The #CivilWarAndAlexGarland Tweets

The #CivilWarAndAlexGarland Tweets

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

The #CivilWarAndAlexGarland Tweets

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

More to come...




































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

The Shining (1980) : The #UCFF Tweets

The Shining (1980) : The #UCFF Tweets

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

28 October (one added, 16 December)

The Shining (1980) : The #UCFF Tweets

‘The Shining’ (1980) bathrooms pic.twitter.com/0Cy3lJETsh

— Arthur K. Flam (@arthurkflam) October 24, 2019

The weakness in Kubrick's conception on that level becomes more and more palpable, causing apter resonances and reverberations to die swiftly away in the closing images (or even in presenting the material that they contain) - however much in the service of Stephen King's vision !

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 29, 2019

There is no comparison with the composure of the specific, then general drôlerie with which Michael Hordern's narrator concludes Barry Lyndon (1975).

Or the (albeit terrifying) gesture to close Brazil (1985), another film where fantasy and imagination enter / alter the everyday.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 29, 2019

In both, what went before is enlightened, whereas moments that conclude a film called, after all, The Shining deaden or flatten its imagery.

Or in the few paragraphs of Borges' stories 'El Sur' or 'El otro', or Pinter's Old Times, the past penetrates the present with a frisson.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 29, 2019

If you check into a place called The Overlook Hotel for the winter, there might be a clue that, well, you might not have thought of every detail... ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 16, 2021

Post-script :

Somehow, since Monday, I appear to have got away with suggesting that Kubrick largely undid 'the good work' of the preceding 136 mins of The Shining in the last ten ;)

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 31, 2019

Cheers, Jim - as with Jack* (overly re-typing a version of Knots (1970), R. D. Laing's unlove-letter to love ?), I'm prone to introduce errors of meaning when I type ! ;)

* Unfair that Shelley Duvall has to be Wendy, whereas Jack (Nicholson) can be Jack, Danny (Lloyd) Danny ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 31, 2019

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