Hey, if I’m writing about The Equalizer, I can briefly recount Walking Among the Tombstones, somehow the exact same film in every way. Or at least the exact the same actual length – 2 hours – and the same sustainable justifiable length – 10 minutes. I saw it because Mr. Scott Frank did the pretty great adaptation for Out of Sight. This obviously disproves the Author Theory (that it’s the writer that controls the film more than the director), but I’m going to keep believing in it as it might refer to original material. The novel upon which Out of Sight was based was written by Elmore Leonard. You know, of Killshot and Life of Crime fame.

Nope. Still believe it. The writer was having an off day. Because of the credit they gave the director. Writers are sensitive about this.

(Editor’s note: Killshot is actually Mr. Leonard’s best novel, and he wrote more than six. Check it out).

There’s nothing to say or remember, especially now a month on. It’s the kind of plot that makes you wonder about the state of modern noir, in the sense that you can say fuck and show boobies and have very unpleasant violence, but still be bored out of your mind. I’m not being nostalgic, as films like Laura or Out of the Past are dull beyond compare and films like Se7en both out-gross and outgross films such as these. Basically you could do a G noir, as many of the 1940s-50s films are, and keep the audience in. While today, one might cut off a woman’s nipple (yep. Thanks for that), and have an audience reaching for its notepad.

To assuage my guilt (yes, I have that) actually went to the gym, then to the movies. There has got to be a way to combine these. I think a screen on the bottom of the pool would certainly help with the dialog.

Maybe it’s character, maybe it’s story, maybe it’s lack of an engaging milieu, or just an unwillingness to write compelling dialog, which, let’s be fair, is rather important to the genre. Who knows, who cares, but boy I was wishing I was home watching a forty-two minute episode of a NYPD Blue I had seen seventeen times before.

Still, we are forced to but it is slightly better than its Equal(sizer) counterpart in that in has a truly unforgettable sequence which involves a voice-over of the famed twelve steps incomprehensibly over the final action. Normally, the sidekick hiding in a van that we see the bad guys check and not see him would be utterly nonsensical. But, this is, of course, their failure to take a fearless moral inventory. Of a van. Likewise, when some guy cuts off another guy’s hand to get out of his handcuffs, that would be so stupid as to simply deny even the flimsiest of movie logics. But when you realize he would make amends, he just didn’t want to do so if it would injure or behead others.

Right. Might be the lack of respect for even a basically believable film universe. Pick one to get right.