Layer Cake/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• In Layer Cake, there's a scene where one character, Morty, savagely beats up a former colleague whose incompetence resulted in Morty spending ten years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. Right before Morty explodes, the guy is begging for money and it was only on second viewing that I realized the significance of the last thing Morty says before attacking him "Let's make it a round ten" (ten pounds/Morty is taking revenge for those ten years). --Jordan
• I've been re-reading the novel of Layer Cake and this time, it really hit me what a depressing book it is. While on first reading I thought the characters were just unpleasant compared to their versions in the film, I was a lot more sympathetic upon re-reading. The protagonist is lower middle class and hates the idea of living that kind of existence, which is why he got into crime, but that line of work is a never-ending series of interactions with psychopaths who can be nice one minute and then subjecting you to their Hair-Trigger Temper the next. And a lot of the gangsters also have impoverished/depressing backgrounds which explains why they got involved in crime. It also hit me that this same kind of spin is why the leader of the Ruthless Foreign Gangsters is revealed as looking like a schlub despite his extreme cruelty and pretensions to being Wicked Cultured. The whole book is a pretty good deconstruction of Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!.- Jordan