Terence Davies, C/D. S/D

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.

i liked AQP fine til the two long death scenes. Dude loves death.

Keith Carradine only actor who knew how they pronounce "aunt" in Massachusetts tho.

Very oddly for me I just saw TWO Terence Davies films in two days.

A QUIET PASSION wasn't quite what I expected from TD but at least it had quality dialogue with tons of barbed back & forth put-downs. I had never known that Emily Dickinson was supposed to be so witty.

Then DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES. I had never known before that it was in two parts. I preferred the STILL LIVES. DISTANT VOICES was somewhat dominated by the father who was not pleasant. I'm not sure I understood this film or got much from it, except from the moments when the young women talked to each other - their talk was vivacious and colourful, unlike most of the rest of the film. But on reflection I think: I ought to welcome attempts to make films that work and tell stories in unusual and different ways.

Dickinson's letters are marvelous.

I have read a load of articles about her over the years, but that element never came through. Watching the film, I assumed that the wit must be drawn from letters, not just made up by TD.

I'm not sure the poems came across so well in the film - not always sure of Nixon's delivery of them (though she would surely be advised and directed on that), and hearing them without seeing them made them harder to follow anyway.

Interview: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-terence-davies-a-quiet-passion-interview-20170502-htmlstory.html

I had a qualm or two but overall AQP impressed me.

out on disc etc

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/a-quiet-passion

Excellen film.

*Excellent

I'm watching it again this Saturday night, appropriately sober this time.

well maybe not that much, but not shitfaced!

LOL Cal!

Cal's quiet passion.

New one about Siegfried Sassoon opens on Friday. I'm watching it tonight. Anyone seen it yet?

Benediction is brilliant. I keep thinking about some of the hilariously vicious and cold dialogue from Novello and that very sad parting of ways when Wilfred Owen is packed off to his death. TD has still got it, man!

Film of the year imo

it really makes you think of regret and seemingly innocuous moments of mild drama in life that haunt you for the rest of your life. It's a great movie.

like you get a strong sense of that one short moment of mild class condescension towards Owen is something Sassoon regretted for the rest of his life.

Any film that brings the three of us together.

Davies has become a whiz at showing the passage of time: how it happens without your being aware of it, as the hurts linger.

I’ve somehow studiously avoided Davies all these years, but finally watched Summer Song last week and was hooked. I’ve been baptized, I’ve been baptized.

Ahem, Sunset Song

Sunset Song got criticised on here because the Auld Lang Syne in it wasn't authentically Scottish enough! I'm not beefing about it, it just amused me at the time.

People seemed to like it on my Scottish language thread, despite or because of having to read the book in school. Or maybe it’s just the book they liked.

So why did you go to the Impressionists?
I only did it for the Monet.

We’re here to enjoy ourselves. Come on, Micky, give us a song.

Quite lovely:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS-boGJ8hd0

RIP

fun list

https://www.instagram.com/p/CyGrwkrIsTH/

i still think about my favorite professor showing us distant voices, still lives at byu. did he know the queer, closeted kids in the class needed to see it? was he somewhat queer himself? probably a little bit of yes to both. it was all so unspoken though.

Loved this bit from Michael Koresky:

At the conclusion of that deeply nurturing conversation, as I was nervously pressing stop on my audio recorder, Davies then looked up at me with a warm smile and asked, “So… what is your book about?” Concerned and amazed, I responded: “You! The book is about you.” Davies’ face turned red and lit up like a child, delighted but also humbled beyond belief.

“Me?!” It was an expression of unbelievable modesty coming from a man many agree was England’s greatest filmmaker of the last quarter century, but also evidence that Davies, never a commercially successful director in all the boring ways we measure such things, was always on the edge of being forgotten. It’s impossible to imagine, however, that Davies’ cinema will ever be forgotten by anyone who has seen a frame of it; his monumental films held candles as vigils to the form itself, and now without him, we will – we must – keep that flame burning.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news/terence-davies-obituary

MK is living the life I wish I was. He’s the perfect person to pay homage to this particular director

I'll watch his last couple of films. Really hope Davies is not forgotten :-(

My obt for him.

Some nice memories here:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/oct/11/terence-davies-tom-hiddleston-rachel-weisz-jennifer-ehle-peter-capaldi?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1bF7DkZskET2ghvSB4za-cE6oQhHuC1GwtlA7_lK1zMJTfmIozv3MRDaQ

So lovely - the Capaldi contribution particularly.

Yes, that was great, thanks!

I'm getting the Koresky book from the library, this aspect of the description sounded really intriguing:

focusing on four paradoxes within the director's oeuvre: films that are autobiographical yet fictional; melancholy yet elating; conservative in tone and theme yet radically constructed; and obsessed with the passing of time yet frozen in time and space.

Koresky's good.

I have a mega critic-crush on him

I don’t know from him, just heard about him now on this thread. His book Films of Endearment has a cheesy title but maybe it’s good?

I loved it, but as I said above ...