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bloodygranuaile"M" is for "mob movie," and also "murder mystery"!
Last night I watched Scarface (the Pacino version, not the 1932 one), which somehow I had never seen before. I guess there's not a whole lot new that can be said about a classic like that--everyone knows what it's about. My thoughts: A friend recently compared mafia stories to trashy romance novels, and that was really all I could think about while watching it--this movie especially is very much a hyper-macho version of a trashy romance novel. I don't know why it amuses me so much, but nothing makes me laugh like loudly overdressed guys waving guns around and having gruff, heavily accented conversations about their balls. And god damn, do they talk about their balls a lot in this one! Factor in that Al Pacino's version of a Cuban accent is ridiculously mumbly and sort of weirdly low in the mouth so it sounds like he's keeping marbles in his jowls, and "balls" is about the only thing he says that you can make out half the time. Thankfully, this does not hold for the line "You need people like me, so you can point your fingers and say 'THAT'S the bad guy!'", which is such a fabulous line that "Say hello to my little friend" was quite a letdown afterwards. Also: the Gina subplot was my favorite, except for the poor girl's hair, and I wish she'd gotten a few more shots in. The whole grand "main plot" climax of "a large number of dudes show up and shoot lots of very large guns very loudly and there is lots and lots of shooting and yelling!" really just didn't have the same sort of emotional pull as Gina's final confrontation, what with all the actual dialogue referring to stuff that had actually happened, and there being a personal relationship between the two of them, and even having each individual shot from her handgun being individually discernible. I think I would have liked it better if Gina had just been a better shot and managed to take him out herself, and then the DEA or whoever (I wasn't even sure who it was that stormed the house at the end) had showed up and been like "...Um. Well then." But perhaps that is just me.
This morning I read Vicki Stiefel's The Grief Shop, which I think is the third installation in her Tally Whyte series, of which I have not read the first two. Vicki Stiefel was my Advanced Fiction Writing teacher last year, and gave us all copies of this book because it's her best-reviewed. And it's very good--fast-paced, multi-plotted, and Tally is a very capable not-actually-a-detective (she's a homicide grief counselor). Apparently some reviewers have characterized her as "whiny," but I judge her to be about 0.12 Hamlets of whiny, and a character really needs to be at least 0.25 Hamlets before they can actually be classed as "whiny." Also, she and most of her remaining family and also a bunch of small children are either dead or having attempts on their lives made for most of the book, so she's allowed to be less than chipper, I figure. I really don't want to talk about the plot, since it is a mystery novel and I don't want to spoil it for anyone else, but I will say that there are Nazis, and it is not goofy or cliched, which is impressive. It's also an extremely New England-y book, like even more New England-y than Castle is New-York-y. I personally had a bit of a difficult time reading some of it because of the small voice in my head comparing/contrasting every damn word in the book with all of the things Vicki taught us in class, but this is just a hazard of reading stuff by your teachers, and should not affect the reading experience of anyone who was not fortunate enough to take her writing classes.
Last night I watched Scarface (the Pacino version, not the 1932 one), which somehow I had never seen before. I guess there's not a whole lot new that can be said about a classic like that--everyone knows what it's about. My thoughts: A friend recently compared mafia stories to trashy romance novels, and that was really all I could think about while watching it--this movie especially is very much a hyper-macho version of a trashy romance novel. I don't know why it amuses me so much, but nothing makes me laugh like loudly overdressed guys waving guns around and having gruff, heavily accented conversations about their balls. And god damn, do they talk about their balls a lot in this one! Factor in that Al Pacino's version of a Cuban accent is ridiculously mumbly and sort of weirdly low in the mouth so it sounds like he's keeping marbles in his jowls, and "balls" is about the only thing he says that you can make out half the time. Thankfully, this does not hold for the line "You need people like me, so you can point your fingers and say 'THAT'S the bad guy!'", which is such a fabulous line that "Say hello to my little friend" was quite a letdown afterwards. Also: the Gina subplot was my favorite, except for the poor girl's hair, and I wish she'd gotten a few more shots in. The whole grand "main plot" climax of "a large number of dudes show up and shoot lots of very large guns very loudly and there is lots and lots of shooting and yelling!" really just didn't have the same sort of emotional pull as Gina's final confrontation, what with all the actual dialogue referring to stuff that had actually happened, and there being a personal relationship between the two of them, and even having each individual shot from her handgun being individually discernible. I think I would have liked it better if Gina had just been a better shot and managed to take him out herself, and then the DEA or whoever (I wasn't even sure who it was that stormed the house at the end) had showed up and been like "...Um. Well then." But perhaps that is just me.
This morning I read Vicki Stiefel's The Grief Shop, which I think is the third installation in her Tally Whyte series, of which I have not read the first two. Vicki Stiefel was my Advanced Fiction Writing teacher last year, and gave us all copies of this book because it's her best-reviewed. And it's very good--fast-paced, multi-plotted, and Tally is a very capable not-actually-a-detective (she's a homicide grief counselor). Apparently some reviewers have characterized her as "whiny," but I judge her to be about 0.12 Hamlets of whiny, and a character really needs to be at least 0.25 Hamlets before they can actually be classed as "whiny." Also, she and most of her remaining family and also a bunch of small children are either dead or having attempts on their lives made for most of the book, so she's allowed to be less than chipper, I figure. I really don't want to talk about the plot, since it is a mystery novel and I don't want to spoil it for anyone else, but I will say that there are Nazis, and it is not goofy or cliched, which is impressive. It's also an extremely New England-y book, like even more New England-y than Castle is New-York-y. I personally had a bit of a difficult time reading some of it because of the small voice in my head comparing/contrasting every damn word in the book with all of the things Vicki taught us in class, but this is just a hazard of reading stuff by your teachers, and should not affect the reading experience of anyone who was not fortunate enough to take her writing classes.
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Date: 2011-01-24 04:20 pm (UTC)ALSO, if you are interested in more gangster/mobster/seedy crime type movies, I can definitely give you some ideas. I wrote a whole paper on old gangster movies while at Clark
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Date: 2011-01-25 01:35 am (UTC)And I also kind of want to read your paper now, too. :P I wrote one on Catholicism in The Godfather (and some other books too) last year; it was one of the funnest paper I'd written in ages.
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Date: 2011-01-25 05:45 pm (UTC)And I'll come up with a list sometime soon. Just remind me, I've misplaced my brain due to this stupid brief.
...I really miss the days I wrote about gangster movies. Now I write about how the court shouldn't quash service or expand the fraudulent enticement doctrine. Ugh!