“We was beat when we was born.”

I needed this one pretty bad (and again, I’m totally behind, this was before this past weekend). It’s amazing how many of my thoughts, things I’ve written this past week or so in places I can’t even link to such is the world, came together while I was watching this movie, as if someone up there, call it the movie god, was watching down and decided to send me a message saying, “you’re not alone on that, don’t worry.” (gugh, sorry if that was cryptic – I’d make it less so by way of more words but I really just need to post these straggling reviews while I’ve the urge)

“I’m just not used to having whether I stay or whether I go matter to anybody …”

The songs don’t come as thick and fast as I’d like, I found my focus drifting somewhere towards the end of the second act (speaking in 3-act movie terms, not 2-act theatrical terms, lol) – it would I think work ever so slightly better as the 90 minute TV movie musical like Annie or A Christmas Carol. But once the pace picks up again at the end – boy oh boy does it ever pick up, from “Once and for All”, the reprise of “And the World Will Know” all the way up until the end credits.

I’m not often stirred by things like this but like I said it just spoke volumes to my current concerns with how people are freely allowing their senses to be beaten down by keywords in the media that genuinely amount to brainwashing. The sight of Robert Duvall as Pulitzer with his fingers in his ears to the crowd of truth outside his building is seriously almost more music to my eyes than Alan Menken’s songs are to my ears.

“I can’t afford to be a kid no more.”

It’s really just one of those movies that, despite its flaws, when it hits its highs, of which there are many, it honestly feels like there needn’t be another movie in the cosmos. I keep going back to the lyrics of Once and For All this evening – nevermind the wonder of Alan Menken (god, I was tearing up almost before the picture had finished fading in with his opening notes, lol), if I’m honest Jack Feldman’s work is what deserves praising more here. Seriously if we could have just one or two movies a year with as much passion in them as there is there, the world would be a better place.

“There’s no one here but the fighters.”

I was pretty damn loathe to watch this without any prior knowledge of what it was about etc after Spartan completely failed to ignite me. That I’ve been terrible at keeping up the movie-watching habit lately (I’ll get better soon, I promise) made me even more apprehensive: I thought a stupid comedy might’ve been an easier option to get me writing again.

But dammit, it’s Mamet. I decided that if this movie couldn’t hold my attention then there must clearly be something wrong with me or it, lol, and I dove in. The opening credits didn’t let me down – all the names you want in a Mamet movie, Rebecca Pidgeon, Ricky Jay, a couple of surprises in Tim Allen and Jennifer Grey, the brilliant Robert Elswitt on photography duties. And then the madness begins.

The movie is pretty convoluted for the first 40 minutes. Speaking of Elswitt, the quirkiness of the plot points actually kind of reminded me of Paul Thomas Anderson. A strange and frazzled girl walks out of the rain into a martial arts place and almost shoots a police officer and we’re just expected to accept that “these crazy things happen all the time” as the Magnolia narrator might say. The moment is “forgotten” and we move onto something else. I think the one reason none of this bugged me because it was scored – yes, scored, I think that’s the only word for it – at all times by Mamet’s unmistakably perfect dialogue (something else that’s familiar in Anderson movies, in fact – I don’t think I’d ever entirely made the connection). It’s like Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes plus the old world meets new world ways of Ronin meets Rocky and Mamet’s edge.

But fear not, because it all comes together in the end, in more astonishingly powerful ways than I’d ever have seen coming. The strange girl turns out to be an attorney who has issues with physical contact after being attacked before the story begins. There’s a scene where a trainer from the martial arts place at the start, our hero Chiwetal Ejiofor, who must surely be headed for an Oscar some day if not today, breaks through the wall and holds her in exactly the way she doesn’t want in order to help her. It’s an outstanding scene ending in the line above that speaks volumes about how the good guys, the honest guys, maybe avoid such confrontations too much. The movie is ultimately about having enough of the bullsh*t and speaking the truth and it’s done in such an overwhelmingly brisk and unique fashion … one should expect no less from David Mamet, but like I said, after Spartan … it’s practically phenomenal. Double bill it with In Bruges. Even I’m inclined to dub it a “man movie” despite it’s leanings towards very womanly issues in that attorney subplot that really made the movie for me – those two times Ejiofor and the attorney touch are cinema at its best to me.