IMDb #137 Review: Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)

Source: Wikipedia

London lowlifes, big and small, run amok in the city. And holy balls, what wild messes they get mixed up in.

Four drinking buddies lose at cards to hardcore gamblers -- they now owe 500 grand by the end of the week, or else. The sort-of-hero's dad faces a choice: your bar, or your son's life. The friendly neighborhood cannabis growers indulge in reasonably paranoid security measures, or else get so blazed that they can't calculate how much cash they're stacking up. A psychotic Jamaican drug kingpin watches football at the pub. A tough bald hitman religiously practices take-your-prepubescent-son-to-work day.

And meanwhile, a mobster negotiates the sale of a pair of antique shotguns, hence the otherwise confusing title.

There's a lot of characters to keep track of.

Most have names like Barry the Baptist (drowns people) or Nick the Greek (he's Greek) or Hatchet Harry (don't ask), the man who presides over this sticky web of interwoven plotlines like a fat Cockney spider.

Everybody's harboring an agenda that clashes with everybody else's agenda. Double-crosses pile up like just another day at the tombstone factory. Bullets fly, people die. Drugs and shotguns and bags of cash pass through multiple sets of grubby hands. Downright idiocy results in more downright idiocy.

To make things even more perfectly confusing, the camera whizzes around like a GoPro strapped to an inebriated hummingbird. Who then mistakes the fat Cockney spider's plot-web for a trampoline.

I had no idea what was going on most of the time. But I didn't want to miss a millisecond of the manic fun. Once the credits hit, I had to remind myself to resume blinking.

It doesn't need to make sense the first time around. Just bask in the schadenfreude.

120 minutes.

IMDb #155 Review: Trainspotting (1996)

Source: Wikipedia

What scads of cringe-worthy anti-drug PSAs can't drill into impressionable young minds, one movie can.

What's that, kiddos? You don't want a boring life with the typical boring choices? Then hop aboard the heroin train, where there's friends and shenanigans and the highest dopamine rush money can buy. The price of admission: every fucking other thing you ever wanted to do with your life. And it'll probably take your life too.

Just kidding. Don't mind the title, the movie's barely got anything to do with trains. Heroin ruining lives? Hell to the yes. In harsh Edinborough brogue, no less.

Four Scottish punks pump themselves with the happiness needle and accomplish little else. Until our hero Renton, not for the first time, decides to get off the stuff. His life goes to shit -- literally, since his journey begins shoulder-deep in "the worst toilet in Scotland." Then come the disturbing hallucinations. Withdrawal. Constipation. Women whose sex education revolves around Cosmo advice columns.

Soon it's back to the slag, and eloquently discussing James Bond flicks, and stealing a laundry list of other drugs to afford more heroin. Rehab. Jail. Emergency room visits. Disappointed families. And the constant risk of gruesome death.

So when the main guy finally decides to clean up his act -- move to London, bullshit into a soul-numbing job in real estate, keep his nose and arm clean -- his old life follows him. The guys drag him back in. And their habits, not limited to drugs, threaten to spoil his shot at a better life.

It's a fast, gross, darkly comic peek into a hopeless yet virtually omnipresent lifestyle. Which, thanks to this thing, I never want anything to do with. Not that it took much convincing.

93 minutes.

IMDb #160 Review: Rush (2013)

Source: Wikipedia

Formula 1 -- NASCAR for sophisticates, for enlightened connoisseurs of expensive cars driving in circles really fast and exploding.

Apparently this is serious business. Especially for two diametrically opposed superstars. Scrawny Austrian car nerd Nikki Lauda gives up a successful future in finance to drive in circles really fast. Beefy beach-blonde British playboy James Hunt presumably considers cars a negligible distraction from women and booze.

But as our chiseled long-haired demigod says, the racing is incidental. It's the personalities, the competition, the brain-boggling piles of cash sunk into these races. And the closeness to death makes them so attractive to women. At least for him (heads up: plenty of luscious lady-flesh) -- so long as he's winning.

These guys have one thing in common: they alienate their families, ditch potentially stable careers, to taunt death driving "bombs on wheels."

Our joint heroes meet in the minor leagues, where it's hate at first sight. The rivalry spans years. One wins, the other wins, and sometimes some irrelevant dude wins. James Hunt goes through women like toilet paper; the abrasive Austrian plops into a lovely love life which, if it weren't based on fact, I'd condemn as improbable fiction.

The cinematography makes the movie. It's quick, tense, up-close-and-personal. Expect POV wheel shots and close-ups of eyes and axles. The races travel to exotic locations around the world -- from Brazil, South Africa, Spain, Monaco, Germany -- different title cards for slick asphalt tracks.

But priorities change. The promise of glory, the fear of horrible flaming death, grows complex when both guys have spouses to support. So as they yo-yo in and out of slumps, and when the wheeled bombs blow up in their faces, they might finally learn to respect each other. Even if they can't like each other, they can become like each other. Let respect and envy drive them both to greatness.

If that's how you wanna look at it, at the finish line, everybody wins.

122 minutes.