an antidote to the glorification of crime in cinema

In the distant past, back when the Rat Pack was walking the street, there was made a film called Ocean's Eleven. The film was basically an excuse for Sinatra and his buddies to be in Las Vegas for a few weeks and get paid while they were partying all night. The film is somewhat forgettable, and is only noteworthy today for the remake which was made a few years ago.

In the original Ocean's Eleven, the bad guys lose all the money at the end of the film. That ending was in line with the dominant moral philosophy of the time, which said that crime must not be shown to be lucrative in film. After all, every film must demonstrate the truth of the notion that crime doesn't pay.

The remake with Clooney, Pitt and the gang had a much different ending, as I'm sure everybody reading this knows. Indeed, in recent years films like the Oceans' Eleven series, Entrapment, the Italian Job remake, The Score, etc. Indeed, the fantasy theft caper is a booming genre in Hollywood these days.

So, I decided to see an English-language film in Montpellier, after sitting through Shoot 'Em Up in French a couple weekends past. (Oh, I'm sure I missed the subtleties of that film because of the language barrier!) This evening I saw Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, and Marisa Tomei.

I really liked this film. I recommend it highly to everybody. It is an antidote to the trend of glamorizing crime in films of recent years.

(minor spoilers follow)

This film concerns a robbery planned by a man named Andy, played by Hoffman, and his brother named Hank, played by Hawke. Andy and Hank are both short on cash, so they decide to rob a small jewelry store in a suburban strip mall, a "Mom and Pop" place. The film starts with the robbery, which goes horribly wrong when the robber, who is a third man, is shot by the old woman alone in the store. In retaliation he shoots her back, critically injuring her, before she shoots him again and he flies through the glass door of the store, startling Hank, who has been waiting outside in a car in a curious moustache, wig, hat and glasses disguise. Hank drives off, swearing.

The film is told from three points of view, those of Hank, Andy, and their father, Charles. The magnitude of the fiasco is slowly revealed.

First, we find out that the store was not just any "Mom and Pop" store. It turns out that the Mom and Pop were Charles and his wife, Nannette. The plan was to hit the store when the place was manned by a nearsighted employee, Doris.

Then it's revealed that it wasn't Doris there after all.

As even more secrets become revealed, the fiasco slowly crushes all of the people involved. Decisions that seem initially innocuous ultimately turn out to have drastic implications.

I am a fan of realism in films, and the crime genre has been in need of a jolt of reality to the fantasy fare that audience have been gobbling up in recent years. What this film underscores is that crime is borne of selfishness and hatred, and the path taken can have severe consequences. Thankfully, this film does not fall into the opposite trap common in serial killer films (and much of TV crime), namely viewing life through a "good guys vs. bad guys" filter, where there are a certain number of "crazy" or "evil" people out there just waiting to prey on the weak and innocent. This other genre feeds the police state mentality, while the caper genre feeds the guilt-free capitalist mentality.

Come to papa!

After 16 days, my Barclays' debit card, which my mother mailed via US priority mail from Loo-zee-anna to Paris to try to catch me before I left for Montpellier, has finally arrived chez ma souer.

Go go postal service!

Looks like this guy was in charge:



(And a hello to the new visitor, Jolene!)

In case anybody was wondering

I have very little to say about the baseball situation, other than it was nice to wake up this morning, my fifth morning in Montpellier, and the first when I didn't check the scores to see that the Red Sox lost and the Yankees won.

Of course, neither played yesterday. But I'll take what I can get.

In a very real sense, it hardly matters now whether the Sox win the playoffs or not. The Yankees have so clearly been the better team for the past two months that I really have low expectations for the playoffs. With the best four hitters on the Red Sox all injured and the bullpen running out of steam, it could get ugly.

That will be my only comment for a while, as my German readers don't want to read about baseball.

Talk like a pirate day!

Garrh! Avast ye maties!

Some resources for your pirate inclined.

The homepage, your handy Talk Like a Pirate Day translator, and a YouTube clip featuring everybody's favorite movie pirate!

No, not Captain Jack Sparrow! It's Steve the Pirate!

RIP, Robert Jordan

Sad news.

Lesson for other authors: do not overestimate your ability to stay alive indefinitely, when choosing to add exponentially many characters and plot twists to your fantasy series. In the early 90s, Jordan put out the Wheel of Time books at a pace of about one every year to 18 months. And then the books started getting longer and longer, with more and more (mostly identical) characters, pursuing ever more uninteresting plot lines.

And now the series remains unfinished.

*sigh*

OK, this post is in poor taste. So be it.

going King mode

Too many things...time to go into an incoherent, Larry King-style rant.

- OJ got away with murder, so of course he thinks armed robbery is an easy thing!

- I'm sorry, there just is no moral line between "using your own cameraman to steal signals" and "using the network's cameramen to steal signals". Yes, rules should be followed, but enough of the moral outrage already|

- Buffy is tired of moving. She needs a permanent home.

- All those websites that have decided I speak French? Stop it! (I'm looking at you, Google..)

- Anyway, while the cats were staying at the Finsbury park flat of Dr. J and his red-head, the good doc tested his stealth badger camera in the flat to track cat movement. Some pics will be forthcoming.

- Bush cannot leave office soon enough. I'm tired of the idea that winning a war is done just like any other PR campaign. And the media fall right in line, every time, sucking up to General Petraeus on schedule. Stop it! The war is still a stupid and immoral idea. The fact that a temporary increase in force (and unsustainable increase in force, in fact) can be used to create statistics indicating a decrease in violence (as long as the stats are doctored sufficiently, and the media don't examine the story closely, which of course they won't) does not in any way justify staying in Iraq.

Whether Iraq becomes a peaceful, democratic society or not is not something that further American military presence in Iraq can affect in a positive way. Best idea? Get out. See Vietnam for an example.

I was refreshed to see Alan Greenspan acknowledge the elephant in the room: this war is about oil and always has been. That's always been true. I'm sorry, but it's so obvious that it's hard to stomach the steadfast refusal of mainstream media outlets to address this issue.

Look, oil prices have doubled since the invasion of Iraq. That fact is caused in part by the decrease in oil production from Iraq. It's also caused in part by the fact that the Bush family is essentially a subsidiary of the Saudi royal family.

Not only are oil prices going up, energy company profits are zooming up. Net profits at ExxonMobil, for example, have doubled during the war years. This is a fact that needs to be pointed out in any discussion of the war. Right now regular taxpayers are paying for a war (or, more precisely, funding debt to support a war) in order for Exxon to double their profits.

When discussing the American foreign policy, it's important to keep an eye on the ball. It is not in the interest of the country as a whole to do everything one industry wants it to do, no matter how important that sector of the economy is.

Let's take on these ratfuckers directly.

update

Have not really had a chance to blog recently. I'm at my sister's place in Paris. Sadly, all of her WiFi neighbors have discovered encryption, which means that I have to take my turn at the PC along with my sister and her husband.

Lots of things to talk about...the incompetence of Bush, the sheer vapidity of the news media, and the Patriots videotaping scandal.

I don't have time for any of this right now, but I should be back online tomorrow.