Ugh, I’ve been really slacking off, I realize it’s been almost a month since my last entry. Appy polly loggy. A lot’s been going on. I’ve still been watching a lot - my viewing tally for the year is now at 104 films (yes, I keep count) - I just haven’t been committing much down on paper. Less drinking equals less Drunk Movie Time, sad to say. I will attempt to rectify that and catch up on a bunch of excellent films (and some less-excellent stuff, too) over the next few weeks. Even if it means you get a lot of short posts, I figure that’s better than the utter void.
First a little following up on my last post. I finished up Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy. For those of you who may have checked out Refn’s American breakout Drive last year, there is a strong aesthetic seam running through his films, and it fits the characters well, straddling the fence between glossy, glowing flash and a suffocating griminess. These are people running wild outside the law, underground but playing out “wealthy mobster” fantasies on various levels, from the able street hustler (Frank in Pusher) to the unsophisticated pawn (Tonny in Pusher 2) to the brash, ambitious dealer-on-the-rise (Mohammed in 2 and 3) to the aging kingpin (Milo).
For me, Milo (Zlatko Buric) is clearly the most compelling character in Pusher and Pusher 2. No matter how badly someone else has fucked something up, everybody is welcome to sample his cooking, everyone is still his “friend.” Thus, he manipulates his underlings with a babbling delivery filled with pretense, injecting stabbing sparks of tension into the narrative.
In Pusher 3, however, Refn’s focuses wholly on Milo and he must deal with his own stressful fight-for-survival. This strips away some of the evil mystery surrounding Milo that I’d built in my head from the first two films, and gives him a much more vulnerable aura. Right from the start he’s sweating out a session in an Addicts Anonymous support group, and throughout the film he’s thrust into situations where he is forced to bide his time and eat shit as a younger hoodlums write him off as “getting too old for a young man’s game.” The results of their insolence are none too pretty and make for the best, most gruesome ending of the three films.
As with Padilha’s pair of Elite Squad films (and their precursor documentary Bus 174 - about which more in an upcoming entry) here we have another instance where examining them as a whole makes for a richer experience than only considering them as individual films. Even though each Pusher film follows a different character, the pattern of the story is similar in all three: main character falls into a deal-gone-bad situation, must claw like a cat in a sack to survive, does even more bad shit. Er, that’s also the basic gist of Drive, come to think of it. That makes them feel a little stuck in neutral at times, but there are some harrowing moments that are worth the slog.
As for Drive, again, it carries thematic and expository similarities, ramping up the style and action a couple notches but filling in the remainder with Ryan Gosling sleepwalking through a character that should be much more interesting, resulting in great swaths of tedium. Albert Brooks is the clear highlight of the cast in a role that plays against expectations, one that echoes Milo's viciousness if not his manners. Bryan Cranston and Ron Perlman also catch juicy little parts that have mirrors in the Pusher world. Lately, I've visited quite a few what I guess you could call "modern mobster"-type films and Drive fits in nicely with films like Steven Soderbergh's The Limey and Johnathan Glazer's Sexy Beast. I can't think of one that I'm ready to elevate to "masterpiece" status, but all are most definitely worth a look.
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands (2004): 70
Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death (2005): 75
Drive (2011): 75
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