The Damned United

After I got home from seeing The Damned United last night I began David Peace’s book, on which the film is based:

Quote:

Repetition, Repetition - Fields of loss and fields of hate, fields of blood and fields of war - Their sport upon the walls, their sport upon the floor. Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee… In her shadow time. On our terraces, in our cages, from Purgatorio, we watch, With our wings that cannot fly, our tongues that cannot speak: ‘Destroy her politics! Destroy her culture! Destroy her!’ But our wings are thick with tar, tongues heavy with her coin, On our broken backs, our broken hearts, she’ll dine again tonight. In her shadow place - We are selfish men: Oh, Blake! Orwell! Raise us up, return to us again. These civil wars of uncivil hearts, divided and now damned - The old is dying and the new cannot be born - By Elland Road, I sat down and wept; D.U.F.C.

It’s not the same! Hell, that sounds like a bleat, a whine…b-but. I said I’d never do this. But. Ten, twenty, thirty pages in, and it’s not the same still.

At the start of the film, Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) arrives from Derby, with his kids in the back of the car, to begin his 44 turbulent days as manager of Leeds United, the English champions and the then giants of the game. With Manchester United relegated the season Leeds finished top, there is no-one to challenge them as preening popinjays. Clough hates Leeds, hates them for a years-old insult, but his hubris is leading him along. Fuelled by a long-held resentment towards the departing Leeds manager, Don Revie, bouyed by his success at Derby, determined to scotch rumours that he can only manage when his best pal Peter Taylor is by his side, he turns up full of vim and vigour ready to turn L.U.F.C. into a loved team. Loved, because they’ll play the Brian Clough way.

Now this much is the same. But, bloody hell, I’ve read enough Peace to know that when I saw Clough’s car peeping into view and the jaunty pop music du jour playing along, this would be a lighter take on the whole thing. And it’s true. In the book (the last time I’ll use that phrase, I promise) it’s an altogether darker affair:

Quote:

The floodlights and the stands, all fingers and fists up from the sticks and the stones, the flesh and the bones. There it is, my eldest is telling my youngest. There it is. From the motorway. Through the windscreen - Hateful, hateful place; spiteful, spiteful place… Elland Road, Leeds, Leeds,Leeds.

And that’s as it should be; no obligation for the viewer to have read Peace’s novel. Unlike, say almost all the Harry Potter films, or the recent Watchmen, the source material isn’t required; the movie can stand on its own. Apart from the self-evident aspect of not wanting to be lost in a flood of facts and character interactions you might not otherwise have known, this is an important point to make because obviously you don’t want people to be lost, but also because if you’ve picked up anything about the novel it will probably be that it’s not a football book. Like Ninety Eighty wasn’t a book about the Yorkshire Ripper, it just happened to have the Ripper there within its pages, The Damned United, you will have heard, takes place within football, but is actually about Clough the man. Not the manager.

And it’s important to say that because, actually, there is way more football on view here than I ever expected. Drenched in a pitch perfect carapace of washed-out muted green and browns, evoking the 70s with wonderful precision, we start with league tables, contemporaneous footage, a lot of training ground action, footie history. Clough and Taylor take the Second Division by storm; they win the league title. He buys Dave McKay, Ray McFarland. Only fleetingly are we away from the grounds or the dressing rooms or the boardroom. It’s about Clough, but it’s also a film about football.

How could it not be? Not being inside Clough’s head, not having the internal monologue that I’m now finding is driving the text like a runaway train, the visuals are inevitably footie related. Born and brought up on Seventies football, and Cloughie in particular, I can’t see it as a bad thing, personally. Ole Big ‘Ead was a consistently entertaining figure on the telly; outspoken, dry, dark, witty and sharp, Brian Clough wasn’t just a man you saw on Grandstand or World of Sport, he was almost everywhere. That droning North-East twang, and the snappy one liners are seared into my brain.

Sheen delivers this perfectly. It really is like watching a young Cloughie up there on the screen, mouthing off, being brilliant, being a prick, being a football genius.

Director Tom Hooper and Writer Peter Morgan have managed between them to create biopics ranging from Blair to Nixon to HRH to Lord Longford to Idi Amin and, now, Brian Clough. Clough stands out in that crowd, of course, by seeming such an odd choice (no doubt he’d have preferred me not to have added that qualification) and, I have to admit, that if there’s one nagging question which hung around in the back of my mind as wallowed in the story and the nostalgia, it was the so-whatness of the story. But it’s questioning this that creates the film’s saving grace, it’s entire purpose. In The Deal, in The Queen, in Frost/Nixon, in The Last King of Scotland, and here in The Damned United what you have is a just what Hooper and Morgan do brilliantly, a distillation of events which culminate to create perfect tipping points. These are dramas, and The Damned United may just be the best of all of them, that isolate a moment of change. Watershed noir? Nouvelle catharsis?

I don’t know, but the build and build and build here, and the inevitable fall, paints a picture of a man who changes fundamentally, and surely that’s what we want out of human stories, isn’t it, character change? Insight is rare, insight into the flawed but lovable, rarer still. It’s reported that the Clough family have decided not to see the film. Incensed by the book, they have snubbed the movie as a further insult. It would be nice to think they might rethink. This is no meek hagiography, Clough comes across as no angel, but there is a warmth and respect that emanates from it. Sheen said recently that he hopes the family relents and takes a trip to the flicks to see what he’s made of the old boy. I hope so too.

Only, as I’m discovering, they may be best advised to carry on steering clear of the book.

Lesbian Vampire Killers

I would say it’s been a fairly grim couple of weeks for Matthew Horne and James Corden, adored laddish double-act of Gavin & Stacey fame. Not only has their cock-shrivellingly awful sketch show been universally derided in the press, but they’ve also had to endure a total mauling at the movies as this, their first big screen collaborative project, has rolled out to empty screenings up and down the country.

So, I’ll be nice, because they’re lovely aren’t they? The fat one, the cadaverous one, they’re, you know, really well liked and that. What with their…stuff…the funny…stuff.

You know. Fatness. And looking all surprised and a bit, sort of, angular. People like that.

James does his robot dance (again). And shouts ‘fuck’ a lot. Matthew…does…that, er, that thing. The thing with his face. The angular face thing. He does that. A lot. People like that. I imagine. Which is good, because he does that here. A lot.

So, they’re good at that. It works, I expect, for them. It must do. because they do it. Like, a lot. Loads.

James, the dance, the shouting; Matthew, the face, the angular…face.

All good. All, you know, there…

Er, and the seats. Yes, the seats were great. Really, really comfy. Really very comfy seats indeed. God, they were comfy. To the max. They were comfort maxed out. Oh yes, sirree. No problem with the comfort from the seats.

And I was particularly impressed with the guys from Cineworls. They’d cleaned and taken away all the litter and stuff. That was good. Nice, clean cinema. Really very clean. Spotless, actually. I’d go so far as to say spotless. Oh yeah, top marks for that! Well done, Cineworld. Good job.

Good, good job there.

One thing I wasn’t sure about was the food and drink. I was kind of pushed. Bit rushed, hectic life, yadda yadda. Sure you don’t want to know, but there was this thing at work, and i was kind of in a bit of a flap, so food wasn’t a priority. But I bet it would have been great. Looked great. Looked really good. Drinks, popcorn, the other things. All looked excellent. Can’t really comment, but I’m sure I’d be praising that too.

So.

I hope they can use some of this. Back of the DVD maybe, chaps? Just ask. Just you know, email, facebook, tweet me. Yeah, tweet me…happy to oblige. You’ll recognise me, I was the only person in the 300 seat theatre. OK?

Cheers.

The Unborn

Sometimes, sometimes screaming is the only answer. David S Goyer’s shockingly bad The Unborn is a daft little horror story about a girl who unwittingly (of course) strangled her twin brother in the womb with her umbilical cord, and now the little bugger wants revenge.

Or it seems to be about that. Then it’s not really about what she did at all, and it’s about a Dybbuk, a disembodied spirit from Jewish folklore, who attempts to possess a living body that belongs to another soul. There are various origins attributed to these spirits. These Dybbuks may be the soul of a sinner, who wishes to escape the just punishment meted to it by the angels who seek to resolve them, or it may be seeking revenge for some evil that was done to it while it lived. It’s a bit confused, to be honest, but I’ll come back to that in a minute, because the Jewish angle, instead of being actually rather interesting, turns ugly and even a little offensive.

Anyhoo. Back to the girl. Fortunately, she’s 19 and utterly gorgeous, which is good news as she seems to spend an inordinate amount of time traipsing about in her white cotton briefs. Why this is necessary for her dead baby brother to make an appearance I’m unsure, but it seemed important, so I just ran with it. Casey (Odette Yustman) lives in one of those enormo-houses out in the Chicago suburbs where it’s easy for horror movie protagonists to hide, because the rooms are so huge and the staircases have to bend where the shadows meet (since no-one ever turns the fricking lights on). With great good fortune, she’s also one of those girls whose father is almost always “out of town on business”, except at those crucial points when he’s requireded to explain the plot a little, so that she’s almost always alone in her gigantic mansion (apart, of course, when her boyfriend is needed to not see the horrible things she will then spend ten minutes insisting she did see). It is also wonderfully convenient that, as a baby-sitter for the similarly well-housed people across the street, as soon as she hears a footfall upstairs instead of walking swiftly along to see if her infant charges are awake, she creeps cautiously to the bottom of the stairs and calls, “Matty…?” I mean, how else are you going to ratchet up the tension? She’s rich, young and good looking, isn’t that enough; you surely didn’t expect her to act like every single other person on the planet, did you?

So. Bad things happen. Blah blah blah. Horrible bugs crawl out of things. Her dead Mom appears. The baby-sat child starts to say prophetic things. Like I said…blah blah blah.

Then she finds a grandma she never knew she had, ferreted away in a spooky retirement home (never a sunlit warden-controlled holiday village, note) and we track the disembodied spirit down at last…to…delightfully, the Holocaust. Charming. A nasty little central back story is suddenly segued in at this point, about how the Nazis wanted to experiment on twin children (in this scene, the twins are all uniformly about 8, because a room filled with 24, 31 and 53 year olds wouldn’t have the same affect when the nasty German doctor is pushing a syringe into their eyes) and how this process – God alone knows how – turns one of them into an evil spirit child type thing. I mean, what? I’m sure I didn’t get that wrong. But anyway, it seems Casey’s deceased Great Uncle has been captured by a Dybbuk, and now wants to come back and…you know, be all evil, and stuff.

So, along comes Super Rabbi Gary Oldman (I’ve lost you, haven’t I?) and with nary five minutes’ worth of persuasion is throwing himself and his colleagues into an exorcism, a ceremony he has never performed before. Lot’s of wind and howling and noise later, oh, I don’t know, something happens and it’s all over. I’m unsure really, as I’d lost the will to live about an hour in.

Crucially, The Unborn builds up no good will in its early scenes, instead starting with a nightmare (why should we care? It’s not our nightmare, and it’s not the nightmare of anyone we’ve learnt to care about) and then continuing with a serious of allegedly spooky occurrences that seem to have little or no point to them. For a film that lasts less than 90 minutes and tries hard to have something happening at almost every turn, it is remarkably boring. The Dybbuk angle may be interesting (I’d never heard of it) but that is the one diverting aspect in the whole thing – well, that and Ms Yustman’s bottom – because everything else here we have seen a thousand times before.

Now, admittedly, the end product is quite polished, and as I understand it, Goyer is responsible for much of the story of The Dark Knight (but also Jumper, worryingly) so he has a lot of experience, I guess. Possibly this may explain why he asked Gary Oldman to join in; why the guy agreed is another matter altogether. The introduction of the Holocaust as an engine to drive the middle act of the story is badly judged and leaves a nasty taste. Overall it’s a film that gets worse every time I think about it.

Avoid.