Elegance Bratton

But a movie I think a lot of people are eager to dismiss, that I understand why, but I'm way too fascinated.

The movie is Elegance Bratton's By Any Means, which is...

A studio picture and among other things, Mark Wahlberg's return to... regular movies i guess movies that don't feel like they're built around his brand and built for his brand uh although by any means does fit into his brand in the sense that um it is a movie that believes in um believes that a righteous individual left alone, kind of like Randian idea of like a really talented, really righteous individual who is well suited to the moment, left alone, unfettered, will get better results than any institution.

And that's very much the Patriot's Day, which invents um, one cop to, uh, uh, to solve the, uh, Boston marathon bombings here.

And it's like, eh, I guess that's what he looked like.

But I don't know that it needed the movie.

I don't know that it aided the movie in any way for Mark Wahlberg to have a ridiculous... prosthetic nose and jowls or whatever um and i don't know what kind of accent he's supposed to be i mean it's supposed i guess i do know what he's supposed to be doing which is brooklyn but i don't i don't detect that um but um all this is to say that i after the inspection and move your body i i trust elegance bratton i trust that if he is making a movie It's because he has something to say with it.

He has a point of view.

They were the original murders that Greg Scarpa came down to help solve.

But my issue with the film was that it felt like there was such an emphasis from the director, Elegance Bratton, and the screenwriter, Sasha Penn to show the violence that Greg Scarpa was capable of that they often held back when it came to the violence that the KKK were inflicting as well.

In fact, there's a key character in this film that gets killed by the KKK, which is what actually makes Strider's evolution into Scarpa, in a sense, quicker, but you're held back.

It feels like the director kind of protected the audience from seeing that, but then had no problem later on of showing Scarpa committing acts of violence as well.

Six years, I keep saying this shit.

Directed by someone named Elegance Bratton, and written by a person named Sasha Penn.

And if I'm not mistaken correctly, this is based on a true story.

Of course, the names and details have been changed because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

If you're having trouble falling asleep when this movie comes out, stream it.

It really should have been a better movie than it was.

Again, I'm not familiar with Elegance Bratton.

I mean, the premise that I jokingly referenced in the intro seems like an interesting movie.

Yes.

Directed by Elegance Bratton, the crime thriller By Any Means takes us back to the 1960s Mississippi during a series of brutal murders targeting civil rights leaders.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars as a young black FBI agent assigned to the case who finds himself forced to team up with the infamous mafia hitman Greg Scarpa, played by Mark Wahlberg.

As the two men navigate a broken system, they are pulled into a deadly hunt where the boundaries between justice and revenge start to fade.

So who we got this week?

Yes.

So the director of this film is Elegance Bratton, whose film career I have followed literally since the beginning.

His first feature film was a documentary that came out in 2019 called Peer Kids.

I'm very torn on this because on the one hand, I think on a technical level, it's well made.

It's directed by Elegance Bratton.

And I think it's directed well.

It's not, you know, Hitchcock or Spielberg or whatever, but I mean, it's solid direction.

That is obviously speaking to some of our, our modern times and in such a powerful way and quite a while, certainly not one that wasn't made by like a massive director like Spike Lee or Ava DuVernay, you know, someone with a, with a real name.

Um, This was directed by a person named elegance Bratton.

I've never seen any of their movies before.

And so it felt like I was seeing, you know, I stayed for all the credits and I was like, I've never heard of most of these people.

Yes, sir.

Directed by Elegance Bratton.

I knew he was blocked by that name without knowing anything else about this person.

You said it,

And now I want to have a conversation with that gentleman's parents.

But I'm like, was destiny not an option? Or Portia? Anyway, not a few Porsches in my life.

So directed by Elegance Bratton, starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who my family and I affectionately started calling Kareem Abdul-Jabbar because we couldn't remember his name.

Mark Wahlberg, the bane of Robert's existence.

I think I'm forgetting which vowel it is.

Elegance Bratton.

I almost said Breton.

It's Bratton.

And Elegance Bratton is...

Like, you know, they're very talented.

They have a lot of very slick, smart, effective direction.