The Killing
It’s totally off-topic, but I wanted to mention it anyways. Yesterday, Pip and I were watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation from the terrible, terrible first season (“Coming of Age”). One minor character made a big impression on me because he was so bad, so annoying and so horribly acted. It made me feel sorry for the desperate actors trying to land acting gigs and having to accept the worst roles ever. There was also one scene with Worf in which he had some utterly stupid lines (“Only idiots have no fear” *stern face*) that made me feel sorry for Michael Dorn to have gone through so many seasons of bad characterization before he was able to return with a better role in Deep Space 9. Considering how Star Trek was supposed to be all idealistic and such, the reality of the show is a rather bleak one for its actors (like the first Ferengi appearances or that terribly racist TNG episode at the beginning of season 1). I perceive the idiocy of these roles as worse than getting naked on camera, because it makes you look like you’re incapable of acting. So I was wondering about this aforementioned minor character and it turns out he was played by this guy. When I saw the Memory Alpha article, I had a feeling I have read this name before, and then it suddenly dawned on me. We watched “All the Way” back when it was shown in Boston, just to see Bryan Cranston on stage. (I still remember how Cranston ended the show announcing modestly that they are all hopeful for the show to make it to Broadway, and then it moved on to get a Tony Award.) It absolutely blew my mind that the poor guy who played annoying Remmick on The Next Generation (and gets his head blown off in that role) will end up becoming a great playwright later on. And if I hadn’t been curious about this Remmick character, I would never even have discovered this unlikely connection.
Now I could talk about lucky and unlucky coincidences and tie it to “The Killing” to make the previous paragraph sound like it has some actual purpose, but that would just be an excuse. I will even continue to digress by musing about how I saw some of my favorite films at the PIFFs. There are many possible reasons for that. It could be because we tend to choose films that we expect to be good (especially Gorp, who will often choose a film he has seen and loves), but it could also be because during a PIFF, I am more likely to view a film in a different way. I usually never watch films in a group bigger than 2 people, and the dynamic of multiple people seeing a film and talking about it while it goes on is very special. “The Killing” is one of those examples where the PIFF most likely affected my impression of the film. I thought that the direction and the cinematography were brilliant and found the story very suspenseful too, but maybe I perceived it that way because I saw the film from a different perspective than, say, back when I watched “Detour” by myself (another film that Gorp likes, but I thought was kind of meh).
In another curious coincidence, Coleen Gray died just recently, over 2 months after we saw the actual film! Unlike for Robert Schenkken, I simply looked her up because she struck me as strangely beautiful. This coincidence reminded me of how a French teacher back in school desperately tried to convince us that the book we were reading were not actually that old using the argument that the author was still alive, and then, a month or so later, she died at age 99.
All in all, “The Killing” is a film one must see and not write about. I read that the film influenced Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” and it clearly shows. Both are wonderfully shot cheap gangster movies with some great story twists, and in both cases I think that the constraint of making their film cheap is bringing the best out of them, so I prefer “The Killing” over “Barry Lyndon” and “Reservoir Dogs” over “Django Unchained” or “Kill Bill”.