Click images for desktop size: "Calico: Conversation and Competition" by Unknown I've been watching movies and playing with dogs.
Maybe not productive as hell but gets me through the pain and keeps me at a level of sanity I'm pretty happy with.
As to my puppy: She's fitting in.
She misses certain things and is becoming increasingly jealous of my giving attention to any other dog. She's too gentle to become aggressive over it but she lets her feelings be known.
She displays the same attitude towards my friend. She doesn't want her petting other dogs either. My puppy wants it all.
And why not?
I've always watched a lot of crime films. I like them.
The latest USA caper films leave me cold. There's too much fantasy, and grit means a smidge of ash precisely stroked across the leads forehead.
The US used to make the best crime movies. Things like, "The Friends Of Eddie Coyle", "The Seven Ups", "White Heat" and even the minor "The Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3" all showed crime in a way that we could all relate to. It was sudden, desperate and could swoop down to overtake anyone; either as a criminal or a victim.
You didn't become a gun runner because you were near psychotic and you didn't supply guns to guys to knock off liquor stores on Saturday night.
It takes a bit of being a sociopath, all crime and for that matter most success stories require that.
You became a criminal because you wanted a new car with a blown hemi that could do the quarter mile in 8 flat. You could work for it at the factory where your father worked, getting paid minimum wage. If you had enough brains to be a criminal you saw where that would lead you: no hopes, no dreams, bills to pay and soon a wife and a family and there you were, forever trapped in the dust bins of the American Dream. Most good crime films show that, or at least hint at it enough to make me care.
Click images for desktop size: "Dale Evans" These criminals were real. The cops who chased them were real too.
Sometimes even more venal. Often a disease worse than the crime.
The super-sop syndrome started with Don Siegal's "Dirty Harry". Harry was a super cop, but he was flawed. He was more human than cop.
The movie cops that came in his wake forgot the humanity and went for the grim humor and the big guns.
They stopped being real. They stopped being something you could touch.
Spike Lee's, "The Inside Man" was a decent step in the right direction for crime films. As was Denzel Washington's portrait in "Training Day". They brought crime back to the possible.
Andy Lau, a brilliant Chinese filmmaker, has been doing it for years. His "Infernal Affairs" films, that he wrote, directed, produced and starred in (as well as doing some camera work). Kept the fantastic in check. You had to be smart, lucky and ruthless. And if you were you would win. You could beat the system and leave comfortably within it.
"Infernal Affairs" was made in America by Martin Scorsese. It got a lot of awards and was . . . okay. Scorsese let his catholic guilt get in the way. In his remake, "The Departed" he couldn't stand to see the bad guy (which is a term clearly open to definition) get away with it. he had to be killed at the end, which takes all the joy out of it.
The joy was seeing someone succeed despite all the odds, despite all the pressure, despite being merely human.
Lau is the only writer, producer, director, star working today. Sylvester Stallone was the other one. Odd to think of them together. George Clooney tries to be a filmmaker but feels best being a celebrity, at least that's the way it looks in his movies.