The Blueprint (3 page)
‘It looks like
she didn’t really want to give you her number,’ I reply.
‘We’ll call it
a two,’ He decides, tapping the screen a couple more times and then
throwing his phone onto the coffee table. He yawns, and wraps his
arms round himself. ‘It’s getting to be that time of year where
it’s no fun to be a smoker,’ he says, giving a small shiver.
‘I’m well
aware of that,’ I reply, ‘because you never close the fucking door
behind you.’
‘I like it
when I have someone else to share my pain,’ he smirks.
‘Have you
considered putting some clothes on?’
‘Nope. In the
eternal struggle between common sense and laziness, I’ve always
found that laziness comes out on top.’ He falls down onto the
crappier of our two sofas. I’ve already claimed the best seat in
the house; the one next to the radiator and which doesn’t have that
weird smell on it from what we’ve all silently agreed is Johnny’s
vomit, drunkenly half-cleaned-up and then either denied or
genuinely forgotten about. Charlie opens his pizza box and grimaces
to himself. ‘Speaking of laziness,’ he says, ‘can you nip to the
kitchen and get me a knife and fork?’
‘It’s pizza;
stop being so middle-class and eat it with your hands,’ I tell
him.
‘Actually it’s
beans on toast; we just ran out of plates.’
‘What did your
last servant die of?’
‘I shot him in
the face because he wouldn’t do as he was told.’
I sigh.
‘Fine, but if
I come back in here and you’re sitting in my seat, it won’t be your
lunch on the end of it.’ It’s a special kind of relationship, where
you can threaten a person with a stabbing and they just giggle and
tell you you’re adorable.
When I return
he’s still on the vomit sofa, but he’s pulled the coffee table
towards him, so now he can put his feet up and I can’t. I protest,
but he waves me away.
‘Consider this
pay-back for you moving my alarm clock.’
Shit. Guess
I’ll have to find a new way to mess with him.
He asks what
I’m doing with my morning. I hold up the DVD case I’d been
excitedly tearing the cellophane off of before I started narrating
his morning routine.
‘There go my
lectures for today,’ Charlie smirks. He only has about six or seven
hours of contact time a week, but it’s very rare - unheard of, come
to think of it - that he’ll actually show up for more than half of
it. Whenever Johnny or Liz confront him about his impending
third-class degree, he invariably replies that he’ll be rich and
famous within two years of graduation, and small trifles like
university results don’t matter when you’re both of those things.
To prevent any other trifling things like rational argument or
common sense from casting doubt on his future of stardom, he’ll
simply put his fingers in his ears and sing to himself until the
end of the conversation.
‘You gonna put
it on, or what?’ he inquires.
‘I suppose
it’s too much to hope that you’ll get up off your arse and do it
for me, isn’t it?’
‘You’re right
on that one. To be honest, it’ll be a fucking miracle if I even
have a shower today,’ he chuckles to himself.
‘How have you
ever
convinced another human being to have sex with
you?’
‘I just
patiently explain to them that I’m gonna be rich and famous
someday.’
‘That’s your
answer to everything.’
‘That’s
the
answer to everything,’ he corrects.
Charlie and I
have a shared love of by-the-numbers Hollywood bullshit. The more
formulaic and hackneyed a storyline, the easier it is to spot the
points where real-life would come and kick the protagonist in the
balls, and, therefore, make yourself feel superior. Over this
semester our theme has been heist movies. Today being our
twenty-seventh, possibly twenty-eighth, viewing session we’ve got
the heist blueprint near-enough figured out, and it’s not likely
that today’s film will be throwing any spanners into the
over-arching theory we’re developing. Act I starts as all the
others have, by introducing us to our budding con-artist/armed
robber. He is, as expected, ruggedly handsome and all-American, so
as to assure us that we should remain on his side even if he starts
(technically) murdering innocent bystanders later on in the movie.
This is something that Charlie and I have labelled the James Bond
Principle; a good-looking Western dude can get away with far worse
behaviour than an ugly Eastern European can. Replace Pierce Brosnan
with Gary Busey or Ivan Drago in
Tomorrow Never Dies
and
you’ll suddenly look on him much less sympathetically.
Early on in
the film, our hero’s motive for undertaking the heist will be laid
out. The money tends to be a secondary factor here; greed is
generally more of a villain’s character trait. Any film that trots
out the old dying daughter needing funding for her operation can be
safely turned off after ten minutes, in the knowledge that nothing
in the following ninety will ever rise above the level of dreck.
Mileage varies when it comes to One Last Job movies, but the best
bet for an enjoyable and enlightening viewing experience is one
where the lead character’s only motivation is to prove that he’s
got a bigger dick than every other person in the cast, especially
the police investigator trying to catch him, with his beaten-up car
and his strained marriage.
The third box
to check during the first act is to find a suitable business for
our well-endowed protagonist to rob. If the screenwriter was
feeling particularly lazy at the time of writing - maybe he got
distracted by the never-ending labyrinth of porn and cat videos on
the internet, maybe he had a
Scarface
-sized mound of coke to
get to work on - the target will be owned by a guy who is
unquestionably a worse human being than the hero, or someone who’s
just as casually murderous, but is at least far more foreign. If
there’s not a bad
guy
, per se, then the role will be filled
by a high-tech security system that Biggus Dickus must out-smart.
This second one is for movies where the hero and his gang are
trying to steal something like a famous painting or a rare diamond
- famous shit that it would, in reality, be all but impossible to
sell on the black market - because it’s too difficult to make an
intimidating villain out of a museum curator. They tend to avoid
having their enemies fed to exotic animals.
Okay, so now
we have a dashing hero, a large quantity of loot for him to get his
well-manicured mitts on, and a reason for stealing said loot which
demonstrates that he doesn’t really care about money. Now we can
start adding some other characters for him to trade sarcastic quips
with. The team is usually built out of the following mix ’n’ match
elements: the femme fatale, who will inevitably end up fucking the
main character, regardless of the lack of chemistry between them;
the wizened veteran, who will spend the entire film resisting the
temptation to say that he’s ‘too old for this shit’; the guy with
obvious psychopathic tendencies which all of the other characters
will seem oblivious to until he starts capping civilians; the geek,
who is basically there to paper over any plot holes with computer
jargon and furious keyboard tapping; and the token black guy,
sometimes replaced by an Asian martial-artist if the geek character
is white. Note that the character who provides the slight nod to
diversity will never turn out to be the psychopath, because that
would be racist, though apparently it isn’t racist to make him add
“Dawg” to the end of every sentence. Last of all, there’s the rat.
If there’s a character who doesn’t fit into any of the
aforementioned gender, age or ethnic slots, there’s a pretty high
probability that he’s either an undercover cop, or at some point
he’s going to announce that he’s decided to take all the loot for
himself.
With all our
nice, generic jigsaw pieces in place, we come to the plan. If the
plan is explained before the heist itself, then the film is
basically inviting you to guess at which point it will all go tits
up, thus providing the screenwriter with a cheap and easy source of
suspense. The ‘what goes wrong?’ question tends to be answered in
one of three ways:
The high-tech security
system throws a curve ball; the alarms go off, and it looks for a
moment as though our heroic protagonist and his gang are going to
be caught, until someone - usually the old guy - figures out an
ingenious way out. In movies where the writer was especially
coked-up, the geek character might solve the problem by repeatedly
slapping his palm against the keyboard.The rat springs his or
her trap. If this happens, don’t be surprised if another twist
comes along, and it turns out that the hero had been expecting this
the whole time. Whether through ridiculous foresight or clever
improvisation, the hero will eventually send the betrayer off to
the ninth circle of hell where he or she belongs. Note that the
betrayer can only be a ‘her’ if there is more than one female
character knocking about; otherwise the film can’t end with
PG-13-style implied intercourse, and it wouldn’t be fair to the
hero if, after all that work, he can’t even get laid.If someone towards the
right hand side of the sliding scale of Hollywood disposability
(Eastern Europeans of ambiguous sexuality < suspected terrorists
(read ‘Arabs’) < racists < crooked cops < Mexicans <
extras with their faces hidden behind helmets and windscreens <
black guys < white guys < honest cops < women <
children < dogs < puppies) gets their brains blown out during
the heist sequence, expect the protagonist to be in one of two
places by the time the credits roll: in a prison cell (a slightly
more insidious implication of intercourse here), or in a
blood-splattered mess on the floor. A good rule of thumb is that
the lead character is only allowed to murder those who lie to his
left on the scale. So Jason Statham, for example, could shoot
Denzel Washington in the face and not suffer the consequences, but
he wouldn’t get away with turning his shotgun on Lassie.
So there you
have it; mine and Charlie’s tenuous formula for a heist movie. I
imagine your first question after all that is, ‘Why? Dear God,
Why?’ followed quickly by a suggestion that I really need to get a
girlfriend. To be fair, I do actually have one of those, although
to be fair again I doubt she’d be keen to remain in that
arrangement if she knew that I cancelled on her last week so I
could finish my graph plotting the number of people killed by
various movie characters against their chances of making it to the
end of the movie alive and not in prison. Possible Asperger’s
syndrome aside, I guess the reason I take even the guiltiest of
filmic pleasures so seriously is that they hold up a mirror to how
we secretly think the world works: we’d like to believe that our
crush on the popular girl will eventually be requited; we’d like to
think our home nation will always triumph in the end; we’d like to
think that all the people we hate will get their Karmic
just-rewards; and - most importantly of all - we want our lives to
follow the simple pattern of inciting incident, progressive
complications, climax, resolution and happily ever after, rather
than the rambling chaos that existence tends to serve us up. I
think pop-culture’s what our generation has instead of scripture.
I’ll probably go to hell for saying that, but I can’t be sure,
because I’ve never read the Bible. I can recite
Commando
word for word, though.
‘Y’know what?’
Charlie says, over the din of gunfire. He turns to me. ‘I’ve just
realised something.’
‘I’m all
ears.’
‘I think we
might be wasting our lives.’
‘You set a low
fucking bar for epiphanies.’
‘Ah, but it’s
not for the reason that your girlfriend would have me believe.’
I roll my eyes
in a theatrical fashion.
‘Go on, then;
let’s have it.’
He takes his
feet down from the coffee table and leans forward with his elbows
on his knees, as he is wont to do when he’s being serious. I snatch
this opportunity to yank the table back in my direction. Charlie
doesn’t notice; his eyes are too busy dancing in the flame of his
new idea. All of a sudden he sparks into life, grabbing the pizza
box and pelting it across the room. The remnants of his beans on
toast slam against the window with a cartoon-sound-effect
splat!
My eyes stop mid-roll.
‘What the fuck
did you do that for!’ I exclaim. Hence the exclamation mark.
‘Never use
words to prove your point, when a grand gesture will do.’
‘I fail to see
the point,’ I retort. ‘You know, unless the point was to
demonstrate what a colossal prick you are.’
‘There it is!’
Charlie exclaims back at me, grinning broadly. ‘Now take that
anger, that glorious, slightly effeminate anger, and ask yourself
why
you’re feeling it.’
‘At the risk
of choosing the obvious answer;
because you just threw a tin of
beans across the living room, you twat!
And - let’s be honest
here - it’s going to be
me
who has to clean it up!’
Charlie is
still infuriatingly calm.
‘Even if that
was true - which it isn’t - it would take you, what, five minutes?
Out of a day where you’ve spent two hours watching Marky Mark dig
Michael Caine’s grave just so he’s got something to dance on?’
‘Still doesn’t
change the fact that you’re an irritating bastard,’ I reply, my
anger quickly giving way to surliness, since I know there’s sod-all
I can do with the former emotion.
‘That much
I’ll admit, but my act of throwing beans across the living room
isn’t the reason you’ve decided that I’m a bastard. Not in and of
itself, anyway.’
‘And what,
pray tell,
is
the reason that you’re a bastard?’
