Jack Cardiff

I’ve sounded off on these pages before about the genius of cinematographers like Roger Deakins, Chris Menges and Robert Elswit. Yesterday, one of the giants of the art, Jack Cardiff, died of natural causes at the age of 94.

His debut as director of photography was Powell & Pressburger’s timeless classic ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, lensing half the film in sumptuous technicolour and the other half in steely monochrome. Of his two subsequent collaborations with Powell & Pressburger, ‘Black Narcissus’ and ‘The Red Shoes’, the former won him an Oscar.

He worked with Hitchcock on ‘Under Capricorn’, John Huston on ‘The African Queen’ and Laurence Olivier on ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’.

Jack Cardiff’s achievements in directing peaked early, with his D.H. Lawrence adaptation ‘Sons and Lovers’ in 1960. His fifth film as director, it was to be his greatest achievement in the field. Although he continued directing for another decade an a half, helming another nine films, perhaps the only standouts are boy’s-own action thriller ‘The Mercenaries’ (from a Wilbur Smith novel) and the Marianne Faithfull ogle-fest ‘Girl on a Motorcycle’.

He continued working as cinematographer, either in films or on prestige TV series such as ‘The Far Pavilions’, until he was in his 90s. IMDb gives his last credit as 2007 - 68 years after he took his first job in the industry (as a clapper boy!) in 1929.

He published an autobiography, ‘Magic Hour’, in 1996 and received an OBE in 2000.

in memoriam Jack Cardiff, 18th September 1914 – 22nd April 2009

Incoherence is the sincerest form of flattery

I posted a review of ‘The Damned United’ twelve days ago. Today, trawling the internet while I should have … I dunno … been working or something, I came across this.

It’s basically my ‘Damned United’ review, but as it would look if someone translated it into Serbian, translated that into Russian and had someone translate the Russian version into English only to demonstrate a notable lack of facility in either language.

I’m not sure who the blogger is, or even why they’ve done this, but it makes for hilarious reading. Two examples:

My original review:
So it was out of curiosity as to how well Michael Sheen’s performance captured Cloughie’s trademark admixture of charm and belligerence that me and my friend Aidy headed to the Broadway Cinema last Saturday night for a screening of ‘The Damned United’. Our better halves evinced no interest in the film and occupied themselves otherwise while we attended the screening, then enthusiastically discussed the film in the pub afterwards.

The plagiarist’s version:
So it was antiquated of bric-a-brac as to how cordially Michael Sheen’s portrayal captured Cloughie’s trademark admixture of assuage and belligerence that me and my bosom buddy Aidy headed to the Broadway Cinema up to date Saturday blackness as a servicing to a screening of ‘The Damned United’. Our cured halves evinced no fire in the mizzle cloud up and occupied themselves in another setting while we attended the screening, then enthusiastically discussed the mizzle cloud up in the saloon afterwards.

My original review:
The verbal stand offs between Clough and Longson, particularly when Longson suggests that Clough give Leeds an easy victory so they can play a stronger side against Juventus in a forthcoming European match, are tour de forces.

The plagiarist’s version:
The oral last offs between Clough and Longson, outstandingly when Longson suggests that Clough pass Leeds an unpretentious supremacy so they can subtract up a stronger side against Juventus in a anticipated European contest, are drive de forces.

“Antiquated of bric-a-brac”. “Our cured halves evinced no fire in the mizzle cloud up”. “Drive de forces”. Marvellous!

Top ten hard-ass military types

Robert Duvall as Colonel Kilgore in ‘Apocalypse Now’

James Coburn as Sergeant Steiner in ‘Cross of Iron’

Lee Marvin as Major Reisman in ‘The Dirty Dozen’


R. Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in ‘Full Metal Jacket’

J.T. Walsh as Sergeant Major Dickerson in ‘Good Morning Vietnam’

Clint Eastwood as Gunnery Sergeant Tom Highway in ‘Heartbreak Ridge’

Harry Andrews as Sergeant Major Wilson in ‘The Hill’

Tom Berenger as Sergeant Barnes in ‘Platoon’

Nick Nolte as Lieutenant Colonel Tall in ‘The Thin Red Line’

Nigel Green as Colour-Sergeant Bourne in ‘Zulu’

PERSONAL FAVES: Goodfellas

“As far back as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a gangster.”

Has any film ever set out its stall so simply, so iconically and with such cocksure swagger as ‘Goodfellas’?

Number 15 on IMDb’s Top 250, a personal favourite of virtually everyone I know, endlessly imitated by other film-makers (would Danny Boyle’s ‘Trainspotting’ or Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Boogie Nights’ have such verve if it weren’t for Scorsese’s template?), there’s either a book-length thesis to be written on ‘Goodfellas’ or nothing more to say but simply take one’s hat off to a powerhouse cast, an ace cinematographer (Michael Balhaus), an editor whose contribution to the film verges on genius (Thelma Schoonmaker) and a director at the top of his game.

Aw, the hell with it. I’m taking the easy way out on this one. Here’s ten classic moments from one of the all-time classic films:

The 1950s-set sequence where the young Henry Hill (Christopher Serrone) is seduced into the mob lifestyle even at the cost of his pissed-off father taking a belt to him: “the way I see it, everyone takes a beating now and then”.

The twenty-something Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) on a date with Karen (Lorraine Bracco), jumping the queue outside a nightclub, sliding in a side entrance, waltzing her through kitchens and corridors, glad-handing and slipping twenties to the employees, emerging near the stage and catching the eye of the maitre d’ who has a table carried in and set up in the premiere position. Karen, agog at Henry’s panache and connections, asks him what he does for a living. “I’m in construction,” he says.

Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) having everyone in tucks with his foul-mouthed account of a beating he took from an overzealous cop. “You’re a funny guy,” Henry avers. Oh-oh. “Funny how?”

Sonny Bunz (Tony Darrow) discovers the reality of having Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino) as a business partner: “Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with the bill? He can go to Paulie. Trouble with the cops, deliveries, Tommy. He can call Paulie. But now the guy’s gotta come up with Paulie’s money every week’ no matter what. Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning? Fuck you, pay me.”

Henry responding to a distraught call from Karen after she’s been improperly treated by a guy on the block. In future online editions of the Oxford English Dictionary, when you look up “pistol whipping”, there’ll be a YouTube clip of Ray Liotta stalking up a driveway and using a gun butt to turn some football jock’s nose into gruyére.

Billy Batts (Frank Vincent) recently released from prison and somewhat belligerent during his celebratory drink. Running into a clearly not-in-the-mood-for-it Tommy DeVito, Billy makes the fatal mistake of bringing up Tommy’s youthful employment as a shoeshine boy. “Now go home and get your fuckin’ shinebox.” Bad mistake. Baaaaad mistake.

Jimmy Conway (Robert de Niro) engages in a little housecleaning when he decides he can’t trust his old crew. Cue ‘Layla’ and a whole bunch of corpses. “When they found Carbone in the meat truck he was frozen so stiff it took them three days to thaw him out for the autopsy.”

The increasingly coke-addled Henry spending a frenetic day trying to take care of business, look after his wheelchair-bound brother and cook a family meal while nursing a case of severe paranoia exacerbated by the omnipresence of a police helicopter. Remember: it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.

Henry’s testimony when he sings like a canary to save his own skin: “When I was broke, I’d go out and rob some more. We ran everything. We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges. Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the taking. And now it’s all over … And that’s the hardest part ... Now I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schmuck.” Lessons learned: none.

That final, brutal, chilling image – superimposed – of Tommy unloading a pistol right into the camera. Right into Henry’s subconscious. What goes around, comes around.

The Castle of Cagliostro

Lupin III – the name suggesting antecedence in Maurice Leblanc’s famous creation Arsene Lupin – is, like his namesake, a gentleman thief. He’s also an inveterate (if sometimes hapless) womaniser and an aficionado of the kind of gadgets that make you wonder if he doesn’t have a trade account with Q branch. All in all, a pretty cool guy. Cool enough, anyway, that he can get away with a lime green sport coat, black shirt, yellow tie, blue chinos combo.

Assisted by all-purpose sidekick Jigen – a hulking tough guy who’s good with a gun, dependable in a scrape and so befuddled by plot developments that he spends most of the film asking Lupin to clarify exactly what’s going on – Lupin has effortlessly relieved a casino of its takings in Danny-Ocean-meets-the-Keystone-Kops stylee as the film opens. Making good their escape, Lupin and Jigen barely able to see through the windscreen of their getaway car for the bundles of cash that surround them, it soon becomes apparent that this is one big score that’s gone south.

The money is counterfeit.

Lupin sets out to track down the perpetrator, the trail leading him to the principality of Cagliostro. He and Jigen quickly get into trouble, interceding in the impending royal wedding between heir to the throne Count Cagliostro, and his less-than-willing bride-to-be, the Princess Clarisse. Something dubious is afoot and Lupin happily gets himself embroiled. The arrival in Cagliostro of Interpol agent Inspector Zenigata, intent on arresting Lupin, complicates matters. So does the presence of Fujiko, Lupin’s (also kleptomanically-inclined) old flame.

‘The Castle of Cagliostro’ was Hayao Miyazaki’s first feature-length film after more than a decade working in television. He’d already directed several episodes of the ‘Lupin III’ TV show, so ‘Cagliostro’ was a natural choice for his debut movie. A light, frothy, almost slapstick caper, with none of the deeper concerns that run through Miyazaki’s later works, its animated style is often very redolent of its small screen roots. Nonetheless, there are plenty of indications of things to come: exhilarating aerial sequences (flying, whether by machine or mythical creature, features in virtually all of his films); castles (‘Cagliostro’ is the first of three Miyazaki’s that have the very word in the title*); and, in the plucky Clarisse and the kick-ass Fujiko, his penchant for strong heroines is already evident.

His next project ‘Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind’ (reviewed by my better half on these pages last year) would raise the bar in terms of theme, content, intellectual concerns and quality of animation. It would also prove the first of his deadly serious works (the hugely acclaimed ‘Princess Mononoke’ falls into this category). Personally, I prefer my Miyazaki served with a seasoning of humour and a twinge of the wistful (‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’ achieves a nice balance) and I find both ‘Nausicaa’ and ‘Princess Mononoke’ a bit of a long haul.

‘Cagliostro’ is flat-out absurdist humour, from the boiiiiiing sound effects as Lupin and Jigen athletically hurdle a series of obstacles while fleeing the casino, to a car chase that makes ‘Wacky Races’ look like an exercise in kinetic realism. Miyazaki gleefully crams the 100-minute running time with perilous escapades, hair’s breadth escapes, fiendish plots and last-minute rescues, homaging everything from Leblanc’s original Arsene Lupin adventures to the big-budget absurdities of the post-Connery Bond films by way of ‘Raffles’ and ‘To Catch a Thief’.

That ‘Cagliostro’ is Miyazaki’s first and (by comparison) least accomplished film is beside the point: it’s thirty years old and delivers more fun, flair and imagination than any American animation outside of Pixar.



*The other two being ‘Laputa: Castle in the Sky’ and ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’.

Top ten foul mouthed fellas

Words (very strong ones) not pictures on today’s top ten.

Cheech Marin as Chet in ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’
“Come on in pussy lovers! Here at the Titty Twister we’re slashing pussy in half! Give us an offer on our vast selection of pussy. This is a pussy blow out. We got white pussy, black pussy, Spanish pussy, yellow pussy, we got hot pussy, cold pussy, we got wet pussy, we got smelly pussy, we got hairy pussy, bloody pussy, we got snappin’ pussy, we got silk pussy, velvet pussy, Naugahyde pussy, we even got horse pussy, dog pussy, chicken pussy. Come on, you want pussy. Come on in, pussy lovers. If we don’t got it, you don’t want it. Come on in, pussy lovers. If you can find cheaper pussy anywhere else … fuck it!”

Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito in ‘Goodfellas’
Tommy: What do you mean I’m funny?
Henry: It’s funny, you know. It's a good story, it’s funny. You’re a funny guy.
Tommy: What do you mean? You mean the way I talk? What?
Henry: It's just, you know. You're just funny, it’s ... it’s funny, the way you tell the story and everything.
Tommy: Funny how? What’s funny about it?
Anthony: Tommy, no. You got it all wrong.
Tommy: Whoa, whoa, Anthony. He’s a big boy. He knows what he said. What did you say? Funny how?
Henry: Just, you know, you’re funny.
Tommy: You mean … let me understand this ’cause, ya know, maybe it’s me. I’m a little fucked up, maybe. But I’m funny how? I mean, funny like I’m a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I’m here to fuckin’ amuse you? What do you mean funny, funny how? How am I funny?
Henry: Just... you know, how you tell the story. What?
Tommy: No, no, I don't know. You said it. How do I know? You said I’m funny. How the fuck am I funny? What the fuck is so funny about me?

Jack Nicholson as “Bad Ass” Baddusky in ‘The Last Detail’
Bartender: I’m gonna call the shore patrol.
Baddusky: I am the motherfucking shore patrol, motherfucker. I am the motherfucking shore patrol. Now give this man a beer.
Meadows: I don’t want a beer.
Baddusky: You’re gonna have a fuckin’ beer.

Brendan Gleeson as Ken and Ralph Fiennes as Harry in ‘In Bruges’
Ken: Let’s face it, Harry – you’re a cunt. You’ve always been a cunt. The only thing that's gonna change is that you’ll become an even bigger cunt. Maybe have some more cunt kids.
Harry: You retract that bit about my cunt fucking kids.
Ken: I retract that bit about your cunt fucking kids.
Harry: Insulting my fucking kids! That's going overboard, mate.
Ken: I retracted it, didn’t I?

Steve Martin as Neal Page in ‘Planes, Trains & Automobiles’
Receptionist: Welcome to Marathon. May I help you?
Neal: Yes.
Receptionist: How may I help you?
Neal: You can start by wiping that fucking dumb ass smile off your rosy fucking cheeks. Then you can give me a fucking automobile. A fucking Datsun, a fucking Toyota, a fucking Mustang, a fucking Buick. Four fucking wheels and a seat.
Receptionist: I really don’t care for the way you’re speaking to me.
Neal: And I really don’t care for the way your company left me in the middle of fucking nowhere with the fucking keys to a fucking car that isn’t fucking there. And I really didn’t care to fucking walk down a fucking highway and across a fucking runway to get back here to have you smile in my fucking face. I want a fucking car right fucking now!

Al Pacino as Ricky Roma in ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’
“You stupid fucking cunt. You, Williamson – I’m talkin’ to you, shithead. You just cost me six thousand dollars. Six thousand dollars and one cadillac. That’s right. What are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna do about it, asshole? You’re fucking shit. Where did you learn your trade, you stupid fucking cunt, you idiot? Whoever told you that you could work with men? Ooooh I’m gonna have your job, shithead. I’m going downtown to Mitch and fucking Murray … I don’t care whose nephew you are, who you know, whose dick you’re suckin’ on, you’re goin’ out. I swear to you … What you’re hired for is to help us. Does that seem clear to you? To help us. Not to fuck us up. To help men who are going out there, to try to earn a living. You fairy. You company man.”

Tom Cruise as Les Grossman in ‘Tropic Thunder’
“First, take a big step back and literally fuck your own face! I don’t know what kind of pan-pacific bullshit power play you’re trying to pull here, but Asia Jack is my territory. So whatever you’re thinking you’d better think again, otherwise I’m gonna have to head down there and I will rain down in a godly fucking firestorm upon you. You’re gonna have to call the fucking United Nations and get a fucking binding resolution to keep me from fucking destroying you. I’m talking about a scorched earth, motherfucker. I will massacre you. I will fuck you up.

Hugh Grant as Charles in ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’
“Fuck fuck fuckitty fuck!”

Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth in ‘Blue Velvet’
“I’ll send you a love letter - straight from my heart, fucker. You know what a love letter is? It’s a bullet from a fucking gun. You receive a love letter from me, you’re fucked – forever. You understand, fuck? I’ll send you straight to hell, fucker.”

Quentin Tarantino as Mr Brown in ‘Reservoir Dogs’
“Let me tell you what ‘Like a Virgin’ is about. It’s about this cooze who’s a regular fuck machine. I'm talking morning, day, night, afternoon: dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick …Then one day she meets this John Holmes motherfucker and it’s like, whoa baby! I mean, this cat’s like Charles Bronson in the ‘Great Escape’. He’s diggin’ tunnels. Now, she's getting’ this serious dick action and she’s feeling something she ain’t felt since forever: pain … It hurts just like it did the first time. You see, the pain is reminding a fuck machine what it once was like to be a virgin. Hence ‘Like a Virgin’.”

The Arrivals

My thanks to Tony Passarelli for the following article:



The prospect of writing about ‘The Arrivals’ is daunting. How do you review a 50 part online internet documentary that has turned into a global phenomenon? A series that for all of its fifty parts has drawn only one major criticism: that the series is too short!

I guess I can only attempt to rise to the challenge and direct the reader to the door that will open their mind to ‘The Arrivals’.

‘The Arrivals’ can be seen from any computer that is online for free. Google and YouTube video sites have many different uploads of the series from various users. There are also torrent sites from which you can download the entire 2 hour DVD version and burn onto disc. This gives you the option to watch ‘The Arrivals’ in the comfort of your living room on the television set, which might be the best option for those who get a little faint of heart at times because the pause button freezes the information download for a short while. Why only a short while? Because you’ll just have to know more.

So what is ‘The Arrivals’? It’s a documentary that exposes hidden truths and meanings about your very existence. It opens doors to truths that are hidden by their own clarity. The eyes of a population can be blind by their own sight. ‘The Arrivals’ is more than information to be uncovered: it is new knowledge and awareness, waking one’s inner consciousness.

From the very first episode the viewer is taken on a ride to a new awakening, with some very big shocks along the way as lifelong hopes and beliefs are catapulted to a new destination. This is not so much a journey but an inner leap to an unknown destination point that is way out of the average person’s comfort zone!

Prepare yourself for revelations that will shock the foundations of your soul. Are you feeling frightened? Has this review made you turn in an opposite direction? Is life better lived inside a comfortable shatter-proof box? Is your inner self speaking right now and telling you that what you don’t know can’t hurt you? Then maybe it is time to watch ‘The Arrivals’.

‘The Arrivals’ takes you on a trip through our world’s history, as well as its present and future. Then it drags you into the computer screen as you realise that your life story is being laid bare before your very eyes. You will lament. You will be enraged. You may be a little scared ... But above all, you will wake up the following day with a new awareness and a greater reason to live your life.

Enjoy the ride.



For more information on ‘The Arrivals’ visit www.wakeupproject.com. The stated vision of the Wake Up Project is “to create powerful and meaningful films and multimedia projects, aimed at increasing positive change, social awareness and cross-cultural understanding. Their influence is to be positive, constructive, inspirational, and appealing to a global audience.”

Little Miss Sunshine

Meet the Hoover family: patriarch Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a motivational speaker who insists that everyone has a choice between being a winner and a loser, even though his personal success rate relegates him to the latter category; his wife Sheryl (Toni Colette) juggles a day job, motherhood and running a chaotic household; their children number Dwayne (Paul Dano), a goth who wears a ‘Jesus was wrong’ t-shirt and refuses to speak, and Olive (Abigail Breslin) a precocious pre-teen who dreams of being a beauty queen. Unexpected guests in the Hoover household are Richard’s father Edwin (Alan Arkin), newly expelled from his retirement home for drugs related offences, and Edwin’s brother Frank (Steve Carell), a brilliant but neurotic scholar recuperating from a suicide attempt.

Which doesn’t add up to the stuff of which feelgood comedies are made, but ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ – directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris from a literate and witty script by Michael Arndt – is second only to ‘Sideways’ (up soon on the Personal Faves project) in mining a seam of humour from a melancholy set-up, and emerging, in its final scenes, as life-affirming.

Like Alexander Payne’s masterpiece it unfolds as a road movie, the dysfunctional sextet crowding into a beat-up old VW Microbus as they head for California where Olive is to compete in the final of the Little Miss Sunshine contest. Everything from mechanical failure to hospitalisation conspires to prevent them, and when they finally make it to the pastel-decorated hotel hosting the event, Richard, Dwayne and Frank - at odds from the outset - find themselves united in abhorrence: the beauty contest verges on exploitation, prepubescent girls made up and paraded more in the manner women ten or fifteen years their senior. Olive, however, insists in competing.

Melancholy pervades the characters, the journey, the film itself: virtually all of the Hoovers are defeated in their ambitions. By the end, it’s all down to Olive to win one back even though everything seems stacked against her. The ending doesn’t pan out quite as you’d expect ... but it’s an absolute delight all the same, gloriously sending up the beauty pageant for what it is.

Abigail Breslin (aged ten at the time of filming) turns in an astounding performance, but so does the whole cast; in particular, Toni Colette, striking the right note between flustered and dependable as a woman trying to be all things to all family members, and Alan Arkin, an absolute hoot as the foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed Edwin “Are you getting any?” he asks Dwayne at one point. “What are you, fifteen? Just the right age. You're jailbait and they're jailbait. It doesn't matter. Leave it till you're eighteen and you're looking at three to five.” (Bear in mind that it's Edwin who coaches Olive for the dance number she performs at the contest and you might get some idea of how unorthodox her routine is.)

Greg Kinnear, insufferably smug in most of his characterisations, convinces as a man trying to cling onto the positivity he peddles in his seminars even as he suffers one setback after another; while Steve Carell, in a performance devoid of the mugging and tomfoolery that often defines his onscreen persona, achieves a career best that you wouldn’t have thought possible. Both turn moments of cringe-making embarrassment – one involving the purchase of a pornographic magazine, the other the discovery of same by an overzealous traffic cop – into absurdist highlights.

And – proudly reversing into a parking space alongside a forecourt full of automotive icons including Herbie, the General Lee, Inspector Morse’s Jaguar Mk II and a certain Aston Martin DB5 “with modifications” – the Hoovers’ unpredictable yellow VW Microbus manages contain the entire family and all their differences and run away (almost literally!) with some of the funniest scenes.

Top ten gumshoes

Mickey Rourke as Harry Angel in ‘Angel Heart’

Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe in ‘The Big Sleep’

Jack Nicholson as J.J. Gittes in ‘Chinatown’


Steve Martin as Rigby Reardon in ‘Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’


Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer in ‘Kiss Me Deadly’

Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe in ‘The Long Goodbye’

Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in ‘The Maltese Falcon’

Gene Hackman as Harry Moseby in ‘Night Moves’

Bob Hoskins as Eddie Valiant in ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’

Bill Pullman as Daryl Zero in ‘Zero Effect’

Red Dwarf: Back to Earth

As “Trekkie” denotes fandom of ‘Star Trek’, thus “Dwarfer” for ‘Red Dwarf’.

My wife is a Dwarfer. I’m something more than a fairweather fan myself. So excitement was running high chez Agitation on Friday evening as Dave (a fairly laddish cable channel normally specialising in cars ‘n’ gadgets type programming) prepared to air the first new episode in a decade.

In true Lister stylee, we sat down to watch it after partaking of a curry and a few beers. We had speculated as to the content and quality of the new three-parter, and whether the cast would gel quite so naturally after a ten-year hiatus. My take was that the first episode would re-establish character dynamics, the second would contain the comedic highlights and the third would be a wrapping up of things.

Friday’s episode was a tad stilted and awkward to begin with (although this could have been deliberate given the direction the story takes in episode two), but there were enough belly laughs, spiky new character Katerina (Sophie Winkelman) was interesting, and at the end of the day it was just good to see the old team back together.

I must admit that I winced when Saturday’s episode went down the meta-fiction “hey, we’re all made-up characters in a TV show” route: as a plot device, it's hokey and has a tang of desperation about it; plus, it’s been done before (and with varying results) – ‘The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse’ springs to mind. But then the first of a series of rib-tickling set-pieces kicked in and after a few minutes I was laughing too hard to care. A couple of brilliantly conceived ‘Blade Runner’ homages sealed the deal - the boys from the Dwarf were back and I was itching for the last episode.

The final part upped the ante on all things ‘Blade Runner’ (“I want more life, smegger” had me in hysterics), as well as neatly twisting the meta-fiction elements of the story and revealing “Back to Earth” as something of an extended sequel to the classic Series Five episode “Back to Reality”. And the extended skit on Craig Charles’ current tenure in ‘Coronation Street’ was priceless.

Then there was the mysterious reference to the show running for ten seasons (there’s only been eight) which seems to indicate that Doug Naylor has something up his sleeve. Any time you’re ready, sir: a new series is long past due.

PERSONAL FAVES: Unforgiven

William Munny (Clint Eastwood) is living a hard-scrabble life, working a pathetic dirt farm, half of his pigs dying of fever, trying to raise his two young children and bitterly mourning the death of his wife – “she cured me of drinkin’ and wickedness,” as he tells anyone who will listen – when he’s offered one last shot at the brass ring.

And what wickedness. “You’ll be William Munny out of Missouri, killed women and children,” says Sheriff ‘Little’ Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) towards the end of the film, when killer and lawman stand off each against other. “I killed women and children,” Munny admits; “killed just about everything that walked or crawled …”

‘Little’ Bill is a regular kind of guy; he inspires loyalty in his deputies, spends his off duty hours building a house where he can enjoy the simple pleasures of sitting on his porch, smoking his pipe, drinking coffee and watching the sun go down. Nevermind his shortcomings as a carpenter, he’s a man who takes pride in a job well done. And the results of a job well done as far as being sheriff of Big Whiskey is concerned is a town free of outlaws and assassins, a town where visitors obey the clearly posted City Ordnance sign and turn in all weapons.

When Skinny (Anthony James), owner of the local billiard hall (read “brothel”), summons ‘Little’ Bill to officiate after a couple of cowpokes attack one of his girls after “she let out a giggle” at his “teensy little pecker” (these Bar T boys obviously have issues about size), he fines them and threatens them with the bullwhip if they don’t pay up.

The girls, led by Strawberry Alice (Frances Farmer), are understandably aggrieved and pool their meagre savings to post a bounty. Word gets out and the first gunman who shows up is English Bob (Richard Harris), a flamboyant and self-aggrandizing showman who’s travelling with his “biographer” W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a writer of penny-dreadfuls who laps up all of English Bob’s heavily exaggerated tales.

‘Little’ Bill greets English Bob by giving him a pistol-whipping and kicking him down main street, sending out a message to any other assassins who might come calling that Big Whiskey is a zero tolerance kind of place when it comes to gentlemen of that profession. When English Bob is run out of town in chains, Beauchamp stays on, just as entranced by ‘Little’ Bill’s tales of the reality of the west.

Meanwhile, Munny has been coerced into picking up his guns and saddling his horse once more – he’s lost his technique with the former and can barely stay in the saddle of the latter – by a wind-and-piss braggart who styles himself as ‘The Schofield Kid’ (Jaimz Woolvett) “on account of Schofield model Smith & Wesson”. Munny in turn ropes in his old partner, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), and the three of them head for Big Whiskey and a double killing. After all, as Ned puts it, “we done stuff for money before”.

Under Eastwood’s direction, the terse frontier poetry of David Webb Peoples’ script (which Eastwood bought the rights to ten years before he filmed it, waiting until he was the right age to play the character) becomes an elegy for the western in a way that no other film since Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch’ has achieved. It also demythologizes the western while at the same time, through the ingenious use of the Beauchamp character, reminding us where the myths came from in the first place.

Munny is Eastwood’s finest acting performance (Walt Kowalski in the recently released ‘Gran Torino’ runs a close second), a man who spends all but the last fifteen minutes of the film in denial. Along with the oft-repeated “she cured me of drinkin’ and wickedness”, his mantra is “I ain’t like that no more”, and every time he says it, it sounds a little more hollow, a little more like something he’s trying to convince himself of.

‘Unforgiven’ deconstructs the genre by painting everything in shades of grey. Munny by his own admission has killed women and children, done things for money and professes to being unable to remember most of his misdeeds (“I was drunk most of the time”) and yet for all of his assertions that he’s changed he’s simply being untrue to himself and it’s only when the need for revenge and half a bottle of whisky are lodged inside of him that the real Munny re-emerges … and an apocalypse in microcosm comes to Big Whiskey.

‘Little’ Bill just wants to keep his town free of assassins and “men of low character” and yet he has no qualms about resorting to brutally sadistic methods to accomplish it. The Schofield Kid is desperate to make a name for himself and blatantly fabricates the extent of his career as a hired gun, and yet the messy reality of killing a man proves too much for him in the final analysis. English Bob already has a reputation but is hellbent on perpetuating his own legend; he is ultimately proved a liar. Beauchamp, the ending implies, is the man who will chronicle Munny’s showdown with ‘Little’ Bill (I’ll omit the motivations and mechanics of this scene for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t seen the film) and yet his literary talents seem less in harness to the truth than to the claiming of a story dramatic enough to boost the sales of his purple prose.

The title crawl that closes ‘Unforgiven’ is purposefully ambiguous, as is the very title. An anti-violence aesthetic hangs over the whole film (particularly in the painfully extended death of one of the cowpokes), yet the final shoot-out is as cathartic and iconic as any western in Eastwood’s filmography.

‘Unforgiven’ is a richly rewarding film that demands repeated viewings. It works on many levels. Acting, script, direction, cinematography and music are spot-on perfect. There isn’t a misstep or a wrong note in the whole thing. It’s a film whose characters are flawed and world weary; who are defined by experience and regret. Some of them change their minds in a welter of remorse. Some can no more escape who they are than fly to the moon. And, in the main, it’s all on account of pullin’ a trigger.

Top ten romantic heroines

Keeping it clean for Easter Sunday (don't worry - normal service will be resumed next week), here's the top ten romantic heroines:

Audrey Tautou as Amelie Poulain in ‘Amelie’

Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’

Celia Johnson as Laura Jesson in ‘Brief Encounter’

Amy Adams as Giselle in ‘Enchanted’


Vivian Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in ‘Gone with the Wind’

Kim Hunter as June in ‘A Matter of Life and Death’

Emmanuelle Riva as Elle in ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’

Josette Day as Belle in ‘La belle et la bête’

Janet Gaynor as “the wife” in ‘Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans’

Gene Tierney as Lucy Muir in ‘The Ghost and Mrs Muir’

Atonement

My thanks to Viv Apple for the following review:

I found ‘Atonement’ so absorbing and involving that it took me some time to untangle my thoughts about it. It was certainly beautiful, but was it about class, or love, the pity of war, or the foolishness of youth? It was all of these and more. The opening scenes, set in a country house in the 1930s, seemed to exaggerate class attitudes a little too much, but even that became acceptable for the times as the drama took over.

In a key scene the teenage Briony (Saoirse Ronan), a dreamer, looks through a window and sees her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) strip off her dress and dive into a fountain watched by Robbie (James McAvoy), the housekeeper’s son who has just graduated from Cambridge. Briony misinterprets the situation, which leads to more complex misunderstandings and eventually to the tragic separation of Robbie and Cecilia just after they have acknowledged their love for each other.

Although the story was made believable by sensitive performances, there were some flaws which could have undermined the whole narrative. For example, the police investigation which hinged on a young girl’s word was glossed over, even though it appeared that Robbie, the accused, was elsewhere when the offence in question was committed.

Fast forward four years, and the rest of the film is set during the second world war. We see the effects of Briony’s lie intertwined with her attempts to atone for her behaviour.

I won’t spoil the plot by describing any more of its intricacies, but must mention the remarkable Dunkirk scene: a long tracking shot in which Robbie wanders, wounded, through the beach with all the horrors of that time around him. Hundreds of soldiers, horses, a beached boat with shredded sails, men singing in an old bandstand, all against a background of a Ferris wheel, combined to create a surreal atmosphere reminiscent of ‘Oh What a Lovely War’. At first I thought this too unreal and stagy, but then it struck me that it was not meant to be representational. The effect was highly emotional and, like Picasso’s Guernica, the surreal nature of the scene underlined the unimaginable horror of war.

In a final scene, Vanessa Redgrave plays Briony in old age, effectively bringing together loose ends. Beautifully done, but somewhat marred by a sugary final shot which bordered on cliché. Had director Joe Wright cut the film by 30 seconds, I would have believed it all.

The Damned United

Full disclosure: I have no interest in football. I am, however, Nottingham born and bred and I was seven when Nottingham Forest won the European Cup in 1979, a feat they reprised the following year. Brian Clough was – and is – a legend in Nottingham. The A52 connecting Nottingham and Derby has been re-signposted as ‘Brian Clough Way’ (apposite given his track record managing clubs in both cities) and his statue was unveiled in the Market Square in November last year.

So it was out of curiosity as to how well Michael Sheen’s performance captured Cloughie’s trademark admixture of charm and belligerence that me and my friend Aidy headed to the Broadway Cinema last Saturday night for a screening of ‘The Damned United’. Our better halves evinced no interest in the film and occupied themselves otherwise while we attended the screening, then enthusiastically discussed the film in the pub afterwards.

If this makes ‘The Damned United’ sound like a blokey movie – trawl up to the cinema with a bunch of mates, cheer at Sheen’s heroic performance, then head for the boozer afterwards – then I’m doing the film a disservice. There’s nothing laddish about it at all, and the amount of actual on-the-pitch footage would probably add up to little more than a couple of minutes. What ‘The Damned United’ is really about is friendship, rivalry and overreaching ambition.

Tom Hooper’s film, adapted by Peter Morgan from David Peace’s novel, contrapuntally charts Clough’s miraculous leadership at Derby County in the late ’60s and early ’70s, dragging the club from Second Division doldrums and turning them into fiery First Division contenders, with his disastrous 44-day managership of Leeds United in 1974.

Leeds were then at the forefront of British football, undisputed champions, and relations were loyal and productive between them and manager Don Revie. They were also aggressive on the pitch and had a dubious disciplinary record. ‘The Damned United’ takes the rivalry between Clough and Revie (Colm Meaney) as its central dynamic, Revie snubbing Clough at a Leeds vs Derby match, refusing to shake his hand, and Leeds trouncing Derby in several clashes over the years, Clough’s players fouled and injured by Leeds’ thuggery.

So when Clough’s outspokenness and habit of royally pissing off Derby chairman Sam Longson (Jim Broadbent) sees him and assistant manager Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall) relieved of their duties, he reluctantly accepts a job with Brighton & Hove Albion. Taylor relishes the challenges of building up the club from nothing (ie. the Third Division, which is pretty much the definition of “nothing”), but Clough rails against the seaside, the boarding houses and cafes, and the general ubiquity of Southerners. The moment Revie quits Leeds United to manage the England squad, Clough takes the job.

He loses no time in earning the animosity of his team. Day one, first address to his players: “The first thing you can do for me is to chuck all your medals and all your caps and all your pots and all your pans into the biggest fucking dustbin you can find, because you’ve never won any of them fairly. You’ve done it all by bloody cheating.”

What follows is kind of like ‘Downfall’, but with a football stadium instead of a bunker.

Michael Sheen is simply astounding in the lead role; following on from recent turns as Tony Blair and David Frost, the man’s king of the biopic, with a real gift for evoking the personalities he plays. Timothy Spall is an odd casting choice for Taylor, physically nothing like him, but succeeds in capturing the frustration and affection that characterised the two men’s turbulent relationship. Colm Meaney brings a dour gravitas to his characterisation of Revie, even if the role is tad underwritten. But it’s perhaps Jim Broadbent who deserves a man of the match award, jettisoning a good decade’s worth of twinkly comedic roles and really getting under the skin of old-school chairman Longson, a working class man made good whose patience is sorely tested by Clough’s cavalier attitude towards him and the board. The verbal stand offs between Clough and Longson, particularly when Longson suggests that Clough give Leeds an easy victory so they can play a stronger side against Juventus in a forthcoming European match, are tour de forces.

I mentioned at the start of this piece that I don’t like football. The main reason I don’t like it is the tribalism and the alpha male bullshit that goes with it. There’s a scene where Clough, being interviewed for TV, states that football is “a beautiful game and it should be played beautifully”. Amen to that. Cloughie’s a local hero – hell, a national one – and although his family have spoken out against ‘The Damned United’, for my money it’s a damn fine film.

Top ten truckers

UPDATE: thanks to Alper for reminding me of Stallone's pugnacious trucker in the splendidly over-the-top, uh, ‘Over the Top’:

In honour of the two day ‘Wages of Fear’ love-in, ten coffee-drinkin’ smokey-dodgin’ double-clutchin’ truckin’ types:

Stacy Keach as Pat Quid in ‘Roadgames’

Carey Loftin as “the truck driver” in ‘Duel’

Yves Montand as Mario in ‘The Wages of Fear’


Richard Conte as Nick Garcos in ‘Thieves’ Highway’

George Raft and Humphrey Bogart as the Fabrini brothers in ‘They Drive by Night’

Hugh Jackman as Jack Willis in ‘Paperback Hero’

Stanley Baker as Tom Yately in ‘Hell Drivers’

Kris Kristofferson as Rubber Duck in ‘Convoy’

J.T. Walsh as “Red” Barr in ‘Breakdown’

Patrick Swayze as Jack Crews in ‘Black Dog’