Holy mackerel is this a movie. Watched the remastered Encore edition and sat rapt. Two hours and nineteen minutes never went by so fast.
This had been on my list for a long time. I started reading about Dutch Schultz and Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll (Nicolas Cage’s real-life counterpart) and Bumpy Johnson when I was a teenager. I’ve seen a few different versions of the Dutchman’s story, but in that first scene where Richard Gere meets him in a club,…
Remember how Challengers isn’t really about playing tennis? Black Bag isn’t really about espionage.
George and Kathryn are spies who seem to live the perfect married life, which seems to baffle their coworkers, who keep cheating on their partners, or suspecting their partners because they’re all professional liars anyway. George says he hates liars, so when his wife gets flagged for possible embezzlement, or worse, things get complicated.
There’s a bit of a John le Carré flair to David Koepp’s…
The superior Crimes of the Future directed by David Cronenberg. A moody dystopian story about surgery as performance art and body modification as evolutionary necessity. Last year I had my remaining kidney taken out because it had cancers on it too big to cut off, and Cronenberg’s body-horror has been therapeutic for me . The idea that someone would do this as a kind of performance sounds plausible.
“It’s only a matter of time. You get in bed with the Devil, sooner or later you have to fuck.”
When Pismo says that line to little brother James Spader, I knew that was the basic mission statement. Even if Lowe and Spader don’t actually fuck.
Rob Lowe is a classic Highsmith villain, a Tom Ripley or Charles Anthony Bruno to Spader’s Guy Haines. Because it’s 1990 and this is Rob Lowe, they make it very clear from the first…
