Five Degrees

Crime and Punishment and perdition lends itself easily to the moviemaking medium. Before I begin to sound like the celebrity hosts at the Oscars with their hackneyed one-liners let me quickly say that I just happened to catch up with several movies of the same genre in rapid succession, and cannot currently resist the temptation to rank them in a continuum ranging from the purely amoral to the redemption tales.

Joint #5: The Flock and Lonely Hearts: Do you like your porn served freshly killed and/or amputated? Gorno (gore + porno) is apparently the new rage - with movies like Saw and Hostel running into several delightful sequels. Thankfully movies like The Flock (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0473356/) serve as some degree of anodyne. Did anyone notice the resurrection of a leaner meaner Richard Gere? Adventurous war photographer in The Hunting Party, and keeping tabs on crimes of passion offenders in The Flock - this movie shows the lengths of depravity that affection can lead to. Same with Lonely Hearts (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0441774/) - John Travolta, Jared Leto and Salma Hayek light up the screen and make you retch at the sheer inhumanity of man

#3: Zodiac (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443706/): David Fincher in another brilliant movie about an obsessive chase of a serial killer. Watch for Robert Downey Jr as the obsessed detective here. What does one make of the futility of the search, many years on? Little, it appears. A movie with lots of drama and few conclusions. Fincher is consistently brilliant

#2: Cleaner (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0896798/): Samuel L Jackson is singularly missing from this blog so far. This movie is about those that clean up post a death in the family. Things get messy as crucial evidence is "cleaned" from a murder scene. The movie goes on into explore the moral ambiguities in the protagonist's past, and the effects on his daughter. It ends with a lot for the small family to clean up, with a little help from a friend. Playing around with shades of gray and degrees of right and wrong, an otherwise hackneyed theme is well executed by Samuel L Jackson, Eva Mendes, and Ed Harris - the last being in a pivotal role

#1 Road to Perdition (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0257044/): What is it about Tom Hanks? (Well - there was Paul Newman and Jude Law here too, but, really?!) In Forrest Gump you cry as this man, oblivious to walking hand in hand with history, lives by the simplest of tenets. In Saving Private Ryan, we have no trouble believing that this man is a schoolteacher as well as a consummate leader of men on the battlefield. In Apollo 13, we live the space dream gone horribly wrong and rejoice at survival against all odds. Really, what is it about this man?! The perdition of Mike Sullivan Sr (Tom Hanks) lies in protecting his surviving son from the damnation of hell that is likely to eventually befall all gangsters on account of their chosen path. If I were to attempt to summarize this movie in a single sentence, I would say thus - Tom Hanks is a gangster, is unfairly set upon, avenges his family, and is survived by a son untainted by evil. And having summarized thus, I can categorically say that such a summary completely fails to capture the evocation, the emotional highs and lows, and the superb performances in the movie. This is among the best movies that I have ever seen, period. This is about legacy, about what you are remembered by, about what you live by. In a Depression and in a world of gangsters, and with your hands tainted by innumerable killings in the course of your profession, if you are remembered by your son for your goodness and resolve, you are truly noble. If the Corleones draw you by the sheer thrill of their acts and way of life, the perdition of Tom Hanks actually makes you believe that a gangster can be truly noble at heart
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PS: American high society is pretentious (who isn't?) and flaunts many trappings of Brit high society while never failing to castigate it at the same time. Saw Woody Harrelson in an unexpectedly brilliant role in The Walker (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0783608/) where he cleans up his complicity in a high society murder with reserve and panache! And on Mr Hanks - a relatively simpler role of leveraging disgruntled CIA officers (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and high society ladies bored and with nothing to do, really (Julia Roberts) to spark off - hold your breath - a counter-offensive against Russia in Afghanistan(!) in Charlie Wilson's War (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0472062/)

Looking at these posts, I cant help feeling that we live in a Golden Age of movies with so many brilliant performers and scripts, both new and resurrected, aided by the greatest heights cinematography and sould editing has ever attained thanks to technology. And that in itself makes maintaining a movie blog (currently with zero readership) worthwhile.