naked Viggo

Did that get your attention?

I went to see Eastern Promise the other night (which I insist on calling "Eastern Standard" despite each and every reminder that that's a restaurant, not a movie title). I was accused of wanting to see this film solely because of the naked Viggo factor, but that's a filthy lie. I wanted to see it because I'm a complete sucker for a mob movie.

My fascination with organized crime dates to my childhood, where the confluence of media depictions and stories about the (comparatively) palatial home of the bookie my mom babysat for in her youth led me to view that kind of criminal behavior as more than vaguely glamorous. Then, in my own youth, my future ex-husband met, through friends of friends, a low level Mafia guy and his wife, and started doing some work on the guy's cars for him. We would occasionally go by their house--new construction in a very nice suburb, and thus, about 2,000x better than our crappy, secondhand furniture-filled apartment in a semi-bad neighborhood--so the guy could pay my ex money he owed him or have him look at something. And they were always very, very nice to us. It was all, "Oh, come in, sit down," and "Have a drink. Want something to eat? Do some coke with us!" and amusing anecdotes, like the one where their four year old found a bag full of cash and was throwing piles of twenties all around the first floor of the house while the wife's mother rang the doorbell and they raced around trying to pick up the money and get it stuffed away. I was enchanted by this couple, finding them a magnitude of charm and glamour and cachet above any other petty criminals and drug dealers we knew.

Then the woman became pregnant again. And the coke usage didn't stop. I was only 20, 21, and in college, and not particularly well-versed in the intricacies of proper prenatal care, but even I knew that snorting large amounts of stimulant drugs probably wasn't included. And the scales fell from my eyes (or however that saying goes) and I began to realize that despite the money and nice things, the hospitality and funny, titillating stories, these people really were pretty skeezy. I stopped wanting to go over there. The spell was broken and my romanticizing of crime, especially organized crime, came to a crashing end.

But I'm still a sucker for a mob movie. Especially when it contains a naked, tattooed Viggo, okay?

xoxo