Terence Davies, C/D. S/D

I wasn't bored and it didn't drag but the film had an erratic rhythm. Chris went from independent mistress to married woman awfully quickly, and Ewan is hustled off the screen just as quickly so he can SPOILER disappear into mud and hymns.

Nothing wrong with keeping it moving... Working in 2.35:1, I thought you could see the influence of '50s Wyler, Ford, Stevens etc on Davies but he made it his own (even Bergmanesque with the first 45 mins' horrors).

For what it's worth.

btw bowlegged hottie Guthrie is up soon in a remake of Whisky Galore!, which sounds like a terrible idea.

he's a nice bit o' arable land, isn't he

Bowlegged? Could I like this guy any more?

I haven't seen this btw

whisky galore is a fucking hilarious movie.

once i saw it i remembering thinking, "aha! now i know where bill forsyth comes from."

Rewatched The Long Day Closes on CC Blu-ray... It has a good "South Bank Show" from '92 with on-set footage and Davies musing on his life and art. He says when the Trilogy first screened some critic scoffed that "it makes Bergman look like Jerry Lewis." "And it's true!" TD laughs.

Some great supps on the production design and lighting of TLDC too.

i watched distant voices, still lives last night, superb. admit that going into it i didn't expect to see an action movie running-away-from-explosions scene

Wait why is Whisky Galore mentioned on this thread? Oh, I see.

early Dickinson review roundup

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-nyff-2016-terence-daviess-a-quiet-passion

seeing on the 16th at NYFF

Looks like he's Chanelling Cries and Whispers, a film he's talked about, passionately, before. I hope it's good. The trailer... Well I dunno. I might like the whole thing but I don't really like the trailer.

But, in a sense, I "taught" myself to like The House of Mirth.

i hope not, C&W is one of my least fave Bergmans

xp

I'm seeing Sunset Song tomorrow! Quite excited. Saw Distant Voices, Still Lives yesterday to prepare, and that's probably the best film I've seen in a loooong time. Also saw Of Time and the City, but honestly didn't like it as much as I'd hoped.

so weird-- terence davies came up (in a very apposite way!) on the blue nile thread just yesterday

Sunset Song is so underrated on critical aggregation sites (81% on RT, 72 on metacritic). I know these things don't really matter, but were a majority of critics really so not raving about a great TD movie?

uh those are majorities

aggregator site scores do not measure raves well

I know I am pissing in the wind here, but just 2% better than Eddie The Eagle :p

Sunset Song uses harvest-time almost as much as Terence Malick uses dust. Oh, okay, now it's harvest again, I suppose... I liked it, was a tad slow in the beginning, but when things start happening it's brutal, and the last half hour or so - from the people seem to wander ghost-like over the corn fields - of course ripe and ready for harvest - - it becomes quite surreal in an upsetting way.

Shame that that the Emily Dickinson biopic might be long. Nevertheless I am looking fwd to it.

Looks like he's Chanelling Cries and Whispers, a film he's talked about, passionately, before.

Yes - I remember seeing a thing on Channel 4 when I was about 16 (googled, called Movie Masterclass?) where he analysed and discussed it with some students for an hour. It blew my mind a bit at the time - the kind of attention he paid wasn't a way I came at film.

I remember that programme too!

Love Cries and Whispers, possibly my favourite Bergman.

Yes, I loved Movie Masterclass too - esp remember Lindsay Anderson doing My Darling Clementine

Persona is my favourite Bergman - as close to a perfect film as I know of - but Cries and Whispers is up there too

Fanny & Alexander! But that's for another thread, probably :)

Davies wears his Bergmanisms a bit more lightly than Woody Allen, tho I think it might be interesting to see some of the same kind of fantasy as in Seventh Seal, Hour of the Wolf etc in a Davies movie.

I finally saw Sunset Song. I actually laughed out loud at the end because it was so bad. It's utterly ridiculous. The casting and the accents aren't event the main problem, I accept fairly well that a general "Scottish" sound is more understandable internationally than Scots Doric but at least give some kind of credence to the language the book was written in. Forget about Agyness, she was simply badly cast (given that she's not actually an actress) but Davies allows everyone to speak in either not-Scottish or Glaswegian. Peter Mullan should know better but I suppose he's played his particular game often enough that he's just going through the motions (incidentally, this is the third time I've seen PM weild a belt violently on film and for it to be the MO of his character)

But even within his own cast choices Davies makes the wrong ones. He should have cast the big guy, Douglas Rankine in the Kevin Guthrie role. That's a stupid decision. KG is just a wee boy.

His tin ear for dialogue In this is pretty clear and his lack of feeling - I heard this is a project he's worked for three decades to get made? - is clear. If you'd worked on something for three decades you may have thought he would have researched far enough to get the lyrics to Auld Lang Syng right. It's the pivotal scene. The fact he got them wrong ("for the sake of auld Lang syne" really? This line is a kind of gross insult) renders him a fool. Jesus Christ, this dude made Distant Voices, Still Lives, how in gods name could he have made this piece of trash?

They get the lyrics to Auld Lang Syne wrong in The Long Day Closes as well. Guess that's worthless trash too, then.

My complaint from May still stands: the husband's collapse happened too soon.

Ewan? He definitely switched too fast but it's just one thing happening after another and none of it has much heft so I don't feel like it mattered much.

Frederik, English people in the 50s would have got the lyrics wrong, these characters wouldn't have.

Holy shit, A Quiet Season is amazing. Cynthia Nixon should win all the oscars, and the humor and confidence in every aspect of filmmaking is shocking, almost.

A Quiet Passion, sorry, was on a break between movie four and five of the day, my brain is kinda mush. Anyways, this film!! Funny as fuck, and there's one music piece that's absolutely shamelessly mindblowing that it's in there, which seems to have escaped most reviewers. I didn't believe it was in there until I stayed for the credits, but yup.

surely the "wrong" lyrics for "auld lang syne" are themselves authentic to the times and places that davies wished to recreate in his films? i have mixed feelings about most of his films since "long day closes," but the last thing he is is sloppy.

could be authentic to deliberately depict an american person today talking about "paninis" or "a caffe latte with milk" while showing an italian american particularly of some generations past doing the same might be jarring to the point of unbelievable

suggest terence davies doesn't know the words to auld lang syne

Am, Did you see it? Because you're criticising my problems with the detail while saying (upthread) "I'm pretty sure this film will be a travesty" - it is one. And it's pretty sloppy too fwiw.

Also, of time and the city and the deep blue sea were also pretty sloppy.

you're pretty sloppy

x-post

the reviews of the film (the emily dickinson one) have heartened me a little. i was v. disappointed by sunset song--outside of a few nice moments, the best description of it might be "academic." you might be right about auld lang syne. but given that "long day closes" is mostly constructed from davies's childhood memories, i'm willing to give him benefit of the doubt.

people who worry about casting choices are sometimes made out to be simps, and sometimes they are, but my first reaction to news about the dickinson biopic was that cynthia nixon was too old. but i think i had thought that dickinson died much younger than she in fact did. anyway.

Deep Blue Sea is good but not his best - but that's as much to do with the ho-hum source material more than anything. iirc the opening sequence felt out of place too. Sloppy sounds right. I could be that TD was perhaps always limited in the kind of story he was able to tell.

The play was revived at The National Theatre - didn't catch it.

Jack Greenlees as Chris's brother is good, I think. He's quite amazing looking, but there's the problem I think, there's something unbalanced, and perhaps questionable, in a film that pores so much attention over his beating while paying relatively cursory attention to the mother's suicide after killing her baby.

Sorry, that's garbled but you know what I mean.

Cynthia Nixon is absolutely amazing in this, and her comic timing is impeccable and surprisingly central in the film. It's definitely one of year's best. When will you all get to see it so I don't have to rant alone?

Amateurist, I realise that the incorrect words to ALS mean nothing to 95% of the audience and I don't want to beat a dead horse but, for what it's worth, the Variety review of A Quiet Passion, which I have just read, complains:

The wisdom of covering Dickinson’s entire adult life, as opposed to a judiciously chosen and dramatically crucial passage thereof, is most sorely tested when the Battle of Gettysburg rolls around: Though understandably budget-strapped, Davies questionably elects to cover it with a kind of cinematic PowerPoint presentation of colorized photographs, adding insult to injury by closing the montage on a shot of an inaccurately over-spangled American flag.

(Admittedly, probably the production designer's fault)

oof!

Nah, that reviewer misses every willful anachronism but one, then complains about that one as if it ruins the whole movie. Also calls Jessica Hauser's askance compositions 'symmetrical', so is clearly blind.

This movie is WEIRD, and the images of flags are awesome.