Duplicity

There are two slightly-obscured agendas in this film, despite its appearance of being merely a spy film with some ingredients of slack romantic comedy. The first doesn't really interest me at all: some vague moralistic suggestion that trust must be constantly renewed in love relationships. When the dew-eyed spies confide in each other that "they aren't like other people" aren't they actually universalizing their suspicions? In other words, doesn't their game feel at some level like the normal process of guaranteeing sincerity on which all intimacy is based? Aren't they then just like other people except that they talk about this process instead of living it? The argument would then be that we all ought to realize how unreliable a testimony of love is. But what do we do? Subject this testimony to more scrutiny?

The second agenda is much more interesting but unfortunately its vehicle is the hoakiest part of the film: the provocation that shareholder-beholden corporations have inherently perverse incentives. Here the film is awesome. Misinformation and counterintelligence doesn't bother us so much in the context of warfare, ultimately the sides are drawn tidily. But in the context of corporate espionage the game seems crass, even pathetic. Intelligently, the film suggests that profit-driven corporate spies can only be played by the system they think they can outsmart. Without spoiling the plot, I think Duplicity is on to something interesting: try to leave the system by fooling it, and you get marooned.

A really good film that I thought about during Duplicity is Le Cercle Rouge - Criterion Collection

Les Plages d’Agnès

This funky, chaotic, charming bricolage often put me in mind of Synecdoche, New York. There's a lot to love in this film because Agnès Varda has led a long, extraordinary life and she shares it here well, in several media and with an overt interest in being entertaining. Gems include back story on the nouvelle vague, the story of Varda's time in LA, and the evolution of her latest creative endeavors.

I saw this film at a Varda retrospective which she herself attended. It's unsettling, even unreal, to consider that someone from the world of Cleo de 5 a 7 is alive and conversant. After Varda's remarks I lingered to ask her about my favorite shot from her 1962 film (the famous point-of-view sidewalk scene when Cleo attracts the attention of several idle men). I panicked in front of Varda and wasn't sure if I had a question or merely a compliment. She told me that the men weren't actors and that they only shot the scene twice.

If you haven't seen Cleo, take the plunge at your earliest convenience: Cleo From 5 to 7

Choke

This film is entertaining and often clever but it doesn't amount to much. The whole sex addict shtick gets a little old (and so does the self choking scam). They're both basically great ingredients for a trailer but they don't cohere well enough to breath life into a full character. But splicing in those flashbacks at the nursing home was a nice touch.

What really sucks about this film is that the person's contemporary life is supposedly explained away as a pathetic recapitulation of the indirect child abuse he endured being raised by a mentally ill mother.

I feel strongly about the misuse of psychology as a plot device.

The film's mockery of tourism put me in mind of a great quotation from the late David Foster Wallace's essay Consider The Lobster: "To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."

The Dark Knight

It's no Matrix but it's definitely a philosophical action film. Not sure why the female lead had to die (is this a quotation of Antonioni's L'Avventura?). What makes this film interesting is obviously what makes real Westerns captivating: an exploration of the role of the outlaw in society. The joker is an anarchist who cannot be reasoned with and knows it...Batman is a moralist who won't kill recklessly. Unlike the great Westerns, though, this film is tinged with piercing Bush-era questions about whether, in extraordinary circumstances, it can be worth compromising the moral integrity of a state in order to stabilize it.

As philosophical film it's certainly lacking, especially when the plot wears thin: humanity's nobility is demonstrated by two boats worth of people unwilling to blow the other boat up to save their own? Come on.

You've probably already seen it, but just in case Click Here

Woman Under The Influence

"Be yourself!" is Nick's fierce refrain in the face of his wife Mabel's breakdown. Yet his efforts only exaggerate her fragile condition, which seems to walk the line between severe pathology and mere social dysfunction. This film's subtle thesis is that our mental life belongs to us, of course, but we share it with the people in our lives and they in turn influence it in a variety of disastrous ways.

In the film, Nick is particularly concerned with his co-workers' impression that his household is normal and functional. And he genuinely loves his wife and children. But in treating them as a means--as the route to social esteem, parental approbation, or personal gratification--he's cruel to them. Mabel isn't innocent, however, since it's never clear why she's so ill equipped to resist the opinions and desires of others in the first place. You can't blame her for being helpless or weak, but isn't her self-indulgence toxic too?

Woman Under the Influence

The Lives of Others

I couldn't be happier that there's actually a contemporary German film distributors have deemed worthy of sharing with us, but this film's wretched depiction of femininity ruins everything for me. I'm not certain whether a subtle comment on the status of women in the DDR was intended (if so then my anger might subside), but as it stands the world of this film is one in which women witlessly bring about the destruction of the noble male project.

Perhaps the script was rushed and no mechanism other than a woman's drug addiction (i.e., weakness) could bring the ship to port. If not, then women everywhere who praise this film's romance/drama should take a closer look.

The Lives of Others

Hard Eight

"Never ignore a man's courtesy" is the ominous line that looms large over this artful film's plot and the idiocy of several main characters. These characters bear a distinct resemblance to those in PT Anderson's later film Magnolia which I can't stand (I think his so-called masterpiece is an overrated, dirty rip off of Altman's Short Cuts). However, there's a dramatic heft to Hard Eight stemming largely from Philip Baker Hall's performance. He nails the role of Sydney, a worn out degenerate gambler secretly attempting to expiate his earlier crimes.

Anderson's directing talent does make certain scenes in this film shine. Too bad the best filmed scene comes at the very beginning.

Hard Eight