Can I make a confession, here?
Can I?
I am very tempted, right now, to start wittering on about fine wine.
I am.
I work in an off-license; wine and football always make for handy metaphors.
Even though I neither drink, nor watch football.
But I’m thinking they make for a handy comparison.
Because — as you may have notice — me and Adrian, along with various others, have caught quite a few films, over the past few weeks …
The one tonight?
Well, the posters are a clue, but it case you missed them, we caught Layer Cake, and the reason I’m thinking wine — and I hate repeating myself — is comparison.
Because, as gangster films I’ve seen, they’re the ones that spring to my mind; Eastern Promise being the hefty Caucasus Cabernet Sauvignon, Pulp Fiction a full-on Californian Merlot, and Snatch a rather fruity Aussie Shiraz.
Or possibly an exploding tin of Fosters, I’ll have to think about that …
But I’m thinking it’s more of a sophisticated, and bone dry, Chablis.
Or possibly Petite Chablis.
Both descriptions are justified, here: the humour in the is decidedly dry regions of French wines, and gives the plot of a Tarantino film a run for the complexity money.
Daniel Craig plays an unnamed and successful cocaine dealer: one who follows a strict set of rules for what he sees as his business, and one finds himself facing the prospect of having to break them, when asked for a couple of last big ‘favours’ for his boss, Jimmy — played with a certain amount of complicated menace, by Kenneth Cranham.
Craig’s character has to find the teenage daughter of one of Jimmy’s friends and sell one million hijacked Serbian Ecstasy pills.
Those are the least of his problems …
And certainly worth watching, to see how it gets resolved.
Because something that has come up in conversation about recent movies is the level of violence in many modern action film.
Granted, we can accept a certain amount, in context.
After all, that is in part, why film certification is in place.
Layer Cake does manage to answer that I’m thinking: it’s a credit both to the film’s writer, J. J. Connolly, and to Daniel Craig’s performance, that — after the one fairly cold blooded killing his character has to commit — we see an extended sequence showing us his character’s reaction to having to cross what — for many of us — is possibly one of the lines*.
And that’s what makes this a film worth watching, I think …
To quote one of Craig’s other wlell known film; “It gets easier the second time …”
•••••
| Actor | Role |
| Daniel Craig | XXXX |
| Colm Meaney | Gene |
| Kenneth Cranham | Jimmy Price |
| George Harris | Morty |
| Jamie Foreman | The Duke |
| Marcel Iureş | Slavo |
| Michael Gambon | Eddie Temple |
| Tom Hardy | Clarkie |
| Tamer Hassan | Terry |
| Ben Whishaw | Sidney |
| Burn Gorman | Gazza |
| Sally Hawkins | Slasher |
| Sienna Miller | Tammy |
| Dexter Fletcher | Cody |
| Steve John Shepherd | Tiptoes |
| Louis Emerick | Trevor |
| Stephen Walters | Shanks |
| Paul Orchard | Lucky |
| Dragan Mićanović | Dragan |
| Nathalie Lunghi | Charlie |
| Jason Flemyng | Crazy Larry |
•••••
* Actually, one of the minor points, here, is simply something I think I may need to think about. Where exactly is the line between cold blooded murder, and killing in hot blood? Interesting food for thought, that …
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