Last night I saw David Mamet's Spartan, a nervy essay on the action movie in the classic Mamet style. It's fun.

I always have a fine time at Mamet's movies, and almost always leave vaguely disappointed. Something similar often happens with the Coen Brothers. Their best films tend to be just two heartbeats short of a masterpiece, and I always leave hoping that maybe next time Mamet or the Coens will really pull it together and make the great movie they've been groping towards for years. However, I've begun to realize that this may never happen, that their approach to filmmaking, which is highly cerebral, planned down to the smallest detail, closed off from spontaneity and happy accidents, in short a writer's way of directing, may inherently shut them out from the sort of cinema that I love most. It's unclear whether Mamet or the Coens ever work directly from their subconscious, as even Hitchcock sometimes did. And I'm not sure I should expect them to, any more than I would ask Wong Kar-Wai or David Lynch to depart from their chosen mode. These directors don't differ in quality, but rather in kind.

This isn't to say that I won't see The Ladykillers next weekend, though. And I still love The Winslow Boy.