Showing posts with label Melancholia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Melancholia. Show all posts

Wednesday 12 February 2014

Ain't misbehavin'

This is a review of August, Osage County (2013)

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


12 February

This is a review of August, Osage County (2013)

Just hearing the dialogue of the trailer, it had been clear that this film was a mess, and not a very appealing one. Still, though one chose not to face it in the case of Polanski’s Carnage (2011), some tasks cannot be ducked.


Quite apart from the fact that this film is not very cinematic in nature, sometimes it is just inadequately or even poorly shot – opening shots of landscape to set the scene do not, of course, have to be vibrantly beautiful, but these were mediocre, whereas a different unit, later in the film, produced some very nice work in and around the lake, and another ambiently showed when Little Charlie (Benedict Cumberbatch) is met by from the coach by his father, Charlie Aiken (Chris Cooper).

Inside the house, another sequence of Barbara (Julia Roberts) lying, rising, going out through the screen-door, and birds flying was all nicely filmed. Compare that with the distracting variable focus around the infamous lunch table, and no doubt some of the time the back of the chair was sharp so that Violet (Meryl Streep) was in soft focus, but other times her wrinkles were crisp, and there seemed no rhyme or reason as to what the camera was most on from one shot to the next. In this respect, this must take some beating as an entirely arbitrary approach that acts against concentrating on the swordplay.



Some of the lighting and composition of shots was not much better. No, not every shot need be composed so that it gives one an aesthetic thrill, but the sequence after the three sisters come out of the conservatory, and Violet tells her tale about the boots, is clunkiness itself, worse than many a holiday snap – if you have a visual medium, you cannot just offend the eye to feed the ear with dialogue and a faltering speech, as you might on the stage.

Tracy Letts is credited with the screenplay from her own stage-work, but, in the translation, she has in no way freed it just because there are cars (overtaking cars, even), a gathering at the Baptist church, and a few other moments outdoors. Some might say that the paucity of life outside the restless confines of the house throws one back on its claustrophobic quality and intensifies it, but, equally, it could have the effect of stressing the stage-bound nature of the writing, conception and direction.

Streep and Roberts are both nominated for awards, which seems to send the message that people who shout, say ‘fuck’ a lot, and declare that they are in charge are the best at acting. As to whether the repetitive lines given to Roberts, urging Streep ‘to eat the fish, bitch’, represent the heights of dramatic inspiration or its nadir may divide opinion, but it all seems to be about to set off the fuse off another lunch scene when, starting with Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), three plates of fish are dashed to the ground :

Which is the essential message, If you smash your food on the floor, I’m damned if I’m not going to do the same, more loudly and messily, if possible. Against all this rebellion, the best speech from Aiken was when he tells his wife, Violet’s sister, that they will not make it to their thirty-ninth anniversary unless she changes. Which begs, of course, the question how he ever made it to the thirty-eighth, and Violet’s husband Beverly (Sam Shepard) survived as long, because, at the rate at which emotional and relational ammunition is being fired off in the compass of the film, even the grass that is supposed to get Aiken through would have worn thin.

The plot tries to be like an Ibsen play, with secrets from the distant past back to haunt, let alone like Chekhov (Violet being in the position of Firs in The Cherry Orchard ?), and all this ‘truth-telling’ that Violet indulges in makes the stressful wedding reception in Melancholia (2011) seem like a walk in the park, except that one ultimately does not much care, because the film frankly does not, whether she is like it because of abusing psychiatric medication, because of any actual psychiatric condition and / or whether the abuse has made it worse, and / or because it is just in her nature.

Yet what all that says is that it has all happened in the past, because we are told both that Beverly has disappeared before and Violet has been in rehabilitation, so nothing is different now, but we are expected to believe that severe home-truths, which could not be unsaid, are being told for the first time. Apart from a fleeting suggestion that Violet might be a Lear-like figure to Barbara’s suddenly tyrannical Regan / Goneril, which might have been interesting, some more actually powerful moments than the fireworks around the table are :

* When Ivy tells Barbara and Karen (Juliette Lewis) that they have both left her to it, but she is going to New York (Three Sisters meets Uncle Vanya ?)

* Earlier, Karen’s monologue, overpowering Barbara in the car, and into the house

* Charlie meeting Little Charlie (as mentioned above)

* Ivy joining Little Charlie to watch t.v.


In this world, Lewis for turning herself into Karen, and Nicholson for a very nuanced performance, go unnoticed in the shade of the nominations, but not on this blog…




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

Friday 4 November 2011

Funny Games v. Melancholia

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


5 November

Isn't Lars von Trier's Melancholia, perhaps, like Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997)?

In an interview with Haneke about the original film in German (but it may be applicable to the US remake, bizarrely also made by this director, ten years later)*, and elsewhere (there appears to be, if I could find it**, an essay of his called 'Violence + Media'), he said that it was a healthy response to have had enough and (in the cinema) walk out or (otherwise) eject the DVD before the end. (Indeed, on the cover of one DVD release, on Tartan Video, one is asked 'How far is too far?')


Or, maybe, Moira Buffini's play Dinner**?

It's supposedly witty, etc., and opens the wittiness with the guests for the title's meal being served with lobster. Only the lobster under the cover is alive!

Hungry people (does no one eat something before a meal out, just in case?) faced with needing to kill / cook - for some reason, in whatever class they (are supposed to) hail from, they have not done this before.


If, however, as it is not really a culinary (but a cultural) rarity, one of them had, then no premise for all the distress, as he or she would simply have cooked for all - unless that was against the rules: I forget.

Those who found Dinner simply provocative (i.e. provocative for no very good reason, and, in that sense, like the torture and violence of Funny Games, for no reason other than 'Because I can') might not have stayed.


It was in the first half of the 2010s, but I'm fairly sure that even one of the guests does just that - or maybe that's not allowed within the rules of the evening: I forget.

Either there was a hint to take, and I took it when I could (always easier with an aisle-seat), or I vacated my seat for a longer interval than others may have enjoyed.


With Melancholia, when I came to leave its realm / influence / phantasy, was not pushing the same buttons of 'I do this, and I defy you to continue watching', but almost - far less overtly, but still something there to challenge one's continued attention.


Not entirely seriously, I wonder whether the screenings of the film were a nationwide psychoanalytic study:

By and large, because some people go to films socially (rather than alone, just because they want - or think that they want - to see the film), and one may have chosen this one without, in some cases, the other(s) even considering it, there will have been some basis on which the audience has selected itself.

If it is a screening in a multiple sense, what does it say about the people who 'stick the course', as it were, rather than giving up on it as one might Funny Games or Dinner by walking out?

I think, if I am right, rather more than about those who leave - those who don't get secretly tagged, and followed until a convenient point to invent a spurious medical appointment at which a more durable microtransmitter (plus, depending on your fantasy, microchip, transponder, etc.) can be inserted. (Or is that, given where we started, the scenario of one of Haneke's other films?)


End-notes

* Strangely, the two young men who - principally, but not exclusively - play the games are described on the IMDb web-site as 'psychotic' when writing up the original (in US English, if arguably not in British English, that word is a synonym for 'psychopathic') and 'psychopathic' for the English-language follow-up (and so not using the word 'psychotic', although it seems more current in the States).

** Incidentally, when a search-engine not only wants to default to what it thinks that the appropriate search-string should be (as an afterthought, offering up one's choice as an option, and only, and after protest, letting the string in the search-box be edited), but will not find a play from one's recollection of author and title, it's time to say 'Goodbye, Google - hello, Amazon!'. (As things stand, the software on the latter's web-site allowed me to find the play, despite the misremembered name.) With the Haneke essay, having the title did not even help!


Sunday 11 September 2011

A posting that has lacked a title (until now)

More views of - or at (or before) - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)



11 September

I was chatting to a man of the cloth earlier about films and the Festival, and he mentioned one (well, a pair of them) that had been given what I understand not to have been the smoothest ride by the Rotten Tomatoes web-site (well, maybe nothing new about that - the UK critics, for example, all wrote in a way that disappointed me about Sarah's Key), but which he thought worth a view: The Gods Must Be Crazy I + II.

As the Internet Movie Database, IMDB (www.imdb.com), also gives a voice for those who do not review films for a living, I have just casually looked up this title, and it seems that I might as well take him up on the offer of borrowing the DVDs some time...

To-night, though, is too soon, as I plan to delve into the backlog of home-viewing and catch up with Lars and the Real Girl in time for the release of Melancholia.


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