Friday, 16 February 2018

A very strange choice of questions in the #MHAReview survey !

A very strange choice of questions in the #MHAReview survey

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

15 February

A very strange choice of questions in the #MHAReview survey (and my attempts to answer them, without being sectioned) !





Q1. Based on your experience, do you agree or disagree that being sectioned has been the best approach for your mental health needs ? Please explain your answer.

1. Being 'sectioned' is, in itself, a piece of jargon that we do not need - it is worse than when the language was 'committed', or 'certified', and has no objective justification : unless Regulations determine whether, for example, the police can detain a person against his or her will, such a detention will be under some section of an Act of Parliament, but we don't call that 'being sectioned', but (usually) 'arrested'.

 2. Detention against one's will is often not an approach for that person's 'mental health needs', but, usually, to keep someone in an environment that is neither usefully stimulating, nor therapeutic, for the benefit of and away from others (e.g. family or neighbours), until that person 'is better', so I cannot agree that 'sectioning' was for my needs, or implies any approach (good or bad) to them - the existence, nowadays, of crisis resolution and home treatment, which are approaches, and the paucity of places on wards, mean that I would not have been sectioned now.

 3. It was a dehumanizing and degrading experience, and it licenses the use, on patients and regardless of whether they have capacity to consent, with powerful medications whose exact effect is guesswork to those who prescribe them, as is the incidence of very unpleasant side-effects (of which no warning was given) : they may quieten them, but so would psychological interaction, and without badly altering their brain chemistry. It is legalized experimentation with dangerous substances.


Q2. What could have happened differently that could have prevented you from being sectioned ?

1. As mentioned at Q1, the existence of crisis resolution and home treatment services, or the lack of ready availability of psychiatric places, which allowed people to be detained who could clamour for one now, and not be admitted.

 2. Psychiatric services for those who really do need and want them have, unfortunately, been deprived of such funding that the only benefit is that people can no longer be put under detention for so little reason.

 3. In my case, proper psychological engagement with me, as I was, rather than the police-led escalation of my mood, thoughts and fears, would have assisted.


Q3. How would you describe the care you received while sectioned ? This could be either in hospital or a Community Treatment Order.

1. I am not sure that it is correct that one is, as such, sectioned when on a CTO : certain sections and / or certain triggering events may cause a Responsible Clinician to put someone on a CTO, but my understanding is that one cannot say 'while sectioned' to mean on one.

 2. The care was not 'care', but containment. In comparison with even some other wards on the same site, it had a reasonable programme of activities, such as a cooking group, or a so-called 'breaking-out group' (going into the city under escort of 2-3 nursing staff). Other activities were more patronizing, such as being given time to make a piece of art, but then have to have someone supposedly analyse it / one through it, or the community meeting (which I avoided, after being at it once). Asking for an hour's ground leave and walking around the grounds was best.

 3. None of this was 'care'. One was indoctrinated with some medicalized account of one's self, and obliged to take medication (haloperidol) - this felt more like punishment for what one was not meant to think / have thought, with constipation, stiff and awkward arms and legs, painful neck-cramps. All depersonalizing, humiliating and taking away any status that one had in the name of psychiatry.


Q4. In your experience, what are the most important things that can help people stay well following discharge, and reduce the need to be sectioned again in future ?

1. The 'need to be sectioned' proved to be tied to finances - when funding for mental-health services became curtailed, it became less likely that anyone with my experiences (20+ yrs ago) would be sectioned.

 2. Nonetheless, the important less that being 'sectioned' teaches a former detainee is to behave in such a way that psychiatrists lose interest and discharge him or her. Then, despite a mind that has almost certainly been damaged in the way that the nonsense about 'chemical imbalance' claimed justified one's detention, take sufficient medication to control behaviour that attracts others' attention.

 3. For those who were desperate to be discharged (and did not just outright refuse to agree to the terms of Supervised Community Treatment, because then a so-called Community Treatment Order would be impossible to make), it will not be the CTO - no evidence of that whatever.

 4. The 'need to be sectioned' - there is no such need, because it is driven by societal and family pressure, but only as long as there is money for it.


Q5. Do you feel you were treated with dignity and respect ?

As a person who was twice detained against his will ? Absolutely not !

 Put on section 2 on c. 21 April 1996, the consultant did not even have the decency to tell me that she had taken me off the section - for years, until I saw my records, I thought that she had just let it expire.

 Detention under section is one of the most humiliating and degrading experiences of my life - that is the true answer to Q5, that, apart from the GP's stupid 'experiment' of continuing me without medication after an abrupt week-long withdrawal (as I had no tablets, and he decided not to prescribe), which saw a re-admission in January 1997, I had no intention, after that, of going back to hospital again for more dehumanizing and status-less time there.


Q6. Where relevant, do you feel your carers (e.g. family or friends supporting you while you were sectioned) were treated with dignity and respect ?

More so than I was. I was only taken off haloperidol, during the first admission, when my somewhat hard-hearted wife, obsessed with how her life had changed, pleaded for me.

 During the second admission (January 1997), she agreed to apply for me to be discharged from my section (section 3) - that, as I only established from the records, appeared to have been blocked within the period of 72h, but, again, there was zero transparency as to what had happened.

 Besides, my wife was not a carer - she was a prime cause of the behaviour that was diagnosed as supposed mental illness.


Q7. What rights do you think a person sectioned under the Mental Health Act should have ?

1. They should have the rights that the Act already gives them - not available, in my experience.


 2. A curiously open-ended question, but, certainly :

(a) the right to a full assessment of capacity to consent to treatment in compliance with the Mental Capacity Act ;

 (b) based on being found to have capacity, the right to refuse treatment ;

 (c) the right, again with capacity or based on a relevant advance directive, to refuse ECT, and not for there to be a deemed lack of capacity or an 'emergency' need for ECT ;

 (d) not to be put on a CTO (and for all existing CTOs to be discharged), failing which explicit rights to an IHMA when a CTO falls to be considered and to be told of the right to refuse to agree the terms of a CTO and the consequences of so doing ;

 (e) the right to much better than the tokenistic 'reading of rights' that patients are given, by staff who do not believe that someone detained against his or her will has any rights ;

 (f) an easier way than displacing a nearest relative to have that a person of one's choice ;

 (g) right to a second opinion ;

 (h) better protection against ill-treatment than under s. 127 (has anyone ever been prosecuted successfully ?).


Q8. What rights do you think a carer (e.g. family and friend) sectioned under the Mental Health Act should have ?

 They have too many rights as it is, e.g. to request a Mental Health Act assessment. Carers are often not the people whom those for whom they claim to care would choose, and the balance is too far in favour of abusers, who take away others' peace of mind, or even apparent sanity.


Q9. If you could change one aspect of the Mental Health Act, what would you change ?

 It must be that, irrationally, it overrides people's capacity to refuse treatment (i.e. forced medication) for their alleged mental ill-health, but the very same people, with capacity to consent to treatment for a cancer or other such condition that will kill them (and a consultant in that field would be absolutely bound by their advance directive, if they lacked capacity, for such treatment, or to require them not to be resuscitated) - so much for parity of esteem !

 (A close-run thing with the unnecessary involvement of the police, which makes people confuse their psychiatric detention with the criminal-justice system - e.g. returning 'absconding' patients, or under s. 136.)


Q10. Is there anything else you would like to tell us ?

The power of others to put people, either supposedly out of concern for them, or - as neighbours or as family members - by complaining about them or alleging being in fear of them, into a coercive environment that is unlikely to be therapeutic should be reduced / redressed in favour of those detained against their will.

 How much has really been understood since, or changed because of, Placed Amongst Strangers [www.mentalhealthalliance.org.uk/pre2007/documents/placedamongststrangers.pdf] ?


[...]


Q16. Do you know which section(s) of the Mental Health Act you were sectioned under ?

Yes :

 April 1996 - s. 2

 January 1997 - initially informal, then a s. 4 holding power was used* when - peaceably - I decided that I wanted to go back to the ward where I had been admitted overnight, and six staff used face-down restraint on me, I was taken back in, sedated, and put onto s. 3


End-notes :

 It looks as though that should have been s. 5, in fact :









Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Sunday, 11 February 2018

PIP application : Mandatory reconsideration - My letter to the DWP (as copied to Heidi Allen MP)

My letter to the DWP about PIP (as copied to Heidi Allen MP)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

PIP application : Mandatory reconsideration - My letter to the DWP
(as copied to Heidi Allen MP)
[Address redacted – as
further redactions are noted]
Personal Independence Payment [X]
Post Handling Site [Z]
[Town
Postcode]

21 December 2017
Dear Sirs

 [Redacted : name – date of birth – National Insurance no.]
PIP application : Mandatory reconsideration

 I write further to your letter dated 6 December, whose box was too small to give many and varied reasons why a mandatory reconsideration should make a different decision from that dated 18 November (which, probably over-elaborating*, I am attempting to set out in the separate document enclosed – this and it are watermarked with my name and NI number, in case any pages become detached).

 In addition, I was due to see Dr [X], my usual GP at [Z] Surgery, on Friday 15 December, and I write in the light of seeing him and his agreeing to write to you in support. (However, I believe (from having contacted the surgery’s reception), that he has still to complete and send his report.)

 I enclose, therefore, my detailed submissions (with reasons) why the decision should be reconsidered in my favour (awarding me at least the Standard rate for Daily Living), together with a copy of an annotated version of the letter dated 12 October 2016 that I received from [Z] Partnership (NHS) Foundation Trust (ZPFT). As mentioned further in those submissions, I discussed the letter with Dr [X] near the time, to decide with him whether it was worth my while to try to push to be granted a service more similar to what I had asked for. (An unannotated copy of the original of this letter was shown and given to the assessor, but it is not listed, and likewise others, on the Consultation report form PA4, on page 1 – ‘all evidence considered’.)
Recent chronology :

 * Monday 6 November – appointment with Dr [X], who had not been asked for a report, and who read and then was supplied with copies of the PIP application form (in readiness)

 * Tuesday 7 November – the postponed medical assessment in [Z] (after one had been cancelled on the day)

 * Saturday 18 November – date of decision (which was slow to arrive [sc. because the DWP bulk-uses a private co., UK Mail, which then provides it to Royal Mail to be delivered with the ordinary stamped or franked post])

 * Monday 27 November – called DWP (on [no.]), and spoke to [Y], with whom an hour-long telephone conversation ensued (for a summary of the essential points of which, please see below)
To begin with, I set out the following matters in this covering letter as being, in my opinion, of general application, and so – by copying this letter to my MP, Heidi Allen, by e-mail – I am asking for her to raise them with the relevant Minister(s) of HM government. I do so on behalf of all who have – on the phased ceasing of DLA (Disability Living Allowance), which is itself an inequity (although one from which I have benefited, by not having to go through this process before this date) – been obliged either to forgo such a payment, or apply ‘to transfer to’ PIP (Personal Independence Payment). There are also those who, unwittingly, freely choose to apply, but with inadequate information.

 On 27 November, I made the phone-call, as it seemed implausible that Dr [X] could have been asked to write and have written a report in the timescale given above, i.e. an assessment on Tuesday 7 November, and the decision already made and sent out on the second Saturday succeeding it (18 November). As I told [X], the DWP representative to whom I spoke, the decision had been skimmed through, but it did not appear to mention a report from Dr [X]. She confirmed that none had been asked for, and that – with a discretion whether to do so – Independent Assessment Services (though still not wholly effective in a name-change from Atos) – usually do not request one (or words to that effect – she may have said ‘normally’, or ‘ask for’).
On my own behalf, and having had to seek to assist clients […], I knew that the application form for other welfare benefits preceding PIP (e.g. DLA, or even IB (Incapacity Benefit)) contained the same sort of boxes for name, address, telephone number, etc., of health and other professionals. However, there was the legitimate expectation, because of what the practice was, that medical reports would be obtained, by or on behalf of the DWP – i.e. as part of the process of (re)applying for the benefit.

 In other words, as an individual, the claimant did not previously have to arrange for this to happen – obviously, any existing medical evidence, in letters or reports, could be submitted, but he or she did not have to commission his or her own up-to-date report (and meet any fee for writing it ?). Such existing reports were anyway unlikely to address the specific day-to-day needs in the way that those application forms asked for (or that for PIP now does) : the objectiveness of the assessment is supposedly predicated on its descriptors and corresponding points (as against wordings to fit into under the criteria for DLA, mobility and care components), but assessors, in a rather facile way, pick on what is evident and undeniable to them. (For example, how I am described, at the top of page 10 of the form PA4, under ‘General appearance and Informal Observations’ – one is credited for some of what one says by what the assessor can observe or witness, but not for others.)

 The fact that this is even so is an inequity, both for those less confident of being able to persuade a reluctant, because busy, GP or specialist to write a report – as against a request by or for the purposes of the DWP, which carries official weight – and / or for those without the means to pay for one (de facto they are, after all, applying for welfare benefits).
1. The DWP sends out a fact-sheet that (starting with returning the form) leads up to information about the medical assessment, and refers to the role of Atos. However, as I wish to point out to Ms Allen, as my MP (and for everyone’s benefit), it needs to be absolutely explicit : in this benefit application (unlike others that a claimant may have made, before PIP), the onus has now actually been put on the claimant to obtain – if it does not already exist, in current written form – any additional evidence or information from the professionals who support you that explains how your condition or disability affects your daily life. (Also enclosed, attached to this letter, is a copy of that fact-sheet, where I have marked the sections that I am quoting.)
2. At some level, that may seem clear enough, but the following sentences (after skipping the next one) must be read as well : Please send the most recent evidence you have that shows how your ability to carry out the activities we ask about in the form are affected by your condition or disability. Only send in photocopies of things you already have available to you [my emphasis]. (On the reverse of the sheet (under ‘Evidence that will help us to assess your PIP claim’), it even refers to what will assist a claim (Reports about you from […], followed by a list of eight types of professional, including GPs, consultants (‘hospital doctors’), and physiotherapists.)


 3. Arguably, when coupled with the following factors, it is not clear enough to anyone making an application that reports will not be asked for, but that they are likely to be needful (please see para. 4, below) :

 (a) The fact that the initial application for PIP takes place by telephone, and therefore the DWP could take responsibility – in that call – for being plain with claimants that Atos (as [Y] informed me on 27 November) use their discretion and, by and large, do not request reports (or even tell claimants that they have not requested them),

 (b) At odds with what I was told by [Y], the fact-sheet goes on to say (under ‘What Happens Next ?’), when the claim has been passed to the assessment providers (i.e. Atos), They may ask the professionals who support you for extra information if they need it, and

 (c) Somewhere, between the DWP and Atos, any fee that might have been paid to GPs or others to write reports that were previously requested directly has then probably been pushed in the direction of the claimants (although, by definition, they are applying for welfare benefits), as well as putting on them as patients, etc., the task of trying to get someone to write reports (unlike a GP, etc., having a formal request from, say, the DWP)
4. If all of that is the case, and if it were also fair and right for it be so, it cannot be fair or right not to spell out to claimants, when they make the telephone application, that they have to commission (and pay for) the reports that may assist their claim, i.e. a reasoned account from a professional that explains how your condition or disability affects your daily life. Unless a claimant has had a needs-led assessment, or input from an occupational therapist, it is not likely that a report will happen to cover his or her ability to carry out the activities we ask about in the form (ten activities for Daily Living, plus two for Mobility).
5. Unlike in my case (where I was being obliged to make a claim for PIP by a specified date, because DLA would otherwise just finish), someone who did not want to be rushed with an important application (as it is by definition intended to try to make their life better financially), could then exercise the decision to delay making it – to have the best chance possible with it, by giving him or her time to obtain a report (and, additionally, the funds for any payment for writing it). In such a case, that person should properly be told, at that stage, what position he or she is in, because, by delaying making the application until he or she knew that a report was going to be available (and what cost would be incurred), the chances of successfully claiming would be increased.


Conclusion

 I can therefore see no reason why that is not an important and mandatory element, in the early part of the call (before starting the application itself), when someone telephones to make an application for PIP (or in the information sent out). It should then be followed up with an absolutely clear written statement of the same (whether or not, in that same call, the potential claimant proceeds with completing the application process).
In the enclosed submissions (which have taken me, on and off, since around 8 December (or before)), I turn to the particular matters raised by my own case – the PIP decision dated 18 November, and the Consultation report form (PA4), dated 7 November, on which it is based. As mentioned above, I also refer to the annotated letter dated 12 October 2016 from ZPFT (Z Partnership (NHS) Foundation Trust) (the original of which was sent in with my application for PIP, and referred to in the assessment, but not acknowledged on page 1 of the PA4), and one of the DWP fact-sheet (attached hereto).
Please acknowledge safe receipt of this letter and its enclosures. I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours faithfully

[Claimant]

 cc Heidi Allen, MP (via heidi.allen.mp@parliament.uk only)
* As shown by the appended e-mail exchange, I had been waiting to hear from [X] (at [Z] Council, and who met me to complete the PIP application, in her handwriting, but with my answers). When I did receive this e-mail, and then sent her what I was then working on here (and in the enclosure), I seemed to have no reply from her, so I have had to press on, without her assistance :
Appended e-mail correspondence

 RE: PIP decision
Thu, 14 Dec 2017 9:37
[Sender]
To [Claimant]

 Apologies for the delay. Please send over your response and I will be happy to ‘edit’ if necessary

From: [Claimant]
Sent: 10 December 2017 22:20
To: [Recipient]
Subject: PIP decision

 10 December 2017

Dear [X]

 After you helped me with the PIP application form, and I then managed to avoid having to go to [Z] (and getting stressed in a place that I barely know - though, oddly, that is so narrowly defined in the descriptors for 'Making and following a journey'), I forgot about your covering letter, when you posted me the scanned form.

 It re-emerged, when I was looking for the copy PIP form earlier to-day. An appointment, in [Z], was cancelled on the day, when my friend [/ …] and I had already arrived. They let us rebook it for Tuesday 7 November, and they issued the decision really quickly - I had seen my GP on the day before the appointment, shown him the forms and the descriptors (as he had not been asked to write a report), and made him copies of them.

 When I got the decision (dated 18 November), I did at least receive 6pts (but still 2pts short), and I was quickly on the phone to them for an hour, berating them that, when they know that people want their medical evidence considered, they (or the assessors) do not even tell people whether the assessors used their discretion about whether to request it (apparently, they do not normally request it).

 Which means that the claimant is unaware that it will not be to hand at the time of the assessment. That is just wrong, when their decision claims 'This information is the best we have available...'. I said that I would complain to my MP, and that the DWP - commissioning the assessment services - cannot claim not to know what is in their standard letters to claimants. What do you think ?

 I am writing something to argue myself up the necessary 2pts. Would you be willing to take a look, to temper the enthusiasm of someone arguing his own case, when I have finished ?

 I am seeing the GP on Friday - they are giving him till 25 December to write in support.
Best wishes for Christmas
[Claimant]




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday, 7 February 2018

Watching early Wes Anderson I

A first-time response to Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket (1996)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

7 February

A first-time response to Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket (1996) - co-written with Owen C. Wilson (Dignan in the film)






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Tuesday, 6 February 2018

Brief, note-like observations on London Voices in Stockhausen’s Stimmung at King's

Brief, note-like observations on London Voices in Stockhausen’s Stimmung at King's

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

15 October 2015
Some brief observations, in note form, on a performance by members of London Voices of Stockhausen’s Stimmung, which opened Epiphany Through Music (for Concert's at King's) in King’s College Chapel on Friday 9 October 2015 at 8.00 p.m.





These are some things, external to the work, of which one was reminded (in no particular order) :

 * R. D. Laing’s lovely little book Conversations with Children

 * György Kurtág’s Jelek, játékok és üzenetek [Signs, Games, and Messages]

 * The parlour-game that is familiar under the name Apostles, but may go by other names :




Now seeing this piece, in live performance, felt crucial, and so it was excellent to have an almost unimpeded view of everyone in London Voices (London Voices) with the exception of Ben Parry, because it helped tease these other observations out of the ninety minutes (by which time, performers looked no more comfortable* than the audience, who could not both easily and quietly shift on the chairs of the ante-chapel…), being the work’s following elements and how they intermeshed / interwove (also in no special order) :

 * Play / playfulness

 * Bird-notes

 * Fringe-effects

* Whistling

 * Singspiel, with a link to

 * Cabaret-style delivery






'Magic' words (here are some prominent ones, and phrases, that were noted in the performance) :

 * Elohim

 * Saturday

 * Utterly silly

 * Go away, Thursday

 * Artemis

 * Diana

 * Nemesis





If a copy of Samuel Beckettt's novel Watt had come to hand to quote from, one would preface 'the following important material' in the same way that Watt and / or he does what appears in the closing pages of the book, after its four chapters :


Full Monteverdi - coming out of the audience
Keeping the flame / Apple Mac drone
1968 / not hippie

 Kreis / circle

 Meine Hände sind zwei Glocken binge bung auf Deinen Brüsten bringe brange bring brang…

 3 x 17 / Vespers of 1610 – coherence / disconnection ?

 Rounds
Theatricality
Per-form(ers)


End-notes

 * As one could see, from a few grimaces, when the performers from London Voices rose to take rapturous applause.


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Wednesday, 31 January 2018

All kinds of cats - because (amongst others) Max Reinhardt [@imaxreinhardt] is such a #LateJunction cool cat

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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31 January







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Monday, 29 January 2018

A pretty amazing life, living out one's dream of working in Africa with animals... (work in progress)

This is a short review of Jane (2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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29 January

This is a short review of Jane (2017)




 For once, no more Tweets in this review – as they actually lengthen the process – and even a vague attempt at a nod in @everyfilmneil's style of reviewing in the approach here...

* Disambiguated by IMDb (@IMDb) as Jane (II) (2017), the film is first and foremost about Jane Goodall's work (and life).

* A little in the way, say, that Iris (2015) treats of Iris Apfel* (though she is very much less likeable, quite apart from the question what she has to offer the world), Jane gives us Jane Goodall as a woman who made her way in the world - in her own words (however chosen - please see below), it is she who narrates her own path to the chimpanzees of Gombe (in Tanzania).

* There is much to value here, but, from the perspective of what a documentary that depends so heavily on archival material can and should do (i.e. given the standards of the work of the best of such film-makers*), there must be some caveats.

* Primarily, the film unnecessarily was allowed to show us so much of the rediscovered historical footage far ahead of our knowing how it came into existence [Jane's future husband, Hugo van Lawick, shot it]. As a result, because of questions of its quality, content and how it was even in being**, it ran in such a way that thoughts of gratuitously and highly posed reconstruction kept distractingly presenting themselves as to how it had come into being - which, of course and on one level, it is, but filmed with the patent fondness of a marital partner(-to-be).

* Yet, for those in the know about Jane Goodall (and maybe less bothered about how a film is made and / or a cinematic story told), this would not have been a problem... except that, particularly in the case of a documentary that goes back and, as the opening titles say, re-establishes someone's credentials (and also presents an idea of the sexist reporting that was used to undermine them), a documentary needs to stand on its own two feet, not what one is assumed to know ?

* Unfortunately, the use of high-speed animated note-books, survey-sheets and graphical presentation of data really does the significance of Goodall's work a disservice - by tokenistically demonstrating the volume of what was being done, but only really for no better reason than as a visual interlude - and so, contrary to the message, tending to appear to trivialize*** the research, with which the film (except as mediated by Jane's words, and so about her in relation to her studies) has no intention of engaging with at any real level / depth (despite The National Geographic name on the film).

 * One should have guessed that, of The Rhymicisists (as these pages call practitioners in and of 'minimalism'), the irritatingly restless arpeggiation had to be that of Philip Glass - not his fault that, being too high in the mix, his score tended to drown the voice-over in the central part of Jane, but his, in not his best film-score, for sounding too often like Michael Nyman, writing indifferently, and not like himself on form. (Again, it did not help that one was on such high alert about what one was being shown that it affected how one received what was heard.)

* In various set-ups, seemingly contrived for the purposes of this film, Jane Goodall appeared and answered questions to camera. However, they did not seem to be the best questions, or, if these were the best answers so elicited, a different approach should have been taken.

* Some material (however selected – that could not be established, as each screen of the credits flicked by, but it was said to be from her writings) was read by [someone who sounded like]
[...]


End-notes :

* Or Mavis ! (2015), rather conventionally, of the career of Mavis Staples : just compare with Jeanie Finlay’s (@JeanieFinlay's) Orion : The Man Who Would Be King (2015), or Janis : Little Girl Blue (2015).

** In addition, other footage - as things such as picture-quality and style of filming indicated - originated from other sources.

*** Does it seem to send a patronizingly wrong message, i.e. 'Look, a woman doing all this !'


Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 27 January 2018

A thread about the films that start with The Matrix (1999)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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27 January





[...]




Meanwhile, there is Jimmy Brians's review, as posted on YouTube...








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Friday, 26 January 2018

Looks like we've got a war on our hands ~ William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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26 January

This is a response to Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)


Wes Anderson simply directs us in such a way that he has no need to show us the territory of Moonrise Kingdom (2012) on a map for us to know that it is representational, rather than actual - whereas, in a film that is not without other relevance, it is unhelpfully obvious to any attempt to read The Dressmaker (2015) literally that what is shown has scant sense of being a real place* [though this, for some clear reasons, is also not Dogville (2003)].



However, one believes that there are better grounds for abandoning any pretence that Kate Winslet (Tilly Dunnage), returning to her mother Molly (Judy Davis), is not just a revenge-romp (if one that is dusted down with touches of fairy tale and cod psychology). In Billboards, invoking such fictions as 'When they diverted the highway' causes one to think of Psycho (1960), rather - excellently entertaining though it is – than of Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent : Travels in Small-Town America, but perhaps writer / director Martin McDonagh desires to operate on both levels ?

All this anger begets anger ~ Penelope (Samara Weaving)

If it were actually the premise of the film, it was pretty obvious from the title what the billboards would be doing. Even in terms of believing in the film and / or being asked to believe in what the film shows, likewise pinning too much (pun intended) on them cannot be done in literal terms** : people misquote what Hitchcock meant when talking about a MacGuffin, but, in that extended sense, the billboards certainly are one.

 Or, rather, they patently are one, but McDonagh will have it that they are not one...








Some film-references :

 * Calvary (2014)

 * The Dressmaker (2015)

 * The Hairdresser's Husband (Le mari de la coiffeuse) (1990)




End-notes :

* According to Wikipedia®, the closest that we get with Billboards is Ebb, ‘an extinct town in St. Clair County, in the U. S. state of Missouri’.

** For example, as if although (and because) not rented out for the lengthy period of time found in the records of Ebbing Advertising Co. (and despite the obvious dilapidation [if one can have it, of something made of wood, not stone...] of the billboards themselves), the cogency of the installation is not going to need checking and repair before the resumption of an electrical supply. The conceit simply will not bear thinking of thus in those terms, if one had to imagine what would be an appropriate rental (rather than a figure and cash on the desk).




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 15 January 2018

The trouble about these Hollywood dames ~ Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart) (work in progress)

A response (work in progress) to In a Lonely Place (1950) ~ Bogart and Grahame

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

15 January
On first viewing Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (1950) (work in progress), as screened at Saffron Screen, on Monday 15 January 2018 at 8.00 p.m. (in the restored form from 1977)



Multiply, despite a police Captain who [says that he] has a microphone that is set up to record interviews, the film treats contamination of evidence (or even whether the matter is relevant) as if it is no part of its remit, or within its purview. Whereas it is sufficiently clear that even an innocent person, suspected of a crime (let alone one with a sizeable dossier at police HQ), will not, for the moment, want to act in a way that openly calls into question the independence of someone who claims to be a witness. (No more so than the police themselves will want there to be such an opportunity for embellishment of the evidence and / or for another witness 'to be found' ?)

If Peter Bradshaw (@PeterBradshaw1) is right that it falls to consider In a Lonely Place in the category of noir, then maybe such a flavour of the inauthentic that pervades everything is apt – or, contrariwise, maybe it is a reaction to a film that seems to aim at being plausible, but where so much remarkably does not succeed in giving that impression, that, as its saving grace, we invoke the concept of film noir ?




Attribute to Grahame’s character Laurel that she has seen it all before (with Mr Baker)*, or that Humphrey Bogart is a case, before the diagnosis existed (or before Taxi Driver (1976)), of post-traumatic stress disorder, but :

 * Roger O. Thornhill (Cary again, with Hitchcock in North by NorthWest (1959)) is far more alarmed, though wildly drunk, by having been set behind the wheel of a car than Grahame as passenger – we see the vehicle objectively career, and also from the driver / passenger point of view - on one heck of a ride (we should either not have been shown that at all, or, if we are not intended to withdraw our belief, Grahame has not to react as if this is quite usual driving)

 * As Adam Feinstein made a very case for, at Cambridge Film Festival 2016, Michael Curtiz did some unjustly neglected work with The Breaking Point (1950), and not just in Casablanca (1942) (with this film’s male lead and Bergman) :



* This film just shows why Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur (2011) was really so conventional (it felt as if, without acknowledging it, it was importing Peter Mullan from Ken Loach / Paul Laverty’s My Name is Joe (1998) ?)


All of which is calling out for some other film-references (assembling here, in alphabetical order) :

* The Artist (2011)

* Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (2017)

* Mulholland Drive [Dr.] (2001)

* […]


End-notes :

 * But Laurel doesn’t seem to have the signs of having seen it all before even of Audrey Hepburn, as Holly Golightly, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) (even though, obviously, the oral sex in the gents is mightily toned down from what Truman Capote wrote – fancifully, although collected with three other stories in a slim volume, IMDb calls it ‘a novel’…)




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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We ? Who the hell are we to think that we're suddenly special ? (work in progress)!

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

This accreting load of twaddle is Our mistaken notions, in twenty-first-century Western so-called society, that we are all individuals – rather than just another batch of conformists














Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Sunday, 14 January 2018

Some comments on Molly’s Game (2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 January
Some comments on Molly’s Game (2017) (watched at The Light Cinema, Cambridge, on Wednesday 10 January 2018)






 When not supposedly being both therapist and self-critical father, Larry Bloom is otherwise shown as a beastly father, ignoring his wife’s pleas for Molly, and invoking the word weak as an alleged synonym for tired : perfectly psychologically reasonable, then, that both Player X (Michael Cera) and, before him, Dean Keith (Jeremy Strong), prove dangerously attractive as the types of character who like to crush others (even if it can also be personally costly to know them).


[...]


Post-script :








 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 11 January 2018

Two laundromats near Staines, formerly Middlesex (in production)

Some premonitions, prognostications and precautions about the promise of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

11 January
Some premonitions, prognostications and precautions about the promise of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)



It is almost cunning that we are reminded that it is the writer and director of In Bruges (2008), and not - for some reason - of Seven Psychopaths (2012)

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday, 9 January 2018

Three Tweets about Bound (1996) [by The Wachowskis]

Three Tweets about Bound (1996) [by The Wachowskis]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 January

Three Tweets about Bound (1996) [by The Wachowskis]








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