My stonking film scenario !

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9 December

Isn't Tweeting wonderfully liberating and creative... ?

Big movie birthdays today. Judi Dench (78), John Malkovich (59) and Kirk Douglas still going not so strong at 96. Last of the big ones.
— Bath Film Festival (@BathFilm) December 9, 2012

@bathfilm What a possibility ! Dame Judi stars as mother to John, still living at home, and who fantasizes about being Spartacus ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 9, 2012

@bathfilm -> In a dream, Kirk comes to him, and promises him an encounter. Next thing, old Kirk comes to town, and Judi falls for him...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 9, 2012

© Copyright Belston Night Works 2012


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What the dickens !

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8 December

* Contains spoilers *

I thought that Ralph Fiennes was tremendous as (Abel) Magwitch, Great Expectations, but, sadly, outclassed Jeremy Irvine as a result.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 8, 2012

This remains my view of Great Expectations (2012), and I thought that Jason Flemyng was equally strong as Joe Gargery, but without the effect of stealing the scene. As for Robbie Coltrane as Jaggers, I was more impressed by him than I would have expected, whereas I had heard criticism that Helena Bonham Carter was too young as Miss Havisham, which - without having consulted the text - I am inclined to think right.

With the exception of little moments such as Pip’s sister, which Sally Hawkins was required to play as a grotesque, as a caricature amongst others at her Christmas meal (principally, Mr Pumblechook (David Walliams)), much was really rather naturalistic (though that is more true of this novel than others), which then set off well touches such as Wemmick and his castle, the Finch dining-club (foppish to the extent of resembling an amalgam of Mods and Teddy Boys), and Fiennes’ explosion onto the screen at the outset, with his Hannibal Lecterish tale.


As for the overall impact of the film, I Tweeted this

Overall, Great Expectations was very dramatic, but was what David Nicholls had done with it Dickens ? I'm unsure, but that doesn't matter.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 8, 2012

The book remains the book, and this is an approach at telling its story, where what has been changed is essentially in the realm of detail and emphasis : it gives me the feeling that I should like to make room to reacquaint myself with what Dickens wrote, partly because much of the dialogue had been invented, but not in a way that an Andrew Davies does it with his adaptations.

However Dickens did describe the marshes, the combination of wide horizons and skilled cinematography gave a beautiful sense of space and of tranquility, only interrupted by the man-hunt (and by Joe’s wife calling out two miles away !). That said, the contrast with London, which seemed unnecessarily full of mud and offal (as if better arrangements would not – they may not have been in the book – have been made for Pip’s reception and conveyance to his lodgings), seemed a little contrived, as if the local market town would have been any different, except in scale. (We only see the inside of Pumblechook’s premises, not how Pip got there, nor, for that matter, have we much notion of where Miss H. and Estella are, in relation to anywhere else, at Satis House.)

As to the ending, well, it is suitably uncertain to pass, but that, and Estella’s story, is what I could most easily check. Whatever feels changed does not leave me unhappy, but there is that feeling, with ‘a classic’, that some of what one could happily have imagined were better not presented for examination and consideration, and that the more quiet ebb and flow of the story became more tidal. That said, it would still be with the invention of dialogue that I felt most out of sorts.


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Collette revisited (thanks to @dannytheleigh)

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8 December

* Contains spoilers *

I have been encouraged, by a Twitter-chat with @dannytheleigh, to think again of Shadow Dancer (2012), and what I thought and wrote about it a while back (Who's dancing with whom ?) : I had happened, probably because someone had Retweeted it, to see him saying

Only just caught up with Shadow Dancer - can't think of many more underrated films this year. Subtle & woozy but still thriller-gripping.
— Danny Leigh (@dannytheleigh) December 2, 2012

That hadn’t been my impression, so I Tweeted Danny Leigh, commenting that My impression is that it received more praise than justified by how it didn't really hold together...



From our dialogue, I can distil these further thoughts :

1. Maybe Collette is a deliberately poor choice of informant – if so, it’s just convenient that she exists as a means of making a sacrifice, by being implicated, to protect Shadow Dancer as an asset

2. That knowledge about the poor choice could not have been shared with Mac, the agent tasked with recruiting her, because he is clearly the sort of person who would have baulked at the task, and we have to imagine that he cannot see for himself why she won’t be convincing

3. Some nascent romantic angle might just about gloss over why he is blind to her deficiencies (though he must have adored her from afar), but what if he had not been blind (as later he is not) and had rumbled the true motivation for engaging Collette ? What, then, for the plan ?

4. Yet all of this begs the question why, in the first place, Mac is on the outside of all this intended machinery, because having it so seems to serve no purpose other than the plot, not of his fellow agents, but of the film: no secret arrangement, nothing to discover, no development, no dénouement

5. There could have been such a motivation in the original book, but, if so, here – to my mind – it is so far submerged that it just gives the appearance of leaving Mac out in the cold for the sheer hell of it, and, oh damn, he’s found us out, and the wrong person’s dead


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Are Virginia and Sergei an unusual couple - kept apart from birth ?

This is a review, after a special screening, of What is This Film Called Love ? (2012)

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5 December

This is a review, after a special screening, of What is This Film Called Love ? (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

Even the presentation of the title What is This Film Called Love ? (2012) in the opening credits, contains a suitable ambiguity, because the last word (maybe even without a question-mark – I am unsure now) appears on a separate slide.

What I think that that subtlety does for me - of implying that there could be a comma before the word ‘love’- is to remind me to watch this as a film, not as an artifact. Its director, Mark Cousins, had just been telling the audience in Screen 2 at Festival Central on Sunday afternoon how he came to be in Mexico City with three days on his hands before a flight* : a situation to which he responded by deciding to film the basis of the film, and with the only outlay being laminating a photograph of Sergei Eisenstein (which made Eisenstein resemble, a little, both Harpo Marx and Dylan Thomas).

As a film, it is almost pointless (whatever the title may suggest**) to consider the precise genre, because, although we might later know that Cousins, filming both himself and the city, kept a notebook of his thoughts (as he told us), I think that he was asserting neither that the dreams represented were ones that he recalled having then (or ever), nor that this was a documentary in fictionalized form, and the film – as it should – speaks for itself.

Yes, we see clips from other journeys, travels, that Cousins had made, but there is using footage – itself almost necessarily what one selects to record (or have another record) – and there is editing it together with other material in a dream-sequence. When Cousins talked about Virginia Woolf in the Q&A, it was clear that he had been spending time with her writings, in particular her diaries***. Good lad! (My impression is that pitifully few people give Woolf any time, attention which did not seem to materialize with Cunningham’s The Hours and the 2002 film (or even with Orlando (1992), taken from a wonderfully anarchic novel), but might now that some pointless anniversary is slapping us in the face and telling us that she exists, a lively, passionate woman who wrote amazingly and was not just - as I have heard her dismissed - a depressive).

I had been wondering about the female narrator****, and now I realize that, modernity apart, it has a Woolfian quality to it, if not necessarily of Orlando itself, then of other significant works. And there were, with it, other qualities (even a probably quite deliberate echo of the sing-song woman vocalist / male narrator in that once deeply popular song ‘Tubthumping’ by Chumbawamba), amounting to a sense of familiarity with the delivery, the type of content, the message behind the voice being there.

The apparent purpose of the film is to show how the days available were spent (although the introduction gave the impression that, say, they fell between arrival on Wednesday and departing on Sunday, whereas the narration suggested a different placement within the week, which could just be because, off the cuff, Cousins forgot how the days fell). However, a degree of licence is implied, because there is a coherence to the narrative and its direction that might have been purely fortuitous if one had had, with no starting-point, to root around for what to do with a camera for 72 hours.

In the case of Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs, of whom I was reminded early on by being shown a block of ice (against which Eisenstein’s laminated image was duly rested) and who, unknown to Cousins, works in the city, the starting-point for one happening-like work is such a block : I am not sure whether Alÿs has done so more than once, but there is footage of him pushing and pulling it around all day until there is nothing of it left, which was sub-titled Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing. My point being that it is a rare thing, on demand, to be able to hit upon where to start - which is what Cousins chose to do - and not to make a false start.

As it unfolds, the film is not primarily about what Eisenstein did or saw when he was in the city, but partly, in conversation with him, it suggests insights to him into what he would not have known or witnessed then (though he may have had other ideas), all of which is in an endeavour to come closer to what he documented as having thought and felt. That Cousins, in trying to relate to Eisenstein’s word ‘ecstasy’, only came to a thought on his film’s day two that was with me on day one (from knowing the literal meaning), is neither here nor there, but it did give that element of dramatic irony, of seeing, as the viewer, a course of action not known to the protagonist (why ever we used that word deserves a blog posting in its own right, some day...).

What we were being shown did not feel self-revelatory, although it may well have been highly so (and I do not just mean the Billy-Connolly-style desert streak), because it had the forward momentum that I have mentioned above (which was only slightly lost in one dream, and in one long musing in bed before getting up, where it did feel that it could have been a fraction tighter). Cousins himself would have known precisely what each thing presented signified, whereas we could only guess at it through the narrative voices: as an outsider, I had been quite content that, rather than telling his own story of those days, he could have been acting in what he had fabricated. For, to me, it made no difference, although it is clear enough, at the same time, that he positioned the camera to do some press-ups, and must equally have feigned views of falling asleep or waking up.

As I say, none of this really matters, because it was, complete with the Woolfian twists right at the end (courtesy of, again, Orlando, and also of her short book Flush), not even where we ended up with the city and with leaving it, but of the triangular relationship over time between Eisenstein, Cousins and the camera, as commented on - as if from above - by the female voice.

To this already complex mix, P. J. Harvey (or Polly, as she is known to Cousins) brought two songs (I think that it was just two) that I found the most significant part of the audio, and I brought my own little feeling that I was part of it, having Tweeted Cousins when he was in Moscow that maybe he would find cherry-blossom at Eisenstein’s place of rest, since he had left a stone from a cherry there on a previous visit…


End-notes

* Probably fortunately, no one asked, and Cousins did not say, either how this had arisen, or why he did not strive to change the flight to an earlier one.

** And hearing a recording of Ella Fitzgerald sing the Cole Porter number from her version of The Cole Porter Songbook made me value her all over again.

*** Widower Leonard Woolf edited them to one length for A Writer’s Diary, as a full set, and as an intermediate length.

**** (Cousins is also a narrator, but a more interior one, of what he said and thought, although my impression, in recollection, is that one could not make an exact separation – it may be that he strays into ‘her’ territory, and vice versa.) A question was asked about why a woman narrating, with a suggestion as to why (other than something that is narrated near the end), but, sadly, I cannot recollect the idea clearly enough to document it.


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The Step-Ladder Model of Mental Ill-Health

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4 December

No, this is nothing – much – to do with the type of joke (many of them unfunny) How many [type of persons to stereotype*] does it take to change a light-bulb ? ...

But it could be related to answers to the question How many light-bulbs can someone with bi-polar disorder change in an afternoon ? : 0 or 24.

What about this ? If someone is 'in psychosis', does a whacking great dose of haloperidol treat the symptom, but ignore the organic cause ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 12, 2013

If I am on a step-ladder** (in no particular order) :

* It could feel pretty insecure on the ladder, and my anxiety about feeling unsteady could worsen my balance, thereby heightening my anxiety – How do I even stay here, let alone get down ?

* Even though being on the top step, with maybe only three of the feet in contact with the uneven ground, does not feel safe, as such (because I know what they say about using ladders), it’s perfectly manageable - If I stand on tiptoe and just reach out at full stretch, perhaps putting a foot against the wall…

* I look OK, but motionless, on a step two up from the bottom - I just about register that I’m down at the bottom of the ladder, but don’t ask me whether I’ve stopped on the way up or down, it’s too much to think about, and I’d like to get off and go somewhere else, but figuring out what to do just isn’t coming to me.

* I’m hurrying up the ladder, and then I stop, think, go down a step and stop again, think again, then slowly up two steps, then another pause and a thought, and hesitatingly reaching down for the step below with my foot - Damn, I’m sure that I didn’t post that letter – it’s in my pocket – I’ll go and get… – no, better to finish this first, and remember to look in my jacket – ah, but when did I last have anything to eat…?


If I am not on the ladder :

* I know where the ladder needs to be, where the light-bulbs are, and can check the wattage of the old bulb when it is down - There is so much in front of the ladder that I’ll have to move out of the way, then clear the stairs enough to get it through, manoeuvre it in and upstairs without scraping the walls or knocking anything valuable over, then lean it up again whilst I clear a space to stand it, get on it, climb up, reach – oh, God, can’t I just put batteries in the torch instead, if I need to see where I’m going there ?’


End-notes

* Not that it is a word that I like to use, but now, having written it, I’m not going to rest until I discover how something that sounds like a hi-fi component means that (and has had such influence).

** The step-ladder does not stand for one, immutable thing, but a set of feelings, mood, etc., and it may signify differently from moment to moment.


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Short films at Festival Central (6) - Friend Request Pending (2011)

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3 December

* Contains spoilers *

Director : Chris Foggin ; Writer / Producer : Chris Croucher

Friend Request Pending (2011) – the clue is in the title – brought together two of my least favourite things about life, Judi Dench’s acting and Arsebook, the former through too much exposure to dire situation comedies (which, for me, have also wasted the talents of Zoë Wanamaker, Geoffrey Palmer and Robert Lindsay), the latter on account of the tales of bad experiences from those known to me, which make sound anything that happens on Pratter / Splatter benign.

(I know that one should divorce oneself from such influences, but I didn’t, although I have somehow managed to shut off the Dench detectors for the latest Bond films.)

The premise, then, was not one that appealed: that I was to witness Dame Judi (ably assisted by Penny Rider*) employing her rudimentary keyboard skills in seeking to be a friend on Arsebook with a man whom she had just met, and Penny’s and her ideas of dating and of chatting him up on instant messaging (that all sounded a bit drunkenly implausible – not that they should have been drunk, but gravitating to a cocktail bar, where, one must infer, they must have managed to swap quite a means or two of contact** for her to be doing this messaging).

I grant you, translate the things of youth to someone of Victor Meldrew’s age, and the hilarity and japes in him getting it all wrong are an endless mirth factory. We are not in dissimilar territory here, for me, and it was where two noisy older women in the audience became raucuous, as if given permission, when Tim Healy (as the sergeant in Man in Fear (2011) had not.

What can I say, save that the ending had a J. R. Hartley quality to it, or of one of those good old British Telecom adverts (before they became BT, and more hard nosed), of warm, homely good-feeling? No, it couldn’t have preceded anything else in the bill of fare, and, yes, I did phase out a little, though all credit to Chris Croucher, who reported how he had pounced on Chris Foggin when the latter had let slip that Dame Judi had said that she wanted to be in a short, if he made one, and who showed how he had earned wings in the usual job of Assistant Director.


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End-notes

* Chris Croucher told us afterwards that Penny is a long-time mate of hers, who goes through lines for her and stands in when they are getting the shot and the lights right on set.

** Why do we talk about contact details ? The details are not of the contact that we have had, or will have, but the wherewithal to make it.



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Short films at Festival Central (5) - The Ellington Kid (2012)

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2 December

Director / Writer : Dan Sully

This short was almost the envy of Chris Croucher, writer / producer of Friend Request Pending (2011), in its brevity: Dan Sully and he were in agreement that some shorts are, as this one is, in the nature of – this wasn’t the language in which they discussed it – dealing with just conceit with a punch or knock-out line.

What it exemplifies is how easily, when a character is talking (in this case, Nathan (Charlie G. Hawkins) speaking to Beefy (Hammed Animashaun)), we can slip into adopting the images that accompany his or her words, as if the images – which is what cinema does – acquire a status of credibility, authenticity, by being shown. Yet we do not do that (at least, I hope not) when it is the same old VW ‘see film differently’ clips that purport to tell us how an aspect of Jaws (1975), Taxi Driver (1976) or The Silence of the Lambs (1991) came into being : they are being knowing in a different way, sharing the joke with us as it goes along that we might credit what is presented.

As writer / director in a shoot of, as I recollect, two days, Sully achieves a tight narrative in which we are totally sucked into what Nathan says, only to feel as foolish as Beefy when the ground is pulled from underneath him. (Or is it? There is a nice little hint at the end that there might have been some murderous truth in what he has been told.) As to the specific assertion that Nathan makes, I had anticipated it, then thrown it away – so much the better !


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Short films at Festival Central (4) - Man in Fear (2011)

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2 December

* Contains spoilers *

Director / writer : Will Jewell

This film gives a delightful interchange between a constable manning a desk in the station (Tim Healy, credited by IMDb as Sargent (sic) Brown, though he does not, as I recollect, have a Sergeant’s stripes) and the film’s protagonist Anthony Fox (Luke Treadaway), which, whilst not literally at the centre of Man in Fear, at least gives us an insight into what Fox fears.

Not in a derivative way, I was reminded of a scene in Luc Besson’s Angel-A (2005), where a similar desperation leads André Moussah (Jamel Debbouze) to seek arrest in the cells as sanctuary (equally, there’s Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life), but Healy’s PC was delightfully erudite, delightfully abrupt, and simply, in a superbly bluff British way, not willing to entertain what he was being told or what was done. (Not until afterwards, anyway.)

Beforehand, Treadaway brought us all the early fluster from North by Northwest (1959) of trying to prove the reality of what is happening to him, only to find that no one wants to listen, of being confronted by this PC who throws Damien Hirst and his suspended sharks in his face. In between, is the audience, to whom Fox's paranoia is palpable, and in whose hands - almost - his character’s fate seems to lie.

Much more so than Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), evading the fate of being Kaplan, Fox has a sense of vulnerability, of being – unsympathetically - thought to be in psychosis, when maybe his big overspilling bundle shows what he says…

A palpable playing with the borderline between being ‘in fear’ and what others will make of one’s fear, this film is a gem, given 9.0 on IMDb.


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Putting on a premiere of a play versus making a film

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1 December

NB What follows is written from – and for – the perspective of the layperson

I want to suggest that the former may be less wasteful, when we are talking about the millions of dollars, pounds or other currency spent on making a film that may not get any (or enough) distribution for it to be made back, let alone make a profit. At its own higher end, a play can still be tested elsewhere before being taken to a theatre in the West End, where the overheads and risks of even a short unsuccessful run might be prohibitive.

Trying out (trialling, some would have it) a work of cinema may be possible as it’s put together, but there is nothing to compare with having the finished film before the critics, whose praise one hopes to be able to print on the posters, and to be read or heard by those influenced in other ways. Likewise with the critics’ words of acclaim outside London theatres, and all that makes for a production being a hot ticket, just as certain films become a must see.

Is there even a parallel between a play written by, say, David Hare and a screenplay ? Take Hare’s play Skylight, which first appeared at The National in 1995, and was published by Faber & Faber in May of that year, though I have been unable to establish when, in relation to the production and going on to ??, that was. Now, it is quite possible that the text of the play was moulded by its director, ??, and by the cast prior to publication, as there was likely to have been a tie-in between the published and performed versions, and even that Hare sat in on rehearsals.

That level of intervention in what is still essentially one person’s dramatic effort is still relatively small, compared with, in the case of some films, the number of people who might have been batting around ideas at different levels of nearness to a shootable script for a fairly long time: the person whose name appears credited as writer may often be a matter of politics, rather than a true ascription in the way that Hare’s name on the front of a copy of Skylight would be.

So why are so many films made that never – or scarcely – get seen on our cinema screens, which, at one point (around nine years ago), was said to be 19 out of 20 ? How, we wonder, did films such as Gambit (2012) attract actors such as Firth, Rickman and Diaz, and how well would the films that they supplanted have fared, if they had been distributed instead ?

In terms just of authors, even if they write for radio to begin with, does a writer have a better chance not script-writing for cinema, but writing a play, and what lures them to a world where they may have to relinquish all control over what they have worked on for months ? The same attraction that takes us to watch films – of seeing it on the big screen, performances caught to supposed best advantage of crew, cast and credited screenwriter.


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Short films at Festival Central (3) - Scrubber (2012)

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29 November

* Contains spoilers *

Director : Romola Garria (although IMDb rightly credits her as Romola Garai)

Scrubber (2012) is, as the title is (and as A Gun for George (2011) is), an ambiguous piece of narration. In its literal sense, we see Jenny (Amanda Hale) scrubbing at the floor at one point; at another, when she is saying to a neighbour with whom she is leaving her daughter (Honor Kneafsey), she glosses over what she does by saying that she did work, and citing the house.

In what is the most lengthy of the shorts, though only a few minutes longer than George, there is playfulness shown between mother and daughter, for example with the shampoo beard, and, when we think that Jenny is alone, she has her next to her. Nonetheless, she is in the way, and Jenny leaves her with a relative stranger, rather than change her plans.

Particularly with the scrubbing, but also with reactions to situations where there is messiness, there are hints at a psychological dimension to Jenny’s actions. Yet, for all that she courts sexual encounter, we do not feel part of her motivations in the way that we are with Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), and we are quite precisely kept on the outside, although we might hypothesize that Jenny hates herself for indulging what she craves.

Whether we think that such is a cinematic portrayal of such a disorder, not bearing a proper connection with the experience of those who have one, must depend on our knowledge and understanding: it is nevertheless one that would bear being seen again.


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Short films at Festival Central (2) - A Gun for George (2011)

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29 November

* Contains spoilers *

Director / Lead : Matthew Holness

For all that it, intentionally, raised laughs with The Reprisalizer and the gun-fixated nature of his activity (and where some shots had been directed), the film was skilfully playing with the audience’s sympathies for, and expectations of, Terry Finch - down to who George was, and what the balance of power was with others whom he, often confrontationally, encountered.

Finch is not exactly a Walter-Mitty-type character, but there are nods in the direction of sources such as t.v. private detective Jim Rockford (The Rockford Files) and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). That said, Matthew Holness in writing and playing the part, creates - in scarcely more than fifteen minutes - an identifiable breed of (would-be?) revenge-taker, and his own brand of hero. Finch selects himself for attention or ridicule by his style of dress and of appearance, but it is what he is happy with, because he has not moved with times that have deserted him and his sort of writing.

When we see that it has led to attacks on his property, we find out what matters to him, although, contrasted with the ludicrousness of his notions of heroism and reprisal, there is a clearly felt sense of bathos. In the last wish of a friend, both themes come together, with shots up to and down from a room several stories up suggesting a threshold, on which we leave Finch.

The whole film is pervaded by ambiguity, and keeps one working to piece together fact from fantasy in a way that mirrors the pressured nature of Finch's self-expression and behaviour. Well worth another viewing to see how the kaleidoscope changes !


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Short films at Festival Central (1) - Long Distance Information (2011)

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28 November

* Contains spoilers *

Director / writer : Douglas Hart

Curiously enough, a 75-minute play of this name was directed by Stephen Frears in 1979 as an episode of Play for Today.

Be that as it may, because looking for the dates of these shorts has unearthed other exact or similiar matches on IMDb, it adeptly explores the characters' assumptions and ours about what is happening, and it is often what we - or they - hear, or imagine that they hear.

We are straight into the film, with Alan Tripney's head seen sideways on a stained piece of wood, and the sounds, as he rouses, of a raised Scottish male voice from below. Tripney makes clear both that he is used to this, and that he despises the man.

We begin to make assumptions about who this man is, where Tripney is, and, eventually, what he is doing when he picks up the phone and - unusually enough - literally dials a number, from memory. (As to how long the number was, marks off for not paying attention, but I had thought him pissed off enough to be ringing downstairs, although it was unlikely that he would know the number.)

In the meantime, we have been introduced to Peter Mullan, exercising his tyranny (and not seeing how it is received by Caroline Paterson) from a chair that bears a passing resemblance to the one in Tripney's room, and refusing a suggestion that he should watch The Queen, so we believe that we know where we are, for his cantankerous reign is conducted firmly, but not by shouting.

(There is, though, a feeling that Paterson just lets him think that his assured condescension rules the roost, and that asking him about the Christmas broadcast was done to irritate without him realizing.)

Once he stirs himself to answer the phone, there is just about a conversation during which Tripney and he talk to each other, though it is clear that they have nothing to say, and that the one question that gets asked - why the son isn't there - would have been better not asked. And then these males have it all turned on their heads, and the stunned response that comes from them is, seemingly, their pride jolted too much for their ease.

I'd gladly see this again, this time to see how it builds to an end. All three principals are excellent, with Tripney seeming like a son who would have such a father, but the accolade must go to Mullan, for embodying him.


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Short films at Festival Central

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28 November

Aline Conti presented six short films last night, some as short as five to seven minutes, which had been presented as an organized sequence under the umbrella The Joy of Six (which is also what a group of Cambridge poets have been calling themselves for many a year) by Soda Pictures and New British Cinema Quarterly.

In conversation with Conti first, and then answering questions from the floor, Dan Sully and Chris Croucher, the director and writer / producer, respectively, of the last two films, were present. They seemed to think of the choice 'a mixed bag', and, when asked, would not have been wished to be placed anywhere else in the running order.

That said, I thought that what connected the films was that they were all psychological in nature, and it was quite an anxious feeling to go where each was leading, and that few, except perhaps Friend Request Pending (2011), gave you an unnecessarily clear sense of who people were and what they were doing.

To do justice to each film, I will have a posting per film, to which the items in the listing below link (all now live - 3 December):


1. Long Distance Information (2011) (7:42)

2. A Gun for George (2011) (17:22)

3. Scrubber (2012) (20:56)

4. Man in Fear (2011) (10:50)

5. The Ellington Kid (2012) (5:00)

6. Friend Request Pending (2011) (11:58)



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Cracking a nut

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28 November

It was, apparently, some dire ill of both members of unmarried couples having tax relief on their mortgage (MIRAS), a scheme soon enough taken away, that led to the massive distortion in the house market for purchases to complete by 31 August 1988.

A policy, and a decision to have such a cut-off date, that led to house-price inflation, a doubling of mortgage interest rates, and, for many people, this thing newly popularly called negative equity.

And all for what ? A hare-brained scheme to penalize those who weren't married, whereas MIRAS for everyone just became more and more worthless until it went altogether - if taking the latter step had been envisaged first, the folly of what went before could have been avoided for many, many households.

As I recall, the ill in question was that there was only one MIRAS allowance for married couples, so, equally, rather than give them the benefit, the Thatcher government desired to squeeze everyone else.


And now this minimum price for alcohol. If it is designed to stop people drinking so much, how has that been arrived at ? Where has this been done before where it did reduce drinking ?

It will stop us all having the same amount of alcohol for the money that we used to spend, because everyone's drink will cost more (as discussed). As if the people who buy a bottle of wine for £3.49 or three bottles, individually £3.99, but priced at £10.00, will buy them less often just because they have to pay a minimum amount, or will consume their contents more slowly.

So the whole range of prices rises for all alcoholic drinks, and more revenue is paid on every can, bottle, wine-box, etc. And what happened to curbing drinking ? What lessons have we learnt - or are still to be learnt - from the era of Prohibition ?

Policy is all very well, if it relates to its objective: here, we have the belief that the availability of cheap alcohol is what leads to problems with it or for society. It ignores the fact that you don't need to drink cheap beer, wine or spirits to have a drink problem or have alcoholism, and where is the evidence that these measures will have any effect on those drinkers ?

It also ignores the fact that establishing this minimum price will not stop future nudging it up in the belief that, putting it at the right level will achieve what is wanted, and ignoring suggestions that it simply doesn't work, because this isn't the answer to achieving the desired objective:

So, if it is set at 45 pence per unit, do not reckon on it staying there, and also do not reckon, once retailers have had to price everything with respect to units (cost and effort for them), that you'll necessarily be able to buy a drink containing 2.0 units for 90 pence, when it will probably end up at £1 or more...


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Tweets about alcohol prices (with guest, Julian Huppert, MP)

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28 November

@alantravis40 @julianhuppert No doubt the same will apply in all the bars and restaurants of both Houses, and to Speaker's Scotch, etc. !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 28, 2012

@theagentapsley @alantravis40 I'd be very surprised if any prices here were lower than that anyway ...
— Julian Huppert (@julianhuppert) November 28, 2012

@julianhuppert Anecdotally, not what I heard about spirit prices. In any case, a bottle of 4% beer never sells for less than £1 retail.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 28, 2012

@theagentapsley there are lots of anecdotes. Not all true.
— Julian Huppert (@julianhuppert) November 28, 2012

@julianhuppert Well, depends who your sources are, e.g. a researcher for a Peer, and the public needs to be satisfied, after expenses, etc.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 28, 2012

It's meant to be just anecdote that drinks are cheap in bars and restaurants of the Houses of Parliament, but are they, and do we trust MPs?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 28, 2012

Members of both Houses can also buy special bottlings, such as House of Lords scotch, or the Speaker's Single Malt...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 28, 2012

Apparently - it may be untrue - you can get just as drunk on Lanson in a City wine bar as on cut-price shots or cheap supermarket cider. ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 28, 2012

@theagentapsley would you have a heart necessarily?

— ewoolerton (@ewoolerton) November 28, 2012

@ewoolerton Damn ! Thanks, I forgot that it had become obsolete in that sphere (maybe not the only sphere).:)

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 28, 2012

With luck, though, anyone 'priced out of' buying lower-end alcohol will not think of home brew, or even illegal distillation. All OK then.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 28, 2012

If you ever speak to anyone in the wine trade - and, yes, these people have a reason for you to believe what they say - he or she will say that the fixed costs of production and selling mean that there can be (choosing to spend one's money wisely) an appreciable difference in the quality of wines priced two pounds apart :

If the minimum price for a 12% ABV bottle were going to be around £4.50, then those once cheap wines would then be competing with the wines that would naturally be at that level of price, so the latter would inevitably go up in price, then those in the bracket above them, etc., etc. Price inflation for the sake of stopping people supposedly abusing cheap alchohol and themselves with it - as if the premum brands, in shops and in pubs, would sell for much more, if price were all that mattered to drinkers.

So, although the representatives of the drinks industry say that the minimum price will hit the poor, it will hit anyone who has a drink - and it will impact on the pubs, too, because you can't have the prices in supermarkets and in wine merchants going up, and have a reduced differential with pubs, and so the drinkers who are difficult enough to attract except by serving meals(as if anyone cared how many pubs are closing, if those people don't go to pubs !) will be yet scarcer...

Further thoughts here...




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The origins of a perfectionist attitude...

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24 November

At kindergarten, maybe not every day (but at least once per week), you had a chance to look at the nice, big book about and picturing birds in lovely illustrations. You had a chance, if you came top in the 'all comers' compulsory (though never stated to be) spelling-test, probably out of 20...

It was irritating that getting to see the only book worth looking at meant coming top, and that an older girl called something like Naomi almost always go to hog this book as her prize, until she became old enough to go to a primary school, taking her talents at spelling and concomitant rights over stewarding the book with her.

But I did, once (maybe more), get to see the book, to hold it and turn the pages. A reward for excellence, but, to me, it became a rod for not being the best. If it had been a weekly (or however often) draw, then everyone, in theory, would have had as good a chance of getting to see it.

Unlike hearing about Dorothy and about Oz, which everyone could do, though, this looking at the book was a meritocracy (I think that the winner chose first), the merit being scoring highly in the spelling-test. So the message, at the age of five, was that you had to get things right, because, if you didn't, you'd never be valued by being able to look at a nice book.

I think that that is where it came from, and I've only recently realized, though I could quite easily have told you that, when I had reached primary school, it always hurt to lose marks, not to get 10 out of 10, not to get an A. And I was one of thosewho got good marks, so this relatively modern thinking that you damage the less able by competition didn't hold good for me...

If you are at 'a lower school', where there is 'the right way' to address an envelope... :https://t.co/V2bRWeKamu

Was being given a letter for one's parents, taught how to fold it properly (with very narrow margins for error - brown, unyielding DL envelopes), address it good ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 29, 2018

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Do I self-classify, or do others, sometimes more importantly, label me ?

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24 November

@theagentapsley I struggle with the idea of man-flu. There are the genuinely ill, the walking wounded (as I currently am) and drama queens.
— Sarah Parkin (@SarahParkin1) November 23, 2012

@sarahparkin1 That may be true, but who can rightly allocate anyone else to any such category ? And is that the root of -isms... ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 23, 2012

@theagentapsley surely more true of some -isms than others? I trust people to self-classify as a rule- though maybe not the drama queens.
— Sarah Parkin (@SarahParkin1) November 24, 2012

So, taking up that idea of self-classification, what about where someone else doesn't let me be what I choose or am ? :

1. I am descended from a couple who immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago at a time when the UK encouraged them to come here (albeit to drive buses or collect fares on them), but they were my grandparents, my parents were born here, and so was I. Yet those who stir up hatred and talk about 'repatriation' try to deny me two things: being - whatever that is - as British as they are, and relatedly the fact that this is my home country and culture, too.

2. I have a mental-health condition. Let's say that it's unipolar depression, and so I am prone to my mood going low, or that I have other conditions that fluctuate and which, when they are at their worst, mean that, if I can function at all, I can barely do so. If I have, before I learnt by experience, shared that I have such a condition, people may not actually say 'But there's nothing wrong with you', but you can see it in their face, in their eyes, because they see you when you are functioning. Worse, they are people with power to see you when you cannot function, and who think that you aren't trying, are pretending. And the same can be the experience of those with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), who can be taken for being drunk (so hurtfully) when there is lack of balance or control.

3. I identify as being female, and dress accordingly, but do not want to change my physical gender. Often enough, without reference to me, I'd be called a man in a dress, and people would make all sorts of assumptions.

4. In my local supermarket, in the throng around the reduced items, a female member of staff is talking loudly to her colleagues, saying 'All men always...'. By being a man, I am included in her extreme generalization, because:

All men always do X
I am a man

Therefore I always do X


And that is the pattern for much of this - lumping people into together because of one characteristic that they may (or are assumed) to share, and ascribing to them all (or most of them) some behaviour or other characteristic, ignoring who they are, or what they have to say about it: all benefit claimants are scroungers, for example...


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Thumbnails and icons - the language of crap ?

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23 November

If you know anyone in the Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox traditions, and see their saints around the home in places that mean something to them, you might find it hard to relate those portable gilt pictures to the images on your desktop (so called, although it will often enough be the screen of a laptop, and, unlike any but the most exceptionally busy tops of desks, rarely seen), which link to My documents, Internet Explorer, or the Recycle bin (where there is little evidence of recycling - you can't even open the items in it without 'restoring' them, and who ever did more than take something out of a bin, not restore it?).

Now, I'll grant you that that rather uneasy word 'iconoclastic' has been with us in this world a very long time, but we never use it in its original sense, which is more akin to Cromwell's forces and the literal acts of de-facing, but more as a semi-Byronesque description of rocking the boat in a big way. Still, little explanation why these desktop images should be icons, any more than Madonna or Cher being 'a gay icon', or James Dean or Marilyn Monroe screen ones. (As I revise this, I find that my mind has done work for me, by bringing in what many an icon embraces - the Madonna and Child - by implication.)

Little explanation, unless you believe that, when terms were conceived for these purposes, the originators were laughing up their sleeves at the idea of everyone in the future talking about which version they were running. Just as if someone, in an alternative world, would be being urged not to click on an icon (or thumbnail), but, say, to touch a pussy, with different cats denoting what the swirly 'e' of Explorer or that stylized folder for documents (for some reason lying on its back) represent.

Maybe that fantasy's not true to whatever happened with these names, and I do quite like the word 'browser' (which people, though, little use), but what about these Chinese take-aways called things like Jade Gate, which I am led to believe directly translate to depicting the vagina ? Is that a big joke at everyone's expense ? And so, finally, to that Not the Nine O'Clock News sketch, with made up names for Thai food that sound like 'cock' and 'dick', and also the scene in Alas Smith and Jones where an approximation of the Javanese Gamelan is being played by our two: in one of the common bars' rests that are a feature of such music, Mel turns to Griff and simply says 'Is it me, or is this just crap ?', and then they carry on playing.


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Not mastering The Master

This is a 'leave early' response (itself a response) to The Master (2012)

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21 November

* Contains spoilers *

This is a 'leave early' response (itself a response) to The Master (2012)

Other than Melancholia (2011), I can only think of anything at the film festival in September that impressed me so negatively that it was 'a walker'.

To-day, to my unexpected surprise, it was The Master (2012), because I had no notion that I would not be there for the full trip. But I can concur with the person (whom I would credit, if I could recall who it was) who recently (courageously?) said that Brando in the trio of films about The Godfather (1972) gave a terrible performance, because who wants to hear someone mumbling.

Much in the same way, I was, by fifteen minutes in, totally antipathetic to hearing Joaquin Phoenix (Freddie Quell) talking out of the corner of his mouth*, and so rendering parts of the script unintelligible, not least with an already difficult accent. Not, in itself, maybe quite enough to ditch a film, but :

The depiction of servicemen with 'shattered nerves' was so one dimensional that this film, unaided, could put back the average audience's appreciation of the issues of mental ill-health by decades: the painful scene with the Rohrschach test, the travesty of the scene in the photography concession of a store, even the very early sexual exploits with the sand-woman on the beach as merry South Pacific (1958) / On the Town (1949) naval ratings career and cavort on the beach in their white caps

For me, far rather watch, again, Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), or even, flawed though it is for its concept of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), As Good as it Gets (1997). No, The Master may not have the job of convincingly depicting, as such, the reality of mental-health conditions, but it does not even come close to a plausible backdrop to its main action with this !

But I do wonder this: what could David Byrne have done with this, not just with Phoenix's role, but with directing the whole thing...


End-notes

* For the record, the left-hand corner.


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The what station ?!

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21 November

How I loathe, detest, and don't even like this relatively recent import from US English : 'an old warehouse opposite the train station'.

Listen carefully to Woody Allen films from the 1970s, and characters talk about 'the train station'. However, then it was not British English (and I'll fight for it never to be), but the station was just 'the station' :

Any other station, such as the bus station, police station, or fire station, needed qualifying, but we had (anyway) the word 'railway', if there were any doubt...

Or does anyone think that we should go further, and start using 'railroad', and other such terms from the States ?


As gratuitously added to www.takeonecff.com (TAKE ONE's web-site) - more of the same at What do we need 'for free' for?


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Assisted suicide : Writer's Rest meets Unofficial Cambridge Film Festival

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21 November

Brain-controlled robot interface. Look at something, robot knows what you want. tinyurl.com/clznfxk
— Lindsay Edmunds (@EdmundsLE) November 20, 2012

@edmundsle I'll take a peek later - but I'm guessing : is it like speech recognition, in that the robot only gets any good through training?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 20, 2012

@theagentapsley IT is an EEG controlled interface, which is brain waves. HOW it happens I do not know.
— Lindsay Edmunds (@EdmundsLE) November 20, 2012

@edmundsle Suicide by proxy: I associate a thought with a knife lunged at me. If I later cannot do this myself... © Belston Night Works 2012
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 20, 2012

@theagentapsley Now that is a wild idea. Thoughts have always been powerful, advances in AI are on way to making them concretely powerful.
— Lindsay Edmunds (@EdmundsLE) November 20, 2012

@edmundsle Yes, wild (and kind of repellent, unsure why), but I hope that you liked it: to me obviouswhich is why X's mind doesn't map Y's
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 20, 2012

Short story now Work in Progress (no Exagmination or Incamination involved)...


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WIN SIGNED COPIES OF TULISA'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY (thanks to the generosity of Huffington Post)

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20 November

Huffington Post is good to us:

It knows that people run raffles (e.g. proceeds to pay for services at their local hospital) at Christmas Bazaars, and raffles need top prizes to catch the eye and ease the pocket open (e.g. £100 John Lewis advert, I mean voucher).

But they also need little stocking-filler-like items - and this is where the Post's priceless geneorosity (?) comes in, providing the opportunity to secure a celebrity book to be 23rd prize...


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Video: Courteney Cox is bikini fabulous at 48 (according to AOL®)

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20 November

Do we, at last, see some variation in this twaddle about '[insert woman's name]'s bikini body' ?

Not what (semi-mockingly, as I recall) Fowler - in Modern English Usage (or was it The King's English?) - called elegant variation (because we might have our own go at something that actually works now...), but variation nonetheless :

* Fabulous in bikini - Courteney Cox at 48

* 48 years of Courteney Cox, and still fabulous in a bikini

* That bikini looks fabulous worn by 48-year-old Courteney Cox


etc., etc.


PS Other than Kinnock stumbling at the seaside, or Daniel Craig on the beach when he first became Bond, what other men at the seashore have been given any significant report and images circulated and perpetuated...?


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