The Good, The Great, and the Ugly

Layer Cake

I picked up a copy of this with the old copy, where much of the cast are more-or-less equally displayed. Newer versions have, I see, reacted to Daniel Craig’s success as James Bond by pushing him forward in the publicity. In one sense, it’s a bit of a pity—the movie doesn’t need Bond-dust to look good.

Layer Cake is directed by Matthew Vaughn, the guy who produced Guy Ritchie’s good movies, all two of them; it’s a very good Brit-crime flick. It’s humour is generally far drier than the likes of Snatch or Lock, Stock, which would be two of the obvious comparisons. In a sense, it’s a movie that seeks to undercut the glamour of Brit crime movies—Craig’s character is a smart, well-dressed, calculating pro who is going to get rich and get out; he’s a well-heeled businessman, dealing with the cream of the old guard, who themselves have become well-heeled businessmen, dining at fine country clubs and so on.

Nice theory, right? The film quickly peels away the glamour of the central character’s life, and, indirectly, the British film industry lionisation of crime culture, showing Craig’s character a hasher reality—the blokes he’s working for and with may affect an establishment front, but, in the end, they fought up a very dirty path, and underneath they’re still the same bastards. Craig’s attempts to get out cleanly go nowhere—in the end, he’s dragged further in to gangs and power blocks, with Michael Gambon playing an old, genteel-seeming hard bastard who hates Craig’s character—not least for his clean hands.

The action is brutal and unglamorous. Once Craig stumbles into the plots and counter plots of the top men the film creates a real sense of his danger. The black humour keeps coming, and the film becomes more and more taut—more like a thriller, in some ways, than an action-gangster movie.

I won’t say too much more about it, since I enjoyed it’s twists and turns, and you should too. I like the black humour, the combination of grit and glamour, and the determination to examine what the character’s lives are really, fundamentally about.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

This would be worth it for the typography and design alone. It’s kind of hard to sum up without chucking spoilers everywhere; if I wanted to offer a hyphenated genre summary it would be noir-arty-metafiction-romantic-comedy-mystery movie, I guess. With Val Kilmer as a hardboiled gay detective. Who meets a small-time theif being cast in a role after an accident during a burglary gone wrong. Who meets up with his dream girl.

And then there’s a murder.

See this. If you have any affection for smart, funny, poignant detective movies, see this.

V for Vendetta

Let me say: I wanted this to be good. For one thing Alan Moore, brilliant artist and pretentious fruit-loop, has had so many awful adaptations of his work it seems he must, sooner or later, be due a good one. For another V for Vendetta is probably my favourite of his comic works, probably because it’s such a highly political, relevant piece of work. I admire From Hell, but I don’t really like it that much. I find Watchmen compelling, but you really have to care about superheroes-as-modern-mythos to get a lot out of it. V has a broader reach, I think, and is better for it. Also, I read Orwell at an impressionable age, you know?

Also, I must admit an ignoble motive: there are a lot of people who knee-jerk dismiss anything before they’ve seen it. People were queueing up (as they did with Lord of the Rings, for example) to fling poo before so much as the merest sliver of detail has emerged, driven mostly by a kind of nerdy elitism that is a counterpart to people who whine on about “real punk” or “real heavy metal.” It would be kind of amusing for those people to be proven wrong.

Alas, alas, alas.

Look, I understand that in moving from one medium to another there will be changes, compromises. Things that work well here will not work well there; the biggest problem with any movie is almost always going to be time. Things will have to be cut, compressed. So the part of the comic where Evey shacks up with a gangster after running away from V is replaced with a brief stay with Stephen Fry playing Stephen Fry; it plays out in much the same way, in any case. We don’t really get the intrigues amongst the Leader’s top men and their wives; to get all that in you’d need a mini-series, not a movie. Fine, fine. I’m not the sort to squeal when things are chopped and changed a bit.

But still, in the first 30 minutes I came close to switching it off and hurling the DVD out the window. The opening, with Guy Fawkes and Natalie Portman rattling on about her love for V was bad enough. The butchery of Finch’s character was the piss-flavoured icing on the donkey-shit cake.

Then it got worse, by getting better. Specifically, the section where Evey is captured and tortured is powerful, effective— a faithful adaptation from the book, and a sign of what the film could have been if screen time hadn’t been wasted on crap like Evey’s extra life outside, or falling in love, or the other steaming mounds of shit spattered across the screen.

The respite was brief, though. Soon enough we were back into V for Romantic Movie land, V for Fucked-Up Extra Sub Plots. In the time taken to spin out the “Government Creates Crises” we could have had more of, you know, the original story. Which in straight adaptation would have made for a really good viewing.

And my thought at the end, when the army of V mask wearers show up was— well, I guess it’s kind of Alan Moore by way of Monty Python. “You are all Anarchists! You all stand for individual freedom!”

You know what would have made this whole mess better? Letting Paul Verhoeven direct it. Yes, he sometimes creates great steaming shitcakes—but Starship Troopers and Robocop and Flesh and Blood are evidence that he could have made a V for Vendetta that wouldn’t be a horrible dissapointment.