Last night Charlton Heston died at age 84. He is not an actor I fancy much but I wanted to watch 'The Agony...' for a long time. The movie itself I find very weak, somewhere near a documentary with all the poor and pretentious talk I can imagine. 'I'll die for my work' - Michelangelo exhibits mood swings worthy of some capricious wench rather then a passionate and focused artist. Read the book - it is much better.
There's been a few like this in the past years - the killer and his daughter - or how interesting it is to kill for a living and love at the same time. Nothing very special about this movie, maybe some loose ends (the old man missed his date, the daughter didn't fall for the new guy, what the H is Todd doing there at all?) but I liked these. I also liked the first scene - what happens before the credits. Like an essay sums up the whole thing and I would stop right there - the movie doesn't really get any better then this abstract. I would be probably horrified should I take this movie seriously - the possible range of issues that it touches is so great and so heavy that it has no time to do it. It's like one of my essays - too much ambition and too little space. It turns out that if reality is complex one way to deal with it is to focus on fewer aspects. I don't generally agree but I can see the point here - it really does take time to deal with issues.
The movie would be a perfect example of how the mouse eats the cat. It is not because the mouse is so stupid and the cat so strong that there is no possible comparison - the cat simply has to commit suicide. Surely there are secondary stories going around and the plot goes like this (spoiler warning!): A couple is ready to make a new life for themselves, moving to some other country and starting anew. Before they go to the airport a mafia-type guy calls the boy and asks for 'the money back'. The amount of money is so huge that 'the boy' wants to rob a small shop to cover for it. During the chocolate bar rubbery a young angelic cop comes in and is shot it the fight that starts. Running from the little shop 'the boy' and his hysterical and emotionally labile girlfriend have a fight so the car ends up in a ditch. Only after do they kiss and make up and start looking for a car which they find in front of a rich house. Trying to get the keys they manage to enter the house and a surprised scream of 'the girl' in front of an espresso machine calls Victor-' the guy from upstairs' - whom they 'kidnap'. Long story short - Victor is more dangerous then even I imagined. Please watch a Stan Laurel movie before and after this one - they are the same - stupidity drives the plot - there is no real action - In a movie with serious crime and issues that doesn't appear to be a parody - But it is.
2008 Western! People didn't get enough of westerns and they do more. Please watch the oldies again and spend the money on some serious stuff. "Aces 'N Eights" has some rough camera and gratuitous violence but it really doesn't get close neither to the Eastwood ones nor to modern sculpture like "The Assassination of Jesse James...". I missed the rhetoric of progress so much - "with the railway not only trains but the rule of law comes about". Sure you have to die a bit and we killed these other people but it will come. "And if you touch that gun and kill me you won't get a ticket to this train". I'm so impressed, this is such low propaganda that I cannot imagine serious people ever taking it into account. And don't forget "It (the railway) is bigger then you or me". Fuck off! Ah...and if I hear once more from a sad woman standing in front of man "What happened to us?" I'm going to eat some industrial sugar - I know it's bad for me but I cannot resist. It's 2008, wake up "Nothing happened" to us other then we're terribly bored by this line.
Random action flick with one moment to remember - picture this: the middle of a harry business involving royal family sex, a bank job, drungs, politics and the violence that go together. The leader of the pack (just out of the bank) comes home to wife and children for a brief update. He manages to tell her that things are worse than what she saw on TV one of their friends being dead and all. Guess what she says: I hear there was also a woman in the bank. Did you sleep with her? Yeap - that would have been really serious.
