Recent Observations of Moving Pictures

The Brothers Bloom

I adored Brick, writer/director Rian Johnson's previous film. It was basically a love letter to Dashiell Hammett, a modern day film noir. Only set in a high school. It sounds unworkable, but it sold it beautifully, and managed the tricky feat of being very funny while still never winking at the camera.



Enter The Brothers Bloom. Convoluted tale of crime? Check. Anachronistic pulp aesthetic? Check. The signs are good.

So why doesn't it quite work?

Rinko Kikuchi nearly steals the show as the almost-mute Bang-Bang. Rachel Weisz is ditzy and adorable. Adrian Brody is put-upon and vulnerable. The actors all do their part.

The problem is in the plotting. The main characters are con-artists, and there's a bit too much knowing self-awareness there. And soon you become aware that everyone is being jerked around by Stephen Bloom and his preternatural planning ability. Including the audience.

It's just a bit too clever by half.

(Also, I don't know if I've been broken by too many movies slavishly adhering to the three act structure, but there's something wonky with it there. But let's not get too nerdy here.)


Public Enemies

The story of America's most famous bank robber and the FBI agent that hunted him down seems tailor made for Michael Mann, who's made a career out of depicting duels between men on different sides of the law.



Alas, this will go down as one of his mediocre pieces.

Not from lack of acting caliber though. Depp and Cotillard in particular are great, as is Billy Crudup as J. Edgear Hoover. A lot of the actors are short-changed by the script though, Christian Bale in particular has very little to do except being the grim humourless lawman. A lot of the elements, like the other big bank robber in the yarn, Baby-Face Nelson, feels very undercooked.

Somewhere, there's a half an hour longer cut that fleshes everything out and lets all the elements breathe properly.

His stylistic tics steer him wrong this time. He's been going for a glossy, high-saturation look since at least the Miami Vice/Manhunter days, so him embracing digital photography is in many ways a natural development. Much like the rest of the movie though, there's plenty of times when it just doesn't work. For every moment that feels like you're right there, there's another where the cinematography goes all high-contrast, ultra-digital and just throws you out of the scene.

It's a Michael Mann movie, so it's still worth seeing, but it's a bit of a disappointment.

Duplicity

He's a spy, she's a spy. They work for competing corporations, fighting over a new top secret formula. They have an affair. But wait! She's actually using him. But wait! They're really in love, and they're working together for one of the sides. But wait! He's really...you get the idea.

It's reasonably likeable fare. Clive Owen and Julia Roberts are decent enough leads, and Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson are clearly having fun as the dueling CEOs. But after a while, you get tired of the constant reversals. Like Brothers Bloom, it suffers from too-clever-by half syndrome. And while it does have a stronger throughline in that we're constantly focused on the Roberts/Owen relationship, it's not nearly as charming or stylish as Bloom.

Crank 2

In a way, this was the most remarkable film I've seen lately.

But not in a particularly good way.



In the first Crank, Jason Statham had to keep his adrenaline up to prevent a poison from killing him. And then he fell out of a helicopter with the guy who poisoned him. Fin.

Well, no. It made money, so he miraculously survives and gets snatched for harvesting his miraculous organs. This time around he has to keep electrocuting himself to prevent his spare heart from stopping until he can get his real one back.

The first Crank was immensely stupid, and pretty funny. This one's immensely stupid, grotesque, rancid and mad.

At one point, Jason Statham gets so electrocuted he imagines himself as a child on a talk show. Geri Halliwell is his mother. Then he's electrocuted to the point that he imagines himself as Godzilla. That's the sort of lunacy that should make you cackle with glee, but instead you feel soiled. Part of it is the camerawork, which is the worst sort of ADD-filmmaking, and somehow makes every frame feel ugly.

The other part of it is the stuff like a man cutting off his own nipples for little discernable reason. Or a stripper getting shot in the breast, blood and silicone pouring out. And the movie expecting you to laugh at this.

Oh yeah. It has a bit of a problem with women. Every female character is either a whore or a stripper, or an old woman that Statham has to rub against to generate static electricity. Because that's hilarious.

Either this is writers/directors Geraldine and Naylor extending a giant middle finger for having to make a sequel against their will, or it's them vomiting their id all over the screen. In any case, you find yourself unable to look away, but really wishing you could.

The words "seduction community"

Catching up on Penny-Arcade and the associated newsposts brought this to my attention.

I wish it hadn't.

I'm not one to get moralistic about who people choose to have sex with; if some people who met five seconds ago choose to get it on, that's fine with me. It's only if the power dynamics get iffy that my hackles get raised.

The "Seduction Community" is basically selp-help -- with the all of baggage that brings -- where the objective is to form you into a grade A pussy hound, downing women like gazelle on the savannah. Learn to use Neuro-Linguistic Programming for speed seduction! Love Systems will teach you the secret of Same Night Lays!

Press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, a, b for pussy.

If you're unaware, the basic idea of Neuro-Linguistic Programming is to hack language and social cues in order to get people to do what you want. In reality, it's a bunch of pseudo-scientific tosh dressed up in fancy language, more accurately summarized as sales technique.

Picture it if you will: a jolly bunch of travelling salesmen, gathering to share tips, slap each other on the back, and improve their oily craft. Only instead of selling insecure, unassertive people stuff they don't need, they're selling insecure, unassertive people fucks they don't want.

You don't have to be Feminist McRage for that thought to make your blood curdle.

The internet might be a magical place where dreams come true in the form of mpeg files, but before it existed, I didn't have to go to sleep with the knowledge of people coming together all over the world to celebrate and reinforce their pathologies instead of having their delusions ground away by a world filled with people outside their little circlejerk.

Sure Is The Risk Made

It seems like only two years ago that wily young man Conelrad put out a lovely lp of ambient/shoegaze noise filled with nuclear paranoia. And now he's at it again:

Yes, an entirely new, entirely free album. On the first couple of listens, it's been just as good, if not better. Go get it here.

Words. On the internet.

I'm drunk; here we go.

Gomorrah

A courier carrying money to the families of imprisoned gang members. A middleman and his apprentice facilitating the illegal dumping of countless tons of toxic waste. Two teenage wannabe gangsters obsessed with Scarface. An even younger boy going from observing the clans' drug trade surrounding him to a participant. A tailor making haute couture for a pittance in a blackmarket factory. All lives inextricably tied to the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia.

Gomorrrah isn't a movie that bothers to spell things out to its audience. After opening with a seemingly unrelated massacre in a solarium, it heedlessly plunges into these five story threads, and observes them with a documentarian's eye. Even when the director pulls out obvious cinematic tricks like completely killing all the sounds in a scene, it never ceases to feel authentic. Small wonder, since it's based on journalist Roberto Saviano's exposé that landed him in police protection when published, and has a completely convincing cast compromised of local amateurs. (Some of which have apparently since been arrested for their ties to the Camorra.) It's grungy, gritty and thoroughly unglamorizing of its subject matter, with violence shockingly casual and ever-threatening.

The movie gives a good sense of the poisonous web of crime and corruption that permeates everyday life in Naples, but the complete dedication to the characters' viewpoints comes at the expense of clarity with regards to the bigger picture, both within the mafia and society at large. Saviano's book, for all it's flaws and tendency to ramble, never shied away from pointing out the way the Camorra's operations fit into the greater economy. And inside the movie itself, there's a war brewing within the clans, a splinter group of malcontents causing tension and an increasing bodycount, which initially seems to come completely out of left field. That is, until you remember the massacre that kicked off the movie an hour earlier.

Still, Gomorrah is an easy recommendation to make for anyone who doesn't mind their crime movies filled with uncomfortable amounts of real life.

Escape From City 17, Part 1

As someone who greatly enjoyed Half-Life 2, this made me smile. Youtube's low fidelity helps the bits cribbed from the game blend in better, but it's still pretty nifty, especially considering it was put together for $500.

...and we exhale, and roll our eyes in unison

Goodbye to that ignorant, venal, criminal fuck. But credit where credit's due, that was quite a legacy:

Today's recipe is liver, darling

A new year, and along with the customary Don't Be Fatty McFatass, You Fatty resolution, there's a corollary Cook Properly, You Lazy Bastard resolution.

My first go was at that unfairly maligned organ, the liver. I know, I know, I've suffered through the same school kitchen horrors, and the Finnish maksalaatikko (approximately liver casserole, if we consider casserole a superset of all things thrown into a pan in an oven) is an abomination, but when properly done, liver is bloody delicious. And like so many other dishes, what is needed to do it properly is bacon*.

It is also extemely easy. You will need:

• Bacon
• Onions
• Liver
• Spices

Chop the onions and sautée them together with the bacon in a pan over medium high heat, until the bacon is done and the onions translucent. Remove. Quickly rub your spices onto the sides of the liver - I went with simple salt and pepper, but there's no reason you can't get more exotic - before tossing into the pan to fry in the bacon fat. Be careful not to overdo it, liver should preferrably be a little bit pink inside.

Aaand - you're done!

Well, you'll need something to serve it with as well, unless you fancy an all-protein diet, but I'll leave that up to you. I went with potatoes and lingonberry jam.

If you're a closet alcoholic like me, you can also grab that bottle of red wine and use all the flavour in the burned bits in your pan to improvise a red wine sauce. Brown a bit of flour to get your basic roux, add red wine, and boil off while loosening the bits in the pan until you have a consistency that pleases you.

Just make sure the bottle's a screw top, otherwise you'll *have* to drink all of it to make sure it doesn't spoil. And that way lies intoxication, madness and posts on the internet.


*If you think you've spotted a conflict between resolution A and corollary resolution B, you're mistaken. Bacon is a vegetable, and vegetables are good for you.