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Tom Hooper's The Damned United (2009) dramatises Brian Clough's 44-day stint as Leeds United football coach. You don't have to be an English football film to appreciate the film which is a cautionary lesson on leadership, set in the downtrodden, rainy Northern English landscape that has become a Screen Yorkshire aesthetic.

Clough (Michael Sheen) makes several classic mistakes which self-saboages his leadership. He accepts the job because of personal animus with his predecessor Don Reavey (Colm Meaney), whose team has used dirty tactics in games with Derby County, a third league team which Clough and assistant coach/talent scout Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall) have taken into the first league. Clough's aggressive leadership style alienates the Leeds players who still feel loyal to Reavey, and who undermine their new coach. Clough does not have a 100-day transition plan and improvises his training sessions. Nor does he brief the Leeds players on pre-game tactics, whereas Reavey compiled detailed dossiers, in advance, on Leeds' competitors. Clough's overconfidence and chutzpah becomes a liability to the Leeds board when he fails to deliver results, and he blows-up. Anyone who has been through an exit interview will empathise with Clough's sad observation outside the boardroom, 'every story ends with two words . . . the end.'

Peter Morgan's script (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Last King of Scotland) based on David Peace's novel (The Red Riding Trilogy) contrasts Clough's troubles with his earlier success with Derby County. A sub-narrative reveals how Taylor's expertise was essential to Clough's success, and how the assistant coach 'grounded' Clough's all-consuming ambitions. The relationship frays when Clough miscalculates during a brinkmanship negotiation with Derby County's board, which accepts Clough and Taylor's resignation, despite them getting the club to the top of the English league. On reflection, The Leeds board suggests that their error was in the wrong hiring decision: they should have hired Clough and Taylor, rather than Clough alone. Clough's blindspot was a lack of political savvy: as a manager he refused to negotiate with Derby County's owner or to heed his advice, and to listen to the Leeds board.

The film's epilogue shows Clough and Taylor's later success with Nottingham Forest, which won the European Cup in 1979 and 1980.The Damned United alludes to a deeper reason why Clough failed at Leeds: the 'situational fit' of talent to strategic circumstances that may only become clear in retrospect. Clough was a gifted turnaround coach whose chutzpah was needed to energise and motivate teams. Leeds had hired Clough with a different aim, to sustain and build its high performance team. Clough was correct to see how money would redefine English football, but in this transitional period, managers did not yet have the power to out-negotiate boards and club owners.

Ron Howard's film adaptation of Frost/Nixon (2008) adopts a thriller format in contrast with the Melbourne Theatre Company's stage production which I saw several months ago.  Salvatore Totino's cinematography turns David Frost's interview into a claustrophobic tit for tat whilst editors Daniel P. Hanley and Mike Hill linger on the emotional aftermath of Richard Nixon's elicited, emotional self-disclosure.

For me the MTC's version suffered from a first act which established the interview's circumstances, obscured the dual track negotiations between Frost and Nixon's advisers, and veered into comedy, before ratcheting up the second act.  Howard avoids this dilemma through taut pacing that has a semi-documentary feel heightened when the characters deliver their monologues straight to the camera.

The cast needs to be stellar for this ensemble film and it delivers.  Frank Langella's Nixon is a self-tortured leader with feet of clay; I have to now revisit Anthony Hopkins' portrayal in Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995) for a comparison.  Michael Sheen's Frost adopts a chutzpah mask which hides a risk-taking gambit to avoid career demise and the compromises made to financiers.  Kevin Bacon's Jack Brennan is prepared to take the flak for Nixon.  Sam Rockwell's James Reston Jr. evokes how research can become an all-consuming quest when your beliefs and passions are on the line, deftly counterpointed by Oliver Platt's Bob Zelnick who zigs and zags between self-depracating humour and conscientious objector angst.  Matthew Macfayden's John Birt updates the role he played in Spooks (aka MI5) as a nuanced political operator who must counterbalance Frost's chutzpah and the resistance it creates for Reston Jr. and Zelnick with keeping the team together, and getting the interview planning, negotiations and logistics done.  Rebecca Hall's Caroline Cushing and Toby Jones' Swifty Lazar provide comic relief from the tension and function to advance the film's plot points.  Langella gets the spotlight for his Nixon portrayal yet the rest of the cast are vital because the plot needs everyone to be a coherent whole.

Playwright and scriptwriter Peter Morgan's previous films have explored weighty themes: self-willed blindness to the dark side of charismatic leadership in The Last King of Scotland (2006) and leadership judgment during crisis-driven events in The Queen (2006).  Set after Watergate and Nixon's presidential pardon, Frost/Nixon explores the commitment costs for a research group that sets out to achieve public justice and the ploys in a complex multi-party negotiation.  There's far more beyond the heart-to-heart phone call between Nixon and Frost, and Nixon's final self-disclosure, just as there was more to Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987) than Gordon Gecko's 'greed is good' sound-bite.  All sides use psychological tactics to gain momentary bargaining advantages and to leverage power imbalances, from Swifty Lazar's late night reply on Frost's opening bid to Birt, Reston Jr. and Brennan's interruptions of the interview taping at strategic points that are beneficial to their teams.  Frost opts to 'lure the tiger from the mountain' (36 Strategies) for Nixon to self-disclose, enraging Reston Jr. and Zelnick who want a front-on attack about Watergate and the Vietnam War.  Nixon uses sleight of mouth patterns to interrupt, stall and throw Frost off guard.  Birt is caught in a position akin to a consultant or line manager: responsible for logistics and having to persuade all parties to move forward.  Anyone who has had to raise money against the odds for a project will wince with familiarity at Frost's desparate meetings with television network chiefs and advertising agencies.  It's this pointillism which makes Frost/Nixon even richer than the interview's climatic revelations and why the film will be perfect for an MBA class on mergers and acquisitions, negotiation and game theory.

Now all I need to see are the Frost/Nixon original interviews . . .

Australian comedian and raconteur Andrew Denton finishes his six-year running interview show Enough Rope.  Denton's production company Zapruder's Other Films announces Project Next for 2009: finding "the next bunch of original thinkers, movers, mischief-makers and cage-rattlers."

Chinese Democracy looks set to be the most delayed and expensive album in history: a rumoured $US13 million recording budget, 5 guitarists, 14 studios and a horde of Pro Tools digital editors.  I'm not exactly a Guns n' Roses fan but I bought the album anyway for the CD booklet: a list of production credits for the massively overrun project.  For the project's background see Wikipedia's CD history page and Jeff Leeds' article "The Most Expensive Album Never Made" (New York Times, 6th March 2005).

Interesting that Axl Rose augmented the Best Buy-only release with a MySpace streaming strategy and that Amazon.com's top search today for "Chinese Democracy" is Metallica's Death Magnetic (Elektra, 2008) . . . Rose's CD is ninth on the search algorithm's list.

I'm saving most of my thoughts on Chinese Democracy for a journal article. 

Former Gn'R co-founder Slash in his autobiography Slash (HarperEntertainment, New York, 2007), co-written with Anthony Bozza, has a prescient and interesting anecdote (p. 371) on Rose's decision to use Pro Tools in the recording studio:

There were rows and rows of Pro Tools servers and gear.  Which was a clear indication that Axl and I had very different ideas of how to do this record.  I was open to using Pro Tools, to trying new things--but everyone had to be on the same page and in the same room to explore new ideas.  The band managed to do a little bit of jamming and come up with some things.  A couple of the ideas I had come up with Axl apparently liked and they were recorded onto Pro Tools and stored for him to work on later.

We'd show up at different times every evening, but by eight p.m. generally everyone in the band would be there.  Then we'd wait for Axl, who, when he did come, arrived much, much later.  That was the norm; it was a dark, miserable atmosphere that lacked direction of any kind.  I hung out for a bit; but after a few days I chose to spend my evenings at the strip bar around the corner, with orders for the engineers to call me if Axl decided to arrive.

Actor Mickey Rourke is an Oscar favourite for his Method role in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008).  Press coverage focuses on Rourke's rise-and-fall: how his bad boy image led to onset difficulties in the late 1980s, a bitter breakup with model Carre Otis, and living humiliated, destitute and largely forgotten by the mid-1990s.  Arrogance, self-loathing, and rejecting offers for roles in later blockbusters all played a part in Rourke's banishment to straight-to-video films.  He has waited 15 years in the wilderness before a career turnaround.

Steven Sebring's sprawling documentary Dream of Life explores a 12-year Saturnian arc in the life of poet and musician Patti Smith.  She moves from Detroit, Michigan to New York's Chelsea Hotel after the death of husband Fred 'Sonic' Smith, and reactivates her touring band.  Sebring interweaves historical glimpses of her early recordings and encounters with Beat author William S. Burroughs with the praxis of a return to performance: late night ideation sessions, fellow musicians tuning Smith's guitars, a meditation on Coney Island, backstage warm-ups, impromptu jams, and onstage free-form poetry.  Smith situates her search for stillness in the mundane (an angst-free visit to her parents for dinner, scenes with son Jackson and daughter Jessie), the spiritual (breaking down during a reading in memory of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg), the aesthetic (visits to the graves of Beat poet Gregory Corso and Decadent author Arthur Rimbaud), and contemporary politics (a call to arms against the Bush Administration).  Amidst the Romanticist rage for life are moments of quiet revelation: Smith tells how her brother's death triggered a transmission of baraka (grace).

The live shows are amazing when the band focuses on the music but things fall apart in between.

That's the narrative arc of No Way, Get F*#ked, F*#k Off! an SBS/Beyond International documentary on the reformation of the Australian rock band The Angels after eight years of legal battles.  The documentary contrasts fan jubilation with the band's in-group struggles: leadership battles between lead vocalist Doc Neeson and rhythm guitarist John Brewster over setlists and song arrangements; drummer Graham 'Buzz' Bidstrup's disagreements with management over the contracts for merchandise and songwriting royalties; and the weight of the past, notably an archive trip with revelations about The Angels' support tours at their prime with David Bowie, Cheap Trick and The Kinks.

No Way, Get F*#ked, F*#k Off! wisely steers away from The Angels' live performances on a small club tour.  Instead, we see how subgroup coalitions form over the tour, from rehearsals to the final gig.  Neeson and John Brewster's strong personalities act as two magnetic poles.  Neeson appears frustrated that Brewster and lead guitarist Rick Brewster use pincer-style tactics to get their way on key decisions.  John Brewster feels compelled to defend The Angels' management which is taking on the financial risk of the tour, and the record company which offers a favourable deal.  Bidstrup is cautious because of past contracts that signed away his legal rights during The Angels' 1976-81 vintage period.  He also points that Brewster-Neeson-Brewster received royalties as the core songwriters, so there are incentives and power imbalances in the group that affects the decision-making process.

As the tour unfolds the group dynamics change.  Neeson extracts an early concession to have Neeson-Brewster-Brewster on the tour merchandise.  Bidstrup demands further assurances on the scale and scope of the tour contracts.  John Brewster claims Bidstrup is being "difficult" because of his business management and entrepreneurial experience outside The Angels.  Brewster and Bidstrup misinterpret eachother in meetings as Neeson withdraws.

No Way, Get F*#ked, F*#k Off! ends on an uncertain note: management refuses Bidstrup can attend a pivotal meeting, Brewster defends their decision, and Neeson counters that he is uncomfortable with excluding Bidstrup.   As the credits roll Bidstrup wonders on-camera if he will remain in The Angels or if he joined the tour just to "close the circle" on earlier events.  Bidstrup could leave, as Jason Newstead and Joey Belladonna did respectively from Metallica and Anthrax (after their Among The Living reunion in 2005-07).  Alternatively, The Angels could partly resolve Bidstrup's concerns with songwriting credits for new songs to all band members, as Queen did on their final studio albums with Freddie Mercury.

York University anthropologist Sam Dunn has found a communication strategy to reach a broader audience than many academics and scholars.  Metal: A Headbanger's Journey (2005) combined Dunn's fandom of heavy metal music, a taxonomy of subgenres, interviews with influential musicians and a field trip to the Wacken Open Air festival in Germany.  Dunn's follow-up documentary Global Metal (2008) travels from Wacken to three BRIC members (Brazil, India and China), China, Israel, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates.  Global Metal has rich insights on the coevolution of nation-states in the world system, the challenges of market design, indigenous and hybrid responses to globalisation, and new voices on old debates in heavy metal subcultures.

Anthropologists need an entry point into a new culture.  Dunn achieves this by interviewing Max Cavalera the cofounder of Brazil's Sepultura and frontman for Soulfly and Cavalera Conspiracy.  Cavalera explains that Sepultura emerged in the mid-1980s as Brazil evolved from a military dictatorship to a neoliberal market society.  For many heavy metal fans Sepultura's album Roots (1996) was their first encounter with an indigenous worldview as the band included field recordings with the Xavante Indians and Brazilian percussion.  Dunn's interview with Cavalera uses Roots to tacitly bring the anthropological models and theories of Clifford Geertz, David Horowitz, Stanley Tambiah and others to fans who are unfamiliar with these influential scholars.  In contrast to this immersive approach Global Metal ends with a more familiar event: Iron Maiden's concert on 1st February 2008 the first time that a major Western heavy metal band has played Mumbia, India.

A second entry point for fans is when Dunn revisits past controversies and debates in heavy metal media to include new voices and perspectives.  Does Slayer's song 'Angel of Death' about the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele promote Holocaust denial and racism?  Dunn turns to the Israeli band Orphaned Land who note that although the song was written for shock value it has been used by politicians to inform Israeli youth about the Holocaust.  Orphaned Land then talk about Jerusalem as a global city and the past religious conflicts between Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  Far scarier than Middle Ages imagery and occult demons is Orphaned Land's reality of having to live daily with potential suicide bombers in crowded urban areas.

Dunn returns to this debate throughout Global Metal to show how different individuals and groups reinterpret a meme or symbol and how this can have unforseeable outcomes.  Orphaned Land recount how after playing 'Angel of Death' live for Israeli audiences they were sent a mail bomb by Varg Vikernes a notorious Norwegian black metal musician and Holocaust denier.  Iranian fans who are photographed next to Slayer graffiti face possible arrest and torture by religious police - which provokes Slayer's frontman Tom Araya to comment that the fans seek a death sentence.

More disturbingly, Dunn interviews the Indonesian band Tengkorak whose song 'Jihad Soldiers' embraces a militant Islamist worldview.  When Tengorak's lead singer quotes conspiracy theories from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Dunn observes his jacket has a crossed out Nazi swastika.  "We're not against Jews," the singer explains, "just the Jewish system."  Dunn then visits a Muslim mosque with another Indonesian musician.  Tengorak's context is the 1997 Asian currency crisis which sparked a wave of conspiracy theories within Indonesia due to macroeconomic destabilisation.

Many of the interviewees give examples of how heavy metal music is reinterpreted differently to Western narratives.  Japanese fans reject Western alienation as an existential motivation and instead create a more emotional and direct identity that is an alternative to their conformist work identity.  KISS had an immediate impact in Japan as the band's makeup is comparable to Kabuki theatre.  The live improvisation which closed Deep Purple's first concert at Tokyo's Nippon Budokan in 1972 has sparked a subculture of ageing salarymen who reform their teenage bands to play 'Highway Star'.  Former Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman explains how X-Japan and Death Panda have fused heavy metal with Japanese game shows like Rock Fujiyama and pop music to create rifts within and between subcultures.  In China heavy metal music is used as part of a Confucian state policy to give youth an outlet for aggression, even though the music is officially frowned upon.  Whilst visiting Mumbai, Dunn intercuts scenes of Indian bands playing a local bar with the Hindu wedding playing Bollywood music next door: two alternative cultures coexist.

The heavy metal subcultures that Dunn visits serve as barometers for nation-state development; freedom for religious and political views; and in a nod to Ulrich Beck, P.R. Sarkar and Amy Chua, the relationship of subcultural groups to mainstream society and sociopolitical power.  Japan has a Janus-faced subculture which has Western and indigenous elements.  India and the United Arab Emirates' subcultures are at an infancy stage which Dunn links explicitly to democratic political institutions and modernisation: UAE hosts a festival with bands and fans who cannot perform in their home countries due to restrictions.  China, Iran and Turkey have subcultures that are underground due to religious authorities who perceive them as antinomian youth subcultures.  Beck's concept of subpolitics from below and Sarkar's Law of the Social Cycle provide theoretical insights here: if the fans are shudra (workers) they have coopted insights from vaeshya (entrepreneurs, merchants) and vipra (intellectuals) to create soft power which counteracts the influence of ksatriya (military).

Brazil and Indonesia are two test cases of this hypothesis.  Cavalera's narrative of Brazil's transition to democracy stands in contrast to Samuel P. Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) which warned of the gap between rapid sociopolitical change and lagging political institutions.  Instead, Cavalera argues that Sepultura's music signified a subpolitics response by the shudra underclass to poverty and the lack of macroeconomic and sociopolitical reforms by social elites.  The flashpoint is Metallica's concert on 11th April 1993 at Lebak Bulus Stadiam in Jakarta, Indonesia.  Metallica's drummer Lars Ulrich explains that in order to protect a middle class area Indonesian police prevent fans from entering the stadium.  Fans retaliate by setting fire to the surrounding buildings; the smoke is visible on a bootleg concert tape.  Indonesian authorites then banned all heavy metal bands and live tours until the Suharto regime ended in 1998.  Indonesia's heavy metal subculture have since gained greater visibility although Tengorak gives voice to subcultural fears of Western geoeconomic, cultural and religious domination.

The consensus of most fans in Global Metal is that heavy metal's 'identity politics' is evolving into a transnational network with a cosmopolitan worldview.  Almost everyone in the documentary wars an Iron Maiden t-shirt - the power of Chinese sweatshops, marketing and passionbrands.  The major facilitator is the heavy metal entrepreneur, such as the cofounder of China's Tang Dynasty who imported Western heavy metal in the late 1980s and then evolved into an indigenous worldview.  The major barrier to this cosmopolitan ideal and diffusion process is when subcultural identities are caught in Muzafer Sherif's assimilation-contrast effect of social judgment: Japanese purist fans who decry the fusion of pop-metal or Indian fans who are caught in a power struggle with authority figures and family traditions.

Failures in market design are one source of these infra-subcultural battles.  In order to change their financial account reporting Western conglomerates dumped their excess back catalogue such as Extreme's 1989 debut album as cheap CDs into India and other countries.  Third World countries were the beneficiaries of bootlegs, MP3s and illegal downloads.  Dunn coaxs an admission from Ulrich that this is a positive trend, a reversal of Metallica's lawsuit against Napster in 2000.  Black markets emerge where demand exists yet there are no official agents and major price differentials exist.  Ironically,  Global Metal is a victim of this trend: the documentary and a soundtrack of featured bands now circulates on illegal BitTorrent networks.  Turn up the distortion to 11.

Assaf Bernstein's The Debt (2007) portrays the breakdown of accountability during a fictional operation by Israel's Mossad agency to capture a Nazi war criminal.

The film opens with the Mossad team of Rachel Brenner (Gila Almagor, Neta Garty), Zvi and Ehud arriving home triumphantly in April 1965: a scene reminiscent of Beatles mania.  Flashforward 30 years later and Rachel explains to Israeli intelligence trainees what it was like to kill the Nazi war criminal Maximilian Rainer (Edgar Selge) in a safehouse shootout: 'I didn't think of anything, I just closed my eyes, thought of my mother and what she had been through.'  The trainees joke about the Surgeon of Burkenau as a symbol of evil.

At a launch party for her memoir My Mission we hear an account of Rachel's bravery and see her signing books like a celebrity.  As the party ends Zvi arrives with a newspaper story that will shatter the bubble: an old man in a nursing home 40 minutes outside of the Ukrainian industrial city Kiev now claims to be Rainer.  Rachel, Zvi and Ehud all know the truth that has been hidden for 30 years: Rainer escaped from the safehouse and they created the cover-story to hide the truth about the Surgeon of Burkenau's fate that would have shocked Israel. 

The team is being reactived before Mossad and the Israeli public find out the truth.  Ehud is already in Kiev whilst Zvi cannot go due to wounds from an Israeli embassy bombing 10 years earlier.  Zvi convinces Rachel to go to Kiev armed with poison to confirm Rainer's identity and to kill him.  She is unsure about the newspaper photograph.  'People change a lot in 30 years', Zvi tells her.  'We were different then, weren't we?', Rachel wonders.

The Debt's narrative cuts back and forth between the 1964 Berlin operation and Rachel's 1994 visit to Kiev.  Bernstein thus creates a cause-effect relationship between the team's initial decisions and their consequences.

Mossad tracks Rainer to Berlin in 1964 after a 15-year search.  The night before the team's operation begins Rachel examines photographs of Rainer's atrocities in Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Rainer now works as a gynecologist so Rachel poses as Mrs. Roget and gets several appointments for an infertility examination.  These scenes have a starkness similar to David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1988) as Rainer attempts to discover Rachel's true identity.  Eventually the team resorts to an extraction operation: Rachel injects Rainer with a serum whilst Zvi and Ehud arrive with a fake ambulance.

Holed up in a safehouse with Rainer imprisoned the team begins to fall apart.  The cover operation to use an embassy party is delayed several times.  The team starts infighting over their motives: Rachel has unrequited love for Zvi, Ehud's tough personal masks his fears and Zvi is hauned by the deaths of his entire family at Auschwitz.

Rainer emotionally manipulates Rachel and Ehud when they break Zvi's rule not to speak to their prisoner.  He offers several rationalisations: his work was done for 'scientific progress', 'hundreds of deaths' were necessary to save millions, and that 'we could do anything we wanted with the Jews'.  Rachel taunts Rainer that he will endure a public trial similar to Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961.  Rainer explains to Rachel and Ehud that only four guards were needed to send entire families to their deaths: Jewish 'egoists' meant that individuals only thought for themselves.  'Jews only knew how to die, they didn't know how to kill,' Rainer concludes.  The exchanges are a misdirection ploy: with Ehud and Zvi now out of the room Rainer attacks the sleeping Rachel with a razor that she has dropped and escapes.  'It took 15 years to find him, we aren't going to find him in 10 minutes,' Ehud and Zvi argue.  The truth that happened in Berlin is not the truth that Israel must know.

30 years later Zvi, Ehud and Rachel are each haunted by their lie.  When Rachel arrives in Kiev she meets Ehud who is now an arms dealer to both sides in Sierra Leone: 'rebel against them' he explains over a double malt whiskey.  Ehud and Rachel are unable to get into the Kiev nursing home which is a high security facility for former Soviet military.  The next morning Rachel discovers that Ehud has committed suicide because he is a coward.  Zvi asks her to return but Rachel wants to finish what should have been done in Berlin.

After several cat-and-mouse attempts Rachel disguises herself as a nurse to infiltrate the nursing home.  She sees the old man on a balcony.  A Berliner Zeitung reporter also wants to interview the old man and phones his editor in advance to claim a double-spread cover story.  In these scenes Rachel seems cautious to conduct a field operation, unsure of the old man's true identity and out-of-place in a life after espionage.  Both she and the reporter discover the truth: the old man has Alzheimers and started the story a month ago to the concern of his son.  The reporter leaves in disgust.

Only then does Rachel discover the deeper truth underneath the surface truth and by accident:  she follows the old man's grandson and his remote controlled car to discover an elderly Rainer playing cards in the dining room.  'I should never have confessed to him,' he tells Rachel, 'I should have taken this secret to my grave.'  Rachel and Rainer's bathroom knife fight leave both fatall wounded, and Rachel dies on a train platform, remembering the team's triumphant return to Israel, the black and white news footage now in colour.

The Debt explores the ethical challenges of intelligence fieldwork, coming face to face with ontological evil, and the cost of living with a lie.  However two other dimensions are only hinted at.  The team's lie is necessary to maintain Mossad's invincibility and as a counter-myth against the Nazi postwar survival myths of Adolf Hitler, Martin Bormann and the Odessa in South America.  More cryptic is Rainer's explanation to Rachel about World War II's intergenerational trauma: 'The war changed a lot of people.'