Revolver / David Foster Wallace

It won't be a popular opinion, i'm sure but I don't think Guy Ritchie's Revolver is as bad as everyone says it is.

yeah, it overreaches, loses the plot(s), tries too hard to tie everything together at the end but i watched it for the first time the other night and it was... interesting, I thought.

Hard work and probably not worth the effort* but...

I'd avoided it when it came out because it got such terrible reviews - everyone hated it and you can kind of see where they were coming from (the ending is telegraphed, yeah, but somehow I don't think it's supposed to be a twist as such) but, I dunno, there's something in me that likes the fact that he tried something a little out of his comfort zone (I liked Lock Stock in the same way I liked Only Fools and Horses), even if it kind of went a little awry... There's worse out there, stuff that doesn't even attempt to try, stuff that's content to rest on laurels and genre conventions until they can be regarded as Pop art and homage and irony.

RockNRolla is already getting on my tits thought and I've only seen the trailer... It's the spelling, I think.

*As I wrote this I noticed that David Foster Wallace is dead. His books were flawed in the same way as Revolver. They often didn't work, always seemed like way too much effort (way too long) but somehow I always managed to struggle through them. They were hard work like people say Calcutta is hard work. All those footnotes and literary spirals, all that language to plough through... all for tiny little moments of inspiration. I didn't read all his books but I always imagined that one day I might (In a way that I never imagined I would with Umberto Eco, for instance, who seems too far gone to worry with after Foucault's Pendulum). David Foster Wallace books seemed like they might give up something, somewhere, somehow... in the same way that I still think I might understand some of Deleuze and Guattari. I'm not sure if it's, to paraphrase Beckett on Burroughs, 'plumbing not writing' and I'm not sure if all the acclaim was ever really justified but now that he's dead I guess there may be some retrospective or other that'll start to illuminate. I sort of hope not.