The art of good business is being a good middle man

I think they screwed up the audio mixing on the Layer Cake DVD. I had a terribly hard time watching this movie and understanding the dialog. The audio dialog was mixed way lower than the general sounds, so the dialog was often drowned out by the music or general movie sounds coming in on the other channels. It didn't help that my reeiver had somehow messed up the audio settings (I typically have my center channel louded by the receiver, it was the same as the other channels.) And it really didn't help that there were lots of fast talking guys with strong accents in this movie. I actually turned on the english subtitles about half way through, that helped a lot.

Now it's hard for me to figure out if I really like the movie that much. Since I spent a lot of it trying to figure out what was going on. For the first half I was focused on trying to understand the dialog, and the second half I was reading it. This doesn't mesh well with a stylized movie like Layer Cake. They kept doing overpowering sound effects which annoyed me in the first half (since they caused me to not hear the dialog or narration) and I couldn't really absorb the tricky visual stuff in the second half because I was reading subtitles. I would have liked this movie much more with better audio mixing.

That's not to say I didn't like it. I did. It's anonther one of these criminal thrillers where a bunch of people are all trying to be clever and the audience is trying to figure out who's going to be most clever - hint: typically the main character. There are some strange tangents, most notably with a girl that I didn't really see a point to but to add sex appeal and extra tragedy. And it's sometimes hard to keep track of all the different gangsters and their relationships with each other, but it's still fun to watch.

Just another story about a criminals who don't act like criminals most of the time. If anything, that's what this movie is about. For this guy, drugs are just business, and he's a good middle man.

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