Sam's Birthday and Tahoe Thriller

2010_4_13 Samuel Becket’s Birthday
Ron sent me a photo of Becket and a quote from UNNAMEABLE that is Gold Card Becket. I sent likewise to him.
“Breaking Bad” was bizarre on Sunday night. Both Walter and his brother-in-law have gone off the rails and are increasingly in a psychic wilderness. They no longer know who they are and why they are doing what they are doing. Moreover, they are on a collision course. Skylar put a charge into the already fragile Walt by fucking her boss at work and she did it again on Sunday’s program. He tried to break into the guy’s office to talk to him but in his state he was more likely to kill the seducer. He was furious and Security was called to remove him from the premises. In addition to that his principle has put him on administrative leave because he doesn’t teach anymore; he just sits in front of his class and stares into space. She blames his fight with lung cancer and he lets her think that. Like everyone else, she has no idea about his other life. His young meth-making partner has gone and made a fresh batch of blue meth to gather some money. His benefactor-cum-distributer pays half to the kid and the other half to Walt who didn’t know or approve the kid doing it on his own. He doesn’t want to go back into the business but truth be told that is all he is good for at this stage of his disintegration. He is a piece of flak adrift in hell.
Last night I watched a straight-to-DVD movie I had never heard of, some kind of thriller called “Wrong Turn to Tahoe.” It turned out to be an extremely violent movie and at the end no one was left alive. It was all about a war between two drug lords and the attachment one soldier has to his boss. Vincent (Miguel Ferrer) finds out through a heroin addict that a small time dealer named Frankie is out to kill him because the big man, Nino Bellini (Harvey Keitel) wants him out of the way. So Vincent and Joshua (Cuba Gooding), his right hand man and bodyguard, who is tough and good with a gun, go to see Frankie, a Hispanic youngster with nasty mouth, who acts belligerently toward Vincent. His attitude annoys Vincent so he beats his brains out with a baseball bat. When they go to bury Frankie Vincent kills the other dumb-ass hood in his employ because he thinks he was sleeping with his wife. He is thrown in the same hole in the ground with Frankie. Betrayal loves company.
Then they go see Nino at his mansion. The meeting does not go well. Nino calls them small fry and tells them they owe him a $100,000 for killing Frankie. That was the amount Frankie put in his coffers every year. These were fighting words to Vincent and he tells Nino to go fuck himself. What else as this was a conventional thug movie? Nino gets up and leaves the room. While Vincent and Joshua leave and go have something to eat and to talk things over, Nino tells one of his goons to go kill Vincent’s woman who is home alone. By the time Vincent gets home the deed is done: His woman is tied to the bed in spread-eagle style and viciously disemboweled. It is a deliberately grotesque and brutal death, to teach Vincent a lesson. The cold-hearted Vincent is actually grief-stricken—and very pissed off. He was ready to go to war with Nino. Joshua had planned to leave Vincent’s employ and get out of the nasty business, but he found he could not do it. Vincent was more than his boss; he had raised Josh as his own son. So there was a deep sense of loyalty and a very deep attachment to Vincent, even if he was a cold-blooded killer. So the two guys leave to go Nino’s mansion to even the score.
But first they visited the addict who spread the rumor that Frankie wanted to kill Vincent which the dealer had denied. They give him some good heroin and while he is stoned and happy, Joshua shoots him in the back of the head. He has killed often for his father-figure of a boss. He knows he is as bad as he is. Before they kill the addict Vincent tells him that famous story that I first heard from some writings by or about Orson Wells. It is the story of the scorpion and the frog. A scorpion who wants to get across a river persuades a frog to carry him on his back and, although reluctant as he doesn’t quite trust the scorpion, he does it. And sure enough, the scorpion stings him and the two of are sinking in the water. The frog asks him now why did you do that as you are going to die too? The scorpion answers, “It was in my nature to do it.”
When the gunfight ensues the odds are in favor of Nino and his men, eight hoods who are his bodyguards. But Vincent and Joshua prove to be the more resourceful and the better shots and kill everyone in the mansion, included Nino’s squeeze, a beautiful brunette. She put a bullet in Joshua before he puts a bullet in her forehead. So with both women dead, the score is settled. Mortally wounded in the back seat as Vincent drives to a hospital, Joshua decides he should kill Vincent to end his unhealthy attachment to the guy. He puts the gun to the back of Vincent’s head and his boss says, “You are too loyal and committed to me to pull the trigger.” Just before he pulls the trigger, which will end in both their deaths, Joshua mutters out loud, “It is in my nature.”
I like that. It was a clever ending. The screenwriter worked in that Wellsian parable very nicely.
Since I honed in on the story not the performances, I haven’t said anything about how routine the acting was, the kind of movie all the actors had made many times over. About all you could say is, they went through their paces and delivered what was expected of them. They were picking up a paycheck.