Category Archive: FILM
Glengarry Glen Ross
"We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know first prize is a Cadillac Elderado...3rd prize is you're fired."
(Written by David Mamet) (Dir. James Foley) (1992) The sales staff get the leads, such as they are. They go out on sits, when (in various guises) they descend on the unsuspecting and try to sell them what sounds very much like swampland. The salesmen are driven less by greed and more by fear because as the motivational guy has just confirmed, failure to close the deal is death. This film of Mamet’s play is stagy (of course), but with top-shelf power acting (by Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Alec Baldwin and Jonathon Pryce), it amounts to…
Continue Reading →Morality Tales
It’s one of the oldest plots: to grab the gold, you must renounce love. Here is a sprinkling of morality tales on film. The Box If you pick up the box that landed on your doorstep, open the button unit and push the button, you will receive one million dollars (tax free, and at early 1970s values in real terms) but at the precise moment of pushing the button, somewhere, someone you don’t know will be killed. Woo Hoo! Give us that box! Many might not believe in the veracity of this bizarre offer but when a gentleman like the one played by Frank…
Continue Reading →Twilight of the Gods
(Dir. Julian Doyle) (2013) Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the successor to Schopenhauer and a great writer and weirdo, said he “would never have survived my youth without Wagnerian music.” “And Wagner did become Nietzsche’s awakener, who, by subsequently failing to live up to the youth’s ideals, dealt him wounds which, though they never healed, yet played a salutary role in his development into one of history’s most formidable philosophic writers and thinkers. Like King Ludwig, he at first placed Wagner upon so high a pedestal that the concussion of the idol’s fall shattered not only it but the shocked worshipper, too….
Continue Reading →The Boys in the Band
(Dir. William Friedkin) (1970) In 1968/1970, gays were still (perforce) tortured. In this claustrophobic classic, we see a cavalcade of torture. A bunch of lads (‘closet queens’) are having a birthday party for pal Harold (a male Mae West, crossed with Lou Reed), but host Michael’s college buddy drops in, quite inconveniently, on the 8 chaps who prefer sex with men. In a sensational ensemble, the stand-outs are Harold (Leonard Frey, in a performance to die for) and Michael (Kenneth Nelson, all ‘countercharm’, in his greatest role till Edge of Darkness) who clearly have a deep dark history. Also, note…
Continue Reading →The Entertainer
(Dir. Tony Richardson) (1960) This is probably John Osborne’s best play and he scripted the film that centres on Archie Rice and the closing days of his “Act” at one of merry England’s many depressing beach-side town-lets, whilst the Empire slides into the Suez Canal. There is a potent whiff of death hovering about the whole diseased enterprise – when you see the various scenes of music hall depravity, dreadful old routines and songs in the local pub, or the gorgeously hideous Lovely Girls Contest, poolside and prurient, you can picture a young David Lynch, wide-eyed and with a beatific grin, imagining future scenes…
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