Yesterday Anja dumped me to go spend some girl time with some female classmates at a cloister near the Pantheon. I took myself off to see Peter Greenaway's new movie Nightwatchers, an interesting but somehow soporific film i am not sure i really 'got'....fair warning to the rest of you. Something about Rembrandt doing a lot of fornicating and figuring out a murder conspiracy that leads him to paint a huge picture that reveals the truth if you know how to parse all the imagery. He also spends a lot of time on his roof musing with some young prostitutes. I got to the theatre early and had to use the pissoir, paid for the ticket and asked the manager where it was and he told me, in French so i missed part of the explanation but he obviously didn't want me to go there right away because the last show was letting out. Okay, whatever, maybe he was worried about my safety pushing through the outrushing parisian assnobs. So, I waited for a couple of minutes and then went down, searched around and found out that the way to the loo was down the right side of the room my movie was in.....if you're following me that means that when my movie was actually playing folks would wander in, go down the side, use the facility and come back the same way. So, I do this, take a left behind the actual screen, very narrow here, find the tightest metal spiral staircase I have ever essayed, climb that and find myself in a postage stamp of a space with five fat old french women and one fat old french man. We are actually finding it hard not to touch each other as we wait for two doors to open to the two toilets, which from the top of the stairs is maybe three or four feet away. Immediately to my right is a sink (i mean immediately as in....next to me, one step back and I am going back down the stairs); the parisians are filling up all the space in between. And then I notice that to the left is a pissoir....a urinal. Two of the women are right in front of it, have their backs to it cuz it is right there in the open space, and they are unhappy anyway but even more upset to see another man. I had no wish to piss in front of a bunch of old women on my own, so I hesitated, but it was the obvious fact that they didn't want me to piss in front of them so much more than I didn't want to piss in front of them that spurred me to action. They parted grudgingly for me and as I initiated my stream I fancied I could feel their distaste, that I could see their already elevated noses gain just a bit more altitude. I wish I could have managed a fart, but finishing leisurely and then washing my hands in front of them was a far better experience than the movie itself.
As an aside, how can a city so full of itself and it's haute couture and haute culture also have streets so full of dog shit......how does one reconcile those two together? I just don't get it.
The next night Anja and I went to see Taken, the new Liam Neeson film, a mindlessly violent riff/rip of so many other senseless violence movies it was hard to ever get into it. The first few scenes establish he is a divorced dad living in reduced circumstances who has quit his high violence former life in the CIA, though his old buddies still come by for brewskies and steak, in order to spend some time and 'reconnect' with his extraordinarily insipid 17 year old daughter. He buys her a hi end all in one karaoke system for her birthday and takes it to her party which is being held at her stepfathers palace. She is unwrapping his offering when stepdad oneups him by giving her a horse.....bye bye 'old' dad. Of course we don't really know how badass he is, and neither does his family. The kid is very shortly thereafter on her way to Europe to follow the summer U-2 tour. He of course tries to drill a little common sense into her on the way to the airport, but she hasn't been in Paris for more than 30 minutes before she and her hard to believe even more ditzy girl friend have been kidnapped. She is talking to her dad as the mob carries off her buddy and he is packing before she is even out the door, having simultaneously recorded their voices and instructed her on what to do and then warning her captors that he is coming after them. 30 minutes later he is on the stepdad's private jet. He has also called his old beer buddies from 'Langley' (why didn't he invite some of them along?), played the voice recording for them and almost instantly found out the perps are an Albanian mob that turns innocent girls into crack whores. These Albanians are so tough (The Usual Suspects) that even the Russian mafia gives them a wide berth. And, to give the story some added spice, he is told that he only has 96 hours before little dipshit will be sold and disappearred. Gosh, what to do? Find the spotter at the airport, beat the shit out him, beat the shit of his buddy, steal a car, chase down the spotter who leaps off an off ramp and escapes only to mess it up by stepping back into the street to check out his pursuer only to get t-boned by a semi ala Meet Joe Black (note to self: in the unlikely event of ever escaping from a situation like this, DO NOT back into the street to check on my pursuer without looking both ways first). Seems like a dead end now...what to do? Find out where Albanians hang out in Paris, talk stupid to one of their street whores, then plant a bug on the Albanian pimp who shows up to beat him up, having had the forethought to hire an Albanian translater first, then go back to the car, listen to the pimp bad mouth him to some other Albanians, follow the Albanian to where a whole bunch of Albanians run a combo wrecking yard slash outdoor brothel, infiltrate brothel and find his daughters jacket, kill a couple of customers and then all the Albanians in various and sundry.....where is Joe-Bob anymore.....kung-fu, shooting-fu, car chase into a fork lift-fu, etc. He kills all the Albanians! What to do....oh, in escaping from and killing all the Albanians he also avoids several hails of bullets and he also grabs the innocent crack whore with his kids jacket. Of course, like every ex-spook he has a safe house from the old days (check each and every Robert Ludlum novel) and a scant few minutes later, with nary a peep from the flics (cops) he has his new friend in a hotel room and has rustled up some drugs and an IV. Crack whore wakes up and tells him she's nice and his daughter is nice and she gave her the jacket.....oh, and I remember that they took me to a house on Rue de Paradis with a red door. That's it for the crack whore......we never hear of her again. The sun hasn't moved on the horizon and Liam's outside the house with the red door masquerading as a French police bigshot who talks himself into the house, in English (note to self: never fall for the fake French inspector scam if the scam artist can't speak any French), with the scam that he is renegotiating the Albanians monthly payoff to the police department. He spins this line long enough to identity the actual Albanian he talked to on his daughter's phone....though why he goes to the trouble is not clear because right afterwards he kills ALL THE REST OF THE ALBANIANS. All except one. After he kills almost all the Albanians he wanders around the house and finds the useless girl friend who is already dead of an overdose so she's not around to complicate the plot any further. Anyway, back to the last Albanian.......he is wounded but unfortunately for him still conscious. Scant moments after the aforementioned carnage we find our hero, who has miraculously found himself a dark basement, with two very large nails in hand which he drives into the thighs of the remaining, thoroughly tied up to a chair Albanian. While delivering a sermon on the dependability of the Parisian power grid and reminiscing nostalgically of the old days, our hero is deftly hooking our vicious mobster's new metal appendages into said mains. Now there is a few tense moments of ask the question, get spat on by recalcitrant mobster, apply liberal amounts of electricity, watch veins bulge on mobster, ask question, get spat on again, apply power longer, get answer to question, turn power back on, and leave (right out of Man on Fire) mobster to fry.
We move immedately to our next venue, a rich man's party palace near the Seine where drugged up crack whore novitiates are being sold to the highest bidder. Well, we kill a few people and get into the auction and make sure that the bidder we are now holding hostage actually buys our daughter (who of course was the last and best auction item). And now, on the way to actually get his daughter....disaster. Our hero is felled from behind and moments later is hanging from a pipe. Enter rich guy, who asks a few questions, orders his 4 men to kill Liam quietly and exits back to his party. Not only does our hero kill these four armed men from an initial position that seems slightly disadvanteous, but he does it so quickly that the rich guy hasn't even reached the elevator. Liam kills one more guy to get to the rich guy who of course wants to bargain, but after he answers a few questions our hero toasts him in his elevator. Our hero exits the building. Notes his little girl being bundled into a big Audi. Chases said Audi on foot along the Seine (ala French Connection ll.....yes, I know that was Marseilles). Eventually gets tired of running and somehow grabs a high end car of his own. Follows the auction winner (amazingly, the guy he made buy his daughter has taken possession of his purchase) to a supersized yacht (by the way, Paris being denuded of Albanians by now the new bad guys are high gloss, impeccably dressed, champagne swilling, oily petrotrash). Yacht gets underway, our hero follows and eventually jumps out of the car and off one of the Seine bridges onto the boat where he lands, rolls into a petrothug, kills him and AFTER being discovered kills ALL OF THE PETROSCUM. The denouement, after all the minor fish have been executed, is that he finds himself in a room with your quintessential fat oily Arab in a voluminous burnoose, holding an evil looking knife to our hero's daughter's virginal (well, probably not anymore) neck. He too wants to bargain. He too barely has time to draw a deep breath (shades of Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive...."I don't negotiate!") before....well, you know.
I won't bore you with the rest; if 95% of the movie is violent nonsense, the last 5 reaches rarified heights of mushy moronity.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment