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| One of these men has way too much free time on his hands.... |
Matt Damon and Emily Something attempt to outwit the angels who control the universe in this pretty good romantic thriller. The story is based on a short by Philip K Dick but dont let that fool you - it doesnt really have much of an edge to it, although it was produced by PKD's daughter Isa (and some other people). On balance I thought it was a pleasing enough little time waster. Some critics have been saying that its Inception Light but actually its superior to Inception in that there's actually a sex scene and the screenplay understands that love and sex are more important to people than machine guns and explosions. Inception was a film for intelligent 13 year old boys. The Adjustment Bureau is a film for slightly less intelligent grown ups. Damon was bland but competent, Emily Something was bland and completely unconvincing as a kooky dancer. I did learn some important things from the film:
1. God lives at the top of Rockefeller Centre, apparently
2. The many people who said that my screenplay had a hacky denouement because it ended at City Hall where one character was trying to stop a wedding while being pursued by dark forces...were completely correct. It is hacky.
3. The person who wrote the dubbing lines got the Natural History Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art mixed up. The place with the whale is the former not the latter.
4. Yes there are Angels and a heaven but crucially, yes, there is a hell too...its having to watch Emily Something doing modern interpretive dancing.
5. John Slattery from Mad Men can also play John Slattery from Mad Men.
6. No one in the whole screenwriting and producing process thought to themselves, hey this is 2011 lets not have everything go wrong because the black guy was asleep on the job.
7. The trailer for Sucker Punch looks nine kinds of awesome.
36 comments:
Norm McDonald sort of explains my philosophical difficulty with this film.
I've been curious as to weather this one would be any good. It sounded more like another Borne Idenity flick, and I really don't want to go there again.
I love the Bourne films. Matt Damon isnt going to be in the next one, it has a different director. I saw this programme with Damon and Paul Greengrass interviewing each other and it was a real ass licking session. Put me off both of them. I wish they would make more films like the Bourne ones though.
Dont you like Emily Blunt?
Did you see this Adrian?
http://scimaps.org/submissions/7-digital_libraries/maps/thumbs/024_LG.jpg
I haven't seen this or Inception, but I have seen the trailer for Sucker Punch. I got excited just hearing Zeppelin's 'When the Levee Breaks'.
Glenna
Its more a scifi rom com.
Frankie
I never heard of her before yesterday.
Matt
thats pretty cool. I like that Mervyn Peake gets a mention. He's always the poor relation when people are thinking about the birth of fantasy but I loved those books.
Michael
Its all John Bonham's drumming isn't it? Nobody, nobody could pound the skins like Bonham.
Frankie
I tend to have issues with movies supposedly based on books I've read and liked. I want to see an interpretation of the book and the events in it, not what the director wishes would happen or, as in the case of the Bourne movie, a movie that only contains some of the same character names and nothing of the events in the book. It just doesn't work for me.
Glenna, thats interesting because i was thinking of reading Robert Ludlum. The books are quite chunky and im a slow reader so it puts me off a bit. I had imagined the films were just like the books.
Frankie,
They are pretty different. Granted it's been awhile since I last read them, but if I remember right, about the only similarity is the names of some of the characters and that Jason isn't sure where he comes from.
I would recommend reading them, or getting the audio version if that makes it easier, because Ludlum can at times be tedious to read, but they are pretty good.
Here I am again and here I am again talking of something else. I'm sorry. Just wanna say that I have finished to read The Dead Yard, sometimes it's been hard (english slang..) but I can say that if before I loved Michael Forsythe, now I'm totally crazy of him. Thank you, Adrian. Now, let's go with the third and last Dead chapter. In english again, another adventure. Love, Rory from Italy
Praise is never off topic, Rory.
Adrian, I had a kind of 'who is this guy?' moment while I watched that video. I had totally forgotten watching the Norm Show when it was on about ten years ago. I always liked it.
His theories about thinking you were a chicken and coming back to reality also explains a lot about why some people who took acid in the sixties and seventies never really came back.
What's with blaming the Black guy? Huh?
Rory
Wow, I'm surprised you can get through them. There is a lot of Irish slang and gangster argot.
But anyway thanks for the praise.
Seana
Yeah I liked what he said there. And I think if you were shown behind the curtain like in this movie you'd more or less spend the rest of your days trying to put your life back together, which would be that uninteresting a movie and is a bit more like the PKD story.
Kathy
I know. I remember it Goodfellas it was the black guy sleeping on the job that screwed everything up and even twenty years later its the same trope again.
Adrian
it hasnt been so easy, sometimes I had to trust in my intuition, but on the whole I did it. I have read the same page more time before I understood it all, sometimes, but as I said, my devotion to Mr Forsythe made the miracle.
Hi Seana!
Love, Rory
Hi, Rory.
I bet it would surprise Michael Forsythe more than anyone that he has turned out to be such a force for good. It's not the first time it's happened either.
Rory, wait until you read about Killian in Falling Glass. He's a lot of fun.
I guess you didn't get the word, Adrian. People just don't watch Goodfellas anymore - they finally wised up and realized how inferior it is to The Departed.
Or any other sublime Scorsese/DiCaprio collaboration.
Glenna, Seana
Surely you'd agree with me that Forsythe is definitely one of the bad guys in Falling Glass.
Wait, Seana, you havent read it yet so, uh, spoiler alert.
Matt
Its like fine wine isnt it? that generation of directors just gets better with age - Scorsese, Lucas, Coppolla.
Adrian,
(Possible spoiler alert..)
Yeah, I'd definitely agree with you there. I admit, I'm a bit unsettled as to how he got from where he was in Bloomday Dead to the bad guy in Falling Glass, but at the same time, the possibility was always there.
Glenna
I always saw him as the bad guy or at least as an anti hero.
Is Michael a bad guy again? Thank god for that. I thought he was off to make cakes with the W.I. A bad guy who only kills other bad guys is sort of a good guy isnt he? is that what anti hero means?
Frankie
Well in Dead he shoots a guy in chapter 1 who is completely innocent and at the very end of Falling Glass...well I better not say anymore.
I think anti hero is a good term for him.
I just hope there's another Killian novel out soon. You can't keeps us hanging too long Adrian...at least I hope you can't anyway.
I think I'll wait for the italian version of Falling Glass..I'm sorry but my brain is frying, and it's a thing that I let be only for that bad/good guy of Forsythe..see you all at the end of Bloomday Dead..
Love, Rory
Glenna
Well whatever's next just remember that I am a SLOW writer. It might be two years...
Rory
If there is an Italian version. I have no idea how the Italian Dead did.
Adrian
Italians are strange people. I know it for sure, I'm one of them..by the way, I'll read it in english if we wont make an italian version, no problem..some writers deserve it. You, for example. Ok, goodbye for now. Love, Rory
I'm not saying he's good in the novels. Belfast Sixpack should be all anyone needs to say on that score. I'm just saying he's turning out to be a force for good in our world. He'd probably hate it.
I think the reason one does root for him is that you don't feel like he's a psychopath. Maybe Falling Glass will change all that--I don't know. I think you just feel like here's this guy who is placed in this pretty bleak, few options circumstance right from the beginning, and whatever else he is, he's a survivor, and we get drawn in by his will to survive. I don't recall that he ever commits violence gratuitously. He does seem a bit like Odysseus if I'm searching for an archetypal comparison--cunning and resourceful rather than bighearted or self-sacrificial.
Adrian,
You described exactly how I felt about this movie. It was incredibly OK.
Did you see Biutiful? I just watched it and it was certainly the best movie of last year. I know you liked Winter's Bone a lot (as did I) but Biutiful was amazing.
Take care,
Josh
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