13 FOR HALLOWEEN #6: Spellbinder

So, upwardly mobile lawyer Jeff (Tim Daly) has just been shooting some hoops with his yuppie chums – if nothing else sticks with you about ‘Spellbinder’, you will remember it as a film of the 80s – and wanders out to the car park nursing a serious pain in his back that’s been exacerbated by a tumble on the basketball court. He’s yakking to best bud Derek (Rick Rossovich), bemoaning a break-up with his latest girlfriend, when they notice a sinister looking dude in an ankle length leather jacket, Aldys (Anthony Crivello) beating up on a gorgeous redhead. They intervene, Derek taking a cut to the hand when Aldys pulls a switchblade. Jeff seemingly gets the better end of the deal when he offers to drive the girl – Miranda (Kelly Preston) – home. He seemingly gets the even better end of the deal when Miranda tells him she has no home to go to, and he valiantly offers her the comforts of his bachelor pad.

On their first night together, Miranda performs a spell which takes Jeff’s back pain away. It doesn’t seem to occur to him to query exactly how she’s able to do this, but seeing how she’s topless at the time you can understand why the guy might have been a tad distracted. Next day she cleans his house top to bottom and waits for him to get home wearing one of his shirts and not much else. If ‘Spellbinder’ hadn’t been both written and directed by women – Tracy Tormé and Janet Greek respectively – I’d have written it off as the clunkiest of male fantasies. Actually, if the film functions on any level beyond ‘cheesy 80s horror flick for people who don’t like horror flicks’, it’s as a commentary on the gullibility of the male of the species. ‘Spellbinder, or: How Thinking Through Your Penis Isn’t a Good Idea When Witchcraft is Involved’.

Y’see, Miranda is a witch. The palmistry and preternatural connection with Jeff’s dog and cat don’t tip him off either, and he has to wait till around the fifty minute mark, after all kinds of weird things have happened and various of Aldys’s minions have warned him “we want her back”, before Miranda breaks out the expositional monologue. A witch, moreover, who is on the run from her coven. Of which Aldys is the leader. Since when covens were ruled by men, I’m not sure … and wouldn’t that, y’know, make him a warlock not a witch? But, hey ho, the script isn’t too bothered with the finer details. And besides, Miranda disappears during the middle third just so that Jeff can report her missing and team up with Lieutenant Lee (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), an LA detective who spends all his time obsessing about devil worshippers without ever getting the piss taken by his brother offices or hauled into the captain’s office and told to concentrate on real police work.

‘Spellbinder’ really isn’t a very good film. It’s a comment on the 80s that we have rich-as-Croesus lawyer as our hero and we’re supposed to feel sorry for him when of all a sudden he’s not getting sex on tap from an impossibly gorgeous redhead anymore. Hard life, innit? On top of this, we have some of the unscariest antagonists the genre has to offer. Seriously, in a straight-up fight, Aldys’s coven would get trashed by the Lost Boys. Hell, they’d probably get trashed by Count Duckula. There’s a fight scene notable for its appalling martial arts choreography, Miranda casting a protection spell that consists of five random words in Latin, a potentially awesome subplot involving a paranoid survivalist that’s utterly wasted, and an ending that’s not just predictable but lifts the whole “to which you have come of your own free will” aesthetic of ‘The Wicker Man’ wholesale.

‘Spellbinder’ never fully embraces its genre. Nor, with the first half hour hinting at the softcore noodlings of, say, Jag Mundhra or Zalman King, does it deliver as a piece of erotica. Still, its leading lady justifies the film’s title if nothing else.

Kelly Preston

Happy 50th to Kelly Preston. 'Spellbinder' as tomorrow's 13 For Halloween offering? Oh, all right then!

Fifty Shades of Earl Grey

[With 13 For Halloween ongoing and the Winter of Discontent lurking around the corner next month to take this blog into some appropriately dark and nasty territory, here’s a satirical piece of short fiction, offered purely for the laughs.]



It is a truth universally acknowledged that a nascent writer in possession of a manuscript must be in want of an audience.

Thus it was that Miss Steele attended high tea at the Bennets’ and, without request or encouragement, gave a reading from her work-in-progress. High tea was a Tuesday afternoon ritual at the Bennets’ and before Miss Steele’s oration was half over, those foregathered began to entertain the not unrealistic fear that the weekend would be nigh upon them before she concluded.

To the great relief of all, fortune declared that this was not to be the case and Miss Steele gathered up the pages of her manuscript, performed a dainty curtsy and, pleading a prior engagement, disengaged herself with a cheery, “See you next Tuesday.”

The likelihood of her reappearance at the Bennets’ on this date was hotly contested following her departure. It was a matter of no great secrecy in the village that Miss Steele had been enjoying the attentions of a certain Mr Grey, a man of independent means and esoteric interests; a man who, despite his social standing and impeccable fashion sense, was rumoured to be something of a blackguard. Therefore it was suspected by all that Miss Steele’s narrative was a thinly fictionalised account of their folie à deux. Speculation was immediate that Miss Steele’s “prior engagement” was of an amorous nature.

Scandalous possibilities dominated the conversation and, when these were exhausted and more tea had been provided, discussion turned to the qualities – or otherwise – of Miss Steele’s prose. Elizabeth called upon Mary to hold forth.

“I’m mindful of the old maxim that if one has nothing good to say, one should be silent,” Mary offered.

“But, dear sister,” Elizabeth exclaimed, “you are the most widely-read and intuitive of us all. Please give us your opinion.”

Mary stirred her tea, took a thoughtful sip, and set her cup back upon its saucer. “I think,” she said at length, “that there is a breathless immediacy to it which never quite obscures the almost childish simplicity of the writing.”

“Simplicity?” said Kitty. “Your intelligence must far exceed mine, Mary. I do declare, I was quite confused by much of Miss Steele’s tale.”

“Truly?” asked Lydia. “I myself was quite captivated by it. What parts of it perplexed you?”

“To begin with,” Kitty enumerated, “I could not fathom how Mr Grey’s fortune was arrived at. Miss Steele seems to establish him as a man of business – something in the City involving acquisitions and paperwork – yet the manifold references to his erections suggest a career in the building trade. I cannot imagine a common labourer holding as much sway over a young lady’s affections.”

“Perhaps,” ventured Jane, the fifth and hitherto silent Bennet sister, “his company provides the wherewithal to those in the building trade.”

“Ah, a financier!” said Kitty. “That would make sense. It certainly explains Mr Grey’s preoccupation with contracts.” She raised her cup, then lowered it again as a frown ruffled the delicate skin of her forehead. “But there is much about the contract that baffles me. Why, pray tell, is the agreement between Mr Grey and Miss Steele. Surely she is too well-bred to toil with bricks and mortar on one of his building sites.”

“It was my understanding,” Mary explained, “that Mr Grey wished to contract Miss Steele for the provision of personal services. A secretarial role, dear Kitty. Have no fear, our Miss Steele is in no danger of getting her hands dirty.”

A polite titter ran around the room, each of the sisters trilling their contribution. Except Kitty, whose brow furrowed ever deeper. “On the subject of hands,” she persisted, “what is meant by Miss Steele’s disinclination towards fisting? I recall no contextual remarks which identify Mr Grey as a devotee of the pugilistic arts.”

“I can only assume it is a term generic to the building trade,” Mary replied. “Mr Grey would no doubt have picked it up from the labourers during a visit to site. Miss Steele was perhaps concerned that he might take it upon himself to engage in a spot of fisting with the bricklayers, perhaps in order to set an example to them. She would be right to regard such activity with consternation.”

Kitty nodded as if in understanding, but a hint of bemusement remained in her expression.

“I quite appreciate your perplexity, Kitty,” Mary continued. “Miss Steele does herself no favours with her misspellings and mispronunciations. The several uses of ‘anal’ had me quite concerned until I realised that, apropos of Mr Grey’s contract, she simply meant ‘annul’. Likewise the confusion of ‘cunnilingus’ for ‘linguist’.”

“I must confess, I am unfamiliar with either term,” Elizabeth admitted.

“Linguistics,” said Mary, “is the study of languages.”

“And of what,” asked Kitty, “is cunnilingus the study?”

“I am afraid the answer to that is beyond my expertise.”

“Whatever it is,” Lydia declared, “it’s certainly a tongue-twister!”

“But what of this ‘fellatio’? Miss Steele uses the term more than once.”

“An attempt at literary merit,” Mary sniffed. “She strives for artistic relevance by invoking a character from Shakespeare, but once more her ignorance betrays her. ’Tis Horatio she means, not fellatio.” She took a sip of tea and pulled a face. “Dear sisters, our refreshments appear to have cooled even more quickly than my tolerance for Miss Steele’s witterings. I propose we adjourn, the better to enjoy more rewarding pursuits.”

“I agree,” said Elizabeth, glancing at Jane who nodded her assent.

“I, too,” said Kitty. “I shall endeavour to seek out more easily comprehensible reading material.”

“I’d rather like to invite Miss Steele back,” Lydia said airily. Unbeknownst to the others, she had asked the authoress to place her on subscription list to receive forthcoming instalments. “I believe her work has a soupçon of potential.”

“Oh, Lydia!” Mary expostulated. “Surely not!”

Her sister nodded. “More than a soupcon, in fact. It wouldn’t surprise me if this devilish Mr Grey fellow didn’t have enough in him for a three-volume novel.”

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #5: Pro-Life

John Carpenter’s ‘Cigarette Burns’, a one-hour movie made as part of the ‘Masters of Horror’ TV series, was one of my faves from last year’s 13 For Halloween watch-list, so I figured his other contribution to the series would make a good pick for this year.

While it doesn’t boast the killer hook of ‘Cigarette Burns’, nor has it wormed its way into my mind quite so insidiously, the same combination of writers (Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan) and director still makes for an entertaining slab of small-screen scaremongering.

An opening montage of soft light falling through a canopy of branches suggests a peaceful evocation of rural American. A quick cut to a young girl running through the forest, fearful and glancing behind her, suggests otherwise. Running out onto a nearby road, she’s almost hit by Alex (Mark Feuerstein) and Kim (Emmanuelle Vaugier) who are en route to their workplace, an out-of-town abortion clinic. Persuading her to accompany them so they can check her over, Alex and Kim discover that not only is she pregnant but whatever’s gestating is doing so at an abnormally rapid rate.

They also discover that she’s Angelique Burcell (Caitlin Wachs), the fifteen year old daughter of Dwayne Burcell (Ron Perlman), a local fundamentalist Christian redneck with a beef against the clinic who’s already under a court order to stay away from the facility. Pursuing Angelique there, Dwayne and his three equally redneck sons lay siege to the place. Meanwhile, Angelique recounts the strange circumstances surrounding the conception and begs Alex and Kim to kill the inhuman life inside her.

The key thematic concern in Carpenter’s filmography has always been the behaviour of characters under siege, either from without (‘Assault on Precinct 13’, ‘Prince of Darkness’) or within (‘The Thing’, ‘The Ward’), or by inexplicable events/supernatural forces (‘The Fog’, ‘In the Mouth of Madness’). ‘Pro-Life’ ticks the boxes across the board: Dwayne and his boys provide the threat from without, Angelique is attacked from within, and what she’s carrying threatens everyone.

McWeeny and Swan’s script is taut and delivers two particularly icky set-pieces, one during which the ideological differences between Dwayne and Dr Kiefer are demonstrated in gruelling terms, the other an ultrasound that brings to mind the defibrillation scene in ‘The Thing’. The fundamentalism aspect, established from the very outset (i.e. the title) as the motivational dynamic, is neatly subverted as the film progresses, firstly in the concept of a character called Angelique pregnant with something demonic, and secondly in the implication that someone who hears voices isn’t necessarily being directed by a higher power. 

Performance-wise, Feuerstein and Vaugier don’t have much to do but look befuddled, while Wachs is sympathetic but underused as the beleaguered Angelique. Ron Perlman, his physicality alone enough to provide the requisite degree of danger, gives the film its frisson, playing Dwayne not as a scenery-chewing psychotic (although he does some pretty unsavoury things) but as a man utterly convinced that he’s doing the right thing.

‘Pro-Life’ fumbles the ball a tad in its denouement, rolling out a rather rubbery monster, but it’s a minor quibble. Carpenter’s milked the tension and the fun’s been had by this point anyway. Did I say “fun”? Sure did. It shouldn’t be, mind – we are, after all, talking about a fucked up little morality tale about abortion, religious fundamentalism and gun ownership – but there’s a sardonic and excoriating sense of humour behind it all that makes ‘Pro-Life’ more than worth an hour of the horror aficionado’s time.

BOND-A-THON: Casino Royale

Looking back over Pierce Brosnan’s tenure in the tux, it’s clear that the franchise was on shaky ground in just his second outing, while ‘The World is Not Enough’ and ‘Die Another Day’ rammed the saga thoroughly into the doldrums. Something drastic was needed to get this back on course.

And here I needs must use a word I freakin’ hate: reboot.

‘Casino Royale’ takes the most drastic of all approaches in reinvigorating Bond. Not only does it give us a new actor in the role, not only does it have a pre-credits sequence that’s less than four minutes long and shot in black-and-motherhumping-white, not only do the opening credits feature not a single gyrating naked woman in silhouette … but ‘Casino Royale’ completely ignores the twenty films that proceed it, establishes a new timeline and gives us Bond at the start of his career. Just as ‘Casino Royale’ was Bond #1 in the order of the books, ‘Casino Royale’ wipes the slate clean and introduces itself as Bond #1 Version 2.0. If that makes any sense.

But director Martin Campbell (scoring two for two in the director’s chair – he was the driving force behind everything that worked about ‘GoldenEye’) and writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis are smart enough not to try to reinvent the wheel. Thus, the film retains the fast cars, high stakes gambling, prickling Bond/M relationship and sumptuous lifestyle porn that are the hallmarks of any halfway decent 007 outing. And it jettisons the dead weight that had dragged the series down: there’s no Q (sound the Hallelujah Chorus – John Cleese was a fucking insult to the memory of Desmond Llewellyn), no Moneypenny (Samantha Bond had started to make the role her own, but the scripts were fast becoming an insult to the character), no ludicrous gadgets, no monologue-loving uber-villians with a world domination agenda, and best of all no stupid one-liners. The film is, to use a fairly obvious one-liner myself, a Royale without cheese.

With only one minor character, a Swiss banker, edging towards caricature, ‘Casino Royale’ is played dead straight. In the prologue, we see Bond (Daniel Craig) earning his Double-O status by undertaking two kills. The first is messy bit of business. The second sees him well on his way to becoming the mono-emotional assassin of Fleming’s novels: a “blunt instrument” as M (Judi Dench) puts it. We also see him, as his attempt to bankrupt accountant-to-terrorism Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) over the card table looks set to end in disaster, lose his cool. He makes rash decisions; becomes a victim of his own ego; almost fucks up the mission. Bond is challenged from all sides: by his unexpected romantic reawakening as spiky banter with treasury official Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) thaws into genuine affection; by Vesper’s refusal to be impressed with his outwardly brash demeanour; by M’s outrage at his heavy-handed tactics (a brilliantly executed action scene ending with an embassy stand-off sees Bond provoke a diplomatic incident); and, finally, by his own emotions. For arguably the only time since ‘From Russia With Love’, what we have here is a thinking man’s Bond movie. And by God it’s all the better for treating its audience as adults.

Going into ‘Casino Royale’ knowing that it’s a reasonably faithful adaptation of the book (or rather the middle third is: the first hour is entirely invented, ditto a Venice-set finale), it would have been understandable for aficionados to lay a small bet that the filmmaker’s wouldn’t go there with either the torture scene or the brutal final line (“the bitch is dead”). They’d have lost. Torture’s a big thing in Fleming’s novels: Bond takes a lot of pain, and usually in gratuitously extended sequences, in just about every book. The tendency is less evident in the films: there’s the “soften him up” moment from ‘Dr No’ and the keel-hauling scene in ‘For Your Eyes Only’, while Leiter gets ill-used in spectacularly gory fashion in ‘License to Kill’. ‘Casino Royale’ goes all the way with the patented Fleming nastiness, however, as a vengeful Le Chiffre, Bond at his mercy, goes to work in a manner guaranteed to induce wincing in anyone who owns a pair of testicles.

Misogyny is also a big thing in the Fleming bibliography, and indeed the film gives us a harsh delivery of a harsh line; it also throws in, as the inestimable Tim of Antagony & Ecstasy would describe in his own Bond marathon, the secondary Bond girl who ends up end – here the gorgeous but luckless Solange (Caterina Murino), dispatched offscreen by the bad mo’fo’s Le Chiffre is finagling funds for after Bond casually dallies with her then disappears in pursuit of bigger fish. However, the world of 2006 into which the film erupted was a different place, with different attitudes, to the world of 1953 into which the novel crept out (the Bond novels, it should be noted, were by no means an immediate success), and Campbell’s redresses the balance in a manner that ‘GoldenEye’ tried to but never quite succeeded in.

This is a good place to give Dame Judi Dench some serious kudos. She’d already made the role her own (no disrespect to Bernard Lee, but I rather think her M will be remembered as the definitive), but here the character’s importance is expanded and deepened. M’s relationship with Bond – a springboard for terse, almost argumentative scenes in the Brosnan films – actually gets explored here. There’s even room for some wintry humour. After causing chaos at the embassy, Bond visits M’s apartment. Without, one hastens to add, an invitation.

M: How the hell did you find out where I live?
Bond: The same way I found out your name. I always thought M was a randomly assigned initial. I had no idea it stood for –
M: Utter one more syllable and I’ll have you killed.

Speaking of humour, ‘Casino Royale’ acknowledges its imperative as an origin story by establishing how Bond took ownership of his Aston Martin (a card game, would you believe it?) and having him give a waiter specific instructions as to how he likes his vodka martinis, not in an attempt at sophistication, but as a stalling tactic at the card table when things are starting to not go his way. Later, ordering another after it looks like he’s ballsed things up good and proper, he responds to the barman’s “Shaken or stirred?” with a waspish “Does it look like I give a damn?”

Kudos, also, to Eva Green, a glamorous and talented actress playing a Bond girl who’s essential to the narrative and with whom Bond has a genuine and plausible chemistry. She’s not a sex object, not a damsel in distress, and quite definitely not a bimbo. Her scenes have depth and her performance is nicely pitched. Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wright easily slips on the laconic persona of Felix Leiter; Mikkelsen is gimlet-like and sinister as Le Chiffre without ever becoming a cipher; Ivana Milicevic ramps up the glamour quotient as Le Chiffre’s much put-upon girlfriend Valenka; and Giancarlo Giannini (best known for playing beleaguered cops in ‘The Black Belly of the Tarantula’ and ‘Hannibal’) is wry and likeable as Bond’s ally (or is he?) Rene Mathis.

And then we have Daniel Craig. When his casting was first announced, the internet was awash with outcry. “The death of 007”, one dissenter posted. “The name’s Bland – James Bland”, whimpered the Daily Mail. A website called danielcraigisnotbond.com was launched – inexplicably it’s still online, though I guess it’s not getting many hits these days. In short, Craig was not a popular choice.

Then the film came out. And a fuckload of people tucked in their napkins, broke out the condiments and ate their words.

If the blunt, hard-hitting pre-credits business didn’t establish him as the new Bond effectively enough, the film then delivers a full-throttle and often vertiginous free-running scene culminating in the aforementioned embassy impasse. It’s nine minutes of jolting, exhilarating action, showcasing Craig as a resourceful, athletic and frankly downright ruthless incarnation of Bond. If the first 15 minutes of ‘Casino Royale’ don’t make you nod, raise a vodka martini to the screen and happily admit “yup, Daniel Craig is James Bond”, then there’s probably no hope for you.

This brings me to another canny thing about ‘Casino Royale’. It delivers several barnstorming action/chase scenes in its first hour, establishing a contemporary narrative around terrorism and corrupt financial shenanigans in order to bring Fleming’s original story into the modern world, then has the unruffled self-confidence to stage a huge chunk of its running time around a bunch of people sitting around a card table and a man and a woman gradually falling for each other. Campbell proves himself a smart enough director to know that the pounding intensity of Act One is enough to present Craig as Bond fully formed – and the amazing thing about his performance is how economically and immediately he settles upon a characterization of 007 – after which the audience’s investment in the character is a guarantee of their continued interest through a long running time (two hours twenty minutes), entire swathes of which are devoid of conventional action movie tropes.

As I said before, a 007 movie for adults. And, in my personal pantheon of all things Bondian, second only to ‘From Russia With Love’ as the outright best of ’em.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #4: ParaNorman

This one almost wasn’t on my radar. Or, at the very least, had been relegated to “add to rental queue” status. Peak time cinema tickets being so stupidly pricey that me and Mrs F going to see a film on the big screen is currently pricier than actually buying the damn thing on DVD a few months later or, if it’s in 3D, actually buying the damn thing on DVD and still having change for a bottle of wine, I don’t tend to go to the cinema much nowadays. It has to be something good. Something I really hopped up for. Something that’s an absolute must-see.

I’m still smarting over the money I spent on ‘Prometheus’, and all I can say is ‘Skyfall’ had better be a billion-fold improvement on ‘Quantum of Solace’.

But I digress. Last week, driving home from work, traffic was solid. Having spent half an hour getting nowhere fast, I doubled back and tried another route. Bad move. If anything, the gridlock was even worse. We inched slowly along the boulevard, a sign directing us to the access road to the Showcase multiplex. Mrs F suggested: “Wanna go to the cinema?” We parked up, hoofed in, and asked for a ticket for whatever was showing in the next ten minutes.

Hence: ‘ParaNorman’.

The plot, in brief, concerns Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee), a young kid who’s bullied at school and despaired of by his parents on account of his ability to communicate with the dead, and the thankless duty, passed onto him by his eccentric uncle, of placating an angry spirit who threatens to return from the dead each year on the anniversary of her execution as a witch. A duty he’s unable to complete thanks to the ministrations of snivelling bully Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), the ramifications of which are immediate: the dead rise from their graves and all hell breaks loose.

At an early stage in the proceedings, there’s an extended scene where Norman tries to wrest free a book gripped in the rigor mortis ridden hands of a corpse. Slapstick humour and tombstone humour combine in what is genuinely funny and icky in equal measure. And even as I was laughing, I was acutely aware that a bunch of kids – very small ones – were sitting a few rows behind me.

I thought of those kids (interestingly, they didn’t make much noise during the movie – and that includes laughing) during several John Carpenter references that niftily worked in. Went over their heads, I reckon. And I thought of them again towards the end of the film. Norman is faced with the spirit of the executed witch – she’s an eleven year-old girl. Just a kid, like Norman. A kid cursed with the ability to speak to the dead. Like Norman. And just as Norman is bullied, she was executed. Directors Chris Butler and Sam Fell depict the girl’s spirit as literally incandescent with rage. Norman’s attempts to ameliorate her anger make for a tense scene.

‘ParaNorman’ is essentially about the vulnerability of children and the stupidity of adults. Mob mentality and an inability to listen are the hallmarks of virtually all of the adult characters. There’s a telling scene in which the townsfolk set on a group of zombies – in a reversal of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and pretty much every other zombie film you can think of, it ends with the zombies barricaded inside a building and the living clamouring to get in. But these zombies are freighted with guilt and want to make amends rather than terrorizing the living. Again, ‘ParaNorman’ goes into deeper and more poignant territory than I was expecting.

Of course, there’s an honourable tradition of animated films ostensibly aimed at the kiddie market being better and more intelligent than most mainstream adult-centric fare. But ‘ParaNorman’ strikes me as being a little darker, a little more thought-provoking than the norm. It certainly has one of the most put-upon protagonists of any children’s film I’ve seen – poor old Norman gets the shit end of the stick right up until the end when his unwanted gift finally allows him to emerge as the hero of the day. That’s another tradition of animated kiddie fare: the happy ending. In ‘ParaNorman’ it’s hard-earned and all the more welcome as a result.

The Story of the Dirty Thirty

Leicester’s self-described “cultural quarter” houses Curve, an architecturally startling theatre that dominates from both street level and skyline, and the Phoenix Centre, an independent cinema and arts establishment worthy of comparison with Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema.

The Phoenix played host, on Friday evening, to the premiere of Len Holden and Brian Langtry’s documentary ‘The Story of the Dirty Thirty’. It was an evening of music, film and literature (indeed, the event was organised as part of the Everybody’s Reading Festival), featuring contributions by the Red Leicester Choir (their name emblematic of their politics rather than their choice of dairy products), David Bell and Darren Moore, one of the members of the Dirty Thirty.

Bell, upon whose powerhouse book ‘The Dirty Thirty – Heroes of the Miners’ Strike’ the documentary is based, gave a poignant introduction. A long-time chronicler of Leicestershire life and history, this particular title was published on his 70th birthday; he sent a copy to singer/songwriter/activist Alun Parry, who penned a song inspired by the Dirty Thirty; the song is featured to great effect in Holden and Langtry’s film. As Bell put it, apropos of a 135 page volume birthing an anthem and a documentary film, “as a writer, it doesn’t get any better”.

So who were the Dirty Thirty? We need to go back to the 1984/85 miners’ strike, to the bleak days of Thatcherism and a government using every dirty trick in the book to break the power of the unions. With the controversial appointment of Ian McGregor, a man whose very family had a history of strikebreaking, as head of the NCB (National Coal Board), and the stock-piling of coal reserves against pit closures where seams were far from exhausted, Margaret Thatcher essentially provoked a strike and stage-managed it under the spotlight of the media to turn public opinion against trade unionism.

Strike action ensued and was emphatic. But it wasn’t fully consolidated. Miners in the Midlands, for whom conditions were generally better than in most other areas, continued to work. This paragraph pains me to write as a son of Nottingham, and pains me even more to write as the grandson of a miner, Harry Fulwood – born in the last days of the 1800s – who worked down Annesley pit and was out in the 1926 strike and did what was right. My grandfather died before the 84/85 strike and never got to see how many Midlanders scabbed.

To play Devil’s Advocate – and it really is the work of the Devil, since first principles state that you never cross a picket line – many of the Midlands miners were on the cusp of redundancy after 20 or 30 years, their pits destined to close anyway. Redundancy packages that would have paid off their mortgages and funded their children’s educations. Redundancies that would have been nullified if they joined a picket line. Men, in other words, who were blackmailed into scabbing.

Out of more than 2,000 miners in the Leicestershire coalfields, a little over 30 joined the strike: 19 from Bagworth pit, including Malcolm “Benny” Pinnegar, the leader of the group, and the others from Elliston, Whitwick and South Leicester pits. One worker alone from South Leicester – Johnny Gamble – joined the strike. A brave and lonely decision, and every time I hear somebody being referred to as “having balls”, Gamble’s example is the bar I set in terms of evaluation.

The Dirty Thirty took their name from a critic, an anti-unionist who phoned Radio Leicester to join in a debate about the strike. Asked what he thought about the minority of striking miners in Leicestershire, he picked up on their paucity of numbers and dubbed them the Dirty Thirty. He did them a bigger favour than he could possibly imagine. Like the Suffragettes and the Old Contemptibles, they seized what was intended as a pejorative and recast it as a mission statement.

Holden and Langtry’s film, clocking in at no more than an hour, is a low-budget (I suspect a no-budget) production that is all the more impressive for not being bankrolled, not benefiting from tip-top production facilities, not having a kick-ass distribution deal lined up, and not slotting neatly in line with current political thinking and media-friendly editorialising. Essentially, Holden and Langtry approached the project in terms of producing a social document, of preserving the actions of those prepared to stand against what they saw as reprehensible (contextual interjection: the Dirty Thirty and their families went without pay, or local union approved strike pay, for the duration of the strike), and of raising public consciousness in a political environment where the incumbent government is demonstrably in hock to the destructive values of Thatcherism.

As a social document, the film is incredibly timely. Malcolm Pinnegar died in April of this year, just months after his scenes in ‘The Story of the Dirty Thirty’ were filmed. With other members growing old or having moved away, there is a strong sense of Holden and Langtry back-pedalling to amass as much documentary evidence as possible. The contributions by Mick “Richo” Richmond, Darren Moore and support group organiser Jane Bruton are equally as important.

As documentarians, Holden and Langtry remain commendably clear-sighted. Apart from one moment in the closing voiceover, the tone never tips over into polemic. The participants are shown as people rather than activists. The political imperative is reined in; instead we have the story of a small group of everyday men and women – a nod here to the miners’ wives support groups – who made a choice, stood for their principles, and never backed down.

Small details are telling: Richmond wipes away tears when he recalls speaking, albeit reluctantly, at a rally. The fact that he was applauded overwhelms him. Kay Smith, part of a miners’ wives organisation, recalls a theatrical production that depicted the struggle. She’s overwhelmed that a trained actress portrayed her. Nearly thirty years later, these ordinary men and women who became extraordinary by dint of the battle they fought, still evince a humility and good grace.

David Bell has said that, in interviewing the Dirty Thirty, they refuse to consider themselves heroes. Bell’s book, Parry’s song and Holden and Langtry’s film - a low-budget and lo-fi piece of work that nonetheless has a whole lot of heart – prove otherwise.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #3: Vanishing on 7th Street

With a blink-and-you-missed-it theatrical release in America and a muted afterlife on DVD, Brad Anderson’s follow up to ‘Session 9’, ‘The Machinist’ and ‘Transsiberian’ certainly lived up to the key word of its title. In a certain respect, it’s easy to see why: it would have been overshadowed by earlier, bigger-budgeted films with similar apocalyptic themes – ‘The Happening’ and ‘Knowing’ spring immediately to mind – and would have struggled to find an audience not already alienated by those aforementioned efforts.

‘Vanishing on 7th Street’ is a better movie conceptually, aesthetically and intellectually than ‘The Happening’ or ‘Knowing’, but lacks the compulsive car-crash awfulness of the former and the sweeping let’s-destroy-the-world-to-the-strains-of-Beethoven grandeur of the latter. It’s also riddled with lacunae (deliberately), shot through with a gaping plot hole (although there is, albeit metaphorical, the hint of an explanation) and makes a final act swerve from creepy-as-hell horror movie to balls-to-the-wall religious allegory.

It’s a film that wants to make its audience think for themselves as much as it wants them to jump at shadows. It wants to unnerve you and crank up the suspense and get on down with an early John Carpenter siege aesthetic. It also wants to throw out some big questions and God and mankind and the unexplained. It wants you to drop your popcorn at the big scare scenes and borrow some Dostoyevsky from the library on the way home. Oh, and it wants to do all of this while parading itself under a title that sounds like a film noir.

To be sure, Anderson and scriptwriter Anthony Jaswinski want to have their cake and eat it, but as a wise individual once put it, “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” By the final stages, it becomes unavoidably apparent that Anderson and Jaswinski have exceeded their grasp, but what they were stretching out for – the more-than-a-hint-of-it that makes it to the screen – is impressive enough that it would take a harsher critic than me to rule the film a failure.

The main touchstones of ‘Vanishing on 7th Street’ are, respectively, primal and mythical. There’s the age-old fear of the dark. And there’s the enigma, still not entirely satisfactorily explained, of the mass disappearance of settlers from the Roanoke Colony in the seventeenth century. Projectionist Paul (John Leguizamo) reads an account of the disappearance at the beginning of the film, killing time between switching reels in the cinema he works at. A power cut plunges everywhere but his booth into darkness (he’s using a torch); seconds later, the cinema is empty, nothing left of its patrons except the clothes they were wearing, now pooled in untidy heaps on or around their seats.

Physiotherapist Rosemary (Thandie Newton) encounters a similar phenomenon; stepping outside the hospital for a smoke, the guttering flame of her cigarette lighter is the only illumination when the lights go out. She stumbles back inside to find the building deserted except for one man on an operating table, his stomach cut open, suffering from massive trauma. Understandably so.

TV reporter Luke (Hayden Christensen) awakes surrounded by candles, lit in anticipation of a romantic dalliance with his girlfriend the previous evening. He wanders through apartment; the TV doesn’t work, neither does his mobile. Heading out into the street, he finds the city deserted.

Anderson spends just enough time establishing his trio of protagonists, then leaps forward 72 hours. The rules have suddenly, and without much in the way of exposition, been established: the sun is rising later in the day and setting earlier; the city is virtually empty of life; things come out of the shadows – sometimes looking like the silhouettes of large and threatening people, sometimes looking like faces and sometimes resembling nothing so much as tendrils – and encloak everything not immediately contained by the penumbra cast by a source of light.

72 hours and Luke in particular has morphed into a full-on survivalist, roaming the city for torches and batteries, checking every abandoned vehicle he comes across to see if it will start. He has one aim: get out of the city. He purses this aim selfishly, refusing help to others. Until, that is, he fetches up at a bar on 7th Street where the electricity is still on thanks to a back-up generator. Here he meets James (Jacob Latimore), a desperately scared young lad hoping against hope that his mother will return. Presently Rosemary and Paul also fetch up at the bar, and the film settles in for its middle third. Things get talky, with tranches of dialogue given over to trying to find a rationale for what is happening. This is redundant, since a fear of the dark is universal. Moreover, the shadow-things are infinitely creepier for not being explained.

Ultimately, though, the script eschews explanation and wrong-foots the audience with a ‘Dawn of the Dead’ (Snyder version) style escape attempt before delivering its allegorical conclusion. The “reboot” concept (there’s a reason I referenced ‘Knowing’ at the start of this review) leaves the film mired in some heavy-handed and often quite awkward religious imagery, and by the time the two surviving characters literally ride off into what could well be a world-enshadowing sunset it’s hard not to wish that ‘Vanishing on 7th Street’ had stuck with its original tenebrous premise and gone the horror movie route right to the end.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #2: The Awakening

From its opening scenes, something about ‘The Awakening’ bugged me. It didn’t take long to put my finger on it. The film is set in the 1920s (its big thematic preoccupation is the aftermath of the Great War) but the attitudes and mannerisms of many of the characters didn’t seem coterminous with that period of time. In the main it’s little things, but cumulatively there are so many of them that it becomes an annoyance. And that’s without taking into account massive flubs like a reference to a school being in Cumbria (the district didn’t come into existence until 1974). 

Still, there was enough in Rebecca Hall’s taut performance and the slow-burn chills of the first act for me to sideline these misgivings. Hall plays Florence Cathcart, an author who specialises in debunking the paranormal (in the opening scene, she assists the police in exposing a medium’s fraudulence). Still grieving a sweetheart lost in the war, she represses her emotions by rigid commitment to her work. Accepting an assignment to investigate a haunting at a boy’s preparatory school – re: the kids’ dialogue, would “ghost hunter” and “scab” have been in a middle class 10-year-old boy’s vocabulary in the early 1920s? – she finds her belief in science and rationalism sorely tested.

Despite the anachronisms, director Nick Murphy – who co-wrote with Stephen Volk – does some interesting things, particularly in portraying the school masters as something of a dysfunctional survivors club. Factoring in Florence’s emotional scars and the contrapuntal character of a groundsman who faked disability to evade the draft, ‘The Awakening’ flirts with the concept of survivor’s guilt. Later, Murphy seems to be hinting that the title is a reference to his heroine’s emotional awakening after years of self-repression and reaches a point where the paranormal aspects could viably and contextually have served as an extended metaphor for this theme and where the actual danger comes from the psyche rather than the spirit world.

And had this been the case, ‘The Awakening’ could have been a damn good movie. But Murphy swerves away from this potential conclusion, almost as if he’s realised that he’s making a scary movie, goddamn it, and the audience are going to get all the creepy shit he can throw at them.

Not that there’s anything wrong with creepy shit – hell, this is the inaugural review in my third annual 13 for Halloween retrospective – but every bit of creepy shit ‘The Awakening’ has to offer is derivative. This is the other thing about the film that bugged me. There’s a roughly three minute sequence where Florence prowls the deserted corridors of the school that happily plagiarises ‘The Orphanage’, ‘Deep Red’ and ‘Sainte-Ange’. And not in a good Tarantino-esque homage/assimilation kind of way. Murphy’s borrowings are more along the lines of “I’m gonna rip off some foreign movies and keep my fingers crossed that the majority of moviegoers are put off by subtitles and won’t have seen them”.

I’m prepared to bet that, in the case of ‘Sainte-Ange’ he was also counting on the obscurity value. ‘The Awakening’ doesn’t just steal from Pascal Laugier’s debut; it fucking ram-raids it! ‘The Awakening’ makes wholesale appropriations: it’s set in a school; a major set piece has the children leaving with only a handful of characters remaining including a creepy matron; there’s wan, brunette heroine who slowly unravels due to a combination of supernatural occurrences and a trauma in her recent past; the aftermath of conflict (First World War here, WWII in Laugier’s film) is crucial to the story. Beyond this thematic checklist, it’s the imagery that’s so strikingly similar. Watch the two films back to back and you’d think that large sections of ‘The Awakening’ were a re-edit of ‘Saint-Ange’.

For the defence: ‘The Awakening’ boasts well nuanced performances from Hall, Dominic West and Imelda Staunton. That the latter, whose performances are often OTT – even in such acclaimed fare as Mike Leigh’s ‘Vera Drake’ – does restrained and controlled work here is testament to Murphy’s skills as an actor’s director. Eduard Grau’s cinematography achieves the feeling of a sepia photograph in a film shot in colour (Grau also lensed ‘A Single Man’ and ‘Buried’, both of which depend, albeit very differently, on a specific visual approach). And there are some genuinely effective moments, most notably Florence’s discovery of a doll’s house containing tableaux of everything she’s just experienced in the preceding moments. It’s a kicker of a scene: audacious, chilling, perfectly executed. It’s a tantalising glimpse of what ‘The Awakening’ could have been.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #1: Tenebrae

“When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains – however improbable – must be the truth.” This quote, from Conan Doyle’s ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, is central to the construction of Dario Argento’s fiendishly brilliant ‘Tenebrae’.

Having scored a big hit first time out with his debut ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’ – and followed it up in fine style with ‘Cat o’ Nine Tails’ and ‘Four Flies on Grey Velvet’ – Argento pretty much defined the giallo with the magisterial masterclass in mind-fuckery ‘Deep Red’. That was in 1975, when the genre was peaking. Seven years later, the giallo was on the wane but that didn’t stop Argento delivering his second flat-out classic of the form.

‘Tenebrae’ follows American thriller writer Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) as he embarks on a publicity tour in Rome. The whirlwind round of interviews and TV appearances has been organised by his European agent, an expatriate fellow American by the name of Bullmer (John Saxon). Secretary Anne (Daria Nicolodi) and Bullmer’s protégé Gianni (Christian Borromeo) round out his entourage.

He’s barely arrived when detectives Germani (Giuliano Gemma) and Altieri (Carola Stagnaro) turn up in his hotel room wondering if he knows anything about Elsa Manni (Ania Pieroni) – a kleptomaniac first glimpsed swiping a paperback copy of Neal’s latest novel – who has recently been murdered by a black-gloved killer wielding a straight-razor. Neal, understandably since this is his first time in Rome, had never met the lady. Nor can he explain why the killer had stuffed torn out pages of his novel in her mouth.

Neal soon receives an anonymous letter in cut-out newsprint quoting a line from his book. Germani warns him to be vigilant and report any further threatening correspondence. Further killings occur, including a savage attack on loose-living same sex couple Marion (Mirella Banti) and Tilda (Mirella d’Angelo). Anne thinks she spots Neal’s possessive and mentally unstable ex-wife Jane (Veronica Laria) driving past the hotel. Gianni alternates between eagerly assisting Neal (his idol) in his own unofficial investigating and lusting after hotelier’s daughter Maria (Lara Wendel). Maria, meanwhile, endures a series of escalating misfortunes after an argument with her actual boyfriend and the ministrations of a psychotic dog end with her seeking refuge in the house of a murderer.

‘Tenebrae’ befuddles, bamboozles and wrong-foots the viewer from the outset. It boasts more red herrings than a Communist fishery. Even the title misleads. “Tenebrae” is Latin for “shadows” or “darkness” (as well as being the title of Peter Neal’s latest opus), yet much of the film is shot in a cold hard light that allows neither for shadows nor places to hide. Indeed, an image of something very briefly hidden and then shockingly revealed is crucial to the bravura denouement.

The protagonist is challenged as much as the audience, mainly by TV pundit Christiano Berti (John Steiner), a man whose antagony towards Neal’s fiction seems to border on the obsessive. But even before Berti gets in on the act, the first reporter who interviews Neal – someone he is acquainted with and considers sympathetic – suddenly challenges him: “ ‘Tenebrae’ is a sexist novel. Why do you despise women so much? Women as victims, ciphers. The male heroes with their hairy macho bullshit!” Absent the macho male heroes – most of Argento’s male leads, from the edgy Sam Dalmas in ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’ to the outright nervous Marc Daly in ‘Deep Red’ are more petrified than pro-active – and the accusation is one that has often been made against Argento himself, particularly in light of this controversy-baiting statement of principles: “I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man. I certainly don`t have to justify myself to anyone about this. I don`t care what anyone thinks or reads into it. I have often had journalists walk out of interviews when I say what I feel about this subject.” And indeed Argento gives us a world-class selection of women-in-peril in ‘Tenebrae’ …

… as well as creating an air of sexual ambiguity by casting transsexual Eva Robins as a seductive and vengeful femme fatale in an enigmatic and fetishistic flashback whose import is not revealed in full until very late in the day.

Pay close attention to his/her red shoes. There’s a learned paper to be written on the parallels between Dario Argento and Powell & Pressburger. The touchstones are more apparent than you might think.

As with all gialli, style is everything; and ‘Tenebrae’ creates an architectural style that is dislocated, borderline surreal and utterly unique. Although it’s established from the opening scenes that the film takes place in Rome, Argento creates a Rome that is as far removed from the Eternal City of Fellini and myriad other filmmakers, a Rome that repudiates landmarks and tourist hives. A city of stark avenues, unexpected open spaces and sprawling post-modern buildings in which Argento creates some of his most memorable set-pieces, from Elsa’s flight from a rapacious vagrant only to find herself in greater danger the moment she think she’s found sanctuary to a three-minute build-up to a murder committed in plain sight that is worthy of Hitchcock. The stand-out, though, is the justly celebrated two-and-a-half minute Louma crane sequence in which the camera prowls the exterior of Marion and Tilda’s house, occasionally probing through the windows to track their movements. Scored to the thunderous and jarring music of Goblin, it’s a symphony of voyeurism and subjective excess. It exists purely for the technical achievement of pulling it off in the first place, it breaks all the rules of perspective and POV, and it’s absolutely gorgeously fucking brilliant.

The script slyly works in references to several of Argento’s previous works, including a fake death à la ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’ and a conceptual homage to ‘Deep Red’ that I’d like to discuss at great length but won’t because I’d really hate to ruin the film for anyone reading this who has yet to have the experience of discovering ‘Tenebrae’ for themselves. All I’ll say is that where ‘Deep Red’ ends with a bloody but reflective shot, the implications of which are left to worm their way into the viewer’s subconscious, ‘Tenebrae’ gives us a traumatized survivor screaming and screaming and screaming even as the screen fades to black and Goblin tries to drown them out.

All hail the Pumpkin King

Greetings. The spookiest month of the year is upon us once again, and that means two things: (i) you’ll be descending upon by brethren with paring knives and ghost-face stencils, and (ii) 13 For Halloween will be getting under way very very soon on The Agitation of the Mind.

That’s very very soon as in tomorrow.

Our horrible host, the frightful Fulwood, will be fulminating fetidly on a baker’s dozen of maudlin and macabre movies. Just to get you in the mood, here’s a hint of the tricks and treats that await you:

And now we’ve got the unpleasantries out of the way, would you care to join me under the moonlight as we waltz our way towards All Hallow’s Eve?


(Ahem, Pumpkin King? Quit hacking my blog. I do the purple prose around here – end of!)

BOND-A-THON: Die Another Day

I’m only guessing, but I reckon the first script conference for ‘Die Another Day’ went something like this.

The writers: Okay, here’s the deal. It all went a bit OTT in ‘The World is Not Enough’, so what we want to do is really scale things back. Shit-can the gadgets, ditch the one-liners, keep it real.

The producers: Sounds good. Did you get the memo about the invisible car, by the way?

The writers: Uh, I think we missed that. But, hey, what we propose is this: subvert the audiences’ expectations. Have a gritty, down ‘n’ dirty pre-credits set piece that ends with Bond being captured. Totally pull the rug out from under the viewers.

The producers: Cool. Great attention-grabber. Can you work in the invisible car by the half way mark?

The writers: Uh, the emphasis is supposed to be on Bond living on his wits. We want to keep the gadgets to a minimum.

The producers: Absolutely. Invisible car, watch that shoots a laser. That’s two by our reckoning. Oh, and you know what else would be really cool? An ice palace!

There are a lot of things wrong with ‘Die Another Day’, not least that it acronymizes as ‘DAD’, but the thing I have the most problem with is the god-damn stupid motherfucking invisible car. When I watched ‘Die Another Day’ for the purposes of this review, I played the DVD through the laptop, headphones on, rather than insult the TV with it; and on several occasions Mrs F had to break off her RPG and ask me to rant a little quieter and make with less profanity. By the end of the movie, her astute observation was: “Anyone would think you had issues with the invisible car.”

And you know what, dear reader? I do. The invisible car is a god-damn stupid motherfucking concept on many levels, the most obvious being that it brings to mind Wonder Woman’s invisible plane. You know, the one that looked like this:

Keep that image in mind. Now here’s 007 (Pierce Brosnan) in his invisible car:

To my mind there are only three differences: (i) ‘Wonder Woman’ was made nearly thirty years before ‘Die Another Day’; (ii) ‘Wonder Woman’ had a notably smaller budget than ‘Die Another Day’; and (iii) despite her epic cleavage, Wonder Woman looks considerably less of a tit than Bond in a straightforward comparison of these two images.

Yes, I have issues with the car.

I also have issues with the shitty CGI in the scene where toffee-nosed uber-villain Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens) cuts loose with a giant laser, melting vast swathes of tundra as Bond dangles off an ice cliff. Bond escapes this combined fiery-watery fate by surfing his way to freedom. These are some choice examples of the images the paying audience is fobbed off with:

What makes it worse it that ‘Die Another Day’ opens with a surfing scene that’s dramatic, atmospheric and kicks off one of the absolute best pre-credits sequences in the entire Bond canon. I’m tempted to call it ‘The World is Not Enough’ Syndrome, except ‘TWiNE’ gives us a world-class pre-credits sequence then nosedives into redundancy, like a priapic sybarite suddenly experiencing brewer’s droop. ‘Die Another Day’ gives us a frankly pretty damn impressive first three quarters of an hour: Bond’s hovercraft duel with Korean warlord Colonel Moon (Will Yun Lee) and subsequent capture – awesome! Bond’s torture, imprisonment and exchange for the terrorist Zao (Rick Yune) – awesome! Bond’s less-than-victorious return to MI6, the revelation that he’s been implicated in a terrorist outrage and M (Judi Dench)’s fears that he’s been brainwashed (a nod to the opening chapters of the novel ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’) – awesome! Bond breaking ranks from MI6 and going renegade in order to clear his name – awesome! Bond hooking up with American operative Jinx (Halle Berry) as he pursues his own agenda without sanction or back-up – awesome!

I remember sitting in Nottingham’s Showcase Cinema ten years ago, rubbing my hands in gleeful delight as the first third of ‘Die Another Day’ played out, convinced that even the trademark Brosnan pout wasn’t a drawback and that I was watching the most pared-down, focused and hard-edged Bond since Connery was sipping the martinis.

And. Then. It. All. Went. Wrong.

No: it didn’t just go wrong. It went disastrous. It went cataclysmic.

How bad? Well, I think I’ve already mentioned the invisible motherfucking car and shit-awful surfing scene. In addition, there’s the horribly conceived ice palace – the most obviously studio-bound bit of tundra since John Sturges’s production designer painted the floor white and arranged some bits of polystyrene at strategic angles for ‘Ice Station Zebra’ in 1968. There’s a tediously contrived fistfight between the randomly shifting patterns of some laser beams. There’s a cluster of dreadful performances, from John Cleese as the new Q (he was introduced as Desmond Llewellyn’s protégé in the previous film but wasn’t as egregiously annoying as he is here) to Toby Stephens who doesn’t so much chew the scenery as go ‘Man vs Food’ on its ass, while Michael Madsen mopes around in the background, mumbling and waiting for the cheque to clear. There’s a denouement that made me die a little bit inside to watch.

And there are endless – endless – references to other Bond movies. ‘Die Another Day’ was released forty years after ‘Dr No’ and was the twentieth film in the franchise. As such, it was obviously deemed a sterling idea to reconfigure the script as a join-the-dots exercise in homage. Thus we have: Jinx emerging from the sea in a Honey Ryder style bikini right down to the knife belt and a reappearance by the Duke of Wellington portrait (‘Dr No’); Rosa Klebb’s shoe inexplicably showing up in Q’s lab and a potential blackmailer filming Bond in a clinch from behind a two-way mirror (‘From Russia with Love’); Jinx almost eviscerated by a laser, an ejector seat fired from Bond’s Aston Martin and a fight in a depressurising plane (‘Goldfinger’); the old jet pack in Q’s lab, an oxygen mouthpiece used by Bond in a diving scene and a clinic wherein a villain’s appearance is changed (‘Thunderball’); a disused section of the underground commandeered as a secret service base (‘You Only Live Twice’); Bond temporarily buried under an avalanche (‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’); diamonds used to finance a satellite with destructive capabilities (‘Diamonds Are Forever’); Bond using a big American handgun at one point (‘Live and Let Die’); M maintaining and office on board a ship and a satellite that can harness solar rays (‘The Man with the Golden Gun’); a union jack parachute and a similarity in design between the ice palace and Stromberg’s undersea lair (‘The Spy Who Loved Me’); a sword fight through an opulent building in which a fuckload of expensive things are inordinately trashed (‘Moonraker’); the theme song artiste (Madonna) appearing onscreen for the only time since Sheena Easton (‘For Your Eyes Only’) and actually graduating to a speaking part here; the crocodile submersible and mini-jet in Q’s office (‘Octopussy’); Bond surfing in the Antarctic (‘A View to a Kill’); Bond as sniper and a protracted fight in a transport plane, vehicles being jettisoned out of its rear cargo hatch (‘The Living Daylights’); and Bond going rogue after M rescinds his Double-O status (‘Licence to Kill’). Recyclings from Brosnan’s previous outings include a falling chandelier that kills an antagonist – reminiscent of the metal sectioning that similarly finishes off a bad guy in ‘GoldenEye’ – as well as a timer being set for three minutes; the replication of the car park chase in ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ around the different levels of the ice palace; and the sprinkler system that activates after Jinx booby-traps the clinic in Cuba, akin to the aftermath of the bomb attack on MI6 headquarters in ‘The World is Not Enough’. Additionally, the gadget-laden watch Q issues Bond with is described as “your twentieth, I believe”.

Some of these homages are, to be fair, quite neatly done and – ironically – the best of them has nothing to do with the movie franchise (the character name Colonel Moon, an inversion of ‘Colonel Sun’, the first Bond continuation novel after Fleming’s death). Mostly, however, they are as subtle as Oddjob lobbing his steel-lined bowler hat at a statue. Cumulatively, they leave you feeling bludgeoned by the filmmakers’ commitment to self-congratulation over aesthetic development; their determination to rake over past glories rather than striving to create a new classic. We’d have to wait four years for that.

Mylène Demongeot

Happy 77th birthday to Mylène Demongeot, in the seventh decade of her career and still working. A large glass is being raised at chez Agitation.

Herbert Lom

From 'Hell Drivers' to 'The Ladykillers' to being the real comic genius in the 'Pink Panther' films, Herbert Lom will be sadly missed as a character actor, comic actor and irreplaceable cinematic talent.

i.m. Herbert Lom, 11 September 1917 - 27 September 2012

Helen Mirren

Helen Mirren as this year's recipient of the European Achievement in World Cinema award?

I'll drink to that!