In around three Tweets, a #UCFF reaction to Rocks (2019)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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17 October
In around three Tweets, a #UCFF reaction to Rocks (2019)
Rocks (2019) benefits from sharp editing, which 'snatches away' moments on which, one judges (because of the edit), one did not want to linger - but it also does so with moments when characters *do* positively connect : which is, as Ben Stiller says in a film, is very democratic.— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 17, 2019
However, generally, it essentially (as that editing demarcates) has a void at the centre of a story that is *not* about the realities of child protection, *not* about a parent's mental health - and not nearly as worth watching as La haine (1995) ? :https://t.co/UlJN4JJyJv— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 17, 2019
* An incidental feature of Her (2013), which is otherwise an excellent film, by Spike Jonze, in which Joaquin Phoenix plays the lead...— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 17, 2019
Other (non-spoilery) comments :
* The set-up is that what happens, early in the film, has happened before ; yet, the film seems to want ‘to have its cake and eat it’, because the other things that follow it appear as if new (and, given that the starting circumstance has happened before, some of them (or the idea of them), or some of the means of finding out where someone might be, would not be new)
* The occluding of the view, when Rocks and her friends are all together (somewhere), and when we know what looms in the background even as it is talked of, establishes that group, but promises other things about the story-telling that are not given to us
* For, although it is understandable that a new person at her school would ask Rocks why that is her name, we indistinctly hear what is said so do we feel that we need never have heard her ask for the explanation – when, by then in the film, we were quite happy not to know ? (Unless, perhaps, it was an act of telling, but we were not intended to understand what she said ?)
* A film can, of course, end without an ending – Rocks does not appear to end as it does, i.e. to subvert the story-telling that brought us into these lives, or to provide a resolution that is not a resolution, and yet it does seem (unlike that in, say, Abgebrannt (2011)) to serve to take us casually away from the conundrums with which we have seen Rocks wrestle
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
