First, then second, consideration

The Tourist is one of those movies that will leave some viewers scratching their heads, wondering why there isn’t more action, more snazzy editing, more obvious crackle between its stars, Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. But I suspect the people who get The Tourist will simply adore it: It’s the kind of espionage caper that doesn’t get made anymore, a visually sensuous picture made with tender attention to detail and an elegant, understated sense of humor. (Stephanie Zacharek, Espionage Caper The Tourist Offers Mystery and Glamour, Plus Depp and Jolie, “Movieline,” 9 Dec. 2010)

KEY SPOILER ALERT

(First consideration) She is really good and appropriate in this picture. Something about how Angelina refuses the viewer, and her spare personality, works to remind you to attend to everything else perfectly worthwhile in the picture. Elegance, a sure splendor of it -- it's hard to imagine anything making an appearance in the film that wasn't (as Stephanie says, tenderly and appreciatively) "considered" ... But I followed this by re-watching "Knight and Day" -- a movie I just can't deny as one of favorites from this year -- and I'm reminded why something in the TRULY "Wisconsin"-born (read: large-hearted, big-souled American) (once Depp reveals his true identity, we should wish him well but still be quite ready to leave him behind -- his human undeterminedness was fake: he's as furnished and complete as the beautiful hotels he for a glorious time inhabited), hammy, down-to-earthness, can ultimately trump every element of fragile stunning beauty some place like Venice has to offer, perhaps in the same way a single human life, perhaps even before its begat into something storied and interesting, can still trump the whole awesome complexity of the entire rest of the ecosphere: no, I'm sorry, whatever your -- albeit -- formidable luxury of experiences and details, whatever the extent of patience required to appreciate all that's in their tiniest sliver, there's no comparing even the sum of it to spending time along someone with sufficient soul to remainder it all to backdrop.

Where Stephanie really scores points with me in this lovely, faithful review, is that Americans should be able to appreciate this (kind of) film, all that it respects enough to quite-to-the-exact-precarious-point-of distraction think about and love -- not just loud star vehicles -- and how many can? The film loses me, for its making its lesson by noticeably submitting the human -- nothing they "existed" made me really forget the kind of hotels (and trains, and such) they had been in. Great PEOPLE made those grand hotels, but more LIVING, vital presences should still readily backdrop them, and they didn't enough -- struck me as about near always-even (not quite, they surely existed more than the other human-types that "accompanied" them) -- for my preference. I COULD take my eyes off them, and though it opened things up, in retrospect, this isn't so much quite the thing I supposed it was on first consideration. Still a really good film, though.

Link: Espionage Caper The Tourist Offers Mystery and Glamour, Plus Depp and Jolie (Movieline)

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense ...

Salon discussion of "Almost Famous" gang-rape scene

Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape scene? Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity? Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy Benfer). Sawmonkey: Lucky boy Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post, “Films of the decade: ‘Amost Famous’, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec. 2009) Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further presump...

The Conjuring

The Conjuring  I don't know if contemporary filmmakers are aware of it, but if they decide to set their films in the '70s, some of the affordments of that time are going to make them have to work harder to simply get a good scare from us. Who would you expect to have a more tenacious hold on that house, for example? The ghosts from Salem, or us from 2013, who've just been shown a New England home just a notch or two downscaled from being a Jeffersonian estate, that a single-income truck driver with some savings can afford? Seriously, though it's easy to credit that the father — Roger Perron—would get his family out of that house as fast as he could when trouble really stirs, we'd be more apt to still be wagering our losses—one dead dog, a wife accumulating bruises, some good scares to our kids—against what we might yet have full claim to. The losses will get their nursing—even the heavy traumas, maybe—if out of this we've still got a house—really,...

The Invisible Counterpoint

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