When I get busy, my blog gets ignored. Thus I find myself in the unusual position of not having written anything here for nearly a week. Gasp. However did the world survive? Quite well, I guess.
Last weekend we watched three movies. On Friday night it was Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer. Ewan McGregor is hired to rescue the “autobiography” of a recent British prime minister who received a $10 million advance for his memoirs. The previous ghost writer drowned after falling from a ferry between the mainland and the PM’s Martha’s Vineyard compound. The book he left behind is complete, but boring and not likely to garner the type of critical or popular review that might help the publisher recoup much of its investment. All the words are there, McGregor says, they’re just in the wrong order. His deadline is short: a month, and gets even shorter when controversy surrounding the PM increases pressure to get the book out.
PM Lang, you see, has just been accused of war crimes and a tribunal in The Hague would very much like him to appear before them. He’s accused of turning British citizens over to the CIA for rendition and torture. Lang is conveniently out of the country at the time the news breaks, and his compound turns into a media circus. Security around the manuscript is tightly maintained by Kim Cattrall, sporting a decent British accent, with whom the PM is probably having an affair. McGregor’s predecessor left behind some mysterious hints that there’s a bigger secret in Lang’s past. With the help of a cooperative GPS system, McGregor digs in. Along the way he has a delightful conversation with Eli Wallach.
Lang is Tony Blair played by Pierce Brosnan. When he travels to Washington for a damage-control public appearance, the dignitary who greets him could play Condi Rice in her biopic. So, Polanski is getting his digs in that Blair might have been a puppet of the American government, but he also produces a serviceable thriller, much influenced by Hitchcock, most notably during a scene where the camera tracks the progress of a note as it is passed hand-to-hand through a large crowd. A few good twists, a nice turn by Tom Wilkinson, and an ending that Hitchcock would never have dared.
On Saturday we watched The Bounty Hunter, starring Jennifer Anniston and Gerard Butler. I had modest hopes for this movie. I think Anniston is appealing and has done some good work as an actress. However, the trailer gives away most of the movie’s best parts and hides some of the worst–an annoying sub-plot involving Anniston’s puppy dog co-worker, for example. It has a few moments, but not nearly enough of them.
My wife hadn’t seen Shutter Island, so I watched it again with her on Sunday night. I maintain that the movie’s best scene is the one between DiCaprio and Ted Levine where Levine waxes philosophical on the nature of evil men. He’s playing it completely straight, and it’s a gripping moment in the middle of some otherwise surreal goings-on. The odd camera angle switches at the beginning, when they’re on the ferry, still annoyed me, as did the whip-pan left and right when the guard who greets them orients them to the buildings. All in all, I think my first impressions of the movie didn’t change much on repeat viewing.
