September 13th, 2008
David Opderbeck, on why someone might vote for Lying John McCain:
You know, I was thinking about this from a game theoretic perspective. You’d probably want to elect the candidate who lies 90% of the time over the one who lies 50% of the time. With the 90% candidate, I can believe the opposite of what he/she says and be right most of the time. With the 50% candidate, I pretty much have to guess whether what he/she is saying is true at any moment. 
[Don't look for the quote on his blog -- it was an e-mailed response to this post that I wrote here.]
Categories: Humor, Politics |
1 Comment
September 13th, 2008
I attended an opening-night showing of Righteous Kill, the long-awaited DeNiro/Pacino vehicle, last night. It was showing at the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan - former home of the famous Ziegfeld Follies, and still in good repair in all its ornate, flocked-red-velvet-and-gold magnificence - one of the greatest places in the world (behind, perhaps, the main stage of Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood) to see a movie. This is the first film in which Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino have really acted together (their disconnected contributions to Godfather II, and their one measly scene in Heat, don’t count), so fans like me have been drooling in anticipation of this movie. This morning I found an e-mail from the MovieTickets.com Web site, which I had used to reserve a ticket, inviting me to post a review of the film, but the review I wrote was too long for their site, so I’m posting it here for no apparent reason other than to spread the Pacino-love.
I enjoyed this movie very much, but I have to say it didn’t meet my expectations. This will not rank as one of the greatest performances of either of its stars, and as the only film in which they have shared the screen extensively it falls far short of what might have been. That being said, it was a good enough movie on its own merits.
The movie follows two jaded NYPD homicide detectives as they track a serial killer who leaves awful poems with the bodies of his victims. One (DeNiro) is so worn down by the job that he is regarded by his partners and boss as a ticking time bomb; the other (Pacino) has learned to manage the stresses of the job, but is loyal to his partner and friend.
As the investigation proceeds, DeNiro slowly unravels, while the detectives begin to suspect the killer might actually be a cop. Soon the detectives are investigating each other, while the killer seems to become more reckless.
A few sideplots - DeNiro’s rough-sex relationship with one of the crime scene investigators from his station, his willingness to bend the law and his partners’ feelings about that, and the two partners’ attempts to bring down a local drug dealer - add interest, but not much. (NB: the lack of benefit from the rough sex thing had entirely to do with quantity, not quality. “Less is more”, my ass.) The tension between the detectives is heightened by the framing of the film - the audience is led into certain expectations about the partners and their actions, which may or may not be borne out in the end. Every element of the film - including what had seemed the most trivial points originally - is brought together in a carefully worked out conclusion that may be just a little too pat. Nonetheless, it is an interesting, complex, and watchable film - you can easily get caught up in the story and feel satisfied in following it through to the end.
In fact, with two lesser stars it would, paradoxically, have been a less disappointing film - a perfectly workaday “every cop is a criminal / psychokiller on the loose” action drama that could stand proudly among other good films of its type. The only real problem is that one expects more from these actors, given such rich characters to work with. For fans of DeNiro and Pacino, the film is a long-awaited opportunity to drink in a combined 180 minutes of their screen presence - at least one, and usually both, of the stars is in almost every scene. But, honestly, it doesn’t look like they’re really trying.
DeNiro goes crazy quietly, like he’s saving his strength for something more important he has to do later. Pacino is so laid back he literally looks like he’s falling asleep in some scenes which were intended to be set up as major psychological confrontations. (I left the theater replaying in my mind the hilarious scene from Gun Shy, in which Liam Neeson, as an insomniac and sleep-deprived FBI agent, can barely stay awake while gambling his life in a confrontation with Oliver Platt’s Mafia kingpin: “You look like you got dat sleepin’ disease . . . narcosleepy . . . “. This, to put it mildly, is not a good thing, if you’re not actually in that movie.) The whole point to this movie is that the characters care so passionately about what they’re doing - for not always admirable reasons - that it warps their personalities. But they look so bored, while making speeches about how much they care, that in the end you don’t understand why they go to all this bother. And, frankly, I suspect that’s the question DeNiro and Pacino were asking themselves as they made this film.
I hope they find a good answer to it, and bring it with them to a better movie next time.
Categories: General, Media, News & Current Events, Reviews |
2 Comments
