Call me Ishmael…

This is a review of Blackfish (2013)

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7 August (update in 2017, on the death of Tilikum)

This is a review of Blackfish (2013)

* Contains a wealth of spoilers - and is immensely long at 2,200 words !*


STOP PRESS :

Tilikum, Orca from #Blackfish, passes away - so says @Dogwoof news...

Film with odd, hidden ideas of genetics ? :https://t.co/O0XBywcgYg

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 6, 2017

* General assertions about inhumanity of capturing young orcas, etc. - Yes

* Specifically, that this and captivity traumatize Tilikum - Yes https://t.co/oSLarHjFLG

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 6, 2017

From there to whether *breeding from Tilikum* [artificial insemination], with charts of siring, etc., is prudent :

What genetic mechanism ? https://t.co/Ur1XLMMSBW

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 6, 2017

We were told that onshore fishermen call orcas (otherwise known as killer whales) blackfish*, and this term gives this 2013 Dogwoof film its title.

In fact, orcas, although largely black, are also white, and this film has a mixture of light and shadow, although, as far as the construction is concerned, it does steer us to put the SeaWorld organization (one which declined to contribute to the film, despite ‘repeated requests’) in the Tenth Circle of Dante’s Inferno : Blackfish (2013) could scarcely close with footage of four of the main former SeaWorld trainers putting out from land to see orcas in the wild without endorsing their message that that is where they belong and, accordingly, where they behave non-aggressively.

However, these are the same people who, by and large, say how a visit to a show at one of the organization’s sites (or that of some similar operator) inspired them to do what they did, become trainers. Bewilderingly, one of them queries to camera, as if it were strange, why the organization did not tell them of the 70 or so incidents involving trainers being wounded or even killed with the involvement of orcas, as if it were likely to have done so and successfully recruited her.

The organization is then pitted against the former employees, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (unhelpfully referred to by pronouncing the initials OHSA with American accents, but without saying what they stand for), a neuroscientist (who tells us that orcas’ brains have parts that even human ones lack, which indicate a capacity for highly emotive responses), and others who have studied orca behaviour at sea.

It would seem to be a question of whom we believe, but it is more loaded than that, because Kelly Clark, the organization’s head trainer (represented by outline in a stylized court-room, since OHSA had sued SeaWorld), is reported as having likened orcas as being as capable of attacking humans as all men are of committing rape, and similar selected infelicities (the judge had this one struck from the record, so clearly someone had been in court).

Two questions arise : does the US justice system have a notion of sub judice that makes a matter not fair game for comment until all appeals have been exhausted – and what does it mean to strike something from the record, if a documentary can then include it ? In essence, whatever the answers are, the film-makers are clearly not unbiased, to my mind.

Those who haunt the cinema may also recall Rust and Bone (2012), and might, with me, wonder whether the phoniness of what one of the former trainers called an ‘industry’ might not have been patent from it : the false confidence that the orcas like doing – or want to do – what they are trained to do, the assumption that a bond has been built between creature and trainer that mitigates the risk of attack, and the staged, circus-ring nature of the show.

Stéphanie (played by Marion Cotillard) loses the lower part of her legs, and that film does not dwell on the how so much as the what, and on how her life develops : a major feature that has the same theme, and not so much as a mention. However, the makers of Blackfish also do not seem to have considered how much showing a catalogue of incident after incident from contemporaneous footage could harrow the audience :

Therefore, in a sense, this approach seemed as inhumane to those viewers who might not have wanted to see all this as the claimed training methods of SeaWorld were to the captive orcas, not to speak of domestic arrangements at times when the sites are closed. This documentary proof of what happened might be far more relevant to OHSA’s legal action (and one trusts that it was available to OHSA) than to our appreciation of the issues – after the point had been established, by waving a list and showing some real examples, I certainly did not need to see more people being maimed or killed, and rather resented seeing it.

I resented it, because (as is evident) the orcas had a right to their freedom before they were netted and transported, and the people in these clips had a right to respect for what happened to them in the moment of their wounding (or worse). Screening the clips was no doubt done with the consent of relatives, keen to publicize what had happened, but the line between showing enough and too much is not really that fine, and I am sure that Blackfish was on the wrong side of it.

Couple the fact that the narrative of the film left relatively opaque why we were making a call to The Canaries regarding another orca set-up, Loro Parque, and the seemingly avoidable death of another trainer, and I struggled to see why, beyond piling up the viewing misery*, we needed to know that orcas had been transported there from the States**. The effect was really to question the integrity of Clark, because the court-reporting format had her disowning in her evidence that SeaWorld had links with Loro Parque.


Overall, I found the messages that the documentary gave were sometimes confused. These, however, were clear :

1. That the wisdom that visitors to Orlando and like places receive is to the tune that orcas live longer in captivity (we were given three or more sound-bites of staff saying this), whereas the film advanced evidence that they have a human lifespan at sea, double the number of years being said on video.

2. Likewise, they (and some of the staff) are told that the orcas that they see are related to each other, and it is stressed how positive everything is in terms of orcas’ relations between each other and with the trainers, but the documentary challenged this. With both of these points, there was no doubt that it seemed to have been established that SeaWorld misrepresented the facts, because trainers stated that orcas were moved from one SeaWorld centre to another, and that it had acquired orcas (including Tilikum, the large male (or bull orca) who had brought about the death of Dawn Brancheau at SeaWorld in 2011 and which led to court action) from a park run by Sealand when it closed.

3. As to training methods, the trainers (though, of course, SeaWorld might well claim that they had an axe to grind) told us that food deprivation was used, not just in the sense that there would only be a reward if a task were performed right (and, hence, not if not), but by way of making the orcas docile enough to go to their overnight tanks by only feeding them afterwards.

We were told about, and shown shots, of the tanks at the Sealand venue from which Tilikum came, which were grim in themselves, and not just for how long the orcas were kept with no space or stimulation overnight : the whole venue, as given to us in image and word, was cramped. Loro Parque and the SeaWorld park at Orlando were better, but (from that starting-point) it would not have been difficult for them to be better.


Where the confusion set in arises from these presented facts :

1. There had been a fatal incident at the Sealand park that involved Tilikum and a man whose naked body was found (please see below).


2. Relatively little was known to the trainers and other staff who would be working with Tilikum at SeaWorld. (As I have already said, one trainer thought that a place such as SeaWorld would actually tell her about difficulties, incidents, injuries or deaths at the outset.)


3. One of the experts whom we saw said that the conditions at Sealand, let alone the fact that Tilikum was being bullied and lacerated by two females (apparently, orcas have matriarchal communities), could have made him, as he put it, ‘psychotic’. What has to be borne in mind is that the usage of the word in the States means, not delusional (as used by psychiatry and its patients in the UK), but psychopathic – for a film shown around the globe, that should have been clarified somehow, as there is a world of difference between someone being in a delusional state and being a psychopath.

In essence, someone is almost (at some point) by definition dangerous if he or she is a psychopath, whereas a person experiencing psychosis by no means need not be, and might not be having any more than a temporary episode (because medication and / or the natural course of the psychosis brings it to an end).


4. The film then – with no obvious linkage, or recognition of the contradiction – showed how many orcas Tilikum had fathered (by artificial insemination). Obviously, as he is a very big orca (accordingly impressive and likely to pull the crowds), SeaWorld would want to try to pass on genes that had led to his size (nothing told us whether it had succeeded in this aspect of its breeding programme).

The flaw is : if one wants to say that Tilikum’s alleged psychopathology resulted from treatment at the hands of humans and fellow orcas, how could that possibly be a heritable characteristic ? At best, a heritable disposition, if treated in that way, to develop psychologically in the way ascribed to him – as we really do not know these things (i.e. the genetic role and its significance) very well in humans.

The state of UK mental-health services and how they are funded and run apart, all a bit tenuous as a concern about SeaWorld’s approach to breeding…


5. Trainers said several times that there was a sort of get back in the water attitude to any incident or injury (which is sort of consistent with not being told about fatalities – or their not seeking to find out, if they believed what they were told). They at least implied that they feared for their jobs, if they did not.

Frankly, a bit inconsistent with one trainer saying that he wanted to leave, but that he feared for what would happen to Tilikum, if he did. Either people are queuing up to be trainers (perhaps because they saw a show in their youth, and longed to do it when adult) – or they are not, and who could possibly replace Trainer X, unless Trainer X mistakenly conceives that no one else can do the job.


The main thing that I was left with was not the fact that (self evidently) orcas belong in the wild, and that the level of training takes them far beyond the caged drudgery of most zoos to being money-making big performers / attractions, by drenching a pleased audience with their vigorous tail, but by the pervading feeling of naivety.

If you look at the Loro Parque entry, it reports that there have been 40 million visitors, i.e. more than half of the UK’s population : how much can many of these people have been bothered to think about the orcas or their care or well-being ?

With respect to the former trainers, for some reason both they and the OHSA seemed to believe a story that said that the man had brought about his own death by stripping off to be in the water with the orcas : I cannot now give the story the twist that somehow blamed the man, because it has been lost to me in all the other material. However, nothing seems to suggest that this death, or the catalogue of other near-misses, injuries or deaths, was taken seriously.


Is it really so easy just to claim, as was done, that Dawn Brancheau should not have had her pony-tail down (but up in a bun) and / or that what she was doing with the orca in question led to her being pulled to the bottom – and therefore that all that ensued was her fault ? Seemingly not, given the case that the OHSA has brought (and which SeaWorld is seeking to appeal). However, from what I gather, it appears that whoever is the equivalent of the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the RSPCA (the American Humane Association ?), and coroners / district attorneys have not been strikingly assiduous in the past.

For why did it take a fatality as recently as two years ago to bring about the present ruling (being appealed) that trainers in the water are to be separated from, and not in contact with, the orcas ? I have no idea of the OHSA’s remit, but a loss of a limb (as in Rust and Bone) is an unacceptable workplace injury, whereas the film leaves me with no notion of criminal investigations, proceedings and penalties. Maybe the OHSA case has to precede all that, maybe not.


In conclusion, the film has actually left more significant questions open than it has answered – an elephant, a parrot, an orca must be better off where they were brought from, and, even if bred from, they are bred without liberty, so I have no doubt that any creature that will get 40 million visitors through the door is bound to be exploited. Those visitors are possibly too complacent with their holiday memories and their own wish-fulfilment dreams of swimming with orcas (or dolphins – nothing against dolphins !) to notice a film like Blackfish, certainly in the cinema, I would suspect.

As to why nothing seems to have been done before (nothing is reported in the film), again I just do not know. Yet I am actually quite disappointed with employees who were told stories, did not think to question them (even when they could see how these orcas lived, and could imagine their hurt, if they really felt that they had a personal bond with them), and who may not have spoken out at the right time.

I simply cannot tell whether they did, because the featured ones were shown on the media and seemed to be in relation to the OHSA court case. Then again, I have no idea – and they, cannily, did not say – what forces might have been brought to bear if, at any other point, they had put their head above the parapet. That said, having watched another Dogwoof film, Fredrik Gertten’s Big Boys Gone Bananas (2011)***, I can imagine that it might tell those who cannot guess…


End-notes

* A seaman had earlier on told us how very shocked he was when young orcas had been separated from their mothers, and he and two others had to deal with the remains of three whales that had been killed in the operation, which he said had been illegal.

** The Wikipedia® item for Loro Parque talks about this, and what it says the status of the orcas is. Such transportation, if the trainers and Wikipedia® are right, is also scarcely in accord with the notion that the orcas in shows are an organic community.

*** At Cambridge Film Festival 2012, the documentary voted best film by audiences.


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The World’s End – or Shiva, The Four Horsemen and The Fates, trashing it all

A quasi-mental-health appraisal, rather than a review, of The World’s End (2013)

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4 August

* Contains more spoilers than a packet of chip-sticks its usual quantity of contents *

This is a quasi-mental-health appraisal, rather than a review, of The World’s End (2013) – though written not by a psychiatrist or psychologist, but by a mental health advocate of around a decade’s standing.


The approach taken will involve a broad brush, but also some fine brushwork, sketching and chiaroscuro, as does the film.

So what does it mean ? What seemed to be an AA (Alcoholics’ Anonymous) meeting at the start was actually whatever your choose to call it out of a community or planning meeting, and thus a deliberate misdirection to put one off the scent of what and who Gary King (Simon Pegg) is. The voiceover that introduces the personnel of five constituting the main gang makes clear that King is The King (though not in that Elvis sort of sense [also Gary King, Steven Prince, Andy Knight[ley] ? ]), and this titling / description only takes its full force in retrospect :

In my view, the whole film is a free fantasy in dream / psychotic form – I use the words as a pair because I am influenced by knowing of psychologist Richard Bentall’s writing and believing that the mechanisms of the mind that are, and are behind, sleep are operative in psychosis. This means that what ‘happens’ has the same status as the closing sequence of Brazil (1985), i.e. it is wholly real to Sam (Jonathan Pryce), whatever constriction and lack of freedom is in our, as audience / witness, doomy realization of where he is and in what condition.

The clue to it all is in King’s bandaged wrists, of course, with the label of a psychiatric unit : yes, that was not the AA meeting that we took it for, but few are privileged enough to have participated in or witnessed the type that it is. At the very end, after an apocalyptic strafing of Earth, King is leading a new band of five – they demand water, he is told that only he, and not what are called blanks, can be served, and the scene and film close with (yet) another fight.

People who will be disappointed by the It was all just a dream interpretation (of this and other films, etc. (though I hope not that of Brazil)) miss what I have just sought to convey : King’s reality is just as real as anyone else’s, and what, after all, is a film other than a large team of people’s contrivance, maybe based on a book or play, maybe not. For, whether it is sitting in the dark with The Truman Show (1998) or The Agamemnon, Plato would probably still say (The Republic) that we are pleasing ourselves with shadows cast on the wall of a cave, ignoring the source of light that projects them.

So questions such as Does Earth really get destroyed ? or Why does The Network¹ disembark from earth ? only have meaning on the level of interpretation of the semiotics of King’s experience of psychosis / dream. Yet, functionally speaking, there are ostensible drawbacks to this schema :

(1) King would have to be presenting his own history at the opening of the film - whether it is anecdotal or documentary (or mixed) in nature - to himself, to a real (the community, etc., meeting) or imagined other, or to both. However, it is incidental to the by-and-large linear nature of the narration – in terms of a film, it sets the scene, much as the establishing material does, say, in The Magnificent Seven (1960²), or the opening sequence of t.v.’s The Likely Lads.

(2) That said, the self-reflexive nature of the narration then means that King concealing his wounded wrists (real or no, although a second viewing does reveal he does have straps across his wrists, akin to the stirrups of ski-pants), but chancing to expose them to Andy Knightley (Nick Frost), during a dogged attempt by King to drink at the final watering-hole, has to be seen in therapeutic terms (and / or in relation to any alcoholism) – the consequence of revealing what has happened to King effects a reconciliation with Knightley before ‘the bar drops’, a lovely Bond-type touch³. (It matters not whether Knightley ever existed or, if he did, was ever in any close relation to King, because the film / madness / fantasy has its internal logic : see A Beautiful Mind (2001) for one cinematic paradigm of psychotic delusion.)

(3) The delusional nature of the depicted events in and of the fictional Newton Haven⁴, culminating in a charged fireball that makes the effects of many a film look modest, give way to King’s best schoolfriend, Knightley, narrating times beyond that explosive happening, much as, in a way, old Tom Hanks (Zachry) does around the campfire at the close of Cloud Atlas (2012). Knightley not only fights strenuously with King not to have that final pint, until he sees the bandages, the tags, but - as King does not have that pint - serves as a mechanism for him not completing The Golden Mile, seeing off The Network, the fireball that ensues.

Yet, as it is King’s psychosis or dream - not our filmed entertainment - why should he not picture a devastated world where he (as before the reunion) is (symbolically ?) lost to Knightley, but where he is still a leader (which, in a Yul-Brynner fashion, brings us back to The Seven and hell-raising) ? On the level of psychological analysis, the controlling force of The Network, the threat posed by the blanks, the separation from the school chums (and imagining their fate) could represent the closure that King seeks (a loaded psychiatric / psychotherapeutic term that might be overlooked, since it has ceased to be jargon and become commonplace).

Does he make a symbolic mental breakthrough to our new buzz-word of ‘recovery’ – or, as in Brazil (or Birdy (1984), Spellbound (1945), etc.) is it an escape from the horror / trauma of the real situation (attempting suicide, being detained, the psychiatric unit ?). At any rate, King, who is ‘never wrong’, seemingly defeats The Network (though potently supported in this by Knightley, who has just learnt the truth about King) by his dogged refusal to comply and maintaining that it is human to err (the quotation from Pope is daubed on the fence behind Knightley), which, on a plot level, is as flimsy as some escapes from certain death of Bond or The Doctor (to name but two), unless…


Having taken the dear reader this far, I have to confess that the only way to know whether this hypothesis hangs together in more than words is to go back to Newton Haven and revisit The Golden Mile !

In the meantime, it is best to invoke a Freudian-type principle that it does not matter what Edgar Wright, the director of the film (and its co-author with Pegg), meant by it, any more than does Terry Nation in his scripts : the meanings are there and open to analysis. (NB If you seek to analyse my own motives in setting this out, be assured that Wormwood dictated this to me, and every word is his, faithfully recorded by me for this very purpose.)

Well, I went back to Newton Haven, have added to the above in the light of it, but not redacted my view - so, Happy Drinking !


End-notes

¹ Whose voice I failed to place as that of Bill Nighy.

² IMDb claims that there is a remake fixed for 2015… with Tom Cruise.

³ Not to mention the full evocations of the gallery-space below, ranging from the various tribunals in the Potter films to lecture-theatres and public dissections.

⁴ Actually, recognizable as an amalgam, more or less, of Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City.


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Mary Beard sent Twitter bomb -threat, reports AOL®* : How media pique our interest

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4 August


Ten headlines from aol.co.uk's home-page



Text : Sexism, pinkification and our daughters

Sub-text : Ostensibly, we're taking this seriously, but really...


Text : Revealed : World's silliest hotel request

Sub-text : (1) Yes, there is none sillier, and (2) We know this, because we're AOL®, Fount of All Wisdom !


Text : Elle Macpherson 'marries billionaire'

Sub-text : We've got you guessing with those idiot quotation-marks, haven't we... ?


Text : Cringiest ever celebrity music videos

Sub-text : A numbered list made intriguing by a grotesque contortion of the language


Text : Carla shows off incredible bikini body

Sub-text : My blog (link above) tells you all that you need to know...


Text : The people who affect house prices

Sub-text : We're not going to tell you any more than you already know**


Text : Baby Cambridge's top 10 play dates

Sub-text : Not that you have any idea who these people and their kids are, but You need to know !


Text : Annoying telephone customer services

Sub-text : We want you to interpret it as how to do a Henry Root on call-centres


Text : Revealed: World's silliest hotel request

Sub-text : I just put that in twice to see whether you were 'keeping up', but, whilst you're here : In my headline, quoted also from AOL®, Mary Beard is made to appear to be the subject, not the (indirect) object...


Text : PC maintenance could save you cash

Sub-text : It 'could', but will it ? Just AOL® promoting itself by trying to attack your pocket mentally ?



End-notes

* Not that there was anything wrong with synonyms such as received, got, had.

** In a numbered list, of course - with sarky comments.


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Made in Maida Vale

This is a review of Dial M for Murder (1954)

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2 August

This is a review of Dial M for Murder (1954)

* Contains spoilers *

Maybe it's the 3-D of Dial M for Murder (1954), but the use of stock footage of the Queen Mary (arriving) in port, and the street in Maida Vale where Ray Milland (Tony Wendice) and Grace Kelly (Margot, his wife) live, seemed relatively clunky to me, unused as I am to much 3-D : I was certainly glad that the camera did not pan more than a few times, because I really did not find it a pleasant experience¹.

I mention these aspects because they do not typify the film as it proceeds, which is almost exclusively confined to an interior - a bit as is Rear Window (1954)². It is therefore no surprise to know that this chamber work was adapted by Frederick Knott from his play, and to see how the character that Milland brings to the role is a malignant presence that dominates the modest flat in and through his manipulation of Swann (Anthony Dawson), Margot, and Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams).

This makes for an obsessive, almost incestuous, film. I thought that I remembered it from boyhood t.v. - as so often, such memories are unreliable*** (itself a theme of the film), but, whatever I imagined, I recalled that knotted tension when a bungled plot is twisted to serve equal ends, waiting with anxiety for it crumble, and despairing at justice when it does not.

Thinking afterwards, I am convinced that Tony must have been a strategic opponent at tennis, maybe a chess-player, and that he knows how to force errors to his advantage. However, on reflection, I do not believe that - as it appears - he wholly originates his rescue on the hoof, but rather had thought through other significant moves.

And yet, if he were a tragic hero, Tony has the flaw of relying too much on his assumptions about the world in each eventuality - that his watch will not fail him, that the phone-booth will be unoccupied, that Swann will follow his instructions exactly... Lady Luck, as they say, plays right into his hands, though, when the utter weakness of his intention that Swann should have been thought to enter through the French window is exposed by the forensics.

Of course, the galling thing, which is where Hitchcock and Knott earn their reward, is that he deserves to fail for having failed to think things through, and our smouldering resentment turns to hatred when Margot stands condemned, effectively alone. We expect things of Mark as a crime writer, and he appears to disappoint, despite the fact that a few things that did not seem to work were evident to me⁴ (they were not envisaged by the nonetheless clever script, with the maverick streak given to Hubbard).

Partly because Tony has to steer her to her peril, at which he shows himself a master when Margot will not relinquish her latch-key (and we can but guess at the behaviour of which she complained to Mark (Robert Cummings) and which led to their affair), Kelly cannot shine, but must be relatively weak and cowed, and she sobs an incoherent account of things to her indifferent husband (already working out his moves). Plus this was only the 1950s, which is why the affair is considered in a bad light according to the public standards of the day - and why a husband can speak for a woman perfectly capable of speaking for herself and put the police off questioning her till the morning.

Interestingly, though, there is nothing shown to suggest that Tony specifies the manner in which he will have Swann do the murder that blackmailing him has commissioned, which could have failed in ways less capable of remedy : a knife, a gun with a silencer, for example. (Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958) shows another operation of failure, and it would be interesting to know how, if at all, Hitchcock influenced him.)

The brutality of the intended and actual methods of death is surely not unintended, with the chosen method of the assassin, and (for Hitchcock) the Freudian significance of the emasculating scissors - the discomfort of 3-D glasses was worth it just for the moment when Kelly's arm seems to extend beyond the end of the desk and into the auditorium, but otherwise it awkwardly tended to bring into a sharp foreground intervening objects (a row of bottles, at one point). That said, the consequence (as was that of moving a bed into the living-room) was stressing the cramped accommodation, and, with it, the extent to which Tony wanted money to be able to live better.

Whatever the reality of the criminal process in that decade, a trial is concluded in a small compass of time, symbolized by a judge's talking head, and even an appeal. Again, we wonder at what Mark is doing, but need not do so much longer, with his sharp confrontation of Tony of what he could do to save Margot. Since this is a film, and not real life, we can be left in doubt what Mark suspects in saying all this, and, more miraculously (when eventually we realize it), we have Hubbard trying the pieces in a different configuration in the background.

Hitchcock's judgement of the suspense, in collaboration with that of his screenwriter, is masterly throughout, but especially in the closing reel : apart from the drama between Margot and her assailant, with Tony holding on the line (not having, I would gather, pressed Button B), the drama is all in objects, where they are, and in words. And yet it does not ring too ill of a play put on the screen, because the limitations of the physical space add to the palpability of what is happening.

The ending itself, where Kelly can finally be cut off the rein with a wonderful speech that describes exactly the disabling and desert place that is deep depression (whereas what Mark says to her about a breakdown, as if a positive thing, rings strangely in our ears), takes us almost to the so-said wire, with Hubbard narrating Tony's puzzlement, and a closing cunning and curiosity that is his doom.

Tony, however, is remorseless, only offering the victims, with their shredded nerves and with his bravado, a drink. Hubbard, who was only playfully offered one, plays with his moustache : Milland and he really have had the scope to shine in this work, with, certainly, Swann a bit like a rabbit caught in the head-lamps, and perhaps also, though they have their moments late, Kelly and Cummings.

As has been observed, the plotting is not perfect, but Milland is beautifully hateful, and Hubbard delightfully his nemesis, taking due offence at the manners of people who do not take his hat and coat from him, and possibly seeking, if only for that reason, to worst his foe, by fair means and foul.

For this reason, I cannot quite agree with TAKE ONE's reviewer that this is 'an enjoyable, if unexceptional, entertainment' : in fairness, since I am quoting that phrase out of context, I suppose that it must depend what one's scale is, and whether one has a scale for Hitchcock that 'sets the bar high', because Dial M is probably not, as he says, the masterpiece that it was proclaimed to the world to be.



End-notes

¹ Presumably where all this talk of nausea and 48 frames per second comes from...

² Same year, same actress, and, in Milland, an actor not unlike, in appearance, James Stewart from that other film. It was one of five that were taken off release and only resurfaced in the 1980s, but nothing suggests that Stewart could have brought the smooth venom and malice of Milland to Tony.

³ Perhaps the image of the relays operating at the telephone exchange caused me to confuse this film with one where the mode of operation of that technology is crucial to the detection of the identity of a culprit.

⁴ Spoiler alert :

(1) When Tony steals Margot's handbag to obtain the undestroyed letter, it is quite clear that whoever had taken it could have had any number of latch-keys cut - all that we have to answer this point, and therefore to establish the number of keys, is Margot's plaintive insistence that she got the key back, which is no assurance when the bag was not restored to her for a fortnight. What prudent person would not have ensured that the lock was changed (after all, she definitely knows that the bag contained something with her address on it), and how and why did Tony and she manage with only one key between them in the interim ?

(2) Tony sends Margot ransom-notes that ask for £50. It is unclear what Margot entrusts to Mark at the opening, other than the notes, but there might be evidence in the form of her unclaimed letter when she goes to the premises in Brixton (it is also uncertain how she would have proved herself the sender). Even if not so, she might be able to show that the putative blackmailer took no interest in securing his reward (in his account of events, I do not recall that Tony offered his accomplice a reason, but the film requires a high level of concentration not to miss anything).

(3) In any event, a blackmailer who does not ask for £1,000 straightaway, and only seeks £50 - how does one explain asking so little in the first place, as the ransom-notes would show ?

(4) If Margot has a motive in faking an attempt on her life to cover up, what is it in taking Swann's in the first place ? If she intends it and wishes to silence him, she leaves the troublesome letter on his person, and, if not, in what circumstances does a man end up with a pair of scissors in his back and falling on them ?


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Only God forgives – so you’re dog-meat !

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3 August

* Contains spoilers *

I can't honestly recommend Only God Forgives, because that would be morally and socially reprehensible, but I may see it again. #justsaying
— Mark Liversidge (@MovieEvangelist) August 2, 2013

I doubt that one can look for morality in this tale of Only God Forgives (2013), no more so, say, than in Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi, or Ford’s ’Tis Pity she’s a Whore – not to say that there are not motivations, codes of behaviour, because there are, and it is their inconsistency with each other that leads to conflict, death, slaughter.

Slaughter is the word for it, in its purest sense – despatching a beast with some ceremonial, even if not with the supposed aim of the abattoir to be humane about what is done in the service of butchery. In others’ responses, I detect an air of if not revulsion, then distaste, in wanting to relish this film, not so much as if it were a guilty pleasure as if it were immoral to say that one had watched it – might or would watch it again…

@MissSueFlay Outstanding, but be warned that it's deeply strange and even more violent than Drive. It's a very guilty pleasure.
— Mark Liversidge (@MovieEvangelist) August 2, 2013

I am unsure about whether that is right, whether there is a moral issue, and find myself wondering whether director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011), which has more propulsion from Ryan Gosling than here (where he plays Julian), is so far away : are we rooting for Gosling’s character Driver because he seems ‘selflessly’ to be risking his own well-being, life, future to protect Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her family, whom he comes to know and then she turns out to have a soon-to-be ex-convict husband ? That excuses the violence, the brutality that, bidden, seem to erupt from Driver, because it is in the knight’s service of a lady ?

We really know little about Driver’s inner life, however he has existed with his underpaid garage job and bare dwellings, because he seems to have no needs other than looking at and knowing Los Angeles and using that in the thrill of his night job – of course, we approve of him, because our film head allows us to reckon that the burglaries / robberies are of a faceless kind where there is no real victim, or, if there is a victim, then Driver is only the driver, and we want him to do what his name says, and get away.

And morality ? Is it really any more present in Drive than in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004), for, in a world where X is killing Y because of – or to avoid – the death of Z, we stand back, willing The Bride (Uma Thurman) on since she seems more sinned against than sinning. Whatever the history of revenge may be, and whether we choose to trace it back to Aeschylus or to Cain and Abel, the phrase an eye for an eye (and a tooth for a tooth is part of our culture :

Which is where we come to this film’s portentous-sounding title, which has the ring of being a Biblical / Shakespearean / classical text, but without identifiably* being one : do we watch the film, bearing in mind that there seems no evidence that anyone facing, as the case might be, severance, immolation or decapitation (a sort of one-armed bandit of death, if the ‘right’ line of three comes up), appears to be preparing to meet any sort of maker ? If we do, then I think that the issue of immorality disappears – no one here is seeking any sort of forgiveness, only a craven avoidance of death or other penalty.

But not quite everyone : when requested, the man who aided the failed ambush on the police in the eating-place / bar goes into a corner in the shadows and writes his excuse, which is read by Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), and then handed to one of his officers. We have no more notion than that of what the man has to say for himself, and there is then a moment of uncertainty until Chang acts – when he does so, the story moves on, and we do not know what effect, if any, ‘the excuse’ had… Except that, in this respect, the film is explicit about crime and punishment, so can we suppose that he received clemency (of some sort) ?

If by immorality it is not the downward spiral of retribution to which people object (which haunts A Midsummer Night’s Dream just as fully as it does the graphic bloodiness of Titus Andronicus, to which, to King Lear, and to the Sophoclean Theban trilogy of plays concerning Oedipus there is more than a shallow nod), but the tribal, self-appointed justice of the police through the offices of Chang, then I am at a loss to follow the argument or experience the feeling.

The echoes that I have mentioned are there, and I shall explore them at greater length in a separate posting, but musically, in tone, in plot, and in modes that essentially consist of stasis (fixed poses, unblinking gazes, etc.), slow motion (for example, slowly receding down or proceeding along corridors, as if of a maze) and sudden activity (Julian chasing Chang, Chang enacting vengeance, or Chang chasing the man whom he gives a Bob-and-Vic-type treatment) I was hugely put in mind of Enter the Void (2009).

As to music, I found it as unsubtle, because I was fully aware, say, that the only tension in the scene where Mai (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam) seems – if the scene happens in reality, not imagination – to be masturbating in from of Julian after tying his arms to a chair came from the chordal disharmony, which I mentally stripped away, and the visuals were devoid of it. Since, in these terms, the soundtrack was too much on the surface, too obvious, I could not help detaching it at other times, such as the early appearance of Kristin Scott Thomas as Crystal, Julian’s mother, and a moment that, better done, could have been laden with the significance that was sought. With Void, I could likewise not help being aware that the cinematic effect was largely created by an attempt to manipulate the viewer and create sensation that was lacking from the screen itself.

My recollection is of an over-indulgent sense of stasis in that film, connected largely with the use of drugs – as here, drug-induced crime leads to dislocation, mayhem, revenge, and I cannot claim, ever since Robert de Niro was shown stoned in Once Upon a Time in America (1984), to have found those under the influence a source of fascination, whether going ‘to meet the devil’ as Billy (Tom Burke) does, or sitting staring on a sofa. If either film sees itself as a meditation on death or the truths of life, it falls far short for me :

Void felt pretentious, and Only God feels too much like a mash-up to be more than pastiche, whether referencing (slightly) The Matrix (1999) and the film-world that influenced The Wachowskis in making it, or William Shakespeare’s bloodier moments, as well as the softer ones that we see in Julian, both in would-be revenger Hamlet, or in Macbeth, needing Lady Macbeth (equals Crystal ?) to stir him to the pitch where he can murder Duncan.

I believe that Only God is a step or two in the wrong direction from the impact of Drive, which impelled the viewer – this viewer found more in the naivety and yet, with it, un-guessed-at ferocity of Driver than in the sub-Freudian musings behind portraying Billy, Julian, Mai and Crystal.

Our film-maker may believe that he is using reflectiveness and moments of quiet to speak to us, but the techniques are so evident that, unless he intends an alienation to make us step back from the detail of the action and view it as a sort of ballet, as a sort of death-laden dance in the spirit of Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996), he simply fires up our critical faculties to unpick what plot there is and whether it hangs together. In that respect, a response very like that to Holy Motors (2012).


More to come


End-notes

* The Internet / Google does not help much here with a search, because it is laden with references to the film, but The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations does.


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Gedicht

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3 August



Gedicht



Zwielicht

Oder wie Licht

Ändert alles

Mit der Zeit



Lachen

Oder Lächeln

Ganz vermischt

Im Gedänknis



Nachlegen

Oder überlegen

Finsternis

Ins Gesicht



Copyright © Belston Night Works 2013



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Too good to be true ?

This is a review of Frances Ha (2012)

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1 August

This is a review of Frances Ha (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

I had heard such positive noises about Frances Ha (2012) that I feared that I would be disappointed - and would squirm. But my worry was groundless, and I have nothing but praise for the film and for Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote it, as well as starring.

The script had all the urbanity of, say, Dianne Wiest as Holly and her friend and business partner April (played by Carrie Fisher) in Hannah and her Sisters (1986), and one likewise felt that, just as Woody Allen produces very good parts for himself (apart from giving himself the lion's share of the jokes), so Gerwig gauged her own nuances perfectly in the writing. (Allen gave her the part of Sally in To Rome with Love (2012), which, of course, does not surprise.)

The film is shot in monochrome, and uses a montage to give us quickly the breadth of the relationship between Frances and her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner). Coincidentally, and in no ways as a detraction from this film's originality and expressive power, I found myself reminded of those long-lost stories of another inhabitant of New York and her sister, from the t.v. series Rhoda : not pressing the similarities, but the quirkiness, the humanity, and the sense of being an individual.

Frances is gorgeously composed and shot, edited with style and precision, and the music is as it should be, so unobtrusive that, when one sees the list of what has been used, one is boggled not to have noticed so much of it, even well-known classical pieces. To prove the rule, two deliberately prominent tracks are David Bowie's 'Modern Love' and 'Every 1's a Winner' by Hot Chocolate, which feel just right, both in their exact context, and their emotional contribution.

So who is Frances exactly ? I shall say nothing about the film's title other than that one is kept waiting right to the end*, where we feel again the healthily pragmatic and impulsive part of Frances' character to the fore. Throughout, she is her own woman, and those who struggled with the role of Poppy in Mike Leigh's Happy-go-Lucky (2008), an excellent piece of work by Sally Hawkins, might be reminded of it.

If one took seriously what IMDb's headline statement had to say about Frances, one would think that she is simply a dreamer, which she is not : I do not believe that Poppy or Frances is an incurable optimist, but that they have a not infallible sense of others' hurts and susceptibilities, and live their lives trying to take account of them. (Unlike me before this film, Frances approaches things, and people, with expectancy.)

Sumner and Gerwig have to be singled out since, just as Poppy has her trusted flatmate in Zoe (Alexis Zegerman) for their own bohemian world, they are at the heart of the film (though a heart that beats at a distance when Sophie goes to Tokyo), but everyone seems well cast, and to give of their very best as part of the ensemble.

The film covers a lot of ground, and feels a lot like a portrait of Frances done with honesty and compassion : quite naturally, I believe that one feels for her, whether it is being let down about the Christmas show, or finding that a conversation with new room-mates Lev and Benji that she relied on about rent has been forgotten.

A key scene is the rather awkward dinner-party with friends of another room-mate, this time reluctant, where we learn a lot about where Frances stands in relation to others who are not of her kind - with Benji, she was able to communicate naturally, whereas these people seem unable to understand even when, metatextually, she drunkenly tries to explain what makes her able to get on with people.

Perhaps a bit of a loner, an outsider, she is still valued, and she sticks to her convictions. (In this connection, whatever dancer Gerwig may be, the film wisely limits what we see of her on her feet, choosing instead to show her nimbleness as she runs and twirls with ease along the streets of New York and of Paris, so that the status as dancer is established, but does not distract.)

In Poppy, one might have felt that her vibrant persona in the world was a response to something deeper. What we get to know of Frances, with her spontaneity and with a problematic way with money, makes a similar hint, not to be much dwelt on**, but noticed. What I take away is a special person, loving and caring (even for someone whom she does not know who is sad), and a bit of an outsider. If this is what Miranda July had in mind in The Future, I believe that she is way off, whereas Gerwig and the film's co-writer and director, Noah Baumbach, are spot on.


End-notes

* But there is a joke from A. A. Milne...

** Unless one's bedtime reading is informed by such things as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and it guides trying to understand a whole person : one would quickly rule out high-functioning autism, but ponder a mild form of bi-polar disorder, or even traits of borderline personality disorder, on which more here...

Also, I'm not sure that it's just not having the money that means that Sophie has a mobile on which she can get e-mail and Frances hasn't, or that Frances has a computer that she doubts will enable her to communicate with a distant Sophie as suggested. Even if she could, I don't see Frances spending on those things, because her priorities, her notions of relations, are different : Sophie makes an up-beat blog in Tokyo so that her mother will not worry, whereas, tellingly, Frances envisages her mother seeing the truth on her own blog and coping with it. (I forget the quotation, but the word 'depressed' / 'depressing' is used.)


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Let's truncate like we did last summer !

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1 August

Did I bemoan boxset before ? Probably.

It now has a pair in crop top, not, as in crop circle, anything to do with what happened to Farmer Jack's wheat (or rye), but a mutational shortening of cropped top.

I have a theory, and it goes back to the debate that raged at the time of Swift whether raged should appear rag'd so that it was clear that it did not end with a separate syllable, -ed, as in blessed. Others argued not to have rag'd marked out as an exception, with all the others of its kind, but for 'blessed', as more unusual, to be rendered as we know it, blessed.

This, I believe, is what is going on here : in a marginally literate world, where so much is aural, boxed set has 'slipped' to the linguistically nonsensical boxset, and equally cropped top to crop top.

Laziness, ignorance, fashion - I don't really care which it is, but I despise it !


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Signs – any better than symbols ?

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31 July

The sign No unauthorized parking (plus threats sometimes) is familiar enough, but is it so common that the weirdness has rubbed off ?

Those who commission the sign seem to have turned their back on the more simple assertion No parking - is this because some bright spark is aware that the land in question will have cars parked on it, and wishes to disabuse those who might otherwise follow suit that they may not park, although others clearly can, because they are not authorized to do so ?

All well and good, but, if considered, the statement is dangerously close to circular : no one may park here except the people who may ? I recall blogging a while back about the no-smoking ban that applies everywhere, but not where it does not apply, at airports…

No unauthorized parking is terseness embodied, if that is good in a sign, but would this be better ? :


Parking for permit-holders only



To be continued (if I remember…)


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A good long look at Woody ?

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30 July

A documentary doesn’t that takes as its subject a person’s career does not have to mention every date, every detail. However, if he or she has been pictured with the first person whom he or she married, there might be merit in mentioning, by way of commentary, the fact of being divorced at the time of talking about the next marriage / relationship, e.g. X had divorced his / her first wife / husband m years earlier. (Or it could be mentioned at the time of introducing the failed marriage, e.g. This youthful marriage only lasted m years before ending in divorce.)

Whereas a feature film might give us information and expect us to hold it, or to be provisional about whether it is true, so, of course, can a documentary, if it wants to include some references to a person (or thing) for us to ponder before it is explained who (or what) it is. Otherwise, it is just clumsiness and /or bad editing if we have not been disabused that the marriage last mentioned is no longer continuing.

In this film, the longer version of the documentary about Woody Allen that was released at the cinema last year, it does not matter that we see Louise Lasser, in clips from Bananas (1971), before knowing that Allen had been married to her, too, and that they had made the film after their divorce, but no one had bothered to tell us, in the way suggested, that Allen's first marriage had ended. (On a similar theme, Part 2 touches upon the fact that Allen and Mia Farrow had adopted children, but lived separately, although so close that they could virtually wave to each other from their homes, but without specifying that they were not, and had not been, married.)

Anyway, Part 1 of does not cover a whole lot of new ground, but has more facts about Allen's family, dwells for somewhat longer on how Rollins and Joffe made Allen a household name and on his t.v. performances, and, after telling the story of What's New, Pussycat ?, has comments from Allen, but often enough others (such as Mariel Hemingway, Tracy in Manhattan (1979)), on the films up to and including Stardust Memories (1980).


In reviewing the single-film cinema version, I pointed out that what Father Robert Lauder observed, with reference to clips (all of which therefore took up some time), as an insight had actually been stated by Allen himself about his work in the useful volume Woody Allen on Woody Allen : Fr Robert is still here (for some reason*), but not that sequence. Part 1 had taken us to 1980 in some 116 minutes (looking at more or less every film), so by no means halfway through Allen’s film career, but Part 2 did not proceed in the same way, which, when it had done so in the cinema, seemed like a desperate and doomed attempt to continue a film-by-film survey.

Instead, it made much of the peculiarities of Allen’s way of casting, and of scripts being supplied to actors by courier for them to read whilst the courier waited to take them back. Tantalizing quotations from Allen’s personal notes to a number of actors were made, with the text (whether or not typed) whisked across the screen (unless, one imagines, one paused them), and letters or notes laid over each other. Whether Allen minded this, one did not know, but doubted, as he took the view that auditions were awful and awkward, and assumed that everyone else would feel the same.

I cannot say for sure whether much more was said by Allen about the Mia Farrow separation and court-case, but he was no longer heard to say (unless I am thinking of the mention in Allen on Allen in the chapter on Bullets over Broadway (1994)) that he would have been happy for Farrow to play the part with which, instead, Dianne Wiest initially struggled (though she was to win an Oscar), and that everyone else thought him crazy to consider casting Farrow, when he says that he just saw it as a role that she could play.


Josh Brolin was allowed to stand as a dissenting voice about Allen’s direction being good, but even offset by Brolin’s co-star in You will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), Naomi Watts, saying that she had decided that Allen was the best director with whom she had worked. As to the question of coming to film in London and elsewhere in Europe, that was partly glossed over, except to say how difficult it is to film in New York and that Allen had nowhere left that he had not shot, and we were told that the appeal of Midnight in Paris (2011) was the life of the city at night, and (by Owen Wilson) that the title (which he said had been hit upon before the film was written) was the root of the film’s success.

From what I have heard and read, it had become less easy for Allen to film (or film as he wanted), but that was not the whole of it – also, as clips showed, Allen had filmed in places such as Paris and Venice in Everyone Says I Love You (1996) and, I believe, in Italy in Another Woman (1988). Culturally, his range of reference has always been very wide, and, as the film reminded us, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini were favourite directors, and that was surely no coincidence.


A surprising omission from talking about thirty-years of film-making in around 86 minutes (Part 2) was not to comment, in talking about Interiors (1978), how it marked the first film that Allen wrote and directed without appearing in it. In Allen on Allen, he said that he had never thought of casting himself in that film, but it appeared not to have occurred to director Bob Weide that, just as Allen did not fulfill his critics’ expectations with the type of film, they could not have failed to notice that he was not in it. No mention was also made of Allen’s appearances as an actor in others’ films, such as with Bette Midler in Scenes from a Mall (1991), which he had started doing in 1967 with the David Niven version of Casino Royale.

When Allen showed his lifelong typewriter and how he produces material, one could easily have missed his reference to having written all his articles in The New Yorker on it, not least if the viewer does not know the publication. In fact, Allen has published four collections of pieces, and also seven or eight of his screenplays have appeared (from Manhattan (1979) to Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and Interiors). Early plays were talked about, but really as a way of introducing Diane Keaton, when it should have been possible, in a few sentences near the end, to mention books like Without Feathers**, the number of plays and film appearances, and, indeed, how many films Allen had made (and acted in).

Attention was given to the box-office successes of Match Point (2005) and Midnight in Paris, but the film lacked an overview and a structure in Part 2. So we were shown clips from Shadows and Fog (1991), but not in the context of saying anything about the film, almost just to illustrate a character’s way of being by not being able to relate to a God. Likewise, the account (again with clips) of Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989) did not even make clear that chance conversation between Allen (as Cliff Stern) and Martin Landau (playing Judah Rosenthal) was at the heart of the film. Space was given to Allen saying that he found the darker story more interesting, and wished that he had made it without the character of Stern, but the crux of their interaction in the film was omitted from comment.

That said, although everyone (Allen included) was shown saying the word ‘compartmentalize[d]’ about Allen and how he worked throughout the Farrow break-up, and the film had the merit of people such as Letty Aronson (or even, in footage that Allen made, his mother) telling the story without any real narration, it needed it sparingly instead of just using quotation by clip. As it was, what got told about Allen, and what did not, in a two-parter that ran to some ninety minutes longer relied on what Diane Keaton, as a key figure, maybe said, or was asked, or was prompted to say, whereas my feeling is that Weide did not always show his own mastery of the material or the subject in what we saw, and I am not sure that that failure can be accounted for merely by the difficulty of turning, no doubt, hours of footage into a documentary of manageable length.

However, some clips, particularly towards the end, were very telling, and one had a lump in one’s throat in admiring all that Allen had done and excelled at. My wish is that, for those who knew his career and work less well, they could have known about the books, the other plays, the other films : as it was, fascinating though it was to be told that Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem had originated the dialogue in Spanish, translated it into English for the subtitles, and that Allen had had no idea at the time of shooting what they were talking about, giving a bit of time to the sheer body of Allen’s achievement would have said much more than showing that he trusted his actors.


End-notes

* I, for one, am far more interested in what Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe (his producers), Eric Lax (an Allen biographer), Richard Schickel (a film critic), Letty Aronson (Allen’s sister), and Dick Cavett (the well-known chat-show host and broadcaster) had to say, though I suspect that Cavett was given more opportunity in the cinema release.

** The omnibus The Complete Prose of Woody Allen, whose title was falsified by the appearance of Mere Anarchy, would scarcely have appeared without that being a significant part of what the public knows of his work.


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Gabby does it Bristol fashion !

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29 July

From where I'd been dropped, I hurried down the stairs past the Cathedral School, across that strange bridge, and was soon in Queen Square, which I must have walked in before years ago, but never as a venue.

Gabby and Other Animals were already on stage for the Harbour Festival. Without too much trouble, as someone used at Cambridge Folk Festival in previous years to walking between even seated people without standing on them, I got myself to the mud just by the front railings, and then, when some people left, right there. You only had to look at people clapping time, tapping their feet, swaying with their bodies to realize that they were having a great time - and why not, with this exciting, energy-filled band on stage ?

Gabby always wows, and was wearing a pink halter-neck dress with large white polka dots over her usual colourful tresses, and a yellow flower off centre on her head. But this was just a visual expression of the colour and expressiveness in her voice, part of putting on a show for her audience - and this, as could well be perceived, was a fine one.

When I had previously seen the group, it had been a good but distant view, in The Big Top at Cheltenham Jazz Festival, so it was nice to be right up close, and not limited by the seating - that lack of limitation, I am sure, meant that the audience could throw itself into participation more easily, even having a go at some antiphonal singing (dividing the square in half), with which Gabby and her partner in crime Stephen Ellis seemed genuinely pleased, saying things such as Awesome !, and You're amazing, Bristol !. (Stephen, a bit of a style man, too, was wearing a black waistcoat and an old-fashioned shirt with his black trousers.)

Some numbers were familiar to me from the earlier gig ('Horatio', 'In Your Head', 'Lipsink' (spelt according to Wikipedia ?), and the closer, 'Whose House'), but that in no way mattered. For this was a compelling one-hour set, and Queen Square was lapping it up - and that, and the sheer vivacity and versatility of Gabby and her band, fed into the enjoyment, the enthusiasm, and the gig that was being put on : performers can feel that.

Add to all this the quality of the musicianship, from one-piece-suited Milly on violin to the wonderful, sonorous, jazzy trio of trumpet, trombone and tuba (sadly, I seem unable to find the name of the respective personnel), and a solid drummer, plus Gabby's marvellously swinging lead vocals, Stephen's sometimes frenetic guitar-playing, and a good, deep double-bass twang, and there is a force to be reckoned with.

They are just about (in the morning) to record their third album - as I urged Gabby and Stephen afterwards, when I made my agenthood known to them, what people want is to be able to soak up that live festival, carnival atmosphere in a DVD. And I think that there may be something of that, more and better than YouTube videos, on the way...


NB Lovely photograph of Ms Young courtesy of @brizzelness (via Twitter)



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Fuckin' Bruges further

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28 July

Having now watched the extras from the In Bruges (2008) DVD, including the one that almost makes a sort of rap by stringing together every shit-hole, fuck, fucking and cunt, I add a few further comments to my review :

* We learn that Martin McDonagh has parcelled out the two sides of his reaction to Bruges when he spent a weekend there - Ken is the part impressed by the sights and sounds, Ray the one that just wants to get away from it all and have a beer*

* McDonagh had also been quite careful that Bruges, as I found, should be another character, and, with the city's co-operation after he had selected all the views that he wanted to include, had access to all but one

* The scene atop the belfry was shot in a mock-up, reimagining how it would have been before safety-mesh and the like had been installed

* There is confirmation for the idea that the city may be a sort of Purgatory for Ray, or, at any rate, that his negative feelings about himself and what he has done mean that he cannot enter into its and Ken's desire for him to appreciate it

* In one of the extended scenes, Ray likens the balance that Ken talks of between culture and fun to a retarded black girl (culture) outbalancing a dwarf (fun) on a seesaw, and then goes on to say how he was beaten up by a black girl as a child

* The deleted scenes show that there was scope for far more references to boys and toys that did not make the cut, and justly so (although I am not sure how good it is to have these materials presented to us with the finished film)

* Other scenes suggested Ray's emotional vulnerability more strongly : he also supposes that the priest must have had it coming as a paedophile, but it is disabused that he was supporting a campaign against a housing development in which Harry has an interest

* An extended sequence with Chloe, when she jumps up, wraps her legs around Ray, and, when he says that he wants a drink, says that they should have a fuck, shows tenderness (although the scene in bed is clearly interrupted by memory affecting performance)

* It is unclear where these scenes, relating to Harry's personnel (or their foe), fit in, but we are graphically presented with a police detective being decapitated


End-notes

* Bill Bryson reports that reaction to Brussels in his travel book Neither Here, Nor There, and he is not far wrong.


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You have connectivity issues

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27 July

I hypothesize this chronological progression :

* Connection

* To connect

* Connected used as an adjective

* Connective applied to something that connects

* This unnecessary 'word' connectivity, meaning no more than being connected or the ability to be so


Having said that, I can quite easily believe that, if connection comes from French / Italian, there might have been an earlier form such as connective


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No scope for error

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27 July


* Contains spoilers *


Which film combines elements of all these others ? :

* Love and Death (1975)

* Match Point (2005)

* Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

* Broadway Danny Rose (1984)


Films from four decades that have influenced Scoop (2006), from the ending of the first to the patter and character of Danny Rose in the last. It’s a conceit that could easily have come from Woody Allen’s short prose (or the works of Henry James ?) that a respected journalist, hearing of a juicy story when he has died, fights his way back from death to make sure that it is followed up and told : equally, though Hamlet senior has more of an interest in what he tells to Hamlet junior than Joe Strombel (Ian McShane) does in what he says to Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson), there is obviously a long history of crimes being told of from beyond the grave.

Combining that impulse with Allen’s boyhood interest in magic – as portrayed in films such as Radio Days (1987) and Stardust Memories (1980) – through a meeting in a magic cabinet, and one is close to the world of Alice (1990). The intrigue, the tension, come from the middle two films, though, and this almost seems like a re-make of Match Point, with more aristocratic families, plotted killing, and a woman who has become a nuisance with her demands set against a pattern of murder.

Not such a great pair as Allen and Diane Keaton (some of those scenes from Sleeper and Manhattan Murder have me smiling as I think of them and the pair’s bunglingly lucky work), Johansson and he do well enough as sleuths, with Allen not trying very hard to keep himself out of it. He has written himself into the film as Splendini (alias Sidney Waterman), an illusionist, washing his clothes in a launderette whilst he stays who knows where to be in London to do his show – a hilarious come-down for a man passed off, for investigative purposes, at swanky parties as a successful businessman in property or oil.

The bamboozling that we know from Danny and Larry Lipton (or, for that matter, C. W. Briggs in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)) is to the fore, and, just as Midnight in Paris (2011) has us take as read that Gil somehow goes back in the past, so Allen casually has us entertain the possibility that Death, with his scythe, may not give all due attention to his charges and that Strombel gets away from him. (The set-up also provides us with a neat closing joke.)

Looked at in Allen's career, from a man with an obviously fake ginger beard taking over a Latin American country to Leonard Zelig, The Human Chameleon, to an actor descending from the silver screen, an element of the fantastical has long been part of his film-making. Here, it adds a jaunty edge of Death being cheated that lightens a story-line that could be that of Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant with the secret in the basement in Notorious - even if that was not a deliberate outright steal, the sense of homage is there, the eternal feel of a woman snooping whilst she hopes that a man sleeps, but what if he catches her, what of the danger that she is in ?

Here, that sense of danger passes itself to Sid when Sondra has been persuaded all too easily of Peter Lyman's (Hugh Jackman's)innocence (not how I imagined it spelt (Leimann), but what's in a name ?) - echoes of Manhattan Murder, where Diane Keaton (as Carol Lipton) will not let go of teasing away at the contradictions in Paul House (Jerry Adler) and frustrating her husband's (Allen's) desire to let things lie.

And all of this pulls pretty much in the right direction, with romance, intrigue, a murderer on the loose, and Johannson at risk. We even have a slight echo, right at the end, of the indestructible Alex Forrest, dripping water as she proves her continued existence. Waterman gives us a light ending, just as with Love and Death, and there are just a few niggles. One, choosing to drive to where Johannson is with Jackman, is explicable by a district of police and of authority, otherwise they could simply have been summoned and arrived more promptly.

Another is less clear : if one knew that a sensitive room with coded entry had already been entered, would one not have changed the combination, and, in removing one incriminating set of papers, have left another item in its place ? Finally, would one really be on solid ground in thinking that people would appear unrelated when they had posed as father and daughter as guests at several parties ?

Those minor quibbles can themselves be addressed by thinking of the character and self-belief of Lyman, who really had no reason to think that Waterman would talk his way into Lyman's home in his absence and could easily have persuaded himself that - however the woman whom he thought of as Jade had gained access - she had wholly fallen for him and that she posed no threat.

After all, he acts as he does at the end because he has believed a lie about rescuing her from drowning, whereas he thinks that he is exploiting a weakness, and he has dared to seek to blame his act of self-liberation on someone else. That is very much as Chris Wilton does in Match Point by staging a burglary, and, despite cocking up the plan, getting away with it (albeit in a sub-Raskolnikovian sort of way, haunted by ghosts) - departing from that model, Allen has him caught out, and his arrogant belief in his evil ways out of being discovered proving misconceived.

The better thought-out script, the mixture of themes, of light and darkness, makes this a better film than that earlier one, for all its box-office success. Allen in the film gives some great moments, although one can already see how the style of almost improvisatory delivery that is to the fore in To Rome with Love (2012) has become heightened to the stage where, for example, he seems to take forever, after the last murder, to claim to be a newspaperman man on the search for information : I wonder whether Allen, perhaps not just wanting to deliver one-liners, is too much conveying the sense not just of a man looking for the right words (as a contrast to Sidney with the assurance and vocabulary of schmoozing the volunteers and audience in his act), but of one with whom we might find ourselves getting frustrated, wishing that he would spit it out.


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