The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 4)

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

6 February

* Contains spoilers *

Of course, it helps if those short write-ups are accurate.

These, taken from one of my local free newspapers (actually, the only one that now delivers), are not:

For anyone who has seen Another Earth (2011), it might be a struggle to justify the opening proposition 'Astrophysicist Rhoda kills most of a family* [...]', because, although, later on, the contents of her bedroom show an interest in outer space**, all that we know from the film is that, just before the accident, she has got a place at MIT***.

Here, nothing depends on the assertion, but, even if that's all that the place were concerned with, that doesn't make her an astrophysicist. What about the second half of the description, though?:

After discovering it's [sc. a mysterious giant planet] a duplicate of the earth, she tracks down victim John, befriending him without revealing their connection, while on a mission to discover the planet's mystery.

If I had read this first (rather than the spread from The London Standard), I think that I might feel misled by (a) the account of cause and effect, by (b) the language, and by (c) what is anterior to what...


Take another example from the same feature, in relation to My Week with Marilyn (2011), and at which the same criticisms can be levelled at the following excerpts:

* It's the height of Marilyn Monroe's fame - factually, was it? The sentence continues with:

* and her new husband Arthur Miller has to make a brief trip to Paris - well, I didn't register where he was going, or whether it was only briefly, but I am already unsure about this even if true, and of what relevance is it where Miller has to go...?

* I also didn't notice whether (as he was) the film says that Colin Clark was a graduate from Oxford, but he is said to:

* [s]pend [in Miller's absence] a week introducing the star to the joys of ordinary British life

Which is why one scene shows him taking her to his old school, Eton, where she is virtually mobbed, and leading into an unannounced visit to Windsor Castle, where he turns out able to gain access because his godfather is librarian there (or some such).

In both cases, and (apart from a picnic and some bathing - for one of them, inevitably, nude) we see them discovering nothing else (as far as I recall), hardly ordinary British life.


So the write-up has to be worth reading, even if one doesn't (as I don't) do more than glance at it, because otherwise it is a set-up for a film that is different (or even very different).

Not just because I like Woody Allen's work, some write-up - in Picturehouse Recommends, I think - meant that I expected to enjoy Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), so I was highly disappointed to find out what it was - and probably, because of that, have come down hard on it ever since.


To be concluded - promise!****


End-note

* A note of scrupulous accuracy amidst the rest?

** No, on second thoughts, that phrasing isn't felicitous, is it?! (Rhoda has the interest in outer space - the contents of her room do not, but they evidence hers.)

*** Did the person who wrote this even know what MIT is?

**** I mean that Part 5 will be the end of it, that is! - now available here...


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