Mamet's a love-him or hate-him kind of filmmaker, and I tend
to fall on the love-him side: the tense, terse Pinteresque dialog and brooding
machismo is suggestive of a primordial Michael Mann. In his movies, everyone's
a con artist, and most people are conning themselves too. Everything's turned
inward, backed up on itself to the point where it's impossible to truly see the end of the duplicity and manipulation; they're crime films as Escher paintings.
