funny games

I had a week off, and spent some time at the London Film Festival. On my return on the first day Dave asked me if I’d been watching films about ‘gay bumming’. It didn’t help when I protested that no, in fact I’d seen Funny Games.

Funny Games is about two eerily polite young men terrorising a couple and their little boy in the couple’s lakeside holiday home. Why do they do it? Well, as various asides to the camera and one fairly audacious sequence make clear, it’s because YOU the viewer want them to: it’s a film that’s meant to make you question your attitude to screen violence. Mark Kermode says it’s like being ‘told off’. The original 1997 film was Austrian but now the director Michael Haneke has remade it, shot-for-shot, in America with Naomi Watts to reach out to a wider audience… and tell them off.

It must be odd for a creative person to remake their own movie shot for shot. What if you suddenly change your mind halfway through remaking it and realise that, after all, it would have worked better as a musical? Or get the uncontrollable urge to send Arnie in to save the heroine at the end? The first and only time I watched the original I found it really powerful; this time round I was interested but not really moved, thus proving Haneke right: I’d been desensitized.

‘Enjoy the film’, said the usherette on the way in. I could have slapped her. Didn’t she know you weren’t meant to?

Just for the record, the best film I’ve seen at the festival so far is La Influencia, a Spanish movie about a single mother’s slide into depression in which very little happens. So I’m sure you’ll all be rushing out to see that when it’s released.

I stayed one night at my aunt’s in Suffolk. For some curious reason, she has Zone Horror, the dedicated horror channel (sponsors of Frightfest), which enabled me to see a fragment of The Invisible Dead, about a creepy castle haunted by, as far as I could tell, budgetary constraints - hence the monster’s invisibility. In the bit I saw, however, it does become briefly visible as… a man in a gorilla suit. And not a very convincing gorilla suit at that - Abbott and Costello met scarier ones. You can see the eyeholes and everything. It is a genuine shock, however: you thought the movie was cheap, but not that cheap. The film does have it’s enduring mystery, which is: why didn’t they just give up, go into town and blow the budget on a couple of rounds of drinks?

I just hope that one day I’ll get to see the whole thing.

On Saturday we went to the Green Man to greet Hannah on her return from Australia. Yes, she survived. So did Australia. Although her ear 'exploded' on the plane. Mat regaled us with his account of owning two Gordon the gopher glove puppets as a child, one for formal occasions, the other for more intimate moments. Well that was the idea I got anyway: that he had elaborated on the concept of putting your hand up a glove puppet’s arse. He was talking about digging Gordon out some day. About time, I should think.

it's not what you do, its who you do

I had a taste of life as an unpacker on Saturday. Luckily it was a very exciting day on Phoenix FM, the only station our broken radio gives out with any clarity. Roy ‘Pretty Boy’ Shaw, true crime legend and ‘author’, was being interviewed. Though the DJ was having to supply a lot of the pertinent facts, which were a little slow in coming. Still, slaving away in this small windowless room, I got some insights into prison life from Roy’s mushy voice. Prison is mainly full of decent blokes, it turns out, except for the grasses and the nonces, who have to be ‘done’ regularly. Broadmoor, on the other hand, is 'full of nutters'. One tried to bash Roy up while he was sitting on the toilet. His reaction? ‘I pulled up me trousers, and I done ‘im.’ Never has such a simple verb been made to cover so much.

It wasn’t bland though, the accusation normally levelled at local radio. Even the playlist on Phoenix isn’t that bad… normally. Later in the day a female DJ interrupted Antony And The Johnsons in mid-song because they were ‘too depressing for a Saturday afternoon’ and put on Dr. Hook. It may have been the same woman who later said she was going to play a song and invited us to guess what film it came from. The song was A View To A Kill by Duran Duran. Hm, good question. What was the name of that film? Goldfinger?

But obviously it was better than being on the shop floor. In staff training we were shown some colourful posters from head office telling us how they want us to behave over Christmas. They want us to be ‘proactive’, and not only that but ‘passionate’. ‘Look and feel’, read one of the captions. It sounds like they want us to start humping the customers’ legs - an accolade previously reserved only for the sexiest regulars.

On Saturday night I was perhaps the only person hurrying home from Sainsbury’s to watch Deal Or No Deal rather than the rugby. I saw England playing France last Saturday and wasn’t surprised when they won. It wouldn’t have surprised me if China had won: the whole thing was incomprehensible to me. At least in football the players remain, for the most part, discrete entities and you can watch them moving about the pitch and it all seems to make some sort of sense in an abstract way. Rugby is just a mess. ‘He’ll cock his leg and send it long’, one of the commentators said at one point. That didn’t help.

smoke signals

An e-mail came from head office saying that the shop was having problems with ‘frozen images’, so we would have to hire a helicopter, and one of us would have to hang out of it fiddling with something on the roof, while being talked through the process by the IT department over the phone.

However, this turned out to be a dream.

In real life I volunteered to unpack throughout Christmas. Usually we drag some thug in from the streets but they tend to ‘crack’ after a while and then the results can be messy, so - figuring that it will keep me away from the shop floor - I volunteered. By the end of it (stuck out the back with only a lot of cardboard boxes and local radio for company) I expect to have devolved into a squat ape-like creature, with improved musculature but few remaining social skills. Barbara said I could stop if I get ‘fed up’. By that stage I will no longer be able to communicate verbally, so the first they’ll know about it is when I set fire to everything. If I manage to discover fire.

Still, I will miss the occasional felicitous at-the-counter moment. Like when, a week or so ago, a young man came in and bought Teach Yourself Basic Accounting and Spank Me at the same time. Was he buying the accounting book as camouflage, or was he a trainee accountant trying to look more interesting? Discuss.

life during wartime

A woman turned to me with a query about a phrasebook we didn’t have and then paused to ask: ‘You do work here?’ I must have been glaring at her or something.

I get this all the time.

A man shoved a very neatly written letter through the letterbox to inform us that he’d bought a book but, on arriving home, found that it wasn’t in his bag, and therefore (he concluded) we must have it still (so we’d given him, and he’d accepted, an empty bag?) The letter was to inform us that he was coming in later that day to get it. It was like a threat. We were trembling. Because of course, we didn’t have it.

Anyway he came in (thankfully) while I was at lunch, and demanded that he be able to buy the book again at half price, which I suppose was his idea of a compromise. Verity said no, and he had a go at her in front of a queue of customers, and then came back five minutes later to say that, actually, he’d found the book and - sorry.

It seemed a very odd way of going about things. I began to wonder if he was a ‘mystery shopper’, testing our manner of dealing with awkward customers. If that were true, it would make me feel like shooting someone from head office. Even more than I normally do. The fact that it even springs to mind perhaps suggests something about the relations between shop floor and management. The other day we were told to be understanding if people from the accounts department were short with us, because they’re understaffed. Does that mean that we, fighting off customers and trying to avoid being crushed by enormous deliveries, are free to be ‘short’ with them when they ring to ask for a receipt from 1974?

Clearly, I exaggerate somewhat. Still, this feels like the start of a war. Next Wednesday, one of ‘them’ is coming to do an audit, so I suppose we’ll be compelled to go hunting through all those cardboard boxes we’ve stuffed the old paperwork into. Well it isn’t as if they aren’t labelled. On one of them, I noticed the other day, I’ve scrawled in marker pen: ‘Junely’. See, we’ve even invented a new month, we must be on top of things. Although I imagine this auditor will be after more recent stuff, from Augember or even Septober.

My attempts to promote Pets With Tourette's have come to naught, sadly, due to resistance from decent-minded members of staff. It’s a shame, because I had a whole advertising campaign worked out, complete with a slogan (‘Every home should have one’) and a jingle based on Roxette’s Dressed For Success but with the lyrics - obviously - changed to ‘I wanna get Pets/With Tourette's’) and even a whole Get Selling-type initiative in which staff pepper their sales patter (such as it is) with obscenities. Those of us who have always found it hard to say ‘You can take your card’ at the end of a transaction without adding ‘And you can shove it up your fucking arse’ will be gratified.

Unfortunately, this is just the kind of thing head office frown on. The boring bastards.