Au Cinema

Reviews to read:

Started the week in a bad mood due to the fact that I was unable to secure tickets to see Chuck Palahniuk.

In my dreams I was in a super villain guild and we voted out Josh Holloway/Sawyer from "Lost."
Outside was Darth Maul and a bunch of other icons. It was kind of like the Guild of Calamitous Intent from The Venture Bros.

In my dreams I saved a friend from drowning by pulling him through flooded rooms.

In reality I watched several movies:

REDBELT
dir. David Mamet
starring. Chiwetel Ejiofor

"Redbelt" is the Mamet written story of a Jiu-Jitsu instructor who through an escalating series of events, is forced to compete on the under-card of a major mixed martial arts fight. While I had been interested in seeing this film for sometime, I was mostly prompted by watching Chiwetel Ejiofor in Ridley Scott's "American Gangster" the night before.

Ejiofor is a nearly-broke jiu-jitsu instructor whose unwavering code of the warrior stands out in a modern world of scumbags, tricksters, thugs, and prize fighters. He refuses to compete because competition is merely an exhibition and is, per this story, always fixed.
Here we have Mamet drawing direct correlations between the lessons of Jiu-Jitsu to pretty much any life lesson.
The school is financially bankrupt, his friends have fallen, and his wife is tired of him. Not to mention all of his equals are deep in money and power.
Having trained Capoeira for several years it is always nice to see a martial art get the respect it deserves by being held up to such a pure and noble standard and not just being relegated to another action movie.
Ejiofor is uncompromising in his will to simply be a fighter who teaches people to survive.
"There is no situation that you cannot escape from."
Mamet, being Mamet, revels in his Mametry with a lot of the simple repetitive one-liners delivered by frequent Mamet actor Ricky Jay and company. Mamet also pulls Max Martini from the under rated Mamet produced (and returning for a 3rd season) show "The Unit" in another supporting role.
You can't beat Joe Mantegna's response to the one death in the film,
"Everybody dies."

The camera is not invasive but it is also not creative. The third act sort of falls apart as certain characters and elements veer out of control of the film's minimalist structure and I wasn't happy with the result of wife, Alice Braga's character. But again, this is not a fight movie. This is a drama that uses Jiu-Jitsu as its thematic foundation and yet it almost becomes a noir film by the end when we, as an audience, get the whole picture and understand how calculated the entire story really was.

But then, "There is no situation that you cannot turn to your advantage."

Just as "Spartan" was under rated and passed over by most film critics and audiences, so too, will be "Redbelt."