Rocket-launchers and The Middle East

A rating / Festival review of The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012)

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@THEAGENTAPSLEY Crikey, that is intense. I just thought the space race bit was overblown but I will leave the intellectual argument to you.
— neil white (@everyfilmdteled) November 3, 2013

54 = N : 10 / M : 8 / C1 : 11 / C2 : 7 / E : 11 / F : 7

A rating / Festival review of The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012)

N = narration / script

M = material / use of material

C1 = cinematography

C2 = cohesiveness

E = effects / music

F = feel


9 = mid-point of scale (all  scores out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)



The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012) is a curious film : as if it were not enough to have the achievements of that society commemorated in the film by a scale-model erected at Haigazian University (formerly College), it goes on to end (Disjunction 4) with an animation, which imagines (counterfactually) that the society went on, and continued where the Voyager mission left off, with gold discs sent into space. (Reasons are given why the society became part of the military, and was later closed down : an international incident concerning Cyprus; an accident when propellant was being mixed; and pressure from the French government, amongst others.)

Maybe this animation did not originally belong with the film (I can easily conceive of it as a quite separate celebratory screening on Lebanese t.v.), or maybe it would have been better as a fantasy beginning to the film, rather than the voice of the film-makers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, saying, in a puzzled voice, that they were born in the months either side of the Apollo Moon landings, so how did they never hear about this rocket society ?

In fact, I am told, they said to Professor Manoug Marougian (who led the society until he went back to Texas in 1968, not wishing, he said, to be drawn in by other interested powers) that they had first seen the commemorative postage-stamps (only mentioned later, and not, as I recall, shown), and had wanted to find out more. At the outset, then, these seemed something dressed up about visits to archives that had empty film-cans, and very little footage, and about the whole notion of just tracking down Professor Manougian (in Tampa, Florida) and forthwith going to see him (Disjunction 1).

If you can bear that they would have been in contact after Google and before going, and so would have known already what he had kept and handed over to them, then so good, but it seems a bit too much like a telling a story to an uninqusitive child. On the other hand, showing that what Google Images came up for 'Lebanese rocket' were not space rockets did make the point that no one was remembering rockets in those terms. What Manougian did not appear to have to hand over was all the footage that had been absent so far, and the film simply abandoned the idea of looking for the materials for simply presenting and explaining them as if it were self evident how Joreige and Hadjithomas had come by them (Disjunction 2).

At the time when the chronological story has been more or less told (Disjunction 3), we learn of the scale-model, and that the owner of the factory making it is nervous, in case permissions were needed to create something that looks like a rocket. In terms of us watching the film, we have no notion of how it has not been thought to obtain these permissions (not least if others had been funding it), and again, feeling a little false, we are shown top government officials (before the government falls) agreeing on screen to grant them (or that they are not needed).

Then the very impressive installation of the model rocket, which was supposed to be carried to the former launch-site on the coast and from there to the university (but of which, with no explanation, we only see the latter), and the final disjunction (already mentioned). The film did not need all these stages, but it seemed unwilling to tell any part of the story slowly and in full, and concentrated too much information - too much intense reading of subtitles - in the short period after the film-makers have met Professor Manougian.


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

Dangerous Mozart pleases audiences

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23 October

To-night, the first concert in @AAMorchestra's Cambridge season, complete with Alina Ibragimova and, no doubt, much fine playing...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 23, 2013

The Academy of Ancient Music’s (@AAMorchestra’s) concert at West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge (@WestRoadCH) fell into a half of early to mid-period Haydn (a concerto, then a symphony – Haydn was apparently unable to compose beyond 1802, but lived until 1809) and one of very early Mozart (symphony, concerto), opening in a stately Allegro moderato under violinist Alina Ibragimova’s direction in Haydn's Violin Concerto No. 1 in C Major Hob. VIIA : 1 (which the programme variously dates to (contents page) c. 1769 and (notes by Stephen Rose) the early 1760s).

Haydn, as with many a composer, sounds different when writing a concerto from a symphony, and this work reminded me of one of his Cello Concertos (No. 1 in C Major (Hob. VIIB : 1, which seems to be thought written between 1761 and 1765)) for its spacious character. At any rate, the notes tell us that Luigi Tomasini, leader of the orchestra at the Esterházy court, was the soloist for whom the concerto for violin was written, but it could have been written for Ibragimova, who made an imperious gesture in the opening phrase of her solo part, which then gave way to a sublime graciousness that pervaded the first movement.

In pieces from this period, we almost have, in sonata form, the same delight as in the da capo aria, of being reminded music from earlier on, and hearing it anew in its thematic context (although the programme notes tell me that this is more like a Baroque ritornello) : the effect was, at any rate, of somehow simultaneously slowing down and accelerating our sense of progression under Ibragimova’s direction, and she appeared not to be using written-out cadenzas, but gently meditating on the foregoing material.

In the slow movement, Ibragimova was given a full chance to demonstrate her singing string-tone, and the strings had a clockwork-like pizzicato, reminiscent of Vivaldi (those concertos), and brilliantly executed. Exploiting the purity of the upper register of her instrument, and using a lovely piano contrast, Haydn and she charmed us in this Adagio, and prepared us for the Presto finale, which, seemingly with a cognate theme to that of the first movement, had a pleasing sense of inevitability as it worked its way through to a sonorous close.

That same quality of togetherness, under the directorship from the violin of Pavlo Beznosiuk, marked the opening theme of Haydn’s Symphony No. 45 in F Sharp Major, to which the account attaches that it was his protest on behalf of the court musicians at the prospect, in late 1772, of the court at Esterházy staying there beyond the usual October till December. There are momentary bars of repose from that theme’s demands, but they are only momentary, and they built up a sense of longing.

We were then brought, in the long Adagio, to what seemed the emotional heart of the piece, with its well-captured reflective mood seeming to evoke a place for cognition, and subtle horn tones that enhanced this impression. In the shorter Menuet and Trio, a falling four-note motif was evident, which again gave an emotional pull to the music, as it moved towards the finale, marked Presto – Adagio.

The sonority that marked the first tempo was gradually waning in that of the second, since, in pairs, the instrumentalists were leaving the stage (say, second horn with principal oboe), enacting what happened at the first performance, until just Tomasini and Haydn were left : Haydn has a reputation both for his sense of humour (his ‘Surprise’ symphony, for example, or that string quartet that always catches me out), and for having influence with his royal master, but one does not know what risk he had been taking. AAM took none, only prisoners for its sensitive playing.


After the interval, a work of teenage years by Mozart (from 1770), was paired with one of his later - but still early - violin concertos, proving that we are wrong to match one of these concerto works with a later symphony. Hearing the Symphony No. 1 in G Major was not just an educational exercise, but helped reveal the building-blocks from which, more seamlessly, the composer was to construct his more mature style, such as a four-note motif in which the next note went up, then back, then down.

Listening to the thought-out playing of these two movements, again under the direction of Beznosiuk, there were hints of what was to come in the concerto, with a gesture of a heavily accented note on the strings, and then repeated notes. It came across wonderfully as a different sound-world already from that of ‘Papa’ Haydn, though written at the same time as his works.

• Alina Ibragimova : a mixture of total abandonment and total control that is in no way contradictory (The Times)

I thought that I knew Mozart’s co-called Turkish concerto, the Concerto for Violin No. 5 in A Major (1775, when Mozart was but 19, Haydn 43) but this interpretation caused me to experience it anew. After the preceding symphony, as I have said, I was better placed to spot the use of pairs of falling notes, noticing the structural elements, but finding how the music is much more than them, and it does not hurt to know that they are there.

At times bending towards the music-stand, and seeming usually to be in motion between the divided first and second violins, there was a physical feeling of freedom in Ibragimova and her flowing dress that matched her musical inventiveness, and the impression that the orchestra had really warmed to her leadership and performance. In the Adagio, an initial geniality of mood gave way to a sense of things becoming fluid, but, concurrently, of time standing still, as if the music were flowing directly from Mozart’s own bow.

In the Rondeau finale, she gave us ‘slapped’ notes in the strings that would not have been out of place in Bartók’s middle quartets (which, of course, she plays, but I do not know about techniques contemporary to Haydn), and a barbarity and a rawness of tone in the Turkish theme that made it feel fresh and new. In the true nature of such a movement, we also had a sense of play in not knowing where we were at an end, with its familiar unflashy ending, but the audience was in no doubt about how this piece was received :

Ibragimova came back for an encore, which I am told by AAM’s Michael Garvey, its chief executive, was the slow movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 6 in D Major (nicknamed ‘Le Matin’), which not only had a note of leave-taking about it, but also a phrase of wildly abundant expression from our soloist, only matched by the reception from those around me.

Garvey tells me that, after three performances in Italy, AAM is at a new venue for it in London, Milton Court Concert Hall, and then off for a fortnight to tour Australia. A good chance for many others to hear this nicely put-together programme !


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Mental-health in-fighting

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22 October

There is a well-worn claim that a person with an experience of schizophrenia is called a schizophrenic, whereas a person who has cancer is not called a cancerist.

But we do call people diabetics, haemophiliacs, coeliacs, hypochondriacs, hysterics, alcoholics, etc., and half of those nouns relate to physical conditions.

Yes, it is nicer not 'to define someone' by reference to their health, but the cancer argument employed is a bogus one, not least since I believe that people do sometimes relate to hearing that someone has cancer on an irrational level, of its being karma / punishment, or as if the cancer is infectious, or the person can no longer be related to as a person, but as only a substrate for a deadly disease : dehumanizing the person, by only seeing him or her in terms of the spread - or remission - of the cancer(s). (In another posting, I suggested how mental ill-health is not different from, but exactly like, a broken leg.)

Some people object to the term service-user, saying that they did not choose to have mental-health services (they were cajoled, coerced, sectioned, medicated against their will, mistreated (when they were supposed, ironically, to be treated in the system's own terms)), others simply do not care, even if they have had the same experiences, and are not worried about a need to challenge use of the word.

In similar ways, some have a diagnosis thrust upon them, and struggle to feel content with someone else defining their experience in that way, whereas others, refused a service unless they have a diagnosis, embrace one, and feel that it validates.

Of course, that sense of validation, of finally being believed, could relate just as much to the situation of someone with what turns out to be a brain tumour, who succeeds in persuading someone to carry out a scan and whose findings account for their bizarre or troubling symptoms, previously discounted on supposed medical grounds.

Or there could be a person who is happy with his or her body-shape at 22 stone, and who rejects the notion of being obese - and, if it is not interpreted as a mental-health issue (with implications for a forced admission), but, say, as a lifestyle choice, he or she is free (subject to these irritating medical promptings) to do as he or she pleases with his or her body.

So, returning to the question of diagnosis, one person might be able to get help, because of a diagnosis, whereas a person, supported with a diagnosis of bi-polar disorder, might then be denied support, if it is claimed that it was a misdiagnosis and that he or she has borderline personality disorder (and vice versa, the latter likely to be a case where he or she is pleased with the new diagnosis, which he or she has probably been fighting to have recognized as 'a better fit').

And then there is so-called depression (because I believe that the word has outlived its usefulness - unless it can be 'reclaimed' - when too many people think that it just means being a bit sad, that the person described as being depressed is lazy, shamming, not trying as they would, and that they know what it means, when they do not). I took issue with @StephenFry likening depression to a meteorological cold front, which, like the wind, rain or snow, just is until it is over :

I honestly thought that having that debate might make people question whether low mood and negativity really just are, or whether some people might be helped - some of the time - by psychological intervention, as practitioners and writers such as Paul Gilbert want to say (e.g. Gilbert's self-help book, Overcoming Depression). Fry's message of waiting for the good days to come may work at one level, where crashing for two or three days may allow one to regroup and feel restored / revived, but what if that crashing could be avoided, or, at least, postponed to a less critical time ?

It is this polarity of the discussions in mental-health circles that frustrates me : Fry was no doubt wishing to be helpful, but seemed didactic in his statement, as if to the exclusion of the possibility that sessions with a psychologist might make an improvement such as described. Likewise, those 'saddled with' a diagnosis (and, maybe, poor or no treatment) seem to be at odds with those who, as suggested, might have had their beliefs about themselves confirmed by one.

When one person, wanting to feel safe from impulses to commit suicide (which I maintain is an acceptable expression), might benefit from feeling safe on an acute psychiatric ward, someone who is at a level of depression not just to be numbed to what is happening might equally experience it as too lively, too fuelled by the activity of those whose mood is at the opposite extreme to be a therapeutic environment - and they, too, might find each other's psychotic assertions frightening and disturbing, which is hardly likely to lead to peace and a lowering of anxiety.

Is a ward such as that, then, a microcosm of the flare-ups that the mental-health element of Twitter seems to accommodate, perhaps even invite or spark ? Or is it no different from any topic where feelings are running high on both sides ?


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

I was looking forward to the sheep... !

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21 October (updated 23 October)

62 = S : 11 / A : 13 / C : 10 / M : 13 / P : 8 / F : 7 

A rating / review of Killer of Sheep (1977)

S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel

Mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17) = 9


If I were told that Killer of Sheep (1977) came to be made because its director and cinematographer had been working on a commissioned documentary about an abattoir, and thought of weaving a human story around that of the sheep, I would readily believe it. They might also have had some unstaged footage of black children playing, which they could supplement.

One could almost jump mentally straight from there to Dinah Washington singing over the closing shots of massed sheep being herded up a ramp. The sheep have been far more alive than the adults talking to each other, encouraging action or belief, or heavily making a mess of an engine that they have troubled to bring down an exterior staircase and put on the back of a pick-up – though it must be said that this latter sequence, concerned as the abattoir is with motion and process, is nicely shot and put together.

Where life is utterly lacking is in reaction-shots, where it is abundant that what we have just seen is not what was being looked at, or where Stan’s wife (Kaycee Moore, seeking to allure), in an excruciatingly slow dance that feels like sleepwalking or involuntary movement during a coma set to a blues, touches his bare torso in a way that looks so forced that it is no wonder that it does not arouse Stan (Henry G. Sanders).

Some scenes of those children playing feel the same, and as fake as when two guys lug a t.v. over a back fence, but none of this has the ring of artifice that would have us know it as such, because one would not, at the same time, have a boy hiding behind a piece of panel, and only artfully reveal that the projectiles hitting it are part of a big military game, where positions are besieged or stormed. The film is, essentially, very uneven, and too rooted in the manners and behaviour of its time, as if, in themselves, they provide interest.

The clue may be in the title, but Killer of Sheep (1977) is an embarrassment after last week's screening of Nothing But a Man (1964).
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 21, 2013

At one point, we suddenly hear Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 4, at another the unmistakeable voice of Louis Armstrong with a fine clarinettist (‘West End Blues’), but both just steal from what is on screen, rather than adding to it – fine music cannot simply build up what has been filmed, if one is suddenly more aware of and drawn to those sounds and into identifying them.

There are a few nice touches, such as when Moore comes into the kitchen where Sanders and a friend are playing dominoes, and we have both heads momentarily telescoped together as if it were her point of view, but the camerawork only generally comes alive with action such as the engine, and hence the feeling that the parts of the film and their styles do not belong together.

Yes, the film wants to say something to us through the meaning of the Washington song ‘This Bitter Earth’ and the sheep (and Samsara (2011) could have its roots here, as Cloud Atlas (2012) might), but it has taken too much strain to get here, and it is simply a source of gratitude that, in some form, the end has now come.


Put another way (not to seem so hard on the film) :

Maybe the film is deeply clever, but it still seems like a one-trick pony : nice interchanges about the cousin, the uncle, the woman rubbing cream on her leg, but all just leading up to the sight-gag of the engine falling off the back - Laurel and Hardy with no laughs, no infuriated recriminations, just sheep-like acceptance.


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Let the little children... : A write-up of Poor Kids (2011) and an Arts Picturehouse Q&A

This is a review of Poor Kids (2011) [Made for t.v. ?]

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15 October

This is a review of Poor Kids (2011) [Made for t.v. ?]

I had not seen Poor Kids on t.v. Around 100 of us watched, felt, feared. Sad that the Q&A host at @CamPicturehouse didn't ask a filmic Q...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 15, 2013

Not every statistic in this film – there are numerous quoted, many of them quite shocking – is stencilled onto a wall for us to read (the writing is literally on the wall), but those that are actually appeared to be, to judge from a long, angled shot, which leaves two children playing beneath it :

How take in that one in six children in poor families have thought of suicide, for example, or the effects on asthma and other conditions, or on mortality, of living in poor housing ?

We took it in more easily through the eyes, and prematurely wise words*, of Paige, living in a horribly damp apartment that, rightly, we see demolished, condemning the high-rise solution, and, as Paige tells us, the dust carried as far as Argos. We see how she has trimmed the blind, affected by mould, and hear from her how humiliating it is, even though she keeps clothes away from the window, to be told that she smells of it. She is a sensitive girl, adapted to these hard ways of living, and we can see her joy when her mother is given a property half-an-hour away, out of the Gorbals. Seeing her playing in the snow in their garden gives us hope.

The most shocking thing is how these children have to take on financial constraints. One subject, who had eczema on her legs (until repeated applications of cream cured her), chillingly told us, in a throw-away remark, how she had picked her legs until they bled as a way of feeling a sense of release. Self-harm is little understood in society, least of all that there are various, very different reasons, why people harm themselves, not all related to harming in itself – some, who feel numb, do it to feel something, whereas someone else might, through feeling in control (even only of what he or she is doing to her body), balance the sense that everything else is beyond their power.

Sam’s sister Kaylie (?) also told us, I think, that she had attempted suicide, and had suicidal thoughts. Although Sam was the subject in her family (in Leicester), we could see through Sam and her (Sam had to wear his sister’s blouse as a shirt (and her blazer) for school, and that was hardly going to go unnoticed) how they sought to support and understand the pressures on their out-of-work father, including the fact that Child Benefit for her had wrongly been stopped, and he was having to survive until the mistake got remedied. We saw him produce meals for them to eat that looked very nice, but which he said that cost almost for ingredients.

Empty fridges, children going without lunch, or having to be put onto free school meals, and meters for electricity or even t.v. – these things were the stuff of the lives that these children (and their parents) had allowed us to look into. And, as film-maker Jezza Neumann was at pains to point out in the Q&A, this film, had been made for t.v. two years ago, and yet people were still watching it – not a world that suddenly came into existence with The Coalition, but carrying over from the Brown years, and those of Blair before.

We were told that, not surprisingly after the screening, Sam had some two hundred donations of school uniform (and a vicar donated to set up a second-hand uniform facility), Page (I think that it was Page) an offer of riding lessons (she had wanted to try), and numerous other kindnesses from people whom the film had touched. Neumann’s take was that, when areas become those where the poor live, and no one is in any better position than anyone else to help a neighbour, that kindness cannot operate so easily as it might have done, when someone lost a job, and those near them could tide them over.

The film is extremely well made, and Neumann told us how those who had seen it in the States, prior to making the US version, had been through it almost frame by frame, before reporting that they had been unable to see how he had prompted these words from the featured children - he said that the only way to make such a film is to be honest, and that he had known, with Page’s mother, that people would query her apparently manicured nails, whereas she had cut them from Coke cans and superglued them on.

The snobbery between cinema and t.v. films apart, this film conveys its message effectively, economically, and with an emotional force.

We are still where we were, and worse, with Poor Kids (2011)...https://t.co/atiycAeQtahttps://t.co/8IomNOagED

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 8, 2019

End-notes

* We hear children, in this film, troubled with adult concerns, such as debt, how their presents can be afforded


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A fairy tale within a fairy tale

A rating and review of For Those in Peril (2013)

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20 October

91 = S : 15 / A : 16 / C : 16 / M : 15 / P : 14 / F : 15

A rating and review of For Those in Peril (2013)

S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel

Mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17) = 9


For Those in Peril (2013) is a very powerful, intense drama, set on the southern Aberdeenshire coast, and both very well acted by George MacKay (Aaron) and Kate Dickie (Cathy), and carefully brought to life by Paul Wright (in his first feature). It is not the sort of film that some might choose to see, and perhaps one could liken it to an Amour in what it demands of us, for no one will stay the course without accepting its emotional pull.

The story that, towards the end of the film, Aaron asks his mother Cathy to tell him (we do not know his age, but MacKay is 21), about the devil, the sea and the people*, is one that we have heard – snatches of – throughout. She declines to tell it, saying that she does not remember, but then, without saying more, just starts – and maybe finds the words in the telling, itself a sort of metaphor in the whole piece.

That story, because we finally hear the ending (which Aaron may have actually forgotten, and so is asking for the story) takes us to the surprising closing shots - and suddenly brings home how it is more than that Aaron identifies it with this place where he lives, but that the story somehow is about these people and this place. Aaron, his mother and his brother Michael, lost (with four others) the first time that Aaron goes out to sea, feel that they might be better not living here, and that Cathy could have had enough to keep them going in some less exacting community, but then there would be no story – the story that ambiguously resolves with the film serves to keep them there.

Blackbird and For Those in Peril, both screened at @camfilmfest, both with folklore, both in Scotland, but similarities end - watch Peril !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 20, 2013

Younger brothers of a similar age, problems with those living around, but the conception is quite different : there are some interesting elements in Blackbird, but they in no way coalesce, and remain jutting out, whereas here song, the story, Aaron’s mental life, and the Peter-Grimes-like gossip and hostility of the community are a whole, and brought to us by mixing in a whole variety of home-filmed footages and images to represent their past, their history.

On another level, with one film one can ponder long and hard what might have happened to Michael and to Aaron (resented as the only survivor), but there is really nothing to reflect on in the other, save (as done in this review) what diagnosis might fit Ruadhan’s behaviour – which is actually the last thing that one wants to do with Aaron, so careful is the film (as, we were told, Wright intended) to look at his experience in it social context.

Nonetheless, the film is about where mental health resides, and the ambiguities help us meditate on the nature of loss, guilt, blame and separation, both for Cathy and for Aaron, as well as for Jane (?) (Nichola Burley), Michael’s fiancée, and the tentative support that Aaron and she find in each other. Watch this film, but heed the words of this year’s Cambridge Film Festival programme :

[A]n engaging plurality of filmmaking styles [serve] to emphasise the growing disjunction between Aaron’s reality and his subconscious


End-notes

* Another Scottish tradition has a tale of wolves descending on a town, but they are really less wolves than Viking raiders.


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Who is Woody Allen in Blue Jasmine ?

This is a review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

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19 October (updated, with a 102-point rating, 20 October; Tweet added 1 January 2015)

This is a review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

I was waiting for something to happen - and it never did


Obviously, what is revealed about Jasmine (and to her) in the last ten or so minutes did not count for the person who made this comment - what sort of film was this meant to be in which this elusive 'something' might eventuate ?

Having seen Blue Jasmine (2013) exactly a month ago, on the opening night of Cambridge Film Festival, I was pleased to have watched it again, and pleased for Woody Allen that Screen 2 this Saturday night was sold out. Do I vainly hope for some of those people to go back and see some of the fifty or so other Allen films, whether or not they missed them before ?


If so, I would commend, in addition to the well enough known Annie Hall and Manhattan, these personal favourites :


Interiors (1978)

Stardust Memories (1980)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Love and Death (1975)



Back at the film, and the question posed, I have heard it suggested that Dr Flicker is the person closest to Allen himself (i.e. the parts that he writes for himself to play), and I watched him with that in mind. No, he is not Allen - Allen is, I think, Jasmine (Cate Blanchett).

Tuned to Allen, knowing almost all of his films, and having seen this one before, I could hear his cadences, his little excited rages in this role – not exactly, but Jasmine is the one who approaches his self-expression, his fluidity, his vocabulary and assurance. Listen for him, and I think that you will find his voice in Blanchett’s.

97 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 15 / M : 17 / P : 16 / F : 16

A rating and review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)


Meanwhile, back at the nub, the film is not as dark as Interiors, but it is a drama, and I hope that it is being appreciated for that, though one with the humour that Interiors almost entirely lacks : there are themes in common here, and the Allen who cut up footage of Charlotte Rampling for a vivid portrayal of her distressed state of mind (as Dorrie) in hospital in Stardust has long had, if not themes of mental health, then hints at it, and I respect him immensely for that.

Blanchett almost cannot fail to win something big for this performance, because, for me, it is so easily convincing, so true to the psychology of her life (explored more here) and to the experiences that she has, but I am, if anything, even more delighted at a peach of a role like this for the tremendous Sally Hawkins, who really shows what a versatile actor she is at playing a character who has a capacity to delight in the smaller things and be radiant – Allen had cast her in Cassandra’s Dream, and this new part she carries off perfectly.

As to the story, no, there is no big something, and I did not have to absorb two previous films as at the time of the previous viewing, but I am very pleased to run this one through again and see how beautifully it holds together. When Allen crafts a screenplay, as in Hannah (or Harry, or Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), there is nothing that one would change with it – when, for me, he does not, in Match Point (2005) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), it is hard to know where and how one would rescue it.

So my hope is for people to be patient with Jasmine’s story, and the choices that she has made – when she meets Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), she clicks into a fantasy where she has always been called Jasmine, etc., etc., and I could see her entering into straightaway believing things, just because she was saying them and wanted them to be true. We can reach back into the story, and see how much – and, at the same time, how little – she knew about what was happening and what she was doing, and how, as we see her doing all along with prioritizing her needs, she hurts her stepson and husband.

I also hope that they will look out some other Allen, not Midnight in Paris (2011), really, but maybe some of the ones that I have listed; that Hawkins now has the recognition that she deserves; that Allen keeps on with his film every year; and that good film-making like this will be taken to people’s hearts, and cherished.

Where did the Blanche DuBois characterization in Blue Jasmine (2013) really originate... ? : https://t.co/grhg1tGL9g Bananas (1971)
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 2, 2015

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George MacKay Q&A

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19 October


When George MacKay answered questions at @CamPicturehouse yesterday afternoon, it was after a screening of one of his latest, For Those in Peril (2013) - guarding against the peril of forgetting, here is a posting to record the main points...



* Non-spoilery answers *


NB Here is a link to the review


MacKay worked on three films last summer, which, in order, were How I Live Now, For Those in Peril and Sunshine on Leith.

He said that, as he had most involvement with the director in this film, he had found it a more involving experience, whereas he might have relied more on the cast on other projects.

I asked about the voice that he had used for the voiceover, and how it had been arrived at - it sounded like a complex process, not just of director Paul Wright making it sound more breathy in post-production, but of MacKay working with Wright in a studio, trying being himself, being his character Aaron, etc.

I also asked whether MacKay thought that, given that Aaron sees through Michael Smiley's character (Jane's father), he would have taken in what the people in the town were saying about him, or was too absorbed in trying to get his brother Michael back to pay attention - MacKay thought that it would have affected him, but that he knows what he thinks

Host Jack Toye, Marketing Manager at @CamPicturehouse, asked where MacKay saw himself going in twenty years' time - Toye asked if he would be a Hugh Grant by then, but MacKay said that it was not for him to comment

It was also commented that, despite appearing in this film and Leith with an accent, Mackay is not Scottish - I am not so sure that those who do not sound Scottish do not call themselves Scottish, but am assured that MacKay is from London.

Regarding those fellow citizens' derogatory comments, we were told that they had a script for them, but improvised with Wright, who then processed the results in post-production

As to the arduous nature of the part / story, MacKay said that the support from Wright had made it not difficult, but an enjoyable experience

He had not researched mental health much, and his work with Wright had always been to see where the roots to what was happening to his character lay in events, rather than approaching the film as if it were about mental ill-health as such - the status of the doctor whom he sees was left deliberately imprecise regarding being a psychiatrist


At the end, the irrepressible Rosy Hunt from TAKE ONE presented MacKay with two gingerbread figures, the traditional gesture of welcome in these parts


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Where’s the main verb ?

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18 October

The Verb, on a Friday night on @BBCRadio3, has changed. It needed to change, but it has not changed for the better.

I do not recall when I last heard it, but 9.45 used to be a convenient time to listen, and manage most of it before closing-time drinks at the local called, and I had been a regular for several years.

It needed to change, because, incessantly calling it the cabaret of the word, Professor Ian McMillan had become little better than Hughie Green, by which I mean the flowery introductions, larded with compliments for him for being there, us for joining him, and for guests who were never less than monstrously excellent, talented, and guaranteed to be worth our time…

Not to mention the same old people from whom the guests seemed to come, for example Toby Litt – he was back again, because we liked him, and we liked him, because he was back again, or some such self-reinforcing logic – and what ‘we’ had commissioned him to write. But there were, of course, gems, such as learning about Italian ice-cream in Oban from Janice Galloway, or Paul Griffiths (better known as a writer about (twentieth-century) music), with his short novel Let Me Tell You, where he had amazingly limited himself to a vocabulary identical to that of Shakespeare’s Ophelia :

I read that book, because of The Verb, and was stunned by its invention through limitation, telling a story of around a dozen chapters that had to circumvent having no word ‘mother’, or by using a noun as a verb, or an adjective as a noun.
That was its high point, before the guests became routine, the enthusiasm forced, the praise after everything read excessive - I loved the way that you xyz, and the surprise of the abc really caught me unawares. So what made you think of that moment when you say def ?


But what’s wrong now ? Well, on to-night’s showing, the floor-to-ceiling congratulation has gone, but it’s too much the questions / things that McMillan thinks that we might like to ask / comment :

Why did you write that as a fairy-tale ?

Is it very different, after working on a novel, to write a short story ?

When I get to the end of a short story, I’m turning the page, wanting it to continue. [Do people read a short story without looking to see how long it will take, and isn’t it a bad story (or your mistake), if you can’t tell that it’s ended ?]

That piece [an extract from awork in progress] sounded very self contained [which turned out to be because it had been made to be].


None of these sounded as though the words coming out of the authors’ mouths on these meagre cues had not merely been prepared, but rehearsed to death. The best of the programme, that the questions insulted no one, but just were too self congratulatory (I can only ask these questions, because I am a Professor of English Literature), and too much buttering up the writer, has gone, and the questions are banal – I can too easily credit that I did not need to be a Professor to conceive them, so why have one present the show.


So not :

Why have two of you written about wolves ?

What do you think about Orwell’s four stated reasons for writing, and does any of them weigh with you? [Pretty pointless to tell us these four things without doing something with them ?]

You have given ways in which novels are different from short stories – even accepting those, are the similarities greater than the differences?

You say that a writer of short stories has to be multi-disciplinary, dealing with, amongst other things, history and politics, but why are they not the concerns of a novelist?


Plus ça change, plus ç’est la même chose…



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Lord Summerisle, I presume ?

This is a review of The Wicker Man (1973)

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18 October

This is a review of The Wicker Man (1973)

If The Wicker Man (1973) were really a Laplacean fantasy (wicker is produced, because the material is pliant), subverting the notion of free will, one would be better off with The Game (1997), or reading Borges.

As it cannot sustainably be viewed on that level, comparisons with the novel The Magus, even if John Fowles disowned it, are inevitable (and the Anthony Quinn film of 1968, which was made from it, and which pre-dates this one) : an island, beautiful women, playing games, a man in charge who claims to be a channel for other forces, temptation, death.

Only that Quinn is a much better ambiguous conjuror than Christopher Lee's nature-worshipping, free-loving laird, and his discrete retreat is more sinister than a whole island of cult-followers. That said, I would have more time for Edward Woodward any time than for Michael Caine, most of all in these films.


Pondering on the cult following for these cult followers (and their - female - nakedness)...

Not that his shock and anguish at the happenings are not to be more than counterbalanced by the charms of Britt Ekland, Diane Cilento and Lindsay Kemp, in a film that - as films of those times did - celebrates sexual freedom by largely having the bodies of females exposed, with the men's libidos represented by a dimly lit orgy, preceded by bawdy songs in the pub.

Apparently, Ekland complained that the naked gyrations in front of a cupboard, cut with shots of her walking topless around her character's bedroom, were not hers - they were out of keeping stylistically, and almost showed more than they should. That (and the apparent dubbing of Ekland) apart, she acted excellently as a succubus, and Woodward's frustration, desire, were palpable in his acting.


A horror film ? If one had not seen the poster, it might not have been evident where all this was going, and the horror only consists in Woodward's heartfelt cries of grief, grounded on the beliefs that we have seen set in opposition throughout to those of the islanders - I have no notion of the genre, but I cannot see any more than a <i>Lord of the Flies</i> sort of extremity to the drama.

A cult film ? I am told that, as with <i>The Sound of Music</i>, there are sing-a-longs (unlikely to attract the same audience, as the songs are lewd ?), but cannot quite fathom why that would appeal - cult following would suggest that seeing Woodward duped and suffer over and over is a pull, but I do not feel such a desire, as it is not even as if the journey is that clever or brilliantly executed.


Interestingly, screenwriter Anthony Schaffer (Peter's brother) married Cilento in 1985...


Post-script (by Tweet) - 31 October 2021 :

Unless it's, ahem, a broad church¹, I can't see The Wicker Man² (1973) as horror³ :

It's barely⁴ a fable (or parable) about perversely ignoring all the evidence.

¹ Not a 'strait' gate.

² One of the most mispronounced titles (the sense needs stress on the last word) ?

1 / 2

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 31, 2021

Unless it's, ahem, a broad church¹, I can't see The Wicker Man² (1973) as horror³ :

It's barely⁴ a fable (or parable) about perversely ignoring all the evidence.

¹ Not a 'strait' gate.

² One of the most mispronounced titles (the sense needs stress on the last word) ?

1 / 2

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 31, 2021

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What can we learn from Tracy Chevalier... ?

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17 October

Well, I would listen to Richard Egarr, director of the Academy of Ancient Music, endlessly about musicianship, instruments and performance, because I know him, I trust him, and he is knowledgeable.

This filmed account of an exhibition (now past ?), co-written by Phil Grabsky (and another) under the title Vermeer and Music, probably thought it unavoidable to have Ms Chevalier in it.

Does it make as much sense for Jacobi to be a talking head on Bacon's paintings as for Chevalier to be one on Vermeer's ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 20, 2013

I do not know why. Yes, she wrote a best-selling novel about Vermeer's life, and it gave rise to a film of the same name (a vehicle for young Scarlett). The title of both renamed a painting that, albeit by tradition, already had a name. (Vermeer seems to have named none himself : nothing, other than an inventory of his house, was mentioned, whereas what I want to know is why - when he was also dealing in art - he did not have a catalogue of his own works, to whom sold, for how much, when. etc.)

The film, perhaps gratuitously, has a narrator (a woman) as well as an art historian (a man) as its host : in the discussion of the second painting that Chevalier was given space to talk about (probably four minutes of the film, twice, and so competing with the time allowed to the exhibition's curator), she called an instrument lying on its side, which the host had described a viola da gamba, a bass viol. They are not interchangeable terms.

I really do not know which speaker was right, but neither even noticed. This is meant to be a film about music, Egarr has already told us that a gamba is like a guitar on its side (it has frets), and, somewhere, the narration has said that the bass viol got taken over by the cello (via the baroque cello, I think), so there is no scope, and no credibility, in calling the depicted recumbent instrument both gamba and viol: it is just inexcusable that this level of inaccuracy is present at this fundamental level.


Am I interested in what narrative there might be in a painting (the two paintings from The National Gallery, which were flanking the guitar player from Kenwood House) ? Does that fit in with facts about Vermeer's family, wife, mother-in-law, household, children ? Do I need to give such space to this to the exclusion of further comments from curators from all over the world ?

At the exhibition itself, the AAM had been playing live – nothing gave that sense in seeing them filmed, for a short while, at the Handel House Museum, which could have had the camera moving from the players to the artwork and back, and which could have been both cinematic and evocative.

There was nothing about genuine Delftwork, no comment on the tiles that form a floor-level frieze in the two paintings that Chevalier was talking about. No mention, also, of Brian Sewell’s theory that the women in the Vermeers, because of how they are dressed, are prostitutes. Nothing, further, about how any artist who did not have brass chandeliers or any musical instrument might see examples to paint.

Nothing about the provenance of any of the works, or (except a hint, in one curator being interviewed, to the effect that Vermeer created a genre) whether he is believed to have originated them in the hope that they would sell (could any artist afford to do that ?), rather than being commissioned.


And what I wanted to know (or nearly did not get told) :

* That Vermeer  did not abandon the family business (which his deceased father had turned his hand to), because he was still dealing in art, and finding it hard to make ends meet, near the end of his life

* That the inventory tells us that the studio was in the four-storey home - but not why (unless painters worked from home) Vermeer did not incur the obvious expense, to have more space and quiet, of an external studio

* Whether it was unusual for artists' works to be untitled

* Why we only have 36 of the known 50 works of Vermeer (addressing the above - was there no catalogue ?) ?

* Do we really know nothing about whether the two to three paintings per year that Vermeer produced (compared, say, with how many by a typical artist) commanded a suitable price ?

* As to commissions, if Vermeer was dealing as well as painting, what the customary practice was - this model (a family member) with these elements and this feel and size and detail ?

* Could the woman standing at the keyboard (and her fellow, seated at one) be looking out, not at us (as we allegedly wanted the woman with the baroque guitar, in the centre, to do), but at the person who had commissioned the work


Too many such questions indicate too few hard facts, too little solid statement of professional opinion by experts...


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A new scale of interest ?

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17 October

When saying to Chris last night that I couldn't give Le Week-End a 6, but I couldn't give it an 8, a thought-process began that went beyond a 15-point scale (where one could, at least, have a genuine mid-point) :

I unleash, as Paul Bowles might do, the 102-point scale, inspired by whisky's Jim Murray and his Whisky Bible...


For said Week-End, it would be thus (each rated out of 17, 17 x 3 = 51, x 2 = 102)

76 = S : 13 / A : 15 / C : 11 / M : 12 / P : 13 / F : 12


S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel

Mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17) = 9


The rating is based on a studio version, or the director's cut...


Thoughts, comments, insults welcome - with this result, almost a percentage, the film wasn't a 6, but less close to a 7 than it would otherwise have had to be


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Descent into raggedness - director's cut

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16 October

* Contains spoilery spoilers of a spoiler nature *

* Before getting here, you may have read the version put out by the studio, which is more of a review that can be read before seeing the film / if deciding whether to *


Experimentally, I have rated the film 76 = S : 13 / A : 15 / C : 11 / M : 12 / P : 13 / F : 12 - follow this for explanation...



Meg has issues with sex, seeks to ration it, or to rationalize it - maybe she cannot relate to Nick's desire for cunnilingus : has it ever happened, or does she tease as shown ?

When he touches her - or tries to - there is an exchange of hurts, and we see him pleading to penetrate her, but she wants to sleep

We hear, in an angry moment (after he has accused her of dressing up for the laptop guy, and she has looked affronted, brought out maybe prepared adjectives of the buy being sweaty and so on - a defence ? has she really not dressed up, etc., and it is all just Nick's projection ?) of an infidelity with a student 15 years ago

Oh, and I didn't like, @LeWeekendFilm, the flippancy of : Nick : You're bi-polar ! Meg : No, I'm tri-polar.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 17, 2013

Initiating, sustaining, enjoying sex / sexual action has become an enormous problem for these two. Nick is attracted by Meg's impulsiveness (having said, just before the quotation, that he likes her when she is like this), and flatters her, when she says that a man was chatting her up, by saying that she is hot, before being reminded that she is cold :

The chasteness of Diana, the allure for Actaeon of seeing her naked, the terrible price. It is not attraction / seduction / temptation with Nick and Meg, but humbling oneself for sex - may I, do I have permission, for what can be offered a glimpse of, then imperiously taken away (Nick's comment of lack of acquaintance with her vagina in the last 5 / 10 years) in self-denying sexual starvation

Maybe the fling 15 years ago is why Nick's latest job was at a former polytechnic in Birmingham (a fall from grace), although we are then talking only 1998 (with scarcely the highest pretended levels of scrutiny and integrity), and there has been a well-trodden path of randy supervisors and directors of studies, and willing undergraduates, that takes in The History Man, Tom Sharpe's books, and probably, between the lines, those of C. P. Snow, not to mention Michael Frayn's Donkeys' Years


This is all interesting. But there is a greater neurosis - on the threshold of the party at Morgan's, Meg is the one wanting to go into it / saying that she wants to go into it. It, though, is not a party party, and she immediately seems like a fish out of water, even saying something quite inept to Morgan's pregnant wife in the long time that we must imagine that Nick allows himself to push off with Morgan (and Morgan does not even think to effect any more than superficial introductions), before finding and meeting his son

Previously, Nick had almost to be dragged into the cemetery, but then, when we see him before Beckettt's memorial, he is / says that he is enjoying it, and wants to find Sartre

When he cannot sleep with Meg, Nick creates a shrine to the things that he loves - through Brodbent, we hear love being talked of, and know that Nick experiences it, although he mistakes helping his / their ? son, by having him at home, with what Meg might want

The flinching, the pain, at hearing about what happened to Morgan's ex-wife is quite unfeigned

Thirty years married doesn't seem long enough, and Nick we can imagine in communes and protests, but not Meg, unless the morbidity of their sex-life is the result of such drives and impulses as the craven way in which we him ask to penetrate her, and they have destroyed each other's simple pleasure in each other as a sexual companion

Introducing Morgan, and Nick's humiliating speech at the dinner, are turned into ways for the film to change direction, and we have to believe in the grace of Meg to hear and approve of Nick making massive admissions about himself and her

I can follow this film to the threshold of this device, but no further, and I see the - admittedly joyous - dancing at the end as acknowledging that it really has nothing to shed on what went before

No, not resolutions for resolutions' sake, but do we suddenly have to divest ourselves of the first half of the film in a way that - although joyous - feels pretty fake ?


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