Friday, October 15, 2010

Review: "Read My Lips"

I’ve been, for a long time, a fan of the French actor Vincent Cassel.  I first saw him in the shocking French film IrrĂ©versible and have admired most of his subsequent performances.  I often thought he deserved better roles in Hollywood (he was the moronic son of the chief gangster in Eastern Promises, for instance) and with his role in the much-hyped Black Swan perhaps that’s going to happen.


Recently, Cassel starred in two highly-acclaimed movies about the notorious criminal Jacques Mesrine.  I downloaded them both but they didn’t do much for me - they seemed to just depict Mesrine’s famous exploits rather than say anything about them.  But in a review of those films I read a description of another film (Sur mes lèvres (English title: Read My Lips)) which I later saw and I think has become my favourite love story of all time.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Essay: "The Game Ones"

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very moving essay about the parallels between dogfighting and professional football in which he summarizes the medical research which shows that the rate of concussions in football is astonishingly high and provides a description of the horrors of dogfighting (the noted pastime of professional football player Michael Vick).

Gladwell then describes the quality of “gameness”: a dog’s desire to please the owner at the expense of itself. The owners of fighting dogs, apparently:

understand this desire to please on the part of the dog and capitalize on it. At any organized pit fight in which two dogs are really going at each other wholeheartedly, one can observe the owner of each dog changing his position at pit-side in order to be in sight of his dog at all times. The owner knows that seeing his master rooting him on will make a dog work all the harder to please its master.