WORK SUCKS: Fight Club

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, men: no purpose or place. We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.”

Thus spake Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Tyler Durden is the –

No, wait, back up. Bob. Bob had bitch tits –

No, wait, back up a bit further. There’s this guy, Cornelius (Edward Norton), assumed name, but what the hell, he’s the guy telling the story so let’s just call him The Narrator. Corporate guy, suit, briefcase, flight coupons, condo full of designer furniture, by his own admission “a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct”. He works for a car manufacturer, our boy, and his job involves travelling the length and breadth of the States examining car wrecks to determine if the number of similar models in the field times the possibility of the fault recurring times the average out-of-court settlement is less than the cost of a recall; if so, no recall.

The Narrator, uh, narrates this job spec to a fellow passenger during a domestic flight. She looks alarmed. Our boy, in the meantime, banks on the plane banking as a prelude to a mid-air collision. And why not? “Life insurance pays out triple if you die on a business trip.” Fortunately (or otherwise) our boy doesn’t cark it during a routine flight. Instead, he meets pragmatist, soap manufacturer and wannabe pugilist Tyler Durden.

After a conflagrant misadventure afflicts his Ikea-lined condo, our boy moves in with Durden. Chez Durden is a des res for people who deem “shithole” more important in estate agent (ie. realtor) terms than “no upward chain”. This is immaterial. The terms and conditions of relocation to said locale is that our boy hit Tyler as hard as he can. Our boy’s hesitant. Tyler’s insistent. The rationale? What do you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight.

They trade blows in a pub car park. This leads to mass brawling in said pub car park. The whole scene goes underground (literally) in the basement of said pub. The landlord, Lou, objects … briefly. Next thing you know, everyone who’s working a shit job and getting no satisfaction out of life is turning up, losing the tie, adhering to the no shirts/no shoes rule, and finding more than a soupçon of validation in beating the ever-loving shit out of each other.

“No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”

Next thing you know, there’s homework assignments and priests are being provoked into exchanging blows, corporate art is desecrated, computer shops blown up, tower blocks with smiley faces daubed on their glass-fronted façade belch flames, hoardings are appropriated for public (mis)information sloganeering, and roof-top pigeons are overfed so that the BMW dealership below is beset with guano all over its top of the range models.

‘Fight Club’ is a hyper-stylized, brilliantly constructed, funny as fuck howl against the general piss-awfulness of modern life. It is agit-prop and protest art. It is the big fungoo administered to the false gods of contemporary culture, a corrective to the slavering press panting over celebrity scandal and the profusion of reality TV non-entities. Put the latest ‘X Factor’ media whores up against Norton and Pitt and I guarantee a no-contest smackdown.

“You’re not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank, you’re not the car you drive, not the contents of your wallet, you’re not your fucking cactus. You are the all-dancing, all-singing crap of the world.”

For me, the film turns (in the sense of switching from I-hate-my-job wish-fulfilment to something more meaningful; the switch from audience perception to late-in-the-day revelation comes significantly later) when Durden bursts into a convenience store and bustles the clerk out back at gunpoint. He demands the poor unfortunate’s name and wallet. Both are given over post haste. Durden queries the clerk over an out-of-date student card; turns out the lad wanted to be a vet but dropped out because the course required too much studying. “I’m gonna check in on you,” Durden informs him; “if you’re not on your way to being a vet in six weeks, you’re dead.” It’s a pivotal scene both in terms of how the narrative develops (it gets progressively darker) and in gauging audience complicity. Your appreciation of ‘Fight Club’ depends on your response to this scene: do you wince at the Tyler Durden’s treatment of the poor, gibbering unfortunate? Or do you applaud that Tyler Durden has rescued him from a life of subservient drudgery; has in fact liberated him

I fall into the latter category. This may have something to do with having watched the film last night, a good few drinks under my belt, after a shit day at work that included a royal shafting courtesy of the management. Hence the wish-fulfilment aspect of ‘Fight Club’. The scene where The Narrator beats himself up during a one-to-one with his prissy company-man boss is at once the greatest scene of physical comedy this side of a Charlie Chaplin movie and perversely inspiring. Indeed, the whole of ‘Fight Club’ is perversely inspiring. Even when some of The Narrator’s sloganeering is quite obviously that – sloganeering (and whiny with it) – it touches enough of a nerve that you can understand exactly where Pitt and Norton and David Fincher and Chuck Palahniuk (whose debut novel it is based on) are coming from.

I have read reviews by intelligent commentators on film, many of whose opinions I wholeheartedly agree with, who find ‘Fight Club’ juvenile, facile, puerile and emotionally and intellectually hollow. I’m guessing they’ve never wanted to take a swing at their boss, trash their office and shrug off the responsibilities that keep the majority of us tied to our desks and our cubicles and our contracts of employment. I have – on more than one occasion. But because of those aforementioned responsibilities, I’ve kept myself in check.

Thoreau once said “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”. ‘Fight Club’ is the movie that recognises every one of Thoreau’s faceless, nameless, disaffected masses. ‘Fight Club’ speaks out for them, flips off authority on their behalf, and offers catharsis without the detrimental side effects of getting sacked or spending a night in the cells.

(Having said that, I reserve the right to turn up to a Senior Management Team meeting one of these days in a state of bruised dishevelment and bare bloodied teeth in a horrible gargling hiss at some cornflower-blue-tie wearing dweeb of a boss.)

Inglourious Basterds (a review in five chapters)

Chapter one:
Once upon a time ... in the New York Times

There's a review of 'Inglourious Basterds' in the New York Times - an organ normally dependable for its film criticism - which not only misses the point by a country mile, but in its last line writes off the very concept of the anti-hero as a valid fictive creation. This is what reviewer Manohla Dargis has to say:

"The film's most egregrious failure [is] its giddy, at times gleeful embrace and narrative elevation of the seductive Nazi villain ... Unlike those in 'Schindler's List', Mr Tarantino's Nazis exist in an insistently fictional cinematic space where heroes and villains converge amid a welter of movie allusions ... 'Inglourious Basterds' is simply another testament to his movie love. The problem is that by making the star attraction of his latest film a most delightful Nazi, one whose smooth talk is presented as lovingly as his murderous violence, Mr Tarantino has polluted that love."

Firstly, 'Schindler's List' exists in a cinematic space every bit as "insistently fictional" as that of 'Inglourious Basterds' - it's in black and white; much of its visual style is non-naturalistic; ash from crematorium chimneys falls as gently and lovingly as snow - so the comparison doesn't hold water. Secondly, Dargis argues that Christoph Waltz's SS Colonel Hans Landa is the best thing about the film simply because he gives the best performance. Ralph Fiennes's is similarly the best performance in 'Schindler's List'; Dargis's argument is further weakened. Thirdly, why does a "gleeful embrace and narrative elevation" of a Nazi character perforce constitute a flaw in a film's aesthetic? I've always found Paul Scofield's erudite von Waldheim far more appealing than Burt Lancaster's monosyllabic Labiche in John Frankenheimer's 'The Train' - and this dynamic, if anything, makes the film even more interesting. (See also: 'Cross of Iron': German protagonist, excellent film. And where does Dargis's argument leave the "good German" in, say, Powell and Pressburger's '49th Parallel' or 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp'?) Fourthly, criticising Tarantino for creating his vision of cinema within a deliberately fictive space is as facile as slating a Bollywood film for being three hours long and containing a bunch of song and dance numbers. It's little more than an admission that Dargis doesn't like a certain style of film-making, only dressed up in the kind of cheap point-scoring that there should be no place for in the New York Times.

Also, Dargis seems to imply that premeditated empathy with a villainous character - ie. the writer and/or director specifically setting out to make an anti-hero not only palatable but laudable to the audience - is reprehensible. Excuse me? Some of the greatest characters in both classical literature and pop culture and at all points inbetween are anti-heroes. From Hamlet to Hannibal Lecter, from King Lear to Freddy Krueger. Everyone loves an anti-hero. It's the thrill of a character doing and saying the things we could never do or say - things, frankly, that we wouldn't want to do or say. It's the delightful frisson of a character whose moral disconnect imbues them with a fascinating unpredictability; a character who could quite literally do anything.

Chapter two:
Glorious basterds

And while I'm kicking against mainstream film critics, can I just say that I don't understand why so many critics still carp about violence in Tarantino's work. Sure, everything he's done contains scenes of violence, but I'd argue no more so than most tentpole summer blockbusters. While, say, your average Michael Bay film doesn't feature scalpings (how would Transformers scalp each other? "each one of you Autobots owes me one hundred Decepticon pistons ... and I want my pistons!") it buys wholly into an aesthetic of violence - explosions, shoot outs, cars flipping over and smashing into other cars at high speeds - which leaves you in no doubt that sheer, unmitigated destruction is Bay's raison d'etre. Tarantino, however, is more interested in the build up, the tension, the dialogue and character dynamics.

When action or violence happens in a Tarantino movie, it erupts suddenly and is over quickly. There is, per capita, very little onscreen violence in his work. The first chapter of 'Inglourious Basterds' is a clammily tense interrogation by Landa of a French farmer harbouring a Jewish family. It quickly becomes apparent that Landa knows full well the family are there and where they are hidden; he's simply toying with the man. The scene is intense and gripping, punctuated by an inspired mine's-bigger-than-yours visual joke, and what makes it work is not the thirty seconds of gunfire it culminates in but the twenty minutes of dialogue that build up to it. Landa arranging his pen and pot of ink on a table carries far more weight than the machine guns slung over his men's shoulders.

It follows, then, that any director who places more importance on words than action - and how refreshing is that in contemporary American cinema? - must needs be an actor's director. And this is where I still don't think Tarantino gets his dues. Love or loathe the deliberate movieness of his movies, the man gets fucking great performances from his actors. 'Pulp Fiction' made Samuel L Jackson and resurrected John Travolta. Pam Grier and Robert Forster in 'Jackie Brown' - we're talking about finest hours. Uma Thurman's never been as good outside Tarantino's cinema. And now in 'Inglourious Basterds' we have a bravura, multi-faceted performance from Christoph Waltz, vacillating between charm, cruelty and - daringly in the finale - a touch of high camp. It's full-throttle and hugely memorable. But so is Diane Kruger's irresistible diva-like turn as Brigitte von Hammersmarck, the dahling of the German film industry.

Melanie Laurent's character Shoshanna (the only survivor of Landa's first chapter massacre) is almost overwhelmed by Waltz and Kruger, but she's never less than the true main character of the film, and evinces a quiet determination underscored by a melancholic sense of vulnerability. That she understates just emphasises the importance of her character. Michael Fassbender comes within a plummy vowel of stealing the show as Lt Archie Hickox, a British officer despatched to assist the Basterds and make contact with Brigitte (a double agent) in a mission to assassinate the Nazi chiefs of staff. Bouncing off an audaciously cast Mike Myers (as fellow Brit, General Ed Fenech), Fassbender takes up the mantle of George Sanders and gives us a smooth, unpeturbable Brit (his staring-death-in-the-face speech about there being "a special place in hell reserved for people who waste good Scotch whisky" is priceless).

Elsewhere, as the Basterds, Brad Pitt is a scream as hillbilly platoon leader Lt Aldo Raine, drawling his cod-philosophical down-home dialogue with relish; Til Schweiger as the only German member of the outfit, officer-hating Hugo Stiglitz, gives a breakout performance comparable to Waltz's; B.J. Novak makes the most of a bit of comic relief when Landa taunts him that his nickname amongst German soldiers is "the Little Man"; and only Eli Roth seems ill-at-ease as baseball bat wielding Sgt Donowitz.

Chapter three:
European night in Tarantino-land

Because Tarantino's movies are movie movies, references to other films come thick and fast. Since the 'Kill Bill' opuses, his soundtracks have been culled from existing movie music. Character names reference favourite actors (Aldo Raine is a nod to Aldo Ray; Hugo Stiglitz to ... well, Hugo Stiglitz). Movie posters, characters talking about movies, and clips from movies are part of the fabric of a Tarantino film. Prior to 'Inglourious Basterds', he revealed a very '70s aesthetic, culminating in his and Robert Rodriguez's homage to the era of exploitation movie drive-in double bills, 'Grindhouse'.

'Inglourious Basterds' throws open the doors of Tarantino's movie love wider than ever before - and none of it, as Manohla Dargis would have you believe, is polluted. Tarantino - knowledgably and contextually - incorporates the work of Leni Riefenstahl, G.W. Pabst and Paul Martin. The latter's 'Gluckskinder', a loose 1936 remake of 'It Happened One Night', is referenced during the first meeting between Shoshanna, now running a cinema under an assumed identity, and Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), a Nazi sniper heralded as a hero of the nation. Smitten by Shoshanna, he wants her cinema to host the premiere of a propagandist film based on his exploits in which he plays himself.

Zoller proves one of the most slippery characters in the film, charming to the point of being self-effacing, almost sickened by the cinematic representation of his prowess as a marksman, yet still capable of ruthlessness and a threat to Shoshanna despite his feelings for her. Bruhl, impressive in everything I've seen him in since 'Good Bye Lenin!', does more good work here.

An interview with Tarantino at Sunset Gun goes into fascinating detail on the power Goebbels wielded in German film production during the Third Reich. Tarantino pertinently makes the point that many of the propaganda films produced (a staggering 800 titles during Goebbels' tenure) were comedies or historical epics. Parallels can be made, messages got across, without hammering the audience over the head in a blunt and obvious fashion. America and Britain made their fair share of propaganda films, too, many of them - including Powell and Pressburger's first eight collaborations - emerging as bona fide works of art.

Chapter four:
Operation cinephile

'Inglourious Basterds' confounds expectations from the off. Hell, it confounds them from its very title. A dictionary-defying variant on Enzo G. Castellari's 'The Inglorious Bastards', it sets up an expectation of a death-or-glory men-on-a-mission balls-to-the-wall actioner in the vein of 'The Dirty Dozen' or 'Where Eagles Dare'. But 'Inglourious Basterds' doesn't focus solely on the unit put together to undertake one of these missions, nor does it wind up at vertiginous clifftop stronghold or a chateau deep behind enemy lines.

Its denouement takes place at a cinema. Its heroine runs the cinema. Her would-be suitor Zoller plays himself in a film that makes hagiography of atrocity. Landa is put in charge of security at the cinema by Goebbels, who has overseen production on the Zoller film. Lt Hickox is handpicked for his mission because he was a film critic specialising in UFA during peacetime. Even Lt Raine is moved to inform a captured Nazi soldier who refuses to co-operate that he's glad of the man's refusal because "watching Lt Donowitz here beat Nazis to death is about as close as me and the boys get to going to the movies". The climax takes place during a film screening.

The film-within-a-film, 'Nations Pride', was directed by Eli Roth and constitutes a frenzied gun battle between sniper Zoller and hundreds of enemy troops; a shot of a man targetted by Zoller falling into a decorative pool apes a similar shot in 'Scarface'. It's both a nifty in-joke and a provocative anachronism, emphasising (as the title of chapter one - "once upon a time ... in Nazi-occupied France" - suggests) that 'Inglourious Basterds' is a WWII movie only in that it embraces some conventional war movie themes and imagery. Otherwise, it plays by its own rules and doesn't apologise for doing so!

Aldo Raine is as nominally the hero of the piece as Landa is the villain. The real hero of 'Inglourious Basterds' is cinema itself. When Shoshanna plans her revenge, its not explosives she uses to incinerate her enemies but reels and reels of nitrate film. There's something indescribably creepy about that pile of film reels lurking behind the cinema screen - particularly when you're watching 'Inglourious Basterds' on the big screen - and it's an image Tarantino plays on effectively.

Chapter five:
Revenge of the giant controversy

When 'Inglourious Basterds' screened at Cannes, opinion was divided. This is nothing new for Tarantino; there were boo's as well as cheers when he took the Palme d'Or for 'Pulp Fiction'. Debate will doubtless rage on the internet in the coming months, opinion chasmically divided. I'm confident that 'Inglourious Basterds' will prove the love-it-or-loathe-it audience divider of Tarantino's career.

Personally, as you might have gathered from the couple of thousand words I've waxed lyrical on it so far, I love 'Inglourious Basterds'; I still need to watch it a few more times, but I have an inkling it might end up, if not my favourite Tarantino film, then certainly joint first with 'Pulp Fiction'. It has no regard for history, it is supremely self-indulgent (Tarantino is perhaps the only film-maker I can think of for whom self-indulgence is a positive trait), and it continually defies audience expectation. It's a film only Quentin Tarantino could have made, and I can't foist upon it any higher a recommendation than that.

Inglourious Basterds (first thoughts)

It's me and Paula's first wedding anniversary today, and what more romantic a way to mark the occasion that an afternoon showing of 'Inglourious Basterds', Quentin Tarantino's alternative, subversive, brutal and often funny as fuck war movie?

(We're out for a meal shortly, so I've only got a few minutes to blog a quick hit-and-run immediate thoughts type review. Expect a more considered article in the next few days. Oh, and I know I said August was foreign movies month on The Agitation of the Mind, but half of 'Inglourious Basterds' is in French or German and subtitled, so it kind of counts.)

Immediate thoughts, then:

Everything you've heard is true: Tarantino happily rewrites history, sticks David Bowie on the soundtrack of a movie set (mostly) set in 1944, and confounds any and every expectation you go into the cinema with. This isn't so much a war movie as a western (the opening chapter is chock full of iconography that wouldn't be out of place in a Sergio Leone opus, right down to the chapter title "once upon a time ... in Nazi-occupied France") which segues into a men-on-a-mission caper (only without anything as pifflingly audience-pandering as an actual mission*) which then takes time out to spoof the stiff-upper-lip ethos of '50s British war films (the nonsensical verbiage between Mike Myers and Michael Fassbender is a scream) before wandering into a basement bar to revisit the Mexican stand-offs so brilliantly realised in 'Reservoir Dogs' and 'Pulp Fiction' (only with SS officers, undercover operatives and a glamorous double agent thrown in for good measure), with all of the plot strands resolving at an art deco cinema where 'Inglourious Basterds' stops being anything even genre related and reveals itself as a bullet-riddled, explosive and endearingly self-indulgent love letter to cinema itself.

Maybe I'm throwing this out a little too early (I'll certainly be seeing the film again on the big screen - and soon - so I'll save my more considered write-up till after this second viewing), but 'Inglourious Basterds' is the Tarantino film I've had most fun watching since 'Pulp Fiction'.

"This might well be my masterpiece," Lt Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) declares in the film's last line (apropos of what is something I'll leave you to find out for yourself), and it's impossible not to take it as self-acclamation on Tarantino's part. Thing his, he could - could - be right.

*Broadly speaking, "I need me eight men ... we're gonna kill Nazis" doesn't really constitute a mission. It's more like, you know, a mission statement.

PERSONAL FAVES: Ocean's 11

When Steven Soderbergh made ‘Ocean’s 11’ in 2001, he was on a roll. After nearly a decade in the wilderness following his acclaimed debut ‘sex, lies and videotape’, he’d come storming back with uber-cool Elmore Leonard adaptation ‘Out of Sight’ in 1998, followed in rapid succession by ‘The Limey’ (still criminally underrated), ‘Erin Brockovich’ (a potential courtroom yawnfest that Soderbergh somehow made compelling*) and the multi-layered Oscar-winning ‘Traffic’.

Now I love all of those films, and it can be argued (quite easily it the case of, say, ‘Traffic) that all of them have more depth, more interest, more idiosyncracies – hell, just plain more to write about – than ‘Ocean’s 11’. In fact it wouldn’t be difficult to make a case for ‘Ocean’s 11’ as an incredibly entertaining but ultimately generic remake, file it under “style over substance” and move on.

But I would pick ‘Ocean’s 11’ over its stable mates any day. Several reasons.

It’s a pitch-perfect example of pure mainstream entertainment. You don’t need to think about it too much. You can kick back with a bowl of popcorn, crack a beer, relax and let 100 minutes of cool wash effortlessly over you. There’s plenty of films that fulfil the “pure entertainment” remit – most of them, in fact – but precious few that still manage to be supremely well-made and not insult the intelligence.

It improves on the original immeasurably. Lewis Milestone’s 1960 film was a ‘Rififi’-style crime caper teaming the Rat Pack with Sixties stalwarts Angie Dickinson, Richard Conte, Cesar Romero, Akim Tamiroff and Henry Silva; a classic in the making … or would have been had Milestone been able to shoot the film he wanted.

Sinatra and co. all had big room gigs at Vegas during the shooting and this, rather than the film, became their principle focus. Then there was the partying. We’re talking about the Rat Pack, after all. In Vegas. Analogy: imagine you’ve cast Richard Burton, Oliver Reed, Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris in a movie shot around a brewery. How much usable footage do you think you’d get in the car each day of shooting?

Between his stars not turning up on set, and throwing out the script in favour of jokey ad-libbing when they did, the first ‘Ocean’s 11’ lost its chance at greatness. It’s still good fun, but a shroud of “what if” hangs over it.

Soderbergh, however, didn’t have such problems. The script for his version – by Ted Griffin – was tight as a snare drum (the reason there are no deleted scenes on the DVD is that everything slid together so perfectly: nothing about the script was redundant) and zinged with cool dialogue. The cast is top-notch: George Clooney**, Brad Pitt, Andy Garcia (doing his best work in ages), Elliott Gould (ditto), Carl Reiner and Julia Roberts (the “introducing Julia Roberts” credit at the end is priceless). The second tier shine: Bernie Mac, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan and Eddie Jemison hold their own against the big names.

Music, cinematography, production design, editing (want a masterclass on how to use a segue? watch this film) … everything melds smoothly and seamlessly.

I’ve used the word three times already, and it’s a tool of both the stoner and the lazy writer, but there really is no other way of describing ‘Ocean’s 11’: it’s cool.

Suavely, stylishly, seriously cool.




*As well as getting a career-best performance from Julia Roberts.

** ‘Ocean’s 11’ was the second of his six – so far – actor/director collaborations with Soderbergh.