No, no, Herr Waltz, here's to YOU!

That'll be two-for-two on the Tarantino-Waltz partnership, then.

Django Unchained

Where the hell do you start with a review of ‘Django Unchained’?

Do you outright ’fess up that it’s not perfect, that there are some flaws, then shrug your shoulders during a paragraph break and spend the rest of the review blathering on about how much you enjoyed it anyway?

Do you start out by enthusing about the many things that Tarantino gets right, then slowly peel back a few critical layers, saving the nit-picking for last?

Do you mourn the untimely loss of Sally Menke, whose contribution to the cinema of Tarantino is thrown into acute context by the occasionally indecisive editing rhythms of ‘Django Unchained’ that you just know wouldn’t have been there if she’d been in the editing room?

What you don’t do is start throwing around words like “self-indulgent”, “homage” and “no original ideas”, because – damn it! – Tarantino’s is the cinema of the cineaste, a synthesis of all the movies that most of us will never get round to seeing, and there are plenty of us who wouldn’t have it any other way. Complaining about self-indulgence in a Tarantino film is like tutting over the horror in James Herbert novel. It’s kind of the fucking point.

And it’s for this reason that any and every Tarantino film births itself across the screen in the amniotic fluids of movie lore. Thus ‘Inglourious Basterds’ emerges as more than just a revisionist “bunch of guys on a mission” movie if you approach it with, say, some foreknowledge of the UFA protégés who fled Germany during the rise of Nazism. And ‘Django Unchained’ ticks a lot more boxes if you know your Sergio Leone from your Sergio Corbucci. The very title, and a cameo by Franco Nero, riff on Corbucci’s most celebrate spaghetti western.

While ‘Django Unchained’ is most firmly rooted in the spaghetti western tradition – it’s OTT, often nihilistically violent, and utterly divorced from the moral cadences of the more traditional American western – it has to be noted that whereas Tarantino adheres to the iconography of the genre, he doesn’t necessarily hold to its conventions. Granted, I’m all in favour of artists being unconventional, but the western is one of those genres that benefits from a more conventional aesthetic.

To use a sweeping – but, I hope, justified – generalisation, westerns tell essentially simple stories. Even films as thematically deep as Peckinpah’s ‘Ride the High Country’ and ‘The Wild Bunch’ or Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven’ have simple narratives. The greatest westerns are distillations of theme and character: haiku in widescreen and with six-shooters. ‘Django Unchained’ is anything but narratively simple; anything but a distillation. The script is a circuitous affair that rambles into ever greater contrivances in order to thread a veritable posse of genre touchstones into something resembling an actual story.

These range from aforementioned spaghetti western maestros Leone and Corbucci to the blaxploitation ‘Nigger Charley’ films by way of Mel Brooks’s ‘Blazing Saddles’ and, uh, Richard Fleischer’s ‘Mandingo’. It’s this latter – a slice of overboiled Suth’un melodrama – that informs the second half of Tarantino’s film and calls for the largest quota of narrative convolutions. ‘Mandingo’ is a curious touchstone for Tarantino, since the film trades on the sweaty physical violence of bare-knuckle fighting correlated with the sweaty forbidden lure of interracial sex.

Central to ‘Mandingo’ is sex. Central to Tarantino’s ‘Mandingo’ homage is fighting. ‘Django Unchained’ is typical of all of Tarantino’s work in that it is a sexless work of cinema. For all that Django (Jamie Foxx)’s quest is to free his enslaved wife (Kerry Washington) from an outwardly charming but cruel and hypocritical plantation owner, every frame suggests the mindset of a director who is a hopeless (possibly unrequited) romantic – nowhere more explicitly than in the already divisive final scene – rather than the interactions of two characters who enjoy sexual intimacy.

On the plus side, though, ‘Django Unchained’ represents as well as anything in Tarantino’s filmography the two reasons I will always have time for him as a filmmaker: he cares – cares deeply – about dialogue and performance. The dialogue might not have the crackle and immediate quotability of ‘Reservoir Dogs’ or ‘Pulp Fiction’, but that’s only because Tarantino is writing in a different idiom. And when he’s writing for his big villain, Calvin Candie (Leonardo di Caprio), Tarantino fashions dialogue that captures the character’s suavity, venality and egoism and wraps it into a simultaneously seductive and repellent package. Di Caprio’s performance rises to the occasion. Elsewhere, Samuel L Jackson essays a complex and dangerous character in a turn that’s his best in years, while Christoph Waltz, as German dentist-turned-bounty-hunter Dr King Schulz, makes it two-for-two following his star-making turn in ‘Inglourious Basterds’. Foxx meanwhile is all moody cool, iconography in motion, his vengeful anti-hero growing in stature as the film progresses.

Best of all, the whole cast – including some left-of-field cameos (when was the last time you saw ‘Dukes of Hazard’ regular Tom Wopat in anything?) – are obviously in on the joke. Sure, ‘Django Unchained’ is wincingly violent in places, and Tarantino makes no bones that slavery was a fucking awful business, but there’s nothing to say that the heaviest and headiest subjects can’t be tackled provocatively and/or satirically. No pun intended, but I really can’t think of another way to put it: ‘Django Unchained’ works best as a black comedy.

A tale of two controversies

Public service announcement: this piece isn’t a review. It’s an attempt to address the controversies surrounding ‘Django Unchained’ and ‘Zero Dark Thirty’, and I’m writing it for no other reason than to get it out of my system so I can then write reviews of these two movies that assess them as movies rather than going tit-for-tat with some of their harsher critics.

In other words, if the next few paragraphs don’t seem like a fun night out at The Agitation of the Mind, please feel free to skip this entry and I’ll see you back here next week for the ‘Django Unchained’ review proper.

Spike Lee doesn’t like ‘Django Unchained’. Spike Lee doesn’t much like any Tarantino film, certainly since ‘Jackie Brown’. In fact, it’s pretty fair to say that Spike Lee doesn’t like Quentin Tarantino period. What riled Lee about ‘Jackie Brown’ was Tarantino’s wholesale use of what our PC and touchy-feely society dictates we should only refer to as “the N-word”. Lee felt that the degree to which it was used in a film written and directed by a white man was inappropriate. This argument is not without credence, but unfortunately it opens up a can of words as regards entitlement.

The rational let’s-all-be-grown-up-about-this approach should be that any artist should be able to tackle in subject in any manner which best serves the aesthetic imperative of the work. A film’s aesthetic can range from the utterly unrealistic flight of fantasy of, say, Powell and Pressburger’s ‘The Red Shoes’ to the unapologetically grim realism of Ken Loach’s ‘Ladybird Ladybird’. Both of these films use their aesthetic to make a statement; both succeed. ‘Jackie Brown’ is a crime film whose characters inhabit an economically depressed milieu with a specific ethic demographic. These characters are not going to address each other as if they’d just stepped out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel; they’re going to use the language of the street. 

Tarantino attempted to address this element of his screenplay at the time ‘Jackie Brown’ was released, noting that he had used the n-i-g-g-a spelling and not n-i-g-g-e-r. This was perhaps a tad disingenuous given that the variant in spelling makes not one iota of difference to the pronunciation. This might have been the point at which his name got scratched from Spike Lee’s Christmas card list. It was par for the course, then, that Lee wouldn’t be appreciative of Tarantino making a film with about slavery. And not the kind of hand-wringing film that most white directors would turn in, full of liberal sentiments marinated in several gallons of white man’s guilt, but the kind of film that only Tarantino could make, full of gleefully over the top iconography, swathes of non-PC humour and the unique brand of day-glo anti-realism that has been his stock-in-trade since the comparative subtleties of ‘Jackie Brown’ went unrewarded at the box office. Which is to say, ‘Django Unchained’ is a movie movie.

We’re back to the whole “as long as the aesthetic serves the work” caveat, and I’m throwing open the comments section for that to get debated in. The main question is whether Tarantino, as a white director, had any right making a film about slavery. At which point, the question of logical extremes rears its exaggerated head. Where do you draw the line if you disallow Tarantino that right as an artist? Can only Jewish directors make films about the Holocaust? Do we call time on male novelists creating female protagonists? Should a documentarist making a feature about a musician desist if he or she cannot read music or play an instrument? Herzog’s ‘Into the Abyss’ – should the dude have gone out and whacked somebody before he sat down to talk to a convicted murderer?

The question leads ultimately to absurdity. Absurd, too, is the idea of Tarantino as a racist. What racist would repeatedly write iconic roles for black actors (Samuel L Jackson in ‘Pulp Fiction’, Pam Grier in ‘Jackie Brown’, Jamie Foxx in ‘Django Unchained’)? What racist would, in his choice of subject matter, his choice of soundtrack music and his pop culture references, continually demonstrate such a passion for black culture that, had he been alive during the period that his latest movie is set, he’d no doubt have been lynched as a “nigger lover”.

Naomi Wolf doesn’t like ‘Zero Dark Thirty’. In a piece in The Guardian, Wolf castigates Kathryn Bigelow for peddling propaganda in suggesting that “what your script blithely calls ‘the detainee programme’” (i.e. the wholesale torture, post-9/11 of anyone suspected of Al Qaeda involvement) yielded information that led directly to the location – and by extension the execution – of Osama bin Laden.

The most damning paragraph of Wolf’s article is worth quoting in full: “In a time of darkness in America, you are being feted by Hollywood, and hailed by major media. But to me, the path your career has now taken reminds of no one so much as that other female film pioneer who became, eventually, an apologist for evil: Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl's 1935 ‘Triumph of the Will’, which glorified Nazi military power, was a massive hit in Germany. Riefenstahl was the first female film director to be hailed worldwide.”

Up to this point, it’s difficult to argue with Wolf’s article. She pulls apart the “based on eyewitness accounts” tag which opens the film, and draws comparison with Alex Gibney’s ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’ and Rory Kennedy’s ‘Ghosts of Abu Ghraib’ – both documentary films with sourced and verifiable content – as well as citing academically sound studies which demonstrate that torture is ineffective as a method of sourcing military/political intelligence, studies which “rebut the very premise of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’.”

But it’s with the Riefenstahl comparison that the article loses focus. It paints a picture of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ as a film about crusading American intel operatives, God and morality on their side, doing whatever they have to do to get information. I was expecting something akin to Inspector Regan knocking a suspect about in your average episode of ‘The Sweeney’: we know the lairy little nonce has done it, we despise him for giving Jack Regan some lip, and if our favourite hard-boiled Flying Squad ’tec has to give him a slapping to get a confession, well the little bastard deserved it. Instead, the torture scenes in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ – which commence almost immediately – are fucking awful to watch: a succession of beatings and humiliations that are squalid and inhuman.

Riefenstahl made Nazism look Wagnerian, depicting the architects of the Third Reich as almost god-like. Bigelow portrays the purveyors of the US response to terrorism as, essentially, a bunch of low-achievers harangued by their boss to “bring me people to kill”. The scene in question, all of them cowering as the bollocking is handed out, is reminiscent of Alec Baldwin’s “always be closing” speech in ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ – it simultaneously communicates the pointlessness and the banal intensity of a bunch of small people being forced to up their game to secure a worthless result.

Oh, and the film makes no bones about how basically fucking illegal the whole bin Laden thing was. If ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ was intended, as Wolf implies, as a work of propaganda, it’s a total failure. Leni Riefenstahl would have laughed it out of the cinema. Goebbels would probably have had somebody shot.

The Grey

At the beginning of ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’, weary saddle-tramp Hogue (Jason Robards) finds himself betrayed and left to die in the blistering desert. He implores God, “Yesterday I told you I was thirsty and I thought you might turn up some water! Now if I’ve sinned, you just send me a drop or two and I won’t do it no more. Whatever in the hell it was I did. I mean that, Lord.”

Towards the end of ‘The Grey’, beleaguered company man Ottway (Liam Neeson), lost in the Alaskan wilderness and hunted by a pack of wolves, sends out this little homily to the Almighty: “Do something, you phony prick. Fraudulent motherfucker. Do something. Come on, prove it! Fuck faith – earn it! Show me something real. I need it now, not later. Now! Show me and I’ll believe in you until the day I die, I swear. I’m calling on you.”

In ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’, the vengeful but likeable Hogue finds water. In ‘The Grey’, the nothing-to-live-for Ottway is answered only by the tallness of the trees, the vastness of the sky and an overwhelmingly indifferent silence. “Fuck it,” he ruminates, forcing himself onwards, “I’ll do it myself.”

If ‘Hogue’ is the closest Sam Peckinpah ever came to a religious allegory, then Joe Carnahan’s ‘The Grey’ is a wintry blast of existentialism. Still, it shares some aesthetic territory with Peckinpah. There are explicit similarities, particularly when one character expires against the majesty of the age-old mountains in a shot that purposefully quotes the final scene of ‘Ride the High Country’.

And there are implicit parallels, most notably in that both filmmakers demonstrate a keen understanding of how men behave and interact; of the macho codes that simultaneously protect their sense of self-identity and threaten to tear them apart whilst under pressure.

Peckinpah’s film opens with Hogue stripped of his rifle and canteen of water by his so-called partners Bowen (Strother Martin) and Taggart (L.Q. Jones). The rifle’s immaterial except that he might have defended himself with it. The water delineates the difference between two of them living and three of them dying before they make it out of the desert. But Hogue survives and the next act of the film sees him become a property-owner, a businessman and a publican thanks to the discovery of water where there shouldn’t have been any, his success flourishing almost accidentally while he broods on the possibility of getting even with Bowen and Taggart. His sentiments thaw somewhat as he romances saloon girl Hildy (Stella Stevens), but he never fully commits and things sour between them.

Ottway, on the other hand, is introduced to us having lost love. His wife has died, he’s ended up a paid killer of wolves for a petroleum conglomerate, mired in a grim company town populated by braggarts, brawlers and bullshitters. He is, put it mildly, at the end of his tether. Five minutes in, having written (or rather orated, in voiceover) a letter to his beloved, he’s crouching over his rifle, the barrel in his mouth. A wolf howling in the distance makes him hesitate. Plus, it’d be an awfully short film if he went the “goodnight Vienna” route.

Instead he finds himself on a plane with a cluster of noisy stevedores and it’s a genuine surprise when the plane goes down because surely all of that testosterone should have kept it up indefinitely. But plummet from the sky it does and suddenly “cluster of noisy stevedores” thins out to “small band of survivors”. Masculine ciphers – the huntsman, the loquacious smart-ass, the myopic nerve-bag, the ex-con – are gradually revealed as actual people. There’s an astounding scene, very shortly after the crash, where Ottway tends to a badly injured co-worker, and unable to help him medically, basically talks him through the fact that he’s going to die and do so very shortly. It’s a scene that most of mainstream directors working today would have fucked up in any number of different ways – pitched just a tad either way it could have toppled into cloying sentiment or callous indifference – but Neeson’s gravitas and Carnahan’s unobtrusive, observational style of direction combine and hold the moment in perfect equilibrium.

Ottway emerges as de facto leader almost immediately, though he’s challenged more than once. His first assertion of authority is when the bullish Diaz (Frank Grillo) starts rifling through his dead colleagues’ wallets and pocketing the cash. The following exchange occurs:

Ottway: Put that back. We’re not looting dead bodies for swag.
Diaz: You got lucky today, Ottway. You should be lying there with them. Don’t push it.
Ottway: I’m not going to say it again.
Diaz: Motherfucker, take a big step back.
Ottway: I’m going to start beating the shit out of you in the next five seconds. And you’re going to swallow a lot of blood for a fucking billfold.

Or how about Diaz’s assertion later, when the wolves appear and their continued existence starts looking less and less likely, that “I don’t walk through this world with fear in my heart” – Ottway’s response is a curt enquiry as to whether he learned that homily in prison: “Did someone write it on the dayroom wall?” Diaz is mouthy twat for so much of the film that the viewer could easily start rooting for the wolves. Yet he is gifted with – and, in the final analysis, deserves – one of the film’s most poignant scenes.

In addition to the Peckinpahesque examination of masculine codes and the jewel-like moments wherein Diaz and others find their humanity, ‘The Grey’ is also a bloody good thriller. A vertiginous rope crossing over an abyss is executed with Hitchcockian aplomb, the camera hanging back from the cliff edge until the one member of the party with a serious fear of heights takes his turn, at which point a dizzying POV shot demonstrates exactly what he has to be scared about.

Likewise, the wolves’ predatory behaviour is suspensefully developed. Their first appearance is almost ghostly: a pair of eyes emerging from the darkness around the crashed aircraft … joined by another … then another … then suddenly the screen is full of them. Later, bivouacked around campfire, human argument and animosity (Ottway and Diaz are at each others’ throats) is thrown into sudden and brutal relief as howling erupts from all around them.

At its best – in the way a horror film is often at its best when keeping the monster unseen – ‘The Grey’ wrings maximum chills from suggesting the wolves’ presence rather than launching across the screen. (A comment on the animatronics: it seems a lazy choice when even a low-budgeter like ‘Burning Bright’ can be bothered to harness the physical threat of a real tiger … but it’s preferable, at least in the opinion of an old fogey like me, to CGI.)

The horror movie comparison bears out in terms of structure. The second half of the film is marked by dwindling numbers, a stalk ‘n’ slash opus with wild animals and inhospitable terrain instead of a mad axeman and a dark cellar. And as the best horror movies essentially play on the fears we never managed to shake off from childhood, Ottway’s internal journey (its arc in ragged but emotionally persuasive juxtaposition to his journey through the wilderness) finds him back with memories not of his late wife but of his father. A drunk, as Ottway remembers him – moreover, a maudlin one with a taste for poetry. More than once Ottway quotes a poem of his father’s composition. It seems like a palimpsest, the Robert Frost-like repeated last lines suggesting a longer work. Maybe nobody’s life ever stretches to the completion of their endeavours, not Ottway’s, not his father’s, certainly not his wife’s.

Once more into the fray
Into the last good fight I’ll ever know
Live and die on this day
Live and die on this day

Thus the poem, thus the words Ottway arms himself with when the time comes to stand his ground. Another poem comes to mind, a stanza from Tennyson’s ‘In Memorial A.H.H.’:

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed

On so many levels, ‘The Grey’ is an upending, a subversion of the first two lines of that stanza (weigh up “who trusted God was love indeed” with Ottway’s bereavement and his imploration to the Almighty quoted at the beginning of this review) – and a visceral exercise in proving the last two. It’s a brutally existential thriller that debates Tennyson while getting in touch with its inner Peckinpah. I can’t think of many movies you can say that about.

Haywire

I’d had it on good authority that ‘Haywire’ was one of two things: an attempt (director Steven Soderbergh re-teaming with screenwriter Lem Dobbs) to recapture the reconstructive brilliance of ‘The Limey’ but here drawing on the tropes of the espionage thriller; or Soderbergh basically taking the piss with a decent chunk of studio money. And, on various levels, ‘Haywire’ is both of these things. More besides? Let’s amble through the next few paragraphs, then come back to that one.

Comparison with ‘The Limey’ will forever be the elephant in the room for ‘Haywire’, the phrase “suffering by comparison” never more true than here. ‘The Limey’ has the cleverer script and the artier direction, not to mention a more genuinely emotional hook and a powerhouse central performance, Soderbergh proving himself the first director in a couple of decades capable to giving Terence Stamp something cool and edgy and iconic to do. ‘Haywire’ on the other hand is built around Gina Carano and while there is much to be said in her favour, she ain’t no Terence Stamp and Dobbs doesn’t give her even a fraction of the salty dialogue that the earlier script is seasoned with. True, ‘Haywire’ is packed full of talented actors in subsidiary roles – Michael Fassbender, Ewan MacGregor, Bill Paxton, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas (hell, even Channing Tatum manages not to be a sop-ass pretty-boy in this one!) – but talented actors in subsidiary roles is all they are. Which is part of the joke.

Carano had made tentative forays before the camera – the documentary series ‘Fight Girls’, a bit part in ‘Blood and Bone’ – but ‘Haywire’ represents her first lead role and the responsibility which goes with it: that of carrying a movie. And in this respect, surrounding a nascent talent with established performers – generally done with the aim of “buoying up” the lead performance – can often be the kiss of death. Soderbergh is wise enough to pitch the entire timbre of the film to Carano’s strengths. A reductive critic would probably add “i.e. looking good and kicking ass” parenthetically at this point, but Carano definitely has a presence and a certain degree of charisma onscreen. Although she’s admitted that Soderbergh manipulated some of her dialogue in post-production, there’s enough going on in ‘Haywire’ to suggest Carano could carve herself a deserved niche as an action heroine. 

Story-wise, what we have is some fairly generic characters – The CIA-Trained Operative Gone Renegade, The Handler, The Shady Politician Outsourcing To Private Operatives, The Latino Connection With His Own Agenda – playing out a fairly generic game of Second Guess The Next Double-Cross, the needlessly convoluted intricacies of which are glued together by a succession of fight scenes and chases, either vehicular or on foot. Soderbergh, it has to be said, shoots the action like a man determined to show up Michael Bay as a big phoney and never mind that he’s only got a micro-fraction of a Bay-style budget. The action is the primary reason for watching ‘Haywire’ and the film delivers.

It delivers while simultaneously being a knowing homage to its genre. I’m tempted to say satire rather than homage, but satire implies if not outright parody then at least a comedic overtone to the aesthetic. And ‘Haywire’ certainly isn’t a laugh-out-loud funny movie. It’s not meant to be. Although the last scene is almost guaranteed to prompt a wry smile. What ‘Haywire’ is, is a supremely intelligent director employing a playful approach to material that’s been done ad nauseum and abandoning innovation on a narrative or conceptual level in order to indulge himself in a sleight-of-hand display of technique.

Which brings us back to that first paragraph question. Is there anything more to ‘Haywire’? My personal feeling is yes: the sheer pleasure of watching Soderbergh indulge himself as described above. He has fun reducing McGregor, Douglas and Banderas’s dialogue to little more than jargon-heavy white noise: spy-speak overlayered with corporate vagary; and he has fun with structure and set-pieces. The main narrative of Carano’s character, Mallory, hightailing it across the USA in flight from (and later pursuit of) her betrayers is intercut with flashbacks to two missions – one in Barcelona, one in Dublin – which directly relate to her current predicament. Soderbergh stages the Barcelona job as a masterclass in dialogue-free exposition, and the Dublin escapade as an effortlessly effected segue from seductive Bondian elegance to Bourne-style smackdowns and rooftop chases.

‘Haywire’ is, in other words, extremely entertaining – and put together with a lot more élan than a film of this ilk would normally boast. And its leading lady is a knockout – in both senses of the word.

Son of Danse Macabre by Bryce Wilson

Bryce Wilson’s ‘Son of Danse Macabre’ was one of the most interesting blogging projects of the last couple of years. Especially for fans of the horror genre.

Taking as his Bible and starting point Stephen King’s seminal non-fiction overview of horror ‘Danse Macabre’ – and attuned to the fact that the book, originally published in 1981, concludes its consideration of all things dark and scary at the dawn of that decade – Bryce’s remit for ‘Son of Danse Macabre’ was to consider the American horror movie post-‘Danse Macabre’.

The title may have been an homage; the content emerged as anything but mere copyism. Bryce originally blogged ‘Son of Danse Macabre’ as a book-in-progress, a brave and confident approach for any writer as one’s first draft is essentially being launched into the public realm chapter by chapter. Also a daunting commitment to a writing discipline, particularly since real life has a tendency of up-ending the best laid of plans and the purest of good intentions.

It was while real life was doing just this and new material on the project was at a low ebb that I offered Bryce an essay called ‘Foreignness and Home Soil: The American Horror Movie Post 9-11’, which he duly published online. I was quietly proud of the article and heartened that he was able to use it.

When the project concluded and the final essays were posted, Bryce lost no time in kicking up ‘Son of Danse Macabre’ up a notch: drawing the material together, polishing and expanding it into the full-length book it had been envisioned as; and which can now be yours for the ridiculously low price of $2.99 (or £1.85 if, like me, you’re in the UK).

Before it went on sale, Bryce asked me if I wanted ‘Foreignness and Home Soil’ back to post on Agitation, with the alternative that he could include it as an appendix. I felt the essay needed the context of ‘Son of Danse Macabre’.

Thus I find myself at the crossroads marked “conflict of interest”. I’d love to write a straight-up review singing the praises of ‘Son of Danse Macabre’ – because it’s a hell of a good piece of writing, shot through with passionate, knowledge and insight. But I’m featured in it.

So what I’m saying is: it’s an accomplished piece of film criticism, it’s completely affordable and if you’re a fan of Bryce’s indispensable blog Things That Don’t Suck – or a fan of horror movies in general – there’s no reason it shouldn’t be on your reading list.

And never brought to mind ...

This year’s Winter of Discontent has been a blast. We’ve had sex, violence and bad language; hard-nosed crims, seductive women, and a hobo with a shotgun. We’ve had vampires, cannibals and zombies. We’ve had “based on a true story” and “you couldn’t make this shit up”.

But now this third annual festival of filmic feculence is over and I find myself at a crossroads. Although I’m posting this at year’s end, I’m writing it on a spectacularly rainy evening in late November. I’ve spent October and November stockpiling material for the Winter of Discontent. The idea is that, throughout December, the blog will run itself and I’ll be able to concentration on other writing projects.

As regards The Agitation of the Mind in 2013 … well …

There seems to have been a diminution of interest in Agitation during the last year, with demonstrably fewer comments and page views. I’ve been tempted, on more than one occasion, to lock up the store, pull down the shutters and scrawl “CLOSED” in spray-can lettering over the home page. But then I get stuck into something like 13 For Halloween or the Winter of Discontent and I find myself having a good time with it, to the point where it wouldn’t matter if the blog only had one reader and that was my mum – although she’d probably bollock me for the language.

So, stats and comments notwithstanding, I’ll keep Agitation going while I still enjoy writing about film. And right now, I feel the best thing I can do is take a break for a couple of months until I’m suitably enthusiastic about it again.

In the meantime, I’d be happy to open Agitation to contributors. Any form, any style, any length. A list of your favourite movies and why you love them. The first film star you feel rapturously in love with and why they still beguile you. Your memories of movie-going: the picture palaces of your youth, be they arthouse or grindhouse. Or, y’know, just a straightforward review. Emails to slainte[at]inbox[dot]com.

The stage, my friends, is yours.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Hobo with a Shotgun

Come listen to the story of a hobo who turned sour,
Dude got no name but he’s played by Rutger Hauer,
Rode into town on a freight train belchin’ steam*
But life on the streets is where it’s really unclean.

In a town called Hope, where actually there’s none
And the sign’s been repainted so the name’s now Scum,
Our hobo hero dude who ain’t go no name
Goes beggin’ on the sidewalk for a handful of change.

Ragged and dirty, ignored and overlooked,
All our guy wants to do is scrape up fifty bucks
To a buy a lawnmower from a pawn shop downtown,
Do yard work for cash, try to turn his life around.

But the seedy town of Scum (used to be called Hope)
Is ruled with fear by this crazy psycho bloke
Who wears a white suit though his deeds are deadly dark
And his psycho sons who are chips off the block.**

Then our hero meets a girl – a blameless innocent
(Or so he believes; she turns tricks to pay the rent).
When white suit psycho’s son starts jonesing for her bad
Cue hobo as a shotgun-wielding surrogate dad.

In a town that’s lawless, that’s morally destitute,
Where a paedophile cruises dressed in Santa suit,
Where the cops are corrupt and robberies are rife,
Death is dirt cheap but the cheapest thing is life.

In a place where the only career choice is crime,
Our hero cleans up the town, one deadbeat at a time,
Each pitiful pederast, each misogynistic male,
A join-the-dots corpse-strewn spent cartridge trail.

It’s a crusade that puts white suit and sonny-boy on edge;
Their empire crumbling, they call in The Pledge.
At this point a movie that’s already kind of mental
Buys a first class ticket to What The Fuck Central.

The Pledge are two bikers full-on dressed in armour,
Either they’re inhuman or they personify karma;
They’ve bumped off bishops and slaughtered men of state,
They keep a kraken in the cellar, a pet they love to bait.

‘Hobo with a Shotgun’ is one weird fucked-up flick:
Half of it is funny and the other half’s plain sick.
Viewed through alcoholic fug or substances proscribed
It’s an out-and-out cult classic, a trash fan’s wild ride.

But watch the thing cold sober and, buddy, you will find
It will (to quote Cartman) warp your fragile little mind;
It’ll leave your brain scrambled and your senses desiccated
And maroon you at a certain blog whose content’s agitated.



*All right, it’s a diesel. But I’m writing this mo’ fo’ in verse so I claim poetic licence. 

**Epic fail on the rhyming in this stanza.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Lifeforce

It was a few months ago that I watched ‘Lifeforce’, already with a mind to writing it up for the Winter of Discontent. Reviewing my notes, I realise there’s no other way of engaging with the movie than to present, unedited and without contextualizing footnotes, the 500 words of appalled scribbling I produced during the two hours of this holy-fucking-awful excuse for a moving picture:

Five minutes in; first question: when Henry Mancini wrote the score, did he get really fucked up on peyote and hallucinate that he was Hindemith?

Okay, I can live with the shuttle being called the HMS Churchill, but does the alien planet have to look like a giant vulva?

So ... the alien planet: bats, a Nosferatu-like claw and naked chicks in crystal pods. And this was written by the same dude who scripted 'Alien'? Fuck my life!

“I’ve been in space for six months and she looks perfect to me.” No disrespect, bro, but a Tiffany album cover probably would after six months in zero g.

“Stand by for soft-dock.” Somehow I doubt this is a real astronautical term.

Somebody actually said: “Houston, we have a problem.” Please tell me this wasn’t scripted. Please tell me the actor was just taking the piss and it somehow made the final cut.

Interplanetary spaceflight is the norm and the ship’s log is recorded on BETAMAX???

“We were just talking about how to get it open and it popped open of its own accord.” They PAID someone to write this???

Mrs F has just called me “a pervert” for watching this film. It’s very difficult to mount a defence. 

The nudity-to-tedious-exposition ratio is so far swinging heavily in favour of tedious exposition.

Oooh, interesting. Naked alien DUDES. Being shot in phallocentric fashion by army guys. I do believe we’ve rendezvoused with a homoerotic subtext.

OMG! That is THE worst reanimated corpse in the history of cinema.

The hot-alien-brunette nudity to dead-leathery-person nudity ratio is also considerably out of whack.

For an exploitation movie based on the precept “hot naked alien chick wreaks havoc”, ‘Lifeforce’ sure as hell has some boring passages.

“How exactly did he die, Colonel?” “The life just drained out of him.” Yeah, same for the audience.

Jess Franco should have directed this. ‘Lifeforce’ is ‘Female Vampire’ is space, with Mathilda May standing in for Lina Romay.

Telepathy … Volvos … oh dear God in Heaven, Patrick Stewart’s in this POS. I am beginning to doubt my sanity.

Patrick Stewart is screaming fit to wake the dead. He must have got a look at the script.

In terms of production values, this can best be described as ‘Blake’s 7’ with boobs. Not that there have been any boobs for the last half hour. Tobe Hooper, you frickin’ owe me!

“Sterilization by thermonuclear device has been approved.” Whoa! Wait a minute! I work in healthcare and that goes waaaaayyy beyond sterilization. Like seriously, dudes.

15 minutes to go, London’s in the grip of a vampire/zombie invasion, the promised nudity has disappeared, and the level of cinematic craftsmanship on display is making your average Bruno Mattei quickie look like un film de Carl Dreyer.

Swords … bat creatures … columns of blue light. I just don’t have the words …

Peter Firth prevents Steve Railsback from getting it on with Mathilda May and THAT’S a happy ending? I must have missed something.

Rod Serling

It's not just Jesus's birthday today, it's Rod Serling's too. He would have been 88. Dude created 'The Twilight Zone', a show that plugged itself directly into my imagination and threw the switch. Here's to you, sir!

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Late Night Trains

I’d been told that Aldo Lado’s ‘Late Night Trains’ was a pretty damn nasty movie. I’d been told it was ugly, brutal, squalid and cynical. That it was cold, hard and unflinching. That it made for uneasy viewing. That I’d come away from it feeling battered and soiled. And I’m glad I was given those warnings. But I didn’t realize how truly sickening its most horrible, most repulsive moment would be: four entire minutes in which my sense of aesthetics was viciously and incessantly abused. I refer, of course, to the opening credits sequence which plays out to Demis Roussos singing ‘A Flower is All You Need’.

It’s one thing making a rape/revenge exploitation which lifts set-pieces and plot points wholesale from ‘Last House on the Left’ (which itself happily rips off Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Virgin Spring’); it’s quite another to assault the viewer with the tonsil-quivering falsetto of Demis fuckin’ Roussos. I call everyone involved a sick bastard of the highest order.

Of course, it’s easy to see what Lado’s up to in his use of ‘A Flower is All You Need’. It provides, at first, a mawkish accompaniment to scenes of shoppers making their purchases at a German Christmas market. And not a chintzy false one like we have in Nottingham every year. This is the real deal, since the film opens in Germany. During this montage we catch our first glimpse of our soon-to-be-very-beleaguered heroines Margaret (Irene Miracle) and Lisa (Laura D’Angelo), as well as a rather aloof middle-class blonde woman, who gets no appellation, in the film itself or the end credits, beyond The Lady on the Train (Macha Meril). We also get introduced to Blackie (Flavio Bucci) – so called for the colour of his hair – and Curly (Gianfranco Di Grassi) – also monikered for follicle-inspired reasons – who, it is swiftly revealed, are a pair of unlikeable thugs. Their first act? Beating up a stallholder dressed as Santa for a few lousy coins. Their second? Taking a knife to a rich woman’s fur coat. It’s at this point that Demis fuckin’ Rossous’s wailings cease being mawkish accompaniment and instead get pressganged into ironic counterpoint duties.

It’s from the fur-coated slicing incident that Blackie and Curly, pursued by the authorities, flee into a station and jump on a train just as it’s pulling out. The same train, as if none of us saw this one coming, that Margaret and Lisa are travelling on. They’re going to Verona to spend Christmas with Lisa’s well-to-do father, Professor Guilio Stradi (Enrico Maria Salerno), a consultant at a metropolitan hospital), and step-mother Laura (Marina Berti). Once onboard, Blackie encounters The Lady on the Train (hereafter TLotT), promptly sexually assaulting her. She responds to the rough treatment and is soon manipulating Blackie and Curly as they menace and inevitably assault the two girls.

Actually, scratch that; the word “soon” has no business in that last sentence. ‘Late Night Trains’ boasts the slowest first half in the history of exploitation cinema. There are endless vignettes sketching in the other passengers on the train – including a delegation from the Catholic church, and a compartment full of ex-Nazis – the end result being that the train is so overcrowded that Lado and his four screenwriters contrive to have Margaret and Lisa, Blackie and Curly, and TLotT change trains (this second one, by contrast, is almost deserted) just so the nasty stuff can take place without interruption. Also during these long, narratively encumbered 40 minutes or so, we’re treated to one of the least realistic operations ever performed on film (it basically consists of Stradi slicing into a piece of foam rubber while saying, more or less, “Scalpel … swab … keep swabbing … okay, we done”); Stradi talking about society’s problems during a hoity-toity dinner party and identifying himself as a peace-loving liberal; and Margaret and Lisa endlessly giggling about boys, the former having done the deed with a spotty fellow student while Lisa remains uninitiated into the global cult of snu-snu.

These moments are so unsubtle that Lado might as well have got the writers to stand in background holding up placards reading “HE’S A DOCTOR, THAT MEANS HE’S SWORN TO PROTECT LIFE, BUT LET’S SEE HOW LONG THAT LASTS WHEN HIS DAUGHTER GETS VIOLATED AND KILLED … IRONY, HUH?” and “SHE’S A VIRGIN. LIKE ‘THE VIRGIN SPRING’. DO YOU SEE WHAT WE DID THERE?” On the subject of the multiplicity of contributors to the screenplay, I’m not sure what depresses me the most – the fact that it took four people to rip off ‘Last House on the Left’, or that anyone wanted to rip off ‘Last House on the Left’ in the first place.

Lado ups the ante during the protracted middle section, though. The manipulation of lower class Blackie and Curly (muscle; no brains) by middle-class TLotT (elegant, seductive; amoral) contrasts effectively with the opulent but empty Christmas celebrations hosted by Stradi and his trophy girlfriend (tellingly, Guilio and Laura are on the precipice of a relationship-destroying argument when their guests arrive and things settle back into a brittle status quo). There’s a conceptually horrible and utterly unexpected payoff to the Blackie and Curly/Margaret and Lisa dynamic, and Lado conjures a shot of a corpse being hurled off a railway bridge that somehow achieves a weird visual poetry.

So: from dull as ditchwater to brutally effective … only for things to go south in the finale. This, folks, is the section in which the scripters might as well have turned up with another placard, this one reading “È L’ULTIMA CASA A SINISTRA … MA CON UN TRENO DEL CAZZO, VA BENE?” For this is, indeed, ‘The Last House on the Left’ … but with a fucking train, all right?

Trundling as I am towards the 1,000 word mark, I won’t belabour the suspension-of-disbelief-severing circumstances that land the killers at chez Stradi, or the unrealistic means by which relatives receive the bad news (because, yeah, you’d hear the victim’s name on the radio before the police had even commenced an investigation), or the utterly pointless scene, on Christmas morning, where a witness makes an anonymous tip off from a petrol station at which a truck driver is filling up. (Where the fuck is a truck driver delivering to on Christmas morning? Does Santa subcontract on the continent?) Suffice it to say that the last twenty minutes steer unambiguously into distraught-(formerly-peace-loving)-relatives-go-apeshit territory.

It’s to the detriment of ‘Late Night Trains’ that Lado and co. draw so slavishly on ‘Last House on the Left’. With its attempt at a genuine social commentary (class differences and exploitation), and its unsubtle but effective shifts between the girls’ ordeal on the train and the facile artifice of Christmas at the Stradis’, Lado’s film is certainly a more effective outing than Craven’s notorious-but-actually-not-very-good shocker. Wasn’t it Stephen King who described the film as “Abbott and Costello meet the rapists”? ‘Late Night Trains’ wants to be a much better film, wants to instigate social, political and ideological debate. But it homages, evokes and outright copies an inferior piece of work in frame after frame to the point where you wish it had simply done its own thing with the material.

‘Late Night Trains’, frustratingly, could have been so much more. More focused, more intelligent, more provocative. Nastier.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Inglorious Bastards

It was probably just as well for Quentin Tarantino that some enterprising distributor decided that Enzo G. Castellari’s ‘Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato’ would clean up in the English-speaking territories if it was retitled ‘Inglorious Bastards’. Somehow, Tarantino’s epic wouldn’t have benefited from borrowing the title ‘That Damned Armoured Train’. For a start, there’s no train in the Tarantino film.

There’s most definitely a train in Castellari’s warsploitation opus. And it’s most definitely armoured. Damned? Given the amount of people who are shot, stabbed or blown up on or around it, that’s pretty much a definite as well. There’s no accusing ‘Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato’ of not delivering on its title.

Although it was made eleven years after ‘The Dirty Dozen’ – a rare example of an Italian exploitation director taking his sweet time in jumping on a bandwagon – Robert Aldrich’s cynical classic is unequivocally the primary source of inspiration in a film that also happily pilfers from John Frankenheimer’s ‘The Train’, John Sturges’s ‘The Great Escape’ and, uh, Umberto Lenzi’s ‘Battle of the Commandos’.

If ‘The Dirty Dozen’ is basically bunch-of-crims-cajoled-into-a-suicide-mission, then ‘Inglorious Bastards’ (I’ll stick with the English title for purposes of this review, though I much prefer ‘Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato’) is bunch-of-deserters-compromised-into-accepted-suicide-mission. How they become compromised, with only a moderate spoiler along the way, is like this:

It’s 1944 in the Ardennes and a truck containing a dozen or so military prisoners leaves an American base under the command of a prissy sergeant played by John Loffredo who’s not important enough to have a name. He’s got a moustache that’s trimmed to within an inch of its life and a side parting you could use as a slide-rule, so let’s call him Sgt Wellgroomed. The truck sets off but a blow-out strands them out in the open and easy pickings for a passing German fighter plane. Sgt Wellgroomed and his fellow guards pile out and take cover, ordering the prisoners to remain in the truck. Some are killed when the fighter strafes them, others when they pile out of the truck and Sgt Wellgroomed opens fire on them. Once the attack is over and a righteously indignant Private Fred Canfield (Fred Williamson) has throttled Sgt Wellgroomed, the numbers have been reduced to five: the aforementioned Canfield, Lt Robert Yeager (Bo Svenson), and three others who, to the best of my recollection, are only outfitted with forenames: wisecracking asshole Tony (Peter Hooten), thief and forger Nick (Michael Pergolani) and the youthful and perpetually terrified Berle (Jackie Basehart). Together, under the nominal leadership of Yaeger, they decide to take their chances crossing Nazi-occupied territory in the direction of the Swiss border. Meeting up with a fellow deserter – if from the opposite side – Adolf Sachs (Raimund Harmstorf), he briefly becomes part of their merry band even if Tony doesn’t trust him. Mind you, Tony doesn’t much like Fred either on account of him being black. So really Tony’s an asshole is what it all comes down to. Anyway, with Adolf tagging along they have various adventures and narrow escapes until a misunderstanding of brobdingnagian proportions results in a firefight with a group of American commandos disguised as Germans en route to a rendezvous with their French Resistance contacts. Net result: dead commandos, extremely pissed off commanding officer Colonel Tom Buckner (Ian Bannen), and a Resistance cell still in need of assistance to accomplish one of those archetypal could-change-the-course-of-the-war missions.

Said mission involves a train. An armoured one.

Which is where we came in. 

Enzo G. Castellari is one of the minor poets of trash cinema (his second division giallo ‘Cold Eyes of Fear’ has already been part of the Winter of Discontent); by the time he directed ‘Inglorious Bastards’, had chalked up spaghetti western classic ‘Keoma: The Violent Breed’ (another title that’s more than justified by the content) and the cracking crime thriller ‘The Heroin Busters’. Later, he’d helm the ‘Bronx Warriors’ trilogy, a mash-up of John Carpenter’s ‘Escape from New York’ and the expected tropes of the post-apocalypse subgenre that became its own epic saga. Castellari knows what makes genre cinema work: pace, story and incident. Plenty of it. 

Barely ten minutes goes by without an explosion, an exchange of gunfire or a hair’s breadth escape. Exposition is slotted in as and when. There’s a hint of character dynamics, but not so much that it would slow things down. Castellari keeps the pedal to the metal – or, this being a movie prominently featuring a train, the firebox stoked and the regulator wide open – and gives the B-movie audience what they want: dangerous guys armed to the teeth cutting a swathe through the Hun, a perilous mission with no guarantee of survival and a token scene of nudity just so no-one can complain that the flick didn’t tick all of the boxes.

‘Inglorious Bastards’ gives us a terrific action movie cast (seriously, when Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson get tooled up you just know it’s know it’s going to be spent cartridges a-go-go) with the unexpected inclusion of Bannen giving things a bit of class. But only a bit, mind. ‘Inglorious Bastards’ doesn’t want to be an actor’s movie; it just wants to entertain you. And it certainly fulfils its remit. You’ll cheer through your beer and popcorn when that model railway blows up at the end.

The eye candy at the end of the world

Just in case the Mayans got it right, this is The Agitation of the Mind signing off in the company of 13 favourite femmes fatale. It's been a pleasure.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Cold Eyes of Fear

The phrase “London-set giallo” conjures some classics of the genre. Sergio Martino’s ‘All the Colours of the Dark’, Lucio Fulci’s ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ and Massimo Dallamano’s ‘What Have You Done to Solange?’ spring immediately to mind, not to mention the latter half of Luciano Ercoli’s ‘Death Walks in High Heels’.

Enzo G. Castellari’s ‘Cold Eyes of Fear’ is set in London. And it’s kind of a giallo. That’s about all.

The opening credits sequence has a car driving through a foggy London during the evening. There is scant regard for geography, but I’m not holding that against the film. ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ is a bona fide giallo classic and it has the Old Bailey across on the opposite side of the road to the Royal Albert Hall, so fuck the map.

We then immediately leap into obvious genre territory as a sexy blonde (Karin Schubert) is menaced by a man wielding a knife. Castellari spins the scene out for all its worth, and the sexualized threat of violence is about as politically incorrect as it gets. Cue the rug pull: this is just a performance piece in a sleazy club.

In the audience: Peter Flower (Gianni Garko), a solicitor with a taste for the lowbrow, and Anna (Giovanna Ralli), the original good-time girl had by all. They click, this mismatched pair, and Peter decides to “borrow” his uncle’s palatial house for the evening. The uncle (Fernando Rey) – a high court judge trying a big case, won’t be home till the early hours and a phone call is all it takes to persuade his butler Hawkins (Leonardo Scavino) to absent himself for the night. Only things don’t go according to plan and instead of getting his end away, Peter finds himself at the less than tender mercies of sexually ambiguous thug Quill (Julian Mateos). Then Arthur (Frank Wolff) joins the party and ulterior motives come to the surface.

‘Cold Eyes of Fear’ quickly segues from giallo to home invasion exploitationer, and gradually to political thriller. A third act debate on corruption in high places, the inviolate status of the upper classes and their manipulation of less privileged members of the social hierarchy takes things into interesting territory, albeit with a heavy reliance on cack-handed surrealism.

Castellari keeps things tense, directing with enough energy to distract from the script’s inherent staginess (with the exception of only a handful of exteriors, things delineate between the house and Peter’s uncle’s office). Exposition is trickled out sparingly and for much of the running time there’s a genuine mystery about Quill and Arthur’s objectives. The dynamics between hostages and villains shift in a variety of ways, with Anna proving the wild card. The Arthur/Peter antagonism is slow burn.

Where things fall down is in the filmmakers’ absolute rejection of continuity. ‘Cold Eyes of Fear’ plays out over a single night; the exact timeframe is ambiguous but I reckoned it as roughly early evening till about midnight. Shots vary between twilight, full dark and broad daylight, with weather conditions alternating between a pea-souper fog and cloudless night sky. Lighting levels in the house vacillate from soft and diffuse to harshly lit. A scene where a blown fuse renders everything pitch black, characters stumbling around and disoriented, forgets that there’s a blazing log fire and moonlight streaming through the windows. Moreover, various arrivals at the house necessitate the ornate wrought-iron gates at the end of the driveway repeatedly opening and closing themselves during the course of the night.

Continuity flubs happen in even the best produced movies (‘Goodfellas’ has more than its fair share) and often slip by unnoticed. In ‘Cold Eyes of Fear’, errors dance a conga-line across the screen, announcing themselves shamelessly. Already flawed, the movie doesn’t have any favours done for it by the Redemption DVD print that I watched; it looks like someone recorded it off the TV on a camera phone, while the soundtrack crackles and hisses like an old gramophone record.

Still, clocking in at less than an hour and a half, it doesn’t overstay its welcome; Castellari achieves a real sense of the unexpected as the narrative twists and turns its way towards the denouement; and Rey and Wolff – who died in his early forties just a couple of years after making this film – provide a welcome degree of gravitas.

London-set: yes. Giallo: partially. Exploitation status: minor league. ’Nuff said.