Showing posts with label Dogville. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dogville. Show all posts

Tuesday 12 December 2017

From Ibsen to Kafka to Camus and Sartre to Lynch to Burton to Dogville : community and re-watching Edward Scissorhands (1990)

This is a reappraisal (work in progress) of Edward Scissorhands (1990)

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


11 December


This is a reappraisal (work in progress) of Edward Scissorhands (1990)

We need not fear that, because Edward Scissorhands (1990) is entertaining – with its sub-Lynchian palette of pastel hues for homes and clothes within which those drawn to conformity in their estate* express their minor individualism – it cannot also be an outline argument how such societies and their norms marginalize both disability and any proper understanding of what it means to identify as disabled (or LGBTQ, or as from an ethnic or religious minority, or as needing or having treatment for cancer).


Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter (first edition, 1845)




More to come...



End-notes :

* The inhabitants of Tinsmith Circle, Carpenter's Run, Lutz, CA, are credited.




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

Sunday 29 November 2015

Less like themselves, more like they want to be

This is a review of The Dressmaker (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


30 November


This is a review of The Dressmaker (2015)


It is almost as though The Dressmaker has been pinned to fit around this one fact : Sunset Blvd. (1950) premiered in Australia, on 25 August 1950.




For want of a better word, the film is set in Dungatar, in 1951, but nothing in the flash of music, the gestures, the stance, remotely desires more than to draw our attention to the fact that there is unfinished business in this implausible, symbolic place – symbolic, because its very set-up is pat in the way that that of films such as High Noon (1952) always was, so that there can be nothing behind its implausibility, if not symbolism. (Here, the paraphernalia of the wild west, and all the stock sights and spectacles of the age’s saloon-bars, have been rolled into one figure.)

Symbolism, but not of any subtle or interesting kind, because it wants to revisit an earlier time of colourless grey, bit by irritatingly nagging bit. As if picking the skin of forgetfulness off an obliging old tangerine, and miraculously penetrating to – although with no means to do so beyond being back there – what had been misremembered, misunderstood, misrepresented. At best, Kate Winslet, in the person of Myrtle Dunnage (‘Tilly’), says to her mother (‘Mad’ Molly, played by Judy Davis) : I need you to remember me, mum, so I can remember.




That, too, is just a gesture in the direction of a symbolic level for the rehabilitation and restitution of Tilly’s mother (and, a few times, Molly duly disbelieves why her daughter is there). By contrast, in the best of Ibsen, this notion of what really happened can be revelatory, electrifying, and rarely for good, and many a time Hitchcock made true film capital through showing us something on screen that, although it was not the mind’s obfuscations in dream, desire or trauma, mimicked them (e.g. Spellbound (1945), Vertigo (1958), and Marnie (1964) :

Here it is just entertainment, with an audience of would-be psychic explorers, but in titters at Hugo Weaving’s again wearing women’s clothes : he did so devastatingly as Nurse Noakes in Cloud Atlas (2012), and without either exploiting or mocking, as this role does, those who share this interest. The likely audience for The Dressmaker will be unlikely to gravitate towards Dogville (2003), or to do so to their taste, whereas those who missed it and have only witnessed the work of Lars von Trier in more recent works of excess such as Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac Vol. I (2013) and Vol. II (2013), can seek a worthier film there.


This is a film that never tries to do what Dogville does, but really feels like [it wants to be] Wes Anderson, but without Wes, and which is definitely written in a way that wishes that it could be even bad Wodehouse, but which just never will be : it desires to have older people ‘behave badly’, but does so in that stock way that Ronald Harwood uses for Billy Connolly’s character, when he adapts his stage-play as Quartet (2012), rather than is done more inventively, for Judi Dench, in Philomena (2013).

Whatever Rosalie Ham’s novel may be, it seems newly published (in paperback, but there is evidence of an audio-book on CD from 2003...), and does not appear in hardback until April next year.


Some reviews from Rotten Tomatoes (@RottenTomatoes) :

Peter Bradshaw (@PeterBradshaw1), for The Guardian, gave it one star, and closes his review by saying Surely Winslet can find better roles than this.

For Little White Lies (@LWLies, where they score things differently), the marks are not much kinder, and the review by David Jenkins (@DaveyJenkins) is headed 'This lop-sided couture western staggers on long past what should've been a short, sharp run time'.




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

Saturday 14 September 2013

High-class cinema comes to Childerley

This is a Festival review of Edward Scissorhands (1990)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


14 September (14 April and 22 July 2015, Tweets added)

This is a Festival review of Edward Scissorhands (1990)


Agents on location, watching the cinema from afar...


The Long Barn at Childerley Hall, which (apart from yesterday, when I went on the wrong day) I had last seen when the pairing of Northumbrian piper and fiddler Kathryn Tickell and the trio The Side rocked the place, to-night had the treat of bespoke cinema, courtesy of Tony Jones, the director of Cambridge Film festival, and his dedicated team.




This was not just any projector and a screen plus sound-system in a wonderfully atmospheric space with beams, decorative chairs, an extensive bar, and even very tasteful fairy-lights - the image was sharp, beautiful, warm and magic, so that the resolution of the long-shots almost took one by surprise, and one could hear every detail of the soundtrack. I should have expected nothing less from people with these credentials, but I loved them for it.

First up, unexpected I will warrant by many, was something to preface the billed film, Edward Scissorhands (1990) - another Tim Burton number in Frankenweenie (1984). Yes, the original, not the one released in 2012.


So a proper, old-fashioned programme, but with links :

* Winona Ryder is Edward's Kim*, and is the voice of Elsa Van Hesling in the 2012 Frankenw.

* Both works deal with, address or feature the situation of the outsider who can only be loved, if at all,  by people being more than skin deep

* Who else to bring such an outsider from, or back from, another realm than Ben (Barret Oliver), a member of the Frankenstein family, and a Vincent Price at around 79, just a few years before the end of his life, and looking nothing like it ?




* Nosy neighbours, to whom young Frankenstein feels obliged to account for his behaviour, and for whom Edward's arrival in an unnecessary bright yellow automobile is an instant source of fascination, intrigue, and fear

* One in pure monochrome, the other with two almost distinct colour-worlds, one being the washed-out one of Price as The Inventor on his eminence and Johnny Depp as the named work of creation**, the other a Dogville sort of a place, but with the distinction of largely pastel colours pushed to make Tobermory look drab, with hues so garish as almost to be fluorescent


A good night's viewing, with a nice role for a much younger-looking Alan Arkin, but perhaps one for Dianne Wiest that did not leave her much room to move - what was given to, and made of, by Depp, Ryder, Shelley Duvall, and Daniel Stern.



End-notes

* Nearly put Kim in Edward, but that did not feel right...

 ** Edward (even though we are shown how) is left in an explicably parlous state - more important to impart etiquette and poetry than the opposable thumb ? - unless one remembers the origins in Der Struwwelpeter, and what such thinking gave rise to in Haneke's The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band) (2009)




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

Saturday 27 October 2012

A Tweet review II

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


27 October

* Contains spoilers *

Welcome to this posting, about the Estonian film of The Idiot (Idioot) (2011), in which I shall seek to fill out my Pratter review

It will be clear early on, when we meet Prince Myshkin* during a journey, that pews in the aisle of what turns out to be a very large church are representing a railway-carriage. However, arrival at the destination and coming face to face with a neon-fuelled icon is enough to show that we are not going to be playing with physical spaces (as in Lars von Trier's Dogville (2003), but transforming them).

Moreover, they are discreet, identifiably different spaces, and, without leaving the building at any point, we will see a flower-garden and the sea. Yet, as Dostoyevsky's novel runs to at least 700 pages, and we have a little over two hours, we must necessarily concentrate on what most centrally concerns Myshkin. Played by Risto Kübar, we learn early on of his medical history, about which - this is his complete and utter nature - he is unnecessarily open, and its manifests itself, as the role is played, as a helplessly shimmering passivity.

All the more contrast, which is at the heart of the book, not just with his distant relative's husband and family, but with the vibrancy, to everyone's cost, of Nastasja Filippovna, which it would have been tempting for Katariina Unt to overdo. The adaptation and direction by Rainer Sarnet have taken risks, but confined them, leaving the abiding feeling that the claustrophic nature of the setting, with all its overtones of the influence of the church on convention and conduct, has strengthened the telling of the central part of Myshkin's story.

My only regret is being so tired during this screening, which, through my fault, detracted from the compelling nature of the production.


End-notes

* His title means next to nothing at this stage, in practical terms, for he is penniless.


Friday 21 September 2012

More like Pirandello

This is a review of V.O.S. (2009), as screened at Cambridge Film Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


20 September

This is a review of V.O.S. (2009), as screened at Cambridge Film Festival (@Camfilmfest) 2012

V.O.S. (2009) (which denotes that it is the original version, but with sub-titles, i.e. not dubbed) was introduced as a film within a film, taken from a play within a play (which is by Carl Lopez), but it is more like Pirandello than anything else, with Brechtian Verfremdungseffekte thrown in for good measure, plus a hint of Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry.

For the four principal characters do not have - are not shown to have - any existence outside of the film, and though they are stepping in and out of the role as scenes are played out (and envisaged, in discussion, as having taken or to take a different course), it's as though their life is on the set or lot, which makes the experience of watching a lot like that of seeing Nine (2009) or Dogville (2003).

Woody Allen is even mentioned by Clara (Àgata Roca), the pregnant partner of Ander (Andres Herrera) who is seemingly writing the film as it goes, as if it were a linear process that leads up to the scene that we see at the beginning : one audience review that I have seen recently at Cambridge Film Festival critiques an accent as if were less convincing at the beginning of shooting and that that fact is necessarily reflected in where the scene appears within the film.

What does the suggestion that the actors have a life beyond the parts that they play add, when doors that we have been shown into a hospital theatre are later revealed as a mock-up, but then have figures dressed for a procedure emerge from them and appear to be received by the crew as if they are real surgeons or the like? As far as I could see, it merely put a layer of doubt as to whether any of the scenes played out have any status, which is something that Allen has explored, for example, with the use of a chorus (in Mighty Aphrodite (1995), with the alternative realities of Melinda and Melinda (2004), and in Harry or Stardust Memories (1980).

That said, the story of how Ander and Clara become a couple is still an engaging one, because it shows how they have interacted with Vicky and Manu, and it is not as if Allen has just done it all before. Those who are interested can read more in Variety.