side-step critiquing these related so-called social networks (because I'd just want to ask what the sociability really consists in - and I'd no more want to play golf in my living-room, rather than out on the links with club and ball), but just observe that, if I died to-night (and had logged out of my e-mail and Amazon accounts, and my blog), there probably are protocols for my legal representatives to access those things - and to do so before any period of inactivity caused them to be deleted.
However developed the avatar, though, or the profile, they would not be me, would not live on - although things written by or to me might be preserved - in some cyber-existence without the living physical me. Walt Disney reportedly had his brain frozen in such a hope, and, whatever you might think of that as a grasp of what identity is, now as against then, it seems that we are as far from capturing the essence of what would bring Walt back to life, if he died to-day.
For the die-hards of AI, though, what we cannot do is merely not presently technologically possible.
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12 April
And now I have followed on with this:
I'm also, now, wondering about this approach that is promoted to us, even in a context of putting a comment on a web-page as I am now doing, of avatars and profiles - it's almost as if, a bit like Voldemort putting a bit of himself here, a bit there, we are invited to inhabit these computer-generated objects and thereby be there for others to see and know, almost as if that will be there for ever and ever.
I shall side-step critiquing these related so-called social networks (because I'd just want to ask what the sociability really consists in - and I'd no more want to play golf in my living-room, rather than out on the links with club and ball), but just observe that, if I died to-night (and had logged out of my e-mail and Amazon accounts, and my blog), there probably are protocols for my legal representatives to access those things - and to do so before any period of inactivity caused them to be deleted.
However developed the avatar, though, or the profile, they would not be me, would not live on - although things written by or to me might be preserved - in some cyber-existence without the living physical me. Walt Disney reportedly had his brain frozen in such a hope, and, whatever you might think of that as a grasp of what identity is, now as against then, it seems that we are as far from capturing the essence of what would bring Walt back to life, if he died to-day.
For the die-hards of AI, though, what we cannot do is merely not presently technologically possible.
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Who gets diagnosed - and where are the psychiatrists when this is happening? (2)
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12 April
It's Mozart's Rondo in A Minor, K. 511. In a minor key and it sounds sad, so Mozart must have been depressed at the time.
No evidence of which I am aware except the internal temperament of the piece for this proposition: he must have been depressed, because - amongst what we have - it is unusual amongst his works to be in this key / a minor key.
Could someone not, as a patron, have commissioned Mozart to write such a piece? A Duke Orsino, from Twelfth Night, would have desired to hear such a thing, and, when David played to Saul to soothe him, whose mood was he fitting?
For we do not impute to Bach, in those other-wordly passages in the Crucifixus of the Mass in B Minor (BWV 232) the state of mind / soul at the time of composition that the music portrays, before the sudden triumph of Et resurrexit, do we?
To be continued
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12 April
It's Mozart's Rondo in A Minor, K. 511. In a minor key and it sounds sad, so Mozart must have been depressed at the time.
No evidence of which I am aware except the internal temperament of the piece for this proposition: he must have been depressed, because - amongst what we have - it is unusual amongst his works to be in this key / a minor key.
Could someone not, as a patron, have commissioned Mozart to write such a piece? A Duke Orsino, from Twelfth Night, would have desired to hear such a thing, and, when David played to Saul to soothe him, whose mood was he fitting?
For we do not impute to Bach, in those other-wordly passages in the Crucifixus of the Mass in B Minor (BWV 232) the state of mind / soul at the time of composition that the music portrays, before the sudden triumph of Et resurrexit, do we?
To be continued
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Tuesday 10 April 2012
Statistics and the brain (1)
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11 April
On Lindsay's blog, another discussion about AI and virtual immortality.
In a side-strand, generated by comment, I have added:
If they do actually mean anything, and are not more inventions (which, however imaginative they may be, just mislead everybody), these statistics about, for example, how much of the brain we use are in the realm of science - but how good is the science, as, if it were crucial to making the right finding to have more of the scientist's brain working than 10%, then the measurements might be ones that defy or defeat the measurer.
An often-quoted one, and one used by those who like wearing hats to justify the preference, is the claim that - and I think that it is usually this sort of figure - 20% of heat lost by the body is through the head. To which I retort:
1. When someone inverted the figure, and made it 80% heat loss, I really had to question whether he ever engaged the brain before speaking;
2. If this is the loss from the head, and one wants to minimize it, a hat is clearly not the answer, where a balaclava is;
3. Maybe that's where the 10% usage of the brain comes from - it's overheating because of people trying to block its cooling system.
See more, if you will, at Writer's Rest...
And now, also, at Statistics and the brain (2)
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11 April
On Lindsay's blog, another discussion about AI and virtual immortality.
In a side-strand, generated by comment, I have added:
If they do actually mean anything, and are not more inventions (which, however imaginative they may be, just mislead everybody), these statistics about, for example, how much of the brain we use are in the realm of science - but how good is the science, as, if it were crucial to making the right finding to have more of the scientist's brain working than 10%, then the measurements might be ones that defy or defeat the measurer.
An often-quoted one, and one used by those who like wearing hats to justify the preference, is the claim that - and I think that it is usually this sort of figure - 20% of heat lost by the body is through the head. To which I retort:
1. When someone inverted the figure, and made it 80% heat loss, I really had to question whether he ever engaged the brain before speaking;
2. If this is the loss from the head, and one wants to minimize it, a hat is clearly not the answer, where a balaclava is;
3. Maybe that's where the 10% usage of the brain comes from - it's overheating because of people trying to block its cooling system.
See more, if you will, at Writer's Rest...
And now, also, at Statistics and the brain (2)
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A cocked ale
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10 April
Not something that you would want in a cosy village pub, whereas it would be fine in a cellar bar.
For those keen on monastic brews, I have seen some prices, in a special list in a hidden-away pub (the sort that you might struggle to stumble across again), that might knock the holiest of smiles into a frown, and even an offer of a tasting session, again with a price that, except for those really keen on their high-alcohol tipple, might cause a frown.
Cocteau, of course, was someone else, and could irritatingly turn his hand to most things, from film-direction to writing, though he, too, had a weakness, as with Edouard Dermithein Melville's making Les Enfants Terribles (1950), for pushing his favourite players onto another who had to work with them. Without being a composer, he even had a hand in the existence of Les Six.
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10 April
Not something that you would want in a cosy village pub, whereas it would be fine in a cellar bar.
For those keen on monastic brews, I have seen some prices, in a special list in a hidden-away pub (the sort that you might struggle to stumble across again), that might knock the holiest of smiles into a frown, and even an offer of a tasting session, again with a price that, except for those really keen on their high-alcohol tipple, might cause a frown.
Cocteau, of course, was someone else, and could irritatingly turn his hand to most things, from film-direction to writing, though he, too, had a weakness, as with Edouard Dermithein Melville's making Les Enfants Terribles (1950), for pushing his favourite players onto another who had to work with them. Without being a composer, he even had a hand in the existence of Les Six.
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Monday 9 April 2012
Casual Chess
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Easter Monday
This is what Marcel Duchamp advocated, when he appeared to have withdrawn from making art in the early decades of last century - see, for example, the chess-sex that both Man Ray and he designed.
The heretical idea was that chess only came into existence when two players happened to be somewhere simultaneously and found themselves sitting on opposite sides of a board and playing.
However, it was one that came to be discredited when the Surrealists (which usually means their undisputed spokesman in André Breton) - and those who succeeded them - emphasized the place of Desire (where would Salvador Dalà be without it?).
Thus: I seek a game, so I summon another to me to play against me* - or we have a standing arrangement to play on such-and-such a day of a week at such-and-such o'clock.
Flirting does not enter into it, nor does Arousal**.
QED
End-notes
* And so the expectant, largely deserted cityscapes of Girgio de Chirico. (And yet his Hector and Andromache (1917) is full of so much more passion.)
** Thus we have the bare-breasted, dreamy women on the canvases of Paul Delvaux. (But the Le Galet of his compatriot René Magritte, in a Vache period, is far more erotic.)
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Easter Monday
This is what Marcel Duchamp advocated, when he appeared to have withdrawn from making art in the early decades of last century - see, for example, the chess-sex that both Man Ray and he designed.
The heretical idea was that chess only came into existence when two players happened to be somewhere simultaneously and found themselves sitting on opposite sides of a board and playing.
However, it was one that came to be discredited when the Surrealists (which usually means their undisputed spokesman in André Breton) - and those who succeeded them - emphasized the place of Desire (where would Salvador Dalà be without it?).
Thus: I seek a game, so I summon another to me to play against me* - or we have a standing arrangement to play on such-and-such a day of a week at such-and-such o'clock.
Flirting does not enter into it, nor does Arousal**.
QED
End-notes
* And so the expectant, largely deserted cityscapes of Girgio de Chirico. (And yet his Hector and Andromache (1917) is full of so much more passion.)
** Thus we have the bare-breasted, dreamy women on the canvases of Paul Delvaux. (But the Le Galet of his compatriot René Magritte, in a Vache period, is far more erotic.)
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Sunday 8 April 2012
A deserved winner at Cannes (1)*
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Easter Day
* Spoilers ahead - read at your peril, if you have not viewed the film *
It is interesting that the pace of a film can change as much as that of this film did to-night from its first viewing - maybe I was more tired, but, in an unfolding that appeared to have had much time in which I could relish it, much seemed to telescope**, and I found a lot of detail to reabsorb.
Knowing that the doctor (Muhammet Uzuner), the police chief (Yilmaz Erdogan) and the prosecutor (Taner Birsel) were the main ones to watch, I was, for example, much more aware of the first of these sitting behind the second, and how he really only started opening up when talking to the chief's driver for the night, his subordinate called Arab (Arab Ali) - there, as on first sight, the fact that the person who did the subtitles did not follow convention did not help, although I did better, as it is usual to put words in italics when they are spoken by someone not in shot (and there were other pecularities, later on, that meant that I was too busy working out who was speaking to have time to read words before they disappeared).
That said, merely playing detective because one knows the end of the film already (not an inappropriate thing to do when a man (Kenan) has confessed to a killing, maybe murder, as we never really know what he claims happened, and, at a significant moment - when, I think, none of the police are in earshot - his fellow suspect (Ramazan), before silenced by Kenan, calls out that he committed the act) does not usually make the duration of scenes seem shorter, whereas here it turned it into a quite differently paced narrative, although still beautiful.
Where, though, that quicker perception of time was disadvantageous was that the Tarkovksy-like moments, when the wind is moving the crops, or the trees, as if in the guise of a character, seem less naturally poetic, and more overtly arty. In the same way, when Doctor Cemal, who is relieving himself, finds a carved face suddenly revealed by the lightning in the rock level with his own it seemed more contrived, and less convincing, seen for the second time, but these are purely momentary, and did not detract from the whole effect of the piece.
Some have exaggerated the length - or other aspects - of the sequence where we hear dialogue over shots of one apple from those shaken from a tree by Arab, following it as it rolls down a slope and then down a stream, and, although it, too, seemed a little shorter, it still had its power. As did what has been described as an epiphany, when the mukhtar's young daughter Cemile (Cansu Demirci) brings around glasses of tea, lighted by the oil-lamp in the centre of the tray.
On one very obvious level, the film takes us from what turns out to be a view through a window of a living body (Yasar, with the two men who, between them and unseen, kill and inexpertly bury him) to the same one being found and exhumed, and to the indignity of autopsy: where we are left is with the doctor and Yasar's widow Gülnaz, the one watching the other, from the autopsy room, as she walks into the distance with her son, before he turns around, and we are looking for a few seconds at that closing window, then there is a blackout on which the credits come up, but the noise of the school playground (to the left as the widow walks away) and the liquid sounds of the autopsy play over it.
Chief of Police Naci, looking at Prosecutor Nusret in his element as he gives - for dictation onto a laptop - his report from the crime investigation scene, says that a master of revels is the thing to be. Unseen, except by his excellent work, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is such a master, and, in this more intimate screening (screen 3 at the Arts Picturehouse), it was good that the humour came out of moments such as the sergeant being pedantic about distances and jurisdictions, and everyone blaming everyone else for not having a body-bag (and what they then have to resort to), as well as the shock that an autopsy was to be shown, and how affronted Naci is by what Kenan and Ramazan have done to the body.
A little more at A deserved winner at Cannes (2)...
End-notes
* Not that I dare suggest that anything unmeritorious wins!
** Lewis Carroll, in one of the Alice books, brought us this usage.
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Easter Day
* Spoilers ahead - read at your peril, if you have not viewed the film *
It is interesting that the pace of a film can change as much as that of this film did to-night from its first viewing - maybe I was more tired, but, in an unfolding that appeared to have had much time in which I could relish it, much seemed to telescope**, and I found a lot of detail to reabsorb.
Knowing that the doctor (Muhammet Uzuner), the police chief (Yilmaz Erdogan) and the prosecutor (Taner Birsel) were the main ones to watch, I was, for example, much more aware of the first of these sitting behind the second, and how he really only started opening up when talking to the chief's driver for the night, his subordinate called Arab (Arab Ali) - there, as on first sight, the fact that the person who did the subtitles did not follow convention did not help, although I did better, as it is usual to put words in italics when they are spoken by someone not in shot (and there were other pecularities, later on, that meant that I was too busy working out who was speaking to have time to read words before they disappeared).
That said, merely playing detective because one knows the end of the film already (not an inappropriate thing to do when a man (Kenan) has confessed to a killing, maybe murder, as we never really know what he claims happened, and, at a significant moment - when, I think, none of the police are in earshot - his fellow suspect (Ramazan), before silenced by Kenan, calls out that he committed the act) does not usually make the duration of scenes seem shorter, whereas here it turned it into a quite differently paced narrative, although still beautiful.
Where, though, that quicker perception of time was disadvantageous was that the Tarkovksy-like moments, when the wind is moving the crops, or the trees, as if in the guise of a character, seem less naturally poetic, and more overtly arty. In the same way, when Doctor Cemal, who is relieving himself, finds a carved face suddenly revealed by the lightning in the rock level with his own it seemed more contrived, and less convincing, seen for the second time, but these are purely momentary, and did not detract from the whole effect of the piece.
Some have exaggerated the length - or other aspects - of the sequence where we hear dialogue over shots of one apple from those shaken from a tree by Arab, following it as it rolls down a slope and then down a stream, and, although it, too, seemed a little shorter, it still had its power. As did what has been described as an epiphany, when the mukhtar's young daughter Cemile (Cansu Demirci) brings around glasses of tea, lighted by the oil-lamp in the centre of the tray.
On one very obvious level, the film takes us from what turns out to be a view through a window of a living body (Yasar, with the two men who, between them and unseen, kill and inexpertly bury him) to the same one being found and exhumed, and to the indignity of autopsy: where we are left is with the doctor and Yasar's widow Gülnaz, the one watching the other, from the autopsy room, as she walks into the distance with her son, before he turns around, and we are looking for a few seconds at that closing window, then there is a blackout on which the credits come up, but the noise of the school playground (to the left as the widow walks away) and the liquid sounds of the autopsy play over it.
Chief of Police Naci, looking at Prosecutor Nusret in his element as he gives - for dictation onto a laptop - his report from the crime investigation scene, says that a master of revels is the thing to be. Unseen, except by his excellent work, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is such a master, and, in this more intimate screening (screen 3 at the Arts Picturehouse), it was good that the humour came out of moments such as the sergeant being pedantic about distances and jurisdictions, and everyone blaming everyone else for not having a body-bag (and what they then have to resort to), as well as the shock that an autopsy was to be shown, and how affronted Naci is by what Kenan and Ramazan have done to the body.
A little more at A deserved winner at Cannes (2)...
End-notes
* Not that I dare suggest that anything unmeritorious wins!
** Lewis Carroll, in one of the Alice books, brought us this usage.
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Elgar and The Apostles
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8 April
Unless I had heard excerpts when Sir Edward, through the medium of Donald Macleod, was Composer of the Week fairly recently on Radio 3, I certainly had not heard the entirety of his - what I suppose is one - oratorio The Apostles until last night.
Two of those whose views I value thought, with me, that the first part lacked a spark, and I was even - calumny though it is - prepared to blame Stephen Cleobury as conductor for not keeping it moving: we all felt that there were very loud orchestral eruptions that fitted neither with our notion of the subject-matter, nor with the audibility of The Philharmonia Chorus. (I was also not alone in thinking that, whatever the issue was with hearing Susan Bickley, it had been resolved in the second part, whereas Ailish Tynan - despite not even credited as being Mary, Jesus' mother, as well as The Angel Gabriel - was thrilling and energizing throughout.)
Although the work, as shown after the interval, did have greater pretensions to the abiding excellence of The Messiah, and certainly worked better as a narrative once the more cosmic aspects (albeit of Jesus' life, not really that of his apostles), I cannot also help feeling that Elgar, in deriving his own text, would have been better served by a Jennens.
Such a person might also have fitted in, in place of other material in this rather loose and limp first part, some demonstration of apostleship as those who, in two or threes, were sent out by Jesus to do his work. Even so, as Elgar dwells so much not only on the rebel apostle Judas, but also with Mary Magdelene - apart from the perhaps arbitrary identification of her with the woman who anoints Jesus with costly perfume and, in another account of quite possibly a different episode, dries his feet on her hair - beyond the role in finding the tomb empty and meeting the risen Jesus, the title of the piece has already become not fit for purpose.
Certainly, a notion that the text that Elgar has set does justice to the role of the apostles after the resurrection, and then after the ascension, is a doubtful proposition. On this, The Messiah will always be very much superior, because there is absolutely no doubt what it is about, but I do not believe that the embodied theology necessarily puts off agnostic or atheist music-lovers from appreciating the work any more than they do Bach's Matthew Passion.
Having chanced upon this last night from the Proms, and righly guessed that I was hearing it again, I want to blog a bit more, in due course, about the piece, the Radio 3 interval feature about Judas and his historicity and centrality to The Apostles, and Sir Mark Elder's interpretation...
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8 April
Unless I had heard excerpts when Sir Edward, through the medium of Donald Macleod, was Composer of the Week fairly recently on Radio 3, I certainly had not heard the entirety of his - what I suppose is one - oratorio The Apostles until last night.
Two of those whose views I value thought, with me, that the first part lacked a spark, and I was even - calumny though it is - prepared to blame Stephen Cleobury as conductor for not keeping it moving: we all felt that there were very loud orchestral eruptions that fitted neither with our notion of the subject-matter, nor with the audibility of The Philharmonia Chorus. (I was also not alone in thinking that, whatever the issue was with hearing Susan Bickley, it had been resolved in the second part, whereas Ailish Tynan - despite not even credited as being Mary, Jesus' mother, as well as The Angel Gabriel - was thrilling and energizing throughout.)
Although the work, as shown after the interval, did have greater pretensions to the abiding excellence of The Messiah, and certainly worked better as a narrative once the more cosmic aspects (albeit of Jesus' life, not really that of his apostles), I cannot also help feeling that Elgar, in deriving his own text, would have been better served by a Jennens.
Such a person might also have fitted in, in place of other material in this rather loose and limp first part, some demonstration of apostleship as those who, in two or threes, were sent out by Jesus to do his work. Even so, as Elgar dwells so much not only on the rebel apostle Judas, but also with Mary Magdelene - apart from the perhaps arbitrary identification of her with the woman who anoints Jesus with costly perfume and, in another account of quite possibly a different episode, dries his feet on her hair - beyond the role in finding the tomb empty and meeting the risen Jesus, the title of the piece has already become not fit for purpose.
Certainly, a notion that the text that Elgar has set does justice to the role of the apostles after the resurrection, and then after the ascension, is a doubtful proposition. On this, The Messiah will always be very much superior, because there is absolutely no doubt what it is about, but I do not believe that the embodied theology necessarily puts off agnostic or atheist music-lovers from appreciating the work any more than they do Bach's Matthew Passion.
Having chanced upon this last night from the Proms, and righly guessed that I was hearing it again, I want to blog a bit more, in due course, about the piece, the Radio 3 interval feature about Judas and his historicity and centrality to The Apostles, and Sir Mark Elder's interpretation...
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Thursday 5 April 2012
An evening with David Owen Norris
A pre-concert talk by David Owen Norris about Messiaen's Visions de l'Amen at Easter at King's
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6 April
A pre-concert talk by David Owen Norris about Messiaen's Visions de l'Amen at Easter at King's
No, it's not an offshoot of that rather poor t.v. programme An Audience With..., but David visiting Cambridge to give a pre-concert talk about Messiaen's Visions de l'Amen, a work for two pianos, performed shortly afterwards and nearby in the chapel at King's College, where I sat with him for the performance.
I knew that he was hugely charismatic and entertaining, quite apart from being very informative from his wealth of knowledge, because I had heard him before, talking about and around the theme of Good King Wenceslas in York a few years back as part of its Chrsimas Early Music Festival. David is also well known as a broadcaster, and I dimly remember a regular quirky little slot that he had on Radio 3 on a weekday afternoon back, I think, in the late 80s or early 90s (this link will take you where more information is available), but the opportunity didn't present itself to get the answer directly to what that was and when.
He and I happened to talk, because I was outside the venue (seeing no reason to take a seat yet), and he came out, as I gathered, to take the air. Not wishing to venture a question regarding the Messiaen, if he were, in fact, collecting his thoughts, I sought permission, and, saying that I had first heard it on a recording made by the Labèque sisters, asked about the availability of recordings, saying was it under-represented. David said that there probably around 10, and we agreed that that was probably enough, but also that, as to its appearance in recital halls, the work is not performed very often.
To be continued
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Tuesday 3 April 2012
A hiatus
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4 April
If there were anyone (other than The Agent) who looked at this blog most days, he or she would have noticed no new postings in a fortnight*.
Well, that has been a surprise to The Agent as well, but that is how things have fallen out - although it is also possible that some items in draft, which (despite not being public) keep their place from when started, were completed since then.
But who can rightly say? Sooner quote Ecclesiastes - which some have heretically identified as a foundation text for The Goons - and go one's way...
End-notes
* That said, there is evidence of The Agent's activities at New Empress Magazine.
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4 April
If there were anyone (other than The Agent) who looked at this blog most days, he or she would have noticed no new postings in a fortnight*.
Well, that has been a surprise to The Agent as well, but that is how things have fallen out - although it is also possible that some items in draft, which (despite not being public) keep their place from when started, were completed since then.
But who can rightly say? Sooner quote Ecclesiastes - which some have heretically identified as a foundation text for The Goons - and go one's way...
End-notes
* That said, there is evidence of The Agent's activities at New Empress Magazine.
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Tuesday 20 March 2012
Did you hate Cud's son?
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22 March
Tulisa told me not to, not the Tulisa who..., the other Tulisa.
She was sweeping through Belgrade at the time, an onion on each arm, and she said Don't!. So I didn't.
Should have listened to the onions, though: they weren't red onions (which aren't, anyway, red), but onions, large ones. They said - a minor third apart - Do it, do!, in a screeching voice, not at all nice like a counter-tenor, but invitingly.
Only Tulisa said Don't!, and I didn't, truly I didn't.
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22 March
Tulisa told me not to, not the Tulisa who..., the other Tulisa.
She was sweeping through Belgrade at the time, an onion on each arm, and she said Don't!. So I didn't.
Should have listened to the onions, though: they weren't red onions (which aren't, anyway, red), but onions, large ones. They said - a minor third apart - Do it, do!, in a screeching voice, not at all nice like a counter-tenor, but invitingly.
Only Tulisa said Don't!, and I didn't, truly I didn't.
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Sunday 18 March 2012
You'll break it! / It's not a toy!
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18 March
A micrometer - great therapy though it is to find, over and over, the thickness of a piece of paper, and hear it click click when it has reached the point of measurement - is Not a toy.
Nor is a spring-loaded tape-measure, but that doesn't stop it being great fun to have it literally reel itself back in, with that distinctive noise as the stop at the end of the tape (0", 0 cm) hits the metal of the aperture.
So what does that tell us about anything? That - as do other creatures* - we like to play, to repeat, to test things to the limit? Maybe
That, knowing what something is for, we find another use for it? - and, in art, it is Marcel Duchamp who is credited with calling doing this 'a readymade', Fountain probably being the most infamous of such works of his. So our inventiveness, turning our hand to other things, seeing something anew / from another angle?** Perhaps
Or the impulse - coupled with the enabling power - to subvert the order of things?:
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
in the words of early Joni Mitchell***. Possibly
And if not ourselves being those who act, then allowing it? - being those who 'having the power to do good', fail to do so? Conceivably
Saul, the man who became Paul and spread the Christian message over vast distances (from Malta to what is now Turkey), stood by, looking after the others' garments when Stephen****, the first follower of Jesus to be martyred, was stoned to death:
Whoever is not with me is against me (Matthew 12:30; Luke 11:23)
but also
For he who is not against us is for us (Mark, 9:40)
End-notes
* Including plants?
** Yet this is not a purely human trait, as those will testify who try to devise ways either of keeping squirrels out of a bird-feeder, or even challenge the creatures to puzzle out a series of steps to secure rewards intended for them.
*** The song 'Big Yellow Taxi' from the album Ladies of the Canyon.
**** So what is usually called Boxing Day, 26 December, is St Stephen's Day.
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18 March
A micrometer - great therapy though it is to find, over and over, the thickness of a piece of paper, and hear it click click when it has reached the point of measurement - is Not a toy.
Nor is a spring-loaded tape-measure, but that doesn't stop it being great fun to have it literally reel itself back in, with that distinctive noise as the stop at the end of the tape (0", 0 cm) hits the metal of the aperture.
So what does that tell us about anything? That - as do other creatures* - we like to play, to repeat, to test things to the limit? Maybe
That, knowing what something is for, we find another use for it? - and, in art, it is Marcel Duchamp who is credited with calling doing this 'a readymade', Fountain probably being the most infamous of such works of his. So our inventiveness, turning our hand to other things, seeing something anew / from another angle?** Perhaps
Or the impulse - coupled with the enabling power - to subvert the order of things?:
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
in the words of early Joni Mitchell***. Possibly
And if not ourselves being those who act, then allowing it? - being those who 'having the power to do good', fail to do so? Conceivably
Saul, the man who became Paul and spread the Christian message over vast distances (from Malta to what is now Turkey), stood by, looking after the others' garments when Stephen****, the first follower of Jesus to be martyred, was stoned to death:
Whoever is not with me is against me (Matthew 12:30; Luke 11:23)
but also
For he who is not against us is for us (Mark, 9:40)
End-notes
* Including plants?
** Yet this is not a purely human trait, as those will testify who try to devise ways either of keeping squirrels out of a bird-feeder, or even challenge the creatures to puzzle out a series of steps to secure rewards intended for them.
*** The song 'Big Yellow Taxi' from the album Ladies of the Canyon.
**** So what is usually called Boxing Day, 26 December, is St Stephen's Day.
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Drop down for our *NEW* menu!
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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18 March
Our reply to Jamie's Italian*
There's plenty on offer - for every taste, if not pocket - as these examples from our menu show:
Conduits
* Peek and lay Tutu soup *
* Danging well * - a 'bottomless bowl' of spiced water in which old fuse-plugs have been soaked for a minimum of 15 days
* Brock au lit terrine * (as Mr Badger didn't wake up in time)
Sewers
* Lack of RAM, served with micro-chips and some bloody jus or other *
* Ache and stale pi * - comes with its own motherboard
* Distressed tall-backed beech chair * - you can't eat it, but, if you lacked an appetite previously, you'll be keen to eat something after hearing its sob-story about Rennie Mackintosh (and we'll give you a 50% discount on that dish)
* Know-your-plaice fish pie - order this, and wait to see whether you get rebuffed in our most scornful way for ordering something from the depths on the wrong day
Drains
* Lock au chat * - depending on how you look at it, it's either a padlock designed by Pussy Galore, or a cat which, if you could only force it open, contains a refreshing assortment of sorbets
* Peeking pie * - just as you are about to dig your fork or spoon into it, it winks at you
* Death by chocolate * - the chef's own .45 dum dum slugs, with chocolate added to the tips, will soon be fired in your direction from a chocolate-tinted automatic by an ex-showgirl called Browning
NB Unless stated (or you request) otherwise, all dishes come with new potatoes and a refreshing sequence of freshly slaughtered vegetables (not to be eaten out of order, unless you are electing to pay your bill twice)
End-notes
* And the name's a give-away, since he not only doesn't sound Italian, but he also grew up in Essex with parents who ran a pub (in Clavering).
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18 March
Our reply to Jamie's Italian*
There's plenty on offer - for every taste, if not pocket - as these examples from our menu show:
Conduits
* Peek and lay Tutu soup *
* Danging well * - a 'bottomless bowl' of spiced water in which old fuse-plugs have been soaked for a minimum of 15 days
* Brock au lit terrine * (as Mr Badger didn't wake up in time)
Sewers
* Lack of RAM, served with micro-chips and some bloody jus or other *
* Ache and stale pi * - comes with its own motherboard
* Distressed tall-backed beech chair * - you can't eat it, but, if you lacked an appetite previously, you'll be keen to eat something after hearing its sob-story about Rennie Mackintosh (and we'll give you a 50% discount on that dish)
* Know-your-plaice fish pie - order this, and wait to see whether you get rebuffed in our most scornful way for ordering something from the depths on the wrong day
Drains
* Lock au chat * - depending on how you look at it, it's either a padlock designed by Pussy Galore, or a cat which, if you could only force it open, contains a refreshing assortment of sorbets
* Peeking pie * - just as you are about to dig your fork or spoon into it, it winks at you
* Death by chocolate * - the chef's own .45 dum dum slugs, with chocolate added to the tips, will soon be fired in your direction from a chocolate-tinted automatic by an ex-showgirl called Browning
NB Unless stated (or you request) otherwise, all dishes come with new potatoes and a refreshing sequence of freshly slaughtered vegetables (not to be eaten out of order, unless you are electing to pay your bill twice)
End-notes
* And the name's a give-away, since he not only doesn't sound Italian, but he also grew up in Essex with parents who ran a pub (in Clavering).
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Saturday 17 March 2012
Every Veran helps! (2)
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18 March
No one passing by - even if they didn't eat meat - could have failed to notice the huge pieces of sirloin* that my nearest Veran had on offer - I didn't notice what they weighed, but these were shrink wrapped and sizeable, and were individually priced at at least £30.
Now I may have seen a piece of such a size in the window of that rare thing, a butcher's shop, but never in a supermarket (or whatever we are encouraged to call them). And, now that I think of it, they all bore (as did some other items in a display close by) red labels with the words 'From the Butcher' on them in white lettering. Which is making what distinction?
What am I supposed to believe to be the origin of the rest of the meat (and poultry)? Yes, I know that it has been hygienically sealed into its packaging, with the unavoidable admixture of sulphites, and I even know where much of that is done in this region (as I have visited the premises), but can I take it that this large lump of steak has been treated any differently?
Or is it telling me that it has not had a prior life in a freezer, but has made its way just from field to abattoir to butcher to shelf? In effect, boasting of freshness when, one might infer, other products have been stored in the meantime?
OK, I'm not going to dwell on the comparison, but, when a cattery offered for a pet's living area (i.e. not its run) to be heated for an extra, say, £1.20, it was wisely - and, it must be said, repeatedly - asked as an effectively rhetorical question how one would know whether she (for she was a she) had received the benefit for which one had paid extra. Another supermarket answers the question, as applying to the taste and qualify of food, with the slogan Taste the difference...
With freezing, I hazard that it has an effect on the fibres in meat (and poultry or fish, for that matter), which could have a bearing on how chewy it is. I suppose so, because I know that it is said that (even with blanching) some fruit or vegetables do not freeze well, which I take to mean that one would be less keen or less able (e.g. disintegration) to eat them than before the freezing.
In itself, that might argue for the meat to be tenderized by being frozen, but I do not think that it is so simple or that the thawed product would respond to being cooked in the same way as before - and ideal cooking temepratures and durations are a whole other kettle of fish!
End-notes
* By the way, who does believe that story of a joint of beef being knighted?
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18 March
No one passing by - even if they didn't eat meat - could have failed to notice the huge pieces of sirloin* that my nearest Veran had on offer - I didn't notice what they weighed, but these were shrink wrapped and sizeable, and were individually priced at at least £30.
Now I may have seen a piece of such a size in the window of that rare thing, a butcher's shop, but never in a supermarket (or whatever we are encouraged to call them). And, now that I think of it, they all bore (as did some other items in a display close by) red labels with the words 'From the Butcher' on them in white lettering. Which is making what distinction?
What am I supposed to believe to be the origin of the rest of the meat (and poultry)? Yes, I know that it has been hygienically sealed into its packaging, with the unavoidable admixture of sulphites, and I even know where much of that is done in this region (as I have visited the premises), but can I take it that this large lump of steak has been treated any differently?
Or is it telling me that it has not had a prior life in a freezer, but has made its way just from field to abattoir to butcher to shelf? In effect, boasting of freshness when, one might infer, other products have been stored in the meantime?
OK, I'm not going to dwell on the comparison, but, when a cattery offered for a pet's living area (i.e. not its run) to be heated for an extra, say, £1.20, it was wisely - and, it must be said, repeatedly - asked as an effectively rhetorical question how one would know whether she (for she was a she) had received the benefit for which one had paid extra. Another supermarket answers the question, as applying to the taste and qualify of food, with the slogan Taste the difference...
With freezing, I hazard that it has an effect on the fibres in meat (and poultry or fish, for that matter), which could have a bearing on how chewy it is. I suppose so, because I know that it is said that (even with blanching) some fruit or vegetables do not freeze well, which I take to mean that one would be less keen or less able (e.g. disintegration) to eat them than before the freezing.
In itself, that might argue for the meat to be tenderized by being frozen, but I do not think that it is so simple or that the thawed product would respond to being cooked in the same way as before - and ideal cooking temepratures and durations are a whole other kettle of fish!
End-notes
* By the way, who does believe that story of a joint of beef being knighted?
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Cleobury's conception of Brahms
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17 March
To be honest, I have no idea, from to-night's performance in the chapel of King's College, whether he had a conception - or how soloist Tom Poster's, if he had one, related to it.
Between the two of them, and with the necessary participation of Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra (tweely abbreviated to CUCO), they performed the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 83, by Johannes Brahms. I found the following evidence of Poster's and / or Cleobury's possible conception of it, as a work and as movements:
Allegro non troppo
The horns had been strong in Parry's I was glad, which was good, because they are crucial to the opening.
Then the movement proceeded as a struggle between grammar and syntax, in which, for example, Cleobury failed to demonstrate that 'I hit the ball' belongs in the same sentence as 'through the window' and 'by mistake'. Each, though enunciated, could have belonged in different sentences:
I hit the ball. Through the window, my father watched me. By mistake, I trod on the flower-bed.
Allegro appassionato
Here, what came to the fore was Poster's seeming lack of any sense that what Brahms wrote as the piano part needed to be phrased, and very carefully phrased at that. The playing was mostly technically very accurate, but there was nothing betraying that he had a notion of the structure behind the composition - so, just as a repeated group of just a few bars wanted for direction, I heard no overarching understanding of the movement in toto.
It would have been fine, I have to add, for him to have played as if his part were being spontaneously generated, but only if it had sounded as though he knew where the improvisation was going. This did have a fresh quality, but not one that inspired me with that confidence in him.
Andante
All that I can say is that, if the pace set is meant to be that of walking, then it felt more like a dawdling, painfully strung-out amble. Fine to try things with the tempo, but it needs to work - I was just glad that it was over, although more and more reminded of the slow movement of the second Tchaikovsky concerto
Allegretto grazioso
The individual parts were pretty much all right, but very foursquare. What was not 'OK' was where one shifted, morphed, changed into another, as they inevitably: I swear that it was almost as if they had been individually rehearsed as separate units and then, never performed continuously, been brought together in sequence and the transitions left to take care of themselves (which, not surprisingly, they didn't).
The Michael Nyman Band achieves abrupt switches from one mood to another by working at it. Only in the tricky switch-over from one time-signature to a very different one did Cleobury seem to have put CUCO through doing that. Once in a monumental* piano concerto like this one just isn't enough!
End-notes
* The word is used in a good sense, but it has a bad one, epitomized to-night, where (delibertely alluding to Eric Morecambe) just playing all of the right notes in the right order doesn't create 'a cathedral of sound' as beautiful as the venue.
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17 March
To be honest, I have no idea, from to-night's performance in the chapel of King's College, whether he had a conception - or how soloist Tom Poster's, if he had one, related to it.
Between the two of them, and with the necessary participation of Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra (tweely abbreviated to CUCO), they performed the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 83, by Johannes Brahms. I found the following evidence of Poster's and / or Cleobury's possible conception of it, as a work and as movements:
Allegro non troppo
The horns had been strong in Parry's I was glad, which was good, because they are crucial to the opening.
Then the movement proceeded as a struggle between grammar and syntax, in which, for example, Cleobury failed to demonstrate that 'I hit the ball' belongs in the same sentence as 'through the window' and 'by mistake'. Each, though enunciated, could have belonged in different sentences:
I hit the ball. Through the window, my father watched me. By mistake, I trod on the flower-bed.
Allegro appassionato
Here, what came to the fore was Poster's seeming lack of any sense that what Brahms wrote as the piano part needed to be phrased, and very carefully phrased at that. The playing was mostly technically very accurate, but there was nothing betraying that he had a notion of the structure behind the composition - so, just as a repeated group of just a few bars wanted for direction, I heard no overarching understanding of the movement in toto.
It would have been fine, I have to add, for him to have played as if his part were being spontaneously generated, but only if it had sounded as though he knew where the improvisation was going. This did have a fresh quality, but not one that inspired me with that confidence in him.
Andante
All that I can say is that, if the pace set is meant to be that of walking, then it felt more like a dawdling, painfully strung-out amble. Fine to try things with the tempo, but it needs to work - I was just glad that it was over, although more and more reminded of the slow movement of the second Tchaikovsky concerto
Allegretto grazioso
The individual parts were pretty much all right, but very foursquare. What was not 'OK' was where one shifted, morphed, changed into another, as they inevitably: I swear that it was almost as if they had been individually rehearsed as separate units and then, never performed continuously, been brought together in sequence and the transitions left to take care of themselves (which, not surprisingly, they didn't).
The Michael Nyman Band achieves abrupt switches from one mood to another by working at it. Only in the tricky switch-over from one time-signature to a very different one did Cleobury seem to have put CUCO through doing that. Once in a monumental* piano concerto like this one just isn't enough!
End-notes
* The word is used in a good sense, but it has a bad one, epitomized to-night, where (delibertely alluding to Eric Morecambe) just playing all of the right notes in the right order doesn't create 'a cathedral of sound' as beautiful as the venue.
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Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (3)
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17 March
* Contains some spoilers *
The most ludicrous claim* that I have read about this film (from the Arts Picturehouse's programme booklet, which I didn't look at before my viewing):
[Robert] Pattinson plays the seductive scoundrel with unbounded pomp and a voraciousness that oozes star quality, outshining a top-notch supporting cast that includes Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci and Kristin Scott Thomas.
Nothing to do with being unclear which of the phrases is 'oozing', although I saw no ooze, but the belief that, albeit Pattinson is on screen almost all of the time, that means that he outshines anyone is seriously misguided - just physically, and in poise, tone and demeanour, Uma Thurman, for example, is radiant as Madeleine, and she is the part, whereas Pattinson never quite seems to know what his part is, let alone plausibly play it.
But then, nor do the directors or the writers of the screenplay, which is part of the problem...
As to things elsewhere, I see that Philip French has one of his rather terse 'reviews' in The Guradian*, of which this long sentence (which looks longer in columns, and is as chaotic as mine) constitutes almost one-third (without talking about the film in hand at all!):
In 1947 the former English professor, drama critic and leading MGM producer Albert Lewin wrote and directed a fascinating version of Maupassant's 1885 novel Bel Ami about the upward progress of the charming, untalented journalist Duroy (nicknamed "Bel Ami") in a corrupt late-19th-century Paris where the press are in cahoots with the politicians.
Yet, whenever anyone talks about this novel by Maupassant (and, often enough, reviews or synopses of films that adapt something for the first time often enough skate over the origins entirely), why do I get that impression that no one has actually read the thing...?
End-notes
* Less absurd, but no less bad, is this account (from a free paper's cinema section):
Based on the classic Guy de Maupassant novel of the same name [the poster for the film handily points out 'this fact', though I have no conception whether it is a classic, or why it's not having been called Mr Bean's Revenge matters]. A charming but manipulative Parisien [which, in the film, he isn't since, as he points out to Madeleine (Thurman), they didn't go to where he was brought up when they got married] makes his way up the rungs of the social ladder by bedding the most beautiful and influential women in the city [Ricci, as Clotilde, is beautiful, but not influential; the husbands of the other two are both important, one (Charles) in the newspaper that the other owns, but the women and they are just - and only - the people whom he meets when he is invited to dinner by Charles]. Uncertain and awkward in the beginning [does that change?], he learns quickly [ditto] as he conquers - and breaks - hearts [but only having been lavishly and unequivocally tipped off how to conquer those hearts - and why].
** SOme such!
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17 March
* Contains some spoilers *
The most ludicrous claim* that I have read about this film (from the Arts Picturehouse's programme booklet, which I didn't look at before my viewing):
[Robert] Pattinson plays the seductive scoundrel with unbounded pomp and a voraciousness that oozes star quality, outshining a top-notch supporting cast that includes Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci and Kristin Scott Thomas.
Nothing to do with being unclear which of the phrases is 'oozing', although I saw no ooze, but the belief that, albeit Pattinson is on screen almost all of the time, that means that he outshines anyone is seriously misguided - just physically, and in poise, tone and demeanour, Uma Thurman, for example, is radiant as Madeleine, and she is the part, whereas Pattinson never quite seems to know what his part is, let alone plausibly play it.
But then, nor do the directors or the writers of the screenplay, which is part of the problem...
As to things elsewhere, I see that Philip French has one of his rather terse 'reviews' in The Guradian*, of which this long sentence (which looks longer in columns, and is as chaotic as mine) constitutes almost one-third (without talking about the film in hand at all!):
In 1947 the former English professor, drama critic and leading MGM producer Albert Lewin wrote and directed a fascinating version of Maupassant's 1885 novel Bel Ami about the upward progress of the charming, untalented journalist Duroy (nicknamed "Bel Ami") in a corrupt late-19th-century Paris where the press are in cahoots with the politicians.
Yet, whenever anyone talks about this novel by Maupassant (and, often enough, reviews or synopses of films that adapt something for the first time often enough skate over the origins entirely), why do I get that impression that no one has actually read the thing...?
End-notes
* Less absurd, but no less bad, is this account (from a free paper's cinema section):
Based on the classic Guy de Maupassant novel of the same name [the poster for the film handily points out 'this fact', though I have no conception whether it is a classic, or why it's not having been called Mr Bean's Revenge matters]. A charming but manipulative Parisien [which, in the film, he isn't since, as he points out to Madeleine (Thurman), they didn't go to where he was brought up when they got married] makes his way up the rungs of the social ladder by bedding the most beautiful and influential women in the city [Ricci, as Clotilde, is beautiful, but not influential; the husbands of the other two are both important, one (Charles) in the newspaper that the other owns, but the women and they are just - and only - the people whom he meets when he is invited to dinner by Charles]. Uncertain and awkward in the beginning [does that change?], he learns quickly [ditto] as he conquers - and breaks - hearts [but only having been lavishly and unequivocally tipped off how to conquer those hearts - and why].
** SOme such!
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Did Beckettt start it off?*
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16 March - views from a train out of King's X
Following the pattern of The Unnamable - English translation (his of his French orgiginal) only? – in many other works, he left out punctuation.
So one might be confronted with a highly ambiguous title Imagination dead imagine, where one could be being urged to imagine one’s own imagination being dead, imagination in general being dead, or, despite one’s or imagination in general being dead, to imagine – maybe all of those at once.
At any rate, such is the confusion with which I met on being first told Enjoy! - since I knew (without being conscious of the facet**) that the verb is only transitive, an object was clearly missing: I cannot just enjoy full-stop in the way that I could be asked to smile or laugh, but I must enjoy something (did you, too, abbreviate that to ‘sthng’?).
that It’s really about as meaningful as saying Laugh me through that one, will you?, only that’s not one lazy word, however well intentioned the utterer.
So if, kindly though it was meant, you miss have been wished that you would enjoy the pint / gig / meal / exhibition, catch that person during the course of said food, drink, event or show, and cryptically say, in a nice friendly way, with a smile, drawing out the syllables En – joy – ing!.
Then, when it is time for another pint or a coffee / dessert or the cheeseboard, or just to go, adopt the same kind approach and, doing your best Cheshire Cat imitation (though not going as far as to disappear in the process!), drawl Ennnn – joyyyyed.
Now, I grant you that you will then be taken for anything from Gollum to Forest Gump (with Mr Bean in-between), but you’ll have had your say / bowl of cherries / magic ring taken away and hurled into the intense fiery heat, and you’ll feel better for it:
Believe! Do! Enjoy!
End-notes
* Maybe not, but he had a working signal-box in the grounds where he lived at Ussy-sur-Marne.
** A variant reading has 'faucet'.
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16 March - views from a train out of King's X
Following the pattern of The Unnamable - English translation (his of his French orgiginal) only? – in many other works, he left out punctuation.
So one might be confronted with a highly ambiguous title Imagination dead imagine, where one could be being urged to imagine one’s own imagination being dead, imagination in general being dead, or, despite one’s or imagination in general being dead, to imagine – maybe all of those at once.
At any rate, such is the confusion with which I met on being first told Enjoy! - since I knew (without being conscious of the facet**) that the verb is only transitive, an object was clearly missing: I cannot just enjoy full-stop in the way that I could be asked to smile or laugh, but I must enjoy something (did you, too, abbreviate that to ‘sthng’?).
that It’s really about as meaningful as saying Laugh me through that one, will you?, only that’s not one lazy word, however well intentioned the utterer.
So if, kindly though it was meant, you miss have been wished that you would enjoy the pint / gig / meal / exhibition, catch that person during the course of said food, drink, event or show, and cryptically say, in a nice friendly way, with a smile, drawing out the syllables En – joy – ing!.
Then, when it is time for another pint or a coffee / dessert or the cheeseboard, or just to go, adopt the same kind approach and, doing your best Cheshire Cat imitation (though not going as far as to disappear in the process!), drawl Ennnn – joyyyyed.
Now, I grant you that you will then be taken for anything from Gollum to Forest Gump (with Mr Bean in-between), but you’ll have had your say / bowl of cherries / magic ring taken away and hurled into the intense fiery heat, and you’ll feel better for it:
Believe! Do! Enjoy!
End-notes
* Maybe not, but he had a working signal-box in the grounds where he lived at Ussy-sur-Marne.
** A variant reading has 'faucet'.
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Friday 16 March 2012
Complexity, perplexity and diversity
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16 March
I was feeling left out, with everyone I knew making pacts, leaving me feeling left out - oh, I've already said that, so that just shows that I'd be the perfect patsy for one of these 'I'll be damned!', Yes, you will... arrangements.
Anyway, wanting to know where I was going wrong, I called around on Faust, because, after all, he should know, with a pact named after him and all that. Turns out that he's packed and left for Vienna, wanting a word with Freud.
Quite an angry word, as it turned out when I next saw him, because, not satisfied with one thing to his name, he's upset that, for all the bedding of women that he did and in a highly cynical and opportunistic way (for which, of course, now he's repentant), Freud's only gone and called his relevant complex after Don Juan! Faust swears that the Don, apart from anything else, grossly inflated his tally, and besides he, Faust, isn't fictional.
I tried to intervene with the observation that maybe Oedipus was fictional, but he would have none of it, adjuring by his britches (though I prefer 'breeches') that he'd, many a time, had a session with old Oed down at The Golden Dog, and he could drink most men under the table. (Still, I think it could easily explain that rather gratuitous bit of charioteer rage* that caused him a bit of bother.)
Back at me knocking in vain outside Faust's house, who should come along but Dante! A lot of people stay away from him, because she was really rather young even for his day, and they like to lump him in with that Lewis Carroll, why did he have child friends and take photographs of them? rap, but he's OK, if a bit grumpy too much of the time (something to do with spots on the moon, I gather from Beckettt).
To be continued
End-notes
* I'm told that people, lulled by the alliteration, want to style this after the substrate, but you couldn't call what Laertes was driving on a road, and, anyway, the rage was directed at him, not at the road. When Basil Fawlty's car misbehaves, he breaks off a branch and, logically enough, beats the bonnet - hitting the road, unnecessarily violent as it sounds, is something else again.
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16 March
I was feeling left out, with everyone I knew making pacts, leaving me feeling left out - oh, I've already said that, so that just shows that I'd be the perfect patsy for one of these 'I'll be damned!', Yes, you will... arrangements.
Anyway, wanting to know where I was going wrong, I called around on Faust, because, after all, he should know, with a pact named after him and all that. Turns out that he's packed and left for Vienna, wanting a word with Freud.
Quite an angry word, as it turned out when I next saw him, because, not satisfied with one thing to his name, he's upset that, for all the bedding of women that he did and in a highly cynical and opportunistic way (for which, of course, now he's repentant), Freud's only gone and called his relevant complex after Don Juan! Faust swears that the Don, apart from anything else, grossly inflated his tally, and besides he, Faust, isn't fictional.
I tried to intervene with the observation that maybe Oedipus was fictional, but he would have none of it, adjuring by his britches (though I prefer 'breeches') that he'd, many a time, had a session with old Oed down at The Golden Dog, and he could drink most men under the table. (Still, I think it could easily explain that rather gratuitous bit of charioteer rage* that caused him a bit of bother.)
Back at me knocking in vain outside Faust's house, who should come along but Dante! A lot of people stay away from him, because she was really rather young even for his day, and they like to lump him in with that Lewis Carroll, why did he have child friends and take photographs of them? rap, but he's OK, if a bit grumpy too much of the time (something to do with spots on the moon, I gather from Beckettt).
To be continued
End-notes
* I'm told that people, lulled by the alliteration, want to style this after the substrate, but you couldn't call what Laertes was driving on a road, and, anyway, the rage was directed at him, not at the road. When Basil Fawlty's car misbehaves, he breaks off a branch and, logically enough, beats the bonnet - hitting the road, unnecessarily violent as it sounds, is something else again.
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Thursday 15 March 2012
Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (2)
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16 March
A few takes on what could be behind Bel Ami (2012) - or ahead of it...
1. That advert - a distillation from the forest outside Athens?
They talk about the back story*, but, whatever we call it, it imparts essential knowledge:
It used to be that, when the woman had used this body-spray, men around her couldn't help acting on it, spontaneously presenting her, a stranger, with blooms and the like folly. (Men's fragrances didn't really exist, save as after-shave.)
Then came the male equivalent, acceptable to use as a shower-gel, because women would be falling all over the person who had done so. Clearly, Georges was a prescient amateur molecular chemist - or, more likely, knew a female one - and contrived the manufacture of what Puck uses on Shakespeare's human and fairy lovers, a potion so powerful that it acts by being scented.
How else explain KST's, UT's, and CR's characters' instant fascination for him?!
2. The follow-up - Bed, Amies!
Despite his prodigious sex-appeal (so he says) and everything else that he has gained in life at the end of Bel Ami, Georges soon becomes world weary (like Büchner's Danton**), and will do anything for a bet.
We've already seen how, through inefficient timing, he nearly has Virginie and Clotilde in the bedroom, if not in bed, at the same time - a touch worthy of Brian Rix in his pre-Mencap days. Telling these stories to his cronies, and admitting that he stll enjoys his memories of sex with the trio of women, he is put to the challenge of achieving just that, sex with them all at the same time.
He accepts, confident of winning the bet! With his natural cunning (so evident, for example, in assuming that a widow would want to consider an offer of marriage not only from someone with nothing obvious to offer, but also a bare minute or two after she became bereaved), it will be child's play, he reckons...
NB If insufficiently convinced that those who watched Bel Ami could stomach a sequel, go straight to a hard-core version for 'the specialist market'
3. An alternative follow-up - Ami de Freud
World-weary, but interested, when he hears about psychoanalysis, to meet Freud because of his troubling dreams about the three women, Georges goes to Vienna to have a consultation - or, more likely, he pays for an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris - it doesn't matter whether it's plausible, but just that it happens:
They talk, he becomes Freud's patient, and Freud teases out that, a bit like The Fifth Element (1997) (which he has got on VHS), the three essential parts of Georges' psyche are split up amongst the three women:
* One, Clotilde, is essentially benign, and forgives his wrongs (because she cannot miss having sex with him)
* Another, Madeleine, can take or leave sex with Georges (and will put him in his place through it), because she has a longstanding lover, and then, when he is gone, nothing much can replace him
* The last, Virginie, humbles herself for love of him, and he hates her for it, feeling such disgust that he feels compelled to abuse her, orally and physically (although it is, of course, not she whom he wishes to abuse)
You, Freud tells him, will never rest until the three are reunited.
How? asks Georges.
Proceed as scenario for Bed, Amies!, because, as everything is to do with sex, he can never be free until he gets all three women in bed at once...
End-notes
* If I knew who 'they' were, I'd be intrigued to find out from them what, then, is the front story, the side story, the up story...
** Another Georges. The 1983 film is not unworthy, methinks.
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16 March
A few takes on what could be behind Bel Ami (2012) - or ahead of it...
1. That advert - a distillation from the forest outside Athens?
They talk about the back story*, but, whatever we call it, it imparts essential knowledge:
It used to be that, when the woman had used this body-spray, men around her couldn't help acting on it, spontaneously presenting her, a stranger, with blooms and the like folly. (Men's fragrances didn't really exist, save as after-shave.)
Then came the male equivalent, acceptable to use as a shower-gel, because women would be falling all over the person who had done so. Clearly, Georges was a prescient amateur molecular chemist - or, more likely, knew a female one - and contrived the manufacture of what Puck uses on Shakespeare's human and fairy lovers, a potion so powerful that it acts by being scented.
How else explain KST's, UT's, and CR's characters' instant fascination for him?!
2. The follow-up - Bed, Amies!
Despite his prodigious sex-appeal (so he says) and everything else that he has gained in life at the end of Bel Ami, Georges soon becomes world weary (like Büchner's Danton**), and will do anything for a bet.
We've already seen how, through inefficient timing, he nearly has Virginie and Clotilde in the bedroom, if not in bed, at the same time - a touch worthy of Brian Rix in his pre-Mencap days. Telling these stories to his cronies, and admitting that he stll enjoys his memories of sex with the trio of women, he is put to the challenge of achieving just that, sex with them all at the same time.
He accepts, confident of winning the bet! With his natural cunning (so evident, for example, in assuming that a widow would want to consider an offer of marriage not only from someone with nothing obvious to offer, but also a bare minute or two after she became bereaved), it will be child's play, he reckons...
NB If insufficiently convinced that those who watched Bel Ami could stomach a sequel, go straight to a hard-core version for 'the specialist market'
3. An alternative follow-up - Ami de Freud
World-weary, but interested, when he hears about psychoanalysis, to meet Freud because of his troubling dreams about the three women, Georges goes to Vienna to have a consultation - or, more likely, he pays for an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris - it doesn't matter whether it's plausible, but just that it happens:
They talk, he becomes Freud's patient, and Freud teases out that, a bit like The Fifth Element (1997) (which he has got on VHS), the three essential parts of Georges' psyche are split up amongst the three women:
* One, Clotilde, is essentially benign, and forgives his wrongs (because she cannot miss having sex with him)
* Another, Madeleine, can take or leave sex with Georges (and will put him in his place through it), because she has a longstanding lover, and then, when he is gone, nothing much can replace him
* The last, Virginie, humbles herself for love of him, and he hates her for it, feeling such disgust that he feels compelled to abuse her, orally and physically (although it is, of course, not she whom he wishes to abuse)
You, Freud tells him, will never rest until the three are reunited.
How? asks Georges.
Proceed as scenario for Bed, Amies!, because, as everything is to do with sex, he can never be free until he gets all three women in bed at once...
End-notes
* If I knew who 'they' were, I'd be intrigued to find out from them what, then, is the front story, the side story, the up story...
** Another Georges. The 1983 film is not unworthy, methinks.
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Can all text-messages be like this?!
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15 March
I quote (with editing to protect The Innocent):
Dear Xxxxx, PS To-
day's Wordwang is
Hyperbuadfedenti
alltsmiecc. Don't
spend it all at once!
Ciao, Xxxxx
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15 March
I quote (with editing to protect The Innocent):
Dear Xxxxx, PS To-
day's Wordwang is
Hyperbuadfedenti
alltsmiecc. Don't
spend it all at once!
Ciao, Xxxxx
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Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (1)
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15 March
* Contains a splashing of spoilers *
I have no reason to believe that the fault lies with Maupassant*'s novel (published in 1885), on which it is based, but the screenplay of Bel Ami** (2012) - whether or not it does justice to his writing - does not, I believe, to the talents, amongst others, of Christina Ricci, Uma Thurman, and Kristin Scott Thomas, as I shall hope to explain.
As depicted, the story (which, in type, is not an unfamiliar one***) references several works, and so, depending on how one chooses to look at it, either disjoints time, by pulling images of Keanu Reeves and / or Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate (1997) out of our (maybe only subconscious) mind and into nineteenth-century (?) Paris, or, perhaps, has us prefigure those roles on the pretext that Georges is archetypal.
As to Paris, we had one shot of a street that, as soon as I saw it, patently resembled London's Kingsway (with a few token signs in French), and not, as the credits admitted, the French capital at all. The give-away, for those with eyes to see, was that the architecture simply was not right for what it was meant for.
So, as I think about it the morning after, I fear that such glibness, of unconvincingly trying to pass one thing off for another**** (which is, in some ways, at the root of the narrative itself), infected the whole production. (Just imagine Allen making Midnight in Paris (2011) without actually giving you, arguably, one of his best features of the film, Paris herself, shining alongside the radiant Marion Cotillard!)
Now, I have a confession of my own. I must admit that I was carried away with writing another posting, which I thought that I could finish, and that meant that, when I realized how late it was, I had missed not only (as planned) the tiresome trailers and the like, but also (I judge) the first minute or so. However, we were clearly enough in Pigalle or some such place, established by a flash of bare breasts, the scene for the sigificant encounter between Philip Glenister (as Charles Forestier) and Robert Pattinson (Georges Duroy).
There was not much to catch up with, to be honest, and the development of the piece (which I refuse to see in terms of Acts, though, as here worked out at any rate, the story has a clear dénouement) did not require labyrinthine thought-processes to follow / predict. And that was one of its major failings: one was expected to believe that Georges actually has some wits and does just not pick up on the scraps, hints and clues that, like the few coins that Forestier gives to him to set him up for a dinner where our three important ladies are all present.
Here, I think, he most resembled Dickens' Pip in being out of his depth. That said, somehow he knows that he needs a suitable set of clothes to be invited to dinner (and so, when given money for it, has some over for time with the prostitute Rachel), but has no clue (and has not troubled to find out) which knife to use. Here, I may have missed something by my lateness, since, for all that Georges gets tasked with writing under the title Diary of a Cavalry Officer, he plainly does not have the manners, social experience or refinement of a typical officer (but, according to Wikipedia®, he is only a non-commissioned officer in the novel - which does not really explain matters, as NCOs usually have their own mess).
This whole episode, with Christina Ricci coming into the room and introducing herself just as Clotilde, virtually required to throw herself (with her eyes at least) at Georges, is, however implausibly set up, the genesis of everything. At dinner, Georges, who has betrayed no talent for anything (and, for a long time, continues in that vein), is supposed to be 'a pull' (of, initially anyway, one sort or another) for Clotilde, and also for Madeleine Forestier (Uma Thurman as the wife of Charles), and Virginie Walter, played by an unfairly aged Kristin Scott Thomas*****, in much of the role, whose true beauty is only allowed to peep out from behind that make-up for a while.
Rather like for Franz Kafka's protagonists in The Trial and The Castle****** [I must search for dates when he was working on both, though Kafka was but a toddler when Bel Ami was published], sex is a strong impulse - in the former, instead of devoting himself to what his advocate wants him to do, Josef K. seduces the advocate's mistress (as with Geroges, he is irresistible to women); in the latter, K. goes out of his way to try to separate the official Klamm from his mistress. (The scene in the church between Virginie and Georges highly put me in mind of the chapter in The Trial that is set in the cathedral, or of the deceit and immorality of Laclos.)
I, at least, would have been reminded of those Kafka characters, blinded to the true course that they should follow for what (they say that) they want to achieve by impulses such as the desire for sex or to sleep (rather than pay attenton): here, it is truly amazing that Madeleine does not throttle Georges, when he obviously does not listen to a word that she says (if he has something else to say or do), and, when she appears to accede to his demand for sex and sits astride him, she effectively castrates his sexuality instead (in Freudian terms, whatever they may tell us), by making what he sought as pleasure a painful or unsatisfying experience, and thus a punishment.
(The sex described at the opening of America has the same quality of being like rape.)
So much for the referents. As to the dialogue, a lot of it passes muster, but too much does not, and to hear highly skilled performers such as the trio of women having to deliver it is painful, as is some of the bogus staging that they are required to act out. And, to their great credit, they do it as best they can, but the set-up for what they have to do is about as genuine as passing off London for Paris.
Too often, I could strip away the music that was trying to create a mood (in one case, utterly unconvincingly, of tension), hear the bare words that were being spoken, and not avoid cringeing: clearly, a soundtrack should not be so obvious and / or the dialogue of such poor quality that they separate from each other. (I say 'clearly', but someone made this film as it is.)
Nor should, unless one is in very sure and safe hands, a transition be made from a person as underdog to avenger, and triumphant one at that, unless it is better set up to be credible (but we could, maybe, just be meant to imagine that it is a drunken dream of retribution). Resources have to be deployed to whisk someone away, have another called on in the middle of the night, and even to get a clean set of clothes, but this was not even sketched in, passed over as if keen to get the whole thing wrapped.
Yes, we know, if we have lived, that apparent talents can be fronts for people who have cowed or manipulated othes (whether or not they knew it), but there has to be some spark for that to live as an idea. Georges, as written, betrays no real evidence of being able to plot to save his life - he imposes himself, at one point, on card-game where he plainly does not know the stakes (for all that flapping bank-notes are deployed on the table), and, for one self-evidently stupid gambit, ends up considerably the worse (witnessed by a character for whom the provision of lines seemed an unnecessary step, until he is eventually surprised, and comes out with an absurd banality, whose only excuse is to feed Georges a retort to deliver).
There is just too much that cannot reasonably unfold as it does. Admitted, Georges has cunning and is deceitful, but he is stupid enough to take Clotilde to where we first saw him; there is no notion that he has negotiated anything reciprocal with Madeleine when she is quite open about what she wants (we just jump until much time has passed); he lets people down and overlooks them, when he needs to stand in good stead with them; and he even writes a poor piece of rubbish and is surprised that it gets him the sack.
Not least being in, all ways, the worse for wear, far too much counts against this Georges for Bel Ami - the film and he, as he is so often called - to reach its ending. It relies on someone being humiliated, when it us unlikely that it would have been acceptable or decorous for a wife to attend a ball unaccompanied in the first place, and also on this overexploited (in cinematic terms) power for Georges to seduce a woman just by existing.
Maybe with a different Georges, but with this one, on paper and in appearance, no - most of the time, he has not just a five o'clock shadow, but palpable stubble and hair that makes mine look kempt (both hair and stubble even advance and recede when, between his utterances, we cut back from a reaction-shot*******) , and he makes no attempt to disguise his lack of manners, lack of then acquiring them, or sheer raw hunger for sex and money. Back with those referents, but in a fairly gross form that makes them seem subtle.
PS At the risk of seeming to rant more, I should say that Thurman's characterization, particularly the quality of the voice, was entirely and artistocratically thought through, and, unlike Pattinson's, did not wander in and out of timbre or speech-pattern. As did Ricci, she looked suitably stunning, and, although to a lesser extent, one thought in both cases that more was being exposed physically by suggestion - Ricci's poses, in particular, on the bed were provocative and cleverly devised (a deliberate contrast to the Pigalle scene, where one did not need to imagine much).
All three women, as I have tried to say, did their best to deliver what was an inadequate set of lines and their part in the plot, but Ricci probably had it easiest, by just having to be open to Georges, irrespective of what he had done, given a little time. It was, as I have remarked, unfair on Scott Thomas to mask her attractiveness, and she also had to make do with some fairly foolish things that she was required to do as it made her seem, at times, little more than an infatuated buffoon, and, ulimately, an intolerable irritation to Georges. Echoes of Steerpike? (Sting has a registered company with that name in the title.)
For a less serious approach to all this, one could - I fear - do worse than visit Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (2)...
End-notes
* It is now inexplicable to me that we de not call him de Maupassant, but Beethoven is, equally, not van Beethoven.
** For obvious reasons, I cannot name Philip French, but, on this newspaper critic's showing - in a corny crack at the start of (and wasting space in) a tiny piece that passed for a review of Sarah's Key (2011), where he asserted that he had gone into the screening with the belief that he was watching something about Sarah Keays - he will no doubt take his seat, expecting a portrait (what some would call a biopic) of a bearded botanist with a distinctive way of speaking who was on our screens (and, for all that I know, still is) much at one time.
*** For example, Steerpike's devious rise to power (and perdition) from the kitchens in the first two novels of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy (and who, then, reads the third, Titus Alone?!). There are even Dickensian echoes, and, for some reason that I cannot explain, I am most drawn to parallels with Pip in Great Expectations (published, in instalments, from 1860 to 1861).
**** Another example: there is a flash of a street, with French written clumsily in red to indicate where a turning to the right leads, but this, too, no more looked like Paris than the frontage of Harrod's. (Actually, I take that back - featuring the exterior of Harrod's might have been more effective than some of what we were shown.)
***** IMDb renders the surname 'Walters' (with an 's'), but I am unconvinced. As to the age question, CR is 32, UT 42, and KST 51 - but I would challenge anyone to know, just from this film, that it is just nine years that separate the latter two.
****** By the time that we come to America (or Der Verschollene, The One who Disappeared), sex is only the driving force for Karl to be forced to leave home, when a housemaid forces herself on him. In this film, we effectively see Georges raped by Madeleine, as I go on to mention.
******* The continuity is truly dire - even the colour-matching went at one point when we looked back to where we had just been!
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15 March
* Contains a splashing of spoilers *
I have no reason to believe that the fault lies with Maupassant*'s novel (published in 1885), on which it is based, but the screenplay of Bel Ami** (2012) - whether or not it does justice to his writing - does not, I believe, to the talents, amongst others, of Christina Ricci, Uma Thurman, and Kristin Scott Thomas, as I shall hope to explain.
As depicted, the story (which, in type, is not an unfamiliar one***) references several works, and so, depending on how one chooses to look at it, either disjoints time, by pulling images of Keanu Reeves and / or Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate (1997) out of our (maybe only subconscious) mind and into nineteenth-century (?) Paris, or, perhaps, has us prefigure those roles on the pretext that Georges is archetypal.
As to Paris, we had one shot of a street that, as soon as I saw it, patently resembled London's Kingsway (with a few token signs in French), and not, as the credits admitted, the French capital at all. The give-away, for those with eyes to see, was that the architecture simply was not right for what it was meant for.
So, as I think about it the morning after, I fear that such glibness, of unconvincingly trying to pass one thing off for another**** (which is, in some ways, at the root of the narrative itself), infected the whole production. (Just imagine Allen making Midnight in Paris (2011) without actually giving you, arguably, one of his best features of the film, Paris herself, shining alongside the radiant Marion Cotillard!)
Now, I have a confession of my own. I must admit that I was carried away with writing another posting, which I thought that I could finish, and that meant that, when I realized how late it was, I had missed not only (as planned) the tiresome trailers and the like, but also (I judge) the first minute or so. However, we were clearly enough in Pigalle or some such place, established by a flash of bare breasts, the scene for the sigificant encounter between Philip Glenister (as Charles Forestier) and Robert Pattinson (Georges Duroy).
There was not much to catch up with, to be honest, and the development of the piece (which I refuse to see in terms of Acts, though, as here worked out at any rate, the story has a clear dénouement) did not require labyrinthine thought-processes to follow / predict. And that was one of its major failings: one was expected to believe that Georges actually has some wits and does just not pick up on the scraps, hints and clues that, like the few coins that Forestier gives to him to set him up for a dinner where our three important ladies are all present.
Here, I think, he most resembled Dickens' Pip in being out of his depth. That said, somehow he knows that he needs a suitable set of clothes to be invited to dinner (and so, when given money for it, has some over for time with the prostitute Rachel), but has no clue (and has not troubled to find out) which knife to use. Here, I may have missed something by my lateness, since, for all that Georges gets tasked with writing under the title Diary of a Cavalry Officer, he plainly does not have the manners, social experience or refinement of a typical officer (but, according to Wikipedia®, he is only a non-commissioned officer in the novel - which does not really explain matters, as NCOs usually have their own mess).
This whole episode, with Christina Ricci coming into the room and introducing herself just as Clotilde, virtually required to throw herself (with her eyes at least) at Georges, is, however implausibly set up, the genesis of everything. At dinner, Georges, who has betrayed no talent for anything (and, for a long time, continues in that vein), is supposed to be 'a pull' (of, initially anyway, one sort or another) for Clotilde, and also for Madeleine Forestier (Uma Thurman as the wife of Charles), and Virginie Walter, played by an unfairly aged Kristin Scott Thomas*****, in much of the role, whose true beauty is only allowed to peep out from behind that make-up for a while.
Rather like for Franz Kafka's protagonists in The Trial and The Castle****** [I must search for dates when he was working on both, though Kafka was but a toddler when Bel Ami was published], sex is a strong impulse - in the former, instead of devoting himself to what his advocate wants him to do, Josef K. seduces the advocate's mistress (as with Geroges, he is irresistible to women); in the latter, K. goes out of his way to try to separate the official Klamm from his mistress. (The scene in the church between Virginie and Georges highly put me in mind of the chapter in The Trial that is set in the cathedral, or of the deceit and immorality of Laclos.)
I, at least, would have been reminded of those Kafka characters, blinded to the true course that they should follow for what (they say that) they want to achieve by impulses such as the desire for sex or to sleep (rather than pay attenton): here, it is truly amazing that Madeleine does not throttle Georges, when he obviously does not listen to a word that she says (if he has something else to say or do), and, when she appears to accede to his demand for sex and sits astride him, she effectively castrates his sexuality instead (in Freudian terms, whatever they may tell us), by making what he sought as pleasure a painful or unsatisfying experience, and thus a punishment.
(The sex described at the opening of America has the same quality of being like rape.)
So much for the referents. As to the dialogue, a lot of it passes muster, but too much does not, and to hear highly skilled performers such as the trio of women having to deliver it is painful, as is some of the bogus staging that they are required to act out. And, to their great credit, they do it as best they can, but the set-up for what they have to do is about as genuine as passing off London for Paris.
Too often, I could strip away the music that was trying to create a mood (in one case, utterly unconvincingly, of tension), hear the bare words that were being spoken, and not avoid cringeing: clearly, a soundtrack should not be so obvious and / or the dialogue of such poor quality that they separate from each other. (I say 'clearly', but someone made this film as it is.)
Nor should, unless one is in very sure and safe hands, a transition be made from a person as underdog to avenger, and triumphant one at that, unless it is better set up to be credible (but we could, maybe, just be meant to imagine that it is a drunken dream of retribution). Resources have to be deployed to whisk someone away, have another called on in the middle of the night, and even to get a clean set of clothes, but this was not even sketched in, passed over as if keen to get the whole thing wrapped.
Yes, we know, if we have lived, that apparent talents can be fronts for people who have cowed or manipulated othes (whether or not they knew it), but there has to be some spark for that to live as an idea. Georges, as written, betrays no real evidence of being able to plot to save his life - he imposes himself, at one point, on card-game where he plainly does not know the stakes (for all that flapping bank-notes are deployed on the table), and, for one self-evidently stupid gambit, ends up considerably the worse (witnessed by a character for whom the provision of lines seemed an unnecessary step, until he is eventually surprised, and comes out with an absurd banality, whose only excuse is to feed Georges a retort to deliver).
There is just too much that cannot reasonably unfold as it does. Admitted, Georges has cunning and is deceitful, but he is stupid enough to take Clotilde to where we first saw him; there is no notion that he has negotiated anything reciprocal with Madeleine when she is quite open about what she wants (we just jump until much time has passed); he lets people down and overlooks them, when he needs to stand in good stead with them; and he even writes a poor piece of rubbish and is surprised that it gets him the sack.
Not least being in, all ways, the worse for wear, far too much counts against this Georges for Bel Ami - the film and he, as he is so often called - to reach its ending. It relies on someone being humiliated, when it us unlikely that it would have been acceptable or decorous for a wife to attend a ball unaccompanied in the first place, and also on this overexploited (in cinematic terms) power for Georges to seduce a woman just by existing.
Maybe with a different Georges, but with this one, on paper and in appearance, no - most of the time, he has not just a five o'clock shadow, but palpable stubble and hair that makes mine look kempt (both hair and stubble even advance and recede when, between his utterances, we cut back from a reaction-shot*******) , and he makes no attempt to disguise his lack of manners, lack of then acquiring them, or sheer raw hunger for sex and money. Back with those referents, but in a fairly gross form that makes them seem subtle.
PS At the risk of seeming to rant more, I should say that Thurman's characterization, particularly the quality of the voice, was entirely and artistocratically thought through, and, unlike Pattinson's, did not wander in and out of timbre or speech-pattern. As did Ricci, she looked suitably stunning, and, although to a lesser extent, one thought in both cases that more was being exposed physically by suggestion - Ricci's poses, in particular, on the bed were provocative and cleverly devised (a deliberate contrast to the Pigalle scene, where one did not need to imagine much).
All three women, as I have tried to say, did their best to deliver what was an inadequate set of lines and their part in the plot, but Ricci probably had it easiest, by just having to be open to Georges, irrespective of what he had done, given a little time. It was, as I have remarked, unfair on Scott Thomas to mask her attractiveness, and she also had to make do with some fairly foolish things that she was required to do as it made her seem, at times, little more than an infatuated buffoon, and, ulimately, an intolerable irritation to Georges. Echoes of Steerpike? (Sting has a registered company with that name in the title.)
For a less serious approach to all this, one could - I fear - do worse than visit Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (2)...
End-notes
* It is now inexplicable to me that we de not call him de Maupassant, but Beethoven is, equally, not van Beethoven.
** For obvious reasons, I cannot name Philip French, but, on this newspaper critic's showing - in a corny crack at the start of (and wasting space in) a tiny piece that passed for a review of Sarah's Key (2011), where he asserted that he had gone into the screening with the belief that he was watching something about Sarah Keays - he will no doubt take his seat, expecting a portrait (what some would call a biopic) of a bearded botanist with a distinctive way of speaking who was on our screens (and, for all that I know, still is) much at one time.
*** For example, Steerpike's devious rise to power (and perdition) from the kitchens in the first two novels of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy (and who, then, reads the third, Titus Alone?!). There are even Dickensian echoes, and, for some reason that I cannot explain, I am most drawn to parallels with Pip in Great Expectations (published, in instalments, from 1860 to 1861).
**** Another example: there is a flash of a street, with French written clumsily in red to indicate where a turning to the right leads, but this, too, no more looked like Paris than the frontage of Harrod's. (Actually, I take that back - featuring the exterior of Harrod's might have been more effective than some of what we were shown.)
***** IMDb renders the surname 'Walters' (with an 's'), but I am unconvinced. As to the age question, CR is 32, UT 42, and KST 51 - but I would challenge anyone to know, just from this film, that it is just nine years that separate the latter two.
****** By the time that we come to America (or Der Verschollene, The One who Disappeared), sex is only the driving force for Karl to be forced to leave home, when a housemaid forces herself on him. In this film, we effectively see Georges raped by Madeleine, as I go on to mention.
******* The continuity is truly dire - even the colour-matching went at one point when we looked back to where we had just been!
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Wednesday 14 March 2012
STOP PRESS: Beat-Crazed Boffins trounced by Daniella (3)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
15 March
Not for the first time to-night, I have been asked to put my own blogging aside to give time, energy and words to another's cause, which is the following Official Statement:
Official Statement
I, Stan O'Grady, was drummer of the band Beat-Crazed Puffins ('the Band') more or less without a break for 15 years.
I am now quietly retired, and living in Egham.
I do not know, nor have I at any time known, The Sage of Egham.
On account of the name, the Band (not to be mistaken for The Band or The Banned) was linked, but only in some feeble people's minds, with The Boffins.
I have never knowingly played with The Boffins, although, before, during and after my time with the Band, I did play with other bands ('the bands').
The list of the bands, to the best of my recollection and belief, is in the bureau.
The list itself is of the bands with which, to the best of my recollection and belief, I played.
I do not know, nor have I at any time known, Antropuss O'Rourke.
For safety's sake, I should say that, to the best of my recollection and belief, the list is actually of the names of the bands, not of the bands themselves.
That is all that I wish to say.
Thank you for your time
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
15 March
Not for the first time to-night, I have been asked to put my own blogging aside to give time, energy and words to another's cause, which is the following Official Statement:
Official Statement
I, Stan O'Grady, was drummer of the band Beat-Crazed Puffins ('the Band') more or less without a break for 15 years.
I am now quietly retired, and living in Egham.
I do not know, nor have I at any time known, The Sage of Egham.
On account of the name, the Band (not to be mistaken for The Band or The Banned) was linked, but only in some feeble people's minds, with The Boffins.
I have never knowingly played with The Boffins, although, before, during and after my time with the Band, I did play with other bands ('the bands').
The list of the bands, to the best of my recollection and belief, is in the bureau.
The list itself is of the bands with which, to the best of my recollection and belief, I played.
I do not know, nor have I at any time known, Antropuss O'Rourke.
For safety's sake, I should say that, to the best of my recollection and belief, the list is actually of the names of the bands, not of the bands themselves.
That is all that I wish to say.
Thank you for your time
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
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