Bullet Train
…may or may not be the sequel to The Mexican but it appears that I can never tire of watching Brad Pitt play Floyd, the couch surfing liaison between the participating actors in True Romance and we, the non-participants (the audience), who like Floyd never leave our seated position throughout the course of the film except vicariously. As with all films in which James Gandolfini and Brad Pitt appear together, the sinister Hawksian screwball comedy with gangsters and hitmen and multiple layers of conflicting agendas whiff and clash at unpredictable angles and times in ways that surprise and inform and completely engage my (and maybe your) imagination differently with each exposure like Casablanca and True Romance and The Man Who Wasn’t There and far too few other films that don’t appear to be particularly perfect, yet don’t ever age with a surprising resistance to overexposure; Stage Door, His Girl Friday and, to a lesser extent Bringing Up Baby, as further evidence of this wrinkle-free phenomenon you too may recognize as indicative of some of your favorite films.
I think it was Quentin Tarantino’s citation of Uma Thurman’s declaration that Floyd played the part of the designated representative of the audience in True Romance that turned my head around, but to slowly realize that the same actor can play the same role in at least three films as Floyd, Jerry Welbach and Ladybug against James Gandolfini and his ghost, Michael Shannon is an afterdeath trifecta worthy of Hamlet’s Omelet in which heads must roll and eggs must be broken to create a tasty treat at the end of a career path drenched in blood, like the Woo (postmodern multi-faction Mexican standoff) near the end of True Romance, when FBI, Hollywood drugseekers, Sicilian mafiosi and affable amateur thugs + Floyd climax.
This was just a minor reflection on this week’s larger discoveries, that the horse originated in the New World and ostensibly fled across the Aleutian land bridge westward, while the first New World humans came east into North, Central and South America during the last ice age and that Michelangelo’s
Battle of the Centaurs was created the same year Columbus brought horses back to the New World for the first time in 14,000 years, along with steel, the wheel, gunpowder and a vast host of novel diseases that native Americans benefited far less from than the horse … as if Odin’s enormous one blue eye (the inimical prairie sky in1883) looked down from above on the Indians of the Great Plains and chose the blue-eyed sons of bitches over the brown-eyed folks whose now-legendary skill with horses MIGHT have turned treaty-busting lethal transactions into a series of custard’s last stands instead of the way these transactions always went, unfairly; blue over brown. Ken Burns’ Leonardo da Vinci and Renaissance: The Blood and the Beauty. Yay, PBS!!!
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