13 FOR HALLOWEEN #4: Blood: the Last Vampire

Chris Nahon’s visceral pop art opus sets itself the challenge of melding a ‘Kwaidan’-style backstory of a peaceful villager’s transformation into a vampire hunter with a 1970s set main plot that mixes tradition, militarism and a Japanese/American culture clash melee of frenetic and hyper-stylized action.

Wait a minute, what the fuck am I talking about? ‘Blood: the Last Vampire’ is a hopeless bit of nonsense about a hot Japanese girl in a sailor suit who despatches vampires with a bloody big sword.

Or, only slightly expanded from the above synopsis, ‘Blood: the Last Vampire’ is about Saya (Gianna Jun), a three-hundred year old vampire killer (the longevity is due to the fact that she’s a vampire herself) who looks like she’s still in high school. Which is the perfect cover for her handler Michael Harrison (Liam Cunningham) to send her to a military academy on a US base in Toyko in the early 70s. Here she joins forces with the base commander’s rebellious daughter Alice (Allison Miller) while the shadowy organisation she works for – the Council – tears itself apart in a miasma of intrigue and treachery. Meanwhile, Saya’s centuries old nemesis, a demon named Onigen, waits in the wings.

The plot is at once stupidly simple and nonsensically overcomplicated, with the machinations of the Council ramped up to almost court-of-the-Borgias intensity for no other reason than to effect a Saya-goes-on-the-run plot point. The stakes are either world-shatteringly important or non-existent, depending on what scene you’re watching and how many proscribed substances you imbibed prior to watching the film.

What it all boils down to, though, is the entertainment value in watching a schoolgirl with a sword take down legions of the undead. Yet even with so basic an aesthetic driving it, ‘Blood: the Last Vampire’ falters. Jun certainly looks the part and she has a thousand yard stare that could make the entire cast of ‘Sons of Anarchy’ think twice about it, but her facility in the action sequences is painfully limited, and the more extended an intricate the action gets, the more desperate the editing techniques to disguise it. There’s so much of that speed-up-slow-down-speed-up nonsense that you’d swear you were watching a Guy Ritchie film on crack. Elsewhere, a scene where Onigen morphs from human form to demon and leads Saya on a rain-swept roof chase, the latter crashing through neon signs in pursuit, should have been edge-of-the-seat awesome … except that the neon sign looks like it was done in crayon by a five-year-old with no hand-eye co-ordination and Onigen resembles nothing more than a morbidly deformed wine gum.

The 1970s setting is completely arbitrary, the period evocation never convinces and the music cues are all over the place. A title card telling us we’re on an American base in 1970 is immediately superseded by a shot of some kids grooving in a corridor to Chuck Berry’s ‘You Never Can Tell’ (a big hit in 1964 that didn’t enter the charts again until Emmylou Harris covered it in 1978). The performances are uniformly turgid with even, sad to say, Liam Cunningham phoning it in. The action, as noted above, is ruined by the way it’s edited, and the gouts of CGI blood which accompany every swing of Saya’s sword look less like blood than pencilled-in motion capture of a carton of Ribena exploding.

All in all, it’s utterly dreadful, but dreadful in a way that’s strangely compelling. It’s a car-crash of a movie – mangled, broken, almost unrecognisable as an example of the form. You know you should show some common decency and look away but … you … just … can’t.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #3: Scream, Blacula, Scream

Whereas ‘Blacula’ is a surprisingly faithful, if not adaptation, then reconsideration of Bram Stoker’s novel, ‘Scream, Blacula, Scream’ jettisons any connection with the source material. And the result is a mixed bag. 

With cursed nobleman and reluctant bloodsucker Mamuwalde (William Marshall) decomposing at the end of the first film courtesy of a self-inflicted vampire/sunlight interface, director Bob Kelljan and no less than three scripters turn to voodoo to resurrect him. The film begins with a dying voodoo matriarch choosing diligent apprentice Lisa (Pam Grier) as her successor over her hot-tempered son Willis (Richard Lawson). Willis responds by acquiring Mamuwalde’s bones, intent on conjuring the vampire as a servant who will do his bidding and help secure what he sees as his rightful heritage. Predictably, this plan goes tits up and it’s Willis who finds himself in servitude to Mamuwalde.

In short order, Mamuwalde puts together a small army of the undead, attends a swinging party hosted by ex-cop and antiques collector Carter (John Mitchell) and meets Lisa. Looking at some African pieces that Carter is curating for a university, Mamuwalde recognises some jewellery that belonged to his long-dead wife Nuva. As with the first film, it is Mamuwalde’s romantic nostalgia for his lost love that humanises him but instead of seeking a surrogate, here he enlists Lisa’s help to lift the curse.

However, nothing in life (or in blaxploitation/horror crossovers) goes to plan, and Carter’s still-on-the-force colleague Lieutenant Dunlop (Michael Conrad) finds himself investigating several suspicious deaths, all with the same MO: puncture marks on the skin, and complete exsanguination. Misreading the face-palmingly obvious clues, he correlates the puncture marks with snakebites and snakes with voodoo and lays a strip for Willis’s pad. And thus the race against time for Lisa to complete the ritual before Dunlop and his boys lay siege.

Except that “race against time” suggests an urgency that ‘Scream, Blacula, Scream’ just doesn’t have. The rivalry for the heirdom of the voodoo clan establishes tension in the pre-credits scene, but Mamuwalde’s immediate dominance of Willis curtails that particular plot thread. Dunlop’s investigation, which counterpoints the main story, is so plodding and shambolic he makes Columbo look like Dirty Harry. And as for said main plot - Mamuwalde’s courtship of Lisa to release him from his curse – there is little dramatic or romantic dynamic in play. Consequently, much of the film consists of unconnected scenes lurching disjointedly towards a fairly small-scale denouement.

On the plus side, Marshall is every bit as commanding as he was in the original and his contemptuous disposal of a couple of jive-ass pimps is a moment to savour. Grier, too, is always worth watching, even though the script gives her a grand total of two pro-active moments, neither of which happen till the last ten minutes. The absolute best element of film, though, is the way it filters voodoo through vampire mythology and manages to play what is frankly a bonkers conceit with utter straight-faced bravado.

‘Scream, Blacula, Scream’ is to be applauded for not simply repeating its predecessor’s one-off concept of taking a timeless classic and putting a specific cultural spin on it; for instead striving towards a narrative and a direction that an entirely its own. Even if it doesn’t quite hold together as tightly ‘Blacula’, it gathers up a small collection of interesting ideas and runs pell-mell with them, even if some of them get dropped along the way.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #2: Blacula

Blending the horror and blaxploitation genres, and saddled with a title that seems to promise dumbass spoofery plus VAT, William Crain’s ‘Blacula’ actually emerges as a thoughtful and surprisingly faithful transportation of Stoker’s original from 1780s Transylavania to 1970s Los Angeles. Indeed, Crain opens his film at Castle Dracula in the last years of the eighteenth century as the aristocratic Mamuwalde (William Marshall) and his wife Luva (Vonetta McGee) petition Count Dracula (Charles Macaulay) to support their campaign against slavery. Dracula quickly shows his true colours (dude’s all for enslavement and subjugation) and punishes his guests for their liberal agenda by turning Mamuwalde into a vampire only to lock him in a coffin to deny him his bloodlust, and locking Luva in a crypt with said sealed sarcophagus until she expires of natural causes.

So far so cynical. Not a hint of comedy or satire. The animated opening credits sequence suggests otherwise, however, and some low-brow humour threads its way through the next sequence as the narrative jumps forward two centuries and a pair of camp antiques dealers visit Castle Dracula, on the market following a downturn in the estate’s fortunes, and cart off everything they can get their hands on, including the still-padlocked coffin containing the undead Mamuwalde. As soon as the action shifts to American soil, though, a more sombre tone predominates. Mamuwalde, seemingly nonplussed by the passage of two hundred years and entirely at home in streets bathed in neon and bustling with automotive transport to a soundtrack of R&B, swiftly notches up his first few victims.

The LAPD demonstrate a lack of concern at the pile-up of bodies, largely on account of their ethnicity. So it’s left to socially motivated coroner Dr Thomas (Thalmus Rasulala) to make the connections – exsanguination; bite marks; corpses mysteriously disappearing from morgues – and try to cajole jaded homicide dick Lt Peters (Gordon Pinsent) into taking the case more seriously. But things are about to get closer to home than Thomas imagined when his wife Michelle (Denise Nicholas)’s younger sister Tina (McGee again), the spitting image of the long-dead Nuva, attracts Mamuwalde’s attention.

‘Blacula’ boasts a brisk narrative that unfolds as both a gothic romance (the undead nobleman’s grand quest for his lost love) and a police procedural (Thomas – the film’s Helsing stand-in – and Peters working together to track down the vampire). Crain flips between the two strands with ease, maintaining both tension and a shadowy sense of inevitability. Although the script hardly gifts anyone with memorable dialogue, and the performances are generally adequate to the material and no more than that, ‘Blacula’ benefits immeasurably from its two leads. Marshall brings a dignity and gravitas to Mamuwalde that I really wasn’t expecting in a film with such a bad pun as a title (it says something that, apart from Dracula’s pre-credits curse on him, the character is steadfastly referred to as Mamuwalde throughout; the name “Blacula” is spoken maybe twice). Rasulala, too, has immense screen presence and grittily stripped down acting style reminiscent of Clint Eastwood. The ladies of the cast fare less well, but that’s more to do with underdeveloped roles. McGee is a sympathetic presence and Nicholas, in her debut film appearance, makes an impression.

The balance between Mamuwalde as tragic figure and Mamuwalde as dangerous villain is the fulcrum on which the success of the film depends – and Crain as director and Marshall as performer achieve the balancing act with aplomb. The subterranean finale creates an extraordinary dynamic between these aspects of the character, leading to a final scene that’s iconic and poignant and maybe even a tad Nietzschean.

‘Blacula’ had been on my radar for a while without my actually knowing much about the film. I approached it expecting B-movie tomfoolery and came away impressed by a thoughtful and entertaining piece of craftsmanship.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #1: Apollo 18

The found footage genre has one essential flaw. I don’t know if there’s a collective or cultural description for it, but let’s go ahead and make one. Let’s call it Just Drop The Fucking Camera And Run You Doofus Syndrome.

Prime example of JDTCARYDS: ‘Cloverfield’. Big monster stomps all over hipster party – drop the camera and run, you doofus. Guy touting camera sees girl he likes in a state of emotional distress – drop the camera and go be a gentleman, you doofus. Guy touting camera happily goes strolling through military installation – not one rifle butt to the head or instruction to drop the camera ensues.

All damn found footage movies suffer from JDTCARYDS, even when it’s popped on a tripod and left to record ghostly goings-on overnight, a la ‘Paranormal Activity’, although in this example it’s more a case of Just Quit With The Home Movies And Go Sleep In Another Room You Doofus Syndrome.

All damn found footage movies … except one. Because how about if the camera was built into your spacesuit and you were running anyway?

Ladies and gentlemen, ‘Apollo 18’. Granted, it has a concept that sounds like barrel-scraping of highest (or should that be lowest?) order: hey guys, no-one’s made a found-footage movie in space yet! How cheap can we build an egg-carton lunar module? But at a taut 84 minutes and boasting a genuinely imaginative approach to the sub-genre, it emerges as a claustrophobically tense piece of work.

Writer Brian Miller and director Gonzalo López-Gallego get things right from the outset by wearing their influences like badges of honour: this ain’t ‘Blair Witch’ in space; this taps into a more primal and visceral stratum of fear. ‘Apollo 18’ is about isolation, about claustrophobia, about not knowing who to trust, about the terrifying realisation that there will be no rescue party, no escape route, no-one to help you. ‘Apollo 18’ taps into the same strand of horror that informed ‘Alien’ and ‘The Thing’, and it’s clear that the creative team behind it knew exactly what they were doing.

The film starts in typical found footage style with a seemingly disconnected stringing-together of grainy clips: the astronauts in training for their mission, to-camera vox-pops, home movie footage of families and barbecues. What’s impressive is how quickly small scraps of information cohere into subtle characterisation. Likewise, standard mockumentary tropes suddenly give way to a fully-formed narrative where the stakes are about as high as they get. Miller and López-Gallego sneak things up on the viewer with such legerdemain and Swiss-watch precision that ‘Apollo 18’ is a joy to watch even while it’s scaring the crap out of you. (Although it would be remiss of me, as a reviewer, not to mention that the plot lurches into some pretty melodramatic territory for no other reason than to set up a rather needless twist.)

That said, because of how cleverly and subtly it’s done, I’m loathe to discuss the mechanics of plot. There are some movies you just don’t want to spoil, even moderately, for the viewer who hasn’t yet acquainted themself. Let’s just say that ‘Apollo 18’ plays its hand simply by having an object in the corner of the screen – an object that shouldn’t have any business with mobility – moving very slightly for a fraction of a second. It should be silly; it’s actually terrifying. The film quickly seals the deal with a set-piece involving the descent into a crevasse – the whole thing lit by intermittent flashes of light – that becomes a symphony of half-glimpsed horrors.

From just south of its halfway mark onwards, ‘Apollo 18’ starts ratcheting up the tension and doesn’t give its characters a moment to draw breath until the grimly inevitable denouement. It does a similar job on the audience.

Bigger, better, more! Shorter, fewer, less!

It’s been barren on Agitation recently, but this time I have a bona fide excuse. A couple of weeks ago I suffered a flare-up of an impinged nerve that I had treated earlier this year. It affected my right shoulder, arm and hand. Painkillers had minimal effect. Fortunately, I had an “open appointment” with the physiotherapist. The pain reached its worst over the weekend and I’ve barely slept in the last 72 hours as a result. Formulating thoughts in order to structure a film review seemed like Sisyphus getting the boulder to the top of the mountain. Typing wasn’t an option. Even now, having seen the physio earlier today and commenced a treatment plan, I’m typing this hunt-and-peck stylee and it’s damned bloody frustrating!

I had two 13 For Halloween reviews in the bag before the flare-up and these will appear in the next few days. Thereafter, 13 For Halloween will continue as planned (my friend and fellow horror fanatic Debbie cherrypicked her DVD collection to provide me with some cracking material) but reviews will be shorter than usual while physio continues. Much as 13 For Halloween and the Winter of Discontent are my favourite seasons on the blog, getting myself back in shape and pain-free takes precedence.

Matewan

(after the film by John Sayles)

“Welcome to Matewan. This here’s

a company town, and the company

is your benefactor and your god,

your pious mother and stern father.

Boys, think of yourselves as tools,

implements for the extraction of coal.

“We pay ninety cents per ton of coal,

but listen up: your train ride here,

your housing and clothing and tools –

them’s a debt you owe the company:

honour it like you honour your father,

pay it from your first wages, by God!

“There’s a meeting house for God

and prayer. But hear me, boys: coal’s

your cathedral, coal’s Your Father

who art in the mine, ninety cents, here

in the darkness as it is in the company,

ours is the profit and thou art the tools.”

You son of a bitch! Men ain’t tools,

doesn’t matter if they’re lost to God

or chosen to sit in His company

come the day this dark pit of coal

and all the corruption that’s here

on earth is the fuel for Our Father’s

prophecy: the last shall be first. Father,

deliver us. That, or give us the tools

to do the job ourselves: now, here,

in the face of men whose only god

is the ledger book written in coal-

black ink and tallied by the company

accountant. Deliver us from company

enforcers with clubs and guns. Father,

deliver us from the price of coal.

Or shelve forgiveness, give us the tools

and look away. In some places God

and man work differently. Like here,

in this company town. Down tools.

stand with father and brother. God’s

absent where coal is. In Matewan. Here. 

(This sestina was inspired by John Sayles's film. The stanzas in quotation marks are not verbatim from the movie, but my re-imagining of the voice of the company man who, in an early scene, "welcomes" a new workforce to Matewan and informs them in no uncertain terms that they're pretty much owned by the company.) 

Kathleen Ferrier: An Ordinary Diva

In a career that lasted just fifteen meteoric years, Kathleen Ferrier went from prize-winning amateur at the Carlisle Festival to giving the definitive performance of Gluck’s ‘Orfeo ed Euridice’ at Covent Garden under Sir John Barbirolli, by way of still-unsurpassed professional relationships with Benjamin Britten (her Glyndebourne debut was in his just-written ‘The Rape of Lucretia’), Sir Adrian Boult and Bruno Walter. Ferrier’s recording with Walter of Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ is not only the most moving performance of the piece you’ll ever hear, but kickstarted a revival of interest in the composer following the blacklisting of his work under the Nazi regime. (Ferrier’s New York performances of Mahler with Walter and the New York Philharmonic were attended by Alma Mahler, the composer’s widow.)

Suzanne Phillips’s documentary, produced by the BBC under Lottery funding, keys into the importance of Ferrier’s discography, the sheer comet-like intensity of her career (in one single month, she gave 17 performances of Handel’s ‘Messiah’ – 17 performances of a taxing three hour oratorio in one freaking month), and the calibre of the conductors and orchestras she worked with; but the focus is always on Kathleen Ferrier as a person. And what an amazing, unpretentious, warm-hearted person! Drawing deeply on Ferrier’s correspondence – to friends and family she wrote witty, vivacious and conversational letters which she invariably signed “Kaff” – ‘An Ordinary Diva’ embraces its subject’s inherent likeability.

Indeed, there are times when the documentary almost seems like a puff piece. No-one has a bad word to say about her, and there’s almost a sense of a guilty secret finally breaking ground when soprano Adele Leigh recalls that Ferrier enjoyed reciting risqué limericks. Elsewhere, a letter dating from her 1947 collaboration with Fritz Stiedry (a conductor who is now almost forgotten) records that she recuperated from his bullish behaviour in rehearsals by taking herself off to the pub for “a dirty great pint”. This alone, even I wasn’t already in love with her recordings, makes me wish I could avail myself of a time machine, bugger off back to the late ’40s and sink a couple of pints with Ferrier. Put simply, she comes across as bloody good company.

Ferrier’s Amsterdam appearances in late 1946 marked the first time she travelled abroad and her letters capture the wide-eyed delight of the first-time tourist (albeit tempered by the working-class pragmatism of her Lancastrian upbringing). Her first concert appearance drew a small audience. A radio broadcast and a review so incandescent with praise that it made the front page of a Dutch newspaper turned the tide and successive performances sold out. Ferrier’s incursion into America was similarly bittersweet: the first tour saw her footing her own accommodation and expenses and ending up in debt as a result; next time round, she dictated terms and pocketed the proceeds instead of haemorrhaging them.

Add to the globetrotting (a seriously big deal for an English artiste in the first decade after the end of the war) a massively popular series of recordings on the Decca label and Ferrier looked set to conquer the world. Fate stepped in to dictate otherwise. In 1951, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. A mastectomy and chemotherapy (then called “radiation therapy”) seemed to keep the disease in check and Ferrier continued touring and recording. Secondary cancer proved terminal, however, with the cells moving to the bones. Under a sentence of death, Ferrier fought to complete two career-defining achievements. The first was a recording, with Walter, of ‘Das Lied von der Erde’. A beautifully understated archive interview with Ferrier’s personal assistant yields a telling memory: Ferrier, Walter and a few others listened to the master tape playback for the first time. As the last note faded, there was absolute silence. Then Ferrier turned to Walter and asked, “Was I all right, love?” That was the part of the documentary where I broke down and cried.

The second, her remission worsening, was ‘Orfeo’ – full staged performance – at Covent Garden. During the second night, her femur broke rendering her immobile on stage (and it can only be imagined in what degree of pain). Her supporting cast, including Leigh, tailored their performances to disguise her suffering and Ferrier insisted on a curtain call before being carried to a waiting ambulance. This is something worth remembering next time you watch a football match and some ponce-haired nobody plays to the gallery, clutching his leg and wailing after a tackle. Kathleen Ferrier was harder than your average professional sportsman.

Ferrier was only 41 when she died in her sleep. Ten years earlier and her career might have missed the golden age of recorded classical music. Ten years later and enough archive footage might have existed to render ‘An Ordinary Diva’ twice or three times its length. But speculation is pointless. The fact is, Kathleen Ferrier was taken from us on 8 October 1953. Her legacy is impossible to overstate. If anyone with even the vaguest interest in the repertoire can listen to her Mahler and remain dry-eyed, they’re possibly sociopathic. Decca have honoured her recordings and kept them in the catalogue. The 10-disc box set released to mark the fiftieth anniversary of her passing was a thing of beauty. Suzanne Phillips’s documentary – narrated by Robert Lindsay and with her letters read by Patricia Routledge – was not only timely but gave us the woman at the heart of the artist; the human being who embodied the passion.

Pride (in the name of mediocrity)

During 1984 and 1985, the LGBT community – marginalised, ill-represented by the media, and denied their basic human rights by the Thatcher regime – demonstrated a remarkable socio-political stance and display of solidarity with the striking miners. They marched, they raised funds, and they battled a two-pronged assault by middle England: against homophobia, and against the anti-strike, anti-union fervour drummed up by the government and perpetuated by a media in the government’s pocket.

 Plus ça motherfucking change, huh?

Early in Matthew Warchus’s film, Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer) points up the parallels as he rallies a group of militant protestors who centre around a gay and lesbian bookshop in London: both groups are hated by the Tory party, the police and a brainwashed society who belief what a biased media tell them. “The only problem we’ve got that they don’t is Mary Whitehouse,” he concludes. It’s a decent line and it got a good laugh at the screening I attended this afternoon. And that’s one of the problems. Stephen Beresford’s script is full of moments like this. Yeah, he makes a point. But in a throwaway manner. Too much of ‘Pride’ is reductive: a jokey line here, a cutesy moment there, a snippet of archive footage to remind us that all of this really happened.

IMDb bills ‘Pride’ as “comedy / drama / history”. The drama takes a back seat to the fuzzy feelgood moments and the zippy lines. History doesn’t seem to feature at all. ‘Pride’ reminded me a lot of ‘Made in Dagenham’: both are based on true stories, both are set in a very specific period of the recent past, and neither convinced, aesthetically, as period pieces. Whereas, say, ‘The Damned United’ utilizes cinematography and production design that conjures a convincing and evocation recreation of the 70s, ‘Made in Dagenham’ and ‘Pride’ just look like a bunch of people wearing more or less the fashions of the day filmed in bland BBC ‘Play for Today’ style against locations that haven’t even been set-dressed.

The bits of archive material that ‘Pride’ drops in – most notably the shocking image of Lesley Boulton in the split-second before she was clubbed by a mounted police officer at Orgreave – only serve to point up what the film is missing. There is no real sense of oppression by government; or of divided communities; or of hunger, deprivation and desperation; or of police brutality; or of … well … striking. In a film that clocks in at damn near two hours, there’s but one scene of picketing and it’s over in seconds.

The importance of the story told by ‘Pride’ is impossible to overestimate. Even after the strike ended, a massive contingent of Welsh miners arrived at the 1985 gay pride event, NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) banners aloft, and led the march in a show of solidarity. Subsequently, the Labour party moved to enshrined LGBT rights in its constitution, the motion powered through by block vote from the NUM. Additionally, women who had previously experienced little outside of their traditional roles as wives and mothers suddenly found themselves organising, fundraising, protesting, forming support groups, speaking to the media, addressing rallies, finding their voices and speaking out against Thatcher’s government. It’s a tragedy that Thatcher essentially betrayed her gender politically, but the immediate and damning response by a generation of working class women spoke for itself.

The miners’ strike remains a reactionary, searing and viscerally dramatic moment in British social, economic and politic history. And yet the great British movie on the strike still hasn’t been made. American cinema has given us the hammerblow of John Sayles’s ‘Matewan’; French cinema has given us both Yves Allégret and Claude Berri’s adaptations of Zola’s ‘Germinal’. Thirty years down the line, British cinema is still treating the miners’ strike as some sort of colourful backdrop to feelgood stories of self-expression, be it a brass band contest in ‘Brassed Off’ or no-son-of-mine-sensitive-lad-who-just-wants-to-dance in ‘Billy Elliott’. It’s as if no-one has had the balls to tell the real, gritty, gruelling story.

Fuck’s sake, British cinema, grow a pair, take a side, step up. Where the biopic of Arthur Scargill (imagine Andrew Scott, wasted in a nothing role in ‘Pride’, juggling with cinematic dynamite in the lead role)? Where the conspiracy thriller movie about the government’s machinations against the NUM, drawn from Seamus Milne’s ‘The Enemy Within’ (the creative team behind ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ would ace this)? Where the underdog drama of the Nottinghamshire striking miners or the “dirty thiry” in Leicestershire holding the line against overwhelming numbers of scabs and media muck-racking (a Meadows-Consodine re-teaming waiting to happen)? Where the fearless, visceral, fuelled by white-hot righteous anger account of the events at Orgreave (Ben Wheatley: your cue, sir)?

Fuck’s sake, we have the talent, we have the passion, we have truth on our side. Please, British cinema, please: the hour is still to come.

GUEST REVIEW: Boy A

"They said I can choose my own name, any name?" says Eric Wilson, a.k.a. Jack Burridge, in the opening scene of 'Boy A'. It's a line that immediately establishes what the film is questioning. Identity. Who you are, who you don't want to be, who you can become.

Originally screened on Channel 4 in 2007, the film is an adaptation of the novel by Jonathan Triggell and it's easy to see why it's compared to the James Bulger case. But it shouldn't be. What 'Boy A' does is use the Bulger case to haunt the film, rather than be a version of it. 'Boy A' is essentially a coming-of-age story.

Jack Burridge (Andrew Garfield) has just been released from a young offenders' institution for a monstrous crime that he was involved in as a child, the details of which are gradually revealed as the film progresses. Terry (brilliantly played by Peter Mullen) is a probation officer who guides Jack into civilian life. What is apparent from the very beginning is how little Jack knows about real life: he doesn't know how to spend his wages, or what a panini is.

The relationship between Terry and Jack is almost father and son like, and it becomes obvious that Terry is proud of Jack as he becomes more independent in his new life. Terry introduces Jack as his nephew to Kelly (Siobhan Finneran), an acquaintance of Terry's who takes Jack in as a lodger. Terry helps Jack to secure a job at a local firm; it isn't clear what his duties are, but minor details are irrelevant. What is so fascinating is Jack's reactions to normal occurrences. He befriends his work colleague Chris (Shaun Evans) and begins a relationship with the office receptionist Michelle (Katie Lyons).

When Jack is invited out on a night out with his colleagues, he worries he may drink too much and reveal his past. During the evening, his colleagues keep encouraging him to relax and it is only when he is given a tab of E that he finally does so, cutting loose with some manic dance moves along the way. When the group enter the nightclub, there is an almost dream-like feel to the scene which emphasises Jack's innocent exploration/perception of his new surroundings. It is as if he can't quite believe what is happening to him, not just as a result of the drug, but the more natural high of enjoying his new life. He might be wondering if it is all a dream.

The evening ends, however, with a violent altercation that results in Jack nearly beating someone up, giving a glimpse into what he might be capable of and providing a reminder of his past. There is a flashback sequence of a young Jack - or Eric Wilson as he was then - and his friend Philip in an argument with a gang of older boys. Philip is depicted as the more violent of the two, aggressively laying into one of the gang members, and it is clear that he is the instigator in the pairs' misdoings.

The flashback sequences work very well throughout, every so often revealing a bit more of Jack's past, leaving the audience guessing as to the nature of his crime. Cumulatively, this makes for uncomfortable viewing, particularly in a sequence towards the end of the film where Jack's past catches up with him. The dream-like quality is also emphasised in these scenes. Sunlight suffuses the screen, lending a hazy feel to the outdoor scenes. Frequent scenes of Philip and Jack outside sets up a counterpoint to their future life of restraint in the young offenders' institution.

It is the denouement where Garfield really excels. Ironically, an act of heroism, rescuing a child from a crashed car, brings Jack to the attention of the local press. This precipitates a jealous response from Terry's son, disgusted at his father's drunken declaration that he sees Jack as a son, and the media focus suddenly turns upon Jack's hidden past. After being sacked from his job and Michelle's phone turned off, the realisation kicks in that the people he knows have found out about him. His breakdown is intense. Walking the streets in a hooded top, he becomes a fugitive and essentially a victim of his own crime. Unpredictably, he ends in a Blackpool where he sees Michelle on the pier and she tells him she would have forgiven him. This, however, appears to be another of the dream-like scenarios that have filled the film, and 'Boy A' leaves the audience to guess whether Jack, having left voicemail messages saying goodbye to Terry and Chris, is going to take his own life on Blackpool pier.

In what is easily Garfield's finest performance (it's a real shame he went down the Hollywood route rather than delivering more work of this calibre), he brings a boyish, fractured quality to his portrayal of Jack. He is awkward and innocent. There are moments in the film where you really care for him and it is practically forgotten why he essentially has to grow up at the age of 24 when he has already had three different lives: Eric Wilson, Boy A and finally Jack Burridge.

Amy Clarke

The Raid

Reviewing ‘Dredd’ in May, I wondered if its lacklustre box office performance was due to the fact that it “came at the tail-end of two years’ worth of claustrophobic genre movies set in high-rise apartments, from grungy French zombie flick ‘La Horde’ to urban Brit horror ‘The Citadel’ by way of ‘Attack the Block’, ‘The Raid’, ‘Tower Block’, ‘Rammbock’ and however many others”.

And the point remains: every subgenre will eventually become overcrowded and spawn audience indifference. But by the same token, every subgenre will find its exemplar. ‘The Raid’ is the best tower-block-as-battleground movie you will ever see.

That it’s the best of its kind is probably a good thing, since much of it is clichéd, derivative and predictable. If it didn’t power through its gossamer-thin narrative with such demented energy – if it slowed its breakneck pace for even a second – the risk of outstaying its welcome would be palpable.

Here’s some of the hoary old tropes that ‘The Raid’ goes flaunting about with as if it truly were doing something new: the everything-to-lose hero introduced taking his leave of his pregnant wife; the nervous new recruit; the grizzled old-timer with a hidden agenda; the edgy, paranoid, unpredictable gang boss; the sadistic enforcer to said gang boss; the ease with which minor characters are massacred; the improbable injuries the major characters sustain and get back to their feet to fight some more; the predisposition of all parties to get into protracted bouts of hand-to-hand combat when there’s a perfectly functional small bore fireman within reach.

Plotwise, it never extends beyond cops storm tower block, crims bring the pain, an ulterior motive’s revealed, a double-cross takes place, a fuckload of people die. In fact, it’s pretty much interchangeable with ‘Dredd’ (except that ‘Dredd’ bothers to have a female character) right down to the crystal meth lab in one of the mezzanine levels. Because there’s always a crystal meth lab in a tower block, right? Never a counterfeiting operation or a fake fag house or a chop shop in the underground garage. No, it’s always a fucking crystal meth lab.

But I digress. And I’m also spending rather a lot of words banging on about the flaws in a film that I introduced as the exemplar of its subgenre. Which brings me back to the essential point: all ‘The Raid’ has to do to eclipse all other tower block based action movies is deliver more action. Be harder, faster, more relentless. And relentless is certainly the right word. It takes director Gareth Evans – a Welsh-born Jakarta-based filmmaker – just a few minutes to get his tooled up and eminently expendable squad of cops to the tower block. The tension is simmering away nicely by the ten-minute mark and things all go to hell only a few more minutes after that. There is not a dull moment in the whole 97 minutes. There isn’t a wasted frame or a moment of stasis. Everything that happens in ‘The Raid’ happens in order to perpetuate the momentum, to keep the characters on the move, to hyperlink from one violent or suspenseful scenario to the next.

The sequel is apparently a sprawling two and a half hour crime saga. How that will compare to the taut, claustrophobic setting from which Evans wrings every bit of action and suspense possible remains to be seen.

Calvary

A Guardian review quoted on the DVD cover blurb breathlessly labels John Michael McDonagh’s ‘Calvary’ a “rich, ripe and altogether delicious whodunit with a difference”. Which is, to varying degrees, accurate. Although a better description might be a “who’ll-do-it”. A stark, single-take pre-credits scene sets the tone: Father James (Brendan Gleeson) takes confession from an off-screen antagonist who recounts how he was sexually abused by a priest as a boy, and how he intends to kill Father James – in the full knowledge that the latter is a good priest – a week hence in retribution against the church entire.

McDonagh’s script never states it explicitly, but the parallel is clear: Jesus, innocent of worldly corruption dies for the sins of the world; two thousand years later, one good, idealistic, genuinely caring priest will die for the sins of the church. The film’s called ‘Calvary’ for a reason.

Having said that, the cinematic template that informs its increasingly doom-laden aesthetic is not so much ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ as ‘High Noon’ … or at least a ‘High Noon’ where Will Kane wears a cassock instead of a sheriff’s badge, Frank Miller’s identity is kept hidden until the last ten minutes and there’s seven agonising days to the showdown instead of a fraught hour and a half. Again, the parallel is evident without being hammered home: both Will and Father James leave town at a critical point, only to turn back and face up to their date with destiny; both spend the finite time left to them in crucial interactions with the townsfolk. Both receive rejection from various quarters. Both benefit from the friendship of a wise elder who is nonetheless too old to be of any practical assistance – in ‘High Noon’, the retired marshal who was Will’s predecessor; in ‘Calvary’, an octogenarian novelist (M. Emmet Walsh) who is also waiting for the inevitable, but in his case via natural causes.

And both, eventually, face their enemy alone. The ending is where the similarities peter out, but again the title speaks for itself. Another difference: while Will petitions the townsfolk seeking help, Father James sets out to minister to them, to try to make a positive difference to their lives, one last time. An under-the-gun attempt to save someone’s soul; to justify the decision he made, in reaction to the death of his wife years earlier, to enter the priesthood. A decision that has complicated his relationship with his emotionally unstable daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly).

Thus it is that Fiona returns to Father James’s parish for a few days while he makes his rounds and waits for the inevitable. His rounds bring him in contact with cynical hospital medic Dr Harte (Aidan Gillen), soulless businessman Michael Fitzgerald (Dylan Moran), smart-talking gigolo Leo (Owen Sharpe), and jovial butcher Jack Brennan (Chris O’Dowd) whose joviality masks the horns of a cuckold – his flirtatious wife Veronica (Orla O’Rourke) is carrying on with mechanic Simon (Isaach De Bankolé). Rounding out the trouble souls are Milo Herlihy (Killian Scott), a socially awkward young whom Father James is trying to talk out of joining the army, and convict Freddie Joyce (Domhnall Gleeson) who summons Father James not so much for absolution but a bit of company and time out of his cell.

If the Catholic church’s ignoble history of child abuse hangs heavily over the film like a storm cloud – nowhere more poignantly than in a scene when Father James strikes up a perfectly innocent and good-natured conversation with a young girl holidaying in the area only for her father to furiously bundle her away from him based on nothing more than the fact that he’s wearing a black robe – then its other key theme flows quietly below the surface like an underground spring: the church as anachronism, the role of the parish priest an exercise in redundancy. None of Father James’s flock have any use for him, except to mock. Or terrorise.

‘Calvary’ mines the vignettes that constitute its loose narrative – some profound, some satirical, some just plain absurd – from a pretty heavy thematic seam. A late-in-the-game meditation on forgiveness sets up a final scene fade-to-black designed to force the audience to take a thorny question away with them and spend some time wrestling with it.

All told, ‘Calvary’ comes very close to greatness. There are some awkward tonal shifts – a problem that afflicted McDonagh’s debut ‘The Guard’ – and the script often seems to stumble as it reaches for a spiritual profundity that’s clearly beyond it. Nor is McDonagh particularly well served by some of his cast. While Gleeson and Walsh are as good as they’ve ever been – and Moran is a revelation, reining in his smartarse comic persona to create a portrait of bored insouciant arrogance with a dead-eyed void at the centre of it – Reilly, O’Dowd and Gillen flounder, unable to bring to their performances what the script requires of them. I almost want to say that none of these things really matter – because when ‘Calvary’ works, it works – but the truth is, there’s nothing as frustrating as engaging with a work that truly has magnificence within its grasp but falls short.

The Ox

I was drawn to Ben Proudfoot’s 10 minute documentary short on account of my father. Dad worked as a truck driver, an owner-operator, and undertook all the servicing and repair work himself. An intuitive mechanic, he could listen to a truck engine and know just by the sound of it if some component was running out of true. He could strip an engine down and rebuild it and not cast a glance at an owner’s manual. He’d build his own tools if necessary to get the job done.

But his real passion was woodwork. Give him a lathe, a plane, a stand-drill, a jigsaw and he morphed from artisan to artist. Eric Hollenbeck, founder of Blue Ox carpenters and the subject of Proudfoot’s film, put me in mind of my dad. True, my dad never went to Vietnam like Hollenbeck did (he was a veteran at 19), and Hollenbeck’s workshop is way bigger than dad’s, but nonetheless I experienced an immediate point of identification with the film, and something in the way that Proudfoot’s camera lingers on motes of dust swirling through a beam of sunlight that took me back to my childhood.

Hollenbeck is a documentarist’s dream subject: eloquent, thoughtful, knowledgeable; an interviewee who’s prepared to be open and honest without any prodding. Hollenbeck discusses his Vietnam experience with the quiet gravitas of someone who has been through hell and come, in his own time, to his own understanding of it. “It’s like there’s two Erics,” he explains: “the sixty-five year old, and the scared eighteen year old kid.” Describing the difficulty of reconciling the two, he uses the metaphor of bending a coiled spring out of shape: “you can try and bend it back but it never realigns”.

Shaping words as easily as he does wood, Hollenbeck employs another metaphor when discoursing on the modern age: a train going at full speed, collecting information as if shovelled up by the cowcatcher at the front of the loco, while the brakeman on the caboose is constantly throwing it out onto the tracks behind him just to make room for the next lot of information. The problem is, Hollenbeck says, “the information we’re throwing out took us two thousand years to get to”. The most modern piece of equipment in the Blue Ox workshops was made in 1948, the year its founder was born. You have to admit, the man has a point.

But there’s more to Hollenbeck than homespun wisdom and master-craftsmanship. He opens his premises to kids who are failing at school, recalling that he had a hard job fitting in and dealing with theoretical learning at that age. “These are good kids,” he says of a largely court-ordered group of what the system would probably call juveniles; “they’re makers, not sitters.” The work they produce under his tutelage, beaming with pride at their achievement, bears out his faith in them. As the film ends, Blue Ox are approached by the Veterans’ Association to run craft workshops for returning servicemen.

I’ve spent this last month on the blog engaging with offbeat documentaries, from the shameless self-promotion of Troy Hurtubise in ‘Project Grizzly’ to the demented denizens of Vernon, Florida, by way of the Tiffany-fixated individuals in ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’. But ‘The Ox’ has proved the perfect documentary with which to end this mini-season. Eric Hollenbeck is both a regular guy and an unsung hero, a true man of the people.

Vernon, Florida

Errol Morris started working on a documentary about the residents of the titular city when he heard that insurance companies were getting dubious about the amount of claims being filed by people who had lost limbs in “accidents”, a spate that earned Vernon the nickname “Nub City”.

Errol Morris stopped working on the “Nub City” story when he received death threats from certain parties who were concerned that their claims would be compromised. Morris took these threats seriously, proving that – pardon the pun – the armless aren’t necessarily harmless.

This perhaps accounts for the feeling of circumspection that hangs over the film Morris finally came out of Vernon with. Like ‘Gates of Heaven’, it’s un-narrated. Nor does he even name his interview subjects. Which makes things awkward for the reviewer. I guess I’ve got two options for this article:

(a) discuss the participants in turn, studding these few hundred words with such appellations as the Asshole Turkey-Hunter, the Ass-hat Preacher and the Ass-clown Christian Who Prayed To God For His Pick-up Truck, not to mention the Old Fart Who Claims To Be Ambidextrous, the Old Fart Who Keeps A Turtle And A Possum, the Old Fart Who Bangs On About God and the Even Older Fart Who Bangs On About God;

(b) try to present a brief overview of the film’s themes and concerns, and hopefully cling on to my sanity in the process.

What ‘Vernon, Florida’ shares with ‘Gates of Heaven’ (particularly where, in the former, the sons of Harbert are centre stage) is interview subjects who are deeply and misguidedly in love with the sound of their own voices. This is particularly true of the Asshole Turkey-Hunter, whose interminable stories about – guess what? – turkey hunts are delivered in a heavily-accented drawl that frequently drifts into incoherence. In a documentary that doesn’t quite stretch to an hour’s running time, this fella makes it feel like ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’ – and the more he talks the more he seems like a cartoon come to life. You wonder if his mother demanded paternity tests of Elmer Fudd.

There’s also talk of God. Sometimes it’s of God as a supreme being who “wants to have his way with your heart” (I sniggered to hear it said and I sniggered typing it just now), but mostly of God as a provider of pick-up trucks or cheap land deals. God as the kind of guy who’s precisely and finely attuned, across the vast expanse of the firmament, with the lives and simple desires of a bunch of glass-eyed hicks from this li’l ole place called Vernon, Florida.

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Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

In the late 70s, Werner Herzog got so pissed off with kindred spirit Errol Morris not completing a film project that he made a bet: if Morris finished ‘Gates of Heaven’ and got it shown on the big screen, Herzog would … well, the clue’s in the title.

Thus it was that Herzog ate his shoe in front of a live audience at a screening of Morris’s film while Les Blank turned up to make a documentary about it. Herzog and Blank were already renowned documentarians at this point (Blank would later make ‘Burden of Dreams’, about Herzog’s arduous ‘Fitzcarraldo’ shoot) while Morris had just taken his first step along the road that would lead to ‘The Thin Blue Line’, ‘The Fog of War’ and ‘Standard Operating Procedure’.

The nexus of eccentric talent distilled into the twenty minutes of ‘Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe’ would be astounding even if the film was in any way conventional. Which it isn’t. ‘Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe’ is bonkers on many levels, beginning with its title.

The film opens with Herzog disembarking from a plane and offering a laconic wave to Blank’s camera, as if cheerfully acknowledging the absurdity of the undertaking. This to a soundtrack of ‘Old Whisky Shoes’ by the Walt Solek Band. In a car from the airport, Herzog muses in typically deadpan fashion on the interrelatedness of filmmaking and gastronomy. As usual with Herzog, you get the sense that pearls of wisdom are being formed in an oyster of satire.

The nature of the bet is only briefly touched on, with Herzog claiming encouragement of a protégé (it has been suggested that it was more in the way of a sarcastic aside, made in despair of the likelihood of Morris ever completing a project). Various other bits of business fill up the twenty minutes. There’s the culinary preparation, to start with: Herzog stews his shoes for five hours, having packed them with garlic, rosemary, red onions, duck fat and salsa. (Disclaimer: The Agitation of the Mind does not condone the consumption of footwear and accepts no responsibility for readers who attempt this recipe.)

There’s Herzog discoursing on Morris’s fully-formed maturity as a filmmaker on the basis of just one feature; and Herzog discussing earlier crazy escapades, such as jumping into a field of cacti on the set of ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’. Clips from this film, as well as ‘Gates of Heaven’ and Charlie Chaplin in ‘The Gold Rush’ intersperse the interviews. The boots Chaplin eats in that film were actually crafted from liquorice. Herzog, however, munches on the real thing, cutting up one boot – he promises to eat the other if Morris’s film gets picked up by a major studio – with scissors and slowly chewing his way through the small pieces, washing them down with beer. The previous paragraph’s disclaimer still applies, by the way.

In all honesty, the shoe-eating is something of an anti-climax. Blank doesn’t linger on it, except to record Herzog’s caveat that he will not be eating the sole since one does not eat the bones of a chicken. Coming from a notorious hater of chickens, this comment tells its own story.

What really lingers in the mind from ‘Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe’ is his impassioned declamation (another word would be “rant”) on the inadequacy of images, particularly in advertising and commercial cinema. He calls for a holy war on bland and meaningless images. Yes, you read that right. A holy war. But then again this is the man who, in the Faber & Faber title ‘Herzog on Herzog’ warns that our grandchildren will blame us for not throwing hand grenades into TV studios because of adverts.

Herzog doesn’t want to see the Marlboro Man toking on a cigarette. Herzog wants to see something new; that redefines sensory perception. So when, at the end, he calls for “More shoes! More boots! More garlic!” it’s not because he’s developed a taste for Clarks’ finest – it’s a battle cry to the directors and film students and dreamers of the world to get behind him and take a different view and create images that will form a new filmic vocabularly. The shoe-eating was just to get their attention.

Gates of Heaven

The road to Errol Morris’s first feature would probably make a book in itself, never mind a couple of introductory paragraphs to a review; let’s just say that after studying immersing himself, but not continuing a career path, in musicianship and scholarship, Morris found his calling as a documentarian. An unfinished project on Ed Gein brought him into contact with Werner Herzog – of the Morris/Herzog connection, there will be more to say in tomorrow’s review – after which Morris considered turning the material he’d amassed into a manuscript. This potential career as a writer also stalled and instead he started work on a second documentary feature, about the so-called “Nub City” (i.e. Vernon, Florida), thus named because residents were committing acts of self-amputation in pursuit of insurance money. Morris received death threats and the “Nub City” documentary went the way of the Ed Gein documentary, although a very different film about Vernon would become Morris’s second film.

During the turmoil surrounding the “Nub City” project, Morris read of the exhumation of 450 corpses from a pet cemetery that had gone bankrupt. Intrigued, he set off to find out more. The result was ‘Gates of Heaven’. The film – devoid of narration and mostly shot in a “talking heads” style – recounts the efforts of nobly-minded Floyd McClure (Mac to his friends) to establish a pet cemetery and sensitively cater to bereaved pet owners. Mac recruits a few associates and they attempt to establish a viable business in a town where most dead animals end up at a rendering plant. Where they fail (Mac and his partners are estimated to have lost about $30,000 each – this in 1978!), local businessman John Harberts succeeds, and the second half of ‘Gates of Heaven’ shifts the focus to Harberts and his two sons, who run the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park on an admixture of hard-headed business acumen and barf-inducing sentimentality.

McClure, sincere and diffident, was never going to make a go of it. His rueful account of the affair is juxtaposed with the pragmatic worldview of the manager of the rendering plant, and the contrast speaks for itself. When Harberts and his horribly self-obsessed clan come into the picture, your heart breaks for McClure: his down-home good-heartedness is just so much chaff cast aside by the threshing machine of their money-fixated mindset.

Harbert Snr is a patriarch of the dollar-bottom-line school, but for all that he presents as a man who knows how to run a business and run it successfully. His sons, however, are quite something else.

The elder son blathers on about his time in the insurance business (it’s implied that he burned out and came back home to consider other options) and how he’s now learning the pet cemetery business and how he hopes to develop the business and if there’s even the most spurious opportunity to ram the word “business” into a sentence then goldarn it he’d make that his business. He’s given over to saying things like, “What does this mean for me? What does this opportunity mean for me? Well, it means a lot.” And the more he talks, embellishing his sentences with corporate buzzwords (yeah, they had corporate buzzwords back in the 70s: plus ça fucking change), the more his speech is drained of coherence and meaning until words just burble out of his mouth like so much white noise as he grins caprophagously from behind his trinket-lined desk.

The younger son, who perhaps engages a little more with the day-to-day operation of the Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park, gives a less self-congratulatory account of himself but emerges as socially awkward and desperately lonely. He lives near the cemetery, in a house on the hillside (“the house on the hill, we call it,” he says without a shred of irony, winning himself 1978’s Statement of the Obvious Award). He rhapsodizes about his stereo system: “it’s a Pioneer SX1010,” he breathes huskily, in much the same tone Petrarch must have adopted when speaking of Laura. He makes tapes of his choppy and derivative electric guitar compositions. A key image has a single loudspeaker overlooking an empty valley while Harbert Jnr, offscreen, plays bad rock guitar to no-one.

By this point, ‘Gates of Heaven’ reveals itself as a film about the hollowness of the American dream and the individual’s isolation from society, a sort of ‘Great Gatsby’ with deceased pets.

I Think We're Alone Now

Remember that somewhat creepy scene in ‘Ted’ where Giovanni Ribisi gyrates in tight pants to Tiffany’s ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’? Imagine that scene extrapolated to an hour. If you feel slightly ill and want to discontinue reading at this point, then go with my blessings, brethren, for there are no hard feelings.

‘I Think We’re Alone’ now tells the parallel stories of Jeff Turner and Kelly McCormick, both of whom are obsessed with Tiffany. The nature of their obsession is different, however, the most obvious touchstone being that Jeff has followed her everywhere and made ludicrous declarations of affection (and earned himself a restraining order in the process), while the Tiffany concert that Kelly attends towards the end of the film marks the first time she’s set eyes on the singer outside of videos and magazine article photographs.

Jeff has Aspergers, a capacious memory for ephemera, and comes across – superficially, at least – as gregarious and slightly self-effacing. Kelly identifies as intersex and is taking a long and what seems like a lonely journey towards gender reorientation. Jeff can talk the hind leg off a donkey – hell, the whole sanctuary! – while Kelly often struggles to express herself. Jeff has constructed an elaborate fantasy life where he and Tiff are already best buds, while Kelly is painfully, heartbreaking aware that she’s not apart of Tiffany’s life.

A lot of reviews that I’ve read of ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ talk about Jeff as being likeable and sympathetic. Frankly, I found him a pompous windbag and something of a hypocrite, piously courting his pastor’s favour at church then happily swanning off to an erotica convention which Tiffany is attending by dint of her Playboy appearance. Jeff’s late-in-the-game transfer of his affections from Tiffany to Alyssa Milano, almost drooling as he holds up a DVD of ‘Poison Ivy 2’, only serves to point him up as a dirty old man. Aspergers accounts for some of his behaviours, but not all of them, and his wholehearted reliance on incapacity benefits when even his best friend admits he’s perfectly capable of working leaves him with vast quantities of free time on his hands. For a man like Jeff, free time is not necessarily a good thing.

Kelly, depressive and introverted, is also receiving benefits. However, she is a dedicated runner, genuinely seeks friends (albeit struggling socially) and by the end of the film is looking forward to the prospect of gainful employment. A couple of scenes document Kelly as being very close to emotional breakdown, whereas Jeff grins and gabs away throughout the film and doesn’t seem to be bothered by anything. Even reality. Jeff, in short, is the kind of person you can imagine losing his grip on orthodox social behaviours altogether and doing something dangerous (indeed, he was once arrested after trying to woo Tiffany with white chrysanthemums and a samurai sword). With Kelly, whose Tiffany obsession stems from a vision she had while comatose following a cycling accident, you worry for her fragility.

Director Sean Donnelly happily juxtaposes scenes from their lives for 40 minutes before bringing them together to attend a concert. That they don’t really take to each other is painfully evident, but there are none of the fireworks Donnelly was presumably expecting. Nor does Donnelly try to pin down why a two-hit wonder from the late 80s, with only a desperately attention-seeking girlie magazine appearance and a couple of roles in shit movies under the Asylum label as a claim to contemporary relevance, still inspires this degree of fandom. And it’s not just Jeff and Kelly who can’t get enough of her. In an intriguing but unfollowed-up scene, Donnelly films other fans eulogising to camera, including a guy who’s built like a brick shithouse and wouldn’t look out of place at a Pantera gig – the dude almost morphs into a puppy dog as he talks about his idol!

‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ could have been a fascinating look at the Tiffany cult. As it is, she’s an absence rather than a presence; a via negativa, almost. A narrative McGuffin to enable two terribly sad people (Kelly in the sympathetic sense of the word, Jeff not so much) to open up their shadow-lives like a vein in front of the camera.

I use the word “enable” deliberately, because I can’t help feeling that the villain of the piece, the enabler for both of these vulnerable adults, is Donnelly. I’d be very interested in knowing what consent processes were followed in eliciting Jeff and Kelly’s participation, and whether any medical or psychological provision was established during filming or kept in place afterwards. I really, really hope it was.

Project Grizzly

Okay: imagine this. You’re hiking through a box canyon somewhere in the Canadian Rockies when a grizzly bear knocks you to the ground. Instead of treating you as a light snack, it then turns round and walks away. Do you:

(a) offer a small prayer to whatever deity you believe in that you’re still alive;

(b) stick to urban areas from now on;

(c) spend seven years and $150,00 developing a suit constructed primarily from titanium and chain mail so that you can go and find the bear and study it up close and let it wallop you as much as it likes?

If you answered (a) or (b), congratulations: you’re a sane and reasonable person. If you answered (c), you’re Troy Hurtubise and you make Timothy Treadwell, the subject of Werner Herzog’s ‘Grizzly Man’, look decidedly well-adjusted.

‘Project Grizzly’ is a film of two halves. The first half presents an overview of the suit’s development through various design changes. Early iterations make Hurtubise look like Robocop, a comparison director Peter Lynch points up by having said sci-fi opus play on a drive-in movie screen behind a suited-up Hurtubise, while the final model has a kind of astronaut/deep-sea diver combo thing going on. The second half has Hurtubise and his team take to the mountains to discover that the suit is basically fucking useless.

The first half is the most entertaining, with tree trunks being swung at Hurtubise to test the suit’s durability. Arrows are fired at it. An Olympic shooting competitor swings by to blast it with a shotgun. Hurtubise, wisely, stays out of the suit for this bit. Oh, no, wait, now he’s got the suit back on and he’s offering a quartet of bikers to go at him with baseball bats in the parking lot of their favourite bar. They get stuck in enthusiastically, reducing the bats to splinters. Most of us would sign the suit off as fit for purpose at this point, but Hurtubise has a pick-up truck do a couple of hit-and-run numbers on it just to be sure. Oh, and then walks through fire with it on.

And throughout it all, Hurtubise talks and talks. And talks some more. The inability of Troy Hurtubise to shut up long enough to take a breath swiftly becomes the documentary’s defining aesthetic, more so than bears or bodysuits. Here, again, it delineates neatly as a film of two halves. The first half has Hurtubise pitching himself as some kind of conservationist or researcher. “I’d like to be able to go anywhere in the world,” he drawls, “just take my suit and my team and go and do my research anywhere.” In case you’re wondering what the nature of said research would be, “behavioural activities of bears” is the closest he comes to providing specifics. There’s no discussion of what (if any) university or research body he’s affiliated with or funded by, and the matter of whose £150,000 funded the suit remains unmentioned.

Still, Hurtubise as researcher makes for better company than Hurtubise as mountain man, the persona he doesn’t so much slip into as smother all over himself in the second half. Here, he hooks up with a bunch of guys with guns and cowboy hats and they go into the mountains and the macho asshole levels go off the scale. If it’s not Hurtubise eulogising about Bowie knives as he alternately shaves with them or flings them at trees, it’s one of his team reminiscing about volunteering for ’Nam in order to enjoy the “travel and adventure” opportunities and, when the theatre of conflict got too boring, “playing the game called Outrun the Grenade.”

Imagine being stuck up a mountain with this doofus. In fact with half a dozen of these doofuses. And all of them packing rifles, shotguns and knives. Me, I’d rather take my chances with the bears!

The sense that all this bullshit is purely for the camera solidifies as the suit proves inoperable on rugged terrain. The mask slips: Hurtubise reveals himself as a man desperately trying to provide distraction in order to save face. The suit is quietly abandoned; Hurtubise and his buddies play at being trackers; when a bear finally shows up, Hurtubise opines that the snows are about to close in and it’s time to leave. Maybe next year.

‘Project Grizzly’ was made in 1996. Since then Hurtubise has drifted towards a more militaristic specialism, attempting to market to the US Army everything from flame-resistant face masks to landmine-resistant underseal for vehicles, by way of something called Angel Light which apparently sees through walls. Hmmm, perhaps the definitive cinematic account of Hurtubise as total lunatic has still to be made.

Aokigahara: Suicide Forest

The two minute pre-credits sequence to Santiago Stelley’s documentary short introduces us to geologist Azusa Hayano as he drives along country roads, the majestic sight of Mount Fuji drawing closer. Hayano tells us that he studies volcanic eruptions but is also interested in the expansive forest at the base of Fuji.

“In the year 864,” Hayano explains in voiceover, “Mount Fuji erupted and the forest that grew over the dried lava was named Jukai or Sea of Trees. Aokigahara is the actual name of the place but people started calling it Jukai because the forest, as seen from halfway up Mount Fuji, is green all year round and it looks like the ocean.”

A poetic start to a documentary. Then the title appears in stark white letters and things take a macabre turn very quickly. Hayano’s still in the car park when he discovers an abandoned vehicle and speculates whether the owner’s body is hanging somewhere in the vast acreage of Aokigahara. A few feet along the signposted trail, a large sign implores visitors not to waste the gift of life their parents gave them; to think of their families; to contact the Suicide Prevention Association.

It is immediately apparent that Aokigahara isn’t your average nature trail. On the contrary, it’s Japan’s most popular site for suicides – their equivalent of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. The comparison’s strengthened by the fact that both places have inspired documentaries. But while Eric Steel’s ‘The Bridge’ – a work that manages to be both snuff movie and liberal “gee, ain’t it sad that these people are so lonely” handwringing within the same awkward 93 minutes – focuses on the actual act of suicide, Hayano’s trek through the forest is study in aftermath.

Aokigahara is a beautiful stretch of woodland (though one can imagine that to be lost in it, or to be there after nightfall, would drain it of beauty and render it terrifying) and it’s surreal and disquieting to watch Hayano discover the remnants of human despair buried in the undergrowth or, in one startling moment, nailed to a tree: a stuffed toy, nailed upside down (“to express contempt for society” Hayano believes), and a small piece of wood upon which has been carved a suicide note. “I have come here because nothing good ever happened in my life,” Hayano reads, then coolly dismisses the theatricality as the work of someone indecisive about suicide, someone who probably trudged back out of the forest alive. Most suicides, Hayano explains, don’t bother with notes or scene-setting; they head into the forest and get it over and done with quickly. The most common means is hanging.

If this makes Hayano sound more like a psychologist than a geologist, that’s because his research in Aokigahara has brought him into contact with about 100 corpses over the years. Yet he remains pragmatic and even chats amiably with someone whose tent he comes across, pitched way off the official signposted route. Stelley’s camera maintains a dignified distance while Hayano and the camper converse. Hayano later explains that people often camp in the forest for a few days before they make up their minds.

Intelligent, softly spoken and deeply serious about ecology and humanity, Azusa Hayano anchors the documentary. Without him, ‘Aokigahara: Suicide Forest’ could easily have vacillated between morbidity and voyeurism. But as we tread carefully and respectfully through the forest with him – and as he discourses on changing attitudes to suicide in Japanese culture (from the honourable seppuku of the past to the more recognisable emotional malaise of the modern era), the modus operandi of the people who come to Aokigahara to die, and the indicators of their emotional state – the brief 21-minute running time extends beyond mere clinical enquiry and becomes a calm, quiet meditation on life, death, nature and the passing of time.

Reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated

That picture? That’s me reading at a Palestine Solidarity Campaign demo in Nottingham just over a week ago, flanked by Muslims, Rabbis and the Brian Clough statue. I wrote a suite of poems for the event, one of which has subsequently been published on the Poetry24 website.

A couple of days ago, I read at a magazine launch at The Poetry Café in London, sharing the bill with some seriously talented poets. Fortunately, nobody asked me to stop making a nuisance of myself and leave the premises!

VerseWrights recently showcased four pieces, along with a profile. I’m currently shopping a pamphlet around, while zombie reviews continue to appear on the Dawn of the Unread blog and book reviews on the Five Leaves Bookshop website.

In other words, things have been pretty busy at chez Agitation. But look out for new content next week. ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ was an absolute belter and I’m looking forward to seeing if ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ lives up to all the buzz.