🍰✨

I tried to watch the movie Layer Cake one night when I was bored at school and looking to watch something action-packed and produced by Matthew Vaughn (I have already seen Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels). It was, as most of Vaughn’s movies are, very exciting (and enticing, thanks to a sharply-dressed Daniel Craig) but nearly impossible to understand with all of the fast-paced British action flying about. If only I had subtitles (goddamn Megavideo).

But had I been able to understand it, it probably would’ve been an excellent film, which is why I didn’t want to completely give up on it. I just finished reading Layer Cake, the novel.

The novel is just as twisted as the movie, plot-wise, but if you read and reread carefully enough, you might be able to understand what’s going on. I won’t go into dissecting all the layers of Layer Cake. There’s just too many. Even wikipedia had to pick and choose which layers made it into the plot summary.

I found that the beginning of each chapter was like, “Oh, just another day in beautiful London. I got a phone call and then I went to the park, la, la, la…” and then two pages later, “DEAD BODY!”, “BRUTAL BEATING!”, “DRUGS!”, “SEX!”, “THIS GUY’S DEAD AND NO ONE KNOWS WHY!” So when the action picked up, all the extraneous plot details didn’t really matter anymore because it got super exciting. 

In the end, I liked the book a lot (it’s best read in small doses, to avoid getting a headache), and I think I might be confident enough to give the movie another shot.

The rest of my summer reading list can be found here.