I put aside childish things

A rating and review of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)

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7 January

A rating and review of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)

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

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)





When Sean Penn (Sean O’Connell) and Ben Stiller (Walter Mitty) finally meet in this film, it is at the quiet point around which the world turns – Penn, who could so easily have outclassed Stiller in that sort of way that older actors can, just casually reveals that he does not always take a shot when he ‘is in’ the moment of it.

As a photographer, capturing the oftentimes fleeting, he knows what it is to have to wait for his subject to come to him, but he speaks against this idea that we ‘capture’ so much, with our camera-phones and the like, that we are too busy capturing to be there. (That irritating advertisement where a couple ‘shares’ that they have just launched their pastel-hued candle-boats, and straightaway get back an evauluation of how wonderful it is.)

This is not a notion that James Thurber, the writer of the four- or five-page story on which this (and the preceding) film is based, would have rejected. Although he fought for his own career, he also recognized, as Stiller wants to do in his closing credits, all the hands through whom one’s work passes and to which it is entrusted.

I also do not think that he would have been too bothered, unless one ascribes some arcane respect to his original creation (who is not so much a character, as a behaviour), by the action-hero figure that Mitty pictures himself to himself as, which seems quite in line with the ‘ta-pokka, ta-pokka’, and had more than fifteen years before he died in which to get used to Danny Kaye as Mitty – that said, those of an anxious temperament, might find the noisy character that he becomes, lifting up the pavement as if he has hammer-drills in his heels, something that it is welcome he discontinues, and that heavy ticking noises also subside.

This is not a film where we are really invited to know whether, like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), he gave up the life that he desired to conform and provide a wage, but it is touched on. (And then Mitty has a chance to do some big things after all, and he does, although he only day-dreams it happening, become a younger version of himself – hair, looks, etc., to reflect well-being) What we do see is that his mind races ahead to encounter some new possibility, and that he was not ‘in the moment’ but outside it, as if as a way of coping with it.

Thankfully, a careful script from Steve Conrad acknowledges that, when someone says that someone else ‘zones out’, is just a phrase, not the only phrase, and does not convey very much of the experience, which, at the appropriate time, Mitty tries to put into words, and is understood. In what is almost an entirely telephonic contact with Todd Maher (Patton Oswalt), who is trying to explain why the bits that Mitty just skipped might be important to a functioning profile that will let him send ‘a wink’ that he agonizes about sending (only to find a problem when he finally does press the enter key to contact Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig)), Mitty talks about what has made day-dreaming less frequent.

All the while, we are whirled up in an adventure, as to whose status, given that Mitty has not re-emerged from it, we feel reasonably, but not totally, settled. Then, when Penn and Stiller meet we have this beautiful moment where they bicker, take offence, listen to each other, and pitch into a riotous football game with sherpas before the setting sun. Something different, something apart from life, even if Stiller has actually been landed on a glacier by helicopter (presumably, not flown by his screen pilot) : a moment apart, a positive version of that endless journey to discover what is best not known in Apocalypse Now (1979), because the real horror is the casual, uncaring dismantling of an iconic publication.

We do not dwell there (although a cock is snooked at Ted Hendricks (Adam Scott), who tried to belittle Mitty, but just resulted in endearing him to others), because we turn to relations Melhoff / Mitty, but there is a tribute to Mitty’s care for the work of its leading photographer. In between, Stiller has been allowed to present convincing enough evidence of his credentials on the skateboard, and there is just sufficient of his past with his sister and his parents to see who he is now. A certain fastidiousness, keeping a tally in his cheque-book, and so on.

On the side-lines, but engagingly playing a mother whose need to have, in perpetuity, a piano which we are not even certain that she still plays (or desires to play – the so-called elephant in the room) figures large is Shirley MacLaine. A warm portrait to which she brings real affection, as well as acceptance and care.

This is a Mitty for our century, a man who takes his imagination and turns it into seeing what is possible, rather than being held back by whether he can get the train there. He is not everyman, so his solutions are not everyone’s, but the cinematic glories of where he goes make this film shine – although one has to wonder whether some Icelandic influence has gone into the caricature of Greenland (Melhoff, knowing Mitty better than he thinks, checks that he knows that they are different places…), which is, if not exactly dismissive, is scarcely flattering, with men drinking huge beers all day from glasses shaped like boots and, even at their smallest, they are still huge.


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Mira Schendel at Tate Modern - Part III

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7 January
This is Part III of a review of a current exhibition at Tate Modern of the work of Mira Schendel (Part I is here, and Part II is here), which is due to finish on 19 January 2014

Room 7 is where Schendel’s work begins to get interesting, foreshadowing the work in Room 12, just as do the two works that appear in Room 8, in the series Little Trains, the installation in Room 10.

We are told that the installation of pieces in the series of Graphic Objects emulates the installation in The Brazilian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1968, and where she made use of the transparency of the rice-paper. Whether it is meaningfully claimed that ‘transparency’ had a special usage that Schendel made of it is unclear (pun intended), but this is what the room guide asserts :

Schendel’s concept of transparency was derived from the writings of the German philosopher, poet and linguist Jean Gebser (1905 – 1973), who used the word to refer to human consciousness, experience of time and to a form of the spiritual.

Maybe some significance is lost, and also in not following word for word the philosophy, poetry and lyrics, but the work’s strength, in being an accretion of smaller works, is by positioning them in relation to each other.

In a similar sense, Variants 1977 makes one aware that one could be shorter, or taller, and perceive the installation somewhat differently, inevitably looking through one of the ninety-three panes (one is white on black), or not looking through it except by bending or standing on tip-toe. It does so more effectively than the installation in Room 7, and, as the room guide says, it is a constellation or cloud, a sort of Cloud of Unknowing.

Here, the panels are very small and they interpose a sense of depth, with what is near overlapping, at different points, central and far others. It is beyond proper description of photographic representation, and just deserves to be seen.

Little Trains are sheets of rice-paper that hang loose on a thread, and the smaller, in particular, of the two in Room 8 evokes an oriental mood, as if not so much kimonos as samurais. They consist less in what they show than what we can project onto them, and similarly, with some of the Transformables that are hanging nearby, we are meant to look less at their resemblance to strands of DNA (or some other biological material) than at the patterns of varying shade that they cast. Sadly, these are not hung in such a way to make much of that aspect.

Max Bense was the only one who understood that...these things [Transformables] didn't function as objects, because all that mattered was the light and shadow, a continuation of some drawings of mine, those done on that ultra fine, transparent paper.

(1970 - 1974)*

Room 9 is passed over, because it contributes, with its Calculations, Circumscribed Letters and Typed Writings, as much to what matters about Schendel as the Monotypes and Graphic Objects. Room 10 contains an installation, made for the 10th Bienal de São Paulo in 1969, called Still Waves of Probability - again, it achieves its aims by repetition of the same (or similar) material, and here, as we walk around it, it becomes more or less permeable to our sight, sometimes seeming dreach before our eyes, sometimes seeming as if nothing intercepts the view of the other side of the room.

It means more than this attempt to describe it suggests, more than what Schendel said (as quoted in the room guide) that it meant to her, and more than in the Biblical text that she chose to accompany it (from I Kings 19 : 11 – 12**), in black on Perspex :

And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD. And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake:
And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

One might relate to the work without the text, or without the words being understood in a Judaeo-Christian context – say, as the search at the sub-nuclear level, and what gives matter mass – but it speaks in these gradations of very loud and powerful, yet very quiet and peaceful, and with all the changes of state in between. Arranged before the other installation, and with the sixteen works (akin to the stations of the cross, though not in number ?) that constitute Homage to God – Father of the West (1975) en route in Room 11, this is the richest part of the exhibition.

Again, one might not relate to a Hebraic God – as number 11 has it, The living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – but there is the notion of a family line and of protection, to which we all, in varying ways, can relate in thinking about the group of people of whom we are part have fared. For others, the stark statement of number 12, God is love, will make it harder to relate to these works, but, as the room guide makes clear, the church was what permitted her to survive, and it could be seen as quite a personal statement, as was, say, her participation in the São Paulo Bienal, which others thought right to boycott.

As a thinker and an artist, Schendel was quite clear about making her own choices of what was best for her conscience and for speaking through her art. Arranged on either side of walls tapering towards each other, this is a rare twentieth-century statement of faith, and rewards attention for the bold marks and the consequence of her choice of medium***.

As to the tail of the exhibition, what appears in Room 13, with its concentration on day and night, is subject to quite a bit of interpretation, manipulation even, where the room guide says ‘They [tempera and gold] also refer to the determination of the Self’. Of them, and of the concluding trio of series in Room 14, I say that they are not on a par with the striking pieces that occupy Rooms 10 to 12 :

Itatiaia Landscapes feel like a rehash of a series of the Mononotypes in Room 6, whereas, a little in the way that the Roy Lichtenstein show had him persevering to the end with his Benday dots, making landscapes (I recall that being true of another Tate one, and, whilst I could be thinking of Damien Hirst, I think that it was probably not) : it could have been Miró, because nothing pf his that was shown transcended, for me, the four triptychs that were displayed in pairs of two…


Even if one ultimately thinks that Imogen Robinson is harsh about Schendel's works in her Review : Mira Schendel at the Tate Modern for Just A Platform, it is of interest to find comments where she echoes finding pretension in the curation and the claims made



End-notes

* Taken from the exhibition's chronology of Schendel's life.

** The words are well known from the ending of John Greenleaf Whittier’s hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’.

*** Where it falters is with the curatorial choice of translation for the description of number 16, Der Geist – rendered The Ghost, the word ‘spirit’ might have been a better choice.


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The deceptive allure of the rhyme

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7 January


Hot or not ?



As can be seen - because the question was asked a year ago - it couldn't have been...


But ponder, when you next hear yourself saying

That's way too much ?

why it no longer sounds right to you to say :

That's far too much ?

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Torching one's dreams ?

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13 August

This is a review of Foxfire (2012)

 

* Contains spoilers *

The flaws in this film, if they are flaws, are few and slight (and listed below), and do not detract from its narrative power : it runs to longer than one thinks that it has done, and does so almost easelessly, without ever letting one acquiesce in a view.

As to that observation, those who expect a film to let them know where they are have a sense of being uncomfortable in the unsettled feelings that the film engenders, because they are strong ones – nothing to do with a moral compass (a phrase for which there should be scant time in the cinema), but rather that films are not sermons, and it is questionable whether one should look to the former for what an effective example of the latter might make clearer.

Some things are uncertain – and remain so for most, or all, of the film. Our toe-hold is the town of Hammond (Mammond, as I slipped Freudianly on the keyboard…) in the mid-1950s, which does not seem have much to commend it to anyone much, let alone spirited teenage girls who had more than an element of what I am told* is called misandry, the complement to (if that makes sense) misogyny. Small wonder, if an uncle seeking not only to sell an old Underwood (which he had left out to be collected), but also to get more money for it and sex, too (from Maddy (Katie Coseni)), had been typical male exploitation in and of their lives !

That said, in branding themselves (in more sense than one) Foxfire, they came to stand for a sort of purist attitude towards men that meant that, when - late in the film - Rita (Madeleine Bisson) dated a man and was seen in the cinema with him, it was an expellable act from their commune / refuge. Maybe they had had that stance all along (although initially flirting when buying ice-cream did not seem prohibited, and it was also clear, from some stings,& when the joehad been pitied, not despised). However, Margaret** (Raven Adamson) called her father's girlfriend, who seemed a steady one, a slut, and then one was unsure what was going on - was it a reverse Oedipus complex, where the mother had been loved / sainted / abused, or just a resentment at being landed with grandma, 100 miles away*** ?

(Grandma certainly seems to have been given a tongue-lashing, if we think that Margaret is a reliable historian. In fact, all the hints are that no one can be such in this life, in particular the magic of the closing moment, which surprises and undercuts the narrative. At times, this narration was grating, but I can conceive that it was meant to be, and thus to distance from too close a connection.)

At any rate, without seeming didactic, literary analogues such as Orwell's Animal Farm, and Peter Carey's The True History of the Kelly Gang, are enrichened by the properly shocking story that Foxfire tells...


The Agent’s bit of nit-picking

Court-room
Was ever a judge and a court scene such as this - but who is telling the story ?

Having a car
Even if it was normal and likely, was it necessary and affordable ?

Letting
Margaret upsets and deliberately spoils the expectations against how the letting will be carried out, for her vision of what the shared home will be, but maybe not plausibly to the lessor's agents...

Records
How do the type-written records and they typewriter end up where they do ?

Register
Was everything really accurate for what was said, and where it was said, in its time ?



End-notes

* Thanks to @MarkOneinFour.

** For unknown reasons, known as Legs (unless as a corny joke to reflect the fact that she was relatively short, whereas one would have thought, if so, that a name that drew attention to 'ideal' female body-image was hardly consistent).

*** Conceivably, Legs might have originated in the fact of her walking from grandma's back to Hammond, after Margaret's father had sought to exile her there... It matters little that the film does not explain, and it is probably a virtue.


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

The Enchanted Places

This is a review of Hors Satan (2011)

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6 January

This is a review of Hors Satan (2011)

On the IMDb web-site, reviews have been written of Leviathan (I)* (2012) as if the expectations of the writers had been specifically outraged by a film that was meant to be 'about trawling' and they had sat down to a nice study, full of facts and figures, of life and scenes at sea.

No such problems, I suspect, were likely to get in the way of Hors Satan (2011)'s finding the right audience, which would be that of demonstrating the worth of this film to those to whom it might appeal, but without a similarly large budget for trailers :

Just as an opening comment, the comparison is relevant, because the films are - partly as if they are creatures of where they are set** - apt to be both ambiguous, and not to be understood as being 'apart from' what we might normally think about life : neither film explicitly requires us to say how we judge what we see, but, in the case of Hors Satan, we might find ourselves reaching out for a list of similar words to try to describe its world, such as pagan, resurrection, healing, reverence, worship, and The Sun, alongside death, protection, police, and punishment.


It is a shock to realize that the male lead, David Dewaele has already been dead for nearly a year (27 February 2013). When we properly meet Alexandra Lemâtre (Elle) and him, as Le gars (which just means 'the guy' (or lad), we are unclear who they are to each other, although we learn that he looks out for her (and also that she may be abusing his desire to do so ?), and that it is not because of any aversion to sex that he keeps rejecting her suggestions of physical union. They are the nearest thing that ech of them has to any other.

The film has a place, La Côte d'Opale (on which Calais is just 50 miles north of where Dewaele was born and died), but nothing much tells us how long the status quo had existed, and the film rests content with that, by giving us this place that looks onto the sea and, for example, where, although she scorns him, he shows her how actions have averted catastrophe. And, although this is not some Godardian telling of something as unreal, it is on the edges of what we know, to entrance us with its power and / or shock us with its morality.

Treat it as literal or figurative, but the film shows a world where there are other forces, and it is likely to appeal as that of Kosmos (2010) or Postcards from the Zoo (2012) (Festival review)



Postscript

Glancing, a few weeks late, through @PeterBradshaw1's 'The Braddies', there is Dewaele in his choice of best actors in The Guardian...



End-notes :

* Called Leviathan (I) (2012), because it is one of (in this case) two films with that title released in that year.

** If, that is, they themselves do not create (or co-create) their setting.



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The panther in our head

A rating and review of Another Woman (1988)

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29 December (watched on DVD)

A rating and review of Another Woman (1988)

94 = S : 15 / A : 16 / C : 16 / M : 16 / P : 15 / F : 16

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)

Woody Allen, as we all probably know, has been in analysis. In character somewhere, he quips that his analyst was a strict Freudian, so it was only after several weeks that he realized that the analyst had retired.

It must have occurred to him that maybe things intended for the analyst could be heard by someone else, and he has used the motif more than once, both pure, and in the intercepted instructions of David Ogden Stiers as hypnotist Voltan in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). (Something is also overheard in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), but not, probably, in the context of any sort of treatment.)

Yet the most prolonged handling is in Another Woman (1988), with Mia Farrow (according to IMDb, her character is called Hope : the two women discuss the Klimt painting of that name, at one point) audible to Gena Rowlands (Marion) in another apartment. Famously quoted, Burns tells us* :

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!


In due course, this is what happens to Marion, so Hope is then justly called, because Marion responds for the good to what she hears about what she learns about herself when she has contrived to make something of meeting Hope and ended up having lunch with her and making some discoveries. (As in Deconstructing Harry (1997), there is a therapeutic element behind what happens in the film, but without the vivacious humour of and in outlandish circumstance.)

The new space in which Marion has gone to work on her book gives her other unexpected insights into her life, experience and developments, and it is not unlike a womb, in which she can allow fatigue to overcome her and dream, for example, of Rilke's 'The Panther', the man who introduced her to it when she was at college, and what happened between them. Likewise, she recalls the youth of her brother Paul and her, and how both how viewed himself and she did was shaped by their father's opinions.

It is only, though, in hearing what the unknowing Hope says that there is a breakthrough, when she hears herself described by someone who had been going to therapy because of her feelings, but sees how locked up Marion. Maybe, for each of them, the other is the title's 'another woman', but really Marion has that gift of being seen as Hope witnesses her. Rowlands, whose life has intensely been that of the mind and has been defensive (even, as shown, to the part of being rude, or of seducing partners' attention away to her), transforms, and we appreciate the restraint that she has been under, which she has carried off to excellent effect, such that the intellectualized put-downs and self-deception seem faultless.

Farrow is the junior role, of course, but she is vital to how Rowlands' works, and she more than brings off embodying what, for us, is much of the time just a voice, and not even a voice allowed to approach us directly, since she has to come by means of and sound as if through an air-duct. And with that duct - when Marion calls around to the therapist and seeks to find out what has happened to her - there is almost a hint, in what is said, that maybe somehow she had been permitted this insight of which Burns writes, and that her live, until now, has been lived amongst shadows...

At the time of the over-praised Midnight in Paris (2011), not least in the light of the far greater achievement in Blue Jasmine (2013), there were ludicrous claims about a return to form : here, in Another Woman, is perfectly good evidence of form for which some were claiming to look back as far as Annie Hall (1977) for, and which I should have seen again before.


End-notes

* In 'To a Louse'.


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A little ponder about Nebraska (2013)

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28 December

A continuation from here

My ponder is confirmed to have validity by reading Patrick Ogle's (@paogle's) review :

Go to see #AlexanderPayne' "#Nebraska" if you love film. It is a masterwork of cinematography and more. http://t.co/cs0DjZOrwU
— patrick ogle (@paogle) December 23, 2013

What I am homing in on (pun intended, as one reads on) is this :

He heads out, on foot, from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect his reward. Everyone knows there isn't any reward (except perhaps Woody).


This is where the film opens, with the given of Woody (Bruce Dern) determinedly walking, and being pulled over by a cop car.

What is he doing ? Has he really never seen a scam like this one before - or has his wife Kate (June Squibb) always ferreted away such disquieting items of mail in recent years ?

The film does not invite us to dwell on this - we are straight there in media res, and it does not behove us to upset the apple-cart and ask Why now ? Why this ? Why not before ?

We don't really even think to question whether he seriously purposed to set out on this journey as we see him, but what if he did - or, more to the meat of things, what if he did not ?

A superficial - maybe facile - reading of the narrative has it that he is addled by booze, deluded, and impervious to reasoned argument. But what if this is a cry for help, a latching-onto this letter because it comes from the capital of the state where Woody grew up ? For it is also a given of Nebraska that we start in Montana, but nothing, then or later, tells us why Kate and Woody are there (except that she acquired him, won the prize).

In what unfolds, there is a searching for worth and value, which, with David's (Will Forte's) insight, the $1,000,000 symbolizes - until he gets there, Woody expresses no enthusiasm for his home town, wanting to press on to Lincoln to claim his prize, a little, maybe, as Paul talks about in his second letter to Timothy (4 : 7 - 8) :

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.


On the level of symbol, of Nebraska as another place, Woody is seeking something outside himself, just as Paul concentrates on a heavenly realm and considers his earthly life to be a race that he has run and which is now finished. Woody, in turn, is summing up who he is and what he means, and having a reckoning, and without the journey (pretext or not), that would not have happened.

Returning to Billings is the least of that, so the film does not have that in its ambit once the business in town has been addressed. Nor does it really matter what the gestures that David makes at the end signify in actuality, beyond the fact that they uphold his father and his status - Woody has had his homecoming and has found himself, and that is what matters.


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Don't talk to me about social skills !

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26 December

Some talk of 'social skills', but they mean neither skills, nor anything other than the related word 'sociable' - being nice / kind / polite
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 26, 2013

Is it 'a skill' being tolerant, patient, thoughtful, caring ? A skill acting convincingly as if one were ? Social skills = alliteration rut.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 26, 2013

Some kind souls, on related tracks, gave us road rage, the rather offensive gender bender, yummy mummy, and the pink pound, for example. We may have been happy without these terms (particularly the second one), but somehow we gravitate towards them, as if they were indispensable, led on by the spell of rhyme or of the alliteration :

It takes an effort to rebel, almost as if the concept of road rage were an inevitability that we resist - if we can at all - at our peril, because we fear falling into aporia, or even aphasia : that is the label, and we must use it.

Except that people who become furious on the road are furious in no different way, just because the source of their intense reaction comes from driving, and the trite phrase not only does not acknowledge the truth that a shop assistant could just as easily be beaten as a fellow motorist or other road-user, but also makes a separate species of alleged rage almost obligatory.

It certainly becomes categorizable, and so capable of tallies being kept of incidents of this new monster of road rage, whereas the public service workers, such as shop assistants or nurses or parking operatives*, have no name for the outrageous behaviour unleashed on them, and so no publicity or real recognition.


Back at these so-called social skills, this is just a snobbish label for saying both that someone is impolite or gruff, and that the fault lies with their inadequate parents and family circumstance : George has no social skills, even if it is not a ridiculous exaggeration, really damns his entire upbringing and status as a human being, for (as the motto of, amongst others, Winchester tells us) manners maketh man.

Needless to say, but George has probably deviated from doing for the speaker what the speaker expected, or has done something that the speaker (from the speaker's elevated and unfailing understanding of these things) otherwise deems inappropriate, so he deserves to be blasted as of no worth, even to his scurvy face.



Oswald

Why dost thou use me thus? I know thee not.


Kent

Fellow, I know thee.


Oswald

What dost thou know me for?


Kent

A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave, a lily-livered, action-taking knave, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue, one-trunk-inheriting slave, one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deny'st the least syllable of thy addition.



But to end with a little Twittery :

'Henry, the truth is you ain't got no manners, and no finesse' ~ Gertrude Stein, @parisreview @stuartnuttall
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 25, 2013

'Those who can tolerate Miss Parker would find earthquake, wind and fire a pleasant change' ~ James Thurber @stuartnuttall @parisreview
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 25, 2013

'Some people are precious about who famously said first what anyone could say, so I largely attribute to Shakespeare' ~ First Folio
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 25, 2013

End-notes

* If that is what traffic wardens are now called.


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You gave this five Academy Awards and seven BAFTAs in 2012 ? !

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Christmas Day

A film, Michel Hazanavicius, where you do not hear the dialogue is only incidentally, not truly, a silent film : The Artist (2011).
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 26, 2013

It never felt like a silent film, except (as Hitchcock might) drawing attention - in a patent dream-sequence or a waking nightmare of mouths - to sound or its absence. Otherwise, largely uninterestingly shot, and with an effect of black and white that drifted in and out of sepia all the time, it was paper thin in trying to locate a plot in the five years from 1927 on.

This is essentially a palpably hollow rags-to-riches story and vice versa intermingled, and coupled with some inadequately explained fascination of Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) for George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) and, on some level, of his for her. Pride, grand gestures better made in Sunset Boulevard (1950), and a descent into the abyss portrayed there far more effectively conclude the armoury of Hazanavicius' screenplay and direction.

If, as some want to say (as they want to say about what I find the wasteland of Holy Motors (2012), rather than a witty, comprehensive library of reference), this film is a tribute to what some call 'the silent era', this very paucity of living material actually insults the memory of those who worked at that time : compare, say, the richness of meaning in Anthony Asquith's Underground (1928) with the ridiculous scene where Valentin has to pull off every dust-sheet to realize that he has been living on charity, with tempestuously Herrmannesque scoring, which maybe makes using the 'Love Scene' music from his score for Vertigo (1958) seem almost inevitable, but never right :

Now having watched The Artist (2011), which was carefully avoided at the time, @THEAGENTAPSLEY agrees with Kim Novak: http://t.co/n2aiA5YUDn
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 25, 2013

Maybe there is more to say, but not now...


These reviews, via www.rottentomatoes.com, make for interesting reading :

Jeffrey Overstreet, Filmwell

Ron Gonsalves, eFilmCritic.com



Thirty months on, a postlude :

Watched the first ep of #StrangerThings. Didn't think that much to it. Think I'd rather watch actual 80s movies.

— Ryd Cook (@RydCook) August 1, 2016

An equivalent truth may hold for The Artist (2011) [and the theme from Vertigo (1958)], @RydCook ? ;) https://t.co/9wAtIe46KO

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 1, 2016

Not really sure that that is so, @RydCook : reading about Mary Pickford at that time made far more of a valid impression on me ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 1, 2016

@THEAGENTAPSLEY I liked The Artist. It's in the style of a silent movie while at the same time also being about the story of silent to sound

— Ryd Cook (@RydCook) August 1, 2016

It *was promoted* as both of those things :

The Artist (2011) is without audible speech, but is not a silent film ? https://t.co/InDZpVk8D4

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 2, 2016

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

All's fair - if it lets you sue

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23 December

Continuing from Nothing's fair in love and court cases


My guess is that too many people are going to be interested in the court case (and there are so many ways nowadays for news of it to be disseminated) for it to disappear : I have already outlined the tactical reasons that might lead to the decision not being appealed, and, with short time-limits usual within which appeals have to be put in, it will not be long before we know what has happened.


On the face of it, a judge finding a causal link between whatever schizophrenia is and abuse earlier in life more probable than not (the standard of proof being the so-called balance of probabilities). For those who found R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson's Sanity, Madness and the Family : Families of Schizophrenics compelling teenage reading, this ruling has been a long time coming, of course.

However, even if it depends on its own facts, it now legally challenges the orthodoxy that this loose bundle of symptoms called schizophrenia (where A might never hear voices, but B does, even if, say, they share (what is supposed to be) delusional thinking, paranoia, and numbness of affect) is heavily genetic in origin - and, whatever happens to this case, there will still be those who argue that there is a genetic predisposition* to respond to abuse in the way that the judge has found.

In the law of England and Wales, it is established principle in the law of tort (or some say of torts (which are just civil wrongs, some of them the non-criminal counterparts of criminal offences)) that one takes one's victim as one finds him. For example, the person negligently injured who has an egg-shell skull, and for whom the blow on the head was far more serious - on account of the fact that the person from whose negligence the blow has been found to result** is liable, he or she is liable for the complications that resulted (say coma, life-support, paralysis).

Bringing a claim for compensation for 'injury' (in its widest sense) resulting from abuse typically hangs back for any criminal case arising from the same facts to be brought, for the simple reason that the standard of proof is beyond reasonable doubt, so, although there are differences in approach, terminology and procedure between the civil law and the criminal law, a conviction is almost always going to establish the basic requirements of being able to prove a civil case., because another court, with a more stringent test, has already looked at it.

Some abused, perhaps, by Catholic priests, who went on to develop schizophrenia in their mid-twenties and who have been compensated may have agreed to settle all claims in return for receiving payment. Others may not have yet brought or settled their claims (and so would not need to test with the form of agreement had bound them and precluded future cases) might still have smoked skunk, known, in the unlucky few, to correlate not with the chilled experience that they sought, but with frightening psychotic experiences that they may no longer be free from.

A case to cite this Australian judgement, then, would best be brought by someone who was abused, whose abuse has been established but not yet led to a settlement or award, and who has not used recreational drugs, so that the picture is clear and not muddied. What stands n the way are likely to be several-fold :

* Availability of funding (even with insurance, one has to satisfy the insurers and their brokers that the chances are 51% or more of winning)

* The associated willingness of the legal profession (the advice of a solicitor or a barrister's opinion will almost certainly guide that assessment of the chances of winning)

* The calibre of the solicitor and barrister who take it on


How many years will it take for all this to be satisfied, and for a case to proceed to trial without the claimant (through pressure exerted by the defendant and its insurers and brokers and / or, as a result of tactical games, the claimant's own insurers and brokers) being induced to settle or knocked out in procedural wranglings prior to trial ?

Not to seem pessimistic, but I wouldn't be surprised at 15 years. If I'm wrong, take a case - surprise me, and prove me wrong !


End-notes

* We all know, of course, that even the behaviour of non-biological systems, let alone human nature, is in the DNA (as the phrase, for the nonce, has it).

** Charmingly known as the tortfeasor. It could have been indirect, in a road traffic accident (or RTA) - whatever occurred, if insurance is involved, the length of the case may rival that of Dickens' fictional Chancery one of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce...


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Supporting the garlic-eaters - or declining a Faustian pact

This is a Christmas review of It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

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21 December (updated 22 December ; Tweets added, Christmas Day 2015)

This is a Christmas review of It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

Donna Reed shone in It's a Wonderful Life (1946) at @CamPicturehouse - a film rich in meaning and levels !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 21, 2013

When George Bailey (James Stewart) kisses his wife Mary (Donna Reed) on their wedding night, he murmurs (more to himself than to her) ‘Wonderful, wonderful’. He has something then that he loses – or, rather, loses sight of.

Their location at that moment is bizarre in its real sense, and almost, also in its real sense, surreal¹, for they had planned a honeymoon without much thought for the future. But it symbolizes some things, such as courage in adversity and less love in a garret maybe than riches in heaven.

As has been said, George loses sight of the self who found all this, which initially seemed so ramshackle, made whole and complete by Mary’s love and care for him. He faces what seems an impossible position, and his enemy Potter (who started as if to remedy George’s uncle’s mistake, before seeing the capital for him in it (the palpable miserly wickedness embodied by Lionel Barrymore)) threatens him with penalties from a position of power : George ends up abusing the forgetful / easily distracted Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell), and, not believing that anyone can help, gets frustrated with Mary and the children, showing only tenderness for Zuzu [one is reminded of Louis Malle’s Zazie], in bed with a temperature

He has lost hope. What happens, when he seeks to drown his sorrows makes matters worse, and causes him despairingly to recall Potter’s words of derisory rejection, thinking that his value is in being dead, not alive. In one version of the Gospel story, distraught at what he has done, Judas throws the thirty pieces of silver down when they will not be accepted back from him and they are used to buy The Potter’s Field (which is the name of where George builds his homes, but which is where the graveyard is in what Clarence shows him, a Bedford Falls without George, where the place is then called Pottersville ?); in another, Judas hangs himself, so suicide, choosing death over continued life (which some try to harmonize as his doing one and then the other).

Clarence Ardbody (that seems to be his name, and he is charmingly brought to us by Henry Travers) is George’s guardian angel, and he leaves George, after what he has shown him – but only when George chooses to embrace life again, after seeing a world where he is the nobody that he has allowed himself to believe that he is. There he is someone whom no one, not even Mary, knows and is even frightened of, and who is the witness of how differently things could have been.

The conception of this film, starting with prayers for George, Clarence’s appointment, and seeing how George became who and where he is, avoids the easy solution that Clarence should simply tell George how Potter kept back the crucial money that he decided not to return. The film has George choose life, after Clarence’s ruse (used again by Luc Besson in Angel-A (2005)) diverts him from his own plight to – where his heart is as a man – someone else’s, but only after he comes to value himself and the life that he has.

Meanwhile, aside from those prayers, Mary has been addressing the problem that gave rise to his disaffection and, although she did not know it, led him to the brink. He was going to choose water : water had been where, saving his brother from drowning, he lost hearing in his left ear, and into which, in a sort of sacramental baptism, envious hands contrive for Mary and George to fall. Water was falling from the sky and into the new home that Mary had contrived for George and her, and, of course, in the snow of Christmas Eve, it is there in frozen form. That is just an observation, but, those who believe that the other three classical elements will be there when water is found can, of course, excavate…

A criticism that could be levelled at the pacing of the film, which is why do we spend so much time with George in the world where he does not exist before he understands. Actually, because it builds up to him being rejected by the woman whom he still thinks of as his wife (and whose status Clarence has been a little unwilling to give), it takes that for the message that his mother only runs Ma Bailey’s Boarding-House because he is not around to sink in – George has both drunk a lot, before meeting Clarence, and had a double after, and the film symbolically represents how difficult, with a person in deep depression, it is for the truth of his or her worth to permeate and unfreeze that numbness of being dislocated from the world.

As the lyrics of Talking Heads’ song² Once in a Lifetime go, seeming to see a dislocation, from the opposite pole of psychosis :

You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house
You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife


In the world that he sought to leave, George had lost contact with the things and people who mattered to him, burdened by not knowing what to do; in the world that Clarence shows him, he is able to seek out what should be familiar, and keeps trying, ending with Mary. It is only when, under danger of gunfire, that he has gone back to where he started that he can value what he had before and ask for it to be restored – before, it might as well have been in a vault as behind a veil, for he could break through neither to it.

As a portrayal of depression, it demonstrates the truth that one cannot ‘snap out of it, ‘count one’s blessings’ or ‘pull oneself together’, and also, with Clarence’s inscription in Tom Sawyer (some significance in that choice of book, one would warrant), of the value of true friends. But the film works without entering into those considerations, just better if one sees what is slow to change in George.

And perhaps one has to consider the force, in Potter, that George has been fighting, whose Pottersville is debauched and gaudy when (in Clarence’s other world) there had been no one to stop him making it that way : on his desk, seen most clearly when the offer is being made that is too good to be true, is a skull, a bell in a triangular arch, but also an apparatus for heating something over a flame in a spoon that would not be out of place in the drug-laden realm of shooting-up in Trainspotting (1996)³.

In different ways, Potter, desiring domination in a no more rational way than Iago wishes Othello’s destruction, is stood up to by George’s courage and self-sacrifice : by riding the effects of the run on the bank, opposing Potter (and getting the vote) when he moves that the Building & Loan be wound up, and by rejecting a cushy offer for himself. Probably far-fetched that they are parallels to the temptations in the wilderness, but George does give up, respectively, (along with Mary) their honeymoon, his cherished plans of travel⁴, and a life of benefit for himself by going over to Potter…

James Stewart has humour (some of it at the inquisitiveness of Annie, the servant), warmth, and frustration at what he has to give up for what he believes in, even if he does put his foot in it by calling it ‘a crummy little office’ (or some such) to his father : that characteristic quality to Stewart’s voice fits hand in glove with the sort of astonished pleading with people to know who he is. Barrymore, even when he is slow to see his final winning hand against George, brings a smouldering, disgusted malevolence to the role of Potter.

And, when soaked from the swimming-pool trick played on them, George has walked Mary back home in borrowed clothes, Donna Reed and Stewart have a delightful awkwardness to them, so that he does not quite dare kiss her properly when she dares to offer her hand, and then both are spooked by him being urged to kiss her (one almost feels that, by not doing what is suggested, he is trying to avoid his own destiny, and cheat history...). And he has to be snatched away, without that kiss (or, acting against form, trying to exploit her being robeless in the hydrangea bush) on this very night, because of his father’s health. Pain prolonged, and hope deferred, but bringing a life together that they want to lead – though threatened by the opportunistic Potter and George’s despair.


Happy Christmas !



Post-script

One can also find, given that the film was made in 1946, a Hitler figure in Potter : George's father appeased him by putting him on the Board of the Building & Loan ; George fought his offer to Building & Loan customers with Mary's and his honeymoon fund ; Potter offered an alliance to George ; and rejected Potter takes the opportunity to turn the weapons of law and order on him.


End-notes

¹ The ruins where Edward Scissorhands is found spring to mind.

² By David Byrne, Christopher Frantz, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison, and Brian Eno.

³ Seen more obviously, though fleetingly, is a bronze bust of Napoleon Bonaparte near the window in Potter's office.

25 wonderful facts about It's a Wonderful Life https://t.co/aXWbwvPMhN pic.twitter.com/5aKHVr7mTm

— Jeanie Finlay (@JeanieFinlay) December 24, 2015

That (continuing) @CamPicturehouse / @BritSci_Cam collaboration allowed the reference in reviewing Capra's film : https://t.co/giZlbO7xCc

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 25, 2015

⁴ He is a sort of Marius (in Daniel Auteuil's film this year of the same name), with a sense of Wanderlust.


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Echoes of Carnival of the Animals ?

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20 December

Three members of Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia), with a guest pianist in Huw Watkins (also a well-known composer), gave the first in the Sinfonia’s series of At Lunch concerts this season at Cambridge’s West Road Concert Hall (@WestRoadCH) : leader (Jacqueline Shave), principal viola (Clare Finnimore), and principal cello (Caroline Dearnley).


Mozart (1756 – 1791)

However, it was only in the closing work, that we heard all four voices together, as the concert opened with the slow movement from one of Mozart’s violin sonatas (in E Flat Major, K. 481). Watkins and Shave impressed straightaway that the piano could be heard with, not under (or through) the violin, and he played with poise and clear articulation.

There was a pleasing contrast with the tenderness of the string part, which was not played with a mute, but in which Shave brought out an inward quality, whereas the piano line felt as if it soared and was almost semi-operatic in character, not least in its use of ornament. Overall, the eight-minute Adagio felt as if it exuded gracious ease, and was not in the full ornate style of Mozart’s later classical works.


Lutoslawksi (1913 – 1994)

Bukoliki, for viola and cello, dates from 1962, and contains several Polish folk melodies. This short work, in five sections and lasting just five minutes, by twentieth-century Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski started off as one for piano solo, but was rearranged ten years later its composition. (Its title is the same as our word ‘bucolic’, meaning just pastoral.)

Lutoslawski made a nice expanded choice of instrument, because they are a good fit, both for each other, and for the series of miniatures, or moods. In the first, he uses the cello as a drone, and then gives its some very vigorous writing in the second – the use of dissonances between what cello and viola is notable, as is being in folk idiom (which we may know better from Bartók).

The third has effects that made one feel that one was going off the scale of Western music entirely, whereas the fourth, akin to the second’s feel, was more sombre and introspective, leaving the piece to end on a lively dance (and the overall construction of Bukoliki is not unlike Bartók’s Dance Suite. The main feature of this finale was relentless motivic and rhythmic energy and rotation around an interval.


Sally Beamish (1956 –)

The King’s Alchemist, in four movements, is a commission that had been given its world premiere the preceding Wednesday, and it shows that, in the early sixteenth century, people (James IV, specifically) did not know their Canterbury Tales, or they would not so easily have been allured by alchemist John Damian (what’s in a surname !).

The work begins with Cantus (which is a word with a variety of meanings in the musical world, perhaps reflecting the shape-shifting ambiguity of Damian), which makes use of open strings, also contains some difficult stopping, and has a keening air to it, as it is led by the violin at the top of its register. In comparison, in Aquae Vitae*, the instruments feel more equal, and they are very fluid**, with cross rhythms, and a lively ending.

The third movement, Pavana, not the kind of stately dance with a ground bass that I expected, but it built up to the use of discord at the end. Given the story told of Damian in Beamish’s programme notes, including the fact that he tried to fly to France from the battlements of Stirling Castle, one was led to expect the character of Avis Hominis, in the nature of a drunken dance (though not à la Max and The Orkneys), with, using harmonics, chirps and whoops from Shave – it was never going to end well (for Damian), and the final strokes denoted his demise. Beamish, a well-respected and innovative composer, was in the audience (with the Sinfonia’s David Butcher), and took a well-deserved bow.


Fauré (1845 – 1924)

Finally, longer by ten minutes than the rest of the programme put together in the estimated timings, Fauré’s Piano Quartet No. 2 in G Minor, and all the performers together. The quartet opened with an Allegro molto moderato, the first of three marked (with some qualification) Allegro, and was straight in, with themes stated by Watkins on piano that mutated into a sense of rumbling, almost as of the tossing of the sea, before returning to its tempestuous opening.

The shorter Allegro molto that followed had a syncopated theme given by the piano, which had an oriental feel to it. After some difficult runs, the movement ended with a bang. The third, an Adagio non troppo, opened with the piano and some musings from Finnimore on viola. The previous oriental atmosphere continued with arabesques, and Shave making languid cadences on violin, which developed into heady, exotic textures, which swayed hypnotically, as if under the thematic influence of Saint-Saëns (1835 – 1921). When the opening material returned, Fauré had it build, then subside by chordal progression, as if imitating passion sublimated.

The energetic start of the finale, another Allegro molto, reminded of an elephant’s gait (Saint-Saëns again ?) – the chords from the piano were taken up by the trio of strings, with the violin to the fore, before settling down to ensemble playing. The thematic material gave way to more quirky patterns on the piano, and then worked up into a furious mood, before the returning of the opening theme. An excited coda led to a triumphant conclusion, and the work felt as though, in its third outing in this programme, the players had achieved a mature balance between them and real, intelligent interplay.


A good set of pieces to set one thinking about how compositions in different ages go about the business of writing for small combinations of instruments.


End-notes

* The old name for what was effectively whisky, which is a name that derives from the Gaelic word for aquae vitae, usquebaugh.

** No pun intended.


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