Showing posts with label James Thurber. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James Thurber. Show all posts

Saturday 2 January 2016

The Replicated Screenplay : A Fable

The Replicated Screenplay : A Fable

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


2 January

The Replicated Screenplay : A Fable

In thanks to Thurber for the pleasure given by his Fables for Our Time


In the hush-hush days of Hollywood, it is well past the point of no return before what has somehow happened comes to light. Through some staggering implausibility, the screenplay that has been developed in one studio is, word for word, identical with that worked on by another*, and they each had gone into production with it.

When the studio heads eventually come to believe (which is not easy for them to do) that this is truly not the result of espionage or collusion, and that litigating the matter will not get them nowhere, they accept the situation for whatever cosmic quirk it is. They agree different names for each film, and that they will battle it out at the box office, relying on the distinction brought to the screenplay of their producers, directors, stars, directors of photography, film editors, wardrobe, make-up, hair, set-design...

When the films are released, though, what amazes them most is that no one includes both films in their reviews, let alone praising one over the other : seemingly, no one has noticed.

From then on, as other studios watched in surprise, Hollywood learnt a lesson, realizing that they had been giving cinema-goers and critics too much credit. They have never looked back.


End-notes

* Many will not be unaware that one is, of course, also indebted here to Jorge Luis Borges, for his story (in essay form) that re-creates the writings of Miguel de Cervantes, 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ (‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’) (and for having had the opportunity to refer to it a preview, for Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF), of Othello (Otel.lo) (2012)).




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

Tuesday 7 January 2014

I put aside childish things

A rating and review of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)

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


7 January

A rating and review of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)
93 = S : 16 / A : 16 / C : 16 / M : 17 / P : 15 / F : 15



S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)





When Sean Penn (Sean O’Connell) and Ben Stiller (Walter Mitty) finally meet in this film, it is at the quiet point around which the world turns – Penn, who could so easily have outclassed Stiller in that sort of way that older actors can, just casually reveals that he does not always take a shot when he ‘is in’ the moment of it.

As a photographer, capturing the oftentimes fleeting, he knows what it is to have to wait for his subject to come to him, but he speaks against this idea that we ‘capture’ so much, with our camera-phones and the like, that we are too busy capturing to be there. (That irritating advertisement where a couple ‘shares’ that they have just launched their pastel-hued candle-boats, and straightaway get back an evauluation of how wonderful it is.)

This is not a notion that James Thurber, the writer of the four- or five-page story on which this (and the preceding) film is based, would have rejected. Although he fought for his own career, he also recognized, as Stiller wants to do in his closing credits, all the hands through whom one’s work passes and to which it is entrusted.

I also do not think that he would have been too bothered, unless one ascribes some arcane respect to his original creation (who is not so much a character, as a behaviour), by the action-hero figure that Mitty pictures himself to himself as, which seems quite in line with the ‘ta-pokka, ta-pokka’, and had more than fifteen years before he died in which to get used to Danny Kaye as Mitty – that said, those of an anxious temperament, might find the noisy character that he becomes, lifting up the pavement as if he has hammer-drills in his heels, something that it is welcome he discontinues, and that heavy ticking noises also subside.

This is not a film where we are really invited to know whether, like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), he gave up the life that he desired to conform and provide a wage, but it is touched on. (And then Mitty has a chance to do some big things after all, and he does, although he only day-dreams it happening, become a younger version of himself – hair, looks, etc., to reflect well-being) What we do see is that his mind races ahead to encounter some new possibility, and that he was not ‘in the moment’ but outside it, as if as a way of coping with it.

Thankfully, a careful script from Steve Conrad acknowledges that, when someone says that someone else ‘zones out’, is just a phrase, not the only phrase, and does not convey very much of the experience, which, at the appropriate time, Mitty tries to put into words, and is understood. In what is almost an entirely telephonic contact with Todd Maher (Patton Oswalt), who is trying to explain why the bits that Mitty just skipped might be important to a functioning profile that will let him send ‘a wink’ that he agonizes about sending (only to find a problem when he finally does press the enter key to contact Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig)), Mitty talks about what has made day-dreaming less frequent.

All the while, we are whirled up in an adventure, as to whose status, given that Mitty has not re-emerged from it, we feel reasonably, but not totally, settled. Then, when Penn and Stiller meet we have this beautiful moment where they bicker, take offence, listen to each other, and pitch into a riotous football game with sherpas before the setting sun. Something different, something apart from life, even if Stiller has actually been landed on a glacier by helicopter (presumably, not flown by his screen pilot) : a moment apart, a positive version of that endless journey to discover what is best not known in Apocalypse Now (1979), because the real horror is the casual, uncaring dismantling of an iconic publication.

We do not dwell there (although a cock is snooked at Ted Hendricks (Adam Scott), who tried to belittle Mitty, but just resulted in endearing him to others), because we turn to relations Melhoff / Mitty, but there is a tribute to Mitty’s care for the work of its leading photographer. In between, Stiller has been allowed to present convincing enough evidence of his credentials on the skateboard, and there is just sufficient of his past with his sister and his parents to see who he is now. A certain fastidiousness, keeping a tally in his cheque-book, and so on.

On the side-lines, but engagingly playing a mother whose need to have, in perpetuity, a piano which we are not even certain that she still plays (or desires to play – the so-called elephant in the room) figures large is Shirley MacLaine. A warm portrait to which she brings real affection, as well as acceptance and care.

This is a Mitty for our century, a man who takes his imagination and turns it into seeing what is possible, rather than being held back by whether he can get the train there. He is not everyman, so his solutions are not everyone’s, but the cinematic glories of where he goes make this film shine – although one has to wonder whether some Icelandic influence has gone into the caricature of Greenland (Melhoff, knowing Mitty better than he thinks, checks that he knows that they are different places…), which is, if not exactly dismissive, is scarcely flattering, with men drinking huge beers all day from glasses shaped like boots and, even at their smallest, they are still huge.




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

Thursday 26 December 2013

Don't talk to me about social skills !

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


26 December




Some kind souls, on related tracks, gave us road rage, the rather offensive gender bender, yummy mummy, and the pink pound, for example. We may have been happy without these terms (particularly the second one), but somehow we gravitate towards them, as if they were indispensable, led on by the spell of rhyme or of the alliteration :

It takes an effort to rebel, almost as if the concept of road rage were an inevitability that we resist - if we can at all - at our peril, because we fear falling into aporia, or even aphasia : that is the label, and we must use it.

Except that people who become furious on the road are furious in no different way, just because the source of their intense reaction comes from driving, and the trite phrase not only does not acknowledge the truth that a shop assistant could just as easily be beaten as a fellow motorist or other road-user, but also makes a separate species of alleged rage almost obligatory.

It certainly becomes categorizable, and so capable of tallies being kept of incidents of this new monster of road rage, whereas the public service workers, such as shop assistants or nurses or parking operatives*, have no name for the outrageous behaviour unleashed on them, and so no publicity or real recognition.


Back at these so-called social skills, this is just a snobbish label for saying both that someone is impolite or gruff, and that the fault lies with their inadequate parents and family circumstance : George has no social skills, even if it is not a ridiculous exaggeration, really damns his entire upbringing and status as a human being, for (as the motto of, amongst others, Winchester tells us) manners maketh man.

Needless to say, but George has probably deviated from doing for the speaker what the speaker expected, or has done something that the speaker (from the speaker's elevated and unfailing understanding of these things) otherwise deems inappropriate, so he deserves to be blasted as of no worth, even to his scurvy face.



Oswald

Why dost thou use me thus? I know thee not.


Kent

Fellow, I know thee.


Oswald

What dost thou know me for?


Kent

A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave, a lily-livered, action-taking knave, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue, one-trunk-inheriting slave, one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deny'st the least syllable of thy addition.



But to end with a little Twittery :





End-notes

* If that is what traffic wardens are now called.




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

Thursday 5 July 2012

What sort of beast is Dark Horse?

This is a review of Dark Horse (2011)

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


5 July

This is a review of Dark Horse (2011)


One is not exactly left, as David Lynch arranged in Eraserhead (1977), with a feeling of being uncertain what, if anything, has happened, and it's not quite the ending-after-ending impression left by how the Lord of the Rings trilogy winds up in and with The Return of the King (2003), and yet both elements are there: the latter promises resolution, the former confuses such a notion with presenting, amongst other things, a head being turned into an adjunct for pencils.

As Lynch's film did, therefore, there is a questioning in Dark Horse of what 'a story' in a film is for, whether it is to satisfy and lead us, a bit like a classical sonata, from some sort of stasis into the turmoil of a movement in a minor key and back into the catharsis of the closing outer movement, or whether its roots are in the New Wave and before, which, in Buñuel's case, gave us, at the time time when the wave was breaking, the puzzle of The Exterminating Angel (1962).

Just about anything has been fitted into that pattern of things going bad and turning good again, from 10* (1979) to You've Got Mail (1998) or, as I recall, One Fine Day (1996). Much more interesting is when Scorsese gives us, in After Hours (1985), a film that takes us back to where we began, but with an amazing and satisfying - not from moral or plot point of view of - artistic resolution, in a whizz around Paul Hackett's office. Or Gilliam - when he could still be gutsy - with that sickening moment inside the cooling-tower at the end of Brazil (1985).

Subverting building up to an ending - or the expected ending - is one thing. Some view life as linear, and expect the beginning to be at the start. Others might prefer the sort of narration that Betrayal (1983), pretty close to the stage-play, gives us, and might relate more to a muddle of dream, day-dream, imagination, and sheer fantasy, such as, probably more convincingly than Dark Horse, films like Allen's Deconstructing Harry (1997) (or, for that matter, Stardust Memories (1980)) give us.

Though I do not think that writer / director Todd Solondz is aiming at that here: this is not Thurber's Walter Mitty gone slightly more wrong, but has, as it develops, really far more resonance with something very different, a sort of US Enter the Void, but without certain embellishments.

Rather implausibly, you might infer from trusting what I am saying, IMDb seeks to sum up this work in a sentence as:

Romance blooms between two thirty-somethings in arrested development: an avid toy collector and a woman who is the dark horse of her family


Hell, if that were what this film is about, it wouldn't deserve the time of day! These are superficialities, substituting for an appreciation of what the film implies about the creation and distinegration of personality, hope and desire. It is possible that reviews are more on target than what I have quoted, but I don't think that I want to trust having to wade through many opinions that will just criticize this film for not being what it is not - if, though, they were misled by IMDb's said 23-word snapshot (probably little worse than many a trailer), perhaps it is fair for them to air their grievances there.

Confused - probably stunned - as I was when I came out of Dark Horse and incoherently tried to formulate a response in talking to Jon, who was ushering, I gratefully received his affirmation of that feeling, and I shall, at some point, be following up his recommendation of Solondz's Happiness (1998)...

This review is dedicated to Jon, with thanks


End-notes

* Which, before Baywatch, might have been seen as exploitative (probably of Bo Derek), if it didn't arrive at a convenient moral ending.

Monday 30 April 2012

The things we say! (2) - 'Mary makes friends again with her mother

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


30 April

Assurance: No mention of that work from whose title - almost certainly alone - we know that it is, in part, about influence on others*!


Josef was very good at making friends, but fell down in keeping them


Odd, then, that the English language seems to suggest that we keep a friend in the same way that we keep:

* Someone's seat on a busy train

* A pet

* A tidy ship - or a good cellar***

* At our personal trainer's exhausting regime

* Someone sweet, happy, etc.

* Up a subscription to Punch (having 'taken it out')

* A friend waiting, because of traffic

* On making the same mistakes, keeping on, or even trucking

* On ad nauseam, etc., etc.



In other words, possibly quite a very much longer list of cognate uses of the verb to keep, some at least of which, I would say, are present to our minds when, as Michaela (and as people do), we make the proposal to Josetta Let's keep a house of ill-repute!


I'd also say that all the connotations, not only of to make, but also of to keep, are 'with us' when we proffer the olive-branch (the gesture made to Noah?).


And so, I suggest, when Mary says to Mother Let's (make it up and) be friends again, the possibility both of reforging that relationship, and of seeking to sustain that link (which might break again), and there all at once, along with tinges of

* Compulsion : I'll make you regret that

* Influence : He made her cry last night

* Creation : John made a lovely cake!


Need I provide the others?



End-notes

* Though I shall comment: (a) consider the word of Italian origin influenza from which we derive flu**, and (b) the usages of the phrase under the influence, which maybe relate the worlds of hypnosis, and of drugs and alcohol.

** Those who write flu' are clearly deluded, and probably spend too long not on the phone, but on the 'phone.

*** What Thurber, very amusingly, talks about (in quotation of a one-time teacher of his) as container for the thing contained, in describing the figure of speech called metonymy, where the wine (bottles) contained in the cellar are referred to by the container, i.e. the cellar, or, in This is a very good bottle!, the bottle, when meaning the wine.