Monday, 6 February 2017

Some Tweets about Spike Lee's Chi-Raq (2015)

Some Tweets about Spike Lee's Chi-Raq (2015), seen at Saffron Screen

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

5 February


Some Tweets about Spike Lee's Chi-Raq (2015), seen at Saffron Screen, which - perhaps as an antidote to the cynicism of the musical or film called Chicago ? - looks to sisters in Ancient Greece, also tired of warfare, as a source of hope...



Nick Cannon (as Chi-Raq)

As we are shown by titles on the screen during the opening number, whose lyrics are otherwise displayed on a dark screen, the film is predicated on the fact that more men died violent deaths in 2015 in Chicago than US servicemen up to that point in Afghanistan and Iraq together : hence the name Chi-Raq, by which one of the gang-leaders (Nick Cannon) also calls himself (his opposite number is Cyclops (Wesley Snipes), and there is a loquacious chorus-figure, played by Samuel L. Jackson).


Above : John Cusack (Fr. Corridan), Wesley Snipes (Cyclops), La La Anthony (Hecuba) and Spike Lee
Below : Samuel L. Jackson (Dolmedes)


The sex-strike is started by Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) – as in his Greek model, but with the encouragement of Miss Helen (Angela Bassett).


Teyonah Parris (Lysistrata), Angela Bassett (Miss Helen), and
Jennifer Hudson (Irene [= Greek for Peace])


Spike Lee additionally gives a role for the black evangelical church : the real St. Sabina’s in Chicago (all of the locations shown are in the city), fronted by John Cusack (as Father Michael Corridan), but with the support and appearance of its own Father Michael Pfleger, and its music and dance-groups.


Above : John Cusack (Fr. Michael Corridan) and Father Michael Pfleger
Below : Spike Lee, Al Sharpton (not credited ?), and Father Pfleger





John Cusack and Spike Lee


Necessarily, obstacles are in the women’s way, otherwise no drama and no action to the film, but it ends with an unexpected act of mercy, and a revelation by Nick Cannon of the extent to which – except physically – his acting has been subdued until that moment.





Spike Lee offers a message of hope, and we would do well to heed him.



Angela Bassett (as Miss Helen)




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 4 February 2017

Flashback : Louis Malle and Zazie dans le Métro [originally appeared for New Empress Magazine]

This review of Zazie dans le Métro (1960) first appeared for New Empress Magazine

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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An edited version of this review of Zazie dans le Métro (1960) appeared as an on-line Flashback item for New Empress Magazine* [in February 2012]



Thanks to John Davies and his event at The Cinema Museum (@CinemaMuseum), I now know a bit about the directorial career of Louis Malle (including some clips), and have seen Zazie.

 As the book Malle on Malle (one in a series by Faber in which someone in the film business, in this case Philip French, has conversations with a director about the films then made) gives a synopsis, although I think that there are mistakes of detail, I shall not give my own, not least also because the film – probably like the book that it realizes – defies meaningful summary.

 Zazie was released in 1960, and so is exactly contemporary with Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a film so badly received that it virtually destroyed his career. Both film-makers were saying something new and true, but Malle, although also controversial and with a delight in addressing taboos, did not seem, here, to have ambushed his future film-making.

The film, like its title character (Catherine Demongeot), has enormous energy (Zazie’s wakeful activity is coupled with the capacity to sleep through Armageddon), and filming this novel may have appealed to Malle because of that very vivacity (and undaunted irreverence), as well as because it had been thought impossible: nothing better than a challenge for Malle !

 Zazie has few illusions, though she is, naturally, entranced by blue jeans and by the idea of the Métro (which is closed, because of a strike, until the very end – French says that she enjoys her ride, but I believe that she was still asleep). She starts the film by decrying, in no uncertain terms, the taxi that Uncle Gabriel (her mother’s brother, played by Philippe Noiret) has waiting for them – not just because, in true slapstick fashion, it’s full to the brink with other hopeful passengers – and tries to run off into the Métro.

She knows what she wants, and she doesn’t want to be fussed over by Gabriel or his landlord, taking in her stride her mother’s leaving her in his care so that she can go off for the duration with her lover. (Somehow, Zazie doesn’t appear to have been to Paris before, perhaps accounted for by the lover’s newness.) In search of a good time, she courts danger with impunity, treating everything as a game, and she partly has the freedom for her adventures courtesy of falsely implicating the landlord (a scene cleverly mirrored later, when the mysterious Trescallion tells the same gathered company stories about her).

The exuberance of the film, fuelled by Zazie even when asleep on the hoof (leaning on a car’s wing) and throwing bombs at Trescallion in a car-chase, no doubt mirrors that of the novel. The overall impact is crazy and, although Malle said that it went off the rails in the last third, it is almost impossible to know where that happened. The scenes up the Eiffel Tower are truly vertiginous, with access that may have been usual at that time or special to the film.

 The scenes on the streets of Paris are, if one stops to think of it, reminiscent of the Keystone Kops, but Malle reclaims that insane energy in a way that makes it seem wholly new, wholly unnerving. That feeds into the final onslaught in the restaurant, where, without explanation, it is the waiters against the diners, and no holds are barred… (but Zazie sleeps).


End-notes :

 * Now no longer with us...


Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday, 1 February 2017

Cracking open : Ghost in the Shell (1995) (work in progress)

Cracking open : Ghost in the Shell (1995) (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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1 February

Cracking open : Ghost in the Shell (1995) (work in progress)

For those who want / need it, there is a link here to a synopsis [on IMDb (@IMDb)] : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113568/synopsis

 There are around three parts of Ghost in the Shell (1995) that are, in terms of setting up a scenario or telling a story, very heavy on text – which signifies more, when one is reading sub-titles, and trying to work out how long one has to read each (and, therefore, whether one can go back and re-read something that one did not immediately follow – which can cause anxiety can set in…), but is still hardly ideal, if one were trying to catch all the words / what they signify.

 Unless – which simply is not the case here – someone is genuinely being told something, and he or she needs to be told a large amount of information at one time (independently of our knowing it per se), a film in which sections seem overburdened with quickly-delivered text has not been carefully thought through (even in translation from manga, where there is all the time in the world to read, to celluloid, where the reader may, as described, feel justifiably pressured*) :

We cannot even realistically suggest that a native speaker (unfamiliar with the original text) would have been expecting the first of these passages, because they do go against the pattern of the film thitherto of short, sharp exchanges, not all of the content of which seems vital – as is the way in any film with an element of action – and which, if they need to make sense, will or can do so later. Be that as it may, because one passage references Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, and others some concepts in Western philosophy (especially philosophy of mind), some of which are familiar from The Matrix* (1999), there are shortcuts, and these are not strongly held reservations about the film.

 As to whether Ghost titillates, and does so gratuitously, one hears [from @xa329] that the full manga text is explicitly sexual in places, which both confirms and denies the perception : the film could clearly show more (as later films apparently do), but none of this takes away from the fact that a female body is depicted naked, as if this is necessary for the ambient camouflage that is being deployed, when clearly that is not true for others (males) who are likewise camouflaged. (It could have been thought to be necessary by those, on the side of the government department (Section 9) with which we are interested, but that is a feeble excuse, not even used, to show Motoko naked, which is what the film-makers wish to do – and have faux-nakedness, since this is animé, not actual flesh, but as if showing such an image cannot be for sexual gratification : no one watching this film will believe that Motoko needed to be shown in that way, or that watching the motions of her breasts, nipples, etc., as they pass through the air or water are unintended to stimulate.

 Strip away these doubts about the film, and how and why it has been made in this way, and there is still plenty to say – in a way that one doubts that one can say for Jane Fonda’s choice of appearing in Barbarella (1968). The important questions are, almost necessarily, about #AI (since Motoko is not human), and partly about the body that she ends up in, and surveys the city with and from, after declining the offer to stay in Batou’s hide-away : she is grateful to him for being preserved, but does not wish to be secreted away by someone who also has fantasized about her sexually : even that is not much of a position taken from principle, but just of not wanting to be the closet creature of anyone, i.e. the idea of free-spiritedness that has pervaded her role.

 Here, as The Wachowskis did, we will find the rogue piece of code that is Neo (as well as the nature of his activities outside his legitimately paid hours of work), the sentinels, and concepts of seeking physical destruction of something that inherently is not physical, and thus also of being able to merge completely with it, and what that might mean. In Matrix Revolutions (2003), particularly (but also in the whole Matrix trilogy – and it is a complete and necessary trilogy (albeit supplemented by The Animatrix (2003), for those who will have some of the detail alluded to fleshed out…) – that merging is often passing through, and experiencing another’s lack of substance, and here, in Ghost, there is much talk of ‘barriers’ and ‘diving into’ another being, and other key-words that delineate what separates, but could yet allow ingress…
To be continued / polished / edited



 End-notes :

 * One is told, and can see, that The Wachowskis were influenced by Ghost (as considered below).

 ** One is less impressed by an argument that suggests that dumping information on us is mimetic of what M., and her fellow agents, experience as they try to process an understanding of the cyber-enemy that they face (and whether some of them are more artifice, or have been constructed as artefact, such as The Puppet-Master)…






When someone appears to suggest that such image / still is from the film's live-action re-make... :






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Monday, 30 January 2017

Whatever you mean by calling something ‘sexism’, take a look at Spellbound (1945)

Whatever you mean by ‘sexism’, take a look at what Spellbound (1945) shows us...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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29 January (last updated, 20 February)

Whatever you mean by calling something ‘sexism’,
take time to look at what Spellbound (1945) shows us
[watched last year at The Arts, and since on DVD release]...


Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane.

 The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind.

 Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear... and the evils of unreason are driven from the human soul.





Not necessarily always put in the context of what happened when her affair with Roberto Rossellini was made public (which Stig Björkman’s documentary Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words (2015) does well¹ [shown in 2015 at The Arts (@CamPicturehouse), and also at Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (@camfilmfest)]), Ingrid Bergman’s remark, about her career (as well as strongly-held disapproving attitudes towards her life), that she went from being a saint to a whore and back again is often quoted.



Even if Kim Newman [interviewed on the Hitchcock series of DVD releases] thinks of Spellbound (1945), unlike Notorious (1946) (where Bergman plays opposite Cary Grant), as more David O. Selznick’s film than Hitchcock’s, both have plenty to observe on how women are regarded (and they were written by / credited to Ben Hecht) : the latter has Bergman (in the role of Alicia Huberman) as a woman who is ‘notorious’, because of 'who she is' and 'what she does' (whereas a man need not be). As if marrying a man to spy on him were not enough to demonstrate her loyalty to anti-Nazi causes, she needs to prove herself worth Devlin’s (Cary Grant’s) love and respect (despite what is unjust cynicism, rooted in jealousy, on his part) - whereas the former’s Dr. Constance Petersen is, as a female psychoanalyst, actually seen treated with... no more respect.



At Green Manors, which sounds very formal and proper, is where we initially see her putting up with the attentions of Dr. Fleurot (John Emery), one of her fellow analysts, and who even has the nerve to kiss her to see whether he can interest her in him : this action is, of course, partly exaggeration for effect, the effect being both to show that her colleagues are boors (as we later see, when she has spent the afternoon with the presumptive Dr Edwardes, and has to listen to their condescension and mocking), and that Constance, somehow (and contrary to what the world will later criticize in Bergman’s private life), has not hitherto experienced desire for a man [which even Dr. Petersen's peers 'jokingly' want to see as frigidity, and, after the fake Edwardes has disappeared, Fleurot calls her the human glacier, and the custodian of truth : shortly after which Murchison says that Fleurot's colleague and he are offending by their callousness, and 'retain the manners of medical students'].


 Hitchcock and Hecht both know that these are the public ways of the world then, that men think themselves so irresistible that they either scorn a woman for not choosing them, or force their advances on her by making her tolerate being kissed : in disguising this behaviour as the so-called battle of the sexes, neither is necessarily colluding with it, but it is in meeting the character of Constance’s psychoanalytic mentor, Dr. Alex Brülow, that the origins of her attitude towards her own sexuality become clear.


Centre shot, Dr. Alex Brülow (Michael Chekhov), casually waving a large paper-knife around...


Hearing Alex Brülow, played by Michael Chekhov, as a typical Germanic Jung-type figure², we may nonetheless realize, behind what he says, that he has always been sexually attracted to her³, but knows that he is so much older, and that her affections for him – as a teacher, and father figure – are different³ (though, as he sees it, she patronizingly thinks him incapable of seeing through her ruse of presenting JB and herself as on honeymoon, though they do not even have any suitcases, etc., etc.).



So, Alex tells her that he is glad that she is there to make his coffee the way that he likes [Cook me my coffee in the morning, and the house is yours, at which Constance, out of sight, grimaces], and he is keen to say things to the same effect that (as his friend Zannenbaum used to say) Women make the best psychoanalysts, until they fall in love - after that, they make the best patients, etc., etc., all of which is a clear indication that, all along, Constance has been behaving to please him, to be 'a good analyst'.

(The name implies being constant, after all – just as it does in Chaucer, in The Clerk’s Tale – but Ingrid Bergman does, as in Chaucer, stretch our credulity by the extent to which she is prepared to trust Gregory Peck, despite all the signs – put in her and our way – that he may be dangerous, and not worthy of her trust. Even Murchison, in the closing scene with Constance, says Charming loyalty – one of your most attractive characteristics, Constance !)



John Ballantyne (Gregory Peck), after Dr. Brülow has knocked him out with bromide

In essence, the sexism that Hecht and Hitchcock exploit most is that of Alex Brülow [we actually see Constance smile at the house detective at the hotel, who thinks that he knows ‘human nature’, and can read her as a librarian, or a schoolteacher, and is, later, irritated to have been deceived by his own prejudice as to who she was, and why she was there...] :

 Alex has more than ‘mixed motives’, at least³, for wanting to discourage Constance in believing in John Ballantyne, but is passing them off as disinterested doubts. He is supporting her, despite them [he bluntly says, of her, Look at you : Dr. Petersen, the promising psychoanalyst, is now - all of a sudden - a schoolgirl, in love with an actor - nothing else !], because he does not wish to alienate her (and really hopes, as indicated at the end of the film, that she will be proved wrong⁴ ?). Of course, none of it is, in any sense, plausible, but we enter into it as in a film, where Salvador Dalí has been a contributor to a dream world, and where the psychoanalytic process can be ‘hastened’, and can do its work just with one night’s sequence of dreams ?



Unwittingly, we hear these origins alluded to on the train to Gabriel Valley, after they have left Alex. When Constance Petersen says the following words to John Ballantyne (Gregory Peck), he is distracted – as she eats – and becomes visibly more and more anxious, but she has faith in him, and so is not troubled : yet it is an insight, albeit underscored in this way by the man who sits opposite, into her nature, and how it has come to be, such that quite a short scene actually seems quite longer (and we then pass over how the night is spent, and they arrive the next day).


 I always loved very feminine clothes, but never quite dared to wear them.

 I’m going to, after this, I’m going to wear exactly the things that please me. And you.

 Even very, very funny hats.

 You know, the kind that make you look like you’re drunk.


Less plausible than any of the truncated dream-interpretation is that Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll), knowing what he did to Dr. Edwardes and where he left John Ballantyne, leaves all of this to unfold before us – if we know the film, we see him make small touches that attempt to distance himself from Edwardes or what happened⁵, and yet they are not convincingly those of a man who must know that his best chance of surviving as head of Green Manors is by other than what he allows to happen, or does... ?


Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll), ensuring that the note from 'JB' reaches Constance


 Essentially, Murchison leaves it to the improbability of what we see unfold - just as the film would have us credit Constance that she is, all along, doing the right thing - and that he hopes to elude being detected by maintaining a poker face⁵, as at The Twenty-One Club.






End-notes :

 ¹ Though Björkman unobligingly does not properly name Bergman's non-famous initial or third husbands [and, not unusually, IMDb (@IMDb) cannot say who they are either], which is not the least of his film's flaws...

² In this fairy tale of a film (we believe it, because we do not know any differently), where psychoanalysts all sleep / live on the premises, and naturally ‘go into theatre’ when one of the patients has injured someone.




 ³ Yet is there a hint that Alex may have drugged Constance, as he does JB, and have had sex with her in the room in which she used to stay, and which she says looks different to her, now that she is there with Ballantyne-to-be… ? [Seeing them off to bed, Alex ambiguously says Any husband of Constance's is a husband of mine, so to speak... Near the end of the film, Alex has reintroduced Constance to Green Manors, and the physical intimacy is there between them once more. And, right in the closing shot, he has to reiterate this comment, and relinquish Constance...]

(Constance talks as if she know what she is doing, in such a situation, that the couch is for her, and the bed for Ballantyne – which is what we see. But what sort of fairy-tale notion of being a doctor to the man with whom she is in love has her believe that doing this is some sort of useful norm for such a professionally unacceptable position ? [If, just if, Alfred Hitchcock had ever meant us to forget for a second that this was Ingrid Bergman on screen, would he have cast her – and not someone relatively anonymous (though she was one of producer David O. Selznick’s 'discoveries', and so casting was pretty much settled) – to be utterly convincing as this psychoanalyst, who actually breaks (as far as one can judge) all the professional rules in the book ? !

When Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote Good Will Hunting (1997) (and both appeared in it, the latter as ‘Chuckie’ Sullivan), can we any more just take at face value that Dr Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) really is literally to be taken to represent even some sort of maverick psychologist – any more than Constance can be a practising psychoanalyst of any age, who has never been in love before, but falls for John Ballantyne (first, in the mistaken guise of Dr Edwardes) within a matter of hours ?]


Seemingly, the film was marketed in Italy as io ti salverò ('I will save you')


⁴ Alex wakes JB (Gregory Peck) roughly, just after Constance has pleaded with Alex, getting very close, face to face, and he has said that he will pretend that what he is doing makes sense, if she makes him coffee - very reluctantly, Alex drops her hand, as she goes towards the kitchen : You don't like me, papa, JB says, soon after Alex has engaged him in conversation. [In the dream-analysis, where Constance again momentarily looks away, Alex enthusiastically says, to her, If you grew wings, you would be an angel !, just after telling her that JB is the patient, and that You are not his mama - you're an analyst!]

⁵ When Dr Edwardes' secretary arrives at Green Manors, Murchison declares that the imposter has certainly killed the real Dr Edwardes, and describes his trying to take Edwardes' place 'to pretend that his victim is still alive' in these terms : This sort of unrealistic act is typical of the short-sighted cunning that goes with paranoid behavior. (And yet Murchison makes sure that Constance sees JB's note, and that her responses to Fleurot's 'callousness' are not overlooked, as if willing her to follow JB where he has gone...)

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday, 24 January 2017

Campaigns to reduce the rate of [male] suicide in the UK, and what they seem to assume

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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25 January




These pages have looked at matters arising from the public discussion of suicide in the UK before :

 For example, some people declare - as if incontrovertible fact - that writing or talking about 'committing' suicide implies that it is a criminal offence, which was considered in Why can't people write 'commit / committed / commits suicide' ? [from September 2013*].

 The assumption is that, if people were not misled by this language into believing that suicide is still a criminal offence, they would be more free to talk about suicidal ideation. (Yet, at the same time (in some sort of doublethink about life), we almost take for granted that something can be made a criminal act (or decriminalized) by Parliament, and therefore that people are relatively capable of finding out for themselves, if it matters, whether something is or is not punishable by the criminal justice system.)
Which brings us to the following Tweets (about presenting data from 2013) :






End-notes :

 * Amongst other things, a few months earlier, there was the posting Self-killing : the ultimate act of self-harming ?




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Saturday, 21 January 2017

On parental or student choice in education - and, if homeless, the lack of it (even if it compromises choice in education) [work in progress]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 January
Arising from a screening of Half Way (2015), and a Q&A and interview with director Daisy-May Hudson, an outline (work in progress) of how the law on #homelessness affects people

 The law on homelessness is not new, and it changes – as all law does¹.

 Even so, various other changes to policy, over the decades, have worked, alongside the broadly established general principles of who can declare him- or herself homeless, and when, to complicate the effects on such a person and his or her dependants : in Half Way (2015), Daisy Hudson filmed what happened to her mother, thirteen-year-old sister² and her, both to show what happened, and as a way of coming to terms with and coping with it all.



One such way in which the law changed regarding housing, under the Cameron government², was ‘encouraging’ people to move to smaller properties (whether or not those properties actually exist and are available) : this is the so-called ‘under-occupancy charge’ [or #bedroomtax], which might cost a tenant £14 per week for a room that he or she, under the rules that define this ‘charge’, is deemed not to be occupying. Children under a certain age are then supposed to share with each other - or also with their parents - even if they had never done so before, and so their bedrooms, in the property in respect of which Housing Benefit is being paid, became 'under-occupied'.

 Another, starting under Thatcher’s premiership, was when local authorities became obliged to sell off properties, to their tenants and at a discount, from their stock of rented housing, but without, one gathers, being allowed to use the revenues from those sales to build new properties for equivalent rental (those revenues, in any case, did not reflect market values, and might not even – assuming that one already owned the land, etc. – have corresponded with rebuilding costs).


The TAKE ONE (@TakeOneCinema) interview with Daisy Hudson is here



 [...]


 End-notes

¹ Under the law of England and Wales, sometimes through courts interpreting it, to apply it to the cases that come before them (and some of which gives rise to binding case-law), and sometimes through new legislation, which may be to rule out what judges have determined the law to be, or just to change it…

Some changes are said to be needed to revise, update or ‘reform’ the law – their effects, whether or not intended, can profoundly affect people’s lives for the worse, and the notion of ‘reform’ then seems distinctly more like the criminal notion of penal rehabilitation, wrapped up with argument about who deserves, or should pay for, what ?


² At the time when notice is served on Daisy's mother. By the end of the film, Daisy’s sister is 15.

³ Allegedly a coalition – as averted to on Twitter, where he is dubbed #Shameron.




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 6 January 2017

Si, è possibile vendere una città finta !

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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6 January (updated, 27 January)











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Thursday, 5 January 2017

Crash (1996) : thoughts since Cambridge Film Festival 2016 with Jason Wood

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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5 January

Crash (1996) : thoughts since Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) with Jason Wood (@jwoodfilm)







 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday, 4 January 2017

Shoes (who needs 'em ?) : When £40 shoes, unworn, fall apart, and slippers aren't footwear ?

'Shoes ain't what they used to be !'

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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4 January (updated, 5 January)

'Shoes ain't what they used to be !' :









* * * * *


















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Saturday, 31 December 2016

Forty years on, what The Front (1976) tells us...

Responses to The Front (1976) [Woody Allen fronts for black-listed writers]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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New Year's Eve
Some immediate responses to The Front (1976), in which Woody Allen plays Howard Prince, who fronts for writers who have been black-listed under ‘McCarthyism’



With the opening archival montage, and as we hear Sinatra (with ‘Young at Heart’ [Carolyn Leigh / Johnny Richards]), the tone of irony and of dramatic irony¹ is set : deliberately (but only if we stop to ask ourselves what the images that we are seeing depict), a contrast of ostentation, as set against disadvantage…


 Almost at the centre of the film (which goes on to shed insights into the origins of the part of Danny Rose in Broadway Danny Rose (1984)), there is a scene between ‘Hecky’ Brown² (Zero Mostel) and Hennessey (Remak Ramsay), the post of the latter of whom² (whatever is his exact office, which seems to answer callers as 'Freedom Information Service' [suitably Orwellian ?]) effectively influences studios in whom they should consider ‘Unamerican’, and why… :


 Brown : You want me to spy on Howard Prince ?

 Hennessey : We are in a war, Mr Brown, against a ruthless and tricky enemy, who will stop at nothing to destroy our way of life. To be a spy, on the side of freedom, is an honour !

 Brown : And, if I spy on Howard Prince, I can work ?

 Hennessey : I don’t do the hiring, Mr Brown – I only advise about Americanism. But, in my opinion, and as the sign of a true patriot, it would certainly help…

 Brown : (Smiles, and laughs.)






End-notes :

 ¹ Sometimes, we are allowed to congratulate ourselves for seeing in advance what is coming, which helpfully hinders our confidence in our judgement at other times, when we are not granted that privilege. (Irrespective of how meritorious the subject and message of - not unrelatedly - Snowden (2016) may be, the fact that it is lacking in irony, or in putting what we know to good effect with dramatic irony, is a large part of what is so dismally disappointing about the film.)

² IMDb (@IMDb) is, as usual, fairly hopeless on character-names : in the dialogue, we hear Brown’s real name (Herschel Brownstien³, not just this nick-name), and Hennessey has his full name on his desk (Francis Hennessey, with a middle initial of X.⁴), but the web-page for the film, however its information may be gathered (here, just from the closing credits ?), is ignorant of this knowledge, and not to be relied on for it.

³ Except that American pronunciation is notorious for pronouncing a Germanic 'stein' as 'steen'...

⁴ Thereby invoking an Irish-American background and, via the name Francis Xavier (a co-founder of the Society of Jesus), The Spanish Inquisition.

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Tuesday, 27 December 2016

I do in friendship counsel you / To leave this place¹ : A response to Long Forgotten Fields (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 December

This is a Festival response to Long Forgotten Fields (2015) (which was directed by Jon Stanford, and premiered at Raindance Film Festival 2016)


 Featuring what is insightful understanding in, and in showing, whatever is happening to² Sam (Tom Campion), all of it is at the centre of Long Forgotten Fields (2015), but without its being or seeming to be ‘about that', since there are many other connected themes that question the meaning of notions of strength, trust, duty, and loyalty, and how we describe them both to ourselves and to others when we invoked them.

 We are put us straight into the woodland, and then, through his sister, into Sam’s time at home on leave : an embeddedness, in the setting in Shropshire, acts as a tension with what is and becomes reality for Sam, and into which Lily [Rebecca Birch] finds herself entering, and thus becomes – at various levels – complicit...

 Very positively meant, perhaps a little as if Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden (in As You Like It) actually turns out a far worse place than being in the life of a provincial French court, and subject to its ways¹ ? :


And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.

Duke Senior ~ As You Like It, Act II, Scene 1
End-notes :

¹ Le Beau ~ As You Like It, Act I, Scene 2.

² Diagnostic labels, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or schizophrenia, rarely add to the nature of such experience, or the acceptance - or other accommodation - of those who have or see it, because they are reductionist in nature.


Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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A Faustian underpinning to An Affair to Remember (work in progress)

Elements of a Faustian underpinning to An Affair to Remember (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

27 December
Elements of a Faustian underpinning to An Affair to Remember (work in progress)

It is said that An Affair to Remember (1957) closely followed its predecessor Love Affair (1939) : be that as it may, the former was screened at Cary Grant Comes Home for the Weekend Festival (@carycomeshome), in July 2016, so it is the treatment there that is considered¹


It is exactly a quantitative versus a qualitative measure that distinguishes Don Juan / Giovanni [DJ/G] from Faust : DJ/G needs, but can never find, satiety, and so continues desiring and seducing (if the latter is not wholly swallowed up by the former ?), whereas it is more that Faust's palate has become jaded than that he needs [Mephistopheles to allow him] to devour. It appears that, in Faust's sub-lunary perception, everything is mundane, and has lost (or he himself has deprived it of ?) its taste. However, that means that Faust, unlike DJ/G, is at least still capable of feeling, and of making quantitative distinctions - despite his head-bound living, and thereby not valuing putting his talents to good use.

 In an Affair to Remember, Goethe's character of Faust is, vis-à-vis Gretchen and he, telescoped into a number of largely discrete sections, which necessarily hint at Nicolò Ferrante (Cary Grant) as a redeemable figure, such as Goethe has him be (versus, say, Chrisopher Marlowe), but in no way trying 'to flesh out' the whole Faustian background (or even any Mephistophelean pact - Nicki F. is anyone who could be astray in life, not a specific as Faust is) :

1. Time at sea (including, at its core (cuore), the time inland, chez Janou)

 2. The sixth-month time of probation, and what causes it not to terminate

 3. Commencing with Nicki renouncing waiting at the meeting-place, and the resultant voluntary and involuntary (attitudes that lead to) prolongation of the self-imposed separation

 4. Beyond death, and by virtue of another call chez Janou² (with whom Terry also tried to correspond²), and via a chance and awkward encounter (suggestive of each, to the other, a falling-away of their shared promises ?), a bringing-together in and through Janou's gift to Terry, as conveyed by the angry, hurt Nicki



 [...]


End-notes :

 ¹ As it went, it was recalled initially, and faintly, as if it were not itself, but another, very similar film... until one recalled actually having watched this film before (the wonder of cinema ? !).

 ² A reaching-out, beyond themselves, to a kindred spirit.




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