This movie had two strikes against it at the get go, as far as my wife and I were concerned. As much as I really like Ryan Reynolds, I don't like many of the movies he's in -- good actor, bad agent, as far as I'm concerned. And while some of my favorite movies are extremely artistic ("Pi", for example), it's more often the case that I really don't like the artsy films. It makes sense, when you push the boundaries and do something experimental, it's a gamble that will either pay off big or fail miserably.
The first thirty minutes or so of this movie are fairly amazing. Whomever wrote the screenplay is something of a genius, in my opinion. There's a lot of modern critical analysis out there these days which says that the modern story should set up conflict immediately and push to onward from there. This screenplay kind of mocks that notion, and the Western genre as whole, all the while living up to it's simple and beautiful title. It goes to painstaking lengths to set up the very definition of cliché Western.
"Murphy's Law" is maybe the best example of a specific, technical concept which has been broadened and taken out of context. There's some debate on the origin of the idiom, but the story I like is that it was invented by a aeronautics engineer working on the space program. He was working with a group, building a high-G centrifuge-like device. When they ran the device, there was no reading on the sensors designed to measure the G-force. And when they investigated that oddity, it turned out that the sensors had been placed inside the device backwards.
While I'm on the subject of Unix philosophy, I'd like to speak for a minute about Postel's Law. Postel was instrumental in the development of the Internet. Specifically, he was involved in the creation of communication protocols. He Law, if I remember it correctly, was that programs dealing with communication over a network should be conservative in what they send out, and liberal in what they accept. In other words, they be careful to "speak" in formalized and well-formed languages, but they should know how to "listen" and interpret any old garbage sent their way. Good idea.
A lot of people think of me as a "Mac person". But, in reality, I'm a Unix nerd. I just happen to also really like Photoshop, and I haven't found any other Unix flavors that will run it. The secret is that Mac OS X is really Unix under the hood. I spend more time on the prompt than I do in the traditional windows desktop interface.
I've long thought that outside the basic teaching of love and brotherhood, the idea of the Trinity is the most important insight that Christianity has to give us. My reasons for believing in God are divergent, in the same way that the Trinity is, and I'm not sure how exactly they relate to each other (or, to put it in Christian parlance, "it's a mystery").
I'm not sure where this movie came from. I never heard about it being in the theaters. My brother-in-law mentioned that he had seen it and enjoyed it. And then a week later, I noticed it on Netflix's "new releases" list. I would have thought I would have seen this coming -- it stars one of the actors from "Reaper" and one of the actors from "Firefly". Both of those are favorites of mine. So, normally I might have seen words about this on the blogosphere or from word of mouth.
I like a good mob flick, and this is one of the best. It has all the staples: it casts a mobster as a robin hood style good guy whose motivation is nationalistic pride and wanting to help his community fight corporate interests and rise out of poverty; it's an engrossing David v. Goliath plot where you watch a low ranking mob affiliate take on big mob bosses and win; one of the main character's friends is a cop who likes him personally but has to work against him; and Christopher Walken is on the cast. On the face of it, this film has all the hallmarks of a classic of the genre.
It's often the case that I get all worked up because of hype for a movie, and then have my high expectations dashed. There's a long litany of movies which were darlings for the movie awards, and then when I considered them to be merely "good" instead of "amazing", I was heart-broken. I was very much hyped up for "True Grit", but it met my expectations.
