Seven Red

1) babygirl talks a lot. “My phone.” “I need help.” “On the playground.” Other such stuff. It’s pretty amazing.

2) We Own the Night is a painfully bad film. Plotwise, it’s absurd. For some reason, though set in New York in the late-80′s, the director has decided to run a late-70′s soundtrack, which is just weird. But she and I both noticed the same thing: the dialogue is terrible. The exposition dialogue is ridiculous. At a cop’s funeral, one cop tells another that “They’re setting up a new drug deal,” or something to that effect. It’s silly. I mean right when they hand the shovel over. Amusingly, Ed Koch makes a few appearances, despite the fact that the whole premise of the film was that his administration of the City in the late-80′s was a catastrophe. Good to have a sense of humor, I guess.

But the really awful dialogue is interesting, since the film has otherwise good qualities. The acting is pretty strong, the production values are good, they clearly spent money on it. In fact, it could almost be a good film if it weren’t for the terrible writing. Which made us wonder: why did nobody stop this thing? Why didn’t anybody say, “Hey, we’re making a gritty thriller here, let’s get the lines right!” Then we saw that the guy who wrote it also directed it, and both Joachim Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg (the two leads) produced it. In other words, there was no quality control on the writing at any step in the process, and probably others were too intimidated by thye director and producers to say, “Hey, that sucks.”

That said, the film had a distinctly New York outer boroughs feel, so it was somewhat satisfying. At one point, a couple in the film is staying at the Kew Motor Inn, a famous “by-the-hour” joint on Union Turnpike in Queens, near where I went to high school. Friends of mine used to brag about having gotten the “Jungle Room” at the Screw Motor Inn, and other laughable high school sex stories. A character in the film correctly mentions that everybody calls it the “Screw Motor Inn.” Strangely, though, the film cuts to the sign, and it reads “Cue Motor Inn,” which means that they bothered to construct a fake sign, but they spelled the name wrong. It’s a metaphor for the whole film, really: a lot of effort expended for a relatively shitty product.

3) I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 today. It’s nice. I’ll play with it tonight.

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