The Story of the Dirty Thirty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #3: Vanishing on 7th Street

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #2: The Awakening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #1: Tenebrae

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All hail the Pumpkin King

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

That’s very very soon as in tomorrow.

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

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


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

BOND-A-THON: Die Another Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, I have issues with the car.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mylène Demongeot

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

Herbert Lom

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

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

Helen Mirren

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

I'll drink to that!

The Killer

In honour of John Woo's 66th birthday, a re-post of my review of his seminal HK action movie 'The Killer'.

Ostensibly, the ingredients of John Woo’s seminal “heroic bloodshed” opus ‘The Killer’ make it sound like a cinematic cocktail (or, more appropriately, a cinematic Molotov cocktail):

Take one existentially iconic hitman a la Jean-Pierre Melville, a dash of Sirkian melodrama (preferably the ‘Magnificent Obsession’ vintage), a double measure of visual imagery from early Scorsese, and a liberal helping of Peckinpahesque slo-mo. Add white doves. Blend.

Which would constitute a pretty accurate and unprecedentedly short (65 word) review, the only addition to which would be a handful of kick-ass screen shots, were it not for the fact that Woo transcends every borrowing, every homage, every lovingly crafted frame of reference and creates something that is stylistically and emotionally his own.

Or, to put it another way, Woo does what very few other directors have ever done with such a degree of success (I can think only of Tarantino offhand): he synthesises his influences so completely that while the end product is beholden on virtually every level – narratively, aesthetically, everything else that ends in “–ly” – to a plethora of other, earlier works, it nonetheless pulls together these diverse strands in a manner that either goes beyond or in a completely different direction to those selfsame influences.

In ‘Le Samourai’, Melville doesn’t have Alain Delon cauterize an exit wound by tamping gunpowder over it and applying a lighted cigarette. In ‘The Wild Bunch’, Peckinpah doesn’t stage the bunch’s climactic shoot-out with Mapache’s army against a backdrop of religious imagery, flickering candles and white doves. And, yes, Melville and Peckinpah don’t make these aesthetic choices for a reason. But Woo does. And that’s kind of the point in and of itself.

The simplest (and least critically valid) summation is that Woo doesn’t certain things – particularly with regard to his use of slow motion, freeze frames and dissolves – because they fucking look cool as fuck. Which they do. And if you can shoot an action scene that’s as balletic, iconic, dynamic and hyper-kinetic as a John Woo action scene, then screw it, you’ve earned the right to do that kind of thing for its own sake and to hell with anything deeper like thematic content, characterisation and moral imperatives.

Woo, however, does things not just because they fucking look cool as fuck but because they contribute to the thematic content of his work, because they define and develop the characterisation, and because he is concerned with the moral imperatives of honour, guilt and redemption. Then, and only then, does the fact that they fucking look cool as fuck come into play.

Let’s revisit that phrase “moral imperative”. Sometimes it’s the directors whose work appears most violent, or attracts the most controversy, who prove themselves as having the more demonstrable morality: it’s true of Sam Peckinpah, true of Michael Haneke, true of John Woo. Haneke’s approach is one of cool, detached cerebralism; his aesthetic rigidly formalist. Woo, like Peckinpah, is a more emotionally involved filmmaker. He is acutely conscious of the way men interact and the codes that bind or divide them. He understands the mindset of the outcast, the criminal, the (conventionally speaking) bad guy. He sees the wounded and compromised humanity in them. Sometimes it’s a defeated sense of humanity; sometimes it’s retrievable.

‘The Killer’ is about a thoughtful and ultra-professional hitman, Ah Jong (Chow Yun Fat) who accidentally blinds nightclub singer Jenny (Sally Yeh) during a hit that turns into a fully-fledged gun battle. During the aftermath, rather than go to ground, he undertakes the proverbial one last job in order to raise money for the cornea transplant that could restore Jenny’s sight, despite the fact that maverick cop Inspector Ying (Danny Lee) is on his trail and unaware that his former paymasters are about to double cross him.

It sounds generic, clichéd and predictable. In Woo’s hands, it’s a dementedly excessive but savagely beautiful and often ludicrously funny work of art.

BOND-A-THON: The World is Not Enough

Really, there was no reason for ‘The World is Not Enough’ not to have been awesome: a reasonably timely plot about oil pipelines and terrorism, a couple of tip-top set pieces, the return of Robbie Coltrane as Russian mobster Valentin Zukovsky from ‘GoldenEye’ (providing some much required comic relief after the po-faced shenanigans of ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’), a gorgeous and talented actress (Sophie Marceau) raising the Bond girl stakes, and Robert Carlyle on villain duties. And if was ever an indicator that Bond might not prevail, it was in putting him up against fucking Begbie!

And yet ‘TWiNE’ isn’t awesome. ‘TWiNE’ in fact describes a plunging arc from promising to tedious to several increasingly stygian levels of awful, culminating in a pun that you can see coming from the moment the actual Bond girl, Dr Christmas Jones (Denise Richards) is introduced. You see, the filmmakers were jerking your chain with Sophie Marceau and it’s Denise Richards in a tank top, a pair of shorts and a petulant expression – kind of like an extremely poor man’s Lara Croft – who gets to run around with 007 and save the world. Dr Christmas Jones is a nuclear physicist, by the way. Played by Denise Richards. Forgive me if I’m labouring the point, but they fucking cast Denise Richards as a nuclear fucking physicist called Dr Christmas fucking Jones.

Oh, yeah. And they gave Michael Apted the directing gig. Apart from ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’, ‘Gorillas in the Mist’ and some good character-based TV work, much of Apted’s output has been curiously pedestrian and there is nothing on his CV to mark him out as an action director.

Anyone watching the film for the first time, however, would think from the opening sequence that they were in for a treat. At nearly quarter of an hour, it’s the longest pre-credits sequence in the franchise and rather than being its own for-the-sake-of-it mini-movie it sets the stage for the story proper. In its depiction of an incendiary device triggered inside the MI6 headquarters, it establishes a theme of attack from within that recurs through the film. And it culminates in a speedboat chase along the Thames. Which, as it progresses, treads a thin line between cool and stupid, but that was always the appeal of the Bondian pre-credits sequence. ‘TWiNE’ strikes the right balance and, as Garbage’s theme song – not as memorable as Tina Turner’s ‘GoldenEye’ but a vast improvement on Sheryl Crow’s ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ – kicks in, there’s no doubt that you’ve just sat through a kick-ass, supremely entertaining opener.

Enjoy it, cherish it, feel good about it. Because – apart from a bit of business where helicopters with massive chainsaw blades slung underneath them cut through the buildings and gangways of a harbour – it’s the only solid action scene Apted delivers. And it’s the first and last time ‘TWiNE’ is entertaining.

The bizarre thing is, the film desperately wants to be entertaining. The script kicks out what must be per capita the most puns in any Bond movie. Quizzed by nuclear physicist Jones on the nature of his relationship with another woman: “We’re strictly plutonic.” Asked by a voluptuous accountant if he’d like to check her figures: “I’m sure they’re perfectly rounded.” On a Q branch prototype that disguises a flamethrower as a set of bagpipes: “I suppose we all have to pay the piper some time” (Q goes a pun too far by replying “oh, pipe down, 007”). Whilst sliding on a pair of sunglasses while some upgraded gadgets are being demonstrated: “New specs, Q?” Things hit rock bottom when Bond offs a crooked head of security and takes his place on what turns out to be a mission to appropriate a warhead. “Where’s the other guy?” someone challenges him. Bond’s reply: “He was buried with work.” As a one-liner, it’s neither elegant or funny. It’s not apposite, since the dead guy isn’t shown being interred. And Brosnan’s delivery is horribly forced. In its own small way, it’s incredibly emblematic of ‘The Word is Not Enough’.

The plot, which doesn’t so much unravel as twist itself into a series of ugly knots, doesn’t help matters. SPOILER ALERT. Bond recovers a large quantity of cash being laundered by Swiss banker Lachaise (Patrick Malahide); the moolah is returned to rightful owner, industrialist Robert King (David Calder) – a pal of M (Judi Dench). It’s booby-trapped, however, and the resulting explosion kills King. Bond pursues the assassin and is injured. At King’s funeral, Bond meets King’s daughter Elektra (Marceau), who vows to continue his work in building an oil pipeline across Azerbaijan. Bond looks into Elektra’s background and discovers she was the victim of a kidnapping plot by international terrorist Renard (Carlyle) but escaped his clutches. M, it turns out, had advised King to withhold paying the ransom while she investigated. Bond realises that, converted from American dollars to pounds sterling, the laundered money he recovered (i.e. the booby-trap he inadvertently delivered) corresponds to the ransom amount. He takes it as a message and concludes that Renard was behind the attack on King. M despatches him to act as personal bodyguard to Elektra. By circuitous means, Bond realises that she was the instrument of her own father’s death and has faked various attacks against herself and her company, including an aerial attack by paragliders and the destruction of a length of her own pipeline. Bond suspects Stockholm Syndrome and fears that she’s in league with Renard. He’s proved correct, except that it’s Elektra who’s controlling Renard, not vice versa. A bullet lodged in his brain, the wound inoperable and the shell slowly moving through the medulla oblongata, Renard is essentially a dead man, and happily throwing away the last slivers of his life in carrying out Elektra’s plan: to destroy Istanbul (the point at which the three pipelines in competition to Elektra’s converge) and thus facilitate Elektra’s supremacy as supplier of oil to the west. The means of Istanbul’s removal from the map: plutonium from a stolen warhead introduced into the reactor of a hijacked nuclear submarine. As a sort of bonus, Elektra also plans M’s death as vengeance for not rescuing her from Renard (which seems something of a redundant point given that she’s turned him into her own personal Euro-psycho-puppet).

I’ve described the insane what-the-fuckery of the plot in such detail in order to make my point. Which is this. Imagine you’re Elektra. Let the whole M thing go – why, after all, start fucking around with MI6 when you’re pulling a whole bunch of seriously illegal shit that you’d rather not bring to attention of an intelligence agency – and your motivation is basically: I want to get rid of the rival pipelines. As I see it, your options are: (a) buy out the competition; (b) pay some mercenaries to blow up the other pipelines just as yours is reaching completion; or (c) – the, ahem, logical choice according to writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Bruce Feirstein – seduce a psychotic terrorist who might drop dead at any moment to help you steal a plutonium warhead, acquire a submarine with nuclear reactor capacity, set your operation back several months by blowing up a length of your own pipeline, risk death by a stray bullet while some hired guns pretend to kill you, work out your issues with daddy by blowing the poor sod to kingdom come and keep the whole nefarious plot on course while MI6’s finest are all over you.

Am I the only person who sees options (a) and (b) as doable but expensive, while option (c) is basically stupid, riddled with the potential for failure, and financially ruinous. I mean, seriously, how the fuck much does it cost to bankroll the theft of a warhead and a nuclear motherfucking submarine? (SPOILERS END.)

Granted, suspension of disbelief goes hand in hand with the Bond aesthetic. Hey, I’m a guy who’s down with a fully kitted-out secret base in a volcano, for Pete’s sake! But the plot of ‘The World is Not Enough’ (and the illogic behind it) goes beyond suspension of disbelief. In a world of corporationism, where hostile takeovers are entirely legal, where financial chicanery, bribes and corruption are an accepted part of the way business is done, the idea that you’d have to destroy Istanbul in order to get an unfair advantage over the competition is not only ludicrous, but a concept that would have your average CEO – a cohort of bought-and-paid-for politicians in his pocket and the dirtiest lawyers in the business on speed-dial – pissing his pants at the waste of time and effort in achieving a fairly simple outcome.

I’ve struggled with ‘TWiNE’ writing this review: excepting the speedboat chase, I can find little or no reason not to rank it firmly alongside previous franchise low points ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’, ‘Moonraker’ and ‘A View to a Kill’. Actually, being fair, I can find two reasons: (i) it’s the final Bond movie to give us the marvellously wintry interplay between Bond and Q (at least as played by Desmond Llewellyn; the character returns in ‘Skyfall’ in the person of Ben Wishaw); and (ii) I know that’s it’s followed by ‘Die Another Day’ and the sins of ‘The World is Not Enough’ suddenly take on a forgivable hue in the knowledge of what’s to come.

Dinah Sheridan

Happy 92nd birthday to Dinah Sheridan, a classic English rose and star of the evergreen 'Genevieve'.

They say the eyes are the windows to the soul, and the portrait above proves the saying right in scintillating style.