How do you say broke in Spanish? Me no hablo

Each Day, A Film:
January 6th 2012

To be honest, I wanted to talk about The Beach today, and kick off a strange little Robert Carlyle marathon, but I haven't had time to rewatch it - and I plan on watching as many of the films I write about here, although of the five so far I didn't get the chance to watch Double Indemnity, but I've seen it enough that I felt comfortable writing about it anyway and damn but this is a long sentence - so instead, we're going to do something a little different.

Today is all about Not Quite Hollywood.



It's important to note that I love the strange, and the weird, when it comes to films. I had to explain this - albeit in the context of Bhangra and Bollywood music - to a recent friend. It's difficult for anyone born after, arguably, 1990 to quite understand, but when I grew up it was in a small town, with four TV channels, two radio stations other than the BBC channels, and if you wanted to listen to music other than what was on the charts you had to actually go and damn well find it, whippersnappers, the rain was never cold, everything was cheaper and love wasn't deadly, etc, etc, etc...

I joke, but it's a truth for me that - for good or bad - I recognised the necessity of searching out interesting and strange things, which meant failing as much as succeeding, of course. I lived in London for a while, but being terminally shy I didn't explore as much as I would have liked, so my searches were confined to Camden CD stores and receiving a ridiculous amount of free CDs as a 'student journalist' meant I didn't actually have to go that far for the new, the strange, and the occasionally crap.

The problem is that this sounds elitist, but nothing could be further from the truth; I listen to Radio 1, for instance, on a regular basis and have done for about twelve years, and I love mainstream music. At the same time, I love finding odd little cultural corners and bringing stuff out into the light.

This was before the culture flood, though. Culture Flood is another term I use loosely, but for me it denotes the period from when the value of CDs and DVDs started to drop to the increase in digital media sales - neither of which is a bad thing, but suddenly it's like swimming in an ocean rather than navigating a river; there's so much in every single direction that finding stuff becomes a completely random rather than a targeted proposition. Again, not a bad thing, because I like random, but now, frankly, I have no idea where to begin looking. This probably means it's time to go back to Camden, but even that's changed a little since I used to go there searching for CDs and strange accessories.

Anyway... A while ago, Not Quite Hollywood popped up on my radar, and was added to a wishlist, but nothing further really came of it until I finally got round to ordering a copy, but I wish I'd watched it earlier, to be honest, because it's an illumination of a world of filmmaking that probably rarely left Australia - and sometimes that looks like a bad thing - but it's a tale told with such happiness and seemingly happy - if occasionally conflicting - memories that it's impossible not to get carried along with the proceedings.

I wish I could find some of the quotes, but alas both my memory and IMDB fail me - although the discussion over whether George Lazenby (playing a villain) punched the hero of the film (who every single person describes as being an arsehole in real life) for real is entertaining, given that Lazenby swears he didn't and everyone else swears he did.

If you like things easily divided into sections, it's basically Sex, then Horror, then Cars, so if you're uncomfortable with nudity, you're basically screwed, but again, everyone gets in on the action, with actresses revealing they were happy to earn an extra $100 for stripping and directors talking about all manner of strange goings-on.

Also, what's quite refreshing is that Quentin Tarantino, while forming a nice touchstone within the documentary, isn't basically cut back to every five minutes because he's a big name; he's used as a handy reference point, but he's not revered, and that's all kinds of refreshing.

I've got no especial love for exploitation or grindhouse films, but damn if this documentary doesn't make them look like the most fun you can have with or without your clothes on, at the same time as lampshading the goings-on and leaving nobody unscathed. It's that kind of film where everyone smiles as they call everyone else and themselves a bastard.

It's a good documentary to talk about before the weekend, because if you see it you'll be left in a good mood for days.

There's a Chinese cigarette case, and the rest you can keep

Each Day, A Film:
January 5th 2011

Thanks to a slightly biased Amazon recommendation list - in part due to purchasing a large number of Japanese films recently - I get odd things popping up every now and then.

So let's talk about The Gene Generation.



I feel conflicted when I talk about films like this, because it's clear that a lot of passion, energy and effort has gone into The Gene Generation, but it just doesn't... work. At times, it feels like a bundle of discarded William Gibson circa-Neuromancer storylines all rolled into an unhappy bundle; lithe assassins with fingerprint-tagged guns, low-life hustlers in debt with the local gang lord, genetic manipulation that's not really exactly explained at any point...

The last point is the clincher, because in this life of mine I've watched and read a lot of science fiction, and as far as I understand it the trick isn't to make your plot device believable - it's to make the viewer believe your plot device is believable. You don't have to explain things in excruciating detail; you just have to make it appear that what the narrative discusses could theoretically happen in our future, the future, or an alternative future.

Muddying the waters doesn't help; the DNA transcoder of The Gene Generation is initially presented as a healing device that's been developed as a weapon that - for some reason - tends to turn people who the plot doesn't love into tentacle monsters. It requires a chip to make it work, then it requires a separate chip to make it work right, and even then, tentacle monsters. Lots of naughty tentacles.

The plot without the transcoder makes more sense; assassin sister wants to protect fuckabout brother from local ganglord. If someone had come along and said "you know what? screw this genetics shit, let's remake La Femme Nikita in the future and throw in some sci-fi bits", that would actually have made a more defensible film. But as soon as the transcoder - and the scientists (although let's use that term bloody loosely, frankly) who all want it for various reasons - get involved with Bai Ling's Gunplay Show, it all goes a little... wrong, somehow.

Also, there are occasional random flying steampunk viking raider ships. Let's just put that out there and leave it.

For me, no film is truly awful, because I've seen Alone in the Dark. And let's not get around to trashing Uwe Boll, because it's neither big, nor clever, nor difficult. Alone in the Dark is physically the worst film I've ever seen, and I have to thank it for that, because nothing since has even come close. So it's nice to have a benchmark, frankly, but it's so bad that (a) I can't even find a trailer for the film on Youtube and (b) even if I could I wouldn't post it here, because that might just encourage people.

The Gene Generation is not as bad as Alone in the Dark, it's just complex when it should be simple and simplified when it should be complex. And someone also threw a wad of cash at the aftereffects people; the city of the story loses it's entire centre following a disaster with the transcoder --

-- And let's just stop right there to ask how messing around with genetic engineering wipes out both a city and the city's atmosphere --

-- so everyone lives on the fringes, while attempting to get into the new housing built in a circular wall around the city itself. I can't quite imagine the real estate sales pitch there; so it's got a lovely kitchen, two bedrooms, it's close to the tube, and the front room has a balcony window opening up on to SCENES FROM AN APOCALYPSE, plus there's a lovely bakery down the road. The centrail character is trying to save enough money to buy her and her brother passage into the special effect wall, but fuckaround that he is, he keeps gambling it away and borrowing more.

Let's also recognise that assassins apparently don't know how to hide their cash in this crazy future of ours.

So the brother gets into trouble, the sister attempts to solve this trouble by (a) throwing two of the gang lord's thugs out of a window to their deaths, (b) paying the gang lord off, and (c) killing another thug as they're leaving to save 'on the medical bills'. At this point, it's basically easy to assume that every, single, person in the film is functionally psychotic and retains no basic reasoning skills; but let's not dwell on that, because the film certainly doesn't.

I like middling sci-fi; I loved Ultraviolet, for instance, although it was clearly What Milla Jovovich did on her holidays between Resident Evil films. Doom has a special place in my heart; Starship Troopers 2 is even involved there somehow. But there's a curse upon middling science fiction films at the moment, and that curse is called inconsistency; inconsistency of plotlines, of shooting style, of postproduction colour correction (half of The Gene Generation is coloured either low-rent orange or washed out, the other half is Blade-Runner blue), and generally a lack of wanting to tie anything in particular together.

But I've watched it, now, so I guess that's done with...

Scared to face the future, complacent career student

Each Day, A Film
January 4th, 2012

I wasn't sure whether to follow up on yesterday's tease, or to just go with the flow, but let's follow up, because

- I don't want you thinking I'm a tease
- It's a decent excuse for avoiding the "link" format, because I don't have one.

Moving on swiftly, let's talk about Double Indemnity.



Double Indemnity is, for want of a better word, aces. I'm going to abandon any semblance of detached journalistic ethics - even if I could be said to have had them before, but moving right along - and declare a deep, abiding, but mostly platonic love for this film.

Here's the thing; if you ever end up studying film in any kind of academic capacity - or any capacity whatsoever, really - be prepared to watch Citizen Kane. Whether you end up having to watch it once, or many times, you will have to watch it, come rain, shine, or snowfall.



And Citizen Kane is a triumph of filmmaking, a notable achievement in the evolution of the art, and enabled Orson Welles to do all sorts of things. At the same time, if you're anything like me, if there's something that's mandatory to watch, you avoid it like the plague. I did, to begin with, then I stopped, recognised that I would have to do it no matter what, lay back, and thought of England. And it was a fine film. Oh yes.

We're going back to the first year of film studies, here, though, and while there were a lot of films thrown at us in the first year, only a few stick out - there's the classics from the nouvelle vague, the game-changers like The Matrix, the early evolution of stunts by Buster Keaton, and all manner of interesting films.

And then there was Double Indemnity.

Now, Double Indemnity is fascinating from a historical perspective, because it constitutes a pretty impressive go fuck yourself to the Hays Code, the pre-eminent censoring board from the 1930s onwards. The Hays Code - or the Motion Picture Production Code, to give it a longer name - is a curious document, very much of its time, but the gist was basically this: there are good things to show on film and bad things to show on film, and the choice is not difficult to make. Good, healthy, wholesome themes were encouraged; to pick an example totally at random, White Slavery was heartily discouraged. (Note how specific this is, and shudder.)

Film Noir was, functionally, an interesting way of getting around a lot of these conventions. Check out The Asphalt Jungle, for instance, with a central cast of crooks and - shock! - a suicide; there's no way in hell it should really have been released at the time, but it was, thankfully.

Then Double Indemnity came along with sexualised dialogue, an innocent insurance salesman driven to murder, and the craziness of the he-said she-said, all put into a large, sultry and - dare we say it - steamy narrative.

Put it this way;

---

Phyllis: Mr. Neff, why don't you drop by tomorrow evening about eight-thirty. He'll be in then.
Walter Neff: Who?
Phyllis: My husband. You were anxious to talk to him weren't you?
Walter Neff: Yeah, I was, but I'm sort of getting over the idea, if you know what I mean.
Phyllis: There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.
Walter Neff: How fast was I going, officer?
Phyllis: I'd say around ninety.
Walter Neff: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.
Phyllis: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.
Walter Neff: Suppose it doesn't take.
Phyllis: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.
Walter Neff: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.
Phyllis: Suppose you try putting it on my husband's shoulder.
Walter Neff: That tears it.

All delivered at breakneck speed with knowing glances.

It's time for a confession; I didn't actually pay that much attention to the film the first time I watched it. Put it down to the folly of relative youth, or too much side work going on, but at the time screenings were (a) not mandatory and (b) at a difficult time for those persons based off campus. Such is life; that's why DVDs were invented, and at the time an excellent box-set was on offer for £4.99 with four film noir films, including Double Indemnity, so I watched it - not paying as much attention as I should - and got on with my life.

Then, last year, screenings - while still NOT MANDATORY - were at a much more convenient time. It was downright civilised, in fact; after the lecture, a student could leisurely go to the shop, purchase coffee and noodles, and return in time for a cinematic classic. Or smoke, or, as most people did, leave, but let's not dwell on that.

So a year ago last October - and it's weird to consider how long ago that feels - I settled down with a few fellow students and suitable foodstuffs (which were not hugely liked by the people running the room) and watched the film, and, frankly, loved it. Maybe it was the company, or the room, or the food, or the fact that, actually, the film is pretty damn good, but there you go.

Anyway... This is another post with questionable academic merit, but it's full of love, at least. So... Winning?

This feeling has gone only you and I - it means nothing to me

Each Day, A Film:
January 3rd, 2012

Only so many days left until the misinterpreted apocalypse, people!

Anyway... Today's film is The Third Man (Reed, 1949). There is no real connection between yesterday and today, but because we all love to make connections where there are none, how about this:

The Third Man à Orson Welles à Transformers (1986) à Leonard Nimoy à
Star Trek (2009) à Simon Pegg à Mission Impossible 3 and 4 (Ghost Protocol) à Tom Cruise à Collateral.
I'm not proud, but hey! Topical!



Yes, the trailer is slightly ropey.

Let's talk about the film on a personal basis; I only discovered The Third Man due to ropey price policy at my local HMV. I'm sure there's thinking behind it, but I've yet to fathom out, for instance, why one copy of Once will be £4 while the copy next to it on the shelf - of the exactl same dvd - will cost £20. I understand the basics of marketing, here; you're supposed to think "well, hot damn! I'mma gonna save me £16!", but it's just... Strange.

Another thing they seem to do is in one way more sensible and in another more bizarre; on a basic level, stock is always coming in, and not everything is selling. So how better to free up shelf space than by having a completely random sale? It's cheaper than sending the stock back to the warehouse to be sold on a website that is not, fact fans, Amazon. 

So one day - oh, let's say, between five and six years ago, that's a safe bet - I would have been on a DVD trawl in my local store, and there was a copy of The Third Man for £3.

Who could say no to that, really? Well, many people. But they're not here right now, so let's not worry about them.

From a strictly detached standpoint, The Third Man is a strange proposition; taking two American stars, an English director, a neo-realist aesthetic and a bombed-out European city, mix in Graham Greene, simmer, burn the film when you try to edit it so you have to reconstitute it from the negative, release.

It's one of the most interesting examples of adversity making a film work; Welles made the filmmakers chase him around Europe (Paris, to Rome, to Paris) to secure a large paycheck, then refused to do the majority of the chase scenes in the sewers, along with several other scenes that were given to his doubles. Plot points were written, then filmed, then discarded, while the producer - David O Selznick - tried to have the title changed to something like Night in Vienna.

There's adversity, and then there's adversity, and then there's what seems like a constancy of stranger ideas and changes. And while all this is going on, Carol Reed is taking benzedrine and filming in twenty-four hour jags, working three units to get all the filming done, and shipping over Brutes - huge lights powered by exterior generators - that necessitated creatively bending the truth to the locals in order to place them in their rooms for the required lighting of exteriors at night.

And yet, when all was said and done, the film is - and let's not use this word too often, lest we devalue it - a classic. When all the elements combine, and the stars align, and producer, director and star stop fighting long enough, great things happen, it would seem.

So I'm happy I spent that £3, because later I was able to see a restored print of the film at a local cinema - the kind of independent eccentric local cinema that has first a performance by a zither player, then a brief speech from the Austrian cultural attaché - and, the year before last, I actually got to go to Vienna.

So in a way, if I am a filmmaker, I'm happy that The Third Man became such an important film to me, because it acted as a gateway; without the respect I had for the film, I would never have felt comfortable getting into Casablanca, and without Casablanca I would never have felt comfortable with Double Indemnity.

And without Double Indemnity... Well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The only thing bigger, quicker, slicker

Each Day, A Film:
January 2nd 2012

Let's keep this endeavour going with Collateral (Mann, 2004).

For those of you who like links; Layer Cake à Matthew Vaughn à Snatch àJason Statham à The Transporter, Frank Martin:


Anyone who knows me will tell you I'm a sucker for cross-continuity appearances.

So, yes, Collateral.




Get with it. Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, in a speck on one in a blink. That's us, lost in space. The cop, you, me... Who notices?

There are a lot of interesting aspects to Collateral. Firstly, it's worth bearing in mind that Michael Mann is kind of kick-ass when it comes to formats; Collateral, and later Miami Vice (which, frankly, we'll probably come to during the course of this year) were filmed in HD (with, apparently, the exception of one scene in Collateral, which is only just that little bit more kick-ass, because mixing formats is an absolute bastard at the best of times.)

HD is all kinds of interesting, because the images are wonderful but you have to be very, very careful about movement, because you can get strange edging and motion blurring. So you're alright, unless you're filming the majority of your scenes in a car at night and... oh, wait...

So Collateral has an interesting enough storyline; a cab driver, a contract killer, a single night of woe kicked off by an unfortunate placement underneath a falling "Fat Angeleno", and suddenly Max, the cabbie, is an unwilling participant in a stream of witness killings.

Life's funny like that.

Now, Collateral does run on co-incidences, to be sure. Mostly, it's to do with Max's bad luck; if he'd zoned out just that little bit more at the start, he could have ignored Vincent; if he'd parked six feet in front or behind his position behind the apartments, the body would have missed his cab and he could, in theory, have just driven away; and the doozy of all co-incidences, that his fare at the beginning is Vincent's target at the end, well, call him unlucky, basically.

But Max goes through a curious kind of evolution; at the beginning, he ostensibly gives away his dream in the form of a postcard of the Maldives, although he gets a phone number in trade for it. By the end of the film, however, Max becomes - through a process of taxicab osmosis - pro-active, clever, a little kick-ass, and slightly suicidal, willing to crash his cab while Vincent holds a gun to his head just to derail the final killing.

This is, in theory, character evolution - the kind of thing that comes between the destabilising of the equilibrium at the start of the film and re-establishing the equilibrium at the end - and, for the most part, it's nice and believable, because Max - even after twelve years as a cabbie - has to adjust to the constant presence of violence in human form.

Here's the thing; I chose Layer Cake as the first film of the year because I'd been thinking about it for a while. Not so with Collateral; it just kind of jumped out at me this morning whilst I was going through the DVD collection that comprises tangible evidence that I was once gainfully employed. Because of this, I don't have anything especially insightful to say about the film, but that's not because there isn't any deep, meaningful insight into the film that I care to share, it's just because, well, that's the way things are.

Collateral is, however, a beautiful film that's more about the way cities turn us into insular units than it is about a taxi driver and a contract killer, and this is, in turn, largely down to the way Michael Mann has a giant love for how cities look. Just check out the aerial shots, among other things, for instance.

However, one interesting thing to note is that the city empties out progressively during the course of the film; at the beginning, the streets are full of cars, the sidewalks are crowded, there's lots going on; by the end, Max is often the only car on the road, sharing it with wolves/coyotes in the suburbs and absolutely nobody in the centre. By the end of the film, the only people left seem to be Max, Vincent and Annie, along with sleepy transients on the MTA.  It's partly a film about becoming 'disconnected people', as Vincent puts it.

Anyway; one of the other reasons for watching this is to see one of the first instances of Tom Cruise playing against type. But that's only one of many reasons to see such a beautiful elegy to the city and the people it creates.

If I could only reach you, that would really be a --

Each Day, A Film: January 1st, 2012

Sidebar: In case you're wondering why the slightly offbeat title, consider it this way; if it'd been the nice, simple A Film A Day, that would mean that this would just end up being A FAD, and we don't want that.

Today's film - settle down at the back, there'll be questions later - is Layer Cake (Vaughn, 2004). Let's kick off with the trailer:



I'm not a gangster. I'm a businessman whose commodity happens to be cocaine.

I'll be the first to admit that the trailer is just that little bit strange, but then again, there's an argument to be made that so is the film.

Here's a brief history lesson; Michael Vaughn is an oddly fascinating career study, in film terms. Let's be totally honest; you can't separate, at least initially, Michael Vaughn from Guy Richie, because they were inseparably intertwined with the producer / director dyad for Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch.

Now, Guy Ritchie's career is an interesting study, but perhaps you could kind of guess the way things were going; after two initial successes, Ritchie had what we will charitably refer to as 'some wayward years''; I will stand up and defend Revolver if I was called upon to do so, because it's all kinds of fascinating, but even I would have trouble mounting a spirited defence for Swept Away. This was interesting on a personal level , because when I was a teenager - yes, yes, all those years ago, blah, blah, black sheep rock star rap g, Lock, Stock was The. Coolest. Fucking. Thing. Ever.

Part of this was that I was able to have the questionable thrill of sneaking in to see it under-age; it was - and is - an 18-certificate film, and at the time, I was ineligible to see it, for obvious reasons. But thanks to a combination of a friend at the time with a car and a lax ticket seller, there was 'the thrill', and subsequently, 'the infatuation', of doing something I wasn't supposed to do.

We've all been there.

Now, with older and arguably more experienced eyes, both Lock Stock and Snatch seem hyper-stylised, with glamorised violence and plotlines driven on co-incidence; these are not bad qualities, in any way, but as I've grown up (arguably) and got older (inarguably) the violence doesn't feel as exciting, and the speed by which things are made to occur alternates between thrilling and dizzying.

I'd still watch Lock and Snatch quite happily, but now, of course, they have a context, and context is a dangerous thing. At the time, there was a kind of quasi-resurgence of London Pride (not the beer, although...), but it was a strange, almost toxic kind of pride, because suddenly all the real-life gangsters were coming out with autobiographies, going on television to talk about the past as if it were this cool, exciting adventure where people occasionally happened to get, y'know, shot; it was an interesting time. Then you had the real weirdness, like "Mad" Frankie Fraser appearing on, of all things, Brass Eye:



It's nice to imagine this as a capstone, somehow, whereby the genre - having had a nice, cheeky resurgence - couldn't actually register that it was now fodder for parody.

Now, we come to Layer Cake. Six years on from Lock and four from Snatch, Layer Cake was a fascinating film, mainly because the majority of the characters within the film - whether they were aware of it or not - were exactly the opposite of what they professed to be. And now, because of that statement, let's put the word SPOILERS in bold, underlined letters, because from hereon in we're going to have a frank, in-depth discussion about deconstruction.

Yes, I know. But I've been a film student now for two and a half years; what did you expect, exactly?

This is the fun bit; let's not even start with XXXX, the narrator / protagonist, because we'll come back to him. Let's start with Jimmy Price, because he's the most blatant character archetype.

In gangster films, there's always The Boss. The Boss tends to represent the previous generation maintaining a vice-like grip over their 'manor', including over all the criminal activity and with some inroads into the police. The Boss has pretensions of class; sometimes brought about by money, sometimes simply by longevity. However, during the course of the film The Boss will undergo a change, nearly always fatal. This isn't new; check out the final scenes of The Long Good Friday;



Bob Hoskins, having begun the film in control, is finally reaching terminal velocity at the end of the spiral of violence that his subordinate's actions has kicked off. And now, The Boss is dead, killed, in this instance, by James Bond (albeit about sixteen years before he became "[...] a sexist, mysoginist dinosaur; a relic of the Cold War"). The Boss rarely survives the gangster film, because his power is faded and his workers are jaded. Witness Hatchet Harry in Lock, Stock and Brick Top in Snatch, or even Ray Liotta in Revolver.

This is why Jimmy Price is interesting; because he makes people think he's the boss even though he functionally no longer has any power whatsoever, having lost his entire personal fortune in an ill-advised postcolonial adventure, one which Mr Temple - i.e., Dumbledore - was smart enough to only invest a relatively small amount of money in.

Jimmy doesn't need the next generation to turn up and fuck him over; he's already done, on the leash as a police informant, reduced to setting up his underlings to keep himself out of prison and for chump change informant money.

Here's the interesting thing; in Layer Cake, names have power. The most obvious is Jimmy, because he embodies The Price - or, more prosaically, the Cost Of Doing Business. He's the price that XXXX has to pay in order to stay first in business - by kicking up - and later to stay out of prison - by kicking Jimmy's bucket. From hereon in it gets (a) interesting and (b) more tenuous, so bear with me.

Next, there's Mr Temple, who's the richest man in the film; throughout the course of the film, XXXX has to go to Temple to pay homage (although the first time, he's brought there forcefully). The second time, Temple is in an (extremely pretty) room filled with books, where he discusses basically taking Jimmy's place for XXXX - at least, on one deal. The final time is in Temple's bonded warehouse, arguably his central place, where XXXX appears to have to give in to Temple's demands, only to later have his own co-conspirators take care of business in turn.

Now, let's talk about the henchmen, because Jimmy and Temple represent different things; Jimmy represents the strange kind of hereditary-by-profession advancement available to the gangster only by the death, incarceration or enforced retirement of the previous boss. Appropriately, Jimmy's henchman is called "Gene". At the same time, Temple represents business, where he is the head and those who work for him are employees, so his main henchman is called "Troop".

Business within the film, then, is king - because everyone who represents the previous iteration of gangsters basically ends up dead ("Duke", a gangster in the Jimmy mould, and his partner "Slasher", represent the rip-and-run take-no-prisoners violent era, but it's only when they threaten to cross the line between gangster and police that they end up being killed by Gene).

Then there are the more literal names; Tom Hardy's "Clarkie" is, well, a clerk in the cocaine business, performing the vital but entry-level work. "Tiptoes" is functionally a private detective, while "Morty" represents death and violence walking at XXXX's side, arguably to protect him. In the source book, if memory serves, Morty even kills someone over a can of tuna in prison, so make of that what you will.

So XXXX, in not having a name, seeks to escape the nominative determinism that tends to apply to gangsters; remember Razors Ruddock (later to play Hatchet Harry), Barry the Baptist, etc? If you don't have a name, you're better off in the gangster world, although, as XXXX states, he's not a gangster - he's a businessman. And the art of being a businessman is being a good middleman, as Temple will tell you.

Underneath all this, Layer Cake is a beautifully-shot, well-written London Crime Film, with decent charicterisation and a stubborn refusal to let anyone get away with anything. The only people I can think of that escape unpunished - i.e. don't have to lose someone they work with or are close to or a great deal of money - are Cody and Tiptoes, who will continue to entice American girls with the promise of being with the Earl of Oxford - for whom a black Aston Martin is so frightfully common - for a long time to come.

As films to start the year go, it's really one of the best.

*

Let's have some fun; this beat is sick

DoaMS: #record scratch sound effect#

(I was going to try and find it on youtube, but it works better if you imagine it.)

Here's the thing; we're creeping up on the 100 posts mark at the moment, and frankly things have slowly become more and more negative, and stressy, and not fun. This is not the way to live, or to write, so from now on, this blog is being rebranded, believe it or not. From now on, you can look forward to the heading


Each Day, A Film

And I have to be honest, it's pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. This is a new year's resolution right here, disturbing London baby; no more negativity, or complaining, because while venting is a useful thing, all it does is let the steam out of the engine, rather than sorting out the problem i.e. the coals of stress on the metaphorical steam engine burning too hot, too fast.

Yeah, I kind of let that metaphor get away from me. Although on the bright side, that sentence is an excuse for this:



I personally thing this is a good thing.