Thirteen Tweeets about Civil War (2024) : #CivilWarAndAlexGarland (work in progress)

Thirteen Tweeets about Civil War (2024) : #CivilWarAndAlexGarland (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

Thirteen Tweeets about Civil War (2024) : #CivilWarAndAlexGarland (work in progress)

1) Even with a road-trip* (especially ?), a director should earn the right to behave as if a film's emotionally taken anyone somewhere else :

Hanging affectless exchanges in the air may make other, flat scenes seem pacy, but is unsubtle.

* Ostensibly.#CivilWarAndAlexGarland

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 26, 2024

2) Civil War (2024) establishes no more on-screen relationship or rapport between Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) and Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) than with Joe (Wagner Moura) or Sammy (Stephen McKinley), yet thinks us willing to behave as if it had done.

But...#CivilWarAndAlexGarland

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 27, 2024

3) Also from A24, but wholly unlike C'mon, C'mon (2021) - a different type of Jesse, and Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) learning from his nephew* in a process of the former's unmasking and self-realization.

* Very ably and effectively played by Woody Norman.#CivilWarAndAlexGarland

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 28, 2024

4) However, it has a reason *not* to be that type of film, which relates to why Joe, who is already accompanying Lee, is on the trip and – which seems plausible – to what makes him tick, but Joe is 'thinly written' and this feint does not earn its place.#CivilWarAndAlexGarland

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 1, 2024

pic.twitter.com/7xpsDoupp2

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 3, 2024

pic.twitter.com/wV1ChQlPEY

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 3, 2024

6) At first, maybe the lack of good or considered dialogue could be read as denoting the characters' fatigue*, but the misdirections also [need to] abound to make us not just want to quit.

* As well as a stultifying effect that tends to lead to ours !#CivilWarAndAlexGarland

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 8, 2024

7) (A film set in Austria (?) that Michael Haneke made in German – then, 10yrs later and with an American cast, re-shot in English – dares us to leave, too : it and a Peter Gabriel song [on the album Up (2002)] tells us all that Garland does in 109 mins.)#CivilWarAndAlexGarland

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 9, 2024

More to come...

At its conclusion, which took a fair old while to get to, the same disappointment as when Kubrick chooses to leave us with this image.

[Afterwards, it became clear very quickly that elements of The White Hotel infused a highly psychopathic version of The Wizard of Oz (1939)...] pic.twitter.com/ROJx8TP6jv

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 1, 2024

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

Am I my brother’s keeper ?

This is a pre-Festival review of Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (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)

1 September

This is a pre-Festival review of Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013)

As with the version of pool being played in Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986), one does not need to know about the winning moves of chess to watch this film : one is not required to understand them, although it features chess.

The film invites comparison with Good Will Hunting (1997) (where, as a viewer, one does not need to understand mathematics) for a relationship that is at its centre, that between Nico (Nicholas Albert), played by David Solans, and Julio Beltrán (Julio Manrique), even down to the fact that the motives of both participants in the therapy are mixed : Will Hunting (Matt Damon) is effectively blackmailed into it, and his client, passed to him in desperation, is hardly what Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) had been seeking from Dr Lambeau’s contact.

This is an adaptation of Ignacio García-Valiño’s novel, and its evocation of Cain, the first murderer and the one who gave his name to a mark, deceptively plunges us into what apparently concerns us, some mistake with a contract, and attending a posh business party, where the daggers (or the excuses) may be out.

Dream-laden footage of gently curving wide roads in the suburbs have already given us a notion of this sort of milieu (as against the narrow streets where Beltrán’s practice is located), yet it is really about coming home to the shock and uncertainty of an apparently bloody incident, and with a trail downstairs and into the very heart of the grand cliff-top property where the family lives. Nico’s seeming lack of care, and even taunting of his distressed father Carlos Albert (José Coronado), ends up with the latter calling a chance contact for whatever help there is, short of putting Nico in the reformatory.

We see greater evidence of Nico’s provocations of and angry outbursts at his father, not softened by the Mahler adagietto playing in the car during the scene, and we sense that his mother Coral (Maria Molins) thinks him the more and more lost, if he does not get help. Contrariwise, everything – including what Andrew, a respected former colleague, has to say – has been telling Beltrán not to commit himself to the approaches that the family are making, and to say no.

Yet, in his effort to see how he can assist, he is as driven as J. J. Gittes in Chinatown (1974), and takes the chance of even involving Andrew against the latter’s better judgement – as for Gittes, does it also represent a challenge that, for reasons of his own, Beltrán cannot resist ?

Seeing his interactions with others, such as the staff at school or even his own sister (Patrícia), who manages the practice, it is clear both that he dispenses with the formalities, and that he does not suffer fools gladly : he has time for Nico for those same qualities, and for having a very high IQ, as well an ability for chess…

Classifying this film as ‘a thriller’ misses the richness of chess as a metaphor, not least how Andrew’s (Jack Taylor’s) lavish premises with a covert entrance are fully enlivened by Jesús Monllaó’s direction, where Alice’s sense of another world (through the looking-glass, and with its own rules), and of competition on equal terms, are evoked again and again*. (Here, there is even a little twinkle of Hogwart’s, as of the magically gifted…)

There is also a competitive gesture that makes Will Hunting’s therapy a challenge to Maguire, and which figures in Beltrán fascination for trying to fathom Nico. As Son of Cain unfolds, with its deliberate play of light and dark spaces, we will find that, in this sense, it aspires to what we most admire about Hitchcock’s best suspense, that of a taut unwinding, as of a spring.


End-notes

* Just as Scorsese did, as his film built to The Nine Ball Classic in Atlantic City : the epitome of The American Dream.


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

Fairytale Prince of the Forest

This is a Festival review of Prince Avalanche (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

24 September

This is a Festival review of Prince Avalanche (2013)

I think that I have even seen this actor, Paul Rudd, play this type of character before, quite apart from knowing what some call a trope, I a formula, of a judgemental man who is so because he believes that he always does things properly, right, coupled with a foil who is seen as sloppy, ignorant (because, in Alvin’s repeated words, Lance does not know how to tie a knot, gut a fish).

That does not matter in itself, as, of course, there is nothing really new under the sun, but it does tend to give Prince Avalanche (2013) the feel not of a film, but of an extended edition of a t.v. comedy series, unlike, say, that classic The Odd Couple (1968) : it felt harder to stay with these two and feel for what happens, where and when they are, and believe that it was not a humorous set-up, where this team of two is forever painting lines on the road as the back-drop to this week’s wacky adventures.

Not really fair to make comparison with Lemmon and Matthau, but they are so good at making things seem cinematically true (as are Newman and Cruise), whereas the genuine chemistry between Emile Hirsch (as Lance) and Rudd reaches a plateau at a lower level, short of a feature where we can invest in them : when they go wild and booze, it is clear that their antics could be funny, although I was not in the mood for them, but one did not really feel that they had broken free – or through.

It is almost par for the course that there is a tinge of a mental-health issue – Alvin has to drop into the conversation that he has some prescription medications with him (as I guess, living in proximity, the inquisitive Lance would know anyway), but is managing to do without them – but nothing much is made of it. More is in Alvin’s character-type, than in any (psychiatric or) psychological origin, and that is maybe where everything seems forced, for Lance would have seen countless programmes there is a character with an up-tight superciliousness, so common is its portrayal :

It effectively knocks the stuffing out of any confrontation or threat between Lance and Alvin that one should feel that it is familiar from past viewing, just as it does that they settle their differences over drink and agree to party at the weekend. The quirky touches (the truck-driver, the woman looking through the burnt remains, the possibly other woman in the truck) do not, whatever else they do, add to creating a sense of being isolated in a place of prior devastation, and it does not help that one spot where the road furniture is being renewed appears to recur, as if different enough to pass off as new, rather than finding locations that were distinct.

It is good that we see Alvin solitarily do his thing for the first weekend (the film takes us from the preceding week to the eve of the second weekend), and that we only ever hear narrated (extracted by cross-examination ?) what Lance did in the town – in hindsight, it stresses to us that Alvin was really pleasing himself by doing this job, rather than sending money home, because, although it is unclear where ‘home’ exactly is, he could have gone into town with Lance (and, if necessary, on from there), not just sprawled extravagantly on his hammock and the like, as if convincing himself that he likes the outdoors so much.

This film could have, in more ways than one, explored territory, and one of the best shots is saved for last, after Lance and Alvin have driven off from their base and we see other signs of life than the truck-driver : some children playing on a little corner of land, and the vehicle going past, then coming back into shot behind it. Not enough to give a message, or to cement the unlikely feeling that the two men have found very much common ground.


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

Outranking the Gosling film

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

22 September

Films with the word 'money' in the title have a ring to them, as in The Color of Money (1986) - or The Taste of Money (2012), one that I would call 'stylish' if that word were not closeted in a relationship with that of 'thriller'.

This film ends - as it began - with the recirculation of money, and what takes place in-between the appearance of two brittle pieces of furniture in an otherwise solid environment, the door to a strong-room and a large receptacle, never goes far from it (in one form or another). I may be quite mistaken that they seemed so obviously stagey, but I do not think so, and I am more tentative about the notion that they are meant to mark off the intervening feature as a conscious framing-device.

However, because the household, family and staff, at the centre of this film is shown with such style, and they live, dress, drink and relax with such fine things, I shall credit it with that notion, because I quite early found myself reminded of the passionate plays of Jean Racine in a way that I did not think that I could walk with when translated to this world - it felt a bit too much like Only God Forgives (2013) again, whereas The Taste of Money turned out to redeem the merit of using universal themes (and reprises a scene where a man who cannot box challenges another to a bare-knuckle fight, but this time with so much grace and beauty in the mise-en-scène).

Not nearly in such a self-conscious, parodic, almost moronic, way as in Winding Refn's latest, this piece of real cinema echoes the chamber plays of Strindberg, the vast, bloody tragedies of Aesychlus' Oresteia, and we follow the fate of the excellently played Joo Young-Jak (Kang-woo Kim) as a thread through the story - chance has a part to play in the unfolding of events, but nothing that is taken for granted, with every detail accounted for in how what someone knew but did not reveal comes to be known as his or her failure to speak.

An initial impression made it seem as though the film were requiring too much to be believed to be happening for the first time, but, as indicated, director Sang-soo Im was taking no indulgence from his audience for granted. Without anything being forced, everything had its place.

The monetary deals at the centre of what unfolds even mirror the real-life activities of a US corporation (Google and the World Brain (2013)), with the Google Books project cavalierly (though not without the assistance of those who should have opposed, or at least questioned what it was doing before giving it) seeming to break copyright and then seek to have its actions made good in accord with the principle that it was pursuing - we hear it said in this film's script that the outline of the deal will be made, and it is for the lawyers to sort out the niceties to make it happen.

Sometimes affectionately, sometimes mockingly, called Mr Joo, we see his journey from filling cases with cash to buy the freedom of the son of his boss, and contenting himself to smell the fresh notes rather than (as licensed) to pocket some for himself, to differing relations to power and money. This is a thoughtful and powerful film, whose strong visuals live on in the mind.


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