Month: April 2015

Movie review: “Focus” (2015)

Posted on by Eric

focus

“I can convince anyone of anything. I once convinced a man that an empty warehouse was the Federal Reserve. So I’m good.”

Con men and women are such inherently fascinating people, with their outward adherence to a professional code but otherwise subjective morality, with their investment in and facility with appearances belying what one imagines might be a fairly empty soul beneath. I welcome any chance I can get to learn more about this mindset, this appealing, alien lifestyle, which for an ordinary workaday drone like me is really wish fulfillment on a level just below that of “super hero”. Somewhere along the way, though – I’m thinking around the time of David Mamet’s ingenious, insinuating House of Games – movies about con artists stopped so much being character studies, and became little more than overly elaborate twist engines designed to fool the audience first and the protagonist second, if at all. I realize that with such a statement I may be eulogizing a form that actually never existed, but I have, at any rate, noticed that the balance seems to have irretrievably tipped in a direction that just doesn’t particularly appeal to me. Continue reading “Movie review: “Focus” (2015)” →

DVR Hindsight #11 (4/23/15): The Americans – Season Three finale

Posted on by Eric

Americans 3

The Americans – “March 8, 1983” – Season 3, Ep. 13 (FX) SPOILERS

“You can’t see ten feet in front of you. I’ve done nothing but try to take care of you, and because you’re not getting what you want, you think I’m the enemy. And when Elizabeth doesn’t see things exactly the way you see it, you think there’s something wrong with her. You know who there’s something wrong with. Grow up.”

As KGB spy handler Gabriel, played with a precise mixture of grandfatherly warmth and icy detachment by Frank Langella, dresses down his charge, Philip Jennings, thusly, the two have arrived at a long-deferred, finally unavoidable turning point in their relationship. Philip, of course, has been a Soviet spy embedded in Washington, DC for his entire adult life, having navigated a fraught, prickly, at least initially window dressing marriage to fellow homegrown soldier Elizabeth. The Americans is set during the early ‘80s height of the Cold War, a time during which many Soviet and American pawns and proxies (Cuba, South Africa, Afghanistan) were erupting in civil unrest bordering on revolutionary violence and actively affecting the larger chess game in disproportionate ways. Stateside, Philip and Elizabeth are entrenched and invaluable operatives, skilled and deadly intermediaries involved seemingly in every covert Soviet action on the Eastern seaboard, not to mention the parents of two teenagers. Continue reading “DVR Hindsight #11 (4/23/15): The Americans – Season Three finale” →

Baptism by Fire: Lucas Matthysse MD12 Ruslan Provodnikov

Posted on by Eric

Lucas-Matthysse-vs.-Ruslan-Provodnikov-Edit-by-John-Garita

Of all the televised sports, boxing is arguably the most visceral, the most capable of transmitting the action on screen directly into the brain and gut of its viewer with straight line speed and deadly accuracy. Most everyone, after all, can appreciate and wonder at the artistry of a transcendent basketball player like LeBron James soaring some four feet off the ground and covering an eight-foot distance on his way to a ferocious slam dunk, though very few could imagine ourselves in the same position, except maybe as comic relief. Every American kid dreams growing up of throwing the game-winning touchdown in the Super Bowl, or catching it, but the event itself, and the giant men who take the field for it, still seem otherworldly to us as adults. But almost every weekend, a cross-section of American sports fans sit on their couches, attentions fixed on in-ring competition between skilled and supremely willful combatants, men who are paid to punch each other until the other can take no more, and, once immersed, it takes a certain amount of will in itself to not react to particularly hard, clean, or thudding connects with a wince, an involuntary, spasm-like affirmation, or an audible indication of appreciation for the aggressor, or sympathy for the assaulted, or both. Continue reading “Baptism by Fire: Lucas Matthysse MD12 Ruslan Provodnikov” →

Steelers Thoughts #8 (4/16/15): Poets, Seers, and Warrior-Kings

Posted on by Eric

steelers d

Because of the (seeming) increased importance, or at least commensurate media coverage, of the free agent period and draft, fans like me can often find themselves with a skewed subconscious understanding of the NFL off-season. With the draft a mere (albeit punishing) two weeks away and free agent activity now reduced to a trickle, it feels on many levels like the off-season is winding down when, in reality, it’s barely half done. Fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers might particularly already wish it was over, for the 2015 off-season – which, you’ll remember, began with Dick LeBeau’s emotional departure and Keith Butler’s promotion to defensive coordinator – has had a whiplash-inducing quality to it so far, with exceedingly long periods of eerie quiet suddenly punctuated not by a free agent signing, the kind of good faith reloading efforts that provide fans a moment’s excitement during the extended doldrum periods, but rather a full-blown life event, the magnitude of which might cause the recipient to update his insurance in real life. Continue reading “Steelers Thoughts #8 (4/16/15): Poets, Seers, and Warrior-Kings” →

Musings on “A Song of Ice and Fire” vs. “Game of Thrones”

Posted on by Eric

I kill a stark

WARNING: This post will discuss George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” book series in varying degrees of detail, often in direct comparison with its TV adaptation, HBO’s “Game of Thrones”. I will endeavor to avoid spoiling events that have happened in the books but not yet on the show, nor to use prior knowledge gained from the books to speculate on the upcoming season of “GoT” in anything but the most general terms. Fair game for discussion will be any events occurring through the end of “GoT” season four, which roughly parallels the second half of “ASoIaF” book three (“A Storm of Swords”). FYI – Mentioning that something happened differently in the books than it did on TV does not, in my view, qualify as a bombshell anymore, merely a point of interest. I’m pretty sure there are no do-overs forthcoming. Valar spoilhaeris.

Now that its ubiquity in the popular mindset and conversation has marked it as not just a phenomenon, or an institution, but rather as cultural shorthand, it is tempting and altogether too easy, on the eve of its fifth season, to discount the intoxicating complexity and bottomless intrigue of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Both aspects are gifts passed down from its literary forebear (and, interestingly enough, contemporary…as we’ll get into later), George R.R. Martin’s towering A Song of Ice and Fire series, and though a great many fans of the HBO adaptation are not nearly so bewitched by the history and machinery behind Martin’s curtain as I am, the world of Westeros, in itself, remains a fairly breathtaking achievement. Continue reading “Musings on “A Song of Ice and Fire” vs. “Game of Thrones”” →