I'm really feeling this right now.

Spyglasses

There isn't much about Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that I can say which hasn't already been said. Although I loved the movie to pieces, there is one thing that I think I love the most about it.

Traditionally, or at least often, spy characters in film are given dark glasses to wear, to make them as inscrutable as possible. Gary Oldman wore glasses while portraying spymaster George Smiley which greatly increased the size of his eyes - and yet due to his fantastic performance he managed to appear even more inscrutable than the Men in Black and their ilk. That's what I find so tremendously impressive about Gary Oldman's performance; well, that along with everything else.

Also, anyone who leaves the theater without Julio Iglesias' version of "La Mer" stuck in their head has not a soul. That song Tinker Tailor Soldier Lingered.

Without Love (Cecily's review)

I thought it was kind of funny. Because two parts:
One was this lady put on this thing, and it had glass all around it. Or was it plastic? It was glass. Okay so. And then when the man went out of the room, she sneezed, and then she tried to wipe her nose, but she was like, "uhh...." And then she remembered that she had on that thing. Okay. Then, she got inside this space ship thing once the man came back. Um. Oh my gosh. Are you writing all this down? They will not know what I'm talking about. So when she got in, she was like, "Oh, I feel so upside-outside-inside!" I think that's it. You are actually writing down everything that I say. Oh my gosh. mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh.

So the man sleep walked, right into the girl's room, when she was getting some water. Then when she came back she like got in bed, and when she saw the man, she fell RIGHT OFF THE BED!

I like it.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

As evidenced below, I was overjoyed to finally see the cinematic version of TTSS. Most of my love for this film was initially placed in loving Gary Oldman and roughly anything he does, but in order to show my fealty, I decided to read the book and get a sense of this new chapter in my relationship with Gary Oldman.* Now, it should be mentioned that I still love Gary Oldman, but there was something iconoclastic for me in the book that I just had not anticipated and my love was reshaped.

My new love is for the uncanny narrative tension that can only be created by the sheer, unadulterated boredom of the life of great spies. Before I go on, I fear I may give some minor details of the film/book away so I say unto you: here there may be spoiler alerts. The success of the book is its almost epistolary nature. Smiley gathers all of his intelligence through the most mundane and boring means, and what we learn about Smiley and espionage in general is that you just have to listen and connect plot points of people's stories. I've given some serious thought to telling people that this book has no plot beyond George Smiley listening to people and arresting some guy at the end. All of the action happens in exposition, and after six or seven of Smiley's chit chats, you just stop caring about the Cold War and the battle for ideological dominance. What really matters is that Smiley is a sad and sort of pathetic man, but a brilliant spy.

When I finished the book, I started storyboarding the movie in my mind, and I was glad that the film listened to my imagination. The colors are almost completely washed out, Smiley rarely ever talks, and most of the film is just a study of people's faces as they tell stories that are seemingly unrelated. I was bored to sheer joy.

Actually, I don't think the film is remotely boring, but the slow pace of the film and the completely anticlimactic and brilliantly executed end will make people scratch their heads in wonder. After all, aren't spies more like James Bond or Ethan Hunt? Aren't they the peak of physical performance and aren't they the world's greatest lovers? Can't they overcome the most difficult odds through sheer will power and brute force? According to LeCarre, no, spies pay attention when people talk and talk and talk, drink and get drunk, and have trouble swimming anything more than a few laps. To borrow from another movie, these are spies like me.


*The first chapter was Oldman's portrayal of the crooked Stansfield. Then I watched True Romance, Dracula, Sid and Nancy, Immortal Beloved, The Fifth Element (about 100 times just to hear him pronounce, "Jean-Baptiste Immanuel Zorg."), and Romeo Is Bleeding. I like to think of the Harry Potter films and the Christopher Nolan Batmans as the relationship of people who argue over the price of sandwiches.

tinker tailor soldier success!

Young Adult (Lydia's review)

There is not a lot to like in Young Adult. Especially unlikeable is the main character, which is a difficult (but not impossible) problem to overcome.  I liked some details--the loving, almost fetishistic attention to the inner workings of a memorex mix tape in the opening credits went too far and then kept going until it circled back around to greatness. The many close shots of manicures and pedicures; an expanse of a pale and freckled back in the foreground; the frank, underexplained images of hair pulling. These were the things I liked.

There is a standard thing that happens to characters like Mavis,* the ghostwriter in Young Adult. People as shallow and self-destructive as Mavis almost never get through a whole movie without undergoing some major transformation. Maybe it’s refreshing that instead of sticking to formula, Mavis experiences no epiphany, no change, and no catharsis. She simply decides in the end that her raging prom-queen shallowness is her best option--no, not just her best option, but actually correct.

To be fair to Young Adult, I am tired of the movies it is not. The movies that tell me how great and wholesome it is to be fulfilled by ordinary lives which are not actually ordinary at all. The it’s-a-wonderful-life syndrome, where a small-town guy thinks his life is meaningless, then discovers that actually he has a lot to live for, in the form of a beautiful and devoted wife, many adoring and/or adorable children, millions of friends, and quite meaningful work. But most of us aren’t George Bailey. If Frank Capra has convinced me of anything, it is that I probably should throw myself off a bridge, because I don’t have a lovely wife and four children, and I have never saved my hometown from the evil machinations of Lionel Barrymore. I’m bored with hollywood falsely endorsing ordinary lives.

So I should be pleased with Young Adult, which bravely refuses to embrace the lie of Capra’s small town America, an America that not only doesn’t exist now in the era of strip malls, but also never existed in the first place. Young Adult thumbs its nose (is there a more juvenile expression of disdain? flips the bird?) at the idea of values that are not utterly shallow. In the end, Mavis is faced with what might be understood as one single moment of authenticity, in the form of bad, ugly sex. Not mean sex, just bland and sad and based on a deeply felt, totally mutual pity.

I came away from this movie feeling like I’m supposed to believe you have the following choice in life: be “stupid and fat” like everyone in Mercury, or be slightly less stupid and have trichotillomania instead  of  fat, and live in a slightly less hick town, and sneer out loud at anyone who is centimers less than you as measured on the cultural cache tape measure.***

It’s surely true that anyone, at any level of success, can feel like a failure compared to one person and like a success compared to someone else. Being a superhot divorced lady and a ghost writer for a terminated series of young adult novels, for instance, might be someone’s idea of success and someone else’s idea of abject failure. That this movie accepts and illustrates that is fine. But the movie ends with music rising and cheerful, blatantly false voice-over as Mavis embraces her obviously destructive and terrible choices and the miserable life they have brought her. This makes it at best very dismal, with a message of supreme hopelessness. I guess you could call that brave.

* Is her name really Mavis? I feel like I must be getting that wrong.

** I really wish i could construct a pun here about a cultural mix tape measure, but for once I am not up to the challenge...

Young Adult (Kristin's review)

I didn’t have much in the way of expectations for Young Adult. I thought “quirky,” cause, you know, Diablo Cody. And sure, I suppose it was. Mostly, though, it left me feeling a lot uncomfortable and a little disappointed. 

It's surprising to be disappointed when I started with no expectations, but here I am. It happened somehow after the first quarter of the movie. In the first few scenes I felt surprisingly enthusiastic about the about the subject. I’m not one for mid-life crisis movies, but because male characters are so frequently afforded unlimited screen time to indulge in aimless 30s-onset existential angsting I was glad to see a movie wherein a female character gets to do the same thing. The opening launch of the protagonist homeward, mix-tape in hand, felt very High Fidelity. Halfway through the movie, though, the boyfriend fixation was a bit too much, and when Mavis revealed that the seemingly sole core of her widespread and indiscriminant social and geographic loathing were rooted in her inability to have children this lost me. It just lost me. This movie, essentially, is about hysteria. So that’s unfortunate.
Forbes ran an article in which the author, Victoria Pynchon, responds to internet outcries against Young Adult’s main character. It's not surprising that people are hating on Mavis. She's pretty much hateful. And while I get Pynchon's desire to distinguish between immoral behavior in a movie and an immoral movie, I can't get on board with her analysis. She has the poor judgement to say that Mavis is primarily guilty of things like simply saying “aloud what the rest of us keep to ourselves.” What, exactly, is Pynchon thinking to herself? And what on earth could compel her to call Beth compassionate? In what world is condescending pity to be confused with kindness?
Pynchon’s article links to another text at Baltimore Magazine that points out how consistently Diablo Cody’s movies put the most redeeming characters in incredibly homey, traditional roles. The author, Max Weiss, seems to praise Cody for unexpected choices here. I don’t feel the same way. Motherhood isn’t the most redemptive quality women can have, and middle-American values aren’t the only ways to be a decent human being in a crowd of irredeemable criminals. Dial it down, Cody. People are cruel for a lot of reasons; you can lay off the Single Victim of Infertility for a while and try on any of the more likely causes for Mavis's behavior: laziness, vanity, boredom. Girls can be jerks too, without men or babies framing the picture.
I sound super disgruntled, but I'm not actually because seeing this movie led me to read the wikipedia articles on hysteria and female hysteria, both of which are pretty swell.