PS, Mr Linklater

This is an after-thought to a review of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014)

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18 August

This is an after-thought to a review of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014)

The things remembered from (or known about) from childhood, which potentially made watching Boyhood (2014) seem like quite likely to be a self-revelatory experience, but which just are not there in your rather golden, cleaned-up States…


Thinking of, in an unordered list :

* Drug use amongst the earlier years when we follow Mason

* Jerking-off competitions

* Anything harder, pornographically, than models in a lingerie catalogue (although there is a nervous moment when some Internet footage was about to be watched)

* Peeing up the wall of the urinal (another form of competition)

* Bullying for being ‘a swot’ (sc. too academic)

* Sweat / body odour

* Peers showing each other their nascent pubic hair (as a film actor did whom I know)

* Guns and playing soldier

* Getting hurt in games (bruises, cuts, etc.)

* Childhood illnesses / vomiting

* Sneaking some of the parents’ booze

* Exploring each other sexually / one’s sexual organs (doctors and nurses), including siblings

* Embarrassment about being seen naked

* Facial hair and what to do with it – likewise coping with voice dropping

* Brighter kids getting their work copied / doing homework

* Awkward / embarrassment, and unwanted erections (hard-ons)

* Chemistry lessons – stealing magnesium ribbon to burn, and child tendencies to delinquency / immorality

* Fussy eating

* Masturbation / wet dreams / semen

* Being asked to perform in front of one’s parents friends (reading / singing)

* Tantrums – getting tired and stroppy

* Not just graffiti in a tunnel, but mucking around with paint at home

* Breaking things and pretending not to know about it

* Feeling awkward about one’s feelings / self-image / appearance

* Crushes on teachers, etc., etc.


Get the point, Mr Linklater ? Now, you didn’t have to cram all of these in, but the vast majority of them are not even suggested in this sunshiny world* – did you, for example, ever see Herr Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009) ?



End-notes

* Was the film shot with a bright filter, or has it been colour matched in that way ?



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Almost Monty Python (Almost) Live

This is a review of Monty Python (Almost) Live

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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17 August

This is a review of Monty Python (Almost) Live

As Spamalot may have been (the writer does not know), another Eric-Idle-engineered piece, centred on big musical numbers (which, in the case of Monty Python (Almost) Live, were very impressive - with a talented cast of singer / dancers), this show was, for all that it offered, uneven.

No doubt some of the unevenness could have been levelled out by the editing of the Live show to be (Almost) Live, which seemed a marked advantage (as it does for, say, NT Live broadcasts, though others see these things differently).

From the start, we had the dubious benefit of a kangaroo (with an obviously human face) on stage, which eventually found its place later on (please see below). In the meantime, its locomotive human bobbed around, in an irritatingly jolly fashion, which seemed to sound the inappropriate note that the show was going to be cuddly, which, in places, it flatly contradicted, e.g. with the penis, vagina, arse* group of songs (can one seriously write that in a review ? yes, as this is Python…)
It was the same Idle with Michelangelo's Last Supper, where John Cleese was too strong, as when he is allowed to be (such as with that whack with the mammoth fish on the edge of the quay, The Fish-Slapping Dance, and one of Cleese or Idle robbed Idle of the strength of the lines about the 28 disciples, and the 3 Christs – along with Idle’s outclassed cheery quattordicicento painter guise, they plummeted, unable to compete with Cleese, as The Pope, blithely saying fucking.

In this early part of the show, some of the humour – in what seemed to be new material – just did not work, and, by definition, was not the best of Python (e.g. the tame misunderstanding of Oz Arena for the O2 Arena, dutifully delivered by Michael Palin), as one might expect the show to aim to be. ‘Every sperm is sacred’ (from The Meaning of Life (1983)) was a huge production number, with a great dance routine, although not quite to rival the energy and scope of the film, and it also had new lyrics (in places). Another big set-piece, ‘I like Chinese’, was similarly impressive, but – if it was Python – taxed this writer’s familiarity. It started seeming marginally racially offensive, only to turn out not to be*.
Wherever the philosophers’ song came from (with the Bruces as philosophy professors**), Palin seemed, as observed, the only one who had obviously learnt his lines (such as they were) : Eddie Izzard was probably brought on stage at this part, but he just seemed star struck, and contributed nothing other than his awe. Linked with footage of the German and Greek Philosophers’ Football-Match, and sensationally going back to the match as Socrates scores in the final seconds, it worked well as a combination, because of the sheer shared incongruity : when parts of original Python shows were given oxygen to thrive by a suitable setting, both were enhanced.

A re-enactment of the Crunchy Frog Sketch at the premises of the Whizzo Chocolate company had the visually and aurally coarse element of Terry Gilliam, as Superintendent Parrot, farting and retching, as his senior officer (Cleese as Inspector Praline) recalled what he had eaten from the assortment. By the time that sweetmeats such as the crunchy frog were reached, Terry Jones was reading impassively from the card, and, cracking up with Cleese, swallowed and lost losing the impact of Ah - now, that's our speciality (Spring Surprise) - covered with darkest creamy chocolate. When you pop it in your mouth steel bolts spring out and plunge straight through both cheeks.

Up until the interval, the show had been pretty good, and the choice of archive Python had been well made : The Fish-Slapping Dance is always a killer (however many times one has seen it), because of Cleese’s all-too-adept bludgeoning, and included amongst Gilliam’s wizardry were the teasingly postponed / interposed full frontal nudity, the pram that swallows people, and the Rodin ocarina.

However, one strange note sounded was by a caption flashed up that said ‘Munich 1972’ – the year of the Olympic massacre, most notably ?

* * * * *

Palin in Blackmail was smarmy, but the sketch did not have the bite and impetus of that in the t.v. series, and just felt a bit weak. Another piece of shrapnel on stage was what looked like Mike Meyers : no doubt that he was pleased to be there, but he had nothing to do, and added nothing.

Great moments of the second half (as far as they can be recalled) were :

* The Exploding Blue Danube, which (although it probably was not as clever as it looked) was very entertaining

* The Spanish Inquisition, kept together, again, by Palin – with his not inestimable, dogmatically precise zealot prelate (to give the Pythons their full complement, lines on introduction, such as One on't cross beams gone owt askew on't treddle, had been given to members of the cast)

* Moving into Idle opening a fridge, and doing his pink-suited number, ‘The Universe song’ (alias ‘The Galaxy song’)

* One Professor (Brian Cox) being rammed by another (in Stephen Hawking) and accused of being pedantic (for correcting the detail of the preceding song)

* The Dead Parrot Sketch linked up with The Cheese Shop Sketch and finishing with Do you fancy coming back to my place ? (from a little t.v. moment when Cleese, as a Police Inspector, meets another Python in the street) : Palin and Cleese on top form, trying to make each other corpse with ad libs, but Palin getting the upper hand by recalling where they are and telling Cleese 'Your next line is...' - very funny, and in the spirit of Pythons' four re-enactments for Amnesty International (The Secret Policeman's Ball) between 1976 and 1981, although, perhaps notably, Idle was never involved in them***

* Inevitably, ending with a lively, shimmering version of ‘Always look on the bright side of life’


A good way of spending a couple of hours, and an encouragement to dig out that huge boxed set of the t.v. series – and Just the Words, the nicely curated scripts in two volumes (which has provided information of the episodes above)…


Hesitations:

* Just how much it was Idle’s patent show and with his songs, when it could have celebrated Python more widely, than promoting purchase of the films on the flier, by incorporating clips from them (or were their copyright limitations ?)

* Would everyone have known who Carol Cleveland was ? She may have substituted for the original Connie Booth to Palin’s lumberjack, but she was never introduced. Although she did an admirable few other turns, she had always been the token glamour in the t.v. series (when the pepperpots, etc. could not be suitable sirens), so it was a shame that the team did not put the record straight by officially acknowledging who she was.


Reference material :

Blackmail - Episode Eighteen (recorded 10/9/1970, transmitted 27/10/70)

The Bruces - Episode Twenty-Two (recorded 25/9/1970, transmitted 24/11/1970)

The Cheese Shop Sketch - Episode Thirty-Three (recorded 7/1/1972, transmitted 30/11/72)

The Crunchy Frog Sketch - Episode Six (recorded 5/11/1969, transmitted 23/11/1969)

The Dead Parrot Sketch - Episode Nine (recorded 7/12/1969, transmitted 14/12/1969)

Exploding Blue Danube - Episode Twenty-Six (recorded 16/10/70, transmitted 22/12/1970)

The Fish-Slapping Dance - Episode Twenty-Eight (recorded 28/1/1972, transmitted 26/10/72)

I’m a Lumberjack - (Episode Nine (recorded 7/12/1969, transmitted 14/12/1969)

The Philosophers’ Football-Match - From Monty Pythons Fliegender Zirkus (made for German t.v.)

The Spanish Inquisition - Episode Fifteen (recorded 2/7/1970, transmitted 22/9/1070)



End-notes

* Is that taken from The Meaning of Life (1983) and – as only Idle could – ‘updated’ ? (It was an irritation that the text of this, and of the philosophers’ song, were not kept in front of the camera for long enough – perhaps a last-minute bid to protect the innocent ?) If it was, as other pieces / songs were not straight renditions (unlike those that were – insofar as those performing them could manage it – meant to be straight renditions), but had been modernized (one was not always sure why) :

After all, I’m a Lumberjack is just as offensive to the trans audience as it has ever been, but no changes had been introduced to the sacred text (except the tease, in the preceding Lion-Tamer sketch, that Mr Anchovy really wants to be a Systems Analyst). Palin was jeered as ‘disgusting’ by one in the choir (uncelestial), whereas another song (‘I like Chinese’) was cute in pretending to be, but not actually being, racist. In fact, the interjection that followed the sketch on t.v., from Cleese voicing over a letter from Brigadier Sir Charles Arthur Strong (Mrs), had said Many of my best friends are lumberjacks and only a few of them are transvestites


** Which was the only connection with The Bruces, an insignificant piece, made no more or less significant.
*** It is understood that only Jones and Cleese took some role (of whatever kind) in all four shows, with Palin registering three, Chapman two, and Gilliam one. Apart from a brief cameo in the 1989 show by Palin and Cleese, there has been no engagement with any later Amnesty shows.



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Manhood and Hawke

This is a review of Boyhood (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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17 August

This is a review of Boyhood (2014)

Boyhood (2014) at @CamPicturehouse, which some say is a one-trick pony - but how high will the pony kick, and would one watch again... ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 16, 2014

One does not watch such a film for breathtaking cinematographic insights (though there are some nice outdoor locations, not least at the very end), but for character development, set somewhere recognizably real : in its own terms, exploring Mason Evans, Snr (Ethan Hawke), through the story of Mason Evans, Jnr (Ellar Coltrane), it does not disappoint at all, and there are three moments where one has a lump in one’s throat at how a character is being appreciated by another.

That amongst significant moments of behaviour where people have lost their way, and got into blaming or being jealous of each other, which is the contrast in life. At the heart of all this, though – for all that it is talked about – it is not the most remarkable thing about the film that it was shot, for three or four days per year, over the course of twelve years, although it does allow one to see both Lorelei Linklater (his daughter as Mason’s sister Sam(antha)) and Coltrane age, and their faces and features mature. No, it is principally that of the closeness between father and son, and how the former allows the latter to see things from an older perspective.

At one moment, towards the end, younger Mason asks what the point of it all is, and receives the totally honest answer that no one knows and everyone is pretending. For those who have seen Sam Rockwell in The Way Way Back (2013), he is the humorous and intelligent father / mentor that we all identify as being enriching, and, at the best of times, there is that quality in Hawke’s remarkably penetrating acting.

So much so that one almost feels that Linklater has to introduce a distance, by pausing when Hawke meets Charlie Sexton (credited as Jimmy ?*) and they have a child, otherwise Hawke will steal the film.

Other things, such as the invidious position of a stepchild, are probably better addressed by Steve Carell in The Way Way Back than here by Linklater, but the point of it all is the same : that of holding one’s children firm when they need it so that they can have the confidence and belief that they deserve. Patricia Arquette’s* courage in taking her family out of an unsuitable situation (and the strength that her friend gives her) remind of a little 30-minute gem from Cambridge Film Festival 2013 (#CamFF), Avant Que De Tout Perdre (Just Before Losing Everything) (2013)…

Compared with the more fly-away Hawke’s, Arquette’s character roots herself in responsibility, and feels the challenges of life in providing for Sam and Mason. These words could almost have been written for one scene :

She'll take the painting in the hallway
The one she did in Jr. High

Words : Matthew Charles Rollings / Doug Crider

Suzy Bogguss seems to have made this meditative song, ‘Letting Go’, her own, and it has an obvious resonance with the unsettling feeling of impermanence and of relentless change, which sometimes feels too much for Arquette as a mother. Where we leave Mason, we feel that he will make mistakes, but that he has kept a regard for his parents and their nurture, and we are content for him to take the course and not to witness it further.

Boyhood (2014) is by no means a one-trick pony, @CamPicturehouse - knowing the trick doesn't matter, and it could easily be watched again...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 17, 2014

Linklater’s desire to make this film with an ageing cast is not, except as a feature film, a new departure, because the well-known Granada Television series Up (which has been broadcast on ITV and the BBC) has covered 49 years in following fourteen British children since the age of seven (in 1964), whereas Mason is six when we first see the shot of him that is used in the film’s promotion. (He may also already have known that he would make a follow-up to Before Sunrise with the older Julie Delpy and, again, Hawke.)

Just two minor, minor things that do not work : when Arquette is remarried, and we cut to a side-shot of her Compliance Officer husband, his face is making the wrong expression for the serious subject that he is addressing, and then we cut back. That and the father-and-son exchange about other Star Wars films, which felt very placed and stilted.

But with Hawke duetting with the harmonizing Sexton (on Hawke’s own songs), and the other ways that music is organic to the feel, one can keep all the tracks in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) – this is the soundtrack to buy.


Click here for a PS to Mr Linklater - some of the things that made actual boyhood so difficult, but which you will find no mention of in this film






End-notes

* IMDb, as it sometimes can, lets down massively by not providing the names of the characters : it lists Arquette as ‘Mom’ !


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@Film4's 100 Must-See Movies of the 21st Century - analysed (as a list)

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15 August

What is a must-see film ?


Film4.com (@Film4) has recently compiled a list of what it calls 100 Must-See Movies of the 21st Century*

As we assemble our fall schedule, get your cinema fix by debating this @Film4 list of the century's best films. http://t.co/Zj7aD4t2Eo
— Gregory Film Culture (@GregoryFilm) August 6, 2014

However, can it really be right that fourteen of them (which, after all, is around 1 in 7) were released in 2011 alone ? And, when some critics have hailed 2014 as an exceptionally strong year for cinema, is it justified that only Boyhood (2014) qualifies for inclusion ?

A survey last year, by Time Out Film (@TimeOutFilm), of The 100 best romantic movies was much more candid about how the selection had been carried out, which allowed your correspondent to analyse just how many (sc. how few) votes were needed for a film to appear in the top 10, let alone in the top 100 at all.

Analysis showed that, out of 101 respondents (from six categories), only 19 voted for Annie Hall (1977), but that voting still sufficed to secure it 4th place (not that it is not one of Woody Allen’s best films, of course). Much of the list’s pretence to authority (e.g. in the title of the list) then seemed to fall away ?



So how does this top 100 fare…

In decreasing order, starting with the highest-ranking year, one can see below, in every year since the turn of the century*, how many ‘top films’ – according to this list – were released (figures in bold face), with a cumulative percentage

Where the total number of films that has been selected in each year is equal, the number of films that featured in the top 50 (which is in parenthesis) has been used to determine the order of priority (otherwise they are left in date-order)



2011 – 14 (7) 14%

2013 – 12 (5) 26%

2001 – 9 (5) 35%

2000 – 8 (5) 43%

2004 – 7 (5) 50%

2002 – 7 (4) 57%

2009 – 7 (4) 64%

2003 – 7 (2) 71%

2008 – 7 (2) 78%

2005 – 5 (3) 83%

2006 – 5 (1) 88%

2007 – 4 (4) 92%

2010 – 4 (2) 96%

2012 – 3 (0) 99%

2014 – 1 (1) 100%



One can see quite clearly that 26% of films (slightly more than 1 in 4) were chosen from just two years (i.e. 2011 and 2013), and 50% from just five years (adding in 2000, 2001 and 2004). Is this why people have said that 2014 is a significant year for film, although there is only one film from this year – that they meant the year when films were in cinemas ?

Only 2010 significantly moves position, from 12th to equal 6th, on the basis of using the score for the top 50 instead (otherwise 2012 and 2014 swap places).


Top 20 by country (accounting for 12 countries), with a cumulative percentage

USA, as the country with the most films produced, is listed first, and, as it was the country of production of the top-listed film, 1 is given as the highest position scored (in parenthesis)

Where, for example, a film was a UK / US production (as with Gravity (2013), each country has been awarded one-half

Where the number of films is equal (1 or ½), the ordering is by the position in the list of the highest-ranked film (given by a figure in parenthesis)



Directors are noted who have two films in the top 100 (with the name, date and position of the films) : only Richard Linklater and Michael Haneke have two in the top 20

Joel and Ethan Coen are the only directors with two films in the list not to have one place in the top 20 (No Country For Old Men (2007) (at 25) and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) (at 69))

If the 300-film list had not been curtailed, how many more pairs (or trios) of directors might there have been... ?



United States - 8½ (1) 42.5%
3 : Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood (2007)
[also 45 : Punch-Drunk Love (2002)]

5 : Richard Linklater, Boyhood (2014)
[also 17 : Before Sunset (2004)]

10 : David Fincher, Zodiac (2007)
[also 30 : The Social Network (2010)]

United Kingdom - 1½ (4) 50%
4 : Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin (2013)
[also 41 : Sexy Beast (2000)]


France - 1½ (8) 57.5%
14 : Michael Haneke, Hidden (Caché) (2005)


Taiwan - 1 (2) 62.5%

China - 1 (6) 67.5%

Hungary - 1 (7) 72.5%

Japan - 1 (11) 77.5%

Spain - 1 (15) 82.5%

Germany - 1 (16) 87.5%
16 : Michael Haneke, The White Ribbon (2009)

Greece - 1 (18) 92.5%

Iran - 1 (19) 97.5%


Belgium - ½ (8) 100%



It has become clear that, when the introduction to the list says that it is ‘Drawn from 29 countries around the world’, although Mexico and Spain, which were co-producing countries of Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), could have added two to the total of 29 countries (but only one film), this has not been done in the list (as one establishes by having added all of the totals (below))



The rest of the top 50 (21 to 50) by country (which adds 10 countries, to make 22)


United States - 8½ (23)


France - 5 (28)


United Kingdom - 4½ (39)


Sweden - 2 (26)


Romania - 1 (22)

South Korea - 1 (24)

Thailand - 1 (27)

Russia - 1 (29)

Turkey - 1 (33)

Senegal - 1 (37)

Germany - 1 (47)

Australia - 1 (48)

Japan - 1 (49)


Mexico - ½ (21)

Spain - ½ (21)




Adding these totals gives the Top 50, together with a cumulative total


As above, where the number of films is equal (1 or ½), the ordering is by the position in the list of the highest-ranked film (given by a figure in parenthesis)


United States - 17 (1) 34%


France - 6½ (8) 47%


United Kingdom - 6 (4) 59%



Germany - 2 (16) 63%

Japan - 2 (11) 67%

Sweden - 2 (26) 71%


Spain - 1½ (15) 74%


Taiwan - 1 (2) 76%

China - 1 (6) 78%

Hungary - 1 (7) 80%

Greece - 1 (18) 82%

Iran - 1 (19) 84%

Romania - 1 (22) 86%

South Korea - 1 (24) 88%

Thailand - 1 (27) 90%

Russia - 1 (29) 92%

Turkey - 1 (33) 94%

Senegal - 1 (37) 96%

Australia - 1 (48) 98%


Belgium - ½ (8) 99%

Mexico - ½ (21) 100%



The cumulative total shows that the United States, the United Kingdom and France alone account for 59% of the top 50, with 41% (as calculated) spread between, and adding four further countries accounts for nearly 75% of the listing for 1–50

NB As co-producing countries, Belgium and Mexico would not have been counted by Film4 on this part of the list, nor, in the second part, would Ireland, South Africa or New Zealand (even though that entry is for three films)



The remainder of the top 100 (51 to 100) by country, with cumulative percentage


As before, where the number of films is equal (1 or ½), the ordering is by the position in the list of the highest-ranked film (given by a figure in parenthesis)


United States - 23 (53) 46%


United Kingdom - 16½ (54) 79%


Canada - 2 (56) 83%


Brazil - 1 (51) 85%

Italy - 1 (52) 87%

Argentina - 1 (61) 89%

Japan - 1 (71) 91%

South Korea - 1 (76) 93%

Denmark - 1 (94) 95%

France - 1 (98) 97%


New Zealand - ½ (53) 98%

South Africa - ½ (90) 99%

Ireland - ½ (95) 100%


The top three countries (USA, UK and Canada) account for 83% of the films in positions 51 to 100, and only ten other countries are accounted for in this part of the list



Nearly last, the full list (by adding the last two lists), with cumulative percentage


United States - 40 (1) 40%

United Kingdom - 22½ (4) 62.5%

France - 7½ (8) 70%

Japan - 3 (11) 73%


Germany - 2 (16) 75%

South Korea - 2 (24) 77%

Sweden - 2 (26) 79%

Canada - 2 (56) 81%


Spain - 1½ (15) 82.5%


Taiwan - 1 (2) 83.5%

China - 1 (6) 84.5%

Hungary - 1 (7) 85.5%

Greece - 1 (18) 86.5%

Iran - 1 (19) 87.5%

Romania - 1 (22) 88.5%

Thailand - 1 (27) 89.5%

Russia - 1 (29) 90.5%

Turkey - 1 (33) 91.5%

Senegal - 1 (37) 92.5%

Australia - 1 (48) 93.5%

Brazil - 1 (51) 94.5%

Italy - 1 (52) 95.5%

Argentina - 1 (61) 96.5%

Denmark - 1 (94) 97.5%


Belgium - ½ (8) 98%

Mexico - ½ (21) 98.5%

New Zealand - ½ (53) 99%

South Africa - ½ (90) 99.5%

Ireland - ½ (95) 100%



Where the single-country entries appear

The final study explores where the 30% (or fewer) of films that are not from the main countries represented come from : the listing above shows that there are sudden little runs, such as 48 / 51 / 52, 18 / 19 / 22 and 6 / 7 / 8 (that one includes where France’s top-rating film appears), where a country’s single film appears – other decades are dominated by the States and the United Kingdom’s productions, as listed below (with the number, in bold, of such films, and the films from other countries given, in italic and within square brackets, by placing)


0 – 10 6 : [2 / 6 / 7 / 8]

11 – 20 4 : [11 / 14 / 15 / 16 / 18 / 19]

21 – 30 3 : [21 / 22 / 24 / 26 / 27 / 28 / 29]

31 – 40 4 : [31 / 33 / 34 / 35 / 36 / 37]

41 – 50 6 : [44 / 47 / 48 / 49]


51 – 60 6½ : [51 / 52 / 53 (with United States) / 56]

61 – 70 9 : [61]

71 – 80 8 : [71 / 76]

81 – 90 9½ : [90 (with United States)]

91 – 100 7½ : [95 (with United Kingdom) / 97 / 98]



Looked at quickly, there appear to be runs of films not from the United States or the United Kingdom within the Top 10, and the fifth decade (from 41 to 50), and those decades have more films that are not from those countries

After the sixth decade (which is similar), a pattern sets in of almost all films being from the United Kingdom or the States. e.g. an almost uninterrupted run from 57 (in the sixth decade) through the next two decades, 71 to 80 and 81 to 90, to 94 : seemingly, only 4 non-US, non-UK ‘must-see’ films in a run of 39 films

We must pass it over to others to calculate what that might signify by way of selectivity…



End-notes

* Even it was actually on 1 January 2001, because 2000 was the last year of the twentieth century...


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Raskolnikov sojourns in Shanghai

This is a review that couples The Lady from Shanghai (1948) with
Norte, the End of History (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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10 August

This is a review that couples The Lady from Shanghai (1948) with
Norte, the End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan) (2013)

* Contains spoilers *

As soon as someone dubs a film 'a slow-burner', patience is signalled : with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the film's inner beauty suffices.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 8, 2014

Compared with Norte, the End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan) (2013), ‘slow burning’ is not a phrase by which one could still describe The Lady from Shanghai (1948)*. Certainly not as to overall plot or pace, though it does fall into three distinct parts of unequal length (set-up, court-scene, and symbolic hall of mirrors), the second of which is established by the purposeful, if leisurely, unfolding of the first – hence there is a smouldering sense, as if of a fuse.

A fuse implies (such is its purpose, although it may go out) that there will be a detonation, an explosion, which is delivered by the events that close on Michael (Mike) O’Hara at the end of the first part. This is the moment that we were (being temptingly) kept waiting to get back to, after what Mike (director and co-writer Orson Welles himself) told us at the opening, when a darkly lit craft had been coming in under the Golden Gate Bridge (in a film that plays with light and dark, not just in clothes).

Arguably, Norte never does more than burn through at a deliberately steady and slow rate, and, towards the end, balances fairly cowardly actions of restitution (because they risk nothing, even if they are done out of seeming guilt), with those that seem to make past actors guilty as a basis for wreaking vengeance on them (the equivalent of Fabian's earlier acts).

Style and embellishments apart, Norte, the End of History (2013) is a retelling of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, mashed up with Camus.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 7, 2014

Someone may very well behave in this way, but, until this point, the screenplay retains enough of the story of Crime and Punishment, complete with its unsympathetic and grasping money-lender, to tease us into believing that it wishes to engage with re-telling Dostoveksy’s novel. Yet, forgetting that the figure of Porphyry (the detective in the novel) has been omitted, the closest person to Sonya that we see is when Fabian has gone to Manila, and reluctantly (because of the affiliations of his group of friends) has something to do with the church : alone as a way of understanding him, beyond his contentious arguments and justifications, his struggle to say what he has done in La Paz before a group at the church is one of the few expressive moments in the whole film that is not characterized by flatness of affect.

In its way, Michael O’Hara’s tripping brogue, sometimes more convincing than at other times (perhaps to remind us that all cinema is a piece of blarney, a tale being told), is staggeringly cool in its tone, however hot his driving feelings for Elsa Bannister (Welles’ wife, Rita Haywood) may be. With sangfroid, he has us credit (because we see it) that Elsa’s husband Arthur, a trial lawyer on crutches, searches him out as he works (on his novel !) at the hiring hall for seafaring men, and, after begging him to serve on his yacht for a cruise, gets so drunk that Mike and his friends have to see him home – whereupon it is a fait accompli that Mike join the crew.

Noir, which the first part of the film unquestionably is, embraces such plot-styles with relish, asking us to place trust in unreliable narratives and in devices and developments that are more Gothic than Gothic** – although we do go along with what we see, to further the purpose of following the film, we know simultaneously that the logic and reality of the dream is behind all of this, and that we are not to press too hard on its fabric. The veneer of veracity is never more than thin, and amounts to carrying off absurdity with poise (or, if you will, gravitas).

Who knows how much of what has already been outlined is owed to Sherwood King’s novel, but the film has all the trappings of a shaggy-dog story ! Coupled with Mike’s pithy poetic monologue about sharks off the coast of Brazil, the grotesquery of both Bannister and his unexpectedly arriving grinning business partner George Grisby (Glenn Anders), and the corny demeanour of both men towards Bannister’s wife, and one can see Mike smiling his way through an evening of drinks as he tells it.

Superficially, Norte simply asks us to place our trust in it for no other reason than it appears a naturalistic account (which it is not) of the consequences of an injustice – when Fabian’s lawyer friends eventually discuss, at his instigation, the merits of an appeal against JR’s conviction, it is clear that weight has been given to a confession (whose reasons for being made we know), and an incident that connects him with the victim, over such factors as JR having the alibi that, at the time, he was at the place where he was (somehow) found and arrested.

In Mike’s case, Arthur Bannister – although the screenplay has been quietly laughing throughout at what Bannister’s status as a celebrated criminal lawyer means – is presented to us as his only option for being acquitted, but the patent tomfoolery in the court-room suggests otherwise. (Meanwhile, no one stops to ask on whose typewriter Mike's ‘confession’ was supposed to have been written, not least in relation to the particular question - in relation to what we see happen (even if partly as set up by Grisby) - of when and where Mike could have had access to one to do so…)

-> A typed and signed document becomes of great importance, but when - and even where - could it have been prepared in real time ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 4, 2014

In common with The Lady, we have murder, a judicial process (though, in Norte, we do not see any more than its artefacts and officers), and the question of innocence (in a conviction for acts that we know that the accused did not commit). Forgetting the question of justice per se, or of redemption (for which there is precious little evidence – in either film), we have in Fabian (as in Mike) a man who is jaundiced with life, but open to idealism. At any rate, we see the philosophizing with which his friends and he seem to entertain themselves, but which he – although they end up in laughter – seems to hold more dear, and (without such intellectualization) there are aspects of this make-up to Mike.

Both directors (Welles was uncredited at the time), in their ways, challenge us to look at the artefacts that they have brought into existence by the process of film-making, and towards the end not insignificantly so, with Welles’ mirror-scene and with the scenes that Lav Diaz gives us of the wreckage of a seeming coach-crash, followed by JR’s supine body levitating.

Yet, before then, the Gothic nature of Welles’ edifice was saying this all along. In Norte, we see this in the artfulness with which elements such as recurrent Christmas-lights, dogs and chickens, vegetables on a cart, and (returning to Christmas) JR’s inexhaustible production of three-dimensional five-pointed stars (which he not only brings when allowed out on release, but which litter the crash-scene) have been assembled.

Where Diaz may make a minor departure from Welles here (if not a new one) is in his disjunctive use of audio…

Maybe, @theskinnymag @MovieEvangelist - but composing views of a small pig with that recorded sound did little for @THEAGENTAPSLEY... ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 8, 2014

-> Likewise seeing Eliza, Sarah and young Joacquinwalk along accompanied by some unholy unidentified din, @theskinnymag @MovieEvangelist.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 8, 2014

That apart, with two palpable fictions, one has to ask what function there is in following the form of Fabian's interactions, or even Michael O'Hara's wayward narration (though he enchants us more) :


Welles and his writing team seem to be trying to be too clever for their own good, with incrimination that does not stand up to examination (except with the dazzle of mirrors and reflections, though not intellectual reflection), and Diaz, if he assumes that we know the Dostoyevsky (maybe he does not care), only seems to want to play with our expectations of what he will do with the novel's bare bones.

The restoration of The Lady from Shanghai (1947) looks good, with all that shade, and white and dark clothes, but does it hold together ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 4, 2014

End-notes

* Not to be mistaken for The Lady from Shanghai (1947), whose title-character seems to have kleptomania (and whose IMDb entry persists on coming out at the top of a search on Google, with no placing for Welles in the first ten hits)…

Oops, got one's Ladies from Shanghai confused - the Welles is the 1948 one, not the one about a kleptomaniac !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 5, 2014

Apparently, not our film’s original title, but, before it, Take This Woman and Black Irish.

** Here, Mike making eyes at the lady in the carriage and then happening to rescue her : she has no reason to be in the carriage, even, for where it stops under his control is where her car is garaged. Or a screenwriter in debt, pulling off the road to stop his car being repossessed, and, discovering a slumbering villa, entering the place, as Prince Charming, that will enslave him (Sunset Boulevard (1950)).




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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

These are some of my favourite things… (with apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein – let alone John Coltrane)

An overview of favourite films from Cambridge Film Festival in 2011, 2012 and 2013

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 July

An overview of favourite films from Cambridge Film Festival in 2011, 2012 and 2013

A month before Cambridge Film Festival starts, and following last month’s survey of What is Catalan cinema ? (550 page-views), we take another dive for strings of pearls, linked by their preoccupations, this time into the archive that is Fifteen fine festival films (now, seemingly, with the improbable more than 19,000 page-views…).

Put another way, what follows is a teasing-apart of strands in the best of (largely) subtitled festival cinema, the pick of what has been seen at Cambridge Film Festival between 2011 and 2013. They are not themes, by any means, unique to these films, for we can find them in The Matrix (1999) and its trilogy, Good Will Hunting (1997), or The Truman Show (1998), or ones that reductively sum up the films in either case – since, of course, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – but, rather, they are touchstones to what may evoke a response in others.

And themes that, in any case, interlink (as the classic circles do, demonstrating colour-mixing, of red, green and blue) : finding the hidden truth is another aspect of being corrupted, yet of seeking renewal…


Our themes for this posting :

1. Innocence corrupted – and yet…

2. Knowing the beginning for the first time

3. Finding the truth behind the appearance

* * * * *

1. Innocence corrupted – and yet…



The selected films :

As if I am not There (2010) - from 2011

Premise : Samira, a newly started primary teacher, is caught up in the cruelty and selfishness of war, and used for sex, even if latterly with greater tenderness


Postcards from the Zoo (Kebun binatang) (2012) (Festival review) - from 2012

Premise : Threatened with expulsion from her paradisiacal life in the zoo, Lana leaves for a better life, but it vanishes, and she becomes prey


The Taste of Money (Do-nui mat) (2012) - from 2013

Premise : Lightly mocked for his gaucheness, Joo Young-Jak (‘Mr Joo’) seems immune to money’s attractions, but he sees how wealth changes status


In each film, a way back is offered or found, (which, using the language of money, we also symbolically call ‘changed fortunes’) – often both found and offered, for it is with and through the company chairman’s daughter’s changed perspective on her family in The Taste of Money that Joo Young-Jak (Kang-woo Kim) has the courage to act differently and selflessly at the close of the film, and, in Postcards from the Zoo, Lana (Ladya Cheryl ?) feels to be reaching out for her past life as a place that she loves, and where its inhabitants love her.

In between, we have Samira (Natasa Petrovic) in As if I am not There, who, rather as Lana also seems to do, disassociates from her oppressive present : when we first see Samira, she finds herself – unintentionally, in these terms – left to reflect on what went before. War has been unkind to her, and now she is in another country, with no home to which to return. She chooses to face what happened, just as we viewers in part live through it with her, and acts with kindness.

Engaging with her experience allows Samira a different perspective on what life in all its fullness can be for her now, just as Lana has lost what was maybe complacence about her home (and her place in the world), and can gratefully embrace what it offers. In the case of Joo Young-Jak, the film brings us to a more enigmatic close, but one where his companion and he have acted with thought and decency, to right the wrongs of the dynasty of which they have been part.

There is a fourth film that links with this theme, and which was shown at the opening of the Festival in 2012, when director Robert Guediguian took part in a Q&A : The Snows of Kilimanjaro (2011) (Festival review). There, Marie-Claire (Ariane Ascaride) and Michel (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) do not so much lose sight of their principles, as get enmeshed in a judicial process that pushes them in directions that cause them not to share their instincts for good. Nonetheless, they separately act on those instincts, and so reaffirm their beliefs in the meaning of life and in each other.



2. Knowing the beginning for the first time


The selected films :

The Idiot (Idioot) (2011) (Estonia) - from 2012

Premise : A stylized, but sympathetic, retelling of Dostoyevsky’s novel about the saintly ‘fool’ Prince Myshkin, who disarms others even as he harms himself


Kosmos (2010) - from 2011

Premise : Along with Myshkin, another man who, when not looked at in the round, is in danger of being misunderstood (by being over-praised)


Upstream Color (2013) (Young Americans) - from 2013
Premise : Most definitely another film not to be understood naturalistically, it shows the eye of faith seeing connections that their maker intended broken


Starting with the last of these, in the chance meeting and awkward understanding between Kris (Amy Seimetz) and Jeff (Shane Carruth, the writer and director of Upstream Color) we see evoked a feeling that would have one not only seek a sense of safety, snuggled with an unquestioning other in an unlikely confined space, but also, when no longer frightened, would break through into another reality.

No more so than The Taste of Money, this is not really a revenge tale, or about paranoia or conspiracy (though it entertains or employs these aspects), yet it shows / finds literal roots for what has happened. In a circularity that characterizes these narratives, it goes back to the place where those roots once grew freely, again – as with Postcards from the Zoo – with an Eden-like notion, in the vividness of the blooms, of the potential for beauty and for nurture gets subverted. Kosmos, too, has a highly spiritual dimension, which envisages, in its ending shot, a transcendent quality to life and to what we experience :

It embodies, through the unexplained character, power, and actions of a stranger come to town, a challenge to us as to the nature of generosity, a holy way of life, and ‘organized’ religion. Named Kosmos by the young woman whom he likewise describes by calling her Neptün (Türkü Turan), and played by the almost ceaselessly present Sermet Yesil, we do not know whether he is blessed or cursed by the attention that he receives for the act that he performs as soon as he arrives, of saving her brother, and which is inconveniently treated as heroism: for, even at the start, the expectations of – and upon – this Kosmos seem immense and crushing.

However, it is largely only in moments of quiet and isolation, often with Neptün (who both hides from and seeks him), that we see that Kosmos is truly not limited by human constraints. Yet not seeing himself in relation to them when they are in the form of mores, he makes us ask when and to whom the rules can / do apply – not least in relation to Dostoyevsky again, this time with Raskolinkov in the novel Crime and Punishment (from 1866). The Idiot was published soon after (by instalment, between 1868 and 1869), and, if we look at Myshkin alongside Kosmos, we more easily see how our conception of the good person, or of the life well lived, can enslave us to all-or-nothing perfectionist thinking about others (often enough), who may then be seen as capable of no wrongdoing, or, as the case may be, disappoint us.

By contrast, Reha Erdem (the writer / director of Kosmos) seems to want to shatter such a conception, which contrariwise puts the hypocrisy I could never do something dreadful like that ! onto our lips, and thereby creates (if only in our own denied image) the archetype of ‘the bad person’. We will have the same problems relating to Myshkin, but this time because what can be characterized as his extreme passivity, which Risto Kübar has the knack of making seem both irritatingly real and yet otherworldly.

Unlike Kosmos, who maybe finds some better resting-place (or might have to keep going), Myshkin is mentally delivered back to where he began. We must ask, and ask carefully – heeding any faint reply : In whose terms, though, does it make sense to ask whether either man failed – or succeeded ?

In both films, we see lives taken, which different actions might have prevented, and we see love having the power to intoxicate and destroy. Its usual emblem is symbolized to Myshkin by the display of a bleeding heart, gaudy and neon, which transfixes him, and we then see him proceed to be powerless to ignore it. Yet philosophy or religion aside, and just in terms of the making of this film, it creates moods within different ecclesiastical interiors in the Aleksandri kirik (Narva, Estonia), from this evocation of an ikon in a shrine, to a railway-carriage, to a garden, or lapping water…

By contrast, Upstream Color’s looping on itself seems a little different (with at least one hurtful cycle broken). Yet the film’s ending feels exemplary, if not in a didactic way, of the patterns in films such as Leviathan (as screened at last year’s Festival) or Samsara. Or, equally and in common with other of the Fifteen fine festival films, such as Dimensions (2011) (which premiered at the Festival in 2011) or Formentera (2012) (UK premiere, from 2012), of that sensation that Eliot describes in Four Quartets :

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

'Little Gidding', v, 26-29

3. Finding the truth behind the appearance


The selected films :

The Night Elvis Died (La nit que va morir Elvis) (2010) (Catalan) - from 2012

Premise : See the paragraph, in italics, quoted below from What is Catalan cinema ?


The Redemption of the Fish (La redempció dels peixos) (2013) (Catalan) – UK premiere, from 2013

Premise : Likewise, see the paragraph, in italics, quoted below from What is Catalan cinema ?


Tirza (2010) - from 2011

Premise : A university teacher who has recently lost his job waves his favourite daughter off on a flight to Namibia – then, when there is no news, goes off in search of her


To cut this longish posting a little shorter, we take a detour to What is Catalan cinema ?, from which we lift the following paragraph, where two of these films have been talked about before :

On another level, and in Venice, we again have finding the truth in The Redemption of The Fish (La redempció dels peixos) (2013), as Marc tracks down his past, and is seduced and misled by the shapes, shadows and reflections of La Serenissima : so many of these films revolve historical and familial disputes and allegiances in a rich and productive way. In V.O.S. (2009), we have that theme translated into the playful and malleable notion of relation and relationships, in and out of making a film that crosses the barrier between ‘life’ and ‘film’ in a way as inventive and thought-provoking as Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). And - but one might need to read further, with the links below to reviews on this blog - The Night Elvis Died (La Nit Que Va Morir L’Elvis) (2010) teases apart the layers of reality (not least with its quiet homage to Paris, Texas (1984))…


In The Night Elvis Died – whose title refers to when, during the production of the town’s passion-play, Aureli Mercader’s (Blai Llopis’) life unravelled, and what we now see is a man who has forgotten everything but the broad thrust of what happened – the amnesia is our link to Tirza. A feature of film construction that takes us back beyond Hitchcock’s famous use, when he collaborated with a self-celebrated master-of-dreams in Salvador Dalí for Spellbound (1945), we see another man, becoming as ragged, run down and lost as Aureli is, in Jörgen Hofmeester. He only finds out, as he voyages, what his own story is, travelling in the company of Kaisa, a young girl who works as a prostitute, far into the striking territories of Namibia.

With Jörgen (Gijs Scholten von Aschat) both confronting, yet at the same time avoiding, his attitudes to the country’s Dutch colonial past (and other matters) and what those global connections mean, Arnon Grunberg co-adapted his novel in such a way that Jörgen’s involuntary strings of revelation to Kaisa (Keitumetse Matlabo), sometimes drifting from English into Dutch, leads us to the heart of who he is – and the void within him that he has hidden from himself. His narration tips us over into the muddle of our emotions about the man whom he plays, and into the twisted mess of family that has been the genesis of so much torture, violence, degradation, and pain.

When, in The Night Elvis Died, Aureli finds out his truth, the film nigh on destructs with the intensity of the experience, almost fully as much for us as for him, and we are brought before staggering images and insights – which leave Dalí’s role, in dream-imagery, for Hitchcock far behind (albeit his were for the purposes of dream-interpretation). (One is reminded, though in a very different way, of the disintegration in, and the dislocations in the narration of, Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man ! (1973) (itself rescreened at a recent Festival).)

Much more quiet than this is the realization that steals upon Marc in the shimmering Venice of The Redemption of The Fish – perhaps attuned, in tribute, to the shifting sensations of David Lean’s seemingly personal favourite film Summertime (1955), with Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi, but, in parallel, to those of Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973). Yet it is not Marc (Miquel Quer) who is the one here with the tendencies to retelling / reformulating (if not to actual amnesia), but the one because of whom he has gone there to find out more :

One is curiously reminded of ‘the closing reveal’ in another Catalan film, the Festival favourite of 2012 that was Black Bread (Pa Negre) (2010). Yet, compared with the younger Andreu (and what he gains, which What is Catalan cinema ? characterizes roughly as ‘A naturalistic, but haunted, story of a child’s perspective on betrayal, sex and anger’), Marc experiences so many varied things during his short trip.

Not only a host of reactions and feelings (and – with them – a rush and self-realization of maturity), but : relaxed lunches by the canal-side, the Commedia dell’Arte, the under-surface sound made by the waters of the lagoon, moonlight on The Lido, and plumbing the loneliness and emptiness of the quiet corners of the city, as well as books and artefacts, and what they reveal. In closing, and acknowledging again that recognizing the beginning for what it is and penetrating to the truth are not always discrete descriptions, one last paragraph from Whatis Catalan cinema ?, which leads into talking about a film that links, in a profoundly moving way, a Dante scholar, graffiti-encrusted former gun-emplacements, a confused man in hospital, and the history of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War :

Directors such as Ken Loach, working with screenwriter Jim Allen in Land and Freedom (1995), have brought a British perspective on seeking to fight pro-fascist Nationalist forces, but Jesús Garay’s Eyes on the Sky (Mirant al Cel) (2008) delves less into the politics and the pointlessness of brother against brother, but rather, and very movingly, into the ‘visceralness’ of what it means to tick down to something that changes individual lives for ever : although Garay is from Santander, not Catalunya, again this is in the very North of Spain.


Closing note :

Since Cambridge Film Festival 2013, Eyes on the Sky has had a special screening (plus Q&A) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (@ICA), as did another of its Catalan films, The Forest (El bosc), which What is Catalan cinema ? characterized by the key-words Magical realism – Twisted love – Collectivization – Other worlds – Symbolism – Unreal feast, and the short phrase An account of a civil war through how the hated better-off classes fared.

On 23 August 2014, the ICA screens a third one of these films, The Redemption of the Fish, with a Q&A…



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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)