p e n g u i n d e v i l

Ah yes, another great classic. Though like most mystery/crime thriller type films, it’s never quite as exciting after the first viewing (and maybe the second time too) the good ones still have that special something. Like The Usual Suspects. First time through I thought that it was just about the greatest film I’d ever seen and Kevin Spacey was brilliant. All these viewings later, I still like Kevin Spacey, (though 1999’s American Beauty is the most recent film of his that I’ve seen, or wanted to see, as it capped a string of a half dozen great roles starting with 1992’s brilliant Glengarry Glen Ross, but those roles will always leave him at the top of my canon of great modern actors). And the film? It has little mystery left this fourth or fifth time through, but it’s still a great and timeless film and always a winner.

A strangely humorous crime mystery filled with great cynicism, brilliant betrayals and great, albeit terrible, characters: Spacey as Verbal Kint is our narrator and unheroic central character, Benecio del Toro in his greatest role, the nearly unintelligible Fenster, Stephen Baldwin in a role as dislikable as is deserved for the baddest Baldwin, Gabriel Byrne as Dean Keaton, the infamous master criminal who is trying to go straight, and Kevin Pollack as the devil-may-care explosives guy. The are all great in these roles, playing a group of felons who are conveniently (too conveniently) pulled together for a line-up. Of course, one thing leads to another and they go into business together in some crimes that lead to an elaborate plot involving: drugs, murder, Hungarians, Colombians, the FBI, an assault on a heavily guarded boat, lots of burned corpses, ninety-one million dollars, seemingly endless mystery and a mythical criminal boogie man named Keyser Söze.

Getting off to a big start, there is a murder, a big boat explosion, burned bodies and two survivors: the palsied conman Kint and a heavily burned Hungarian in the hospital. As Kint is in police custody, the Customs agent who is out to get Dean Keaton (and who thinks he knows just what is what and who is who) drags the whole story out of him. All while the burned Hungarian man is telling a story of his own to an FBI agent who thinks there is more to this then meets the eye. The story is presented to us, back and forth, through a well structured sequence of current day and multiple levels of flashbacks that always keeps you guessing as to what the hell is really going on.

The Usual Suspects is a stylish, well-paced and enthralling film. Ever mysterious, well written, well acted, a great plot and one of the best twists in filmdom.

Today, though I didn’t watch it completely, we watched the The Beales of Grey Gardens. Well, it is very very much like Grey Gardens. If you watched that and said, “I need more!” Then watch this. Personally, I’ve seen Grey Gardens too many times to want too much more of it, and those ladies strike a little to close to home for me to be completely comfortable watching them. But, on the high side, I thought that this was a more entertaining movie than Grey Gardens. There are actually scenes away from the house! Honestly, though I’m a bit worn on the Beales, I consider Grey Gardens to be a must have/watch documentary. The idiosyncratic ways of this mother-daughter team of Jackie O cousins, stuck together in their rotting and infested Hampton Estate is genuinely terrifying and genuinely sad at the same time. Not so much for Big Edie, who carries herself about with an aristocratic bag-lady pride and couldn’t care less about doing things anyway aside from her own. She seems quite at ease in their odd little life. But Little Edie is so pitiful in her desperation to be part of something that is is a bit heart wrenching. The original movie is a mandatory introduction to them and this film feels more like something to watch if you have seen the first one and are already familiar with the Beales. They are the original crazy cat ladies and everyone should see Grey Gardens and, if they like it, they they should certainly see this second film. Not a sequel, of course, but just more “previously unseen” footage the same batch as the original.