PERSONAL FAVES: Glengarry Glen Ross

There are still quite a few items on my “bucket list” that I haven’t ticked off. I have yet to demand of Michael Bay that he refund the ticket price for ‘Pearl Harbor’ and make adequate fiscal recompense for the three hours of my life that I’ll never have again. I have yet to take the stage drunkenly at a staff karaoke night and deliver a tuneless and slurred account of the UK Sub’s ‘So Fucking What’. I have yet to visit Paris, Vienna, New York and San Francisco. I have yet to see Iron Maiden and the Berlin Philharmonic in concert (obviously not at the same time … unless Simon Rattle wants to get Steve Harris a call and work something out, stranger things have happened!)

And I have yet to deliver – in a team meeting, committee meeting, one-to-one or appraisal – the phrase “you fairy, you company man.” (Because it would doubtless cost me my job, I would probably tailor it to include an appropriately Cartman-like “screw you guys, I’m going home” on my way out.)

Like most people, there are moments where I dwell upon the fact that I don’t like my job. I ought to start taking comfort in the fact that what I do for a living doesn’t inspire the levels of desperation demonstrated by the protagonists of ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’. Based on the stage play by David Mamet (less a piece of a theatre than a stake through the heart, a nail in the coffin and a stream of urine on the tombstone of the American dream), James Foley’s black-hearted adaptation throws the viewer into the mercilessly cynical world of Mitch & Murray, a firm whose salesmen are expected to sell entire tracts of real estate to people who are either not interested or don’t have the money (or both); a world where more business is done at a seedy bar than at their desks (“if anybody calls, I’m over at the office”), cold calls are made from pay phones and over the hill salesmen in cheap suits lie through their teeth, pass themselves off as vice presidents of corporations and say or promise anything that might lead to a sale.

Let’s meet the team: we’ve got Ricky Roma (Al Pacino), on a roll and talking a line that’s even slicker than the suits he wears; we’ve got Shelley “The Machine” Levene (Jack Lemmon), old school but down on his luck; we’ve got George Aaronow (Alan Arkin), who’s even more down on his luck – to the point where he’s lost confidence in himself; we’ve got Dave Moss (Ed Harris), a man whose hatred of the job is eclipsed only by his jealousy towards Roma; and we’ve got jobsworth office manager John Williamson (Kevin Spacey), the object of their collective contempt.

Only when the film opens, they’ve got more on their plate than just a grudge against Williamson. Blake (Alec Baldwin) has just arrived from downtown to deliver a motivational seminar. This is how he motivates them:

Blake: I’m here from downtown. I’m here from Mitch and Murray. And I'm here on a mission of mercy … You call yourself a salesman you son of a bitch?

Moss: I don’t gotta sit here and listen to this shit.

Blake: You certainly don’t pal, coz the good news is: you’re fired. The bad news is, all of you’ve got just one week to regain your jobs starting with tonight … Have I got your attention now? Good. Coz we're adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado … Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired. Get the picture? You laughing now? You got leads. Mitch & Murray paid good money, get their names to sell them. You can’t close the leads you’re given, you can’t close shit. You are shit. Hit the bricks pal, and beat it coz you are going OUT.

Levene: The leads are weak.

Blake: The leads are weak? ... You’re weak. I've been in this business fifteen years –

Moss: What’s your name?

Blake: Fuck you. That's my name. You know why, mister? You drove a Hyundai to get here, I drove an eighty-thousand dollar BMW. That’s my name. And your name is you’re wanting. You can’t play in the man’s game, you can’t close them - go home and tell your wife your troubles. Because only one thing counts in this life: Get them to sign on the line which is dotted. You hear me, you fucking faggots? A-B-C. A: always. B: be. C: closing. Always be closing. ALWAYS BE CLOSING. A-I-D-A. Attention, Interest, Decision, Action. Attention: do I have you attention? Interest: are you interested? I know you are, because it’s fuck or walk. You close or you hit the bricks. Decision: have you made your decision for Christ? Action. A-I-D-A. Get out there. You got the prospects coming in ... They’re sitting out there waiting to give you their money. Are you gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it?

Blake’s appearance (and in a film jam-packed with legendary acting talent, Alec fuckin’ Baldwin damn near steals the show!) is the cause of our boys’ desperation. After he departs, Levene wheedles with Williamson, trying to persuade him to break out some of the new leads, the Glengarry leads, that Blake has instructed Williamson are to be locked away in the safe and given only to closers. Aaronow and Moss hit a bar, bitch endlessly about the job, reminisce over the good old days when they were selling Glen Ross real estate, and gradually come round to discussing the possibility of ripping off the office. Stealing the Glengarry leads and taking them to a rival firm.

Only Roma seems unconcerned by the Blake imperative. And that’s mainly because he skipped the meeting. Roma was otherwise engaged at the bar, spieling a line of bullshit so amorally magnificent that Joseph Goebells might have been tempted to rise up from his grave and make with a round of applause. Roma was busy talking to poor dumb shmuck James Lingk (Jonathan Pryce), romancing him the way a player would bring a girl round to the idea of going back to his place and getting her knickers off.

Meanwhile, Levene – pressurized to pony up the money for his wife’s medical care – gets the brush off from Williamson and heads out into the night to try to cultivate a sale from leads he himself recognizes as “dreck”.

Thus does the first half of the film play out. Act two takes place the following morning. The office has been burgled, the Glengarry leads stolen, the police are all over the place and Williamson is pissed off. Nonetheless, Roma and Levene turn up in ebullient spirits, the former having closed a deal with Lingk and Levene having made an early start by selling $82,000 (this in the early 90s) of land. The jubilation is short lived. Roma is faced with the unexpected arrival of Lingk, suffering from a world-class case of buyer’s remorse, while Levene has a nasty surprise in store about his deal, and Williamson and the cops have some thorny questions for everyone.

‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ is almost a comedy. Mamet’s ear for the endless repetitions and petty evasions of the salesmen is acute. The dialogue between Aaronow and Moss in particular is like a verbal tennis match, the little black core of bitterness that is the ball flying back and forth between two players evenly matched in their irascibility. Levene, in his rumpled suit, trying to pass himself off as one of the senior executives of American Express is hilarious. The whole film would be laugh-out-loud funny if it weren’t so bitterly, horribly, unflinchingly true to life.

What makes it more effective is the baggage the cast bring with them. Levene, because he’s played by Jack Lemmon, conjures an old and almost defeated C.C. Baxter from ‘The Apartment’, passed over for every promotion, left behind, sat at the same desk for thirty years, a joke to the younger guys. It’s easy to imagine Pacino’s Roma as a Michael Corleone who never got into the family business, whose best days were in the army, who came out and took a middle-level job that he coasted by one by dint of his personality and the gift of the gab, a man who’s still doing the job because, really, what else is there? Ed Harris’s everyman persona is just below the surface of Moss’s bitterness, a remind of how easily a decent guy can be beaten down by the bullshit of everyday life. And Alan Arkin, who flew dazed through the horrors of war as Yossarian in ‘Catch-22’, finds himself a prisoner of peacetime and a casualty of the day job here.

“God, I hate this job,” Arkin moans near the end of the film. It’s sometimes misquoted as the last line. It’s a key line, but it’s not the last line. That would mean that one of Mitch & Murray’s beleaguered and desperate salesmen would at least get the last word. And Mamet and Foley know the world doesn’t work that way.

ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL: Personal Faves double bill

'Twas on this day in 2007 that The Agitation of the Mind came into existence. It took a while, but I've slowly built a core audience of readers and fellow bloggers. To all of you who've been on the journey with me - thanks; it's because of you that I keep this going instead of, I dunno, drinking stupid amounts of beer and bitching about the job.

Which provides me with a nice segue to 'Glengarry Glen Ross', a film I first approached thinking it was a documentary about single malt Scotch whisky. 'Glengarry Glen Ross' was one of the two highest ranking films in the Personal Faves poll I've been running over the last week.

The poll closed a few hours ago. The votes have been counted. The people have spoken. The allegations of multiple voting remain suspected but unproven. In a few minutes, I'll be watching 'Glengarry Glen Ross', marshalling my thoughts over a light lunch, then blogging a review. Afterwards, there'll be a quick trip to an idyllic island, a nice little getaway spot, where a bunch of Japanese high schoolers will be attempting to kill each other in 'Battle Royale'.

To summarise: work sucks and so does being a teenager. It's cut and thrust and knife in the back at the office, but it's sheer bloody murder on a school trip. Your career prospects are under threat when it's Alec Baldwin turning up from head office to give you a motivational seminar, and you don't even want to know the implications of having Takeshi Kitano as your teacher.

Welcome to The Agitation of the Mind's gleefully misanthropic anniversary special!

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Fight for Your Life

Of the 72 films on the DPP’s hit list that the UK’s slavering, self-righteous, curtain-twitching media were quick to label the “video nasties”, at least 60 have since been released, many uncut. The remaining titles have either been refused certificates or never resubmitted for classification.

‘Fight for Your Life’ holds the dubious distinction of not only being in the still unavailable minority, but incurring the wrath of the BBFC even before the DPP got bureaucratic on its ass. Prior to its brief shelf-life on VHS, ‘Fight for Your Life’ had been denied a theatrical release in the UK.

Essentially, then, we’re talking about a film which ought to be the nastiest of the nasties, an hour and a half of such depravity, violence, gore and filth that to see it but once is to shuck off one’s own humanity and turn into a feral thing ridden with blood lust and unable to comprehend the basics of civilized behaviour and moral responsibility.

Well, folks, I’m here to tell you that I’ve just finished watching ‘Fight for Your Life’ (yeah, I know, “not available in any format in the UK”. What can I say? A little censorship went a lot further in the pre-internet days) and not only have I not been corrupted by this shambolic piece of celluloid, I wasn’t even remotely offended by it. Even though I can’t shake the feeling I should be.

Here’s a brief synopsis: three criminals escape while they’re being transported to jail, steal a car from a pimp, kill a gas station attendant, rob a liquor store, kill the owner, take a customer hostage and hole up at her family’s house. Here, they goad and terrorize the family while the local cops, their jurisdiction shanghaied by a prissy Fed, take their sweet time in following the clues and surrounding the house.

One of the few DPP targets that’s not a stalk ‘n’ slash or outright horror film, ‘Fight for Your Life’ is a boilerplate home invasion flick. As a piece of filmmaking it fails on almost every level. There’s barely a shred of tension. The violence is strictly amateur hour. There’s virtually no gore. The obligatory rape scene occurs for the most part offscreen. The characters are stereotypes. The dialogue is risible to the point of unintentionally hilarious. The editing is perhaps the worst I’ve ever seen: on at least three occasions, the actors are clearly holding their positions as a scene begins. The mechanics of the police investigation (surely the most lethargic manhunt ever) are nonsensical and the climactic siege almost tips into parody.

So why the controversy? Well, let’s revisit the above synopsis, get rid of the extraneous details such as the deaths of the gas station attendant and the liquor store owner, and put it this way: three villains led by a white trash racist invade the home of a black preacher and his family. And, yes, what follows pretty much flies in the face of cultural harmony. Within five minutes of said white trash racist, Kane (William Sanderson), encountering said black preacher, Reverend Turner (Robert Judd), I counted fifteen different racial epithets. Later, in what I think is the only instance in cinema of someone getting Bible-whipped, Kane clobbers Turner into unconsciousness with a leather-bound copy of the Good Book. And, uh, rapes his daughter.

All of which is blatantly controversial. And yet … and yet …

The aforementioned racial epithets, once you’ve flinched at the unbelievably casual use of the N-word and the C-word (and I don’t mean the one that gets used a lot in ‘In Bruges’), quickly degenerate into such playground name calling as “booger” and “monkey face”; though used less frequently, there’s more vehemence in, say, the Scorpio killer’s use of racist language in ‘Dirty Harry’. In fact, there’s more wholesale xenophobia in your average ‘Carry On’ film.

Nor are director Robert A. Endelson’s sympathies skewed towards Kane. In fact, he does everything possible to paint Kane as an utter fucktard. Kane is racist across the board, giving his Mexican and Chinese fellow crooks almost as much grief as he does the Turners. He’s a coward, a bully and so despicable that he even draws down on a baby at one point.

Moreover, it’s implied that he’s got a small penis and developed a taste for, ahem, receiving during his frequent spells in jail. Yup, Kane is reviled and belittled at every turn. Yup, he and his crew deserve everything they get. You can’t even say that the ending is so cathartic that the filmmakers want to have their cake and eat it with as regards their depiction of violence.

However – and this is probably why ‘Fight for Your Life’ is still unavailable in the UK (uh, unless you’ve got a modem, that is) – it’s ultimately a film about a devoutly religious family who unhesitatingly compartmentalize the turn the other cheek/forgive thine enemy bit the moment they get a chance to turn the tables on Kane and co.; a devoutly religious family who perpetuate the siege when they could easily hand the miscreants over to the police just so they can spend a tad longer getting some payback. It’s also about a by-the-book cop – a pillar of rectitude – who in the final scenes makes the biggest u-turn since Tony Blair was in power and stands his men down while the Turners exact their revenge.

All of which would constitute a thorny and provocative examination of those moral grey areas in which la bete humaine lurks just below the surface if the film had been made with any real intelligence or craftsmanship. But it isn’t. Apart from decent performances by Sanderson and Judd, ‘Fight for Your Life’ (its very title a misnomer: Turner doesn’t go mano-a-mano with Kane until the tables have already turned in his favour) is a damp squib. Frequently stupid, intermittently boring and riddled with mismatched cuts, continuity errors, and horribly clichéd transitions (flipped images; wavy lines) that seem to have wandered in from an episode of ‘Scooby Doo’, it’s hard to see how anyone could take this seriously enough to take offence. Unless, of course, the BBFC and the DPP are racist motherfuckers and they can’t get down with the black guy plugging the white guy at the end.

Oh, sorry, that was a spoiler.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Shortbus

‘Shortbus’ features scenes of unsimulated sexual intercourse.

(The moral majority might want to log off at this point.)

To be more specific, ‘Shortbus’ features scenes of straight sex, gay sex, oral sex, group sex, SM, voyeurism and what is academically referred to as solitary sexual activity. Y’know, polishing the lighthouse. Or if you’re female, flicking the bean. There’s even a scene where a rather limber chap contorts himself into a position whereby an attempt at self-fellatio proves almost successful. The downside is that he ejaculates onto his own face.

Anyone still reading?

Although I don’t want to wade too deeply into the muddy waters of crudity in this review, I am an advocate of calling a spade a spade. Not a digging implement. Or, if you’re anything like the council workers in my hometown, a leaning implement. Also, there’s a word I need to get out of the way (that’s “get out of the way” as in introduce it so I can use it repetitively throughout the review); so let’s all take a deep breath, face up to the male appendage and say it together:

Cock.

It’s not a word I normally use, but damned if I’m going to repeatedly type “penis”, “phallus”, “member” or “organ”, and I doubt I could take this review seriously if I opted for “dick” (private eye connotations), “willy” (whale on the run connotations), “knob” (door handle connotations) or “todger”. I simply couldn’t type “todger” over and over without braying with laughter.

So, then: cock. There’s plenty of it in ‘Shortbus’. The film opens with a naked man lying in the bath then cuts to a close-up of his cock. He waggles it about a bit. Next thing, he’s holding a camcorder and zooming in on it. Then we cut to a rather severe looking dominatrix (is there any other kind?) giving some Ivy League chinless wonder a good flogging; he gets so excited he ejaculates on a Jackson Pollock print (this is intended as a visual joke; it’s not a very good one). Up next: a twenty-something couple working their way through an energetic sequence of positions, some of which would see many of us on the waiting list for a hernia operation if we attempted them with such gusto. But proving that quality is better than quantity, it’s soon revealed that their shag-a-thon is less than orgasmic.

Let’s make the introductions: the naked man of bathtub/self-BJ fame is one half of a gay couple, James (Paul Dawson) and Jamie (P J DeBoy*), known to their friends as “the Jamies” even though James would prefer to be called James and not Jamie. The dominatrix is Severin (Lindsay Beamish) and her client – the “trust fund muppet” to use her own description – is Jesse (Adam Hardman**). The energetic couple are Rob (Raphael Barker) and Sophia (Sook Yin-Lee). Rob volunteers at a soup kitchen, while Sophia’s the breadwinner. She’s a sex therapist (“I prefer the term couples counsellor”) and she’s never had an orgasm.

Oh, and there’s a mildly creepy guy, Caleb (Peter Stickles***), who lives in the apartment opposite the Jamies (sorry, Jamie and James) and spies on them.

After the opening montage of cock-filming, whipping, various positions, semen/Pollock interfaces and what is probably the world record for exertion in pursuit of a self-gobble, writer/director John Cameron Mitchell gets down (oooh, madam!) to the story proper. Actually, that’s pushing it. When a film contains a credit to the effect that the narrative and characters were “developed by the actors”, you know you’re in improv territory. ‘Shortbus’ is basically the cinematic equivalent of a fringe group putting on a shoddily conceived play with a couple of good ideas but no real focus. Here, the lack of focus is obfuscated by the preponderance of cock.

For what it’s worth, the story element runs along these lines: Jamie and James attend counselling with Sophia where they debate whether to introduce a third party into their relationship. The session gets a tad argumentative and Sophia lets it slip that she’s never achieved orgasm. In a move that tramples all over patient/counsellor relationship protocols, they invite her to a sex club called Shortbus where they’re confident she’ll get her bell rung. In a manner of speaking.

This is a good place to pause and consider the title. When Sophia asks Shortbus’s gender-bending Master (uh, Mistress?) of Ceremonies Justin Bond (him/her?self) why it’s named thus, his (her?) reply is, “It’s like the big yellow school bus. But it’s short.” I’m not sure I want to dwell too long on the implications of this statement.

Anyway, it’s at Shortbus that Sophia meets Severin and a tentative and unlikely friendship develops; Caleb moons over James and Jamie; and James and Jamie meet Ceth (Jay Brannan) – pronounced “Seth” but he’s a floppy haired poncy student type so what are you going to do? – and promptly get a little three-way action going. God knows I’m not the expert on Gay Three-Way Scenes in Early Twenty-First Century Independent American Cinema, but this is probably the only gay three-way scene which climaxes (sorry!) with an in-flagrante performance of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. (This is not a paragraph I ever imagined I would type.)

Anyone still reading, by the way? If you are: (a) thank you – from the bottom of my heart, thank you; and (b) I promise I’ll wrap this fucking thing up before it hits the 1,500 word mark.

The above mentioned rimming/fellatio/American national anthem scene is actually pretty funny, one of two scenes that are genuinely amusing and reasonably well executed. The other one involves a vibrating egg that Sophia stashes upon her person. So to speak. Elsewhere, though, the film falls flat. Virtually all of the characters are self-obsessed, precious and unlikeable; occasional lurches into melodrama (particularly a story strand that resolves in a suicide attempt) are abrupt and unconvincing; attempts at relevance through lumberingly unsubtle references to 9/11 are inappropriate and embarrassing; and the mise-en-scene of the club itself is vaguely ridiculous – I mean, really, a sex club with a house band that looks like this:

The essential dichotomy of ‘Shortbus’ is established in its opening sequence and never successfully resolved. The camera glides over an animated New York that looks like it’s been constructed from cardboard boxes and through the window of the Jamies’ apartment.

It’s arty, artificial and reeks of self-conscious indie cuteness. It’s a technique that’s repeated throughout the film, the cardboard NY expanding to incorporate a paper cut-out Central Park and what looks like a papier maché Ground Zero (more 9/11 heavy-handedness). Between this, the quirky little touches like Sophia’s inability to orgasm causing power cuts (!), and the pseudo-poignant ending where the patrons of Shortbus light candles and join in a sing-song, Mitchell’s real aesthetic – a warm, fuzzy indie dramedy – is both painfully obvious and utterly at odds with the interminable and unerotic panoply of jiggling cocks, wobbling arses and naked skin.





*Either this is a pseudonym, or the dude’s parents were freakin’ psychic!

**Do I even NEED to make the comment?

***Did the cast of this movie just make up suggestive sounding names for themselves?

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key

Okay, let’s get the checklist out.

Magnificently ludicrous title? ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’. Check!

Genre stalwart in the director’s chair? Sergio Martino. Check!

Twisty turny plot? We’ll attempt a synopsis in a minute (minor spoilers will apply), but for now: Check!

Black gloved killer? Uh-huh, and with a penchant for using a scythe. Check!

J&B? Let’s put it this way: play the giallo drinking game (rules here) while watching ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ and you’re liable to be carted off to get your stomach pumped long before the viciously ironic denouement. Check!

Edwige Fenech? Present, correct and indulging in mucho plenty kit-offery. Check!

I stumbled across this movie on a video sharing site last night. Never released in the UK and with the Region 1 DVD out of print and changing hands for stupid amounts of money (anywhere between £50 - £70; ie. $80 - $110), I’d pretty much written off any chance of seeing it in the near future. Then, having cruised said site for ‘Black Mama, White Mama’ and a certain notorious Ruggero Deodato film, I decided to chance my luck and fed Edwige Fenech’s name into the search box. Like the Promised Land revealed to Moses, like the doors of perception cleansed to Aldous Huxley, like Hugh Hefner surveying the Playboy mansion and reflecting smugly that he ain’t doing bad for an old dude who wears his dressing gown all the time, I beheld the glory and majesty of … oh well, fuck it, let’s just call it a midweek Something For The Weekend and post these three shots:

Okay. Now before you rush out to splurge that £50 (or $80) you saved for a rainy day/found down the back of the couch/mugged a little old lady for [delete as applicable], let me just mention that there is a very slight downside to this movie. La Fenech doesn’t put in an appearance until almost the 40 minute mark. In a 97 minute flick, this presents something of a test of the patience. Particularly since we have to spend that first third in the company of the resolutely shitty Oliviero Ruvigny (Luigi Pistilli) and his brittle, much put-upon wife Irene (Anita Strindberg).

Oliviero is a once-successful writer whose books are now out of print and who uses his grumblings that “the novel is dead” as an excuse that he hasn’t been able to write worth a damn for years. When Hemingway decided he couldn’t write worth a damn any more, he chewed on the business end of a shotgun. Oliviero channels his failure differently: he hosts decadent parties for beatnik friends, obsesses borderline Oedipally over his dead mother, sexually harasses his maid and humiliates his wife. That’s on a good day. On a bad day, he beats her. Oh, and he runs around with other women, too. Like bookshop assistant and his former student Fausta (Daniela Giordano). When she meets a nasty fate (business end of a scythe) while waiting for him at a tryst, the police come calling. There’s no hard evidence and, of course, Irene takes his side during questioning. She’s too scared to do otherwise.

Then the maid buys the farm (same modus operandi) and Oliviero panics and hides the body. He insists that he didn’t kill her but daren’t risk the police discovering she was killed in his house. He demonstrates his innocence and deep-cleaned conscience by walling her up in the wine cellar. By now, Irene is fearing for her life and freaking out every time Oliviero’s cat, the charmingly named Satan, leaps out at her or gets nasty with its claws. (‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ is nominally based on Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’. As in: there’s a cat, it’s black and somebody gets walled up in a cellar. Oh, and the mechanics of the denouement follow Poe’s template as well.)

It’s not a happy household and these aren’t particularly likeable people. Mercifully, it’s at this point that Oliviero’s sexpot niece Floriana decides to pay them a visit and all kind of shenanigans ensue. Turns out that Floriana’s not exactly a nice person either, but what the hell, she’s played by a never more gorgeous Edwige Fenech and she’s often naked. I hate to sound shallow, oikish or hairy-palmed, but in the world of gialli this is the kind of thing that can make or break a film.

What follows is kind of like ‘Knife in the Water’ without the boat and with the pressure cooker atmosphere of sexual tension actually resolving itself. In short order, Floriana worms her way into Irene’s confidence via the simple expedient of worming her way into her bed (thank you, Sergio Martino, you are great and wonderful man); catches the eye of local delivery guy and motocross rider Dario (Riccardo Salvino) and gives him an altogether different form of ride (Christ, my usual cerebral standards of film writing are taking a nose-dive!); and finally gets Oliviero hot under the collar in a scene that’s as sexy as hell so long as you keep your eye on Fenech and don’t remind yourself that Pistilli (grey-haired and wearing a crap sweater) is actually onscreen as well.

Then there’s a surprising revelation about the murders and the film takes a different turn. Martino has fun playing with convention and pulling the rug. What starts out as a study of a dysfunctional and sado-masochistic relationship, with the odd sidestep into the more easily recognisable giallo territory of fetishistic death scenes, suddenly veers into the realms of the erotic thriller, while teasing the viewer with subplots about the black cat and Oliviero’s mother which weave in and out of the narrative seemingly at random, before a series of reveals paint the last 15 or 20 minutes in the darkest shade of black. As well as the brightest shade of red.

Even in a genre not renowned for happy endings, redemptive character arcs or a sunny depiction of human nature, ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ is singularly cynical and mean-spirited. You can’t empathize with or root for anyone. If Fenech wasn’t so throat-tighteningly beautiful, you’d lose interest in Floriana pretty quickly. More than one character gets their just desserts, but there’s no catharsis. ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ is a damn good giallo – arguably one of the greats – but fuck me, it’s bleak.

Now is the winter of our discontent ...

With Summer of Satan unequivocally in the lead in the poll for next year's big retrospective, and two particularly contentious titles standing out as favourite choices for the third anniversary double bill this weekend, I got to thinking about (a) doing a "winter of something" mini-fest during the last month and a half of 2o1o and (b) following up last night's review of 'Black Mama, White Mama' with a few more exploitation titles.

So welcome to the Winter of Discontent. Six weeks of anything any everything that's exploitative, controversial, provocative, decadent, dark and nasty. We'll be cruising through the cinematic equivalent of the Reperbahn, dropping the window and propositioning the kind of movies your mother warned you about.

We've got an is-it-art-or-is-it-porn classic, one of the nastiest of the video nasties, Christina Lindberg with an eyepatch and whatever else that's shocking or seedy that I can dig out of the collection or track down on the net. The whole nefarious show kicks off tomorrow with an incredibly hard to find giallo; we'll be toasting Edwige Fenech and Anita Strindberg and ordering in J&B by the crate.

Black Mama, White Mama

After his Oscar night clean-up with ‘The Silence of the Lambs’, it’s my personal guess that Jonathan Demme quickly redrafted his CV and decided to leave a few things off it. ‘Caged Heat’, for instance, his directorial debut and a key entry in the “women in prison” genre. Or his “story by” credit for ‘Black Mama, White Mama’, Eddie Romero’s scuzzily entertaining slice of grindhouse starring the iconic Pam Grier, the frankly fucking awesome Margaret Markov, and the living legend and cinematic personification of disreputability that is Sid Haig.

Sid Haig sporting hick shitkicker country & western outfits and wearing the kind of handlebar moustache seldom seen outside of the Village People.

Like ‘Caged Heat’, ‘Black Mama, White Mama’ starts off in unapologetic WIP style. Which suggests a common theme in the early stages of Demme’s development as a filmmaker. And I gotta say, ‘Rachel Getting Married’ would have been a lot more fun with a bit of shower block frolicking and a subplot about a lesbian warden with a penchant for jail-bird jail-bait with short skirts and –


*takes cold shower*

*gets review back on course*

Um. Yes. ‘Black Mama, White Mama’ starts off in unapologetic WIP style, with hooker Leigh (Grier) fetching up at a women’s correctional facility on what I think was somewhere like the Domenican Republic. Either the script doesn’t bother establishing the locale or I was too busy marvelling at the fact that this movie was made thirty-five years ago and Pam Grier is still an absolute knockout. Talk about the thinking movie-buff’s cougar!

*second cold shower*

*bromide pill*

Okay. Right. ‘Black Mama, White Mama’ starts off in full-on WIP style with Leigh banged up for soliciting and promptly inviting the unwanted attentions of Matron Densmore (Lynn Borden) – a woman so blonde, so Aryan and so predatory she comes across like a bargain basement Ilsa, She-Wolf of the Whatever. Leigh isn’t too responsive to Logan’s overtures, but fellow prisoner Karen (Markov) cosies up to her. Karen’s our Patty Hearst stand-in for the day, a poor little rich girl currently affiliated with a terrorist group who wear berets and cultivate Che-like facial hair but don’t actually appear to do much of anything for the oppressed underclasses or whomever it is they’re fighting for.

Leigh and Karen don’t get on. A dining hall catfight pretty much sets the tone for their relationship. Things get worse when they’re chained together for transfer to a maximum security prison where Karen is to be questioned about her revolutionary activities. The prison bus is attacked en route by Karen’s comrades, but in the shoot-out Leigh and Karen flee for their lives while the terrorist cell, forced to retreat as reinforcements arrive, get separated from them.

Here endeth the women in prison bit.

Leigh and Karen, on the run, find themselves not just at odds with the personality clash, but also in terms of which side of the island they want to make a run for. Leigh’s after a suitcase full of cash she appropriated from sleazoid pimp and local crime boss Cheng (Vic Diaz) and a quick passage off the island on a friend’s boat. Karen wants to keep a prearranged rendezvous with her comrades in order to facilitate an arms deal which will allow them to something something liberate something something oppressed masses. Or maybe just Steven Soderbergh to make a two-part film about them. Or something.

In the meantime laconic copper Captain Cruz (Eddie Garcia), under pressure from his grandstanding boss Galindo (Alfonso Carvajal), enters into an uneasy arrangement with pool-playing badass and walking fashion disaster Ruben (Haig) to basically do his dirty work for them. Ruben hits the trail in the most inconspicuous vee-hickle ever driven by a good ole boy. Seriously: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the Batmobile and Del Boy’s Reliant Robin look sleek, elegant and sophisticated compared to this dude’s set of wheels.

Elsewhere, Cheng – not happy with the whole missing suitcase full of cash scenario – also despatches a bunch of gun-toting heavies with gimlet eyes, cheap suits and limited acting ability to track our heroines down.

If all of this sounds needlessly convoluted for a 90-minute exploitationer, fear not. All these machinations ultimately add up to is four groups of dubious individuals, all with their own agenda, scouring the countryside for Leigh and Karen. Ethnically divided yet chained together. Running for their lives as the bad guys converge on them. In other words, ‘Black Mama, White Mama’ makes a sudden shift, after about 20 minutes, from WIP cheapie to ‘The Defiant Ones’ meets ‘The Getaway’. With hot chicks. Chained together. Who occasionally go at each other in hair-pulling, slapping, scratching girlfight stylee when tempers flare up.

Anyone deleted ‘Rachel Getting Married’ from their Netflix list yet and queued up this one instead?

‘Black Mama, White Mama’ boasts casual violence, gratuitous nudity (most of it completely unerotic), wholesale lines of dialogue that begin and end with the word “bitch”, occasional moments of absurdist humour (our heroines mug a couple of nuns for their habits and, later, kick ass and use bad language while still kitted out as brides of Christ), and more shoot-outs and explosions than you can shake a Sly Stallone comeback vehicle at. It’s populated by low-lifes, scuzz-buckets, pimps and bent cops, all of whom are taken on by tough chicks. It’s low on production values, high on the entertainment factor, unapologetic for being what it is, and has the courage of its convictions to deliver a weirdly poignant downbeat ending entirely apposite to its view of a world where corruption is everywhere and life is cheap.

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: Julie Christie in Darling

The people's choice

The Agitation of the Mind celebrates its third anniversary in a week’s time. I’ll be marking the occasion with a double bill drawn from the remaining titles on the Personal Faves list.

Just to make it interesting, you guys get to pick which ones.

Your choices are:

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000)

Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)

Bullet in the Head (John Woo, 1990)

City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002)

A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

The Constant Gardener (Fernando Mereilles, 2005)

Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989)

The Eye (Danny & Oxide Pang, 2002)

Get Carter (Mike Hodges, 1971)

Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992)

Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994)

Hollywood Shuffle (Robert Townsend, 1987)

Howl's Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004)

Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996)

Malcolm (Nadia Tass, 1986)

Matewan (John Sayles, 1987)

Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2007)

Providence (Alain Resnais, 1977)

Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994)

Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993)

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942)

Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson, 1987)

Head over to the sidebar poll. Cast your vote(s). Top two get reviewed Sunday 13th November.

Emma Stone

Talented, funny, immensely likeable and seriously easy on the eye into the bargain, Emma Stone is 22 today.

I'm betting she'll be the biggest thing in Hollywood - and with good reason - by her 23rd birthday.

The Machinist

Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ is only nominally about crime and not literally about punishment. Not in the judicial sense of the word. It’s about the punishment the psyche imposes upon oneself. ‘Crime and Punishment’ is about the crushing weight of guilt.

It’s another Dostoyevsky novel (‘The Idiot’) that Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale) reads in Brad Anderson’s ‘The Machinist’, but it’s not the Christ-like man-child Prince Myshkin to whom Reznik invites comparison. Imagine Raskolnikov, the anti-hero of ‘Crime and Punishment’, not as an idealistic yet compromised student but a blue-collar factory worker. Imagine he hasn’t slept properly for a year. Imagine that he spends his evenings at an airport coffee shop where he cultivates a stilted but poignant rapport with waitress Maria (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) and his nights in the company of call girl Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – an archetype of the Dostoyevskan “fallen woman” if ever there was one.

If I seem to be overdoing the whole Dostoyevsky thing, it’s because Scott Kosar’s script and Anderson’s stylized but atmospheric direction continually draw attention to the parallels. It’s particularly fascinating that Kosar – whose other produced screenplays have been for the remakes of horror genre staples ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’, ‘The Amityville Horror’ and ‘The Crazies’ – dabbling in a psychological drama so explicitly inspired by one of the heaviest hitters in all of literature.

‘The Machinist’ superficially unfolds as a thriller – Hitchcock as if filtered through David Lynch – with Reznik blamed for the industrial accident which costs a colleague his arm, and sent to Coventry by his colleagues. Gaunt, hollow-eyed and painfully thin, even before his involvement in the accident Reznik is drawing the wrong kind of attention from the management, who want him to take a random drugs test. Taking a smoking break to cool off, he meets the mysterious Ivan (John Sharian) who tells him he’s standing in for a co-worker. It’s Ivan who distracts Reznik at the crucial moment, deliberately it seems, and Reznik is left looking highly blameworthy when the shit hits the fan. Things take a strange turn when colleagues and management alike profess to never having heard of Ivan.

Cryptic notes resembling a game of hangman turn up in Reznik’s apartment. He catches his eccentric landlady Mrs Shrike (Anna Massey) letting herself in. Stevie turns up with a black eye; she describes it as an “occupational hazard”, but Reznik wonders if it’s courtesy of her “psychotic” ex. Reznik starts to suspect that said ex is Ivan.

And what’s Ivan’s connection with Maria’s son?

The thriller aesthetic, albeit tempered by low-key character-based scenes, defines the first two thirds of the movie. A photo lifted from Ivan’s wallet points Reznik towards someone at the factory. The alignment of letters in the hangman notes suggest the surname of someone else. A ride on a ghost train seems to trigger memories. Scenes are rhymed. Images are revisited and recontextualized. Symbolism is rife: a tunnel or passageway branching off in two directions; tableaux in the ghost train ride that prove analogous to events in Reznik’s life; landmarks which seem imbued with relevance even before the big reveal.

The last third contains some real narrative curveballs. The linearity becomes suspect. What’s taking place in the present? In the past? In Reznik’s increasingly disturbed mind? The film almost completely deconstructs before the pieces are reordered and everything is explained.

‘The Machinist’ is almost too clever for its own good, particularly in the inclusion of certain tropes which are highly reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’. There are some significant literary references – look out for the placement (and I do mean the literal placement) of the Kafka reference – which are at odds with the casual manner Anderson tries to incorporate them. Also, the big reveal is done with such accomplished cinematic sleight of hand that the directorial flourish threatens to outweigh the emotional cachet of the scene. Fortunately, Anderson knows exactly how to structure the film and exactly where to cut or transition a scene; and the whole thing is anchored by a cluster of excellent performances.

They Live

“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”
- The Gospel According to Roddy Piper

From Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer’s coke and ego fuelled string of glossy ’80s money-makers to Michael Bay’s Mephistophelean relationship with the box office over the last decade or so, Hollywood has never been anything but priapic for a bit of high concept.

Well, stuff your big budgets and power ballads and dare-devil flyboys and mismatched cops and oil-pissing robots, because I’m here to tell you that the highest of high concepts is a pair of sunglasses donned by a professional wrestler who promptly gets a mite pissed off at the ensuing revelation that society is being manipulated by skull-faced aliens with a penchant for subliminal messaging; that money, promotions and status symbols are nothing but placebos; and that when a fella whose twin motivations are bubblegum chewing and ass kicking finds himself bereft of bubblegum, well his options are kind of narrowed down.

It’s a killer hook: put on a pair of shades and your perception shifts; you see things as they truly are. The world is black and white. Behind every billboard, every road sign, every poster, every page of every newspaper and magazine is an exhortation to OBEY. That wad of bank notes in your hand: just bits of paper emblazoned with THIS IS YOUR GOD. That guy next to you who got the promotion you were passed over for: don’t look now, but he’s not human. The woman in the beauty parlour with the bouffant hairdo and jewellery dripping from her: she’s not either. And, brother, you don’t want to know what they’re dripping into your subconscious while you’re watching TV.


John Carpenter’s masterstroke with ‘They Live’ is to take his time – and in a film that runs just an hour and a half, I do mean take his sweet time – establishing character, milieu and socio-economic context. Our hero, he of the bubblegum preference, is George Nada* (Piper), a blue-collar drifter looking for work and reduced to sleeping rough. Dossing down at a ramshackle encampment with fellow labourer Frank Armitage (Keith David), Nada becomes intrigued by the comings and goings at a nearby chapel. Finally venturing inside, he discovers not a congregation of worshippers but an underground political movement. A police raid dispels them from the chapel (as well as trashing the encampment) before Nada can do anything.

Then he discovers the sunglasses. And by extension the truth. His immediate priority is convincing Armitage to view the world through said eyewear. Armitage proves a tad reluctant. Nada insists. Cue one of the longest – and funniest – punch-ups in cinema.

Ah, yes. The fight scene. Just one of many great, great moments in this still strangely underrated film. The Nada-first-dons-the-glasses scene is also pitch perfect in its execution. Likewise an almost immediately subsequent moment where Nada, fighting off two cops (one an alien), arms himself with their weapons, strolls nonchalantly down a busy sidewalk and into a bank and delivers The Gospel as quoted above.

There are those who hone in on Roddy Piper’s limited acting range – and, let’s face it, the man’s no Olivier – as the film’s great flaw, but personally I find Piper’s rugged, slightly self-deprecating persona ideally suited to the story Carpenter is telling. With a more “actorly” actor in the lead, ‘They Live’ might easily have come across as over-egged, its slightly schizophrenic tone – social realism to high concept to broad comedy to sci-fi actioner – more nigglingly apparent than with “Rowdy” Roddy Piper striding John Wayne stylee through the midst of the mayhem, a lumberjack-shirt-wearing everyman out to chew bubblegum and kick ass on behalf of every poor sumbitch wage-slave in the audience. “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, taking the fight to the extraterrestrial ad-men, kicking their corporate crap back into the cosmos. “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, a man of the people and a hero of our time.

*The character is never name-checked during the film and only referred to as Nada (Spanish for “nothing”) in the end credits. I’ve taken the name George Nada from the Ray Nelson short story ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning’ which the film is based on.

The Nanny

A Hammer film in black and white, that’s character-driven, favours the psychological over the gothic, boasts a script by Jimmy Sangster that’s an exercise in slow-burn tension rather than an overwrought piece of hack-work, and features a performance by Bette Davies that’s as good as anything she ever did in the American studio system?

Say what?

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to ‘The Nanny’. A week ago, picking up some groceries in Sainsburys, I came across ‘The Best of Hammer’, a 5-disc box set. My 13 for Halloween series was ticking along nicely and I figured ‘Dracula: Prince of Darkness’ would be an ideal entry. Of the other four titles in the set, ‘The Devil Rides Out’ is a minor classic, ‘Frankenstein Created Woman’ (recently reviewed on Antagony & Ecstasy) is one of the key Peter Cushing titles, and ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ is a splendidly entertaining bit of low-fi sci-fi. The remaining film, ‘The Nanny’, was the only one I’d not seen.

On it went.

Set almost entirely in a well-appointed London townhouse, its pressure cooker atmosphere of class-defined tensions inexorably rising to the boiling point of an inevitable revelation, ‘The Nanny’ is one of those peculiarly British films into which a darkly foreign aesthetic has crept and the result is something that is both a time-capsule of the year it was made (1965 in this case) and yet somehow out-of-time in its off-kilter atmosphere and provocative approach to the material. Focusing on a twisted reversal of the toff/servant relationship, incorporating such peripheral issues as mental illness and back-street abortions, and with the mystery at the heart of the narrative centred around a possible case of infanticide, ‘The Nanny’ is the kind of film you’d have got if Polanski had directed ‘The Servant’ instead of Joseph Losey. Or if someone had stuck ‘Bunny Lake is Missing’, ‘Séance on a Wet Afternoon’ and ‘The Innocents’ in a blender.

Comparisons with ‘The Servant’ (made two years earlier) are difficult to avoid, not just thematically but in the presence of Wendy Craig. Her hysterical matriarch Virginia Fane, still catered to by her childhood nanny (Davies), is a more emotionally unstable version of her brittle society girlfriend in Losey’s film. Similarly, ‘Innocents’ alumnus Pamela Franklin turns in a deliciously precocious performance as chain-smoking 14-year old party-girl-in-waiting Bobbie, with whom Virginia’s 10-year old son Joey (William Dix) forms a friendship on returning home after two years in an institute.

Joey’s been under the care of Dr Beamaster (Maurice Denham) since his involvement – the exact details of which remain unrevealed for most of the film – in the death of his infant sister Susie (Angharad Aubrey). The good doctor has been unable to reach the boy and releases him back into his parents’ care in an admission of defeat. His mother frets and fusses, dreading his return. His father, Bill Fane (James Villiers), is a stiff upper lip mounted on a stuffed shirt, the whole construct held together with an old-school tie and an anally-inserted rod. He’s a civil servant for whom his job is everything and his gentlemen’s club an escape from domestic responsibility. He talks up a storm about disciplining the lad, but it’s all empty threats.

The actual business of keeping things together and trying to marshal the Fanes into at least some semblance of a family unit falls to Nanny. Yes, even Bill and Virginia and Virginia’s ailing sister Pen (Jill Bennett) call her that: “Nanny.” But this is a film where the adults behave like children, wailing and throwing tantrums and having to be spoon-fed when they refuse to eat.
Nanny does her best to make Joey’s transition make into the Fane household easy on everyone, but Joey proves particularly truculent – this, after all, is a boy who is first introduced pretending to hang himself in order to freak out the staff at the institution – with a special hatred reserved for Nanny.

In the pantheon of creepy kid vs. grown woman cinematic smackdowns, from creepy kid vs. Lee Remick in ‘The Omen’ to creepy kid vs. Vera Farmiga in ‘Orphan’, this would normally be a no-brainer. But this is creepy kid vs. Bette fuckin’ Davies. The battle lines are drawn.

Adapting a novel by Marryam Modell, director Seth Holt keeps the facts surrounding Susie’s demise offscreen for as long as possible. Instead he keeps the tension simmering by simply observing the strained interactions between a petulant and morbid child, his pathetically inept parents, a pill-popping and booze-swilling relative, and the nanny who has come to be a surrogate parent to all of them. After about half of an hour with this motley bunch, the question isn’t so much who is to blame for Susie’s death but whether the poor little mite ever really had a chance in the first place.

Tom Savini

Just to prove that it’s not all cheesecake and cleavage here on The Agitation of the Mind, we're raising a toast to FX maestro, occasional actor and all-round icon Tom Savini, who turns 64 today.

Happy birthday, Sex Machine.

(Normal service – ie. film reviews – will resume tomorrow.)

Katharine Isabelle

Because posting three pictures and a nebulous birthday greeting is an easy way of maintaining new material on the blog …

because the excesses of October have left me a tad blogged out and I haven’t started sketching out any new reviews yet …

and because she fucking rocks in ‘Ginger Snaps’ …

… a full-bodied glass of shiraz cabernet is being raised here at chez Agitation to Katharine Isabelle, who is 29 today.

Aishwarya Rai

Aishwarya Rai – star of the charming ‘Mistress of Spices’, the face that launched a shedload of Bollywood productions, and a woman resolutely unacquainted with the ugly stick – is 37 today.

Which is justification enough for posting these pictures.