Has anyone seen that film Smoking Aces? I guess after Pulp Fiction the market was suddenly flooded with Tarantino rip-offs. Often this took the form of the director inserting a scene with some gang member talking about pop music for two mins in a sequence that doesn't fit even vaguely with the rest of the film, before the director went back to business as usual, pleased he had shown the audience that he was the next great, idiosyncratic one-off unique auteur like Tarantino.
Some of these films are shameless and just embarrassing to watch. I saw Lucky Number Slevin the other day which is one of the very worst... apart from Smoking Aces which tries so desperately hard to be cool, its difficult to watch, you feel sorry for the actors as you observe them through your fingers.
So I was surprised to see this... at first, and then it made perfect sense.
Smokin' Aces has its issues, but there's also a good deal of entertainment value here and an overall fun mix of comedy, action, thrills, and drama. Funnily enough, it's also a movie that acclaimed
filmmaker Terrence Malick is a big fan of, even though the type of film
Smokin' Aces is couldn't be further than
the kind of thing Malick usually makes (his stuff is slower, generally less flashy, and usually far from action-packed).
The only possible conclusion, what with this and with his own recent efforts, is that he's just totally lost it. He had it and it's gone and he has no grasp of good or bad etc any more. He's just flailing around going what if I film a butterfly dying in slow-mo for an hour...? Would that be good? It's all a cry for help from an artist who long ago lost his muse and whose late career is an extended sad and pathetic dying moan.
