My little bit of recent media enjoyment...

It's been a busy start to the school year what with the full-time website duties, three preps at school, a sixth class about to start, and all, so I haven't had much of a chance to read, see, or listen to loads of stuff. I do have a couple of recent media encounters, however, that I'd like to point out.

First up is the new film from David Cronenberg, Viggo Mortensen, and Naomi Watts - Eastern Promises. The film is an impressive turn from all involved, telling the story of an innocent British doctor (Watts) who finds herself brushing a little too closely to the world of Russian organized crime in London. Mortensen plays the crime family's driver/undertaker/jack of all trades. He is a friend and underling to the family's son, played very well by Vincent Cassel.

The film is excellent, incredibly well acted, but not for everyone. Promises is dark, violent, and at times, thoroughly gruesome. We see fingers cut off, throats slit (with copious blood both times), knives wielded in a fight, and even an eye stabbed in desparation. People in the theater with me gasped and groans as the violence was very much shown with no glorifying angles or majestic soundtrack. And there is nudity - nothing flattering, no soft focus either on the teen prostitute from one scene or on Viggo's fully nude, tatooed body.

In the course of the film's hundred minutes, very little light comes into the films world, shot with little light and using London's old, dour character as a strong setting for the displaced Russian gangsters. Their actions are dark. Their memories of the homeland are tinged with exiles in Siberia, horror at the KGB's actions, and unrelenting violence in dealing with their new, strongly insular community. Into this tight family comes a blonde, waifish doctor with a Russian heritage of her own, not knowing the world into which she's falling. Her intervention causes a number of ripples as the father of the family - a brilliant, stoic, nostalgic part played by Aleksandar Mikic - attempts to hold onto his position of power. Luckily it does turn out that there is a hero within the family, if only he is given enough of a chance to so his small good deeds.

The filmmakers have crafted an excellently tense film that doesn't resolve the main storyline until the last possible moment and that leaves us uncertain of just where the family will be heading by the finale. The darkness, at times, threatens to overwhelm the characters as well as the film itself, but that doesn't ever take anything from the film. They have made a marvelous gangster movie set in an unexpected location.

Check out the trailer here and lots of mostly-positive reviews here.

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Earlier this year I took a read through the first volume of Bill Willingham's Fables series. I wasn't too impressed, but the strong reviews continued to bumble across my browser, so i'm now working my way through the volumes that PLCH has on the shelves. Now, four volumes in (and waiting on the next two), I'm far more impressed with the series as a whole.

Willingham's opener didn't do much more than set the scene, introducing most of the main characters and giving us a general view of each of their personalities. In the subsequent volumes, however, the scope of the whole tale has begun to be revealed as the Fables community views themselves as a community of exiles from the Homelands, chased out by the Adversary (yet to be revealed in my reading of the series, but knwown to me thanks to Wikipedia.) Some of the Fables believe that they should be preparing to return and take back the Homeland while others are happy enough to live in their new community (a few blocks in downtown New York and a farm in upstate New York for the less human-looking Fables).

Willingham has said in interviews here and there that he sees much of the Fables tale as an analogy for the story of Israel, and catching that fact (again, from Wikipedia) has made my reading of the series much richer, allowing me to read on an entirely new level. I am now fully impressed with the series and am looking forward to getting to the next half dozen volumes.