s

340 meters per second

Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.

&mdash Alfred Adler (1870-1937)

Friday, May 25, 2007

And yet so little.

One of the benefits of being forced into silent, solitary inaction by circumstance (read: a child with very particular sleeping habits) is the development of a daily time block reserved exclusively for the consumption of media. I can even afford to watch movies which, far from being on my 'must-see' list, only vaguely interest me. Case(s) in point:

* * *

If Nick Love were a little smarter, The Business could have been a brilliantly self-aware, hyper-generic doubleback on gangster iconography, the shallowness of every cinematic representation of 1980s-era shallowness and North America's perpetual motion cultural-regurgitation machine.

Instead, it's just one more boring, vacuous ode to greed, consumption, a loosely-defined criminal ethos and the (ubiquitous in this genre) perils of cocaine. Like Jarhead, this movie cannibalizes its betters and, after 97 minutes of digestion, leaves you with a steaming pile of stolen imagery and Disneyfied cultural touchstones.

Foreshadowing future tragedies (or refuting my entire point, depending on your point of view), star Danny Dyer provided the voice of GTA: Vice City's slimey limey, Kent Paul.


* * *

And then there's Art School Confidential, a shamelessly self-conscious romp through the tiny, navel-gazing world of... well, art school. Neither particularly offensive nor particularly interesting, this movie didn't leave much of an impression on me. The script is fine, the performances decent enough and the satirical barbs are spot-on (even if it is shooting fish in a barrel).

Without any punch or point, Art School Confidential left me dry and shrugging; YMMV.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home