The first episode of the second season of the UK edition of Life on Mars covers similar ground to The Dead Zone. If you knew beyond all doubt that someone was going to commit heinous crimes in the future, would you be morally justified in doing something about it? That’s the dilemma Sam faces, and his very life is at risk because of it. The only flawed aspect of his approach is that he (mistakenly?) believes that the bad guy is aware of what his older self is doing, when there’s no real reason to believe that’s true.
We watched Burn After Reading last night. What an odd little film. I came away from it wondering which character the audience was supposed to identify with. The only one who was at all admirable was Frances McDormand’s boss at the health club, and look where that got him. The film could easily have been called Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, because they mostly were. It was amusing to watch Clooney’s growing paranoia (justifiable paranoia, as it turns out), and Brad Pitt’s character was so clueless that when he suffers a major head trauma at one point, I mused that it probably wouldn’t do him much harm because the injury occurred to his least used organ. Clooney’s wife was a bland enigma, Tilda Swinton’s character was simply hateful, Malkovich’s foul and angry, and McDormand’s blissfully ignorant. The three characters I liked the most were the divorce attorney, the plastic surgeon (Jeffrey DeMunn) and the head of the CIA (JK Simmons), because they were true to their stereotypes in amusing ways. The latter was especially entertaining because all worried about was damage control–burn the body, put him on a plane to Venezuela, worry about the comatose potential witness if he ever wakes up, etc. Tidy up the messes and ruminate over how to avoid a similar situation in the future. He lived in this little bubble, never shown anywhere but behind his desk in his cushy office. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I liked the film, but even a bad Coen Brothers movie leaves you with something to talk about.
