More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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18 September
(Or more than one use for a collar...)
To say that Dax Shepard's film Hit and Run (2012) is playful makes it sound terribly fay, but it has a veneer of being some other kind of film, which deliberately gets chipped or smoothed away (a bit like Gerhart Richter with his layers of paint showing through, as the upper one(s) are squeegeed and scraped).
I'm choosing playful, because ironic and post-modern irony have been just about done to death by over- and misuse (not, I am sure, starting with Alanis Morisette), but I could just as well emphasize that this is part of Tarantino's legacy, but that it is a strange junction between his film-making and the ethos and feel of something like Friends.
In itself, that needs some explanation. There is a lot of shouting in the film, but it abates as soon as it began, whereas human-beings do not just calm down when faced with the voice of reason. Even people who, one might reckon, have reason to do something brutal just seem to settle for money, not revenge. Irrespective of the references that I have given, what this film most resembles is Wacky Races, not least with the cars and their stunts, the chasing around in circles, the burnt rubber, the high-octane exhaust used to disguise onward movement and choke the opposition.
Anyone who mistakes Hit and Run for something with a more serious golf-club to grind in another's face is missing the point, and this is typified by a woman (Kristen Bell) taking a shower who, when told by her partner (Shephard playing Yul Perrkins) that the engine has been lifted clean out of his Lincoln overnight, asks if there is anything that she can do.
Laughing at crap psychology and the foibles and hypocrisy of others may wear a bit thin at times (the same woman, Annie Bean (sic) who forbad doing violence when they are being tailed, because so proud of her doctorate in conflict resolution, seems suddenly not bothered that Yul's father is beating someone around the head with a shovel), but the film delivers on the level on which I understand it should be taken.
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Tuesday, 18 September 2012
Any time soon
This is a Festival review of Now is Good (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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18 September
This is a Festival review of Now is Good (2012)
The words of the film's title, Now is Good (2012), come as a reply when Tessa (skilfully played by Dakota Fanning) is asked on a date, and shortly before something unexpected happens. Knowing that she isn’t, she has been treating herself as if she were indestructible, much to the dismay of her father (Paddy Considine), who would have wanted her to persevere with having leukaemia treated.
He may no longer be seeking an answer that would save her for a while longer, but he has not given up thinking that things other than medical science may preserve her or that there is a sense in which he almost owns her remaining life. Much to her irritation, he is always trying to speak for her, whether to a radio-show host or the medical staff (and those people collude, as anyone who uses a wheelchair would tell you that they would).
However, tellingly, when Tessa asks the Macmillan nurse (with whom she had previously been a little abrasive, as if she represented not help for her, but an embodiment of what she was battling) what her last days have in store, they are alone. By contrast with her father, Tessa’s mother (Olivia Williams), from whom he is separated, does not seem much interested (though turns out to have her reasons for that appearance), and both parents ‘get to’ Tessa by failing to understand her needs and motivations.
Adam, the boy next door (who has had his own life affected by his father’s death in a crash), meets her when she stalks out with things from her bedroom wall that she wants burnt and starts putting them in the lit brazier of garden waste. Excellently played by Jeremy Irvine in dialogue that, of high quality throughout, reaches its peak of expressiveness when Tessa and he are talking, there is a sense of advanced maturity in Adam, which postponing study and acting as support to his mother probably has brought out in him.
The frailties that surround talking about and confronting death are fully explored (as when younger brother Cal, quite honestly, asks if they will go on holiday when Tessa is dead, because he doesn’t remember the previous trip to Spain), but, for all the tears that come at so many points in the second half, this is also a joyous film.
It makes you gasp at what people are capable of, as when Adam sets out to make Tessa famous, or surprises her by taking her up onto the cliffs. Tessa does not want to be thought of as brave, but she shows that she faith to reach out beyond and disregard the limitations of physical strength, and of the norms and mores that her father would have her obey.
Ol Parker has brought his own script beautifully to the screen, with cast and photography all of a piece in locating Tessa’s story in and around Brighton. And I think that it would be no less strong the second time, because the film is built around not what must happen, but about the relationships that make it something no longer to fear.
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Monday, 17 September 2012
Never go back
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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17 September
* Contains spoilers *
The film Postcards from the Zoo, in white letters on a black screen, five or six times gives us definitions (acknowledged to be from Webster's or from Wikipedia®) of terms such as translocation and reintroduction, and - as I realized - they relate to Lana's story as much to that of the animals of Ragunan Zoo.
That said, it is possible that the animals whom we see have been tamed in a way that many zoo-captives would not have been, for a young tigress enjoys being showered, and the sole giraffe (Jera) and the hippopotami seem unaverse to touch or to being fed from the hand. Although Jakarta is not known to me, someone in the screening to whom I spoke afterwards had visited the zoo itself, and rated it highly by the standard of others in Indonesia.
We do not know Lana's exact past, except from seeing pictures of a younger she, but she appears to have had no life outside the zoo, until she is captivated (pun intended) and led away by an appealing figure with a hint of Johnny Depp about him (Nicholas Saputra), who turns out happily to let her shoulder pushing a heavy handcart behind him.
Leaving the zoo with him may be the fantasy, and - to the extent that the zoo itself is highly symbolic - it may or may not happen, but, at any rate, he would only have needed, as he more or less does, to snap his fingers at her for her to follow him. (There are echoes of The Girl on the Bridge (1999), though Lana does not need rescuing in the same way, and maybe Gabor (Daniel Auteuil) has more to offer Vanessa Paradis as Adèle than is given to Lana in the role of assistant to this man of few words, however fetchingly she dresses to become his pair).
Whatever her connection to him, Lana then seems, when he departs, cut off from relating to the zoo, which she once loved: we painfully see her essentially motionless figure in scenes of activity, sensing that she is barely participating in or witnessing the life going on around her. The contact will get re-established, but it takes the massive dream equivalent of the elephant in the room to get her there.
Unlike being shooed out of Eden, it is as if the zoo itself transports Lana back to where her real life lies, and perhaps, in legends of Indira, we can find a further level of meaning. (In Strindberg's A Dream Play, it is Indra, whose daughter Agnes goes to Earth to experience life there.)
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17 September
* Contains spoilers *
The film Postcards from the Zoo, in white letters on a black screen, five or six times gives us definitions (acknowledged to be from Webster's or from Wikipedia®) of terms such as translocation and reintroduction, and - as I realized - they relate to Lana's story as much to that of the animals of Ragunan Zoo.
That said, it is possible that the animals whom we see have been tamed in a way that many zoo-captives would not have been, for a young tigress enjoys being showered, and the sole giraffe (Jera) and the hippopotami seem unaverse to touch or to being fed from the hand. Although Jakarta is not known to me, someone in the screening to whom I spoke afterwards had visited the zoo itself, and rated it highly by the standard of others in Indonesia.
We do not know Lana's exact past, except from seeing pictures of a younger she, but she appears to have had no life outside the zoo, until she is captivated (pun intended) and led away by an appealing figure with a hint of Johnny Depp about him (Nicholas Saputra), who turns out happily to let her shoulder pushing a heavy handcart behind him.
Leaving the zoo with him may be the fantasy, and - to the extent that the zoo itself is highly symbolic - it may or may not happen, but, at any rate, he would only have needed, as he more or less does, to snap his fingers at her for her to follow him. (There are echoes of The Girl on the Bridge (1999), though Lana does not need rescuing in the same way, and maybe Gabor (Daniel Auteuil) has more to offer Vanessa Paradis as Adèle than is given to Lana in the role of assistant to this man of few words, however fetchingly she dresses to become his pair).
Whatever her connection to him, Lana then seems, when he departs, cut off from relating to the zoo, which she once loved: we painfully see her essentially motionless figure in scenes of activity, sensing that she is barely participating in or witnessing the life going on around her. The contact will get re-established, but it takes the massive dream equivalent of the elephant in the room to get her there.
Unlike being shooed out of Eden, it is as if the zoo itself transports Lana back to where her real life lies, and perhaps, in legends of Indira, we can find a further level of meaning. (In Strindberg's A Dream Play, it is Indra, whose daughter Agnes goes to Earth to experience life there.)
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Don't get too close
This is a Festival review of Intouchables (Untouchable) (2011)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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17 September
This is a Festival review of Intouchables (Untouchable) (2011)
An unlikely relationship, this one a real-life friendship taken as the basis for Untouchable (2011) (curiously, as Intouchables, plural in the French), has seen many a feature through as its underlying theme, whether DeVito and Schwarzenegger, Withnail and I (1987), or, as someone was overheard saying in relation to this film, Scent of a Woman (1992).
For all the difference in age, though, there is more of a sharing in both directions between François Cluzet as Philippe and Omay Sy as Driss, and that is what makes for broad fun, even if it does lead to the implausibility of one's first painting being sold for 11,000 euros by the other: Al Pacino is very much (pun intended) in the driving-seat for all his need for help from Chris O'Donnell.
Cluzet, looking at times like Dustin Hoffman, has a wickedly engaging smile (I cannot, surely, be remembering him from as far back as French Kiss (1995)) with which Philippe disarms any tension, more often than not when Driss has fooled him, rather than the other way. Sy has one, too, but broader, and Driss keeps a straight face to fool Philippe, although, with judgements that are quick to get to the heart of things, sometimes there is joke behind what he has said.
The selling of the painting is, if I remember right, an almost exact steal from Conversations with my Gardener (2007), but I do not mind that (although it has taken me an age to think where I have seen this done before), but what I cannot overlook, because I could not overlook it in the screening (overhear would mean something else), is the music. Not the classical music that Philippe has played to Driss on his birthday, or the number to which Driss dances so fabulously and gets everone on their feet, but the incidental music when it is not from songs:
It grated with me, in thinking that it was making me edgy without my noticing simply by playing on the piano with the same note or a few adjacent ones, rather than being a decent piece of film score and not drawing attention to itself with its limited range. That said, when it converted its skeletal self into an emotional theme near the end, it did work, despite the overtly romantic character, with the scene, and not against it.
The story remains, of course, a heartening one, as is the extent to which Driss shows not only that he has a better understanding of Philippe's psychology, but also that he is able to learn from Philippe and for the two men to find a common ground in fun, sex and flight.
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Sunday, 16 September 2012
Who is Andy?
This is a review of Andy Needs his Milk (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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16 September
This is a review of Andy Needs his Milk (2012)
I know from asking him that Carl Peck hasn't read Barcelona Plates, a collection of short stories by Alexei Sayle (which I think that he published before appearing as a novelist), but something about the walk that Carl's mind works in his short Andy Needs his Milk chimes with the feel of many of those pieces, and with the meat of one in particular (whose title I must look up).
In Project Tridentfest's gig at Cambridge Film Festival, Carl said that he had taken as a starting-point the reported last words of Michael Jackson, and he wove from that utterance, in which he found a sinister ring, a tale that, even without considering the resonances, is both amusing and chilling. Looked at in figurative terms, we have a narrator blaming his extreme actions on an irrational desire to keep satisfied the insatiable, because we know, if we stop to think, that what he is telling us (for good and ill) is not verifiable.
Yet, even at a subsconscious level, we know that he has locked himself into a behaviour, and that, even if we can trust his account, it is a sort of victim mentality that has led him to appeasement just literally for a quiet life. The whole piece is carried off in a way that takes us with it, which is the point of connection with the Sayle pieces: creating an interior logic that beguiles us, simply because the presentation effortlessly makes us feel within the thinking looking out, however distorted and contorted it may be.
Scripting and directing the short, Carl even has a cameo role, but the whole project needed a solid player at its heart, and it has that in his casting of the narrator (who would get a credit, if I had a name), bringing off this fine balance between desperation and servility that is in the character / situation.
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Fried and dressed
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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16 September
You could say that Project Tridentfest’s tried and tested, but that’s only the abiding support for these short films (some very short), not in their nature as works, which is to be inventive and very different from each other.
Meanwhile, as I blather, Carl Peck has only one hand, a lovely birthday cake has been made to slide deftly off the plate and into the bin, and a monstrous head is gorging itself, again and again*: what good are words at a time like this, when we need superhero action to reconstitute Carl’s hand from the blender, expose the wiles of the brat Devrin (Carl again), and resist the head’s resistless complaint? We get it in the form of an agent for change who creates far more mess than ever did the thing to be remedied!
Mix in some music videos, a hilarious series of skate-board challenges, and Simon and Andrej in a multitude of two-handed interchanges, and you only need some footage of a chess-player for everyone to get ponderous about how and why it was made and whether it should be shown, a serious response that, in comparison, only points up how strong and effective the comedy was, a bit like inviting a Baptist minister to an orgy. A good evening was had by all, I believe, and the affection for our intrepid loose assemblage of alien-zapping superheroes is surely stronger than ever.
Long live Project Tridentfest!
End-notes
* And which deserves its own ravenous posting... which is here.
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16 September
You could say that Project Tridentfest’s tried and tested, but that’s only the abiding support for these short films (some very short), not in their nature as works, which is to be inventive and very different from each other.
Meanwhile, as I blather, Carl Peck has only one hand, a lovely birthday cake has been made to slide deftly off the plate and into the bin, and a monstrous head is gorging itself, again and again*: what good are words at a time like this, when we need superhero action to reconstitute Carl’s hand from the blender, expose the wiles of the brat Devrin (Carl again), and resist the head’s resistless complaint? We get it in the form of an agent for change who creates far more mess than ever did the thing to be remedied!
Mix in some music videos, a hilarious series of skate-board challenges, and Simon and Andrej in a multitude of two-handed interchanges, and you only need some footage of a chess-player for everyone to get ponderous about how and why it was made and whether it should be shown, a serious response that, in comparison, only points up how strong and effective the comedy was, a bit like inviting a Baptist minister to an orgy. A good evening was had by all, I believe, and the affection for our intrepid loose assemblage of alien-zapping superheroes is surely stronger than ever.
Long live Project Tridentfest!
End-notes
* And which deserves its own ravenous posting... which is here.
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Saturday, 15 September 2012
Video: Cat survives trip to Disney in airline luggage (according to AOL®)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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15 September
Well, cats might be discerning, and would prefer the Methuen Winnie-the-Pooh to the Disney one any day, but why would they be so traumatized by Walt's Wonderful World that they did not even survive a trip there?
Piglet, in contrast, would probably have pigged out on haycorns through sheer terror, and done his poor little piggy ticker no good into the bargain with hyper-anxiety.
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15 September
Well, cats might be discerning, and would prefer the Methuen Winnie-the-Pooh to the Disney one any day, but why would they be so traumatized by Walt's Wonderful World that they did not even survive a trip there?
Piglet, in contrast, would probably have pigged out on haycorns through sheer terror, and done his poor little piggy ticker no good into the bargain with hyper-anxiety.
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Friday, 14 September 2012
The island is full of noises : Formentera (2012) [and Abgebrannt (Burn-Out) (2011)]
The island is full of noises : Formentera (2012) [and Abgebrannt (Burn-Out) (2011)]
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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14 September
Last year’s festival screened Abgebrannt (2011, known as Burnout), which, too, featured a holiday, but the place where the holiday happened, although regimented, did not have a character (in the way that Island (2011) worked hard to give the Isle of Mull one (other than its obvious beauty)).
In Formentera (2012), which is likewise a German-language feature (with pretty good subtitles), the place and the action seem inseparable, seem first to last unavoidably intertwined as to cause and effect, chicken and egg. It may once have been just a holiday in The Balearic Isles, but it is more than that, and we are with Nina (Sabine Timoteo) all the way, as, in a medium shot of them both on the ferry to Formentera, Ben whispers into her ear Ich liebe dich ('I love you'), but one will look in them in vain for that as they disembark, not holding hands, and with Ben seemingly content for her to carry a cylinder-bag that seems heavier than what is on his shoulder.
They then take a scooter to where the community, the female of one pair of which has invited them, they will be staying: Nina does not clutch, does not ever clutch, Ben's chest just because she has to, but, in return, Ben takes her somewhere to stay that will feel exposed, invasive and downright nosy, probably partly in a way indicative of their not having much money as a family (Nina's mother is looking after their three-year-old daughter, but it's not as if the people with whom they have to rub along give them much peace or privacy.
The strength of Timoteo's acting, and her primacy in the story, is clear when around the table for the first night: Ben has opened her up to something, and then does too little and too late to protect her from the comments and attitudes of those known to him, but not to her. Resembling a little Boris Becker (I am unsure about the gap in the teeth), her partner does not accord her needs the attention that he gives to his own about being in Berlin.
Nina is played with superb expression and appropriate inwardness, for she has really been taken for granted, not however much, but just because, Ben understands part of her motivation and some of her ways: as she says to him, he cannot want something for her.
Not in a chilling way, but this film's impulses and atmosphere will haunt me for a while, in particular the awkward scenes on Ibiza that typify and symbolize Nina's isolation, but also her profound strength as a person: she cannot but be affected by her experiences, but she is a fighter, and she is an encouragement to us all, not least as she shows signs of having to keep in check negative impulses.
I notice with interest, and with pleasant surprise, that 55 page-views have clocked up hitherto unnoticed until now (26 October), but no comments...
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More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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14 September
Last year’s festival screened Abgebrannt (2011, known as Burnout), which, too, featured a holiday, but the place where the holiday happened, although regimented, did not have a character (in the way that Island (2011) worked hard to give the Isle of Mull one (other than its obvious beauty)).
In Formentera (2012), which is likewise a German-language feature (with pretty good subtitles), the place and the action seem inseparable, seem first to last unavoidably intertwined as to cause and effect, chicken and egg. It may once have been just a holiday in The Balearic Isles, but it is more than that, and we are with Nina (Sabine Timoteo) all the way, as, in a medium shot of them both on the ferry to Formentera, Ben whispers into her ear Ich liebe dich ('I love you'), but one will look in them in vain for that as they disembark, not holding hands, and with Ben seemingly content for her to carry a cylinder-bag that seems heavier than what is on his shoulder.
They then take a scooter to where the community, the female of one pair of which has invited them, they will be staying: Nina does not clutch, does not ever clutch, Ben's chest just because she has to, but, in return, Ben takes her somewhere to stay that will feel exposed, invasive and downright nosy, probably partly in a way indicative of their not having much money as a family (Nina's mother is looking after their three-year-old daughter, but it's not as if the people with whom they have to rub along give them much peace or privacy.
The strength of Timoteo's acting, and her primacy in the story, is clear when around the table for the first night: Ben has opened her up to something, and then does too little and too late to protect her from the comments and attitudes of those known to him, but not to her. Resembling a little Boris Becker (I am unsure about the gap in the teeth), her partner does not accord her needs the attention that he gives to his own about being in Berlin.
Nina is played with superb expression and appropriate inwardness, for she has really been taken for granted, not however much, but just because, Ben understands part of her motivation and some of her ways: as she says to him, he cannot want something for her.
Not in a chilling way, but this film's impulses and atmosphere will haunt me for a while, in particular the awkward scenes on Ibiza that typify and symbolize Nina's isolation, but also her profound strength as a person: she cannot but be affected by her experiences, but she is a fighter, and she is an encouragement to us all, not least as she shows signs of having to keep in check negative impulses.
I notice with interest, and with pleasant surprise, that 55 page-views have clocked up hitherto unnoticed until now (26 October), but no comments...
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Would you Adam and Eve it?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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14 September
Not much to say about Salma and the Apple (2011), except that, as I was feeling, I'd probably have watched Salar the Salmon in preference to this story set in Iran, which I walked out of just now : Rafi Pitts' The Hunter (2010) (about which I have written elsewhere), rightly or wrongly, spoke to me far more about modern Iran at this festival two years ago.
Maybe if the subtitles had been more accessible - everyone wants to 'get off' the taxi, the wheelbarrow is a tricycle, and one sometimes had to read two full lines of text and yet follow the rest of the screen - it would have helped, but the cinematography, too, right from the opening shot with the son on the horizon at daybreak, is extremely variable. One shot is in sharp focus, the next (say, taking in the wider scene of the garden, or the tree with the eponymous fruit) not far short of fuzzy. (And the music is portentous in a way that draws attention to the over-reached pretensions of the story.)
In Habbib Bahmani's take on Pilgrim's Progress meeting Isaac Newton discovering gravity, I did my best to engage with Hadi Dibaji as Sadegh, suddenly back home from years away, but I just wanted to save myself for something better - and there will be much better things, even to-day - and not find out how all these chance encounters, laden with significance by the barrow-load, unfold.
PS Oh, and forgot to say that, which I could not put out of my mind, there was a resemblance in appearance, naivety and enthusiasm to James McAvoy as Valentin in The Last Station (2009), which did not help me...
PPS Just another poke at the subtitles: someone might just about be called, or describe himself as, a clergyman nowadays, but the words have a ring about them (the 'clergy' part) that makes it about as apt for him to be a cleric. If the translation did happen to want to catch at an archaic air, OK, but I doubt it...
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14 September
Not much to say about Salma and the Apple (2011), except that, as I was feeling, I'd probably have watched Salar the Salmon in preference to this story set in Iran, which I walked out of just now : Rafi Pitts' The Hunter (2010) (about which I have written elsewhere), rightly or wrongly, spoke to me far more about modern Iran at this festival two years ago.
Maybe if the subtitles had been more accessible - everyone wants to 'get off' the taxi, the wheelbarrow is a tricycle, and one sometimes had to read two full lines of text and yet follow the rest of the screen - it would have helped, but the cinematography, too, right from the opening shot with the son on the horizon at daybreak, is extremely variable. One shot is in sharp focus, the next (say, taking in the wider scene of the garden, or the tree with the eponymous fruit) not far short of fuzzy. (And the music is portentous in a way that draws attention to the over-reached pretensions of the story.)
In Habbib Bahmani's take on Pilgrim's Progress meeting Isaac Newton discovering gravity, I did my best to engage with Hadi Dibaji as Sadegh, suddenly back home from years away, but I just wanted to save myself for something better - and there will be much better things, even to-day - and not find out how all these chance encounters, laden with significance by the barrow-load, unfold.
PS Oh, and forgot to say that, which I could not put out of my mind, there was a resemblance in appearance, naivety and enthusiasm to James McAvoy as Valentin in The Last Station (2009), which did not help me...
PPS Just another poke at the subtitles: someone might just about be called, or describe himself as, a clergyman nowadays, but the words have a ring about them (the 'clergy' part) that makes it about as apt for him to be a cleric. If the translation did happen to want to catch at an archaic air, OK, but I doubt it...
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Thursday, 13 September 2012
Making out in Marseille
This is a Festival review of The Snows of Kilimanjaro (2011)
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14 September
This is a Festival review of The Snows of Kilimanjaro (2011)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (2011) is a sort of fable for our time*, with strikingly strong performances, both from (as Michel) Jean-Pierre Darroussin (whom I knew from Conversations with my Gardener (2007)), and Ariane Ascaride as Marie-Claire, a couple whose integrity and good hearts are at its centre.
Subject to an event that leaves all shaken, but especially Marie-Claire's sister Denise (Marilyne Canto is very sympathetic), the course of things unfolds in a manner consistent with not only justice, but also responsibility and reconciliation, almost a modern Dostoyevsky, I often enough felt (which maybe Victor Hugo, a poem of whose is the film's starting-point, and he had in common).
Certainly, although The Angels' Share (2012) is equally good natured and hopeful, this film makes a challenge to our thoughts and prejudices far beyond it: this film treats of its themes seriously, whereas Loach launches into a romp from whose end the dark and threatening scenes from earlier seem far removed - director Robert Guédiguian has sketched a world that acknowledges deep-seated human emotions of envy, resentment and greed, but wants to offer those who feel them a way back.
The centre is the family, whether a party for Michel and Marie-Claire (to which he has invited the other nineteen whose posts were made redundant at the same time as his), them playing cards with Denise and her husband Raoul (a good part for Gérard Meylan), or at the home of their son Gilles and his partner / wife, and the tensions, more or less freely articulated, between them because of their differing viewpoints: in Leigh's Glasgow, the family has little or nothing to offer any more.
Guédiguian answered questions after the screening, and some (as well as some observations from the audience) were of a rather political or judgemental nature, as if depicting certain truths, rather than presenting a story, were the film's purpose. As he sought to stress, cinema is not reality, and the Internet was not there because a screen is not that inetersting, and the focus was elsewhere.
I asked about the use of Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défuncte, which is a beautiful theme, both thoughtful and with a hint of real, not over-blown, sadness to it: he did not comment on that theme in particular, but that, classical or otherwise, the music is fitted early in the editing and has to be what belongs. Later, I aked about the Hemingway novel with the same titles as this film, assuming that there was no connection, as the origins appeared in a song sung at the anniversary party. This was apparently a very popular song in the 60s, and Guédiguian did not comment on whether the Hemingway associations carried any regrettable or deliberate overtones.
End-notes
* To quote a title of Tames Thurber's.
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Wednesday, 12 September 2012
Popular postings this week (no, not 'trending')
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12 September
This is just a list of page-views (with hyperlinks and kinky boots), OK?
5th = All on one day (13)
4th = Wilfredo gyrates in his Y-fronts - expanded view (20)
3rd = Kristin shows her comedic flair (26)
2nd = The patterns of Samsara (26)
1st = How do you weigh 16,000 animals? Has AOL® done a Freudian? (48)
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12 September
This is just a list of page-views (with hyperlinks and kinky boots), OK?
5th = All on one day (13)
4th = Wilfredo gyrates in his Y-fronts - expanded view (20)
3rd = Kristin shows her comedic flair (26)
2nd = The patterns of Samsara (26)
1st = How do you weigh 16,000 animals? Has AOL® done a Freudian? (48)
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Video: Could Victoria Beckham be pregnant? (according to AOL®)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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12 September 2012
The answer, without looking at the video, self-evidently is Yes :
* VB is not known to have done anything to affect her fertility, and
* Nor is she, whatever the age is now, beyond child-bearing age
So why look at a video of someone who - like any other mother sharing those characteristics - could be pregnant
Sooner hear a determination as to whether, at any point, she could sing sweetly...
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12 September 2012
The answer, without looking at the video, self-evidently is Yes :
* VB is not known to have done anything to affect her fertility, and
* Nor is she, whatever the age is now, beyond child-bearing age
So why look at a video of someone who - like any other mother sharing those characteristics - could be pregnant
Sooner hear a determination as to whether, at any point, she could sing sweetly...
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Tuesday, 11 September 2012
Who is the imposter ?
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11 September - work in progress
* Contains spoilers - either resolve to know all about The Imposter (2012), or do not read *
It's a bit like odd one out (a game whose title has singularly always baffled me), or is it?
Well, we could play it with this film and others such as Zelig (1983), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), maybe even with Roxanne (1987), and other media such as The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (with the late and great Leonard Rossiter, 1976), and Orson Welles and his broadcast of The War of the Worlds :
(1) If you watch The Imposter and think that it is a documentary, then you are more gullible than even Welles conceived in around 1938 - it is not a documentary, and you can simply look at the credits to see so, if nothing else convinces you*.
Is it, then, (2) a well-done feature film, or, as I say, (3) a piss-take, which is funny, but whose purpose is unclear. It's unclear, but I'd be amazed if the person with the germ of the concept hadn't been influenced by something akin to the novel Engleby by Sebastian Faulks**. I still question, though, what the genre is, and who's deceiving whom and why?
It is, for me, as if Airplane passed itself for a flight-related real-life drama, in the way that Casualty does as events taking place in a hospital (not a vehicle for characters to interact concerning health-type excuses for action) : speak to anyone who thinks that they know about criminal or civil courts and how they operate, and you infer (they were never a witness or juror, never attended a trial at all), and it's all sucked in from t.v. and film, whereas the truth of the justice system is dry and dull, let alone how it operates.
OK so far? What I propound, then, is that just as you might be able to watch This is Spinal Tap (1984) or anything to do with Steve Coogan / Barry Humphreys / Sasha Baron Cohen / Matt Roper and their other selves, and believe, as at (1), that it's all real, you would then be a more-or-less willing victim (and you'd have lost a lot of money to that nice man in Nigeria). In other words, the equivalent of our hero in The Truman Show*** (1998).
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 September - work in progress
* Contains spoilers - either resolve to know all about The Imposter (2012), or do not read *
It's a bit like odd one out (a game whose title has singularly always baffled me), or is it?
Well, we could play it with this film and others such as Zelig (1983), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), maybe even with Roxanne (1987), and other media such as The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (with the late and great Leonard Rossiter, 1976), and Orson Welles and his broadcast of The War of the Worlds :
(1) If you watch The Imposter and think that it is a documentary, then you are more gullible than even Welles conceived in around 1938 - it is not a documentary, and you can simply look at the credits to see so, if nothing else convinces you*.
Is it, then, (2) a well-done feature film, or, as I say, (3) a piss-take, which is funny, but whose purpose is unclear. It's unclear, but I'd be amazed if the person with the germ of the concept hadn't been influenced by something akin to the novel Engleby by Sebastian Faulks**. I still question, though, what the genre is, and who's deceiving whom and why?
It is, for me, as if Airplane passed itself for a flight-related real-life drama, in the way that Casualty does as events taking place in a hospital (not a vehicle for characters to interact concerning health-type excuses for action) : speak to anyone who thinks that they know about criminal or civil courts and how they operate, and you infer (they were never a witness or juror, never attended a trial at all), and it's all sucked in from t.v. and film, whereas the truth of the justice system is dry and dull, let alone how it operates.
OK so far? What I propound, then, is that just as you might be able to watch This is Spinal Tap (1984) or anything to do with Steve Coogan / Barry Humphreys / Sasha Baron Cohen / Matt Roper and their other selves, and believe, as at (1), that it's all real, you would then be a more-or-less willing victim (and you'd have lost a lot of money to that nice man in Nigeria). In other words, the equivalent of our hero in The Truman Show*** (1998).
I have Tweeted already about the Hitler diaries, but not, I think, alluded to Trevor, Lord Roper : I believe that it was claimed, when it was revealed that the diaries whose status he had approved were shown to be fakes, that so much should have been self-evident, and, with The Imposter, I cannot believe, dedicated popcorn-eating or using the cinema as a more effective bed apart, that anyone would take it for real (item (1), above), or that it was pretending to be real (item (2), above). For, here, we are not talking about Homer napping, as the phrase has it for when The Odyssey or The Iliad creak a bit too much.
Perhaps, though, the film (any film?) itself acts as a soporific for the higher functions of the brain for some, However, its score, for example, I found so intrusive that it was not good film music (of which, I fully believe, that one should laregly cosnciously be unaware, unless it is some big emotional theme, as in Superman (1978), or its reprise), but, again, I do believe that there was some of that Damien-Hirst-like post-modern irony lurking here: with passages that played with the in any case edgy interval of a semi-tone, as if a restless oscillation between neighbouring pitches could be remotely undetectable, or contained not the development of thematic material, but which just enacted descending scales, how could I have expected to acclimatize to them? - and I do not believe that, unless it was a joke at the expense of those who did, I was meant to.
That said, the friend with whom I saw the film has alerted me to the existence of both:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4087370.stm
as well as
http://www.find-anyone.com/aboutcharlieparker.html
From the first, I quote (sceptically) where the reviewer (Geoffrey MacNab) talks of the task faced by The Imposter's director, Bart Layton: Like [Frédéric] Bourdin, he withholds information from us or gives it us to us in such a selective fashion that we can't see the holes. No holes detected in my viewing, as you can see from the end-notes...!
In the second, Francisco Hernandez-Fernandez is supposed to have been used as an alias by the real Bourdin - yes, a very likely name to choose, like Franco del Bobbo! This was at a school that he attended until 'A teacher unmasked him last week [seemingly June 2005] after having watched a television programme about his exploits'.
Yet, at this date, after allegedly being imprisoned in the States for six year following impersonating Nicholas Barclay and having been found wanted, the piece lamely states:
He is said to have assumed numerous other identities
No facts there, then?
Just look at http://imposterfilm.com/interview-subjects/, and see whether there is a closer resemblance to something like (which I hope that you know isn't real) The Addams Family and to the people who might, in character, be playing such a thing - the poses, the expressions, don't they challenge you not to take it seriously?
From Wikipedia: Frédéric Bourdin is a French serial impostor the press has nicknamed "The Chameleon". He began his impersonations as a child and as of 2005 had assumed at least 500 false identities, three of which have been actual teenage missing persons.
More to come...
End-notes
* An appendix can be found at ??, but how about :
The charges for which Frederic is put away for six years (perjury and falsely obtaining a passport) - as if he could not have been found to have committed offences that would have justified and carried a much longer tariff, but he needs to be free to tell the story
The calls to everywhere and anywhere, permitted by the prison to a man whose falsehood from making the calls near the beginning of this story must have been discovered - but he is supposedly released, and without any continuing restriction on his activities (wherever he may then be, as he would assuredly have been deported
The ludicrously lengthy list of 'previous' when Frederic is caught in the events in this film, both as if he would somehow have avoided being put away for repeatedly committing deception all around Europe, and not have been a person under restriction then for his pattern of crime, with all children's homes on alert to him and to his modus operandi
That list even contains (shown on the screen) the name Fernandez Fernandez, and the film revels in its absurdity, aurally and visually - I was in hoots, and my friend was laughing, but, bewilderingly, everyone else in the screen seemed to have taken it as indicative of how bad he was, not of sheer implausibility
** First published by Hutchinson in 2007 (3 May).
*** If the film were really about that : Tru + Man?, and his surname is, of course, Burbank (Truman is his Christian name, as we often forget), a real 'studio man'. Thinking about The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) may not be amiss.
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Wellington boot beef
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11 September
An army marches on its Napoleon. Any Napoleon worth the part takes the cat's whiskers, and she, instead, wears pyjamas.
Meanwhile, in Beijing, the duck still haven't got used to the enforced change of name, and, knowing no better, decide to petition Mao. John Adams, content with Nixon in China, dances with the Chairman of the Bank of England, soon to retire. Adams, however, has no intention of retiring, but, just to be on the same side, goes for a check-up with Dr Atomic.
Past Eve and Adam's, down at the Atomic Energy Authority's annual ceilidh and cake, there's plenty of craic, assuredly no crack, and, to Jennifer Saunders' infantile dismay, barely an arse-crack, let alone a builder's. She takes her tea rough, shaken not stirred on board a somehow sea-borne HMS Belfast, which was a damn-fool choice to sail up the Liffey.
Gub-boat duplomacy being what it is, they have discplined the Guardian's staff, who charter-partied the vessel for their own bash. Insurers rub their hands, having heard that it was for a bash, because their command of idiom is pedestrian, and a crossing such as this is, to be blunt, beyond even Mary's conception.
The army straggles on, into the territory that once was occupied by The Banana People. They had no objection to being named after a green fruit, and still live there, but International Law, International Relations, the UN, and International Rescue deemed them The Papaya People:
For all the sense that it made, it might as well have been The Pipistrelle People, or Pirelli People
Pan's People, anyone?
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11 September
An army marches on its Napoleon. Any Napoleon worth the part takes the cat's whiskers, and she, instead, wears pyjamas.
Meanwhile, in Beijing, the duck still haven't got used to the enforced change of name, and, knowing no better, decide to petition Mao. John Adams, content with Nixon in China, dances with the Chairman of the Bank of England, soon to retire. Adams, however, has no intention of retiring, but, just to be on the same side, goes for a check-up with Dr Atomic.
Past Eve and Adam's, down at the Atomic Energy Authority's annual ceilidh and cake, there's plenty of craic, assuredly no crack, and, to Jennifer Saunders' infantile dismay, barely an arse-crack, let alone a builder's. She takes her tea rough, shaken not stirred on board a somehow sea-borne HMS Belfast, which was a damn-fool choice to sail up the Liffey.
Gub-boat duplomacy being what it is, they have discplined the Guardian's staff, who charter-partied the vessel for their own bash. Insurers rub their hands, having heard that it was for a bash, because their command of idiom is pedestrian, and a crossing such as this is, to be blunt, beyond even Mary's conception.
The army straggles on, into the territory that once was occupied by The Banana People. They had no objection to being named after a green fruit, and still live there, but International Law, International Relations, the UN, and International Rescue deemed them The Papaya People:
For all the sense that it made, it might as well have been The Pipistrelle People, or Pirelli People
Pan's People, anyone?
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Leopard Generate is selected
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11 September
That'll be the name of my fifth novel (which I'll pay Will Self to ghost-write, if he could do anything quietly...), so remember - in a subliminal way - that you read it here first.
I am informed that an alternative modern-day pigmentation is undoubtedly purple, but do they mean purple? : looking at, being cruel, Damien Hirst's so-called spot-paintings (or a paint-card) convinces me that I don't know my puce from my eblow (elbow, even, as I am not 'licensed' to talk about e-blows before the watershed).
As to bringing back the semi-colon, I have just done it on Twitter - as with Peter M. and Michael P.*, it has spent its time out in the wilderness, can be welcomed back into the fold, and become the fatted calf (if it's half-lucky).
@OpiumBooks is now, as a good friend calls it, Twitterating (with) me : can't it get a bit dull just having titles on a topic less of interest to me (than ever it was) since, at the time of its release, seeing Robert de Niro wasting his life as David Aaronson** in Once upon a Time in America (1984)?
Which might take me to Inception (2010), but I had to leave last night's screening, so we won't go into that just now...
So I shall simply close with a comment (allegedly) made by Keith Lemon (or was it Keith Tangerine - or Grape?):
To be in a position to acquire this objective, I can invest hours in entrance of the mirror to get my look correct
Right on, baby - but don't give up Dave's job!***
End-notes
* Oddly, I tend to think of his surname as being Portaloo... (Didn't you realize that the product was called after a family name?)
** I had remembered his nickname as Toots (touch of Dustin there?), but Noodles seems plum crazy even now!
*** Whih is what, on the pattern of Russell Hoban's hugely affecting novel Riddley Walker, is the fate of that phrase, I deem.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 September
That'll be the name of my fifth novel (which I'll pay Will Self to ghost-write, if he could do anything quietly...), so remember - in a subliminal way - that you read it here first.
I am informed that an alternative modern-day pigmentation is undoubtedly purple, but do they mean purple? : looking at, being cruel, Damien Hirst's so-called spot-paintings (or a paint-card) convinces me that I don't know my puce from my eblow (elbow, even, as I am not 'licensed' to talk about e-blows before the watershed).
As to bringing back the semi-colon, I have just done it on Twitter - as with Peter M. and Michael P.*, it has spent its time out in the wilderness, can be welcomed back into the fold, and become the fatted calf (if it's half-lucky).
@OpiumBooks is now, as a good friend calls it, Twitterating (with) me : can't it get a bit dull just having titles on a topic less of interest to me (than ever it was) since, at the time of its release, seeing Robert de Niro wasting his life as David Aaronson** in Once upon a Time in America (1984)?
Which might take me to Inception (2010), but I had to leave last night's screening, so we won't go into that just now...
So I shall simply close with a comment (allegedly) made by Keith Lemon (or was it Keith Tangerine - or Grape?):
To be in a position to acquire this objective, I can invest hours in entrance of the mirror to get my look correct
Right on, baby - but don't give up Dave's job!***
End-notes
* Oddly, I tend to think of his surname as being Portaloo... (Didn't you realize that the product was called after a family name?)
** I had remembered his nickname as Toots (touch of Dustin there?), but Noodles seems plum crazy even now!
*** Whih is what, on the pattern of Russell Hoban's hugely affecting novel Riddley Walker, is the fate of that phrase, I deem.
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Monday, 10 September 2012
All on one day
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10 September
No, not a Hollywood title of a film, conflating One Fine Day (1996) with I Don't Know What (2012, post-production), or anything else...
I'm referring to World Suicide Prevention Day* (WSPD), but, being controversial, it all does seem a bit like that Spielberg film that I could never face seeing, Saving Private Ryan:
Tom Hanks, I am sure, is fine, but not so much what is the concept (or what facts - there apparently are some - is the concept rooted in?), as what's the point of the concept? (Substitute any other industry-standard (or non-standard) screenplay-writing word for 'concept', if you object.)
Mother of four (?) can't be subjected to the announcement of the death of x of them (where x is 3 (or fewer)) on one day, I gather, so save one of them (i.e. he doesn't die), y, so his death, too, doesn't need to be announced at the same time: 'take him out of' the dangerous position in which he is, at the risk of z lives, rather than lying about whether he is dead or not.
The military, of course, always scrupulously honest, especially when (as with the Battle of Culloden (or Prestonpans, for that matter)) it comes to agreeing with the enemy where the sides will engage each other (cf. Winfrey's Last Case**), so a real bind for them to lie, if y were to have died:
How could they lie to a poor mother about whether her son is / sons are dead? Sob, sob.
Back at WSPD:
The parallel? A flurry of activity to publicize the cause, prevention and statistics of suicide on one world-wide day.
Why not a lot less, not all at once, just all the time, done properly, so that, on the 362[.25] days of the year that are not WSPD (or either side), Private Ryan gets as good a chance of getting saved then? For, aren't days*** and weeks of this kind in danger of being tokenistic, too little focused on a tiny part of the year, and no encouragement to proper funding, day in, day out?
I don't know, but when else have I had all these Tweets about suicide?: I don't mind - but don't much need - them, but couldn't they just piss off with overload and quash any compassion or understanding, when too many people wrongly think those weak who choose to end their own lives?
Requiescat in pacem
End-notes
* The name is simply wrong, in Ronseal terms.
And I type it, to check, into Google®, and Google doesn't even know what 'world suic' leads to, in its form-completion mode!
** Ripping Yarns, courtesy of Jones & Palin.
*** And I might include World Mental Health Day, because the people with an interest in it huddle (and everyone else can pretend to have been 'off the radar' or 'not to have had a signal' that day, but, never mind - there's always next year...).
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10 September
No, not a Hollywood title of a film, conflating One Fine Day (1996) with I Don't Know What (2012, post-production), or anything else...
I'm referring to World Suicide Prevention Day* (WSPD), but, being controversial, it all does seem a bit like that Spielberg film that I could never face seeing, Saving Private Ryan:
Tom Hanks, I am sure, is fine, but not so much what is the concept (or what facts - there apparently are some - is the concept rooted in?), as what's the point of the concept? (Substitute any other industry-standard (or non-standard) screenplay-writing word for 'concept', if you object.)
Mother of four (?) can't be subjected to the announcement of the death of x of them (where x is 3 (or fewer)) on one day, I gather, so save one of them (i.e. he doesn't die), y, so his death, too, doesn't need to be announced at the same time: 'take him out of' the dangerous position in which he is, at the risk of z lives, rather than lying about whether he is dead or not.
The military, of course, always scrupulously honest, especially when (as with the Battle of Culloden (or Prestonpans, for that matter)) it comes to agreeing with the enemy where the sides will engage each other (cf. Winfrey's Last Case**), so a real bind for them to lie, if y were to have died:
How could they lie to a poor mother about whether her son is / sons are dead? Sob, sob.
Back at WSPD:
The parallel? A flurry of activity to publicize the cause, prevention and statistics of suicide on one world-wide day.
Why not a lot less, not all at once, just all the time, done properly, so that, on the 362[.25] days of the year that are not WSPD (or either side), Private Ryan gets as good a chance of getting saved then? For, aren't days*** and weeks of this kind in danger of being tokenistic, too little focused on a tiny part of the year, and no encouragement to proper funding, day in, day out?
I don't know, but when else have I had all these Tweets about suicide?: I don't mind - but don't much need - them, but couldn't they just piss off with overload and quash any compassion or understanding, when too many people wrongly think those weak who choose to end their own lives?
Requiescat in pacem
End-notes
* The name is simply wrong, in Ronseal terms.
And I type it, to check, into Google®, and Google doesn't even know what 'world suic' leads to, in its form-completion mode!
** Ripping Yarns, courtesy of Jones & Palin.
*** And I might include World Mental Health Day, because the people with an interest in it huddle (and everyone else can pretend to have been 'off the radar' or 'not to have had a signal' that day, but, never mind - there's always next year...).
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Did Keith Floyd really even like wine?
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10 September
Watched The Truman Show (1998) again - not for real, just on my chat show.
Made me wonder: could the t.v. programme actually have been showing a guy, before the days of I always cook with wine - sometimes I even add it to the food / meal*, consuming wines at that rate?
I reckon now that it was all done with CGI - seeing The Imposter (2012) yesterday proved it to me, because that (excuse the phrase) US government agent was shit hot...
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 September
Watched The Truman Show (1998) again - not for real, just on my chat show.
Made me wonder: could the t.v. programme actually have been showing a guy, before the days of I always cook with wine - sometimes I even add it to the food / meal*, consuming wines at that rate?
I reckon now that it was all done with CGI - seeing The Imposter (2012) yesterday proved it to me, because that (excuse the phrase) US government agent was shit hot...
End-notes
* Even better, the story about Ice Cold in Alex(1958) (thankfully, nothing to do with Marianne Faithfull, for a change) and umpteen takes, real beer, and John Mills - priceless!
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Sunday, 9 September 2012
My pussy is a woozle
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9 September
My pussy is a woozle,
A woozle made from cheese,
And, if my woozle sneezes,
She keeps me from disease
© Copyright Belston Night Works 2012
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9 September
My pussy is a woozle,
A woozle made from cheese,
And, if my woozle sneezes,
She keeps me from disease
© Copyright Belston Night Works 2012
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Sleepin' in mi Jag
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9 September
Who can forget confessional Bobby Chariot, top warm-up man (before ever Marion and Geoff, it has to be said, by a long chalk*)?
I have only just thought of him in a long while through that 'catch-phrase' of his, and another was On pills for mi neerves, but Alexei Sayle as Bobby is a natural person to think of, following on from Wilfredo.
Maybe more later... Maybe just look out mi Alexei video...
End-notes
* Know what that means - and why? I think something to do with darts /keeping score, as a quick guess...
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9 September
Who can forget confessional Bobby Chariot, top warm-up man (before ever Marion and Geoff, it has to be said, by a long chalk*)?
I have only just thought of him in a long while through that 'catch-phrase' of his, and another was On pills for mi neerves, but Alexei Sayle as Bobby is a natural person to think of, following on from Wilfredo.
Maybe more later... Maybe just look out mi Alexei video...
End-notes
* Know what that means - and why? I think something to do with darts /keeping score, as a quick guess...
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Friday, 7 September 2012
Those CFF events (2012) - booked so far
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25 September - an update of :
As of last night, tickets purchased for the Film Festival, though many a gap as more tickets than room in the universe to sort them! :
As last year, there is a code, which is :
A Abandoned - Walked out partway through
B Blog - There is a posting about the film on the blog, although it may not be a review, to which this links
M Missed - Planned - or had tickets - to see, but had to skip
O Take One - Published on line as a guest review
R Review - The blog posting was submitted as a review and appears on the Film Festival web-site, to which a link provided
S Seen - The opposite of Missed
T Technical - Some technical issue meant that the quality of the screening had been compromised and it was refunded
Summary : 30 films seen (or part-seen) in 11 days, with two that couldn't be watched, and quite a bit of juggling at the weekend of 15 to 16 September
Thursday 13
M 3.30 About Elly - too tight to see because of film at 6.00
1. S 6.00 Opening film : Hope Springs (selling out)
Somehow there's time afterwards for a Q&A and to get the new crowd seated in the size of space after About Elly that did me no favours...
2. S B R 8.30 Opening film : Snows of Kilimanjaro (selling out) Festival review
Friday 14
3. A B R 1.00 Salma and the Apple Festival review
4. S B R 3.30 Formentera Festival review
5. S B 8.30 The Body in the Woods
6. S B R 10.30 Tridentfest review 1 and review 2 Two Festival reviews
Saturday 15
T 12.30 Hemel - Gave up, because of picture-quality, for a refund
7. S 5.00 War Witch
8. S B 7.30 On the Road
Sunday 16
M 3.00 On the Road - Substituted by screening on Saturday night
M 6.40 Warsaw Bridge
clashed with
9. S B 8.00 Chimes at Midnight
Monday 17
M 10.15 The Temptation of St. Tony - Proved to be too early!
10. S B R 3.15 Postcards from the Zoo Festival review
11. S B R 8.00 Now is Good Festival review
12. S B R 10.45 Hit and Run Festival review
Tuesday 18
M 10.30 A Cube of Sugar - Also too early
13. S B R 3.00 Home for the Weekend Festival review
14. S B 5.30 The Idiot
15. S B 8.00 The Night Elvis Died
Wednesday 19
16. S B R 12.30 V.O.S. Festival review
17. S B 3.00 Salvatore Giuliano
18. S 6.00 Big Boys gone Bananas!
T 8.00 The Mattei Affair
Thursday 20
19. S B R 3.15 Totem
M 4.30 Event: George Perry on Hitchcock - NB To book separately : film's allocated, talk's not
M 5.15 Vertigo
20. S B O 8.15 All Divided Selves
Friday 21
21. S B 10.45 Vertigo
22. S B 2.00 Warsaw Bridge
23. S B 6.00 Blackmail
M 8.00 Aelita, Queen of Mars - free, no need to book - Too tired!
Saturday 22
M 12.45 Tony 10 - Still too tired
24. S O 6.00 The Lacey Rituals review interview with William Fowler (Curator, BFI)
25. S B 8.30 Black Bread
Sunday 23
26. S 11.00 A Trip to the Moon + Extraordinary Voyage
27. S B 1.00 Lucky Luciano
28. S 3.15 Marnie
29. S 5.30 Surprise film : Looper
30. S B R 8.00 Closing film : Holy Motors
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25 September - an update of :
As of last night, tickets purchased for the Film Festival, though many a gap as more tickets than room in the universe to sort them! :
As last year, there is a code, which is :
A Abandoned - Walked out partway through
B Blog - There is a posting about the film on the blog, although it may not be a review, to which this links
M Missed - Planned - or had tickets - to see, but had to skip
O Take One - Published on line as a guest review
R Review - The blog posting was submitted as a review and appears on the Film Festival web-site, to which a link provided
S Seen - The opposite of Missed
T Technical - Some technical issue meant that the quality of the screening had been compromised and it was refunded
Summary : 30 films seen (or part-seen) in 11 days, with two that couldn't be watched, and quite a bit of juggling at the weekend of 15 to 16 September
Thursday 13
M 3.30 About Elly - too tight to see because of film at 6.00
1. S 6.00 Opening film : Hope Springs (selling out)
Somehow there's time afterwards for a Q&A and to get the new crowd seated in the size of space after About Elly that did me no favours...
2. S B R 8.30 Opening film : Snows of Kilimanjaro (selling out) Festival review
Friday 14
3. A B R 1.00 Salma and the Apple Festival review
4. S B R 3.30 Formentera Festival review
5. S B 8.30 The Body in the Woods
6. S B R 10.30 Tridentfest review 1 and review 2 Two Festival reviews
Saturday 15
T 12.30 Hemel - Gave up, because of picture-quality, for a refund
7. S 5.00 War Witch
8. S B 7.30 On the Road
Sunday 16
M 3.00 On the Road - Substituted by screening on Saturday night
M 6.40 Warsaw Bridge
clashed with
9. S B 8.00 Chimes at Midnight
Monday 17
M 10.15 The Temptation of St. Tony - Proved to be too early!
10. S B R 3.15 Postcards from the Zoo Festival review
11. S B R 8.00 Now is Good Festival review
12. S B R 10.45 Hit and Run Festival review
Tuesday 18
M 10.30 A Cube of Sugar - Also too early
13. S B R 3.00 Home for the Weekend Festival review
14. S B 5.30 The Idiot
15. S B 8.00 The Night Elvis Died
Wednesday 19
16. S B R 12.30 V.O.S. Festival review
17. S B 3.00 Salvatore Giuliano
18. S 6.00 Big Boys gone Bananas!
T 8.00 The Mattei Affair
Thursday 20
19. S B R 3.15 Totem
M 4.30 Event: George Perry on Hitchcock - NB To book separately : film's allocated, talk's not
M 5.15 Vertigo
20. S B O 8.15 All Divided Selves
Friday 21
21. S B 10.45 Vertigo
22. S B 2.00 Warsaw Bridge
23. S B 6.00 Blackmail
M 8.00 Aelita, Queen of Mars - free, no need to book - Too tired!
Saturday 22
M 12.45 Tony 10 - Still too tired
24. S O 6.00 The Lacey Rituals review interview with William Fowler (Curator, BFI)
25. S B 8.30 Black Bread
Sunday 23
26. S 11.00 A Trip to the Moon + Extraordinary Voyage
27. S B 1.00 Lucky Luciano
28. S 3.15 Marnie
29. S 5.30 Surprise film : Looper
30. S B R 8.00 Closing film : Holy Motors
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News from Writer's Rest
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8 September
Lindsay's latest posting at http://writersrest.com/2012/09/06/pretending-to-be-human-the-latest-thing-in-robo-calls/#comment-1542 has enthused me to write this :
Ah, The Turing Test, one of the beloved things that returns and returns, and always pays returns!
I always had an interest in Alan Turing and his fellow theorists and code-breakers, and had been to the place that gave rise to the present GCHQ (the UK’s Government Communications HQ), but seeing the play about his life, brilliantly performed by an all-amateur cast, had me taking my then girlfriend that same weekend to that place in Buckinghamshire, Bletchley Park.
Turing’s sister (who calls him Alan M. Turing) has written a book about him, which I shall some day read, as I shall some day read the text of the play and be amazed again at how much the actor who played him embodied that role and knew a huge role almost word perfect.
For now, I see a little bit of his lively mind and thinking from the thirties and through and beyond the Second World War, and feel moved to support the campaign that he should be pardoned for being gay before his time, and also for his seeming suicide to be looked at not as the self-crime that it then was in law.
If that does not encourage you to visit Writer's Rest, I admit failure...
Plus there's now :
Another thing is that the best AI is where the money is being sought: it is not in the very unconvincing services that ‘direct your call’ by getting you to press 1 then 3 then 2, etc., etc., or the stilted automated announcements at the station, as they have no interest in conveying the notion that they are persons, just suitably comprehensible cut-up bits of persons’ voices.
Actually, that is no false economy, but not pretending to be any more than one is, whereas those who use highly developed AI fail to realize how objectionable people will almost always find a however-clever machine that rings them up, if they catch it out as one, and may have to learn a difficult lesson about what matters to human-beings.
The reason? Simply the same affront at a computer seeming to personalize a form-letter, but addressing me incompetently as Mrs Apsley, because of the principle rubbish in, rubbish out – the seeming care about me as this mythical ‘valued customer’ is belied by not even knowing who I am! Just as irritating as if the new doctor calls one by the wrong name, but he or she can be corrected, and should apologize…
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8 September
Lindsay's latest posting at http://writersrest.com/2012/09/06/pretending-to-be-human-the-latest-thing-in-robo-calls/#comment-1542 has enthused me to write this :
Ah, The Turing Test, one of the beloved things that returns and returns, and always pays returns!
I always had an interest in Alan Turing and his fellow theorists and code-breakers, and had been to the place that gave rise to the present GCHQ (the UK’s Government Communications HQ), but seeing the play about his life, brilliantly performed by an all-amateur cast, had me taking my then girlfriend that same weekend to that place in Buckinghamshire, Bletchley Park.
Turing’s sister (who calls him Alan M. Turing) has written a book about him, which I shall some day read, as I shall some day read the text of the play and be amazed again at how much the actor who played him embodied that role and knew a huge role almost word perfect.
For now, I see a little bit of his lively mind and thinking from the thirties and through and beyond the Second World War, and feel moved to support the campaign that he should be pardoned for being gay before his time, and also for his seeming suicide to be looked at not as the self-crime that it then was in law.
If that does not encourage you to visit Writer's Rest, I admit failure...
Plus there's now :
Another thing is that the best AI is where the money is being sought: it is not in the very unconvincing services that ‘direct your call’ by getting you to press 1 then 3 then 2, etc., etc., or the stilted automated announcements at the station, as they have no interest in conveying the notion that they are persons, just suitably comprehensible cut-up bits of persons’ voices.
Actually, that is no false economy, but not pretending to be any more than one is, whereas those who use highly developed AI fail to realize how objectionable people will almost always find a however-clever machine that rings them up, if they catch it out as one, and may have to learn a difficult lesson about what matters to human-beings.
The reason? Simply the same affront at a computer seeming to personalize a form-letter, but addressing me incompetently as Mrs Apsley, because of the principle rubbish in, rubbish out – the seeming care about me as this mythical ‘valued customer’ is belied by not even knowing who I am! Just as irritating as if the new doctor calls one by the wrong name, but he or she can be corrected, and should apologize…
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This is a farce that makes you think (according to The Guardian)
This is what the theatre says was written about Hysteria by Terry Johnson
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7 September
This is what the theatre says was written about Hysteria by Terry Johnson
Johnson is best known to me as having written the play on which the film Insignificance (1985), directed by Nicolas Roeg, was based, but may also have directed the performance that I saw of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (taken from the novel), and almost certainly did that of Shelagh Stephenson's The Memory of Water.
I do not know Johnson's earlier play, but what do we have here ? : the fictionalization of a real meeting between the inventor of psychoanalysis and one of the world's most eccentric artists of the twentieth century. In Insignificance, Marilyn Monroe famously meets Albert Einstein (though I don't think that they ever did).
But this is not Michael Frayn with Copenhagen, Nils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Bohr's wife Margrethe circling like sub-atomic particles on the stage. Frayn's play is not exactly in the vein of scientific speculation (e.g. The Cambridge Quintet, and nor could Johnson's be imagined to be.
If you could see the last five to ten minutes before the first five to ten minutes you might simply not bother to watch what follows, it is as simple than that - any creative work that does not at least do what Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There to maintain the magic may not be worth the watching.
For does the play actually give rise to the thinking that is attributed to The Guardian? Not beyond thinking that three characters depicted might represent Freud's id, ego and super-ego in a dream, and that just is not that interesting. It is also not interesting that, at the end of his life, Freud might have contemplated again, and regretted having rejected the idea of sexual abuse in the infantile period as the basis of his patients' psychiatric problems - as I reflected on this conceit, I realized that I already knew of this rejection, and that the notion did not add very much.
A great advance on the play filmed as Insignificance? Not really.
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The film is Ten (not 10)
This is a review of Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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7 September
* Contains spoilers *
This is a review of Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
Sounds familiar ? :
A film project unlikely to be completed because of the effect of the director's erotic impulses and of psychological disintegration
No, this is Berberian Sound Studio* (2012), but you could be forgiven for thinking that it is 8½ meets Vincent Price with Black Swan (2010) in the room.
Apart from when we follow, in a disjunctive way that immediately suggests disassociation, Gilderoy (Toby Jones) to his unspecified lodgings - which seem more like his room at his mother's house than the building in which they are supposed to be located - we are trapped in the world of studio 4 at Berberian Sound Studios somewhere in an Italian city, where, for unknown reasons, he has been engaged to oversee the re-recording and foley work on a film whose scenes we only hear described (or their dialogue performed from a sound-booth, significantly well by Elena (Tonia Sotiropoulou)), but of which the title sequence has been suggestive.
The only connection with the outside world (for us, as we never see Gilderoy between his lodgings and the studio) is three or four seemingly inconsequential letters from his mother about the progress of 'chiff-chaffs' in her garden, and which we rather edgily have to read as they move down the screen (because there is no voice-over). We see him only in and on his arrival at the studios, where we might have the sinister realization that no one else seems to have any business, and he is instantly insulted by the film's producer (Francesco**) for having English manners and not the ones that he thinks proper.
So begins a struggle to get Gildeoroy's flight paid, a matter about which he is overly concerned, and everyone at the studios - as if paying people does not rate highly, since they eventually claim that the flight did not exist - is overly concerned not to deal with. Gilderoy is a mystery, but his work, as is the sadistic story, set at an equestrian school and involving priests, alleged witches and secrets, appears to have a grubby nature, because he shruggingly justifies it by saying, referring to his medium, 'quarter of an inch is quarter of an inch'.
Unless that professional background and his evident expertise (he is asked, when the power cuts again, to do a party-piece and make the sound of a UFO) justify him for the task, there seems no reason why he was flown in (seemingly at his own expense) to do it. That said, perhaps not unlike the film world of its time, Francesco conveniently talks to him like a menial, with that same way of putting the faults of his own attitude onto that of others seen at the opening and which hints at menace.
A melting-point for Gilderoy to crack up and for us to see that disintegration - there is no other word for what the visuals present - in, for example, the sound-schedule for a film at Box Hill that we know that he worked on where we are expecting to see the familiar one for the present project: as is so often the case, given as what we factually appear to see, whereas it reflects Gilderoy's disassociating mind.
In a way much, and in a way nothing, hangs on Gilderoy's engagement with the film: I have already said that is not apparent why he was engaged to do the work (and why those who had worked on other distasteful projects with inappropriate insertions of a red-hot poker, which Santini wheedlingly does his best to try to justify, are not available), and we see others replaced, when choosing to renounce the project (which Gilderoy does not have the apparent confidence - or, maybe, the cash for an air-fare back - to do).
If, however, he were replaced, no more Berberian Sound Studio, of course, and no more following the state of his tortured psyche. I say 'tortured', because what he is being demanded to do is a torment to this Brit, and it is bound to go one way or the other (if not both) of lashing out (such as in the destruction of part of the sound-recordings) or impacting on Gilderoy.
Toby Jones does an excellent job of embodying this nervous expert, and writer / director Peter Strickland has created an incestuous and self-focused universe, which the title neatly suggests (as also the unique talent of Cathy Berberian). It is a rough ride, but interesting, and one which I found that I engaged with more richly by relating to the world of Fellini's work about a non-film: the fact that, even when we think that we might, we never see what Gilderoy has to marshal the sound for making it not only more piquant, but even also hints at this antecedent.
End-notes
* Why, as if it is like The Ministry of Sound, do I want to call this film Berberian Sound System?
** Played by Cosimo Fusco, who, like Gilderoy, has no surname (according to IMDb), whereas the director, Santini (Antonio Mancino) has no Christian name.
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Wednesday, 5 September 2012
The patterns of Samsara
This is a review of Samsara (2011)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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5 September (re-edited, 9 February 2024)
This is a review of Samsara (2011)
* Contains spoilers *
Unless you intuit something from the eyes of the dancers at the beginning (and they, at least, are allowed a varying expression, not just a fixed gaze), you may not realize how intense, disturbingly intense, Samsara (2011) is going to get. You may recognize some locations early on, such as Petra, The Hall of Mirrors at the Palais de Versailles, the cathedral of Rheims, but it is not material, for this is not a travelogue with a soundtrack of music: its abiding purpose is not to substitute for visiting those places.
Let's come back, first, to those unvarying faces, without expression save in the eyes. This is not witnessing, this is determining, as if for passport photographs, how someone must agree to look to appear. So, also, is the editing, which, for example, takes out unwanted frames in the close scenes of workers on production-lines, by selectively speeding up that part of the process so that we see the product but not what intervenes.
On these grounds alone, quite apart from the fact that the credits acknowledge Fricke and Madigson's 'treatment', do not doubt that this film will manipulate you any less, perhaps more, than a feature film. The transitions, the juxtapositions, are managed well and done carefully, because they need to be in what is choreography, a thought-through presentation of images and music, much of the latter having been composed especially for the film.
Samsara has, in its widest sense, a political message. It shows chickens being gathered by machine to be caged for transport, piglets suckling in a confined space, cows being milked on a huge turn-table, food items and meat being processed en masse, landfill sites and scrap PCs in pieces being rooted over, and the process of manufacture of weapons, and electrical goods and even, to take things to their logical conclusion, sex-dolls*, together with a display of dancing Thai lady-boys (all with a number, and so all can be chosen).
All is pattern, all is conformity, from the convicts performing aerobically in a jail in The Philippines (to what appears to be an added disco-beat) to vaster numbers still of the military performing tai chi, where, seen from one angle, the uniformity of movement became translated into order. There was a similar effect of reducing the individual to a geometric display with the worshippers at Mecca, or military parades of what appear to be US marines and Chinese women with short red dresses and automatic weapons.
Early on, the film propounds a theme of decay, of the stars in their apparent traverse across the night sky in time-lapse scenes being the backdrop to human activity and the natural world, and of the transient nature of all things : if we know the Book of Ecclesiastes or the Buddhist teaching about impermanence, still none of this prepares us for the cumulative power of the images with which we are confronted, summed up in the scene from France where a man wearing a suit and sitting at a desk slowly starts applying clay to his face and is soon, in a frenzy of transformation, no longer recognizable. Likewise, the footage of multi-lane highways from around the world, showing traffic ever in motion, is both mesmerically beautiful, but also seems to question the point of all this motion and striving.
The film takes us into all this activity and consumption, to an almost unbearable degree, and then calmly reverses out through revisiting a Tibetan Buddhist painting that, when the novices had come in from outside and gathered around, we saw being carefully constructed with coloured sand (a mandala. The West’s approach might be to revere or seek to preserve such an artefact : here, first one line is scored through the mandala, and then three others intersecting it, it to represent to the creators (and to us) that - however attractive it may have been - it is just one world-picture amongst others, and all the coloured sand is then mixed together by all present, scraping and scooping it up into a container.
The simplicity of the horns that called out from the monastery have brought us back to the dancers in Bali or somewhere like it, performing one in front of another with a profusion of elongated arms and of the eyes on their palms. Their actions seem serene, graceful, although embodying the same need for everyone to play her part in a seamless whole.
We end, to the sound of the sea, with the desert. All of these things that we saw before both seem and do not seem different, because we are different**.
End-notes
* I was unavoidably reminded of Bianca in Lars and The Real Girl (2007).
** I avoided Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011), because it seemed overly long and likely to be irritating. Samsara was not, but I was glad when I could sense that the uncomfortable footage was coming to an end. On that note, I have found some reviews that I found worth looking at (the last two very brief ones, the first in more depth):
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/august-web-only/samsara.html;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/sep/02/samsara-ron-fricke-review;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/aug/30/samsara-review?newsfeed=true.
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Thursday, 30 August 2012
Tales of Wilfredo
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30 August
I sent my man Wilfredo down to sort him out. However, I forgot that he fancies himself a poet, and so I heard a considerable commotion, resulting from his attempt to recite verse relating his latest alleged conquest, and had to go down myself.
Peace!, I had to cry out more loudly than I liked, Peace! Foolish, frail Wilfredo was at the bottom of a pile of men who meant him no good, and none of this was furthering my cause. I desisted from saying anything about unhanding him, because that was just old hat, and instead pleaded that they let him live, my servant.
His face, with the leering teeth, came out and to the fore. What were you thinking of man?, I hissed; Now I am embroiled in what is below my dignity! He smirked. What was to be done with him!
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30 August
I sent my man Wilfredo down to sort him out. However, I forgot that he fancies himself a poet, and so I heard a considerable commotion, resulting from his attempt to recite verse relating his latest alleged conquest, and had to go down myself.
Peace!, I had to cry out more loudly than I liked, Peace! Foolish, frail Wilfredo was at the bottom of a pile of men who meant him no good, and none of this was furthering my cause. I desisted from saying anything about unhanding him, because that was just old hat, and instead pleaded that they let him live, my servant.
His face, with the leering teeth, came out and to the fore. What were you thinking of man?, I hissed; Now I am embroiled in what is below my dignity! He smirked. What was to be done with him!
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Wednesday, 29 August 2012
Luc Besson looks prolific
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30 August
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30 August
* Contains some spoilers *
That is the impression created by Besson's page on www.imdb.com.
I have caught up with Angel-A (2005), and found it an engrossing adventure for Jamel Debbouze as André and Rie Rasmussen playing Angela as Capra met City of Angels (1998), not in Los Angeles, but Paris. Rasmussen I feel sure that I should have known (although I turn out not to know her other work, but she was a good emotional and physical foil to Debbouze (who played a strong role in Let's Talk About the Rain (2008)), and they worked well as a team, stalking around an often deserted city, although there is many a twilight shot just of him, walking across a deserted bridge.
Bridges give a sort of loose connection of theme with Leconte's The Girl on the Bridge (1999), but the real tie is with a take on It's a Wonderful Life (1946) (whose Donna Reed so impressed me at a screening, appropriately on Christmas Eve, when last seen): Angela is bold and self-assured in life and in her sexiness in a way that André is not, and she is a pre-echo of the title role in Besson's The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010), as is the humour.
With Jimmy Stewart, it is easy to see that he does not deserve his lot, though he cannot see all that he has done to improve people's lives, whereas with André, not that it matters, it is the beauty of what Angela can see in him that turns out to count, both for him and for her, in this well-imagined and gloriously photographed embrace with Paris, and with these two people who dance around it.
Duck's off!
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29 August
Our own gourmet night, when a friend and I visited an upmarket Indian restaurant that had shunned dark furnishings in favour of a light and bright decor (replete with shining statues of violins and saxes), was nothing like Basil's.
Except that, when I saw the list of tandoori items available, I could not resist - because I had never experienced - duck done in a tandoor oven.
Now I know, because I have no reason to believe that it was not a perfectly good initial piece of poultry, that the transformation that the process works on chicken (or lamb) is not suited to that very different commodity of duck: the effect, as characterized by my friend when he sampled a couple of pieces, was to render the dense flesh more like liver.
So it was alchemically no longer duck, but more like (though not sufficiently so to repulse me) a cheaper offering: gold into lead, one rather feared, for all that the experiment was worth...
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29 August
Our own gourmet night, when a friend and I visited an upmarket Indian restaurant that had shunned dark furnishings in favour of a light and bright decor (replete with shining statues of violins and saxes), was nothing like Basil's.
Except that, when I saw the list of tandoori items available, I could not resist - because I had never experienced - duck done in a tandoor oven.
Now I know, because I have no reason to believe that it was not a perfectly good initial piece of poultry, that the transformation that the process works on chicken (or lamb) is not suited to that very different commodity of duck: the effect, as characterized by my friend when he sampled a couple of pieces, was to render the dense flesh more like liver.
So it was alchemically no longer duck, but more like (though not sufficiently so to repulse me) a cheaper offering: gold into lead, one rather feared, for all that the experiment was worth...
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Tuesday, 28 August 2012
Wilfredo gyrates in his Y-fronts - expanded view
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27 August
* A quick sketch, whose detail is being filled in *
We couldn't see the said Y-fronts*, but could conceive not only, from his style of dress as a class club act gone wrong, that Wilfredo was wearing them, but also that, as with his shirt, they would be held closed (ouch!) with a safety-pin.
With his trousers elevated to below his ribs, Wilfredo cut a figure reminiscent, including the teeth, of when down-and-out Reggie Perrin, in the first series of his Fall and Rise and having faked his suicide, ends up having to muck out the pigs in the character of Mr Potts**. And, indeed, Wilfredo is another such creation as Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, whose ways and manners become - and let him embody - his role.
I do not think the comparison with the great Leonard Rossiter, or, indeed, with the equally great Ronnie Barker, unjust: to make a Rigsby, an Arkwright or a Fletcher - or even a Dame Edna - necessitates having a feel for what that person would do in any situation, and one sensed that quality in Wilfredo and how he lived, moved and breathed.
This had been Wilfredo's last show in his run at the Edinburgh Fringe, downstairs in The Tron (pub), and there was great warmth from those in the audience - and also, amongst the women, probably a fear of either some not exactly passing slight, or of some equally unwelcome favourable attention, from Wilfredo.
This was a very convinced embodiment of a Spanish celebrity singer, whose humour lies in having more faith in his love-making and his talent than one felt could really be justified (the boasting of Cellini in his autobiography, or the ambition of an Alan Partridge to be more than he is? - except that Wilfredo, somehow, has none of the doubts or mishaps, and so is more like Cellini).
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27 August
* A quick sketch, whose detail is being filled in *
We couldn't see the said Y-fronts*, but could conceive not only, from his style of dress as a class club act gone wrong, that Wilfredo was wearing them, but also that, as with his shirt, they would be held closed (ouch!) with a safety-pin.
With his trousers elevated to below his ribs, Wilfredo cut a figure reminiscent, including the teeth, of when down-and-out Reggie Perrin, in the first series of his Fall and Rise and having faked his suicide, ends up having to muck out the pigs in the character of Mr Potts**. And, indeed, Wilfredo is another such creation as Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, whose ways and manners become - and let him embody - his role.
I do not think the comparison with the great Leonard Rossiter, or, indeed, with the equally great Ronnie Barker, unjust: to make a Rigsby, an Arkwright or a Fletcher - or even a Dame Edna - necessitates having a feel for what that person would do in any situation, and one sensed that quality in Wilfredo and how he lived, moved and breathed.
This had been Wilfredo's last show in his run at the Edinburgh Fringe, downstairs in The Tron (pub), and there was great warmth from those in the audience - and also, amongst the women, probably a fear of either some not exactly passing slight, or of some equally unwelcome favourable attention, from Wilfredo.
This was a very convinced embodiment of a Spanish celebrity singer, whose humour lies in having more faith in his love-making and his talent than one felt could really be justified (the boasting of Cellini in his autobiography, or the ambition of an Alan Partridge to be more than he is? - except that Wilfredo, somehow, has none of the doubts or mishaps, and so is more like Cellini).
Wilfredo's petulance as a performer is delightful, provoking the laughter that he resents, and which he insists requires him to start again, in his recitations (is one reminded of Frankie Howerd?). Likewise, his lechery, both somehow suggested, and made unlikely to achieve its aim, by his peculiar smile is very real - will he jump off the stage into a woman's surprised lap? (Fortunately, he confined himself to throwing individual red roses to the ladies.)
With a little more development of material, Wilfredo could go on to greater things embodied by the likes of Sir Les, but he needs, perhaps, to be a little less downright strange: When I first saw you / I dropped my pasty may be some recondite sexual reference, but, although the stark incongruity was funny - because, precisely, it evokes the shabbiness by which Wilfredo's appearance belies his grotesque self-belief - it maybe did not fit well with the rest of the ditty about Harriet Harman.
Yes, Rt Hon. Harriet Harman MP, but I shan't say more - you'll have to see the act! (Or you could read another reviewer's account.)
End-notes
* By Tweet to @TheAgent Apsley, Wilfredo has declared that he 'goes commando', and that Y-fronts are never his thing.
** Strangely, an official Perrin web-site, which purports to give a synopsis of every episode, does not even mention the pig-farm.
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