"Farewell to America, the Country I've Never Been"

If you've ever wondered what it's like for someone from a foreign country to see stereotypes of their nationality portrayed in American films, I think 2000's Brother 2 (Брат 2) might give you a good idea. It's the sequel to the 1997 Russian gangster film Brother (which I reviewed here) but despite having a couple characters in common, the two films are so different I wouldn't say it's necessary to see the first to see the second. It's like if Coming to America were the sequel to First Blood. It's fluff, certainly not half as serious as it takes itself, but enjoyable and sort of sweet.

The super effective killing machine with a perpetual air of innocence and charmingly deficient knowledge of Russian pop culture Danila (Sergey Bodrov Jr.) has relocated to Moscow. He quickly endears himself to Russia's version of Britney Spears, Irina Saltykova (playing herself), when he doesn't recognise her and asks her for directions.

He's on his way to a television appearance with two of his former military comrades, one of whom will shortly afterwards be assassinated in his apartment. The man behind the killing is a bigshot American, so soon it's off to the U.S. for Danila and his brother Viktor for a revenge killing.

This is the same brother from the first film who set Danila up and was part of the film's emotional core about Danila's commitment to his fellow man even when they're not so committed to him. Viktor in this movie is portrayed as a broad, comedic character, practically one of the Three Stooges. In order to evade the heat on them, he and Danila take separate routes to Chicago--Viktor flies straight to Chicago while Danila goes to New York, planning to drive 12 hours to the city in Illinois.

Here Viktor argues with a cop who gets on his case about drinking in public. "Those guys around the corner are doing it!" says Viktor.

"Those guys have their bottles in paper bags!" retorts the cop angrily. They speak in Russian--although Viktor and Danila don't speak English and the language barrier is referred to as a problem for them, they nonetheless seem to run into a lot of people who can speak Russian.

The car Danila buys in New York breaks down on the way and he hitches a ride with an extremely affectionate truck driver stereotype.

They can't speak the same language but they share the universal language of the musical montage as we see them happily getting hotel rooms together, doing their laundry together, laughing together at diners, and poking around at tourist attractions.

When they get to Chicago, Ben (the truck driver) pulls up alongside a row of prostitutes and their pimp who wears a massive fur coat and a gold necklace. This is one of the ways in which the movie has an oddly 70s feel. The American actors sound natural enough but a lot of their dialogue sounds distinctly like it comes from someone who hasn't spent much time in the U.S.

Danila, Viktor, and a Russian prostitute Danila met earlier called Dasha, are amazed that no-one catches the crawfish who crawl right up out of the river. So they're cooking up a big pot of them when Danila refers to a nearby black man as a "negro", prompting a whole group of homeless black men to start a fight with them.

Dasha chastises Danila for not calling the man an African American and Danila complains, "What's the difference?" and says "negro" was the word he was taught to use in school.

The racial stereotypes in this movie are particularly stark, seemingly more as a vague commentary on race relations in America than on the fundamental nature of individuals based on skin colour. When Danila's beaten by the pimp and his friends, he's brought to the police station for questioning. The pimp had told the cops Danila had beaten up Dasha (which he hadn't). The stereotypical fat white cop says, "Fuck the niggers," and lets Danila go.

With the exception of a beautiful television reporter who hits Danila with her car and takes him back to her apartment to have sex with him, everyone black in the movie is portrayed as impoverished and/or criminal.

Viktor says he likes it in America, that money is power and this place was made of money. Danila, when he confronts the man at the top of a skyscraper who he's come to this country to kill, explains money isn't power because it didn't stop Danila from killing him.

Danila's logic isn't airtight, to say the least, but it seems to be the real argument the director's making. Danila and Dasha escape the country in a vintage limousine belonging to Ben, reminding us that for all of America's faults, she has a few perfectly friendly caricatures.

Godspeed, little Russian hitman buddy. Godspeed.

Bodies in the Gears

Now here's a man who could play Ichabod Crane, David Thewlis, and he nearly is here in Mike Leigh's 1993 film Naked. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to compare him to Falstaff, the model Washington Irving drew on for many protagonists in his works. Like Falstaff (and Ichabod Crane), Thewlis' character Johnny embodies an affectionate and unvarnished portrait of humanity. This is a brilliant black comedy that exposes the cruelty and failure of capitalism and other social conventions through a series of contrasting characters and circumstances.

The film opens with Johnny having a violent sexual encounter with a woman in a Manchester alley. The Wikipedia synopsis refers to the encounter as rape, but in this interview Thewlis describes it instead as "sex that gets out of hand". The impression I had watching was that it was consensual sex but Johnny ejaculated inside the woman without letting her know beforehand, possibly on accident. He grabs her hair a little roughly, too--there's certainly a hostility in how Johnny conducts himself during intercourse though he never forces a woman against her will. Jeremy (Greg Cruttwell), on the other hand, only seems to achieve sexual pleasure from raping women.

The two men are one of the first sets of contrasts the film employs. Jeremy is introduced in this scene angrily exercising long before the plot brings him into Johnny's world. But the pertinence of his appearance alongside scenes of Johnny is to establish two different conceptions of entitlement being played out--Johnny represents what a conservative might mean by entitlement, Jeremy represents what liberals might mean by entitlement.

As Johnny later says, he flees Manchester to avoid a beating--from the woman's husband presumably. He comes to London to the home of his ex-girlfriend Louise (Lesley Sharp). He has no money, he lives on the dole, as does Louise's roommate Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge).

Sophie's the first person to come home and find Johnny waiting on the doorstep. In his particularly good review of this movie, Roger Ebert describes the relationship that develops between the two aptly;

The "relationship" that develops between these two people is so pathetic that it can barely be watched. The "sex" they have is such a desperate attempt to feel something in the midst of their separate wastelands that it is much like watching them wound themselves.

Throughout the film, Johnny expounds on his complex philosophy and conspiracy theories about the future and the meaning of life. He talks to Sophie about how ridiculous it is to explore outer space, wondering if people really think they're going to find God or meaning in the heavens. And Sophie responds, "Because let's face it, right, what are rockets? I mean, they're just big metal pricks." The two wax clever for each other, neither quite seems to understand the other, but both seem to admire the other's ironic distance from life.

She sits on his chest and he tries vainly to unlace her corset which she calls an "intelligence test" before finally saying, "You tried the stairs, now take the escalator," and twisting the garment around to where there's a handy zipper.

After they've had sex, Johnny's reading a medical book and tells her about the complexity of the human body, telling her he could've been a doctor. "Do you want to examine me?" she asks and he says, "You don't believe me do you?" Johnny is a little more serious in the intelligence test he gives, part of a pattern he displays throughout the film in deploying devices to avoid emotional intimacy.

When Sophie proves too clingy for him, he leaves both her and Louise in the flat. But he lives on a presumption that men and women are brothers and sisters and everyone is entitled to be treated as such. He greets a mentally impaired Scotsman on the street like an old friend, he happily accepts the temporary hospitality of a security guard whose job is to guard a completely empty building throughout the night. He constantly takes the piss with the people he meets, both out of his habitual fear of intimacy but also out of his presumption of comradeship. He is entitled to take the piss out of everyone because everyone's his brother or sister.

Jeremy, on the other hand, sees everyone else as members of a lesser species, there for him to exploit for his sadistic pleasure. Despite this, he's clearly possessed by a constant anger, a dissatisfaction with the world being as he sees it. In one very evocative scene, he stands almost naked over a cowering Louise, Sophie, and Johnny and observes with undisguised disgust, "Aren't people pathetic?" as though he's not one of them.

Jeremy is the consummate benefactor of capitalism. A system dependent on the suffering of those whose combinations of talents, skills, and mental aptitude prevent them from taking slices of the pie reserved for the likes of Jeremy. Johnny, who's recently been beaten bloody on the street for no reason by four men, tearfully implores Jeremy to see him as a brother. Jeremy's like Patrick Bateman, a British psycho instead of an American one, and not so very different for that. But it's perhaps his fundamental humanity that makes him angry and dissatisfied with the sadism capitalism has nurtured in him.

There's a glimmer of hope as Louise and Johnny talk about going back to Manchester together, but this seems a cruel reflection of the capitalism that made Jeremy as this leaves no room for Sophie who's heartbroken. The movie doesn't end even as happy as that situation. Maybe a lot could have been avoided if Johnny had listened to Morrissey, another Manchester native, when he sang, "If you think peace is a common goal that goes to show how little you know."

Why Bother with the 18th Century if George Washington Isn't Involved?

I've been seeing this new Sleepy Hollow getting talked about on io9 where a couple writers seem to be thoroughly ecstatic about it. It seemed like some of it may be due to bribery since the articles feature a couple statements that are simply too ridiculous to take at face value, like this article which asks, "How will the Sleepy Hollow show be different than Tim Burton's movie?" As though that's where it all began. The interview is with executive producer Len Wiseman;

But he was attracted to the idea of trying to find a new take on this story and get back to its roots. "In the original Washington Irving story, the origin of Headless — he's created in a battle of the Revolutionary War, which is something that we were able to depict in ours. There's a battle scene."

I like to think I'm not such a sourpuss. I can enjoy a pastiche. I like Hammer movies. I thought maybe I should come down off my obstinate plough-horse ("Gunpowder") and give this show a chance.

First of all, this show in no way takes the story back to its roots. I would put money on this being the most divergent adaptation ever made. The Tim Burton movie, with all the liberties it took, at least kept in place the theme of the city dweller running afoul of rural custom. At least the character of Ichabod Crane was a little silly, even if he was better looking than the man in the story and a crime fighter.

Aside from names, I don't think there are more than three aspects of the original story preserved. Ichabod Crane is still male. Sleepy Hollow is still a place where people live. Katrina is still a woman. Beyond these most superficial of details, there's little here that would connect the show with Washington Irving's story.

But is it fun? Well, not for me. It's pretty milquetoast with a lot of lazy writing.

Nicole Beharie is charming as modern day police lieutenant Abbie Mills who meets Ichabod after he wakes up from an over two hundred year enchanted slumber in a cave. There are a couple cute pieces of humour about his interactions with the modern world though nothing as clever as "Rip Van Winkle".

Abbie's partner is killed by the Headless Horseman, who in this version is not the ghost of a Hessian or Brom Bones in disguise but rather one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, who was somehow under the employ of Britain during the Revolutionary War. Abbie calls in that there's an officer down and across town an officer played by John Cho receives the call and is on his way to assist but stops to arrest and take back to the station the recently awakened Ichabod Crane apparently for jaywalking.

This is the show's extremely, bafflingly lazy way of getting Ichabod and Abbie together.

It's pretty obvious what kind of demographic the show's aiming for. The cute Abbie has buried her heart since witnessing something supernatural in her youth that no-one believed really happened to her, and the handsome, brilliant, strong, aristocratic and somehow vulnerable Ichabod personifies evidence that there really is magic in the world.

There're a lot of standard supernatural cop show moments, particularly the end where Abbie's superior all but says, "Okay, until all this is sorted out, you two are stuck with each other--I'm making you partners!"

What fascinates me is how the changes made to Ichabod's character reflect what audiences need in their fantasies nowadays. In the original story, Ichabod is an impoverished, American, itinerant school teacher who's forced to lodge with the parents of his students, doing odd jobs in return. He's physically peculiar looking, though his education lends him some attractiveness to the women of the remote village. He's really smitten by Katrina Van Tassel, but a lot of his pursuit of her is motivated by her father's wealth and he hopes to be delivered from his tramp-like lifestyle. His primary rival is Brom Bones, and Ichabod is no match for him physically, not being an athletic specimen by any means.

Ichabod Crane in the new show is not only a war hero, General Washington personally enlists him to battle the mysterious horsemen who Ichabod eventually beheads personally after shooting him in the chest from range, knocking him off his horse. He's still a teacher, but no pathetic wandering schoolmaster he--no, he was a professor of history at Oxford. Instead of a man of shaky moral convictions, this Ichabod is an Englishman who defected to the side of the American colonists, compelled by his conscience. And he's pretty conventionally handsome.

One of the io9 reviews says the show's "leads are well-acted and already being fleshed out beyond the tropes they’re starting from." I would say the exact opposite is taking place--fleshed out characters have quite obviously been dumped for modern supernatural romance tropes. You know, I don't think anyone at io9 has ever read "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow".

Sonnet of the Daleks by setsuled

Twitter Sonnet of the Daleks

Silver cylinders wag plungers at Earth.
Offended voices raise as they all point.
Tinsel fingers from an egg beater berth.
Eye stalks swivel slowly in socket joint.
Frozen blue springs keep a snug cornea.
Lidless lenses restlessly demand death.
Green yolks are perpetual hernia.
Panicked cursors count more days than Macbeth.
Pulsing, gentle garbage disposal womb.
Outrage ignites here before all crime.
Immortal metal sheathes a lousy tomb.
Shining slimy suns are born all the time.
Rice pudding placates no kettle of hate.
White hot space machines have no time for fate.

No Volunteers

Last night I dreamt my primary means of transportation was a swarm of bees that crawled about, never flying, carrying me in a sitting position. I was only stung once, on the palm of my hand, but I remember everyone being very angry at me for getting about in this way. I didn't see the problem if the bees didn't mind, in fact they seemed to multiply during the time they carried me. There was more to the dream, too--something about being in a class with a teacher who unabashedly robbed possessions from the students and something about being under surveillance, possibly regarding the bees.

I guess I picked an inappropriate movie to write about yesterday in light of the navy yard shooting which left 13 dead. I had read about the story before writing my blog entry but somehow it didn't occur to me until later it might not have been the best time to write about a John Woo film starring a million bullets. Though, of course, considering ongoing violence throughout the world, such a movie would always be a ridiculous clash with reality somewhere. And I wonder that I can still see anything extraordinary about a shooting occurring in the U.S.--a by-product, I suppose Putin would say, of America's perception of itself as exceptional. I doubt I need address Putin's hypocrisy in his op-ed at this point. But it's certainly true the U.S. notoriously harbours an undeserved admiration of itself.

I see a few obligatory mentions of this latest incident prompting dialogue on firearm legislation. But if dead children and a congresswoman with a life altering injury weren't enough to move the beast of capitalism to empathy I doubt the deaths of a dozen military men will. I doubt there's one person who seriously expects it to.

I can't tell whether this cartoonist is making a point by putting a hammer and sickle on Putin's arm or if it's a reflection of the artist's ignorance. In any case, it's once again appropriate to quote William S. Burroughs;

We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision.

They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of past.

There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers.

The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident. Inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.

Perhaps the last haven for the dictator is in the motion picture industry, something implied by this badly written op-ed in The Guardian. I get annoyed when I see the many typos and errors that crop up on my blog but when I see mistakes in a piece written for a publication where people are presumably paid to do copy editing it's even more frustrating. Here are a couple gems;

Sir Lawrence Olivier and method-acting Dustin Hoffman shared an infamous exchange during the filming of Marathon Man. Hoffman, who had rationalised not sleeping for 24 hours as preparation a gruelling scene where he needed to appear exhausted, was approached by Sir Laurence, who simply asked “why don’t you try acting?”.

That's two spellings for Olivier's first name, I guess they figured one of them must be right so why bother looking it up? It's Laurence, by the way.

Yet this tightly-bound relationship can often crosses over into abuse.

The article lazily connects voluntary method acting techniques with director enforced physical and psychological stress. I do agree that it's troubling that in a disproportionate number of the cases where the actor is unwillingly suffering for a director it's a female actor and a male director. The quote from Bjork about Lars Von Trier has a fascinating insight, "He needs a female to provide his work soul. And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming. And hide the evidence."

Though it's interesting the Guardian article avoids using the entire quote from the article it pulls its quote from;

"...you can take quite sexist film directors like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick and still they are the one that provide the soul to their movies. In Lars von Trier's case it is not so and he knows it. He needs a female to provide his work soul. And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming. And hide the evidence."

Perhaps the author of the Guardian article found this muddied the issue a little too much.

Personally, I generally do think an actor ought to be willing to go as far as the director wants. If the actor is unwilling, he or she should not accept the role. If the director finds the actor unwilling to do what he or she needs him or her to do, the director ought to have the right to fire that person. But it gets tricky when one considers the legal ramifications of firing someone for not being willing to have a nude boxing match twenty feet in the air or something. Also there's the consideration of what if, as in Bjork and Von Trier's case, the actor and director had initially seemed to be on the same page on the issue and later found themselves at odds? You end up with a lot of wasted time and footage if the actor leaves the film under those circumstances, a situation that could endanger the possibility of the film being finished at all. It seems to come down to the question of whether art is more important than human suffering. I would say, absolutely. Suffering is a much more finite thing than art.

I'm glad there are protections in place now against harming animals for the sake of film, beings whose suffering for art is inevitably non-consensual. But would Apocalypse Now be the same without animal slaughter? Or Aguirre, the Wrath of God without Kinski flinging the monkeys around?

Having seen only two of John Woo's Chinese films now, I'm starting to understand why they're so much better than his American films. They're just as silly but they're earnest as hell. The two I've watched, 1986's A Better To-morrow and 1989's The Killer have very similar plots--Chow Yun-fat plays a gangster, a supernaturally expert killer, and another guy plays the cop intent on busting him before they finally join forces for a decadent gun battle at the climax.

The Killer is definitely the better of the two films, as it streamlines the plot a bit more and moves Yun-fat to a more central role. It's not hard watching these films to see why he became a star. He has the remarkable poise and capacity for sudden violent and precise movement that make a great action star.

Wikipedia says Woo was inspired by the films of Martin Scorsese but The Killer seems more in line with the films of Sylvester Stallone, featuring the pariah killing machine like the Rambo movies, though it's much more delightful than those films.

It's hard to think of a Scorsese movie that even approaches the level of melodrama in The Killer--Yun-fat plays a contract killer named Ah Jong who stipulates in every job that the person he kills be thoroughly bad. Then, during the first of the film's several long shootouts where everyone shooting at Ah Jong misses and everyone he shoots at gets killed, he accidentally blinds Jennie (Sally Yeh), a beautiful young piano player he tries to protect. Already the needle on the melodrama meter has broken past the Dickens mark.

Wracked with guilt, Ah Jong dedicates himself to protecting and helping Jennie in any way he can, going to watch her perform night after night and eventually becoming her lover after he beats up some thugs trying to mug her. All the while she never discovers he's the same man who blinded her.

Danny Lee plays Detective Li Ying, and it's the moral conflict between the two men that drives the film. Li Ying hates Ah Jong with intense passion, even after witnessing the assassin protecting a small child who got caught in crossfire between gangsters and police, even going so far as to drive her to the hospital, all through a hail of bullets.

It feels like guns are being fired for around 75 percent of this movie and around 20 percent of it, Li Ying and Ah Jong are having an intense conversation while holding guns on each other.

Are you an accurate subtitle?

In both this and in A Better To-morrow, one senses Woo is passionately caught up in the idea of the law not being in the right and how the system makes things unfair for good people. It would be a noir if it wasn't so silly. As it is, it's rather endearing.

The Murder Bouquet

Is it appropriate to wonder whether a villain would be happier married to another villain or to a virtuous person whose faith and position are conducive to further villainy? We're dealing with a subcategory of morality where the main category has already been violated, of course, yet this question is one of the things that makes 1949's Kind Hearts and Coronets so wonderful. The other thing, of course, is the delight inherent in sharing the exploits of an utterly unrepentant serial killer.

When we meet Louis (Dennis Price) at the beginning of the film, he's already the Duke of Chalfont and already in a cell awaiting the hangman's noose in the morning. To pass the time he writes his memoirs, the tale of how, to avenge his ostracised mother, he killed six of her relatives, all individuals in the line of succession to the dukedom ahead of Louis.

All six of Louis' victims, and two more individuals who die on their own, are played by Alec Guinness. Guinness does a brilliant job in each role and though the device is amusing it somehow doesn't deflate the gravity of Louis' crimes. He feels sorry about having to kill a woman who happens to be in a boat with one of his victims but is not heart broken. He's glad when he doesn't have to kill the Alec Guinness who got him a decent job in the family bank because he dies of a stroke. He's sorry to have to kill the affable photographer Alec Guinness.

But he seems to feel all his regrets with the depth most of us would feel at being unable to attend the wedding of a dear old friend. Louis does evince some passion when he confronts the duke himself and tells him, before he kills him, why he's carried out this campaign of systematic murder.

This he's very clear about, the motivation he's carried since the duke denied his mother's dying wish to be buried in the family plot. His feelings regarding the two young women in his life are subtly conveyed through story and performance as being much less clear to him.

Sibella is his first love. He meets her in school and her father, a doctor, takes him in when his mother dies without being able to bequeath him her annuity. So he's forced to take a job as a draper, something he considers deeply humiliating. It's because of this Sibella, despite having affection for Louis, doesn't hesitate before accepting the marriage proposal of a man with wealth and position. She also delights in tormenting Louis with this state of affairs.

As Louis' position in the world starts to look better after a couple Alec Guinnesses have perished, she begins to meet Louis in his apartment entirely for the purpose of sleeping with him.

She asks him to tell her how he would describe her to someone else.

"I'd say that you were the perfect combination of imperfections. I'd say that your nose was just a little too short. Your mouth just a little too wide. But that yours was a face that a man could see in his dreams for the whole of his life. I'd say that you were vain, selfish, cruel, deceitful. I'd say that you were adorable. I'd say that you were . . . Sibella."

She loves this description so much she asks him to repeat it before they make love.

The other woman is the widow of the photographer Alec Guinness, a woman of fundamental virtue whom Louis regards as being a sort of aesthetically suitable duchess for him.

One likes both women but perhaps wishes to see Louis and Sibella end up together a little more. That the heart automatically wishes for the happiness of a serial killer probably says something about human nature. What is admirable about Louis? He's a man of conviction, who hasn't the slightest inhibition about pursuing what he wants and what he feels is right. He's a psychopath and as is sometimes the case with psychopaths, extremely charming for it.

Twitter Sonnet #547

A round rubber coat looks up from slumber.
A pruned sun gazes purply through cardboard.
Caravans of spines rattle on lumber.
Cotton sticks to where pages are harboured.
Galloping cattails trampled the coke cup.
No-one wonders where kelpie buy produce.
Social fungi greet toes in the stirrup.
Reeds clasp the rail of the drifting caboose.
A beige plastic bridge reached over the pond.
A stone eyebrow disapproved of a web.
The old yellow cowboy dyed his hair blonde.
Lando won at the Battle of Taanab.
Drama grasps the invisible torso.
Airplane spies don't crack under the lasso.

Some Memory Lanes Were Never There

For some reason to-day I got to thinking about the Interpersonal Communication class I took a couple years ago. Just as a sort of idle challenge I decided to try and remember one thing I retained from that class, one item of information that was part of the subject. I couldn't think of a single thing. I remember the teacher was very high strung and giggly. I remember one of my classmates was a skinny young woman who was in the navy and loved football and The Godfather and other things she considered traditionally male. But I can't remember anything about "communication" as it was outlined by the class. I got an A in the class, I got As on all my tests, which were all essays. I must have written at length about things pertaining to the class but I'll be damned if I can remember even a single topic on which I wrote. Maybe I could check the sixty dollar text book I had to buy for the class, but I guess that would be cheating.

Through the mists of my memory extremely vague things emerge about how sometimes people listen to each other and sometimes they don't. I think the word "ethnocentric" was discussed but it was also discussed in my Anthropology class. In fact, I do remember thinking the most valuable things in the class were things that ought to be, and often were in fact, taught in English and Anthropology.

I remember the two movies we watched, of course. I can't remember the title of one of them, which was a documentary about a woman who dressed and lived as a man for a couple years as a social experiment. I remember she wasn't very good at it as before beginning it didn't even occur to her to study men's body language, she basically just wore men's clothes and was quite surprised when everyone saw through what she was doing.

And we watched Breaking the Waves, which of course I love but I remember not being quite clear on what the movie had to do with the subject matter of the class. The teacher seemed to focus on the differences between Emily Watson's and Stellan Skarsgard's cultures, but the movie seems to me more about resolve and torment than about culture shock. If it were me, I might have picked a movie like Walkabout or maybe The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. But, then, I can't honestly claim to know what would be appropriate for that class.

Considering cinema has been the dominant art form of the past century, it seems rather strange it's not a formal part of the curriculum. Maybe then most modern movies wouldn't be lousy.

Here are some pictures I've taken lately;

Markets of Lives and Souls

Violence here and its unpredictable consequences lurk ever on the edge of reality. Like in his Get Carter, Mike Hodges' 1987 film A Prayer For the Dying achieves a lot of its magnetic quality by showing violent characters not being violent, by simply regarding each other casually allowing the possibility of violence to provoke quiet tension. This is an inferior film to Get Carter and certainly to Croupier, though I think a lot of the film's flaws are due to producer interference which introduced elements of a more conventional film. But it still mostly works as thoughtful noir.

At the centre of the film is Mickey Rourke as Martin Fallon, a former IRA member who, at the beginning of the film, we see in Northern Ireland contributing to a roadside bombing that accidentally kills a school bus full of children instead of the intended targets, a couple British army vehicles. He vows to give up killing and flees to London where a former comrade blackmails him into working for an English mob boss named Jack Meehan. It's a nice, typical existential noir problem--Fallon doesn't have a choice but to perform a hit if he wants to flee the British Isles, but of course one always has a choice.

A problem arises when Fallon's witnessed in killing his target by a Catholic priest named Michael Da Costa (Bob Hoskins). Fallon refuses to kill Da Costa, tricking the priest into taking confession from him about the killing thereby binding him to silence. This isn't good enough for the gangsters who demand Fallon kill Da Costa anyway.

This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Surely the only person endangered by Da Costa is Fallon and if Meehan's concerned about Fallon getting caught and talking to the police, I don't see why they don't simply execute Fallon.

Instead, they put him up with a prostitute named Jenny (Camille Coduri) who looked incredibly familiar to me but it wasn't until I checked imdb after the movie that I realised she was Rose Tyler's mother from Doctor Who.

So River Song in Croupier and Jackie Tyler in A Prayer for the Dying. Perhaps this is some insight into tastes of the casting director for Doctor Who.

Anthony Head is in the film, too, as one of Meehan's henchmen.

Most of the movie is spent with people hanging around waiting for someone to start killing. There's an ongoing dialogue of moral conflict between Da Costa and Fallon as Da Costa attempts to redeem Fallon's soul while Fallon has seen too much of the senselessness in how the world metes out violence to even begin to feel persuaded.

Da Costa isn't really a great one to present the argument for religion. A former military man, we see in one scene where he beats the lights out of four of Meehan's men that the priest barely contains an intense compulsion to violence himself.

Perhaps the weakest element of the film is Da Costa's daughter, an organist for the church named Anna (Sammi Davis). She's blind and has complete faith and love for Fallon. And otherwise she doesn't have a lot of character traits. She seems to exist mainly for a tremendously awkward love sequence between herself and Fallon and to be terrorised by Jack Meehan's sadistic brother Billy.

Her love for Fallon, as the blind woman who can "see" better than everyone else, actually just waters down the moral conflict between Fallon and Da Costa. Particularly as Fallon's personal dissatisfaction with life is a lack of anything to believe in. After his disillusionment with the cause in Northern Ireland, he remarks there's nothing he wants to live for and there's nothing he wants to die for.