People, places and what triggers you to make faces

Friday, June 30, 2017

Drinking deep

When you're young, you're so eager to inhale the intellectuals like Dostoyevsky and Sartre and de Beauvoir and then Donleavy and John Irving and even, godhelpus, Ayn Rand, but as life grips you by the balls, so to speak, you gotta get some release. Which is why my books are for my emotional pleasure only these days and my movies are of the John Wick variety.
Isn't Keanu great? Personal suffering seems to have taught him to be a nice guy and one of the things about nice guys is that they don't take themselves too seriously. Perfect casting for Wick, then. In the sequel (we wait with bated breath for the third instalment), there are 2 bits I particularly liked. The one with his new dog, where the dog and the concierge stare at each other ruminatively in the hotel lobby, and then where Claudia Gerini plays out a near-Lady Macbeth death scene that was gorgeous, rich in tone, rich in setting, rich in life lessons.
How Gerini combined dignity, grace, guts and a middle finger raised for all us chumps out there made for some perfect cinema.
Rapper Common added something to the mix as well with that hard, dangerous edge we love in both our heroes and our villains, and I was just happy-happy to drink deep for a little more than 2 hours.

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