Emma Stone

Talented, funny, immensely likeable and seriously easy on the eye into the bargain, Emma Stone is 22 today.

I'm betting she'll be the biggest thing in Hollywood - and with good reason - by her 23rd birthday.

The Machinist

Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ is only nominally about crime and not literally about punishment. Not in the judicial sense of the word. It’s about the punishment the psyche imposes upon oneself. ‘Crime and Punishment’ is about the crushing weight of guilt.

It’s another Dostoyevsky novel (‘The Idiot’) that Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale) reads in Brad Anderson’s ‘The Machinist’, but it’s not the Christ-like man-child Prince Myshkin to whom Reznik invites comparison. Imagine Raskolnikov, the anti-hero of ‘Crime and Punishment’, not as an idealistic yet compromised student but a blue-collar factory worker. Imagine he hasn’t slept properly for a year. Imagine that he spends his evenings at an airport coffee shop where he cultivates a stilted but poignant rapport with waitress Maria (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) and his nights in the company of call girl Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – an archetype of the Dostoyevskan “fallen woman” if ever there was one.

If I seem to be overdoing the whole Dostoyevsky thing, it’s because Scott Kosar’s script and Anderson’s stylized but atmospheric direction continually draw attention to the parallels. It’s particularly fascinating that Kosar – whose other produced screenplays have been for the remakes of horror genre staples ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’, ‘The Amityville Horror’ and ‘The Crazies’ – dabbling in a psychological drama so explicitly inspired by one of the heaviest hitters in all of literature.

‘The Machinist’ superficially unfolds as a thriller – Hitchcock as if filtered through David Lynch – with Reznik blamed for the industrial accident which costs a colleague his arm, and sent to Coventry by his colleagues. Gaunt, hollow-eyed and painfully thin, even before his involvement in the accident Reznik is drawing the wrong kind of attention from the management, who want him to take a random drugs test. Taking a smoking break to cool off, he meets the mysterious Ivan (John Sharian) who tells him he’s standing in for a co-worker. It’s Ivan who distracts Reznik at the crucial moment, deliberately it seems, and Reznik is left looking highly blameworthy when the shit hits the fan. Things take a strange turn when colleagues and management alike profess to never having heard of Ivan.

Cryptic notes resembling a game of hangman turn up in Reznik’s apartment. He catches his eccentric landlady Mrs Shrike (Anna Massey) letting herself in. Stevie turns up with a black eye; she describes it as an “occupational hazard”, but Reznik wonders if it’s courtesy of her “psychotic” ex. Reznik starts to suspect that said ex is Ivan.

And what’s Ivan’s connection with Maria’s son?

The thriller aesthetic, albeit tempered by low-key character-based scenes, defines the first two thirds of the movie. A photo lifted from Ivan’s wallet points Reznik towards someone at the factory. The alignment of letters in the hangman notes suggest the surname of someone else. A ride on a ghost train seems to trigger memories. Scenes are rhymed. Images are revisited and recontextualized. Symbolism is rife: a tunnel or passageway branching off in two directions; tableaux in the ghost train ride that prove analogous to events in Reznik’s life; landmarks which seem imbued with relevance even before the big reveal.

The last third contains some real narrative curveballs. The linearity becomes suspect. What’s taking place in the present? In the past? In Reznik’s increasingly disturbed mind? The film almost completely deconstructs before the pieces are reordered and everything is explained.

‘The Machinist’ is almost too clever for its own good, particularly in the inclusion of certain tropes which are highly reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’. There are some significant literary references – look out for the placement (and I do mean the literal placement) of the Kafka reference – which are at odds with the casual manner Anderson tries to incorporate them. Also, the big reveal is done with such accomplished cinematic sleight of hand that the directorial flourish threatens to outweigh the emotional cachet of the scene. Fortunately, Anderson knows exactly how to structure the film and exactly where to cut or transition a scene; and the whole thing is anchored by a cluster of excellent performances.

They Live

“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”
- The Gospel According to Roddy Piper

From Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer’s coke and ego fuelled string of glossy ’80s money-makers to Michael Bay’s Mephistophelean relationship with the box office over the last decade or so, Hollywood has never been anything but priapic for a bit of high concept.

Well, stuff your big budgets and power ballads and dare-devil flyboys and mismatched cops and oil-pissing robots, because I’m here to tell you that the highest of high concepts is a pair of sunglasses donned by a professional wrestler who promptly gets a mite pissed off at the ensuing revelation that society is being manipulated by skull-faced aliens with a penchant for subliminal messaging; that money, promotions and status symbols are nothing but placebos; and that when a fella whose twin motivations are bubblegum chewing and ass kicking finds himself bereft of bubblegum, well his options are kind of narrowed down.

It’s a killer hook: put on a pair of shades and your perception shifts; you see things as they truly are. The world is black and white. Behind every billboard, every road sign, every poster, every page of every newspaper and magazine is an exhortation to OBEY. That wad of bank notes in your hand: just bits of paper emblazoned with THIS IS YOUR GOD. That guy next to you who got the promotion you were passed over for: don’t look now, but he’s not human. The woman in the beauty parlour with the bouffant hairdo and jewellery dripping from her: she’s not either. And, brother, you don’t want to know what they’re dripping into your subconscious while you’re watching TV.


John Carpenter’s masterstroke with ‘They Live’ is to take his time – and in a film that runs just an hour and a half, I do mean take his sweet time – establishing character, milieu and socio-economic context. Our hero, he of the bubblegum preference, is George Nada* (Piper), a blue-collar drifter looking for work and reduced to sleeping rough. Dossing down at a ramshackle encampment with fellow labourer Frank Armitage (Keith David), Nada becomes intrigued by the comings and goings at a nearby chapel. Finally venturing inside, he discovers not a congregation of worshippers but an underground political movement. A police raid dispels them from the chapel (as well as trashing the encampment) before Nada can do anything.

Then he discovers the sunglasses. And by extension the truth. His immediate priority is convincing Armitage to view the world through said eyewear. Armitage proves a tad reluctant. Nada insists. Cue one of the longest – and funniest – punch-ups in cinema.

Ah, yes. The fight scene. Just one of many great, great moments in this still strangely underrated film. The Nada-first-dons-the-glasses scene is also pitch perfect in its execution. Likewise an almost immediately subsequent moment where Nada, fighting off two cops (one an alien), arms himself with their weapons, strolls nonchalantly down a busy sidewalk and into a bank and delivers The Gospel as quoted above.

There are those who hone in on Roddy Piper’s limited acting range – and, let’s face it, the man’s no Olivier – as the film’s great flaw, but personally I find Piper’s rugged, slightly self-deprecating persona ideally suited to the story Carpenter is telling. With a more “actorly” actor in the lead, ‘They Live’ might easily have come across as over-egged, its slightly schizophrenic tone – social realism to high concept to broad comedy to sci-fi actioner – more nigglingly apparent than with “Rowdy” Roddy Piper striding John Wayne stylee through the midst of the mayhem, a lumberjack-shirt-wearing everyman out to chew bubblegum and kick ass on behalf of every poor sumbitch wage-slave in the audience. “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, taking the fight to the extraterrestrial ad-men, kicking their corporate crap back into the cosmos. “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, a man of the people and a hero of our time.

*The character is never name-checked during the film and only referred to as Nada (Spanish for “nothing”) in the end credits. I’ve taken the name George Nada from the Ray Nelson short story ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning’ which the film is based on.

The Nanny

A Hammer film in black and white, that’s character-driven, favours the psychological over the gothic, boasts a script by Jimmy Sangster that’s an exercise in slow-burn tension rather than an overwrought piece of hack-work, and features a performance by Bette Davies that’s as good as anything she ever did in the American studio system?

Say what?

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to ‘The Nanny’. A week ago, picking up some groceries in Sainsburys, I came across ‘The Best of Hammer’, a 5-disc box set. My 13 for Halloween series was ticking along nicely and I figured ‘Dracula: Prince of Darkness’ would be an ideal entry. Of the other four titles in the set, ‘The Devil Rides Out’ is a minor classic, ‘Frankenstein Created Woman’ (recently reviewed on Antagony & Ecstasy) is one of the key Peter Cushing titles, and ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ is a splendidly entertaining bit of low-fi sci-fi. The remaining film, ‘The Nanny’, was the only one I’d not seen.

On it went.

Set almost entirely in a well-appointed London townhouse, its pressure cooker atmosphere of class-defined tensions inexorably rising to the boiling point of an inevitable revelation, ‘The Nanny’ is one of those peculiarly British films into which a darkly foreign aesthetic has crept and the result is something that is both a time-capsule of the year it was made (1965 in this case) and yet somehow out-of-time in its off-kilter atmosphere and provocative approach to the material. Focusing on a twisted reversal of the toff/servant relationship, incorporating such peripheral issues as mental illness and back-street abortions, and with the mystery at the heart of the narrative centred around a possible case of infanticide, ‘The Nanny’ is the kind of film you’d have got if Polanski had directed ‘The Servant’ instead of Joseph Losey. Or if someone had stuck ‘Bunny Lake is Missing’, ‘Séance on a Wet Afternoon’ and ‘The Innocents’ in a blender.

Comparisons with ‘The Servant’ (made two years earlier) are difficult to avoid, not just thematically but in the presence of Wendy Craig. Her hysterical matriarch Virginia Fane, still catered to by her childhood nanny (Davies), is a more emotionally unstable version of her brittle society girlfriend in Losey’s film. Similarly, ‘Innocents’ alumnus Pamela Franklin turns in a deliciously precocious performance as chain-smoking 14-year old party-girl-in-waiting Bobbie, with whom Virginia’s 10-year old son Joey (William Dix) forms a friendship on returning home after two years in an institute.

Joey’s been under the care of Dr Beamaster (Maurice Denham) since his involvement – the exact details of which remain unrevealed for most of the film – in the death of his infant sister Susie (Angharad Aubrey). The good doctor has been unable to reach the boy and releases him back into his parents’ care in an admission of defeat. His mother frets and fusses, dreading his return. His father, Bill Fane (James Villiers), is a stiff upper lip mounted on a stuffed shirt, the whole construct held together with an old-school tie and an anally-inserted rod. He’s a civil servant for whom his job is everything and his gentlemen’s club an escape from domestic responsibility. He talks up a storm about disciplining the lad, but it’s all empty threats.

The actual business of keeping things together and trying to marshal the Fanes into at least some semblance of a family unit falls to Nanny. Yes, even Bill and Virginia and Virginia’s ailing sister Pen (Jill Bennett) call her that: “Nanny.” But this is a film where the adults behave like children, wailing and throwing tantrums and having to be spoon-fed when they refuse to eat.
Nanny does her best to make Joey’s transition make into the Fane household easy on everyone, but Joey proves particularly truculent – this, after all, is a boy who is first introduced pretending to hang himself in order to freak out the staff at the institution – with a special hatred reserved for Nanny.

In the pantheon of creepy kid vs. grown woman cinematic smackdowns, from creepy kid vs. Lee Remick in ‘The Omen’ to creepy kid vs. Vera Farmiga in ‘Orphan’, this would normally be a no-brainer. But this is creepy kid vs. Bette fuckin’ Davies. The battle lines are drawn.

Adapting a novel by Marryam Modell, director Seth Holt keeps the facts surrounding Susie’s demise offscreen for as long as possible. Instead he keeps the tension simmering by simply observing the strained interactions between a petulant and morbid child, his pathetically inept parents, a pill-popping and booze-swilling relative, and the nanny who has come to be a surrogate parent to all of them. After about half of an hour with this motley bunch, the question isn’t so much who is to blame for Susie’s death but whether the poor little mite ever really had a chance in the first place.

Tom Savini

Just to prove that it’s not all cheesecake and cleavage here on The Agitation of the Mind, we're raising a toast to FX maestro, occasional actor and all-round icon Tom Savini, who turns 64 today.

Happy birthday, Sex Machine.

(Normal service – ie. film reviews – will resume tomorrow.)

Katharine Isabelle

Because posting three pictures and a nebulous birthday greeting is an easy way of maintaining new material on the blog …

because the excesses of October have left me a tad blogged out and I haven’t started sketching out any new reviews yet …

and because she fucking rocks in ‘Ginger Snaps’ …

… a full-bodied glass of shiraz cabernet is being raised here at chez Agitation to Katharine Isabelle, who is 29 today.

Aishwarya Rai

Aishwarya Rai – star of the charming ‘Mistress of Spices’, the face that launched a shedload of Bollywood productions, and a woman resolutely unacquainted with the ugly stick – is 37 today.

Which is justification enough for posting these pictures.