Amber Heard

Happy 26th birthday to the very cool, and quite definitely photogenic, Amber Heard.

Corpse Bride

The obvious approach to take in reviewing ‘Corpse Bride’ – and it’s so obvious there probably ought to be a law against it – is to observe that Tim Burton depicts the world of the living as grey and inert, and the world of the dead as colourful and lively, therefore yada yada yada blah blah blah upload student paper to blindingly_obvious_critiques@agitation.net.

This is what ‘Corpse Bride is really about:

Class.

The basic set-up (established in a musical number that comes across like Gilbert & Sullivan after a few G&Ts too many) has upper crust but penniless couple Finis and Maudeline Everglot (voiced by Albert Finney and Joanna Lumley) scheming to marry their winsome daughter Victoria (Emily Watson) off to Victor (Johnny Depp), the hapless son of nouveau riche parvenus William and Nell Van Dort (Paul Whitehouse and Tracey Ullman).

The names are just too priceless: Finis (as in “the end”) and Maudeline (maudlin) are the stuffed shirt aristocratic types drifting stoically towards their own personal financial Gotterdammerung, their stately home crumbling around them. Their nemeses/saviours are William (you can imagine he’s “Bill”, an archetypal working class diminutive, to his mates) and Nell (a name inevitably evocative of a nobleman’s consort). The romantic couple in waiting are called Victor and Victoria. The obvious filmic homage notwithstanding, both are reticent, gauche, clumsy and socially inept: there’s nothing victorious about either.

Victor, reeling under Pastor Galswells (Christopher Lee)’s admonition at being unable to memorize his wedding vows, takes a sheepish walk into the dark forest just on the outskirts of town and practices the lines and the giving of the ring. In the kind of innocent misunderstanding that could easily befall any young man, he finds himself betrothed to the titular Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter).

[Parenthetically, the following exchange, which took place at chez Agitation while watching the DVD last night, might be worth recording:

ME: Okay, so she’s dead, crawling with maggots and has a detachable arm, but the lass has a decent figure.

PAULA: Hmmm, I don’t know. Could do with some meat on her bones.

ME: High five.]

Hooked up with Deadgirl Corpse Bride, Victor finds himself in a bustling, variegated underworld where money and social standing don’t mean squat, where a Napoleonic general and a Rhett Butler-type suth’un gennulman hang out in the same bar with a group of pool-playing skeletons and an equally fleshless jazz band. Death the great leveler, indeed.

‘Corpse Bride’ – released the same year as Burton’s overblown remake of ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ – is a curious film. Clocking in at just an hour and a quarter, its slender plot nonetheless feels dragged out in places. There are only two real set-pieces: Victor’s half-delirious half-terrified waltz through the underworld (incorporating the marvelous title song in swing band style), and the wedding finale at which arch-villain Barkis Bittern (Richard E Grant) threatens the celebrations of both the living and the dead. (We were talking about character names earlier. Barkis Bittern. Geddit? Geddit?) It packs in a vocal cast of staggering quality – in addition to the above named, Michael Gough, Jane Horrocks and Enn Reitel lend their dulcet tones – some of whom only get a line or two. The songs probably account for over a third of the screen time. Visually, it’s kind of like the characters who didn’t make the cut for ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’ decided to put on their own show and to hell with it.

It looks like it’s set in a woodcut illustration from a book of German fairy tales, yet comes on as a black valentine to Englishness. It puts up an English rose against a pretty freakin’ hot (and decidedly non-living) goth chick. (And you can’t get much more goth than actually being six feet under.) It doesn’t just laugh at the Reaper, but chortles along with him. It’s glib and sardonic and takes its leave of you with a scene that’s authentically and throat-tighteningly beautiful. Well played, Mr Burton, well played.

BOND-A-THON: Goldfinger

Between them, ‘Dr No’ and ‘From Russia with Love’ set out the various elements of the formula: in the former, a megalomaniacal villain with an outrageous plan for world domination, exotic locations and beautiful women; in the latter, a tantalising pre-credits sequence, a big ballad theme song, the post-credits promise that Bond would return, and … er … more beautiful women.

‘Goldfinger’ put all of these elements together, went to town on the gadgets, and turned the whole thing up to eleven.

‘Goldfinger’ is either the quintessential Bond movie in terms of what a contemporary audience understands by (and expects of) a Bond movie, or it’s the point at which the rot set in. As cynical as I tend to be, I can’t quite bring myself to dislike ‘Goldfinger’ for setting the franchise on course for its mid-period formulaic turgidity. I ought to. And likewise, I ought to take it to task for sanding some of the rough edges off Bond, chamfering the character into a smooth adventurer rather a governmental blunt instrument. But, damn, it’s just too entertaining a movie for me to be mad at it for any real length of time. And, damn, if Shirley Bassey’s powerhouse theme song isn’t the definitive 007 chart-topper. And, double damn, if the Aston Martin DB5 (with or without modifications) isn’t the sexiest car ever made.

Moreover, none of the elements which so quickly became formulaic are particularly intrusive here; in fact, with only a couple of minor reservations, the film as a whole is as sleek and iconic as you could want a mainstream event movie to be. Director Guy Hamilton – helming his first Bond movie; he’d return, with variable degrees of success, for ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, ‘Live and Let Die’ and ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ – eschews the shadowy espionage of Terence Young’s previous outing, sets out his stall with a bang (Bond blowing a drug plant sky-high in the pre-credits scene, before electrocuting an assassin and tossing out a one-liner: “Shocking, positively shocking”), then opens the film proper in sunny Miami Beach as Bond interrupts nemesis-in-waiting Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe)’s card-cheating system and dallies with his escort Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton).

Goldfinger is on M (Bernard Lee)’s radar as a potential gold smuggler. Bond crosses him in Miami, then crosses him again at an English club during a round of golf characterised by rampant cheating by both players. Goldfinger proves himself a bad loser, and when the portly megalomaniac gets pissed off his monosyllabic Korean manservant Oddjob (Harold Sakata) tends to do something about it. (Come to think of it, ‘Goldfinger’ adds another staple to the formula: troublesome sidekick whose social deficiencies emphasize the über-villain’s ostensible sophistication.)

From Miami Beach to England to Switzerland (globe-trotting: another franchise check-box) as Bond tracks Goldfinger to his European metallurgical headquarters, discovers how the smuggling works (pretty ingenious, actually) and realizes that Goldfinger is mixed up in more than just a bit of import-export without making the relevant customs declarations. What he is mixed up in involves Chinese nuclear physics experts, US underworld bosses and an all-girl flying circus led by the unsubtly-named Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman).

Which brings us to a suitable place to consider those aforementioned reservations. ‘Goldfinger’ is the Ian Fleming novel I have the most trouble with. Not for the writing (it has the same Janet-and-John linguistic simplicity and narrative thrust of all the other Bonds) but because of the homophobia. Fleming settles on Pussy Galore as a lesbian for, seemingly, no other reason than to engage in a bit of gay-bashing, concluding with that teeth-grindingly reprehensible ideology – depressingly prevalent at the time Fleming was writing – that all a gay person needs to, ahem, straighten them out is a bit of vigorous straight sex from the right person.

Mercifully, the film – series regular Richard Maibaum co-scripted, this time with Paul Dehn (who went on to adapt John le Carre’s ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’, about as un-Bond-like a project as possible) – leaves Pussy’s preferences merely hinted at, while the inevitable Bond/Pussy clinch is as perfunctory as any of Bond’s conquests in the later movies. What Maibaum, Dehn and Hamilton replaced the homophobia with, however, was a trace element of misogyny that would burgeon as the series developed. Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s poem ‘Bond Girl’ expresses what I’m getting at:

The girls were something else. All that they earned
for being perfect examples of their kind –
Black, Asian, White – blonde, redhead or brunette,
groomed, beauty-parlourised, pleasing in bed,
mixing Martinis that were shaken not stirred,
using pearl varnish on their nails not red –
was death. A night (or 2) with 007,
then they were gilded till they could not breathe,
chucked to the sharks, shot, tortured, carried off
or found, floating face downward in a pool.

Honey Ryder in ‘Dr No’ was in the wrong place at the wrong time; Tatiana in ‘From Russia with Love’ was duped just as unsparingly as Bond; both were characters as opposed to mere trinkets. If ‘Goldfinger’ pulled together the franchise’s defining qualities in terms of guns, gadgets and globe-trotting, then it also defined the Bond girl: glamorous, willing and expendable. For all that Honor Blackman got third billing as Pussy Galore, it was Shirley Eaton who gave the film its most iconic image – a woman: naked, gilded, dead.

Alice Braga

Happy 29th birthday to Alice Braga, probably still best known for her turn opposite Will Smith in 'I Am Legend', but sultry and unforgettable in 'Lower City'.

America Unchained

The impetus for ‘America Unchained’ came when English comedian Dave Gorman toured the United States with a one-man show. Fascinated in his youth with the concept of the free-wheeling, transient lifestyle which for him was emblematic of American culture, he was disconcerted to find himself in drinking at the same airport coffee franchises, staying in the same homogenous hotels and barely being able to differentiate between one city and another despite travelling hundreds of miles between them.

Gorman decided he’d had enough of corporate America; enough of chain motels, chain eateries, chain gas stations. He decided to cross America, coast to coast, without giving any money to The Man. To cross America and only give his custom to Mom ‘n’ Pop outlets. To discover, essentially, the real America.

‘America Unchained’ is the story of how he almost didn’t achieve it.

Landing in the States with his director-cum-camera-operator Steph Wagstaffe, Gorman immediately hares off the planned route in order to find a suitable car for the journey. He picks up a second hand Ford Torino station wagon. That’s second hand as in 1974 model, by the way. It has “666” as part of its license plate. Many people would have backed away from it; Gorman practically falls in love with it. The Torino proves itself a poisoned chalice on four wheels (“Ford,” a mechanic remarks airily later in the documentary after it’s broken down for the umpteenth time: “Fix Or Repair Daily.”)

With a muffler begging replacement before the road trip’s underway, Gorman accentuates the positive and gives his business to an independent garage. Then he discovers that there’s a town called Independence and makes another deviation from the planned route in order to pay a visit. It’s a disappointment. Combing the map, he locates a bunch other towns called Independence dotted all over the USA. The coast-to-coast in a more or less straight line idea goes quite spectacularly tits up at this point.

It’s fair to say that Gorman’s haphazard and whimsical approach to the project tempts fate. Fate turns out to be a real bastard and it’s a Wagstaffe who bears the brunt. Suffering with back pains severe enough to leave her unable to operate the camera (Gorman assumes DoP duties for a while; let’s be charitable and just say that it’s not really his forte), she eventually has to depart the project and fly back to England. Marooned in Moab, Utah for a week while producer Andy Devonshire tries to pressgang someone – anyone – into replacing Wagstaffe, Gorman undergoes a small personal meltdown.

Actually, no. Gorman full-on fucking wigs out a la Captain Willard in the opening scenes of ‘Apocalypse Now’. We’re talking personal heart of darkness territory, only with a Utah hotel room instead of one in Saigon.

How bad does it get? You’ll have to watch ‘America Unchained’ to find out.

Evidently unable to find anyone else, Devonshire flies out to America to help Gorman finish the documentary. He’s wanting to get home before Christmas to spend the festive period with his baby daughter and puts the kibosh on Gorman’s excessive peregrinations straightaway. Which is all well and good, but Devonshire doesn’t have any influence over the vagaries of the Torino.

‘America Unchained’ is an entertaining 75-minute film which, approached as a stand-alone work, pretty much ticks the required boxes. I purposefully left a couple of years between reading the accompanying book and watching the DVD. And yet I still can’t quite reconcile the substantial 378-page paperback, with its wealth of observation, detail and often screamingly funny set-pieces, with its wistful and slightly flimsy celluloid counterpart. Still, the film never outstays its welcome and Gorman makes for a genial guide along the highways and byways of America, full of self-deprecating humour and “everyman” likeability. He certainly comes across as a nicer guy than I’d have proved in the circumstances. Me, I’d have shot that fucking car after the first fifty miles.

BOND-A-THON: From Russia With Love

During the latter stages of ‘From Russia With Love’, James Bond (Sean Connery) and defecting Russian cipher clerk Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) are biding their time on a trans-European express train with a stolen decoding machine, waiting to disembark at the crucial moment to effect a strictly passport-free border crossing. Agents of SPECTRE, who have been using both of them as pawns in a meticulously constructed piece of espionage, attempt to prevent their escape and retrieve the machine.

A pick-up truck, parked across the tracks as if broken down, its bonnet propped open, stops the express. Bond anticipates the trickery. Dropping noiselessly off the train, he sneaks up on the SPECTRE agent on his blindside and slams the bonnet down on the guy’s hands before cold-cocking him with the butt of his Beretta. It’s all done with a ruthless efficiency. Earlier on, Bond slaps a distraught Tatiana – hard, really snapping her head back – to get information. Earlier still, he assists his opposite number in Istanbul in an unsanctioned revenge killing and tosses out a glib one-liner as the two of them stroll off.

For me, Connery in ‘From Russia With Love’ defines Bond. He’s basically a cold, ruthless bastard who employs a mixture of low cunning and unflinching brutality to achieve his ends. But it’s not for this reason that ‘From Russia With Love’ is my favourite Bond movie (yup, this retrospective is peaking two films in; thanks for joining me, folks, it’s been emotional). The film wins out for me because it’s what most of the Bond movies aren’t: a proper, straight-up, according-to-Hoyle espionage thriller.

That might not sound like I’m making much of a claim, but consider the basic Bond template: M calls 007 into his (or her, when we come to the Dame Judy Dench incarnation) office and lays down a few minutes of exposition: something naughty’s happening and the main suspect is a multi-billionaire industrialist/scientist/metallurgist/newspaper baron [delete as applicable]. Bond goes waltzing into the middle of said megalomaniac’s operation, announces himself as “Bond, James Bond” (whoops, there goes the cover), a bit of cat and mouse ensues, Bond gets laid, Bond gets captured, Bond frees himself, the bad guy’s secret base gets blown to shit.

Except for the getting laid bit …

… none of this malarkey happens in ‘From Russia With Love’. Which makes it the most un-Bond of the Bonds. And decidedly better for it. (Although in other respects, it establishes the pre-credits sequence, dancing girls in silhouette during the credits, a celebrity theme song – take a bow, Matt Monro – and Q department goodies as franchise tropes.)

What happens instead is that SPECTRE head honcho Ernst Stavro Bolfeld (Anthony Dawson – his face unseen and billed as “?” in the credits, presumably to detract from the fact he’d already appeared, and been dispatched, in the first Bond movie as Professor Dent) approves a plan by chess champion and all-round devious swine Kronsteen (Vladek Sheybal) to exploit Cold War tension between Britain and Russia, get their mitts on the much sought-after Lektor decoding machine, disgrace Bond and thereby enjoy a little payback for Dr No’s demise.

And what bait do you dangle in front of Britain’s top secret agent? That’ll be a pretty girl, then. Former Russian operations head Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) – now working for SPECTRE – recruits Tatiana to seduce Bond. She also recruits Aryan psychopath Grant (Robert Shaw) to ensure Bond, Tatiana and the gadgetry don’t make it back to Britain.

Sent to Istanbul, when Tatiana is working at the Russian embassy, Bond makes contact with Turkish spymaster Kerim Bey (Pedro Armendariz, having a whale of a time playing as big a ladies’ man as 007). En route to the acquisition of the Lektor (was Thomas Harris a fan of the movie, I wonder?) – which, incidentally, is a Macguffin worthy of Hitchcock – there’s all manner of red-herrings, with everyone in Istanbul seemingly spying on everyone else, and a subplot regarding rivalry between gypsy tribes, incorporating a narratively redundant but leeringly lingered-upon bitch fight between two gypsy girls.

‘From Russia With Love’ was Ian Fleming’s fifth novel. While its predecessors had sold decently in the UK, he’d failed to crack the American market and, as he wrote to Raymond Chandler, he worried that he was running out of ideas. The book has a more experimental structure than the others, its first third dealing entirely with the plot against 007 and Bond himself not showing up for a good 100 pages. The last chapter intimates that Fleming was ready to call time. The final line is “Bond pivoted slowly on his heel and crashed headlong to the wine-red floor”.

All things considered, it’s an odd choice for a second instalment in what producers Saltzman and Broccoli were unambiguously developing into a franchise. (The closing credits teaser “The End … but not quite the end … James Bond will return in the next Ian Fleming thriller ‘Goldfinger’” is more than just a statement of intent; it’s an exercise in branding that your average Madison Avenue ad man would have been proud of.) They made damn sure, though, that the last scene of the film was nowhere near as dark as the novel’s.

As with ‘Dr No’, Richard Maibaum and Johanna Harwood collaborated on the adaptation, with Terence Young calling the shots. Series regulars Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell return as M and Miss Moneypenny, while Desmond Llewellyn puts in his first appearance as Q. Eunice Gayson carries over her role as Sylvia Trench from ‘Dr No’, in the only intimation the franchise offers of a relationship outlasting the heat-of-the-moment frisson of Bond’s mission du jour.

Connery’s much more at home with the character this time around, and there’s none of the padding (excepting the gypsy girl smackdown) that punctuates ‘Dr No’. World domination silliness is given short shift. Genuinely suspenseful set pieces – Bond and Grant’s vicious hand-to-hand in a cramped train compartment; Bond’s duel with a helicopter; a speedboat chase – deliver more excitement than multiple explosions. Gadgets are minimal and used contextually instead of as the hi-tech deus ex machinas of the later films. In Bianchi’s Tatiana (albeit a dubbed and slightly stilted performance), we have a Bond girl who’s integral to the plot rather than just buxom set-dressing.

Best of all, though, the Bond of the novels gets the fullest filmic outing he’d have until Daniel Craig and Martin Campbell took the series back to its roots with ‘Casino Royale’. The polarity between character and actor that informed ‘Dr No’ seems harsher in ‘From Russia With Love’. Connery’s panther-like muscularity is more evident; his working-class tough-guy aura is never far away; and the suave, socially adroit façade of James Bond is never in more danger of being punctured than in his exchange with Grant after the latter (temporarily at least) has out-manoeuvred him.

“Red wine with fish,” Bond muses, remembering Grant’s restaurant car faux pas; “well, that should have told me something.” Voice as steely as his eyes, Grant contemptuously replies, “You may know the right wines, but you’re the one on your knees.”

As the youth of today would no doubt put it: PWNed, Mr Bond.

I originally reviewed ‘From Russia With Love’ in July 2008 as part of my Personal Faves project. Here’s the link. I’ve deliberately not referred to it in writing this article.

The Kid with a Bike: a Belgian film in French with English subtitles

Thanks to my good friend Viv Apple for this review

‘The Kid with a Bike’ is the story of Cyril, an 11 year old boy with two things on his mind: his bicycle, and his dad. Both are missing as the film opens, and he is passionate about both of them. The bike is found by Samantha (Cécile de France), a hairdresser who understands what Cyril is going through and takes him under her wing. But his father is a far more intractable problem, and one which underlies every dramatic incident in the film.

We know this from the first scene where Cyril (beautifully but unsentimentally played by Thomas Doret) is desperately trying to phone ‘Papa’ from the children’s home where he now lives; a scene which could have been gut-wrenchingly overdone but which instead is all the more moving because of its understatement. Directed by the Dardenne brothers, this approach is sustained throughout the film, despite some dramatic and even violent scenes. Samantha allows Cyril to stay with her at weekends, and manages to arrange a meeting between him and his father which is fraught with difficulty - after which the boy comes to realise that his dad will no longer look after him.

The film conveys, without spelling it out, that what happens next is due to the sense of hurt and abandonment Cyril feels. He still loves his father – who is portrayed as sad rather than bad – and in trying to kick against this betrayal he becomes involved with a local drug dealer. The film has several long, unbroken takes during which we can almost see into Cyril’s mind, and after one traumatic incident we follow him in close-up as he his rides his bike, painfully coming to terms with the fact that the dealer is not the substitute father figure he longs for.

How and why Samantha copes so tirelessly with Cyril’s difficult behaviour is not explained, but perhaps it does not need to be. The film has a ‘double twist’ ending, the first part of which is as heart-stopping as being in a plane about to crash; the second part is the safe landing which Samantha was there to ensure all along. But this is no Hollywood style happy ending. True to itself, the film’s final scene is extraordinary in its ordinariness, hinting at the redemption that very nearly didn’t happen, and leaving us to imagine the rest of the story.

by Viv Apple

The beautiful game

The new banner is from 'The Damned United', a film I reviewed when it was released back in April 2009 and absolutely loved. I watched it again a few nights ago ... and I still absolutely love it. Michael Sheen nails Brian Clough and there are a cluster of bravura supporting performances from Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, Colm Meaney and Stephen Graham.

Dirk Bogarde

Dirk Bogarde - matinee idol, fearless character actor, memoirist, novelist, artist and all-round enigma - would have been 91 today.

One of my favourite actors from any era of film history, I have written about Bogarde repeatedly on The Agitation of the Mind. Here's hoping the likes of 'Providence' and 'Despair' get the long-awaited DVD treatment and his peerless work can once again grace the pages of this blog.

In the meantime, here's a large raised glass of pinot and the slow movement of Mahler's fifth.

BOND-A-THON: Dr No

Sean Connery: milkman, truck driver, coffin polisher, bodybuilder, actor. Oh yeah, and the definitive James Bond. Although he’d been a jobbing actor for a decade before he was cast as 007, his only lead role had been in the fey musical ‘Darby O’Gill and the Little People’. A son of Edinburgh, his trademark Scots burr would remain in place throughout his career, whether he was playing an Irish-American cop, a Russian submarine commander or an English secret agent.

It’s putting it mildly to say that producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli took a risk on him. The resolutely rugged and working class Connery was far removed from Ian Fleming’s snobbish and disdainful protagonist (who was it that described Bond “an upper class thug”?), leading director Terence Young to groom Connery into the character, getting him used to the suits, the casinos, the gentlemen’s clubs and the high life. It’s the polarity between actor and character which generates the frisson inherent in Connery’s portrayal of Bond.

‘Dr No’ was the sixth of Fleming’s novels, but was chosen as the first film after an original script developed by Fleming, Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham – with the horribly prosaic title ‘James Bond, Secret Agent’ – wound up in a legal wrangle when Fleming decided to rework it for his 1961 novel ‘Thunderball’. The producers settled on ‘Dr No’ as having an exotic locale in Jamaica, a streamlined narrative, and one only really expensive set-piece (the explosive finale at Crab Key, the heavily-guarded island Dr No uses as his base).

At just over $1million, ‘Dr No’ was moderately budgeted even for the early 60s. Purpose of comparison: released the same year, John Frankenheimer’s ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ cost twice as much, John Ford’s ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ three times, and David Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ burned though $15million, a budget that wouldn’t be equalled by a Bond movie until 1977’s ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’.

Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood and Berkley Mather worked on the script, with uncredited additions from Young. Mather had generally worked in television and would have no other involvement in the franchise. Harwood returned for co-writer duties on ‘From Russia With Love’. Maibaum became a series regular, contributing to thirteen Bond movie scripts up to ‘Licence to Kill’.

Opening with a somewhat psychedelic and very dated set of opening credits (it’s the first and last Bond not to feature a pre-credits sequences), the story begins with the assassination of Jamaica-based British agent Commander Strangways (Tim Moxon) and the theft from his office of files on Crab Key and Dr No (just in case, you know, the title hadn’t tipped you off as to the villain’s identity). In London, spymaster M (Bernard Lee) briefs Bond (Connery) on Strangways’ disappearance and his investigation, on the Americans’ behalf, of tracking interference with Cape Canaveral rocket launches that seems to be emanating from his neck of the woods. (I’m assuming that in the early 60s it was reasonably plausible that America might need a bit of help from a handful of upper-class Brits.)

Bond’s mission is compromised from the off: no sooner has he arrived in Jamaica than there’s an assassination attempt – the first of several. One antagonist kills himself rather than talk, leading Bond to wonder who wields that kind of power. That’ll be the eponymous Dr No (Joseph Wiseman), whom Young teasingly keeps out of sight until the last third. No’s first scene shows us not the man himself but his power over his minions, as he puts the frighteners on Professor Dent (Anthony Dawson) and exhorts him to kill Bond.

Setting the pattern for most of the Bond villains, Dr No is refined, cultured (an in-joke has Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington, stolen the year before the film went into production, in Dr No’s possession), articulate, megalomaniacal and the proud owner of a fully kitted-out secret base hidden from the eyes of the world. He works for SPECTRE (the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), an underground organisation that takes on more significance in later films on account of its CEO, one Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Setting the pattern for several decades of straight-up sexism, Bond takes an unreconstructed view of women and punctuates his spying with shagging as he dallies with baccarat-playing rich girl Sylvia Trench (Eunice Gayson) before he leaves for his mission, fools around with the treacherous Miss Taro (Zena Marshall) and enjoys an amorous encounter with Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) as a reward for saving the day.

Unlike many of its successors, ‘Dr No’ is gadget-free. Q is present, but referred to not by the initial of his department but by name as Major Boothroyd. He’s also played by Peter Burton. Desmond Llewellyn wasn’t cast until ‘From Russia With Love’, when Burton was unavailable to reprise the role. Bond’s opposite number from the CIA, Felix Leiter (Jack Lord) also gets his first outing.

In terms of action, Young crafts a sleek and efficient thriller from his limited budget, with car chases, gunboats, shoot-outs, hand-to-hand combat, and an explosive denouement washing across the screen in glorious Technicolor. His direction, though, is often perfunctory and early scenes are padded with local colour. Viewed fifty years down the line, it’s an entertaining way to pass an hour and three quarters, but back then it was something new and exciting, banging at the doors of mainstream entertainment with enough force to create a global phenomenon. There’s no end credits promise that Bond would be back – ‘From Russia With Love’ kicked off that little tradition – but the box office receipts made it an inevitability.

Bond ... James Bond

The Agitation of the Mind's Bond-a-thon kicks off tomorrow: all of the "official" Bond movies, at roughly 10 day intervals, culminating with 'Skyfall' on its release in October.

NHS: RIP

The last time I posted anything of political import on these pages, there was widespread rioting across the UK.

I cannot understand why there isn’t rioting today, why people in their millions aren’t converging on Whitehall, armed with whatever was to hand, and demanding David Cameron’s resignation – if not his head on a plate. And maybe just cutting out the niceties and hanging Andrew Lansley from the nearest available lamp-post.

On 5 July 1948, England’s National Health Service – the NHS – came into being. Its architect was Labour politician Aneurin Bevan. His vision was healthcare for all, funded by taxes instead of being dependent on health insurance; a classless system – socialist in the purest sense of the word – that would care for Britons, as he put it, “from the cradle to the grave”.

On 20 March 2012, Andrew Lansley’s so-called reforms were passed through the Commons. Privatisation, which has already been escorted in surreptitiously through the back door in Hinchingbrooke, has now received carte blanche. Is it a co-incidence that Lansley’s former PA is currently Head of Communications for a major independent healthcare provider?

Aneurin Bevan did the British public arguably the greatest service that can be claimed by any politician. David Cameron – our unvoted-for Prime Minister – stubbornly backed Lansley in the face of massive public protest, scepticism from professional healthcare bodies, and demands for Lansley’s unpublished “risk register” to be made public.

Once again our government has ignored its people. The NHS now exists purely as a brand. It will be broken up into competing services with patient care subjugated to profit margins. Free market economy hammers another nail into socialism. I hoped I’d never have to say this, but Thatcherism is once again the driving force behind Britain’s socio-political direction. A direction that has dragged Bevan’s great institution into its grave and is dragging the rest of the country in right behind it.

The riots last year, and the political disenfranchisement which created the atmosphere conducive to them, left me feeling that there was nothing to believe in politically in Britain. That goes double tonight.

RocknRolla

When, last year, I reviewed Guy Ritchie’s earlier crime caper ‘Snatch’, I drew this unlikely comparision: “the closest I can come to describing the plotting and overall aesthetic is like a P.G. Wodehouse novel. Except with guns. And swearing. Your average Wodehouse novel consists of a foppish toff, a meddling aunt, a potential fiancée, a big social event and the always lurking potential for cringing embarrassment at same. The machinations of a handful of characters and a couple of overlapping incidents are shuffled with the blink-and-miss-it legerdemain of a game of find the lady. Sit down and try to unpick the narrative after you’ve set the novel aside and you’ll be engaging in an exercise in pointlessness.”

You can’t quite say the same of ‘RocknRolla’, since the tone isn’t as rambunctious nor the laughs as frequent. And at nearly half an hour longer than ‘Snatch’, the narrative has a little more room to breathe. This is a generally a good thing, as breathlessly overcomplicated plotting can often ruin a movie; however, Ritchie does breathlessly overcomplicated plotting better than anyone and languorous scenes in his movies are as jarring as a shoot-out in a Tarkovsky flick.

‘RocknRolla’ kicks off with a demonstration of how mob boss Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson) – London is, apparently, “his town” – runs a real-estate racket; it’s four-and-a-half minutes of dizzying back and forth in which Lenny gets his mitts on a nice bit of property, a city councilor (Jimi Mistry) has his strings pulled till he doesn’t know which tune he’s dancing to let alone who’s calling it, and low-rent crims One Two (Gerard Butler) and Mumbles (Idris Elba) find themselves royally stiffed and owing Lenny two big ones.

One Two and Mumbles are part of a group of small-timers who style themselves, with Peckinpahesque delusions of grandeur, as “the Wild Bunch”. Their number includes Handsome Bob (Tom Hardy), who’s looking at a five stretch and wants a little favour from One Two before he goes down (and for those of you who’ve seen the film, yes that pun was intentional). The Wild Bunch pull occasional heists from information provided by Stella the Accountant (Thandie Newton).


Stella is currently working for Russian oligarch Uri Omovich (Karel Roden). Uri wants to build a stadium in London and is employing Lenny to grease the wheels of bureaucracy. Uri lends Lenny a painting in a gesture of largesse (in the film’s subtlest joke, Ritchie only ever shows the frame, not the painting), but finds his luck changes almost immediately as he’s ripped off, over two transactions, to the tune of £14million. Blaming ill-luck on the absence of the painting, he demands it back from Lenny. One little problem: Lenny’s had the painting stolen from him by his coked-up, wayward and dangerous unpredictable stepson, Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell), frontman of a punk band called the Quid Lickers. The same Johnny Quid who’s just been reported drowned.

The usual mélange of double- and triple-crosses ensues as Lenny – suspecting, correctly, that Johnny is alive and milking the publicity for renewed album sales – tasks his enforcer Archie (Mark Strong) to find him and retrieve the painting, Uri steps up security in the form of two Chechnyan hardnuts who make the T-1000 look like Quentin Crisp, One Two and Mumbles have a bruising encounter with same, Handsome Bob coerces information regarding the informer who got him the five-stretch out of Stella’s gay marriage-of-convenience lawyer husband Bertie (David Bark-Jones), and Stella herself tries to extricate herself from Uri’s romantic overtures.

Out of these Altman-like criss-crossings come some inspired scenes. In particular: Archie’s masterclass on how to deliver a proper slap; One Two and Mumbles struggling to find reverse gear in a getaway car; a deliberately naff dance routine; and a heist sequence that starts out in ultra-proficient ‘Heat’-style and swiftly degenerates into a fracas in a sporting goods store. But it’s never quite as dementedly entertaining as ‘Snatch’. Nor is it ever fully clear who our protagonist is: Butler is first-billed, but One Two fades into the background several times in the second half, during which time Archie begins to play an increasingly important part in things. However both are given short shrift for the ascendancy of a pivotal – but, in terms of screen-time, almost peripheral – character.

The cast deliver in spades, right down to one- or two-scene supporting turns from Gemma Arterton as the dolled-up secretary at Johnny’s record label, Chris Bridges (a.k.a. Ludacris) as Johnny’s long-suffering manager, and Nonso Anozie as ticket tout and costume-drama fan Tank (Archie’s speculation as to the derivation of his name gives ‘RocknRolla’ its most memorable moment of political incorrectness). David Higgs’s slightly washed-out cinematography strikes a good balance between the flashy lifestyles of Uri and Lenny, and the grubby milieu of One Two and his ilk, between the well-lit artifice of the art gallery Stella patronises and the shadowy interior of the abandoned warehouse where Lenny conducts interrogations.



Best of all though, is Ritchie’s unrestrained love of film-making; every frame is shot through with a sort of wideboy joie de vivre. The end credits promise, in cheeky James Bond style, that the main players will return in ‘The Real RocknRolla’. Hope so.

Splice

In a moment of surreal clarity, it occurred to me as the end credits rolled that ‘Splice’ is basically ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ but with psycho-sexual overtones, monstrous angels and off-the-scale exponential evolutionary development. Both films take playing-God scientists as their protagonists; said protagonists take their work home with them in an absolutely literal sense; their work develops very quickly into something they can no longer control.

Both films feature bio-genetic research presentations that go spectacularly tits up, and both make villains of a stuffed-shirt project management type who, when all’s said and done, is only doing his job. Both share a pivotal moment where a non-human character’s rebellion is heralded by their startling and brutally succinct use of speech. But whereas ‘RotPotA’ sides unequivocally with its genetically engineered simian, Vincenzo Natali’s thorny psychodrama walks a twisty and shadowy path of moral compromise and emotional ambiguity.

After an inventive (if protracted) sequence wherein the camera glides through some kind of protean interior, picking out the opening credits as if they were an organic part of this as-yet-unrevealed being, a scene of birth – from the embryo’s POV – sets the tone. Birth, parenthood, relationship power plays and sexual neuroses simmer away in virtually every scene for the next 100 minutes.


Under the sponsorship of a pharmaceutical corporation, Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) – the co-owners of the Nucleic Exchange Research & Development facility, and also partners in the romantic sense – are developing artificial life-forms designed to yield medicinal proteins. They have enjoyed unparalleled success in splicing DNA from various animals, and their paymasters are delighted. (The firm’s name, or at least its acronym, is the film’s clunkiest joke. Calling its protagonists Clive and Elsa is its cleverest.)

Elsa is keen to further their research beyond the corporation’s remit and attempt to introduce human DNA into the splice. Clive is initially hesitant, but curiosity gets the better of him. He and Elsa use various samples, but the experiment repeatedly fails. Then Elsa introduces a new sample – unbeknownst to Clive, at this point anyway – it’s her own DNA, and the desired results are achieved. The downside is that Clive and Elsa now have a highly energetic mutant creature on their hands which is maturing through a ludicrously accelerated lifestyle. They call the creature Dren. (Check out that acronym again if you’re wondering why.)

With Dren increasingly difficult to keep under wraps at the lab, they relocate her to a remote farmhouse and all but give up on the day job. Yes, Dren is a she. It’s difficult to tell at first, with Dren resembling an outtake from ‘Alien’. Pretty soon, the resemblance is more akin to a little girl with the facial grooves of a cenobite and the ambulatory capacity of a velociraptor. And not long after that, she’s all grown up, still somewhat reptilian but disturbingly seductive.


Played in her younger iteration by Abigail Chu and as an adult by Delphine Chaneac, Dren is a mesmerising and unpredictable character, achingly vulnerable in the early stages of her development, darkly sexual later, and – finally – dangerous when the repercussions of playing God catch up with Clive and Elsa. Natali veers awfully close to overplaying his hand here, doling out the transgressors’ punishment with a zealous sense of Old Testament nastiness. He’s not exactly subtle elsewhere, with a couple of lab-based montages coming across more like MTV videos than scenes of scientific discovery, and much of the dialogue clunkily expository rather than naturalistic.

But Natali gets a lot more right than he gets wrong. ‘Splice’ neatly marries (or should I say grafts) its Frankenstein/artificial life concept with an almost mythological approach to its unworldly protagonist, so that Dren is variously angel, demon, siren and creature from the id. In doing so, Natali keeps throwing out ideas right up to the finale; I’ll leave it to other reviewers to say whether he over eggs the embryo pudding or not, but I’ll maintain a stance I’ve taken on Agitation more than once in the past: better a film with too many ideas that occasionally fumbles the ball than one with none at all.

Before you could say "Jack Kerouac" / you'd turn your back and I'd be gone ...

Jack Kerouac would have been 90 today.

Here’s the trailer for ‘On the Road’:



Not sure how I feel about it, nor about Walter Salles being at the helm (I was distinctly underwhelmed by ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’) but Jesus H Christ, that’s some cast!

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Posted as part of an intermittent series of espionage-related cinema leading up to the release of the new James Bond film ‘Skyfall’ later this year


I’d had it on good authority that ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’ was a POS. Despite this, I neglected to delete it from my rental list. So when it turned up last week, my rationale was something like this: aww, hell, it stars George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey, and at a pinch I can feature it as part of my intermittent series of espionage-related cinema, surely it’s worth a watch.

Readers, I watched it.

POS is perhaps a tad harsh – there are a couple of bona fide laugh out loud moments – but to watch Grant Heslov’s film is ultimately to watch a terrific cast squander themselves as a brilliant concept is simply frittered away.

For this reason, we won’t dwell on it too long. Synopsis time: journo Bob Wilton (McGregor) does a human interest piece on bonkers ex-soldier Gus Lacey (Stephen Root) who reminisces about his time with Lyn Cassady (Clooney) in a psychic military unit led by quasi-hippie Bill Django (Bridges). Initially sceptical, Wilton files the story then heads to Iraq to prove himself as a front-line reporter after the breakdown of his marriage. It’s here he bumps into Cassady, who recounts the story of Django’s unit as the pair head across country so Cassady can complete some mysterious mission.


Herein my first problem with the film. Point of view and lead character duties skip from Wilton to Cassady to Django with such skittish abandon that I couldn’t get a handle on whether Heslov and scripter Peter Straughan were being arbitrary, indecisive, or full-on going for an anti-narrative. The tone, too, veers from genuinely amusing to trying-too-hard to actually-quite-mean-spirited, seemingly on a whim.

Round at the halfway mark, the film coheres into the Wilton and Cassady road show, but it’s delivered all its satirical barbs by this point and only one inspired but narratively redundant scene involving Robert Patrick as the head of a US security who gets into a firefight with a different US security force which he happily blames on the Iraqis emerges as memorable. The firefight, incidentally, is over superiority in a queue at a petrol station.

Based on a non-fiction work by Jon Ronson, and opening with the irresistible credit “more of this is true than you would believe”, ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’ starts out knee-deep in potential but never fully gets to grips with the off-the-wall political satire the concept demands. Instead we get a smorgasbord of contrived and often unfunny in-jokes, mostly referencing the casts’ previous work. McGregor seems to have been cast purely as the butt of the joke every time one of the psychic irregulars refers to himself as a Jedi warrior.

Heslov, making his feature debut, doesn’t stamp a strong enough visual or satirical signature on the material, particularly when the finale cries out for the demented visual flair of a David Lynch or an Alejandro Jodorowsky. What Heslov manages is ninety minutes of moderate amusement, when Ronson’s book could easily have lit the fuse on a two-hour delirious headfuck.

Normal service will be resumed

That project I was working on? The one that was preventing me from updating Agitation as much as I’d like?

Finished!

Or at least, a first draft is now complete.

Which means that we can get back to some film reviews around these here parts. Join me tomorrow as we get this show back on the road.

Rachel Weisz

Happy 42nd birthday to Rachel Weisz. A glass is being raised at chez Agitation and there's a distinct possibility that 'The Constant Gardener' might find its way into the DVD player.

Literary birthdays

It’s James Ellroy’s 64th birthday today. Here’s the demon dog of crime fiction on being knows at “the guy who wrote ‘L.A. Confidential’.” This quote also contains advice on the etiquette of talking to little old ladies.

‘L.A. Confidential’, the movie, is the best thing that happened to me in my career that I had absolutely nothing to do with. It was a fluke—and a wonderful one—and it is never going to happen again, a movie of that quality. Here’s my final comment on ‘L.A. Confidential’, the movie: I go to a video store in Prairie Village, Kansas. The youngsters who work there know me as the guy who wrote ‘L.A. Confidential’. They tell all the little old ladies who come in there to get their G-rated family flick. They come up to me, they say, “Oooooh, you wrote ’L.A. Confidential’. Oh, what a wonderful, wonderful movie. I saw it four times. You don’t see storytelling like that on the screen anymore.” I smile, I say, “Yes, it’s a wonderful movie, and a salutary adaptation of my wonderful novel. But listen, granny – you love the movie, did you go out and buy the book?” And granny invariably says, “Well, no, I didn’t.” And I say to granny, “Then what the fuck good are you to me?”

Alan Sillitoe would have turned 84 today. As regular readers of this blog know, I’m involved with the Alan Sillitoe Committee, a group dedicated to promoting Alan’s work through a variety of media, and to raising funds for a permanent memorial to Alan to be sited in his hometown of Nottingham. Please visit our website for information on forthcoming events and a variety of articles, archive photos and more. The website is an ongoing project which we intend to build into a major online resource. Please like our Facebook page, as well. If you can spare a little for a donation, it would be greatly appreciated and we’ll happily feature your name on our wall of honour.

Here’s Alan’s most famous creation – the belligerent Arthur Seaton in ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ – slogging through his National Service and resolutely refusing to let the bastards grind him down:

On his first parade the sergeant-major exclaimed that he couldn't make out the shape of Arthur's head because there was so much hair on it, and Arthur jocularly agreed to get it cut, intending to forget about it until the fifteen days was over, which he did. 'You're a soldier now, not a Teddy-boy,' the sergeant-major said, but Arthur knew he was wrong in either case. He was nothing at all when people tried to tell him what he was. Not even his own name was enough, though it might be on on his pay-book. What am I? he wondered. A six-foot pit-prop that wants a pint of ale. That's what I am. And if any knowing bastard says that's what I am, I'm a dynamite-dealer, Sten-gun seller, hundred-ton tank trader, a capstan-lathe operator waiting to blow the army to Kingdom Cum. I'm me and nobody else; and what people think I am or say I am, that's what I'm not, because they don't know a bloody thing about me.

Mini reviews

That project I was working on? The one that's been preventing me from updating Agitation as much as I'd like? The one I was hoping to have done by the end of February?

Still working on it.

Normal service should be resumed shortly. In the meantime, here's some mini reviews in Rupert Bear-style rhyming couplets. Bit of a sci-fi theme going on.

I, ROBOT

Decent enough, but from the director of 'Dark City'

It should have been harsher; more noirish; less pretty.

SUPER 8

An homage so blatant you could easily confuse it

With the 70s films of the man who produced it.

FORBIDDEN PLANET

Prospero's book drowned amongst the stars.

Anne Francis rocks a mini-skirt. Be still my heart!