It’s been another great year at Cannes. When the sun finally came out it was like waking up from a dream. There are many things I will miss but I’m glad to be getting back home. Unfortunately I won’t be seeing David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, Walter Salles’ On the Road, Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy or Jeff Nichols’ Mud. You don’t plan your trip around the screening schedule, but I don’t know that I could have done it differently anyway. C’est la vie.

Until next time, here are a few departing shots.

[photo gallery after the cut]

It’s been another great year at Cannes. When the sun finally came out it was like waking up from a dream. There are many things I will miss but I’m glad to be getting back home. Unfortunately I won’t be seeing David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, Walter Salles’ On the Road, Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy or Jeff Nichols’ Mud. You don’t plan your trip around the screening schedule, but I don’t know that I could have done it differently anyway. C’est la vie.

Until next time, here are a few departing shots.

[photo gallery after the cut]

It’s been another great year at Cannes. When the sun finally came out it was like waking up from a dream. There are many things I will miss but I’m glad to be getting back home. Unfortunately I won’t be seeing David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, Walter Salles’ On the Road, Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy or Jeff Nichols’ Mud. You don’t plan your trip around the screening schedule, but I don’t know that I could have done it differently anyway. C’est la vie.

Until next time, here are a few departing shots.

[photo gallery after the cut]

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes–a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic–their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

Looking for a good quote, ran across the entire novel hosted by the University of Virginia. Gallery of lavish screen shots after the cut.

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes–a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic–their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

Looking for a good quote, ran across the entire novel hosted by the University of Virginia. Gallery of lavish screen shots after the cut.

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes–a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic–their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

Looking for a good quote, ran across the entire novel hosted by the University of Virginia. Gallery of lavish screen shots after the cut.

The first few scenes of Andrew Dominik’s masterful Killing Them Softly, you think you are in the presence of two idiots who have no idea what they’re doing. They’re being ordered to pull off a robbery. They’re the kind of guys who never figured out how stupid they were and those kind of guys don’t last long in crime novels. You know they’re marked men for their stupidity alone. This is a film that peels open slowly like an onion — stylized violence, piercing dialogue, the occasional blood spatter set to a familiar tune, a la Scorsese. But it was never meant to be a Scorsese film, nor a Tarantino film — though it makes you think it is from the first few scenes. How surprising, then, that it doesn’t turn out to be that kind of movie at all.

This isn’t a film about random, absurdist violence. Nor is it a film about the mob. It’s a film about getting the job done, quick and dirty, for a handsome reward. Beneath its surface is an angry rant about the current state of affairs in this country.

They pull of the heist remarkably well, considering. “You know they’re going to kill you, don’t you?” says Ray Liotta to one of them. But the thieves continue, take the money in the suitcases and make all of the guys playing poker put their money on the table. And off they go with the loot. Seems easy enough. Except that it never is. Enter Brad Pitt hired to come in and clean up the mess. He makes a deal with Richard Jenkins to bump off one guy but another hit man has to be brought in to bump off the other guy. The hit man turns out to be James Gandolfini, whose story just keeps getting worse from the minute he steps off the plane.

Pitt will have to fix the job and he does so with no remorse. Why should he have any remorse, after all. These people are all criminals in one way or another. Dominik has updated the attitude George V. Higgins crime novel to reflect the general mood in the country. The dialogue is brilliant, “I was drinking before you came out of your father’s cock,” says Gandolfini.

But there’s no getting around it that Killing them Softly is a deliberate indictment of the American capitalist system; the 2008 meltdown wasn’t only Wall Street, it was a systemic failure in the way our country was designed to function. From the beginning of the film through its duration, Dominik chooses as a backdrop the moment Obama took over the White House as Wall Street was collapsing. In the midst of this crisis, Obama promised change. But when the pieces fell apart, Obama had no choice but to work with the banks, to hire the same people responsible for the crisis. Big business, big crime, no difference.

The film doesn’t point the finger at Obama. It merely draws the parallel in a direct and obvious way that shit went down, illegal things happened and it’s up to you in America to look out for your own damned self, so let’s dispense with the idealism. It is a depressing, nihilistic way of looking at the state of things but you can hardly blame anyone for still feeling the pain.

Pitt is particularly good in this role, so comfortable in his own skin now he’s simply a joy to watch. Skilled, practical, focused — he says he doesn’t like killing up close, when his victims can beg for their lives — he prefers to kill them softly, when they don’t know what’s coming.

Gandolfini is scary/funny as the neurotic, misogynist hit man driving fast towards a brick wall. His weakness: booze and hookers. While his appearance in the film might seem random, it really isn’t. When you look at the Wall Street bailouts, the people hired to fix the problem never really got the job done. It is quick and dirty, this business of robbing the American people blind. And it was clumsy.

Killing Them Softly, some will say, hits you over the head with its message. But that, I think, was the whole point. What’s it going to take?