Saturday, February 24, 2007

Diamonds in the Void

The movie is called Diamonds in the void: This is the voiceover we hear at the beginning of the movie:

“I was told once that a star’s natural combustion process produces an interesting phenomenon. Carbon is drawn into the star, crushed, shaped, infused with new qualities, and finally reborn as a diamond. The raging fires of a star transform an invisible gas into diamonds, way out in the nothingness of space. I’ve always thought that this was a poetic image: diamonds raining in an empty void, unseen, unheard, beautiful.”

The movie’s name is a result of the main character’s decision to keep secret a beautiful truth. The truth (diamonds) remains unknown (raining in the void), hence the title.

The idea is an action that traces the escape of two men from a hotel. As the men escape, they shoot and kill people. When someone dies, we jump to that person’s back story, how they got involved in this particular caper. As people die, the story starts to come into focus and puzzle pieces begin to fit together. The beginning of the story places us directly into the action, as the two men are discovered to be something other than what they said they were. They shoot the man who is supposedly in charge and we trace that man’s story, the events that led him to this particular moment, with these particular men, in this particular hotel. He is not the man in charge.

A man’s sister is the whore of a drug dealer. The sister does not know the man because the sister was adopted before the man was born. The man becomes a tester of drugs for a rival drug dealer so that he may be incorporated into that world. The man wants to save his sister because he has done nothing else in his life. The sister comes on to the man, that is the very first scene in the movie. The man is in the bathroom and the sister, who does not know she is the sister comes in looking for him to fuck him. He turns her down, but then tells her to meet him outside. She leaves to meet him outside. When he walks out of the bathroom, all the shit hits the fan. Now he must get out of the hotel room and outside alive so that he can save his sister who doesn’t know that she is his sister. The guy’s such a junkie that he fiends throughout the movie. The entire movie takes his POV, he’s the main character. But when he shoots someone, or anyone gets killed, we jump to how they ended up in that position.

The movie ends when he is killed and we get his back story and how the whore is his sister. We don’t know she is his sister at first. We don’t know why he is trying to save her.

The man he is doing business with is a cop. The two of them teamed up to go up against the big dealer. The guy ratted out his former dealer friend to the cop in order to get the cop’s trust. But the cop is a real bad guy and the guy ends up killing the cop.

Someone’s a gambler. They met the gambler earlier that night after an all-night binge, the gambler is in way over his head and he is the first one shot. We get his story first. He is a professional gambler who lost in cards and the bet was that he had to accompany them to this meeting.

The drug dealer that they’re working with just got promoted from being a strong-arm, a soldier.

Okay, so the man is trying to save his sister. He’s a drug tester, just the lowest of the low. But he’s turned the tide on the guy he was testing for. He turned that guy into the cops. He was planning on simply turning the drug dealer into the cops, but the sister shows up and screws up his plan. Now he has to act fast, get out in a hurry. But the dealer senses something is up and kills the gambler. The gambler became involved because the guy needed someone else to sit with him because the cop said he wasn’t going to show up. But the cop does end up showing up and the guy ends up killing the cop. The cop ends up being in the pocket of the drug dealer because the cop gets a kickback from the dealers payroll. So from the beginning he was two-timing the guy, Caleb. But what no one knew was that the dealer’s right hand man was two-timing the dealer. So the strong arm knew that the whole thing was a set-up. But his plan was simply to get the money and then kill both the cop and the guy. The dealer wanted them killed immediately, no questions about it. But the strong arm man was planning a coupe against the dealer. He has amassed five guys and they are going to do in the dealer. Now the guy is stuck between a war with the dealer and his right hand man, the bad cop, and he is fiending for a fix something terrible. The right hand man is working to get the dealer’s friends to work against the dealer and he is making calls from the hotel room that they are all in. The sister is waiting downstairs.

How did she screw up the deal?

The movie starts with Caleb about to go out the window of the bathroom and she comes in and says, where are you off to? Don’t you have a drug deal to look after? They chat and she comes on to him very heavily. He keeps turning her down. A beautiful girl, and he’s just a nobody crackhead.

So that’s what it is. He’s there with his boss to test the drugs but his boss didn’t show up because he killed his boss earlier that day because his boss didn’t fit into his plan. So he gets the gambler to play the part of his boss.

So whose story must we kill in order to incorporate the death of his boss? Maybe we don’t have to tell that until the end of the movie, when Caleb is killed. Caleb is killed but exits the hotel, to meet his sister with hundreds of thousands of dollars in a briefcase. She ends up killing him in fury because he has killed her dealer pimp who she thinks she loved. But she has carried with her the ripped in half picture of her parent’s, her real parents and in his wallet, as she is robbing him, she finds the other half of that picture.

What is his plan? He needs to turn the strong-arm against the dealer.

How does the cop fit in? The cop pretends to be working with Caleb, but he’s actually working for the dealer. What does he tell Caleb to make Caleb think he’s working with Caleb? He provides drugs to Caleb, but this is to get Caleb in his pocket. He kills Caleb’s boss. He tells Caleb to take the money that his boss has and make a deal with the other dealer for fifty pounds of heroin. The deal will go down in hotel room X. He tells Caleb that he will bust in and arrest the dealer and his man and they can split the money and it will look great for his career, a major bust. But he tells Caleb that he needs a fall man, someone that will take the hit as the other dealer. This is where the gambler comes in.

Now Caleb thinks that this will solve all his problems. He got involved in the underground trade because of his sister. He saw her at a nightclub one time, asked around found out what she was all about, tried to join that dealer’s club, but got denied so he joined a rival dealer’s entourage, one that occasionally did deals with the dealer that owned his sister. This has all worked out perfectly. But when his sister shows up at the hotel, it all falls apart.

The first problem is that the dealer doesn’t show up. That’s the first sign that things are wrong. The dealer has sent his strong arm man to take the fall. The strong-arm man doesn’t particularly like to be made the fool of and shoots the gambler in a rage. We get the gambler’s story.

Then the strong-arm man starts making calls to various other dealers and hears that the dealer he thinks he just killed, was killed a few days ago. Now the strong-arm knows something is up. He’s about to kill the guy when the cop busts in and tells them they’re all under arrest. He sees the dead gambler and tells Caleb that he’ll have to take the fall. Caleb is outraged. The strong-arm guy realizes that he’s been set up by Caleb, by the cop, and by the dealer he worked for, the one that owns Caleb’s sister. He’s even madder than Caleb. The cop is counting the money and the strong-arm man is handcuffed, as well as Caleb.

The cop is taken out by one of the strong-arm’s men and we get his backstory, how he double-crossed Caleb, how he got involved with the dealer in the first place, Etc, etc.

So they are going to kill Caleb, but the other guy says that the dealer is staying in the hotel, that he has his girl with him. The strong-arm guy and the other guy are going to go kill the dealer and his girl. Of course, his girl is Caleb’s sister. They are going to go ahead and kill Caleb, but he makes a request. He wants to take a hit before they kill him, please, he begs. They think this is very funny and decide to leave him handcuffed, to the baseboard heater, turned on, and leave the drugs just across the room with everything he needs to hit up, needle, belt, spoon, lighter, everything. Caleb watches this stuff in absolute despair. He’s not even thinking about his sister anymore. They two guys leave to go kill the dealer and his girl. Oh, they’ve said that the guy is in room 215.

So they leave and Caleb is stuck, and then another guy comes in, looking for the strong-arm guy. He sees Caleb and Caleb tells him that the cop handcuffed him and took the strong-arm dude upstairs to interrogate him. The guy has no reason not to believe Caleb, uncuffs him and together they go to the room 215. Caleb has to kill him. He wants a hit of heroin so badly he can feel it already, coursing through him. Now he’s alone in a hotel room with hundreds of thousands of dollars and fifty pounds of heroin. This is the best place a drug addict can possibly be. He hears three quick shots and some screaming. His sister is upstairs with the dealer about to get killed by the strong-arm. He has to go save her. But he’s impossibly late. He takes the drugs and the money and hides them in a supply closet.

Now we go to the strong arm and his friend when they go to confront the dealer. Caleb is on his way upstairs, but we go backward in time a little bit. They go upstairs, talking about how pathetic Caleb is. Meanwhile, they are both taking pulls from a flask of Jack Daniels. The dealer is upstairs waiting for the cop. They knock on the door and from inside the dealer says, “Alibari?” The other guy says, James, open up, it’s me, Bryan.” The guy opens the door and both men enter, carrying guns. The dealer is a real skinny, loser kind of guy, paranoid from too much drugs. The girl we get from the two guys point of view. She’s just like Caleb’s sister, but we realize that the dealer has a type. Blonde, thin, full lips, big breasts, strung out. They confront the dealer about the cop and the bust and everything and he admits it and then tells him that the cop had him dead to rights, he had to, he didn’t think anything bad was going to happen. The strong arm says, nothing bad is going to happen, then shoots the dealer, three times and the girl screams.

We get the dealer’s back story. All of this shit comes out as we hear the back stories. None of this shit is clear. I’m writing it clearly just to get the story straight in my own mind. But this is all clouded in mystery.

Instead of the cop at the beginning of the story, it’s a pastor, and he busts into the room to kill Caleb and the strong-arm guy and he says, “I’m sorry” before he pulls the trigger. He hits the strong-arm guy in the shoulder and it all scares the pastor so much that he freezes in shock at what he’s done. Caleb knows him. The strong-arm manages to pull out a gun in time and caps him the forehead. We get his backstory. He’s doing all this to get more patronage in his church. He’s a priest. He gets in the confessional and is promised that his church will double in size if he does this. Why is it important that he do it and not just some crackhead? The priest tries to get other people to do it, including Caleb. Of course if Caleb knew he was trying to hire him to bust up his own drug deal, that’d be a different story.

The cop needs Caleb taken out of the equation because Caleb is a crackhead who is simply a liability. He knows too much and anyone in the cop’s position doesn’t want his secrets in the hands of someone like Caleb. He could simply kill Caleb, but Caleb knows things about his other boss’s deals, where he keeps his money, codes to his safes, bank account numbers, and the cop figures out a way to get all of this in one place and effectively take out Caleb and the strong-arm guy.

He needs the strong-arm guy out of the way because the strong-arm guy is strong-willed and the dealer has devolved into drug-induced paranoia. The strong-arm feels that the cop is getting too big a cut of everything and he’s going to cut the cop out.

Caleb knows bank account numbers. The cop has his sister and is going to kill her unless caleb gives up the numbers. Caleb threatens suicide, gun in his mouth, let his sister go. The cop does. Caleb has given her a book, at the beginning of the movie. The book has page numbers circled: the bank account. She can withdrawal the money as it is under her real name, as his sister. She has her birth certificate. Before he dies he says, “Don’t forget to read that book Tracy Carson.”

His backstory: he kills his other dealer and he circles page numbers in the book to coincide with the bank account info and he puts the account under his name, Caleb Carson and under his sister’s name, Tracy Carson.

Why the priest? And not a crackhead? Because the cop has some beef with the priest. The priest owes the cop a ton of money and the cop offers to wipe the slate clean. Plus he doesn’t like the priest, or at least he doesn’t care about the priest and wants to see him suffer.

How does the cop die? The girl kills the cop. The girl shoots the cop and it goes through him and into Caleb. The cop dies immediately and we get his back story. The girl rushes over to Caleb and he blah blah blah and dies, “the book, Tracy” blah blah and we get his back story, and she’s his sister. She helps him shoot up one last time and he dies.

The movie ends with the sister collecting the money. But she never finds out that Caleb was her brother. This is the diamond in the void. She’s experienced so much loss in her life that Caleb spares her the pain of losing another loved one.

But Caleb sees this as an opportunity to save his sister. When he gets to the hotel room and he sees that the dealer has sent only strong-arm he’s going to leave. But then his sister comes in. Caleb makes a couple quick decisions and gives her a pocket bible after she hits on him. Then he goes back out into the room and tells her to wait for him outside.

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