Showing posts with label Sam Riley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sam Riley. Show all posts

Friday 31 March 2017

Films of former collaborators, with Q&As within 48 hours of each other

Responding together to Free Fire (2016) and Prevenge (2016) as food for thought

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

31 March


The mental collision of Free Fire (2016) (plus Q&A with director Ben Wheatley), at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, on Wednesday 29 March 2017 at 8.50 p.m., and Prevenge (2016) (plus Q&A with actor Jo Hartley), at Saffron Screen, Saffron Walden, on Friday 31 March 2017 at 8.00 p.m., gives food for thought


Babou Ceesay (Martin), Brie Larson (Justine), Armie Hammer (Ord), Sharlto Copley (Vern), Noah Taylor (Gordon) – confusing being brightily with well dressed (even if handily differentiating them…) ?


When Kevin Spacey (@KevinSpacey) talked – on the Wogan t.v. show ? – about K-PAX (2001), in which Jeff Bridges and he starred, the indications were that the film was going to be one from which one would derive much more than from his account of it¹.

Ben Wheatley (at an event for High-Rise (2015)

Were it not that one has the practice of seeking to go ‘blind’ into films, and letting them speak for themselves, hearing the interesting and excellent Q&A at The Arts Picturehouse with Ben Wheatley (@mr_wheatley), director and co-writer of Free Fire (2016) (@FreeFireFilm), and well hosted by Evie Salmon (@eviesalmon), might nonetheless have persuaded one that the film itself, even if it would not just seem like a technical exercise¹, was one in whose outfolding one would find relatively little more of interest.


Cillian Murphy, Sam Riley, and Michael Smiley in Free Fire (2016)

Maybe a title at the top of the film, which said that it had been inspired by a report into what had happened in a real-life gun-battle, would have given one a different perspective from which to watch ? Since, despite the script’s origins, the actions and motivations of the characters are principally fictitious (e.g. we learnt that there had been a sincere expression of interest from Cillian Murphy in appearing in a Wheatley film, and so the question had arisen what business could Michael Smiley and he be about together), one doubts that something such as the step of having an image inset into the frame of where they all were, so that one could much better follow who was shooting at whom (at any time), and from where, would have made much difference to engaging some viewers (others may, of course, have been able to understand that very much more easily - and so also do not find battle-scenes boggling).

Self-confessed fan Ben Johnston writes thus, in a review for TAKE ONE (www.takeonecff.com, @TakeOneCinema), and for whom he also interviewed Ben Wheatley² [surely 'a Ben thing' going on... ?] :

While the tenuous unions form the basis for a lot of the character motivations and a fair bit of the plot, it is the rivalries that bring the most laughs, with plenty of insults flying in between the bullets. This razor sharp banter makes it extremely difficult to figure out who to root for at any given time, especially since nobody seems to be taking the whole situation very seriously. One minute a guy is shouting out that he’s forgotten whose side he’s on, the next someone is taking a quick headcount of who’s still alive – there’s a distinct element of cartoonish slapstick that helps keep the extended gun battle from feeling too monotonous [my emphasis].


Sienna Miller, as Charlotte, in High-Rise (2015)

Having watched the film, one found that, in the event, it had had an essentially similar effect to Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise (2015) (@HighRise_movie), in that one largely, and to an equivalent degree, really did not give a damn about what happened to any of the characters (Laing’s being so naively self-deceived about his importance (and other things) did not help³), or so tend to maintain much active awareness of where one was (obvious exceptions were for the swimming-pool, or Royal’s (Jeremy Irons’) penthouse), because the script could be used to draw one’s attention to it. In fact (unless one can generate enthusiasm and / or concentration), whichever happens first, the law of diminishing returns is likely to apply, because of a feedback loop in which the other is undermined, and then in turn undermines the first. In High-Rise, the issues started early, with what had brought Laing (Tom Hiddleston) to be where, and as, he was shown at the opening of the film.


Elisabeth Moss (Helen) and Tom Hiddleston (Laing) in High Rise

Yet Laing’s matter-of-fact observation about the dog being barbequed rather said it all in a nutshell (or as with Wheatley’s account of how he saw the report that had documented a shoot-out) : the act of saying it presupposes another state of affairs, and who necessarily can maintain interest in what then led up to that point - even though some films work perfectly well so (such as American Beauty (1999), or Sunset Blvd. (1950)) ? When Wheatley spoke to The Arts Picturehouse audience (Screen 1), he made quite clear that he rebels against the portrayal of ‘good guys and bad guys’ per se, but one supposes that it depends what reaction a director hopes to gain for his or her work, if everyone is seen to be flawed. As it is, the presenting reason for everyone to be there at all in Free Fire, initially or later, is illegal activity – quite apart (please see comments above) from the double-dealing between the two groups that constitute the parties, or, as it emerges, the tensions between individuals in the same group, and the other group (a continuing theme since A Field in England (2012)). (In High-Rise, an additional element of more moral illegality / dishonesty is also in play.)


By contrast, with Prevenge, the quality of Alice Lowe’s self-direction, acting and editing [at the latter of which activities, as Jo Hartley (@MissJoHartley) told us at Saffron Screen (@SaffronScreen), Lowe’s baby Della Moon Synott was, as by then fully present, able to be there] is such that her wicked jokes are both amusing and feel truly transgressive⁴ (about the word ‘cut’ after, say, her character Ruth has used a knife on someone : on reflection, one recalls that tone in Roger Moore as Bond, speaking chummily to someone who is, at least, unconscious).


Roger Moore in Live and Let Die (1973)

Whereas, except for those members of the Free Fire audience (who also found every injury or wounding a source of great amusement), the bickering and next bad behaviour that cause matters to unravel felt fairly functional, if arbitrary⁵ – could one even locate this at the level of Tarantino’s successful black humour in Pulp Fiction (1994), or did it just feel awkward when, for example, an actor is trying to be off hand with some doubt whether a character has really been killed ? As predictively Tweeted, Michael Palin and Terry Jones seem to hit the mark well with an episode from the first series of Ripping Yarns (Murder at Moorstones Manor (1976) [the link is to IMDb's web-page])...




Saffron Screen's Q&A guest, Jo Hartley (not in character)

At Saffron Screen (@SaffronScreen), Jo Hartley (@MissJoHartley), who plays the midwife in Prevenge (2016), deliberately used the word 'gestation' to refer to the timescale (as confirmed by IMDb, @IMDb) within which the film was both written and shot (very quickly, and yet with no compromise in values !) :



No time, there, for 22,000 storyboards, etc., of which Wheatley spoke, or mapping the interior terrain (such an amazing space !) and plotting all the movements out on it, or six weeks with actors such as Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy and Michael Smiley, 'lying in shit' (as Wheatley put it). (As for Ripping Yarns, one can hear Michael Palin commenting on the quality effect that director Terry Hughes and he were aiming to achieve : the shoot for 'Murder at Moorstones Manor' (in 1976), just a thirty-minute episode, was Friday 15, Monday 25 to Friday 29 and Sunday 31 October, and (on set, for the final shoot-out in the hall) Wednesday 3 to Friday 5 November.)

'Murder at Moorstones Manor' (Ripping Yarns), with Harold Innocent as Manners


Despite the time-pressures on her to get the film made, Alice Lowe lets dawn on us, at our own pace, what we see happening (or why), but we certainly have no idea of it when her character Ruth has an opening encounter with Mr. Zabek (Dan Renton Skinner), a fruitily-suggestive-cum-titillatingly-menacing proprietor of an emporium of exotic creatures : we ask what it means, and what perversion he committed that – by a voice from which we will be hearing more fully⁶ – is being 'called in' (Ruth arrives with a prepared weapon, and we also see clothes being destroyed) ?



We hear and enjoy how Alice Lowe (@alicelowe) has scripted her own role to give us a person with immense verbal and social facility, fully as much as Dennis Price’s ready charm as Louis Mazzini in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), and an equal, in her personas / accents, for Alec Guinness’ celebrated cameos as members of the D'Ascoyne family (even though, properly seen, he is not the star of the show anyway, but Price’s impressive adjunct – i.e. when not seduced by novelty and the wonders of make-up, as by Linklater's gimmick in Boyhood) (2014)). For Len (Gemma Whelan), shown confronted here by Ruth (feigning to sound Welsh), Lowe has created someone who has the presence of mind to don gloves to try to box her assailant into submission, but who cannot quite help simultaneously believing - to Ruth's incredulity - the presenting story that all this is part of Ruth’s trying to sign her up to donate to a children’s charity !


Likewise, we are not only amused by DJ Dan (Tom Davis), when he casually takes his hair off, but also by the added grotesquery – here, more reminiscent of Steve Oram, with Lowe, in Sightseers (2012) (@SightseersMovie) than of Mr. Zabek’s particular qualities – of what happens to it later. Irrespective of Ruth’s motives in meeting someone such as Dan, and going through with everything necessary to be invited back, we can also – if we try – glimpse our own faiblesse in who he is happy to think that he is, as against where he turns out to live : as Ruth, Lowe does not allow herself to see her own banality (does, also, Louis Mazzini ?), but she roundly presents to us the people whom Ruth can only denigrate into prey (who disparages what someone would do on account of being called Josh - although she did try to relate to him, and, having humorously tried one, called him Dr Anchovy).


The manner of filming, and the intense look of some shots or scenes, working in conjunction with the score⁶, evoke moods and emotions in a very cinematic way : because cinematographer Ryan Eddleston seems to have free rein to make dramatic adjustments to focus and depth of feel within a shot, one experiences more than viewing what is literally depicted, so as to include being aware as a participant that (and how) one does so. There are also other moments, which are more expressionistic than suggestive, but, of course, still vocal, such as when the tables are turned on Ella (Kate Dickie), at the other end of a long, corporate table - in that Ruth is the one who gets Ella talking about her interests and activities outside work, as if she were a candidate for employment at interview. Meanwhile, at some level, we may notice that Ella’s end of the room is blue, in a cool way, whereas Ruth’s lipstick and skin-colour are alive, and fresh...

Alice Lowe (not as Ruth)

In cinema, which principal characters, and / or their relations to others (without our necessarily needing to like them, or their behaviour), will happen to interest us, but perhaps not someone else (and vice versa), may vary greatly (such as in our response to Free Free). Our reaction may be partly, but signicantly, influenced in the manner of the telling, e.g. when Stanley Kubrick decides (amongst other changes) to employ a narrator (Michael Hordern) in adapting Thackeray’s novel as Barry Lyndon (1975) [discussed in reviewing Further Beyond (2016)]). Without an obvious device (such as the inset location, mentioned above, as if the film were a crime construction), Free Fire would be different, say, with the guidance of a sardonic narrator's words, making comments such as To hammer home the offence of having been shot, Justine did not resist expressing a lot of pain, or Vernon really was more affronted at the damage to his jacket than to his shoulder.

At which point, and excused by the fact that Ben Wheatley shows what can happen to gas-cylinders, it is apt to slip in the funniest reference (in context) to people in a building and bullets, with Mia Farrow (Tina Vitale) and Woody Allen (Danny Rose) : this link is to YouTube, of Danny and Tina being shot at in Broadway Danny Rose (1984) [the scene in the hangar for the Macy's Day Parade].


Equally, a perfectly good film may build to a conclusion, as The Rocket (2013) does, but only give a pay-out that leaves one satisfied just then, rather than thinking about (the world of) the film afterwards : for some, this would be a deficit in a film, that the story’s end is co-terminous with the ending of our active satisfaction in it. In a way, A Quiet Dream (2016) falls into that category [(whether it tries, it does not achieve the effect that concludes The Hairdresser's Husband (Le mari de la coiffeuse) (1990)), whereas one almost defies anyone to be left in that place by the latter two on this list :




In the Saffron Screen Q&A, Jo Hartley referred to how, as the midwife and during one of Ruth’s appointments with her, she tells Ruth, You have to decide what's right, what's wrong - clearly, the midwife is not exactly a conscience personified (as Jiminy Cricket, in Pinocchio (1940)), or an angelic character (such as Clarence, from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)), as both of those know what, respectively, Pinocchio and George Bailey have been doing / going through. Still, as with any prophecy, whether that inherent in a pronouncement of the oracle at Delphi or otherwise sibylline in nature, the effect is dependent – and incalculably so – on the attitude(s) of the hearer to what he or she is hearing : Jocasta and Laius, by trying to avoid what is said of Œdipus, as surely more bring it about that it does happen than as if they had ignored it. At any rate, Jo Hartley’s character is kind enough to shield Ruth from enquiry about how and where she is living, given that the story of Prevenge is inevitably heading towards a birth.


Talking, in The Arts Picturehouse Q&A, about Free Fire's ending, Ben Wheatley (without naming any films) effectively confirmed a suspicion, when watching, that there is a resemblance to one for which, around the time of Reservoir Dogs (1992), Quentin Tarantino was an executive producer. Contained in a derelict factory (which nevertheless has more resources and working utilities than one would expect ?), the film speaks of the world outside, which continues to exist, even if the warfare of person against person makes it seem remote.

In Prevenge, if we even take none of what we have seen on the level of phantasy, the question What happens next ? is not asking to be answered at the end of the film : what we have seen has been so full that we do not need to project into a future.



Spoiler alert for the following images...



Some film-references, for Prevenge (by Tweet) :






End-notes :

 ¹ As one did, and so went on to read the novels by Gene Brewer, of which the first (K-PAX) was the only one adapted for the screen. Twenty years on, do films, etc., still get this sort of exposure on a chat-show (probably only later at night, with the likes of Graham Norton – though he is perhaps more interested in increasing the quotient of dubious double entendre than any real form of culture ?) ?

Having said which, the documentation that Wheatley reported originally having seen, and which had been a springboard for the film, did sound to show potential at the level of forensic documentary : in the case of this film, it was just that hearing him talk about it for a short time, as against what had ‘panned out’ in ninety minutes, gave rise to a disparity in what the two time-frames had communicated. Whereas - presumably by the real Wheatley fans in the house - the opportunity was being taken to laugh deeply and fully at every moment of comedy, and not a joke, of any kind, went unbidden.


² Here are some #UCFF Tweets, which give a link to the interview (and suggest perils in being too impressed by one's interviewee) :



³ Blue paint aside, though, this is not a Godard film, and so Laing’s disintegration does not have the weight of Jean-Paul Belmondo (as Ferdinand Griffon) in Pierrot le Fou (1965).



⁴ We know that, when someone says something – it may be us, tickled by how our words have come out – or something happens, there is a difference between registering humour, because what was said or done takes a comic form, and actually smiling because of it, or finding oneself laughing – the latter is mainly involuntary (although one can, of course, set out to have a good time). With Alice Lowe's performance, we laugh despite ourselves (and not even with a groan) - for which a close correlate, as argued further down in the main text, is Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).

 ⁵ Ben Wheatley said, in the Q&A, that he dislikes genre, but Free Fire belongs to one that comprises plots that are dependent on animosity going beyond antagonism to propel behaviour, and which then tend to be located in some types or circumstances of human interaction : the Bond films, already just mentioned, for one are where we often see competitiveness in the line of some sort of spy duty take on an aspect of personal rivalry (obviously, unto death – or apparent death).

⁶ Some of us may be reminded by it of Oskar, in Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) (1979). (An odd coincidence, since IMDb credits the music to Toydrum, along with, first, to Pablo Clements and James Griffith (because it does not seem to appreciate that the latter are Toydrum).)




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday 29 April 2014

He’s bad at taking off clothes ; she wants it fast and for her to be passive

This is a review of Exhibition (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

30 April (updated 4 May)

* Contains some spoilers - major ones are marked in advance *

This is a review of Exhibition (2013)

Exhibition (2013) is centred on Liam Gillick and Viv Albertine, and, respectively, they are called H and D (for some reason). Only once, when she calls out to him from the other side of a locked door, do we seem to hear her say ‘Aitch’, and when she is later addressed by others, as she passes by the wine merchants or bar outside which they are standing, one could swear that they call her Lynn…

No matter (even if their label is maybe intended to tell us as much as if one were M, the other S). Albertine has no real history of appearing on film – and it shows. That said, it may partly be an encouragement from director / writer Joanna Hogg that is responsible for the fact that she is rarely convincing except when we are concentrating on her physicality : it is fictionalizing again, but maybe it is Hogg’s attempt to make raw and real a life together that, in this place*, has gone on for eighteen years.

We first see Albertine lying on a shelf (the pane frosted by her breath, maybe pretending to be a cat), then, at the end, around the corner of the room, and under the table, as a child might hide behind what overhangs. In between, there is acting, there is the certain kind of incoherence that comes with a ultra-realistic depiction and / or with shooting improvised scenes, and there is being a plausible artist : taking these in reverse order, it is fair enough that, as we are observing D, we should observe her doing a sketch of herself in the mirror, where the mirror becomes more and more central to the frame, and we never see the sketch. Yet, just as On the Road (2012) largely failed to establish Sal (Sam Riley) as a writer just by his saying that he was one, there has to be some basis for believing that D could have some sort of creativity to be an artist (whereas it is not almost until the end that we learn what sort of artist, and can feed that back into what has been shown).

As to improvisation, the scene, for example, where she does not want H to go out conveys only through elements of the dialogue why she is saying in a repeated, but largely ineffectual way, that it is too late** for him to go. One may be intended to infer more about her passivity from that (a passivity that has her, humorously fake a faint as a way of getting away from visiting friends – H and she almost seem to have no other friends, and she seems, from what he says, to have no other way of getting out of stifling situations – and which is the stuff of late nineteenth-century Russian literature, rather than twenty-first century Knightsbridge and Chelsea), but that is rather working, once the closing titles have rolled, to do the film’s job for it, when one could just as easily put it down to someone’s lack of experience (or ability).

In any case, the broadest difference between D and H, other than that she is all stripes (with a change of them, albeit limited) to his wearing black, is essentially that they have arrived in a none-too-unfamiliar rut of not being able to initiate sexual contact, and which they nevertheless try to do by buzzing each other on the intercom feature of the phone : at one point, she is seeking reassurance of his love, another time he is, unasked, offering it, but they seem to be out of sequence with each other.

Similar enough that they can have lived so long in this place (and both almost always wearing black sandals, even to go to their friends’ place), in this way, but at what cost ? Made similar to fit in, but it is his true nature to be excessively angry that someone has parked in his ‘private’ space, to the extent that he becomes Basil Fawlty and says that he should erect railings with a big sign on them saying ‘FUCK OFF’ – hers, whilst all this is happening, is to stay, but not really meaningfully interpose another viewpoint, and leave us with the impression of not much. (After all, if someone could cope with taking leave of friends early, he or she would not resort to pretending to have been unconscious.)

The crux of it all is where they live. Forgetting the little yellow vehicle, where he goes to, why, and for how long, and just concentrating on H’s words to D to ‘Enjoy it whilst you still can’, one interpretation might be that he has gone off for good to do whatever it is that he previously said that they should sell the house to do now that they can. He scarcely seems to have been anywhere more than overnight, and her almost petrified patrol around the place, making sure that all is locked, maybe leave us in doubt whether she is more afraid of him coming back in some state late at night than any other intruder : maybe she is like this at all such times, but it seems as though she does not know this experience (over-acting ?).



It is the closely observed feeling herself through the slot in the stool, inverting it, finding a way to rub her crotch on it that Albertine’s contribution has life – in its own way, and given that Nymphomaniac (2013) was meant to tease with its sterile sex (except really when Stacy Martin meets Jamie Bell), Exhibition is far more erotic. We may have to invent an explanation for how elements of D’s sexual apparatus are handily by the bed (unless H knows, and watches, if awake), and what they evoke if not pornographic imagery where the women, whatever else they wear, always wear heels, but there is no doubting the power of that scene.

The ultimate interpretation is that, for all that D tells a friend on a video-link that the couple who lived in the property before (the designers ?) lived there till they were eighty, she is not going to do anything to oppose H directing them to a sale (and just saying that she could not be there – obviously, the estate agents can – when people are talking about making changes is a last-ditch piece of passive resistance).

We will never know what the sale is for, just that the only things that she preserves are sex on her terms (even if it means physically offering herself to him when he desires it, but with the turn-off of not being mentally or spiritually present), and likewise talking to him about her work. The scene, real or dreamt, at The National Gallery nicely imitates Woody Allen, in such films as Stardust Memories (1980), with H trying to interview her on a stage, but she will only allow him to be a companion, my companion. At the same time, she watches them both from the audience, where the film, all too rarely, breaks out of the mould of depicting trivial action and inert interaction, showing them together in symbolic form.


* Interpretative spoiler *

As to an under-text, perhaps D has never wanted children (and has just been unable to conceive anyway), and sees herself in relation to fetishism, embodying a role in performance, and being observed. H certainly alludes to the fact that they have no children, not without some emphasis.

Perhaps pushing the sale through, as Lopakhin ‘saves’ the cherry orchard by having it cut down, is a bittersweet way of revenging himself on whichever it is of her involuntary childlessness, or choosing her career in art***. Certainly, an element of seeing the outside from the inside, complete with a manufactured soundscape that has some troubling elements (alongside bells that suggest a Sunday morning), stresses the presence of the property, and inevitably, as with the Chekhov, makes one wonder what life will / can be like without it - even if D has been offered an exhibition (about which H both tries to reassure and say that he knows best)...


End-notes

* It may not exist, but just be an amalgam of an exterior view (also seemingly seen from inside out), various interiors, and other looks out of windows. It suffices that it exists for and to us.

** * Contains spoilers * Perhaps not a recollection of a psychotic episode, but certainly reliving the fear of violence and / or the involvement of the emergency services.

Probably not unrelated to H's angry conversation with the man who has left his car in H's parking space - and how D relates to it. In her own difficult moments, she extricates herself by fainting, the exact opposite of his head-on attack. Keeping / selling the house is their time of testing ?

*** Their friends, horrified as they contemplate the house for themselves, say that they are artists, and it is a house for artists, but it is largely unclear what H’s art could even be.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday 11 October 2012

Kraken crake

This is a Festival response to On the Road (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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12 October
This is a Festival response to On the Road (2012)

 * Contains spoilers *

 Two admissions, which ruin my credibility forever:

 (1) I declined the opportunity to see The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) because I had no wish to follow the journeys of an early Che - he could have been an early Woody Allen and it would have made no difference to the fact that, if I want a travel documentary (in the case of somewhere where I am not going to go), I will watch Michael Palin's antics, and I see the concept of a film rather differently. (As I did not see the film, obviously I do not know for sure what I missed. Accepted.)

 (2) I have never read On the Road (let alone any of Kerouac's other writings), though, when I decided to get around reviewing the film, which a friend and I saw, largely through his desire to do so, at Cambridge Film Festival, I looked out my copy of it. Therefore, anything that I find to quote from it will be just that - a phrase or passage that I find when flicking through it.

 I also have some insights about Jack K. from my friend, who has read it and more, namely the close identity between the narrators of these works and JK himself.
As the credits for On the Road (2012) tell you, scenery through which we are supposed to be following various travellers on various journeys is nowhere near where it was shot, but in another part of the States (or of Canada). Yes, unconvincingly London passes for Paris in the dire Bel Ami (2012) (quite apart from what we see in The Third Man (1949) or Amadeus (1984)), but that almost makes sense - we can have a sense of the monumentality or grandeur of parts of Paris, even if we are not seeing them.

 Certainly, they must have had reason, in this film, not to show the territories surrounding, say, Louisiana (to and from which we journey), but isn't the entreprise a bit hollow if whatever they do show has nothing to do with those places? I start with this point because, if one cannot say Great panoramas - I must go and see them myself some day, we are 'forced back' on the characters, and I honestly do not think that their desires and changes of heart run to a whole two hours 17 minutes worth of interest, but maybe 90 (with less need to show shots that were really somewhere quite different - I do not think that the list bore any relation to what we thought that we were shown).

 OK, my thesis is this - it's a nice safe bet to film some version of a well-known, successful book, because people have been satisfied enough with how it is put together working to have read it approvingly. Nothing new there, but, if one's choice lands on something that, to be done justice to, has to sprawl so much and maybe be pretty lacking in any story, is that the ideal project, unless one has a big shake-up with the text and portrays it radically differently? Yes, that might upset an author's estate, or even fans at grass roots, but would it be a better film, maybe even be a film?

 Given the acknowledged limitations, but in the light of talking to my friend and others as to whether the way that the text lies lends itself to taking it point for point as the basis for a film, what I have to ask (as I did) is what credibility Sal Paradise has, when we meet him, as a writer, or even simply what there is about him that would make someone, on pretty slight acquaintance, ask him to travel from New York to Denver to see him.

 Now we know, after the event, that On the Road the book resulted from this and all the other travels, and, when Sam Riley (as Sal) starts hitching, we see him scribbling is his small but somehow infinite note-book (as if the guys on the back of the truck with him would not have been more than a little interested and been likely to have parted their company).

 It may be little more than sexual when he is cotton picking, but there is even a sense that this Sal abandons his exteriority to his own experiences and actually feels them : frustrated though I was that I was being asked to believe in him as a writer when there had not even been so much as something being read aloud with his New York chums, I think that, by now, there might have been voiceover, maybe, of some of his writerly snippets (unless that only occurs later, when he actually starts writing, and he is reliving these moments).

 Set against now, where, unless I wanted to be scenic about it, I would take a flight to make this first journey of Sal's, I would still be less than impressed with Dean Moriarity to have had impressed on me that I needed to make a trip whose basis and necessity turn out, in the ever-casual way of intoxication beyond the means of alcohol passing for the common currency of life, to have dissolved, so that, no sooner there and with no thought of where Sal might stay, Dean has to go to Los Angeles (or some such).

 Just the first of a series of long, long journeys that seem to have the same capacity for their purpose to disappear more quickly than the destination can be reached. For me, none of it amounts to more than a few very blunt character traits and repressed feelings, which is where I arrive at a run-time around 90 minutes, because they do not merit more :

 Sal is flattered by Dean's interest in him, and Dean, for his part, talks up this man who, if he did not resemble (a little) Scottish saxophonist Tommy Smith (whose talent I know and value), actually seems to possess no qualities to justify it. It is all sublimated through Dean arranging girls (including his own partner, at a key point) for Sal to sleep with, and then noisily doing so himself.

 That holds true until (for money, and as he says to Sal he has done before) Dean has sex with the man who has been sedately driving them, and Sal witnesses it : not much guessing where his disgust with Dean and walking out on him at breakfast comes from. With a few twists and turns of sub-plots, and of Dean's various and far-flung women, that is pretty much the emotional core of all these lengthy wanderings, except that they always serve as a distraction from him ever knowing what on earth he wants, and all the signs, from how he chatted up Sal on first meeting, are that his own deeper desires from their 'relationship' (I only call it that because they virtually travel across the continent to say hello for ten minutes) are the same.

 However, the film decides to swallow its own tail by having Sal write the book that we are viewing, with a roll of paper that he makes and feeds into the typewriter. Apparently such a roll does exist amongst JK's effects, though its status as being how he wrote the book might be suspect, but we get back to the bogus demonstration of creativity, as if there has to be this infinite roll of paper to receive the limitless notes that we saw scribbled before, and the white-hot power of the process is such that nothing, not even puttting in a new sheet of paper and keeping the finished ones in order, must be allowed to interrupt it. Believe that idea of writing if you like!

 Clearly, things were taken from this film, but - from my position of majestic ignorance - I believe that a better film could have been made by taking the book as raw material, and not setting out depiction as if sacrosanct. And, blow me, I've still not opened the wretched text!
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