→ March 3, 2022
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Red Rocket.

The idea of the con man as amiable rascal goes back decades, at least, but the archetype has been overtaken by current events, not least from our four years with a con man in the White House. In Sean Baker’s latest film, the hilarious dark comedy Red Rocket, Baker plays with the format by giving us a charming, fast-talking con man as the lead character, making it clear in stages that he’s a self-aggrandizing loser who does not care whose lives he destroys as long as none of them is his own. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, or Google Play.)

Baker’s previous film, The Florida Project was my favorite film of 2017, anchored by an incredible performance by a 6-year-old actress, Brooklynn Prince, with no previous acting credits. Red Rocket is almost as good, and once again he’s cast two unconventional actors as leads: former MTV VJ and unserious actor Simon Rex, and an unknown actor named Suzanna Son, who had just one minor movie credit before this one.

Rex plays “Mikey Saber,” a former porn star who has returned to Texas City after his career ended for unknown reasons, and tries to move back in with his estranged wife, Lexi (Bree Elrod), who at least for a time was in adult films with him. After a few futile attempts to find regular work, stymied by the long gap on his resume, Mikey begins selling weed for Leondria, who distributes with the help of her kids, especially her stoic daughter June. When Mikey has enough money to finally pay Lexi and her mom Lil something for rent, he takes them to the local donut shop, where he meets 17-year-old Strawberry (Son), and immediately sets his sights on seducing her, with an eye towards taking her to LA and using her as his way back into the porn industry.

As in The Florida Project, the majority of actors in Red Rocket are non-professionals; only Rex and Elrod had more than one acting credit before this film, with Elrod mostly working on the stage since she was in Shutter Island a decade ago. Baker’s skill for finding people who can fill these roles is remarkable, with Brittney Rodriguez (June) especially standing out once her character finally gets to talk, in the film’s funniest scene by far, a family squabble near the end of the movie that was, of course, provoked by Mikey.

But it’s Rex and especially Son who make this movie. Rex is perfectly annoying as the guy who never shuts up about himself, his plans, how greatness is just around the corner, how he would already have been rich and/or famous except that something happened. He has an external locus of control large enough to enclose his giant ego, and he never tires of telling everyone who’ll listen about it. Son is a revelation as Strawberry, a convincing teenager (she’s actually 26) who leans a little into the Lolita role Mikey sees for her, but who is also naïve enough not to realize how sinister Mikey’s motives are and to appear to fall for him and his schemes, even when some external factors should tip her off. She evinces the superficial worldliness of the teenager who thinks she’s an adult, especially since the world often treats her that way, but who’s also too trusting and sometimes misses obvious points about how the world works. She also gets to sing in one of the movie’s stranger moments – it comes after a sex scene, which is awkward like every single sex scene in the movie, almost always because of Mikey – and has a lovely voice that had me convinced I’d heard her before. (She sounds like one of the many indie singer/songwriters out there right now, although I haven’t been able to figure out which one yet.)

The film is dark, despite being incredibly funny, and never quite grapples with how awful Mikey is other than letting you see the person under the hood (quite literally, near the end of the film). He’s a 40-something creep who seduces a 17-year-old and sees absolutely nothing wrong with it, even when he tells her ex-boyfriend to leave her alone because she’s with Mikey now. He uses his closest friend, or the closest thing he has to a friend, for free transportation for weeks, only to land that friend in a world of trouble from which Mikey escapes. He weasels his way back into Lexi’s life, clearly giving her false hope that he’s sticking around and will allow her to put something back together – her mother is addicted to opioids, and Lexi might be as well – only to have him ditch her the moment he locks in on Strawberry as his mark. He’s irredeemable with no interest in redemption. I have known several people, all men, just like him, convinced that a huge success is just around the corner, that the world simultaneously owes them this success and is the only thing denying it to them. They’re insufferable even as friends or acquaintances, and that’s if you don’t get caught up in one of their schemes. It’s a testament to Baker’s script and Rex’s performance that Mikey is so familiar and recognizable, and that he can entertain us even as we want to throttle him.

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→ July 29, 2020
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The Whistlers.

I doubt I would have even bothered looking for The Whistlers, which is free to watch on Hulu, if my friend Tim Grierson hadn’t named it one of his favorite films of 2020 so far. Submitted by Romania for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, The Whistlers missed the shortlist in a very competitive group, and perhaps was too quirky or absurd for the committee (who did nominate The Painted Bird, which you couldn’t pay me to watch given how much I hated the book). It’s a crime drama with a perfectly ridiculous twist that makes it one of the most interesting and unusual films I saw from last year, so even where the plot is a bit off, it still works and kept me engrossed till the end.

The Whistlers takes place in Romania and on La Gomera, one of the smaller islands in the Canaries, jumping back and forth in location and time to follow the main character, Cristi, a Romanian police officer, as tries to free a businessman named Zsolt who has been taken by an organized crime ring based on the island. I was completely unaware of this before watching The Whistlers, La Gomera has a whistling language called Silbo Gomero that has been used for centuries to communicate across the island’s valleys. (You can read more about it at UNESCO’s page, commemorating its inclusion on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.) To evade detection by foreign police officers, Cristi learns the whistling language, with comic misfires along the way, using it to talk to the various thugs with whom he’s working, along with the femme fatale Gilda, who is working with the criminals but also has her own agenda.

Cristi’s bosses suspect him of criminal involvement and have him under what appears to be nonstop surveillance, including bugging his apartment, which leads to all sorts of subterfuge, not least of which is Gilda pretending to be a sex worker, with Cristi a regular client, to fool the cameras. Of course, Cristi is hardly the only corrupt cop – one theme throughout every Romanian-language film I’ve seen is that pretty much everyone is corrupt – and it’s not really clear how effective their cover story is, especially given one detail towards the end of the film that was the only element I found hard to accept as plausible.

The Whistlers has a very neo-noir feel even with the comedic elements, thanks to a short list of named characters and a plot that has just about everyone in the story working multiple angles, including Cristi himself, reminiscent of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang orsome of the Coen Brothers’ work. The script plays the comedy very straight, respecting the whistling language even as Cristi looks utterly ridiculous trying to reproduce the sounds required for it, while also hiding enough of the byzantine machinations of all of the major characters to make the film’s resolution as suspenseful as you’d demand from a classic noir film.

Writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu is apparently better known for dramatic films, including Police, Adjective (which also stars Vlad Ivanov, who plays Cristi), so this script was a new turn for him, and his ability to write dark comedy is quite promising – and a welcome shift from the grim reputation of Romanian films. It also adheres to the spirit of traditional noir stories in that the actual crime at the heart of the plot, the theft of several million leus stuffed into a couple of mattresses, isn’t actually all that important to the film as a whole. This is about the interactions between the characters, with levity from Cristi’s difficulty mastering the whistling language, with an ending that ties the remaining threads together in clever, cohesive fashion.

Because The Whistlers was submitted and eligible for this year’s Oscars, I’ve included it as a 2019 film and added it to my ranking of all films from 2019 that I’ve seen.

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→ June 28, 2018
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Thoroughbreds.

Thoroughbreds (amazon • iTunes) is sort of Discount Heathers, with a girl playing the disaffected provocateur role, and a lower body count, plus an ending that doesn’t quite hold together as tightly as its obvious inspiration. Even with some of its flaws, however, it’s so tightly written and features two riveting performances by its leads that it’s worth seeing even if you, like me, have fond memories of the 1988 darkly comic original.

Thoroughbreds starts out with the two teenaged protagonists reuniting after several years apart, meeting as Andover student Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) begins to tutor the peculiar Amanda (Olivia Cooke), the latter of whom has apparently just killed her horse. Amanda has exceptional perception and quickly sees through Lily’s pretenses, while also confessing to extreme emotional detachment: Amanda is anhedonic and perhaps antisocial, feeling nothing whatsoever and showing it in her perpetually neutral expressions. Her gaze and her tone are both disarming, which leads to the first of many funny scenes when Lily finally cops to the fact that Amanda freaks her out.

The plot kicks into gear shortly afterwards when Amanda suggests to Lily that she kill her controlling and vaguely creepy stepfather, Mark, who is very wealthy and berates Lily’s ineffectual mother. (Although I thought the film implied early in the script that Mark was at the least leering at Lily, if not actually attempting to abuse her, that turned out to be wrong, and Mark is just an asshole, but not a criminal.) Lily is aghast at the idea, until she sees Mark verbally abuse her mother again and finds out he’s decided to send her to a different boarding school, after which she tells Amanda she wants to go through with it. They plan to use a lowlife drug dealer, Tim (Anton Yelchin in what I think ended up his last film role), as hitman, although his willingness and his competence are both open questions. As the plan progresses, it turns out that Lily isn’t quite the delicate flower – or lily-white princess – she appears to be.

Taylor-Joy is perfect as Lily, embodying both the perfect little white girl persona and the stuck-up prep school teenager, but it’s Cooke as Amanda who grabs the wheel and steers the movie all the way to the big finish. Cooke has to be convincing as this weary, wise, incisive kid who is fooled by nobody and who rigorously applies logic to every situation, including understanding why people will act in specific ways and how to use that to their advantage. And she is, to an exceptional degree – her delivery is so dry, and her face so impassive, that Cooke sells Amanda as a teenaged automaton, making everything that comes afterwards credible, because nothing in this film works without that character. Taylor-Joy works, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she had the bigger career of the two, but Cooke has this film by the throat and never lets go.

Cory Finley made his debut as both director and screenwriter with Thoroughbreds, crafting those two compelling characters and working in plenty of very dark humor, although he seemed unsure of how to stick the landing, and the film wobbles as a result before more or less staying on its feet. Amanda’s motivation at the climax is unclear or just hard to accept, and the brief coda doesn’t add anything to the story; ending the film in the final shot with Lily and Amanda together would have been more effective. There are also some extremely strong and unsettling shots of the girls’ faces that add to the noir-ish feel of the film without interrupting its flow. It’s a very auspicious first effort for Finley, however, marking him as a filmmaker to watch, as well as a star turn for Cooke.

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→ March 19, 2018
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I, Tonya.

The very dark comedy I, Tonya, based somewhat loosely on the memoir by Tonya Harding with many winks and nods to the audience, garnered acting nominations for lead actress Margot Robbie and supporting actress Allison Janney (who won) as well as a nomination for film editing, with some critics anticipating a Best Picture nod as well. It is a perfectly solid film, a B+ or a grade 55, funny in several parts, disturbing in a few others, and benefits from a tremendous performance not by Janney (who’s fine, but one-note) but by Robbie, as well as a story that is itself just really damn good. You can rent or buy it now on iTunes or amazon.

For those of you too young to remember this fiasco, here’s the quick recap: Tonya Harding was one of the best ladies figure skaters in the world in 1991, and only the second woman ever to land the jump known as a triple axel. She went to the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, finishing fourth, and might not have skated again for the U.S. were it not for the IOC’s decision in 1988 to move up the next Winter Games to 1994, awarding them to Lillehammer, Norway. (The film screws with this timeline to make it appear that the IOC decided to move the next Winter Games up after Albertville.) In the lead to those games, someone in Harding’s circle hatched the cockamamie idea to kneecap her primary competition for a spot on the Olympic team, Nancy Kerrigan. That knocked Kerrigan out of the Nationals; Harding won the event and a spot, while the USOC awarded the second spot to Kerrigan. Meanwhile, because the men behind the kneecapping scheme were some of the dumbest hoods imaginable, they were all caught rather quickly, and Harding ended up taking some of the blame even though at the time she claimed she had no knowledge at all of any plan to injure Kerrigan. She had a disastrous performance in Lillehammer; Kerrigan earned a silver medal, as Ukraine’s Oksana Baiul won the gold.

The movie version focuses as much on what came before the 1994 Olympics as it does on what every character in the film resignedly calls “the Incident.” Harding’s mother (played by Janney) gets the Mommie Dearest treatment; she’s depicted as verbally and physically abusive, chain-smoking, day-drinking, and just generally an unlikeable battle-axe who, for all her flaws, will push for her daughter to get the training and opportunities to succeed as a figure skater. Harding, it turns out, was born with great strength and athletic ability, but never had the ‘grace’ that characterized so many figure skaters of the time – and the scoring system prior to the 2002 Salt Lake City Games’ vote-trading scandal was a corrupt, impenetrable joke, so judges could and did play favorites with various skaters. The film makes it clear that judges penalized Harding for being (in the script’s words) white trash, because she wasn’t dressed in expensive costumes and didn’t skate all pretty-like as Kerrigan did. (I always found Kerrigan to be technically skilled but boring to watch; Surya Bonali, who was a contemporary of those two, was by far more entertaining, and would often perform illegal backflips on the ice, which I interpreted as a sort of fuck-you to the judges who seemed to just plain dislike her for being big, or strong, or black.)

Robbie is incredible here as Harding; I’ve said this a few times, but 2017 was an absolute banner year for performances by actresses, with Robbie joining the list of at least five I’d say were worthy of Best Actress in a typical year. The hair and makeup are amusing enough, but Robbie nails a certain tenor to her voice and movements that reflects Harding’s background – or at least the version of Harding’s life that she wants us to hear. Janney was considered a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actress from early on in the process, but I thought the character was monotonous, and I don’t think she faced the challenge that Laurie Metcalf did in playing a more complex character in Lady Bird. (I’d probably also put Janney behind Lesley Manville for Phantom Thread.)

Sebastian Stan plays Jeff Gillooly, Harding’s abusive husband, looking like Rivers Cuomo with a taped-on mustache, and provides a dueling and somewhat differing narrative alongside what Harding tells the camera. Stan is superb, and both he and Robbie make the film’s core gimmick, of having characters break the fourth wall mid-scene, often with a moving camera shot, to explain that what we’re seeing didn’t happen or provide other details, work far better than I would have expected. That fourth-wall bit could go very wrong, but here it makes the film funnier and gives the script some more rope for scenes that seem a little beyond the pale. The movie also benefits from a hilariously spot-on performance by Paul Walter Hauser as Shawn Eckhardt, the fat, nerdy friend of Gillooly’s who hired the doofus hit men, and later gave an interview to Diane Sawyer where he claimed to be an international counterterrorism expert and otherwise showed that he was out of his mind. (He died about ten years ago; Gillooly later changed his name to Jeff Stone and disappeared, although Amy Nelson, writing for Deadspin, tracked him down in 2013.)

Harding’s story may not be true; other participants in it have denied her versions of events, and she even implied in an interview this January that she knew “something” was up, even if she didn’t actually order the hit. What seems beyond dispute, however, is that she was a victim of abuse, likely from both her mother and then Gillooly (which fits, as childhood victims are more likely to end up in abusive relationships as adults). In the script, Harding keeps telling us how various things aren’t her fault, and her mother tells us and tells Harding that she keeps blaming setbacks on everyone but herself. If, however, Harding is a trauma victim, then … well, yeah, that’s something trauma victims do to cope. And sometimes they lie, because dealing with the truth means revisiting aspects of past trauma. And of course they make bad decisions. I, Tonya may not have explicitly set out to make viewers feel sorry for its subject, but I certainly did. Whether she deserved the de facto death penalty she received from U.S. Skating – which I notice hasn’t commented on the film, unsurprising as its judges are made out to be snobbish, elitist asshats – is a bit beside the point, as she wasn’t going to the ‘98 Olympics anyway. The question is how history should view Harding; she says she turned into a punch line, while I think other accounts view her as a villain. If you accept nothing more in this film but the general gist of her life prior to Lillehammer, however, you have to see her as a victim first before she’s anything else.

I was a little uncomfortable with how I, Tonya used that violence for occasional laughs, or would shift its tone mid-scene from abuse to sight gag or fourth-wall-breaking, even when the switch was there to allow viewers to empathize more with Harding. There are many parts of this story that are genuinely funny – anything involving Eckhardt and the two nitwits he ‘hired’ to do the job – but the parts with Harding and her mother are truly horrifying, as is much of Harding’s time with Gillooly. The script also assumes too much on the part of the viewer around Harding’s marriage and why she stayed in that relationship, which risks putting too much blame on Harding (“why didn’t she just leave?”) when the answer isn’t that simple. The secondary theme, about how the U.S. Skating oligarchy wanted no part of a woman skater who came from outside their infrastructure and wasn’t a dainty waif dressed in frills, is also underplayed in the script; it’s less salacious than a dimwitted conspiracy to break Nancy Kerrigan’s knee, but it’s more insidious and wasn’t addressed at all until a global scandal blew up the biased scoring system. Harding’s life plays out for plenty of laughs in I, Tonya, but in the final reckoning it’s just not that funny.

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→ March 7, 2017
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I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore.

So I’m told that the new movie I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore isn’t technically a movie, because Netflix bought the film at January’s Sundance Festival and released it directly to its streaming service, bypassing a theatrical release entirely. That means it’s ineligible for annual movie awards and (most) critics’ lists. I don’t think the movie was going to end up earning Oscar nods, but it might have been on some top ten lists given its indie cred and noir-farcical feel, along with a pretty great performance by Elijah Wood.

Melanie Lynskey plays the protagonist, Ruth, a frumpy, meek post-op nurse who lives alone, is constantly put-upon or merely stepped-on, and comes home from the Worst Day Ever to find that someone broke into her house and stole her laptop and her grandmother’s silver. The police are indifferent and even blame her* a bit for the break-in, giving zero reason for her to expect to ever see her stuff again. She had location-tracking software on her laptop, however, and when her phone tells her the laptop has been turned on and is located about a ten-minute drive away, she recruits her martial arts-obsessed neighbor, Tony, to go get it back … which leads them into one semi-incompetent escapade after another until people start getting shot.

* Unrelated: last year, we had a false alarm at our house for unknown reasons, but the police ended up getting to the house before we could return and call them off. The officer who went through the house was really unpleasant to us after, saying we’d left “every door unlocked,” and all but calling us idiots. While we have certainly made the mistake of leaving one door unlocked, there’s one door that we never open and that is always locked, one he claimed was left unlocked … which it wasn’t. So I probably related to Ruth a little more than usual when the cop was talking down to her.

I keep seeing references to this film as “neo-noir,” but it’s noirish, at best, and is too comical, with protagonists and antagonists too inept, to really qualify as noir. Ruth and Tony are just amateurs, and they get drunk on the success of the laptop retrieval mission. When they get closer to the bumbling, violent idiots behind the burglary, things get more serious, except that the gang literally can’t shoot straight, and we get a Fargo-esque screwup that leaves a few people dead and Ruth running for her life from the big baddie, played by David Yow (lead singer of the Jesus Lizard). The tone definitely gets darker as the film goes on, but less in a Touch of Evil sort of way, more in a Pulp Fiction holy-shit-people-are-dying-horrible-deaths way.

There is a broader theme underlying I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore that takes it beyond mere indie black-comedy territory – that people today are losing their empathy. Ruth views the burglary as the greatest violation in a day of minor violations, and thinks the problem is just that people are assholes (her word for it, not that I disagree). And when she confronts some of the people who were assholes to her, only one, Tony, actually sets about proving her wrong. There’s no answer to the questions of where our empathy went, or how to get it back, but as the foundational observation for an inept crime caper film, it works quite well.

By the way, Lynskey’s first major role in anything was in 1994’s Heavenly Creatures, where she played Pauline Parker, who murdered her mother with the help of her friend Juliet Hulme. The director of that film was Peter Jackson, who later directed the Lord of the Rings films, starring … Elijah Wood. Hulme was played by another then-unknown actress, Kate Winslet. And you probably know who Juliet Hulme is, but not by that name: She was released from prison after serving her five-year term, changed her name to Anne Perry, and became a best-selling author of historical detective fiction.

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→ May 8, 2012
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50/50.

My ranking of the top 100 draft prospects for 2012 went up earlier today for Insiders. Twenty-two of them now have full scouting repots, with more to go up over the rest of the month.

—

Last year’s independent comedy 50/50 seems to have garnered little notice outside of some positive reviews, even though it’s quite funny and never as depressing as the premise would indicate (and perhaps not as dark as it should have been). Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as a 28-year-old public radio reporter who discovers that a pain in his lower back is actually caused by a tumor on his spine, a rare form of cancer with a survival rate that gives the film its title – yet despite that morbid plot, the film mines substantial humor from all aspects of its protagonist’s experience.

Adam is in a dysfunctional relationship with a somewhat self-centered artist when he gets his diagnosis, but it’s his best friend Kyle (played by Seth Rogen) who rallies, with well-intentioned if not always well-executed attempts to keep Adam’s spirits up through the diagnosis and treatment. Adam’s girlfriend, who doesn’t seem to be that into him before he gets the news, isn’t quite up to the task (and is easily the film’s worst-drawn character, although neither of the other two female characters is all that well fleshed-out), while his therapist, Katherine, is still in grad school and is lost when her sessions with Adam veer off script, and his mother, played affectingly by an almost unrecognizable Angelica Houston, is mostly around to get on Adam’s nerves.

Gordon-Levitt carried Brick and was superb in a minor part in Inception, so it’s no surprise to see him excel here as an overly sensitive, slightly meek guy who gradually comes out of his shell while facing his own mortality. But Rogen, who helped produce the film (based on the true story of the experiences of Rogen’s friend, writer Will Reiser, with a similar cancer diagnosis), stole more scenes than anyone else as the loud, boorish, very crude best friend who also happens to care more for Gordon-Levitt’s character than anyone else in the film, even more than Rachael. I’m sure Adam’s mother cares for him, but she only appears in a handful of scenes and is more of a nuisance than a loving parent until the very end of the film – and even then, Kyle takes center stage when the doctor discusses the results of the last procedure. (I wonder if Reiser was working out his issues through the script here, or how his mother felt about her portrayal.) Anna Kendrick fares much better here than in Up in the Air, putting her great talents for appearing flummoxed and looking vulnerably cute to much better use here as Adam’s therapist, yet she’s still overshadowed by Rogen’s character and ends up short on screen time given how important her character is to the plot.

The problem with 50/50 is that it’s only a witty dark comedy, nothing more. The cancer is merely a plot device for exposing how the patient’s relationships with friends and family change once he receives the diagnosis – but only the humorous aspects of the changes, not the subtleties. I have no problem with cancer being played for a laugh, but when the film was over, I thought of a dozen ways in which the film had fallen short, from Mark’s father’s dementia to the way the film made chemo almost seem easy to the fact that every female character was two-dimensional. It’s a funny film, and it’s a well-acted film, but the script was too superficial for it to have any lasting impact with me.

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→ September 7, 2011
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Pulp.

I waited until that night, drove over, parked outside. Nice neighborhood. Definition of a nice neighborhood: a place you couldn’t afford to live in.

Charles Bukowski wrote his final novel, Pulp, as he was dying of leukemia, and passed away before the book was published. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise then that the overarching theme of the book is death – facing it, fleeing from it, and wondering what there is to life other than speeding towards it.

The protagonist of Pulp, Nick Belane, is a private detective who is simultaneously lucky (his cases have a habit of solving themselves) and down on his luck (he’s somewhat broke and usually heading to the bottom of a bottle) when he receives a visit from a new client, who calls herself Lady Death, and most likely is the Grim Reaper in more attractive form than we’re using to seeing. She wants Belane (which I presume rhymes with “Spillane”) to track down a man she believes to be the French author Celine, who should be dead by about thirty years but is apparently running around Los Angeles. Nick picks up a few more clients, including a man who believes his controlling new girlfriend is a space alien, another man who believes his wife is cheating on him, and a friend who hires him to find the elusive Red Sparrow but doesn’t actually know what it is. (The Red Sparrow is most likely a reference to Black Sparrow Press, a small publisher whose financial support allowed Bukowski to become a full-time writer at age 45.)

On its surface, Pulp is a hard-boiled detective novel reminiscent of the clipped tones of Hammett and tight yet rich prose of Chandler, although Belane’s toughness is more superficial than that of the Continental Op or Philip Marlowe. Belane bemoans his inability to catch a break in between catching breaks, dropping into deep depressions that last until the next barstool, where he typically orders a few drinks, starts a fight, and leaves more or less victorious. Clients find him, as do clues, yet he still manages to encounter no end of trouble, much of it because of his own bad decisions.

In between drinks and fights, Belane muses on the nature of life and often doesn’t like what he sees, looking at the indignities of this mortal coil from bodily functions to the need for money to questioning his own sanity. One of the book’s most memorable scenes puts Belane in the waiting room for a psychiatrist he wants to question; the waiting room is full of apparently crazy people, but when Belane’s name is called and he’s ushered in, the apparent psychiatrist claims he’s just a lawyer and Belane is yet another crazy person who’s entered the wrong office. Is Belane crazy? Did he black out? Did reality change on him, as it has a habit of doing to him throughout the book?

As much as Belane looks at life and cringes at what he sees, he’s not running headlong into death, even though Lady Death tells him a few times that he’ll be seeing her again soon. But it’s his inner monologue that really makes Pulp memorable and often very funny in a wry sort of way; it’s an accumulation of decades of wisdom, much of it not all that useful, wrapped up in a fast-paced detective story where the ultimate case is solving the mystery of life. I won’t spoil the ending, although you can probably figure out where the book is heading, and even so the plot is hardly the thing there. Bukowski managed to pay homage to my favorite genre through a black-comic look at the end of life. It’s quite an achievement.

Next up: Richard Stark’s heist novel The Score, available as a free eBook for the Kindle (or Kindle iPad app) through that link. Stark was one of Donald Westlake’s pen names, and I reviewed the first novel in this series two years ago.

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→ July 17, 2011
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In Bruges.

You’ve probably seen my midseason prospect rankings update by now, but if not … there it is.

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I’m a few weeks behind on this, but I watched the dark comedy In Bruges (currently just $4.69 on DVD at amazon) a few weeks ago on my last work flight. I’d seen positive reviews of the film when it was in theaters and kept it in my queue for years, but finally got back into watching movies regularly when I got an iPad last month and have a hell of a list to work through. As for In Bruges, it absolutely had its moments, driven mostly by a really strong performance by Colin Farrell, but by the end of the movie I was kind of wondering what the point of all the violence was – unless the point was that there is no point at all.

Farrell plays Ray, a young hit man who bungled his most recent job by accidentally killing a child who was hidden behind the man he was paid to assassinate. His boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), has sent him to Bruges along with the more experienced Ken to await instructions on their next job … which turns out to be for Ken to kill Ray over the death of the child. Ken wrestles with his conscience over the assignment now that he’s gotten to know Ray. Ray, meanwhile, is completely despondent over his mistake (but not over the death of the target) and contemplates suicide in between attempts to seduce the drug-dealing Chloe, an incompetent effort that leads to a confrontation with an American couple in a restaurant that, of course, ends up interfering with everyone’s plans. It is a screwball comedy at heart, except that in this one half the characters end up maimed or dead.

The strength of In Bruges is subtle, living in the layer beneath the obvious plot about contract killings and before the carnage at the end of the film. Ray isn’t cut out emotionally for his line of work, between his remorse and his short temper – and he absolutely hates Bruges, or as he calls it, “fookin’ Broozh.” Ken, meanwhile, wants to play the tourist, turning the trip (which was sold to them as an escape from the authorities) into a relaxing sojourn. Harry is a little bit of a stock character – the ruthless gangster/loving family man character has been around long enough that he’s totally expected – although his interactions with Ken when the latter refuses the assignment provide some of the film’s best dialogue.

When the shooting starts in earnest at the film’s end, though, we’re given a ten-minute stretch of action film where the plot is resolved through violence and a few funny coincidences, as well as a concluding meditation on the point of the violence that felt a little tacked-on. Within the span of those ten minutes, we go from that dark comedy to a chase-and-shoot (although, again, they do mix in a hilarious scene where Harry and Ray are standing off with a very angry and even more pregnant hotelier in between that) to light philosophy. Would the film have been better with a less violent climax? Or simply a more comic one? Shouldn’t the philosophizing have permeated more of the film (or did it, and I just missed it)? Most importantly, does it make any sense to say you enjoyed the first 90% of a film but not the ending when the ending was, in terms of plot, properly executed?

As for what’s next … I’ve got a long list of films to catch up on, but I’m open to suggestions. I’m particularly light on anything in the last five years – that is, since my daughter was born.

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