"Room 24 will give up its dead, and the dead will be forgiven."

I've moved my blog operation over to samwiebe.blogspot.com . Tumblr isn't really working for me, and I felt like a new start. Check it out.

The above quote is from John From Cincinnati, FYI.

Movie Reviews 1

James Ellroy predicted no more of his books will be adapted into movies in his lifetime. Although his books spawned one great film (L.A. Confidential), one awful film (the Black Dahlia), and one pretty good film (the underseen Cop, with James Woods), a lot of Ellroy adaptations have fallen by the wayside, most notably the adaptation of My Dark Places that was to star David Duchovny, and his novel White Jazz, which Ellroy himself adapted for Nick Nolte, and when that fell apart, George Clooney and John Cusack were attached.

Yet Ellroy's cynical yet moral take on crime and obsession pervades a few movies not directly associated with him. I watched two this week, Zodiac and Hollywoodland.

I can't believe I hadn't seen Zodiac before yesterday. It came out in 2006, the year that left critics divided between the There Will be Blood and No Country for Old Men camps. But Zodiac is in that league. I've never seen such a brilliant, slow-moving crime film, so detailed but so compulsively watchable. Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards (I know he was on ER for forever, but he's still Goose) are brilliant, and Jake Gyllenhall does an admirable job. James Ellroy shows up on the commentary, though he had nothing to do with the film. But it feels like his work, and I wish Fincher had been the one to tackle the Black Dahlia. Zodiac has the same feeling of obsession that Ellroy's best work does. I'm not a David Fincher acolyte, but this film staggered me.

Another Ellroy-inspired film, Hollywoodland, doesn't work as well, but is still very good. Adrien Brody plays a private eye on the make (so painfully Ellroy derivative) who's scamming George Reeves's mother into questioning whether her son committed suicide as the cops contend, or whether he was murdered. Like Zodiac, it's open-ended, and it features some brilliant acting, especially in the flashbacks which feature Ben Affleck as Superman star Reeves. Brody's not haggard enough to pull off the part, but he does a fine job, as does Diane Lane and uber-gangster Bob Hoskins.

Boardwalk Empire/The Town

No spoilers here, just some pretty general comments.

Boardwalk Empire - Like Treme, it brings together a dream team of filmmakers, yet is less than the sum of its parts. Buscemi is great, the writing is taut, and it looks as beautiful as any movie, let alone any TV show. The characters aren't all that defined, and the lead actor is weak. Worth watching, but it's not all that engaging. But then, Omar was only onscreen for about ten seconds.

The Town - Understand something: Heat is the best heist film ever made. So when a filmmaker pays tribute to Michael Mann, as Christopher Nolan did with The Dark Knight, I'm on board. Affleck heads another all-star cast, and the result is a very good, well-pitched movie. If I sound a bit low-key in my praise, it's not because the movie isn't amazing, only that the book, by Chuck Hogan, was better. Normally when you hear that phrase "the book was better" you have to take it with a grain of salt, because they are two very different mediums, and what people expect from book adaptations borders on the impossible. What's weird about The Town is that it's less Heat-like than the novel. Hogan's book has an almost perfect pace to it with regards to the actual heists. You get a feeling for why McRay (the Affleck character) is such a great thief; his patience and diligence shines, just the way Neil McCauley's does in Heat. In the movie, everything happens so much quicker, and the robberies (which are certainly not lacking intensity and ingenuity) seem more the result of brute force rather than planning and efficiency.

I blame the editing. Movies today just seem to need an extra ten or fifteen minutes to establish a more leisurely feel before ramping up the emotional levels. In the book there is a bit of downtime between robberies, which establishes the characters and their relationships. In the movie everything happens at a rapid pace, which, again, does not make the film less watchable, but denies the viewer the chance to connect with the characters in a more mundane situation.

The book also had one setpiece that I really missed. In the book, the second robbery is of a movie theatre. McRay cases the theatre looking for a big opening weekend, sees the audience reaction to the flying cow trailer for Twister (the book is set in '96) and makes his decision. During the actual robbery, Jem (the Jeremy Renner character) has a shootout with the cardboard cutouts in the theatre lobby, petrifying their hostages by yelling out the catchphrases of movie stars while demolishing cutouts from their awful '96 movies. Meaning, Jem yells "Yippie Kai-yay Motherfucker" and shoots down a Bruce Willis cutout from Last Man Standing, and "Ain't Gonna Be No Rematch" while shooting up Stallone from Daylight. It was funny and edgy and would have played well on film. But the movie is set in present day, so they just knock over an armored car. Not that there's anything wrong with knocking over an armored car. It's a great scene and leads to a great chase.

Anyway, it's still my pick for best movie of the year. Affleck was terrific, Renner was even more terrific, Rebecca Hall was amazing and vulnerable and sexy, and there were spooky cameos from Chris Cooper and Pete Postelwaite.

And it has Mad Man.

The Town, revisited

Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves has been out for years. Prince of Thieves has been re-leased in a tie-in to the film, so the book is now called The Town. Trust me to only get around to it when Ben Affleck's head has been pasted on the cover.

I was enjoying it when I posted last time. I just finished the book, after doing nothing much else but reading for the last day or so. It's an engrossing, astonishing, compelling, incredible read. The last book I read that made me feel like that--jealous because the writing is so note-perfect, the story is so taut, the characters so alive, and their movements and reactions so true, was Mystic River. And Hogan's novel has a better ending than Mystic River.

Like I said last time, if the film is half as good an adaptation as Gone Baby Gone, The Town will be the best movie of the year.

You may say I'm building this up a bit too much, but consider two things: as mentioned in previous posts, the kind of films I like don't come out all that often anymore. And I haven't been waylaid--ambushed--by a novel this good in a long time. I hope the movie does it justice.

The Town

It's conceivable that the best movie of the year could be directed by Ben Affleck. That's not preposterous, given his debut with Gone Baby Gone. His next film, The Town, boasts an impressive cast (including Rebecca Hall, Titus Welliver, the Hurt Locker Guy and the Mad Men guy).

I started Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves, the source for The Town. It's a terrific read. It's so good it makes me jealous, he writes exactly the kind of book I'd like to. My only complaint is the abundance of crappy music references. The book is set in 96, so you'd think there'd be something else on the jukeboxes besides U2. But other than that, it's a flawless thriller. If Affleck does half the job with it that he did with Gone Baby Gone, my predictions will hold out, and The Town will be the film of the year.

A handful of James Ellroy quotes from his AV Club interview.

[on his new memoir, The Hilliker Curse]

...no one wants to read a candy-assed narrative discursive parenthetical-filled memoir indigenous to one human being. Memoirs must explicate larger spiritual and social issues.

[on why he dates women who don't agree with his politics]

I'm not looking for ease in relationships with women; I always cringe when a male friend of mine, who's very fixated on women, puts "compatibility" at the top of his list of attributes that he would be looking for in a woman. I would replace compatibility with dialectic...But I'm way past the idea of using ideology or political view as a gauge of human character. I simply don't believe it.

[on being a conservative]

There are people, cultural critics, who see no distinction between being a conservative, and going out and murdering civil-rights leaders and liberal politicians. And that's their faulty dilemma that they will have to deal with.

[just a great curmudgeonly rant]

I'm older; I have a great love of the English parlance. I can't stand dipshit, tattooed, laquered, varnished, depilatoried younger people talking their stupid shit, stage-sighing, saying "It's like, I'm like, whatever," and talking in horrible cliches, rolling their eyes when they disapprove of something. I saw that the culture was pandering more and more to this kid demographic. And in the course of driving from here to there, I began to see more and more billboards for vile misogynistic horror films, white-trash reality-TV shows, neck-biting fucked-up vampire flicks, and stoned-out teenage-boy pratfall comedies. Bad drama, bad comedy, that portrayed life preposterously, frivolously, and ironically, and that got to me. So I would drive here, there, and elsewhere through residential neighbourhoods in order to avoid billboards.

[his take on the recession]

I trust my morality in the narrow path I trek through the world as I work. I've been very much enjoying the financial flatline--and divorce, frankly, and alimony--because I dig struggle. I love to fight. And I've enjoyed the financial necessity of going out and finding work in what is to many a dwindling marketplace, but to me seems to be an ever-expanding marketplace.

Random, not especially deep thoughts.

+ I'm reading a collection of Dostoevsky's short fiction (I just heard the sound of a thousand web browsers closing; hold on a second, I'm not saying it to flash my literary bona fides, I do have a point with this). Between "The Double" and "Notes From the Underground" there is a huge change in style, which is apparent even in translation. He got better with age, and that's comforting. We make so much of creative people who emerge fully-formed, especially when they're photogenic. Orson Welles is the best example, but even Tarantino and Kevin Smith, who--and this is far from a criticism, because I'm a fan of both of them--were as good at the start of their careers as they ever will be. I'd add Michael Chabon to the list, though that's debatable; his first two books are the ones that resonate for me, though I like them all. Hemingway, same thing: appreciate and admire the later works, but LOVE the early stuff. Shakespeare got better as he went along. I'm not that big a fan of early George Carlin, but I'm a HUGE fan of "You Are All Diseased"-era Carlin. It's nice to be reminded that your thirties and forties and fifties and onward don't have to involve a rapid plummet in ability or popularity, that you can improve and actually break through even if your first effort wasn't stellar.

+ Crime films are my favourite genre, and I realized today that they're the only genre that deals with economics. Every other genre, the characters just seem to have these amazing New York apartments and weeks and weeks off, and no financial burdens whatsoever. In a crime film, you always know A) how people make their money and B) how they feel about it.

Couple of film recommendations:

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead has an amazing cast, a great script from Kelly Masterson, solid direction by Sidney Lumet...and no one saw it. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Albert Finney, Ethan Hawke and Marisa Tomei...my brother's man-crush Michael Shannon even shows up. I was knocked out, not just with the tightness of the crime aspect, but the family dynamic is pitch-perfect.

I wrote about Mesrine: Killer Instinct before, but I just want to clarify: there are foreign films that bore the shit out of people (the kind VIFF likes, cheap shot, I know) and there are foreign films that manage to both ape Hollywood fare and put their own distinctive stink on things. Vincent Cassell is terrific as the title character, who at one point breaks out of a Maximum-Security prison in Quebec by enlisting the help of other inmates, in return promising to come back and bust them out. Mesrine has the kind of forceful personality that would convince someone he would keep that bargain...whether he does, well, check out the film. The second part comes out soon, hopefully.

Speaking of Kevin Smith, I haven't seen the last four films he's done, though I dug his "Evening With" series. I did recently see Clerks II, and donkey-fucking aside, I liked it, the ending especially.

Nothing But Trouble might...might...be the worst film I've ever seen. Well, no, but it would be in the running. I think Last Days would be number one, followed by A Perfect World, Postman, and Chicago (which won an Oscar, showing how far from the pulse of the mainstream I am). I also saw another horrendous Eastwood movie recently, Tightrope. Awful, really awful. Most of these are old movies, and there's a reason you never heard of them.