Pride and Glory

...continued from previous post

As earnestly as possible, I strive to live by a code of honor, one that guides me in doing the right thing. More or less, it is based on the Golden Rule, but above all, I try to be open, forthright and honest as much as possible.

This was not always true for me. For most of my life, I had little concept of true honor. To say that classical Hollywood movies helped me discover a code of honor, and to live by it, is a big understatement. Quite literally, the appreciation classic movies changed my life in a very direct way.

One consequence of this is that although I see many, many movies in theaters, and am currently on a very constrained budget, I always pay for a legitimate ticket to the movie I am seeing. Many times I have been tempted, while leaving a matinee in a multiplex, to save a few bucks by ducking into an auditorium and catching a show for free. Of course I wouldn't have a ticket stub to add to my collection, but mainly I don't do it because my word of honor is worth a lot more to me than the money I would save.

So it was with great anxiety that during the trailers of Nights in Rodanthe in Methuen, I decided I would recoup the cost of my lost ticket by sneaking in an extra show of another movie while I was still in the theater. After all, I had paid for two tickets, and I knew that unless I figured out a way to even the score, I would hold a grudge against the theater and the movie as well. I wasn't ripping the theater off, under any definition. What would Buddha do? He'd see another show, wouldn't he?

But which movie to see? Loews at the Loop was one of those theaters with separate hallways wings. I could access only half the auditoriums without passing the ticket taker into the main lobby. I wanted to see something that started as quickly as possible. The staggering of showtimes makes this kind of maneuver tricky. My choices were limited.

Fortunately it was one of those ultramodern multiplexes with LED displays of the movie titles---together with the upcoming showtimes---displayed above the doors. I quickly made my choice, which was to stick around and see Pride and Glory in the same auditorium I had just left.

It would easy, right? No one looking. The theater staff was coping with the kiddie mobs. And who would care anyway? Still it was very anxiety-provoking. I had to wander around in the hallway for over a half hour, pretending to texting on my cellphone. Even though I know it was absurd, I had a cover story lined up: that I was waiting for my wife and kids to get out of Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.

But no one challenged me. It was all my mind. Still, the mental ruse was necessary in order to short circuit my internal programming, and allow me to go through with it.

One wrinkle was that the multiplex was so short-staffed that day that no one came in to cleanup the popcorn mess that a couple had left in the back row after Nights in Rodanthe. Since I like to sit in the back row in small theaters, I was sure that some employee would come in, even after the trailers started. But none did. I was very relieved when the house lights finally went down and the feature started.

Pride and Glory is a suspense crime drama about rogue criminal cops in the New York City PD. Ed Norton is a detective cop who stumbles on the secret of the criminal conspiracy. There is blood, violence, and betrayal.

Here is my impression of the first five minutes of the dialog: "fuck... fuck... fuck... motherfucking... fucker... fucked up... fucking... fuck... fucking... fuck... fuck... fuck... fuck... motherfucker... fucked... fuck... fucker... fuck"
etc. ad infinitum.

"Oy," I muttered. "We get the picture. NYPD detectives use the F-word a lot. Now would you please STFU (no pun intended) so I can exactly follow the emotional arc of the story without being slapped in the face with every spoken line?"

I've often made the joke that since the 1990s, screenwriting consists of typing the word "fuck" five hundred times in a row, then filling in the other dialogue around it.

Pride and Glory seemed on auto-fuck-pilot. It was cute when one of the characters yelled out "Merry fucking Christmas!". About five minutes later, another character says, "Happy fucking Holidays!" This really pissed me. You get one of the other of those lines in a movie, but not both. It violates the law of screenwriting redundancy.

After a half hour, I nearly consigned the movie to "Hate it" bin, but then, as so often happens, the story settled down in a more even pace, and by plot point two, I got into, and was actually enjoying. Somehow it managed to scrape together enough of an interesting narrative to make it worth watching.

Ed Norton is an honest cop, but with a cloudy past, wishing only to get by. Colin Farrell is a dishonest cop and a racketeer. Jon Voigt is a troubled older cop. Honor is stake---both for the people involved, for their families, and for the NYPD as a whole. Characters make moral choices which propel them toward their respective fates via the chain of necessity of action. Suspense was generated, then resolved and dissipated. Despite the initial bad impression I had, the story began to gel into a coherent whole. I wound up...sort of liking it.

But it wasn't deep. It felt about on the level of an episode of Law and Order. Nothing wrong with that, if you like that sort of thing. Not in any sense of the word.

When the credits finally stopped rolling, I slipped out past the ticket taker and into the lobby. It was a quite a relief. Justice had been restored to the world.