The Conjuring

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: it’s the 70s and a hard-working couple with several children move into a rambling old house in the middle of nowhere. They’ve sunk their life savings into the property and are looking forward to a new start. Their pet dog refuses to enter the house. Their youngest child finds an old music box and makes an imaginary friend who might not be so imaginary after all. Another child sleepwalks and sees things. Clocks stop at exactly the same time every night. A boarded-up stairwell is discovered, leading down a cobweb infested basement. Pictures jump off walls. Doors open and close of their own volition. The mother of the family suffers from bruising that doesn’t seem to have any apparent cause. As strange events proliferate, the family prevail upon the help of paranormal investigators who unearth a history of dark secrets and violent events connected to the house.

‘The Conjuring’ does nothing you haven’t seen in several dozen other movies, right down to the period setting which evokes ‘The Amityville Horror’. Its achievement, though, is generally doing these things better than those several dozen other movies. Avoiding their pitfalls. Skirting it, but never quite tipping over into melodrama. Not overly relying on CGI or whiz-bang effects (an exception, involving a bedsheet torn off a washing line in a gale, pays off with such a careworn image that it shouldn’t work … but somehow does). 

Engagingly old-school, ‘The Conjuring’ takes its time in establishing the characters. Let’s meet the family, truck driver Roger Perron (Ron Livingston), wife Carolyn (Lili Taylor) and their daughters Andrea (Shanley Cresswell), Nancy (Hayley McFarland), Christine (Joey King), Cindy (Mackenzie Foy) and April (Kyla Deaver). Okay, Carolyn’s a tad “gee whiz” naïve/optimistic and Andrea’s pretty much got the whole emo sulk routine off to a fine art, but on the whole these are decent people. A regular family. You wouldn’t balk at having them as neighbours. You care what happens to them. That might sound like an obvious thing to say, but you wouldn’t believe how many genre films I’ve sat through whose characters I’ve either not engaged with (‘The Haunting in Connecticut’) or actively disliked (‘Frozen’).

As the ferocity of the paranormal incidents increases, the Perrons engage the services of renowned ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), from whose case files the story is taken. And hence that twinge of familiarity: they were at Amityville, and they investigated the Smurl family haunting, on which ‘The Haunting in Connecticut’ was based. I guess ghosts and malevolent spirits just took to a certain kind of New England real estate and acted in remarkably similar ways whenever the Warrens were around.

The Warrens had their detractors throughout their career, and how closely the film chimes with the actual psychic investigation four decades ago isn’t something I’ve been able define based on some cursory internet research into the couple. Nor does it seem a worthwhile exercise. The film throws out its “based on true events” card from the outset and we all know how spurious that “based on” tag can be, what a multitude of sins it can hide. What’s up for debate here is how well ‘The Conjuring’ works as an example of its genre, as a work of entertainment. Did it give me the creeps? Yes, and then some. Did it make me jump? Twice, both scenes using the same visual motif.

I’ve seen nothing of director James Wan’s work beyond the inaugural entry in the ‘Saw’ franchise, and was underwhelmed to the point that I let the rest of the saga happily pass me by. I’m told that ‘Dead Silence’ was horrible in many ways (if memory serves, Tim Brayton of Antagony & Ecstasy coined the term “fucktrocious” in his review), and ‘Insidious’ reasonably effective if boilerplate. ‘Insidious’ has now been added to the rental list, and the rather pompously titled ‘Insidious Chapter Two’ is definitely on the big screen radar. I’m curious to find out – and it may well be an investigation as freighted by the unknown as any of Ed and Lorraine’s – exactly where James Wan became such an accomplished craftsman.

WORK SUCKS: Office Space

Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) isn’t very happy with his life. He works for Initech, a software company that suffers from that endemic late-twentieth-century corporate problem: too much frickin’ management.

The management culture at Initech is personified by Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), a man whose ingratiating conversational opener "So, [staff member’s name], what’s happening" is inevitably a prelude to dumping on said employee. Lumbergh has a yuppie haircut and wears coloured shirts with white collars. His tie and braces seldom match. He wanders round the office, coffee cup in hand, leaning up against water coolers and partitions while he doles out bollockings for minor things or ruins your plans for the weekend ("yeah, uh, I’m gonna need you to come in on Saturday"). He’s like David Brent gone to the dark side and not bothered about wanting people to like him.


Lumbergh and Initech are the main reasons Peter isn’t very happy with his life. Mind you, his colleagues are equally put-upon. Michael Bolton (David Herman) is saddled with the same name as a singer he doesn’t even like (he tries, ineffectually, to get people to call him Mike instead). Samir Nagheenanajar (Ajay Naidu) has a bad case of nerves and gets agitated at the constant mispronunciations of his surname. Milton Waddams (Stephen Root) is a mumbling, complaining, "not my job type" who gets het up whenever he’s asked to move desks and obsesses over his stapler.

Adding to Peter’s woes are relationship problems with his girlfriend Anne (Alexandra Wentworth) and impending cutbacks signalled when Lumbergh brings in downsizing consultants Bob Porter (Paul Willson) and Bob Slydell (John C. McGinley) – chummily known as "The Bobs". The Bobs stage a round of interviews designed identify suitable candidates for redundancy. The first victim is Milton. The Bobs discover he was actually laid off years ago but kept turning up for work; a payroll error whereby he continued to be paid is swiftly "corrected" in the hope that he’ll take the hint and vamoose.

Anne insists on Peter attending a hypnotherapy session. When the therapist suffers a heart attack while Peter is still under hypnosis, the result changes his life. He sleeps soundly and placidly through an entire weekend while Lumbergh jams up his answerphone with messages cordially reminding him he was supposed to be at work. Peter awakes to a clarity of vision: he decides not to bother with work, or waste anymore time on his relationship with Anne. He chats up coffee shop waitress Joanna (Jennifer Aniston), then moseys into the office to collect his personal belongings.

Nobody takes his declarations that he’s quit seriously, and he finds himself steered into a meeting room for his tete-a-tete with the Bobs. They mistake his insouciant and sarcastic attitude for creative, outside-the-box thinking and mark him down as management material.

Peter responds to his new role by committing minor acts of vandalism around the office and stealing Lumbergh’s parking space. Unfortunately, though, his ascendancy through the Initech ranks isn’t enough to safeguard Mike and Samir from redundancy, so the threesome forge a plot to defraud the company.

‘Office Space’ was released in 1999 (to very little interest at the box office). It could have been made a decade earlier and succeeded as a spoof of/corrective to ‘Wall Street’. It could have debuted a decade later and still scored points about corporationism, downsizing and management culture. I’m surprised nobody re-released it at the height of the "credit crunch" media hyperbole a year ago.

Written and directed by Mike Judge – of ‘Beavis and Butthead’ fame – and expanded from his ‘Milton’ cartoons – ‘Office Space’ has a small-scale look to it which perhaps accounts for its poor performance on the big screen. There was criticism in some quarters that it was too episodic, particularly in its first half where the script resembles an interlinked sequence of sketches rather than an actual narrative. Personally, I prefer the narrativeless vignettes of the first half, particularly a gleefully cathartic bit of wish-fulfilment where Peter, Mike and Samir vent their frustrations on a malfunctioning printer by taking it outside and beating seven different kinds of circuitry out of it. Scored to ‘Still’ by the Geto Boys, the scene proved iconic enough to merit a ‘Family Guy’ parody.





Judge’s portrait of office life may be painted in broad strokes on a small canvas, but it’s nevertheless wincingly accurate. From Milton’s interminable whining (his complaints invariably meaningless) to the caffeine-addled temp who responds to anything less than full-on perky enthusiasm with a cry of "Someone’s got a case of the Mondays"; from the oleaginous Lumbergh (every inch the company man, but whose job requires that never actually does anything) to the Bobs trying to present an affable front when everyone knows they’re hatchet men; from the boxy little cubicles to the wasteful circulation of pointless memos, ‘Office Space’ nails the bland, bureaucratically-blinkered aesthetic of the contemporary workplace. It doesn’t have the desperation or the biting anger of ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’, but that’s not Judge’s remit. ‘Office Space’ is a work of satire, and its director is savvy enough to know that sometimes just observing can be satirical enough.