The other night I caught the second half of a movie called “Spartan” on TV. It is many years old and was written and directed by David Mamet and starred Val Kilmer with William H. Macy and Kristen Bell.
Mamet is of course known for his dialogue and it is certainly on display in the movie (which I had seen before) but rather than being crackling or snappy, it is just incredibly weird.
In addition to possessing a verbal tick of some kind that forces him to call everyone “baby”, Val Kilmer’s character is some sort of shadowy government operator. Sometimes assassin and sometimes hero, he does all that dirty stuff that governments sometimes need done. In addition to creating a very alpha-male, I’m-a-man-see-look-at-this-giant-gun-I-have! kind of movie, this allows Mamet to craft his own lexicon of espionage slang. When Kilmer needs to get fake identification papers, he demands “a new suit of clothes” and when he goes rouge and plans his own operation, his associates remind him “You’re a shooter, not a thinker”.
Say what you will about the arrogance and misogyny of Mamet’s writing, but the man does very interesting things with words and it was a lot of fun to listen to him build his own secret slang.
Another movie that’s a lot of fun for this very same reason is “Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead”. It is probably 15 years old now, but if you have never seen this thing I insist that you go find it right now. Right now! I will wait …
Okay, so you watched it?
Not the greatest movie in the world, right? But it had a lot to like, yes?
Young Andy Garcia playing it cool. Gabrielle Anwar before she got all crazy-buff and extra-strength-anorexic-skinny. Christopher Lloyd playing someone other than Doc Brown. Steve Buscemi as the terrifying hit man! And of course, the one and the only Christopher Walken as a wheelchair-bound paraplegic mob boss. Not to mention Josh Charles for a couple of scenes and Faruza Balk when she was at the absolute apex of her freaky weirdness.
This is an underworld crime movie. Andy Garcia as the charming criminal that everybody knows and likes and who washed out of seminary because he just loved the ladies too much. The Walken gets Andy Gacria to kidnap his child-molesting son’s ex-girlfirend’s current boyfriend in order to scare him off so that the ex-girlfriend will get back with the child-molesting son. All very complicated. In the process Andy Garcia is trying to woo Gabrielle Anwar when he isn’t hanging out with Faruza Balk's feral cat of a prostitute.
More than for its seediness, this movie is interesting because the whole underworld is imagined through its language. When Andy Garcia meets Anwar in a bar, he describes her as a woman “who glides” and then he proceeds to explain (and this is either incredibly corny or incredibly cool, I’ve never been able to decide) that women “who glide need guys who make them thump”.
The whole movie is like this!
They all talk like this!
The criminals say to each other, “boat drinks.” It means that at the end of a long and bad life, we all hope to end up on a boat in Florida drinking with our friends.
The movie was also important to me personally because it was the first time that I ever heard “whatever” uttered in all of its glorious, all-purpose, dismissive glibness. It was this movie that established the word as the always-appropriate, good-for-every-situation reply, no matter what the question or the circumstance. It was this movie that minted the word as a whole attitude that if you were to translate its psychic meaning would be, “Yeah, I think that that is complete crap but really I don’t actually care and am too busy and important to really think about this anymore anyway and, by the way, you’re probably kinda dumb.”
I say, “whatever” all the time!
And, since this is – apparently – now a blog post about movies with their own languages, I should give a nod here to the absolutely fantastic “Brick” which is basically a noir detective story transplanted to a Southern California high school. This is a movie so thick with its own language that half the time it is virtually impossible to figure out what the hell anybody is saying to anybody else. Written and directed by a guy named Rian Johnson, it is a very smart script and the movie stars (and is largely credited with resurrecting the career of) world-renowned bad-ass Joseph Gordon Levitt. This is also a kind of underworld movie, it has drugs and double crosses and murder and it is all about the seedy underbelly of everything. This, BTW, is a far better movie than either of the other two I have talked about. But really, what makes the movie is the language. Cops are “bulls”, the drug kingpin is “the Pin”. When Joseph Gordon Levitt goes looking for trouble he is “shaking the trees”. There is so much like that that it would take me the running time of the movie to enumerate it all. Just go watch it, you will not be disappointed. Though, if you have never seen it before, a word of advice, turn on the subtitles. The slang and jargon is so fast and thick that I watched it twice. Once for the movie and a second time just to absorb the words.
So anyway, this turned out to be a blog post about movies.
Really all I had intended to say was: the other night I caught the second half of a movie called “Spartan” on TV and it made me miss how cool Val Kilmer used to be.
I guess I got off track. Sorry.
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