Showing posts with label Darren Aronofsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Darren Aronofsky. Show all posts

Tuesday 31 October 2017

We’ll soon warm it up and get it feeling like a home - Pandora’s box, with a twist or two… (stalled / incomplete review)

This is a response to Hellraiser (1987), shown on 35mm at The Arts Picturehouse,

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


31 October

This is a stalled / incomplete response to Hellraiser (1987), shown on 35mm at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (CamPicturehouse), on Tuesday 31 October 2017 at 10.30 p.m.


Hellraiser (1987) was released thirty years ago, so this was a pretty impressive 35mm print from which it was projected at The Arts Picturehouse (CamPicturehouse) – photography, even when it is with moving images (cinematography), not still ones, remains about how light falls on the subject :




Some sundry observations (an accreting list) :

* Ten years before Event Horizon (1997), the same pre-occupations with pleasure mixed with pain, and with oblivion : Julia (Clare Higgins), whose nature we know rather better by the time that she brings the first man (Anthony Allen) back to no. 55, probably does not belie the truth when she explains the room to which she has led him with I’ve always preferred the floor

* As to knowing natures better, it has been suggested, of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece , that Tarquinus Sextus (the rapist) and Collatine (the husband) are aspects of the same person : never was a truer word spoken of Larry (Andrew Robinson) and Frank (Sean Chapman)

* This is sure some stylish various on Rubik's Cube (first seen in 1974)...


Needless to say, we dare not show a real Lemarchand's box


* Jane Wildgoose, credited as ‘Cenobite Costumer Designer’, is clearly channelling less fetishwear than queer fashion and gender fluidity (before it was so called)



* Are there not also more than little hints, here, of Doctor Who, or Sir Gawayn and The Green Knight... ?

[...]




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

Thursday 21 September 2017

You never loved me. (Slight pause) You just loved how much I loved you.

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


21 September

This is less a review than an angry dismissal of mother ! (2017), by Darren Aronofsky, the person responsible for the direness that is Black Swan (2010)



Welcome to Aronofsky World - the Parade of Plaster-Saints !





[Accreting list of] Film-references and other references :

* Alien (1979)

* August : Osage County (2013)

* Biedermann und die Brandstifter [The Fire-Raisers] ~ Max Frisch

* Das Schloß [The Castle] ~ Franz Kafka

* Der Prozeß [The Trial] ~ Kafka

* Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)

* Hysteria ~ Terry Johnson

* Melancholia (2011)

* On the Road (2012)

* Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

* The Baby of Mâcon (1993)

* ‘The Circular Ruins’ ~ Jorge Luis Borges







One suspects that one would, again, benefit more by watching Hepburn and Tracy in Adam's Rib (1949) rather than doing any more than groan at Aronofsky's levering the topos into his Weltanschauung... (Yes, there was clearly - from the start - more to the relationship between Bardem and Harris than presented : it did not make for dramatic irony, but for the effect of an inept screenwriter, playing with 'big ideas'.)








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