Showing posts with label Reggie Perrin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reggie Perrin. Show all posts

Saturday 2 January 2021

The Reggie Perrin Tweets

The Reggie Perrin Tweets

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

The Reggie Perrin Tweets













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

Saturday 1 March 2014

L'Étranger ou L'Inconnu ?

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


1 March

This is a review of Stranger by the Lake (L’Inconnu du Lac) (2013)

For some who might wish to know, this film contains no female roles and probably as much graphic sex as Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013)

Amongst other things, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin showed that nothing quite evokes the quotidian as showing that, day by day, people choose to do the same thing (in this case, parking in a sandy spot with a few trees), and a shot of that place and a car drawing up can also be used to denote the passing of time – and to disrupt that easy sense of denotation*. That rate at which time passes can, in itself, be used to play counter to the audience’s expectation of how quickly events should happen, what should happen, what we should see :

This film leaves us in no doubt that we see what director Alain Guiraudie wants us to see, but that may not feel a positive experience for us, even if reflection suggests that confronting us with a slow pace, much fairly promiscuous sex, and the absence, otherwise, of much other than sometimes tense conversations might be calculated to unsettle. Hitchcock, it seems, would have done it that way, although perhaps his script would have had filmic goals, in particular an ending, that this one does not.

If our sex-life is not of a nature (the film calls it ‘cruising’) where people could be talking with someone new and then head inland to caress each other within minutes and have penetrative sex, such uninhibited actions present a challenge – not in terms of whether one wants to watch gay sex, as in what anything more significant might mean**. Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao), who says that he has done all this before on holiday and does not seem much interested, values Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) as a person to talk to, maybe over dinner or a few drinks, a feeling that may be shared equally, although Franck’s deepest desire is to find someone whom he fancies who is not already involved (and, for no apparent reason, dashes off after someone when the two first talk).

Someone gay who also watched this screening said that even knowing about a man what Franck knows about Michel (Christophe Paou) would not have stopped him being attractive and a desirable partner (whether or not the actual Michel is, who seems like a more serious type of Tom Selleck). Given what Franck does know, that seems surprising, in the way that Peter Gabriel (on his album Up) characterizes the audience of his fictitious Barry Williams Show, I love my daughter’s rapist, etc.

What matters, though, is that – of brief origin though it is – Franck feels love for Michel, albeit after the event. We will never know why Michel did what Franck knows about, we will never know what happens at the end of the film, we just see Franck relating to him, knowing that he did it. The film does build tension (though not without a running joke at the expense of the man with his shorts half down and, hand on his penis, likes to watch), and a script and a film-maker can withhold things from us*** – as said, it is made abundantly clear that we are shown what Guiraudie chooses, and that this is not a film that, unlike life, ends tidily.

However, does the end justify the means, just gradually – and effectively – stirring us up about something and leaving us hanging… ? OK, so life is not neat, we do not always know what happened and / or why, and Ingrid Bergman may not always escape the clutches of James Mason into the arms of Cary Grant, but can the point of resisting that resolving temptation just be to involve one in something (unreal) that one could not know anything about otherwise, and then suddenly say that whatever happened next is just unstated. If so, Haneke does that better, many, many times, not least with L'Amour (2012).

Haneke, however, does just not refrain from telling us definitely what is happening only at the end, but throughout – we may come to a conclusion, say, about the character or behaviour of Georges, but it deliberately may be one of several. This is where Stranger by the Lake (and it might be worth considering who we consider ‘the stranger’ of the title to be) leads us on, and then slams the brakes on at the end**** – yes, we know that several things may occur on the given facts, but why is it apt just to leave us with them ? Not that it matters much, but the film feels a little as though it may have broken faith with its audience :

I will show you this, which leads to this, which leads to this, and, when matters have become really critical, down come some pseudo-philosophic shutters, closing off what we might not know definitely in life. Yet one can be sure of two things. One, that, because of what has happened, someone will have to decide, beyond the scope of the film, what then took place and why. Two, that, as this is not life, we were allowed to see and hear things (such as Henri and Franck’s conversations), and have a perspective, which is just denied by this ending, which is therefore arbitrary.

Not so much Reader, I married him, as Reader, I’m not telling you any more after all.


Afterthought

Or maybe it does make for a genuinely suspenseful ending after all - in the sense Nous sommes suspendus...


End-notes

* As when there are no cars when Franck arrives, or when we see him walking down the path to the lake without arriving.

** In Nymphomaniac Volume I (2013), for example, two friends between them have sex with a score of men on a train just in a contest over a bag of Smarties.

*** We know nothing outside this place, and even the representative of authority keeps making visits here, at all sorts of hours, rather than taking a fairly ad hoc and low-key approach.

**** The Woman in the Fifth (2011) does so, but for a different reason that relates to the novel that it adapts.




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

Thursday 5 September 2013

Empty vessels

This is a review of The Way Way Back (2013)

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


5 September

This is a review of The Way Way Back (2013)

* Contains moderate spoilering, and a bit of swearing *

I defy anyone to dislike Sam Rockwell as Owen in The Way Way Back (2013)*. (I probably should not do too much defying, or I might end up like the film's odious Trent (Steve Carell), telling people who they are or what they think.)


As I Tweeted :


The odious Trent, possibly unconsciously, seems set on crushing Duncan, nicely brought about by Liam James - he is the sort of man that he is probably a bit like Reggie Perrin's CJ, in that he did not get where he is to-day without making bogus and manipulatively one-sided 'deals' with people.

Thankfully, the excruciating embarrassment of the characters sizing each other up at the Riptide, the holiday home from Trent's previous relationship, diminishes as Owen and Water Whiz (apparently a real place) hove into view. A little bit like Steve Martin being energized, but largely his own man, Rockwell is the dad whom Duncan does not have / no longer has, as puerile Trent cannot resist grinding Duncan with.

The water-park becomes that sort of home-from-home that we know so well all the way to Alice and her adventures via Dorothy and Kansas / Oz and even into a recent Thai film that was in my top three from last year's Festival, Postcards from the Zoo (2012)** (let alone Midnight in Paris (2011)).

Yes, we root for Duncan, and laugh with him, even despite him, and Owen is no saint, but he is humane, comfortable with himself (most of the time), encouraging. No more than that needs be said - watch the film, relish a world beyond the cringeing hypocrisy of people pretending, and find the punctuation-mark !


End-notes

* With its silent punctuation.

** The zoo is a sort of Eden, but Water Wizz is more flawed, although caring and compassionate, taking in Duncan as he is.




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

Tuesday 11 September 2012

Who is the imposter ?

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


11 September - work in progress


* Contains spoilers - either resolve to know all about The Imposter (2012), or do not read *


It's a bit like odd one out (a game whose title has singularly always baffled me), or is it?

Well, we could play it with this film and others such as Zelig (1983), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), maybe even with Roxanne (1987), and other media such as The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (with the late and great Leonard Rossiter, 1976), and Orson Welles and his broadcast of The War of the Worlds :

(1) If you watch The Imposter and think that it is a documentary, then you are more gullible than even Welles conceived in around 1938 - it is not a documentary, and you can simply look at the credits to see so, if nothing else convinces you*.

Is it, then, (2) a well-done feature film, or, as I say, (3) a piss-take, which is funny, but whose purpose is unclear. It's unclear, but I'd be amazed if the person with the germ of the concept hadn't been influenced by something akin to the novel Engleby by Sebastian Faulks**. I still question, though, what the genre is, and who's deceiving whom and why?

It is, for me, as if Airplane passed itself for a flight-related real-life drama, in the way that Casualty does as events taking place in a hospital (not a vehicle for characters to interact concerning health-type excuses for action) : speak to anyone who thinks that they know about criminal or civil courts and how they operate, and you infer (they were never a witness or juror, never attended a trial at all), and it's all sucked in from t.v. and film, whereas the truth of the justice system is dry and dull, let alone how it operates.

OK so far? What I propound, then, is that just as you might be able to watch This is Spinal Tap (1984) or anything to do with Steve Coogan / Barry Humphreys / Sasha Baron Cohen / Matt Roper and their other selves, and believe, as at (1), that it's all real, you would then be a more-or-less willing victim (and you'd have lost a lot of money to that nice man in Nigeria). In other words, the equivalent of our hero in The Truman Show*** (1998).

I have Tweeted already about the Hitler diaries, but not, I think, alluded to Trevor, Lord Roper : I believe that it was claimed, when it was revealed that the diaries whose status he had approved were shown to be fakes, that so much should have been self-evident, and, with The Imposter, I cannot believe, dedicated popcorn-eating or using the cinema as a more effective bed apart, that anyone would take it for real (item (1), above), or that it was pretending to be real (item (2), above). For, here, we are not talking about Homer napping, as the phrase has it for when The Odyssey or The Iliad creak a bit too much.

Perhaps, though, the film (any film?) itself acts as a soporific for the higher functions of the brain for some, However, its score, for example, I found so intrusive that it was not good film music (of which, I fully believe, that one should laregly cosnciously be unaware, unless it is some big emotional theme, as in Superman (1978), or its reprise), but, again, I do believe that there was some of that Damien-Hirst-like post-modern irony lurking here: with passages that played with the in any case edgy interval of a semi-tone, as if a restless oscillation between neighbouring pitches could be remotely undetectable, or contained not the development of thematic material, but which just enacted descending scales, how could I have expected to acclimatize to them? - and I do not believe that, unless it was a joke at the expense of those who did, I was meant to.

That said, the friend with whom I saw the film has alerted me to the existence of both:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/the-imposter-15--f-for-fake-pg-8076916.html

and also

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4087370.stm

as well as

http://www.find-anyone.com/aboutcharlieparker.html

From the first, I quote (sceptically) where the reviewer (Geoffrey MacNab) talks of the task faced by The Imposter's director, Bart Layton: Like [Frédéric] Bourdin, he withholds information from us or gives it us to us in such a selective fashion that we can't see the holes. No holes detected in my viewing, as you can see from the end-notes...!

In the second, Francisco Hernandez-Fernandez is supposed to have been used as an alias by the real Bourdin - yes, a very likely name to choose, like Franco del Bobbo! This was at a school that he attended until 'A teacher unmasked him last week [seemingly June 2005] after having watched a television programme about his exploits'.

Yet, at this date, after allegedly being imprisoned in the States for six year following impersonating Nicholas Barclay and having been found wanted, the piece lamely states:

He is said to have assumed numerous other identities

No facts there, then?


Just look at http://imposterfilm.com/interview-subjects/, and see whether there is a closer resemblance to something like (which I hope that you know isn't real) The Addams Family and to the people who might, in character, be playing such a thing - the poses, the expressions, don't they challenge you not to take it seriously?




From Wikipedia: Frédéric Bourdin is a French serial impostor the press has nicknamed "The Chameleon". He began his impersonations as a child and as of 2005 had assumed at least 500 false identities, three of which have been actual teenage missing persons.


More to come...



End-notes

* An appendix can be found at ??, but how about :

 The charges for which Frederic is put away for six years (perjury and falsely obtaining a passport) - as if he could not have been found to have committed offences that would have justified and carried a much longer tariff, but he needs to be free to tell the story

 The calls to everywhere and anywhere, permitted by the prison to a man whose falsehood from making the calls near the beginning of this story must have been discovered - but he is supposedly released, and without any continuing restriction on his activities (wherever he may then be, as he would assuredly have been deported

 The ludicrously lengthy list of 'previous' when Frederic is caught in the events in this film, both as if he would somehow have avoided being put away for repeatedly committing deception all around Europe, and not have been a person under restriction then for his pattern of crime, with all children's homes on alert to him and to his modus operandi

 That list even contains (shown on the screen) the name Fernandez Fernandez, and the film revels in its absurdity, aurally and visually - I was in hoots, and my friend was laughing, but, bewilderingly, everyone else in the screen seemed to have taken it as indicative of how bad he was, not of sheer implausibility


** First published by Hutchinson in 2007 (3 May).

*** If the film were really about that : Tru + Man?, and his surname is, of course, Burbank (Truman is his Christian name, as we often forget), a real 'studio man'. Thinking about The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) may not be amiss.





Saturday 28 April 2012

The habit of collecting (4)

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


28 April

Few - not even Bruno Bettelheim's adherents, acolytes, agents, and (they think) apostles - would doubt that the (core) impulse is something of the order of:


There's one that I haven't got!


Mrs President Marcos [I'm calling her that just to be flippant] knew that feeling well, but what did the possessor (as I cannot well speak for ownership) and person displaying this number-slave have at the forefront of his or her mind to have collected it?


GD15 SIX


Which one has to translate into GD IS SIX, as well as postulating that there must be many, many others in the series (in fact, as the whole aphabet isn't used, it must be 23 or 24 squared, some of which might mean more than others):


DD IS SIX (for Dating Direct*)

BB IS SIX (I need not explain that one, I fear)

GG IS SIX (good old Germaine**!)

BJ IS SIX (now that is rating something...)

CJ IS SIX (for those flagging already, just skip to the closing homily!)


All of which, though, assumes that the proposition talks about an age, anniversary, or score, whereas there could be something else going on...

x = 2

x x y = 6


y = ?



Back with the proposition GD IS SIX, could it, itself, be a known acronym, maybe for:

* Gross Diameter

* An open source code library for the dynamic creation of images by programmers (according to www.boutell.com/gd/)

* Graeme Dixon

* The ethical URL shortener with no registration required (according to v.gd/)

* Grand Designs

* Great Dunmow

* Gérard Depardieu (or, to extend him to his full height, Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu)


The end is listless, I believe


But it must really be to do with the spirit of North by Northwest (1959), one of the craziest, but still best, Cary Grant films ever - we are being (or feel that we are being?) set this puzzle to work out, who - or what - 'GD' is, and what it means for it to be 'six', or '6'.

But maybe it's a metaphor for what we make of life, and could mean no more than the title of that Hitchcock film - a big confusion about nothing (where people get killed - or do they?).

Maybe God's Design for Richard Dawkins, maybe Dawkins' message to a God (whom he states is fictional) - God Deficiency is Six?



In closing


Personally - if I can be intimate and private for this closing moment - I don't go along with much of that


We will never know the answer, but that's because it's all wrapped up with


Cheltenham - GCHQ - MI6 - Whitehall - Harry Palmer - hush hush - need-to-know basis - Reggie Perrin and his brother-in-law Jimmy


Amen


Post-Amen (as at 6 May)

In fact, it was GL15 SIX, so please ignore suitable amounts of the above!



End-notes

* Or Deadline Dave...

** Would that be a kind of rating (a bit as for bowed Eric)?