this isn't a Bourne movie, you know
I had another free weekend, for ongoing Familial Reasons, and for those same reasons spent a lot of time on Saturday purposefully trying not to think about stuff. You know the drill: run, movie, TV-though I did manage to have a dinner with a friend this time.
Luckily, A Dangerous Method was still playing in town. And you know, I have to say that, despite the fact that
a) Libby Gelman-Waxner in EW is right to call it the Chippendales Review of Hot Psychoanalysts; and
b) you have to suffer through several scenes of Keira Knightly chewing the carpet and elongating her jaw like the alien in Alien before it gets good;
c) you may, like me, spend more time than you should thinking how fun it would’ve been to see Michael Fassbender in an old skool Cronenberg film, pulling VHS tapes out of his abdomen and stuff like that,
I really enjoyed it. In fact, to my surprise, I think I may have enjoyed it more than either Shame or TTSS, and not just because of my general love of turn-of-the-century mittel-Europe and the history of psychoanalysis. I’d even put MF’s performance in the top rank of fully-clothed Fassbender performances (and, okay, I know there aren’t that many fully-clothed Fassbender performances*; it’s better than Jane Eyre, that’s what I’m saying). Even though he’s playing to one of his strengths (righteous ideologues and the women who love them), he really slides into the role, making Jung intense but not histrionic.
It’s a very talky film (from a play), but in a good way. And you’ll be happy to know that Fassy and Viggo Mortensen (as the dapperest, smuggest Freud you’ll ever see) are as fun having pedantic verbal jousts with each other as they would undoubtedly be defending Helm’s Deep together or waltzing or something. It’s a kick to watch them all be so cerebral-even Keira Knightly, once she gets done with the carpet-chewing, and Vincent Cassel, as Otto Gross, almost steals the film from everyone.
*Even in the two punishment!kink scenes, he keeps his shirt on, and KK just has a nipple showing. It was a repressive society, yo. At his most anguished, he takes off his shoes, and his bare feet, after all the clothing, are incredibly expressive. I’m not kidding.
In the end, I loved Cryptonomicon, but I finally admitted to myself that Quicksilver (the first part of the Baroque Trilogy that is a kind of prequel to Cryptonomicon was boring me senseless. So on a whim I dl’d Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder--because sometimes a girl just has to read listen to a book about a girl who goes down the Amazon. Y’all know how I feel about jungles, and it has the added advantage of having a substantial subplot about malaria medication. It’s all a little bit preposterous, but I’m enjoying it immensely, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it’s totally Heart of Darkness for girls.
It does however, often make me think of this:
Click to view
I watched a couple of episodes of The Unusuals because there it is, on Netflix, and giggled over the fact that one of Jeremy Renner’s very first lines is, “This isn’t a Bourne movie, you know.”
ETA: I love the South, you know I love the South. What I don’t love? The boys’ school being delayed two hours on the strength of an eighth of an inch of snow that only stuck to the freaking grass.