Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
I read a review of this film that said "I had no idea what was going on, but I still loved it". That pretty much sums up my viewing experience as well. Luckily, I had Wikipedia to prepare me for this dense and detailed film. Armed with the synopsis, I was able to follow the plot well enough: Gary Oldman plays George Smiley, a man employed in the top echelon of British Intelligence (an elite group of men known as "the Circus") in the early 1970's. Smiley's mentor and boss, Control (John Hurt), who is the head of British Intelligence, has been collecting evidence of a mole within the Circus who is feeding information to the Soviets. After a mishap involving an intelligence exchange in Hungary, Control and Smiley are forced out of Intelligence and Control has a heart attack. Smiley is left to continue Control's work of rooting out the mole.
The title refers to the nicknames Control gives the top men in the Circus: there's Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), aka "Tinker"; Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), "Tailor"; Roy Bland (Ciaran Hands), "Soldier"; and Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), "Poor Man". It's up to Smiley, with the help of another agent, Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy), and a young intelligence officer, Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), to discover who the "Spy" of the group is.There is a lot going on in the movie, and the filmmakers don't dumb anything down for the audience's sake. I followed the film about 70 percent of the time, but even when I lost track of all the details, I still pretty much managed to keep from getting completely lost. And the film is more than the details of the story--it's about the mood of Cold War Europe as well. 70's England, at the height of the Cold War, appears grey and dirty. The characters' homes and offices are poorly lit and sparsely furnished. There's a scene that takes place during an office Christmas party reminded me of Mad Men--albeit a dingier, far less glamorous version of Mad Men. The men of the Circus have very paltry lives outside of their jobs (however, a major plot point concerns Smiley's cheating wife), and Ricki Tarr says at one point that he wants to get out of Intelligence: "I'm not like you [men]. I want to have a family." These supposedly privileged men are bound to their careers and their country, and because of this they often come across as boring and grey as the scenery. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is hardly a "sexy" or conventionally exciting spy movie, but it is taut, thrilling, and very cerebral--a treat for those who enjoy "brain candy" type films.
4 out of 5 stars
***
Le Havre
On the opposite side of the spectrum from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is Le Havre. Where Tinker Tailor is intellectual and challenging, Le Havre is simple and light. Le Havre is about an elderly shoeshiner, Marcel Marx, living in Le Havre (a port city in France) who takes in an African boy who is heading to London illegally. Marcel takes the boy in and hides him from the authorities until the young man can safely make his way to his family in England. That's it. Le Havre is what I might call aggressively pleasant--even the mean, wily police officer who is on the African boy's tail turns out to be a big softie in the end. There is no actual discussion of the ethical dilemmas that illegal immigration produces. Basically, the movie is: old man lives a pleasant life that is pleasantly disrupted by a pleasant (and almost entirely silent) immigrant until the situation is pleasantly resolved and everything goes back to normal. It was cute; there were some laughs; but overall the film was as light and unsubstantial as air.2.5 out of 5 stars
***
Lady Terminator
Whoa. This movie. Lady Terminator is a bizarrely awful (and I mean in that in the best possible way) film that came to my local artsy theatre as a midnight movie. My friend had been talking about it for months, saying that is was the greatest bad movie since The Room, so of course I had to check it out. Well, she wasn't just blowing smoke. Lady Terminator is insane and so unintentionally funny, you actually may die laughing.
The film opens up with a sea queen who takes on a series of lovers. When they fail to satisfy her in bed, an eel comes out of her vagina and bites their manhood off. None of that previous sentence was a typo: Eel vagina. Bitten off manhood. When the queen finally meets a man who is able to tame the vagina eel (he removes it and it becomes a dagger), she is furious and vows revenge on the man's great-granddaughter. Cut to three generations later: a young, sexy anthropologist goes in search of information about the legendary sea queen, but ends up falling into the sea and becoming possessed with the sea queen's...essence? ghost? In any case, an eel goes into her vagina and she becomes immortal and goes around killing everyone in sight: either with the vagina eel, a machine gun, or frickin' lasers that shoot out of her frickin' eyeballs.
You know what, let's just stop right there. Lady Terminator is beyond explanation. It just exists of a plane of its own. If you get a chance to see it, please do. You won't regret it. Eel vagina!
1 star for quality, dubbing, acting, music, costumes, and script
5 stars for entertainment value
"First she mates...then she terminates!"
***
The Leftovers
by Tom Perrotta
I had been meaning to get around to Tom Perrotta's latest novel for months. When I finally picked it up, I read half of it in one sitting. Perrotta is a master of satirizing suburbia and all the little tempests in teapots that go on in suburban life. His last novel, The Abstinence Teacher focused on the culture war between evangelical Christians and neo-liberal parents over the topic of sex education. His novel before that, Little Children, was about what happens when a registered sex offender moves into a family-friendly neighborhood. In The Leftovers, Perrotta aims for a more existential subject: the Rapture. Or, rather, a "Rapture-like" event where thousands of people around the world disappear into thin air simultaneously: atheists, Christians, Muslims, Jews, gay people, sinners and saints, and people of every nation, color, and creed alike. Perrotta doesn't bother to explain what this Rapture-like event is or what it means--instead he focuses on how those left behind react.
Don't worry. The premise sounds familiar, but this novel is no Tim LaHaye Christian propaganda. In Perrotta's vision of post-Sudden Departure (the name the characters give the unexplained event) small town America, there's plenty of room for bizarre religion fanaticism and existential angst, but there are no "right" or "wrong" answers. Some of the characters find themselves drawn to cults and weird holy men, while others just want to get on with some semblance of a "normal" life after the Sudden Departure. As time goes by, both science and religion fail to offer up any explanations about what happened during the Departure, and the characters are forced to confront the moral and relational choices they've made since the event.
Perrotta, who is one of my favorite authors, walks a fine line between acidic satire and gentle understanding. He has a real respect for his characters--none of them are monsters or caricatures. Even though some of them do boneheaded and mean things, Perrotta makes sure the reader understands and empathizes with their motives. If you haven't read any of Perrotta's work, I highly recommend him. His view of the human condition is realistic and not always complimentary, but always hopeful.
4.5 out of 5 stars
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