Tuesday Minute
No. 153 | September 7, 2010

Once Is Enough

Our theme this week
Actors who have directed one film only

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Marlon Brando:  One-Eyed Jacks (1961)

Gary Oldman:  Nil by Mouth (1997)

Nil by Mouth is a raw, personal, powerful look at working-class life on the south side of London.  Gary Oldman wrote and directed the film, and it’s hard to say how much of his childhood growing up in public housing made it onto the screen, but it’s a relief to know he survived.  Oldman dedicated the movie to the memory of his father.

The father in the film is a desperate and brutal man named Ray, played by Ray Winstone.  The victim of much of Ray’s abuse is his wife, Valerie, a role for which Kathy Burke won Best Actress at Cannes.  Their young daughter, Michelle, is utterly neglected, not even a concern for the parents, as she witnesses endless streams of profanity and shocking violence.  Billy (Charlie Creed-Miles) is Valerie’s brother, who robs them to feed his drug habit, which leads Ray to seek retribution.  The cycle goes on.  The rage within the family hits a boiling point, with Valerie ending up in the hospital, Ray beaten and semi-conscious in a parking lot, and Billy in jail.

It ain’t a pretty story, but it feels real, too real at times.  Nil by Mouth is like a documentary.  We may not be entertained, in the usual sense of the word, but we get a view of life we don’t get to see very often:  humans living in desperate circumstances, doing desperate things, and like the best of movies, it’s not about them, it’s about us.

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Nil by Mouth (1997)
Gary Oldman, writer-director
Ray Winstone, Kathy Burke

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Quote of note
“When you go out, you go out with your mates, and when you are in, you’re pissed out and your brain’s asleep in front of the fucking television.  I turn the television off, go up to bed, you follow me up at three o’clock in the morning stinking of booze.  That’s what I get.  Either that or you’re knocking me about.  I’m 30 today, you know, and I feel so fucking old.  You know, I’m tired, you know, I wanna be able to look back and say, ‘Yeah, I had a bit of fun,’ you know, when I’m old, instead of saying ‘Everyone fucking felt sorry for me!’  I mean, that’s the life I’ve got.  Do you hear what I’m saying?  I just don’t want it.  I’ll, I’ll find somebody else.  You know, someone who can love me.  Someone kind.”
—Valerie (Kathy Burke), Nil by Mouth (1997)

…58…59…60.

Thursday Minute
No. 125 | June 24, 2010

The Art of the Heist

Our theme this week
Heist films

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   The Thomas Crown Affair (1968, 1999)
Tuesday         —   Rififi (1955)
Wednesday    —   The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

Sexy Beast (2001)

Sexy Beast generated plenty of buzz when it opened in the U.S. in mid-2001, much of it for Ben Kingsley’s performance as a psychopath who won’t take no for an answer.  I thought the hype was a little overblown, but it’s a good, solid, entertaining film.  It’s vulgar and violent, and has an odd comic edge.   I rather liked Ray Winstone’s character, and among heist scenes in movies, this one had a novel twist.

Winston plays Gal Dove, an ex-con living in Costa del Sol with his wife.  Dove is retired, and wants to be, but he gets an invitation from Don Logan (Kingsley) to join him for (yes, that staple of the genre) one last job—a bank heist in London.  Dove turns down Logan but Logan makes it clear that the only acceptable answer is yes.  That’s a problem.  Logan is so unhinged you can never be sure what he’ll do, and his volatile, profanity-spewing, likely-to-blow-at-any-moment temper makes him an utterly watchable villain.  While he’s in the movie, that is.  But he’s too nasty a creep to last.

Dove still has to deal with Logan’s boss and agrees to go through with the heist, a somewhat ludicrous job involving drilling into the bank vault from the neighboring Turkish bath.  It makes for some memorable images, and a good metaphor for Dove—who’s underwater and unable to breathe.  He needs the heist to go well, not for the riches, but just so he can be done with the life of crime.

Kingsley earned an Oscar nomination, one of his four, and got the lion’s share of the film’s famously juicy dialogue.  The script had an exceptional number of f-words and c-words; many hundreds, in fact, and someone apparently has counted them.  In that respect, Sexy Beast didn’t borrow from heist films of the ’50s, which broke new ground but still conformed to Production Code standards (at least in Hollywood).  Brits, however, seem to have a certain talent for that kind of language.

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Sexy Beast (2000)
Jonathan Glazer, director
Trailer

 

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Sexy Beast (2000)
Ben Kingsley

 

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Quote of Note
“I love you like a rose loves rainwater, like a leopard loves its partner in the jungle, like—I don’t know what like.”
—Gal Dove (Ray Winstone), Sexy Beast (2000)

…58…59…60.