David Mamet's Red Belt.

You know what I like -- fancy dialogue and ass kicking. It is one of the reasons Kill Bill appeals to me so much. And now David Mamet has a mixed martial arts movie coming out. Awesome.



I do not know what the guy from Home Improvement is doing here, or Paolo from LOST, but I trust me some David Mamet, and I know I like the guy from Serenity and Dirty Pretty Things.

I have been watching 24 and The Unit on DVD and my head keeps coming back to this fantasy football idea: I wish David Mamet would write 24. That way I could get large scale plotting, and also dialogue I can remember. Right now those traits are isolated one on 24 and one on The Unit, and never the twain do meet.

On the subject of David Mamet, I recently got into a conversation with a friend about Mamet's wife, Rebecca Pidgeon. My friend Erin, and Sara, hate her because she is stilted and weird, and, they say, an awful actress only in these movies because she is Mamet's wife. But to me, David Mamet creates an alternate universe where everyone can talk in this fascinating, mannered way, a style practiced with a metronome. Like the overblown dialogue of Sin City many actors get it, and many do not, but Pidgeon, to my ear, is one of the few who appears to be a native of whatever alternate universe land this language comes from. A land where words are made up of distinct syllables carefully weighted and measured, and curse words are the stuff of poetry. These clips involving her are not great, but they are all I could find on YouTube.

The trailer for the Spanish Prisoner:



A scene from State and Main:



[If you have not seen these films, or Spartan or the underrated The Edge, you should see them immediately if these clips interest you even only a little.]

It is something about the way she pronounces vowels and weighs the syllables. Everything is distinct -- giving the impression that language, you know, matters, as more than a vehicle for getting stuff communicated.