Mahler on the Couch did not happen. The tickets still available online when I left the house had all sold by the time I got to Brookline; I arrived to find a lot of confused people milling around the box office saying much the same thing to one another while an employee patiently shouted, "If you're here for Mahler on the Couch, it's sold out! Mahler on the Couch is sold out! The Goethe-Institut is sold out!" so I am guessing something happened, but I have no idea what. A deluge of early-rising, German-speaking classical music mavens, possibly. I got my now-usual sujek roll-up and side of fatoush from Garlic 'n Lemons and had a not very exciting day until the evening, when I agreed to see The Adjustment Bureau (2011) with my parents.
I don't know why all the trailers marketed this film as a sci-fi action thriller, because while its central conceit may belong to Philip K. Dick, as a story it descends directly from existential fantasies like Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) or A Matter of Life and Death (1946), where every now and then there are hiccups in the heavenly bureaucracy and chance slips through, usually in the form of death or romance. In this case it's almost strictly the latter, with the former held in reserve as a warning; not so much that our protagonist will be physically destroyed as mentally erased, tabula rasa'd to fit back in with the shadowy, all-commanding "plan" that dictates his life remain unentangled with that of the woman he met once, life-changingly, and was never supposed to see again. Cue free will vs. predestination, chase scenes at eleven. Actually, The Adjustment Bureau is surprisingly less stupid than it had to be—it's not as thoughtful or as screwball as either of its predecessors named above, but its director was clearly familiar with Cocteau's Orphée (1949) and its romantic chemistry is both endearing and believable, which I didn't think happened anymore. There's no urbanely reassuring Claude Rains or judicial Abraham Sofaer, but we do get Terence Stamp as a casually icy, blunt-force specialist in the breaking of illusions; the Edward Everett Horton/Marius Goring role is filled quite effectively by the sharp-faced, sardonic John Slattery as a mid-level adjuster, initially menacing, increasingly out of his depth as the case of David Norris develops unexpected quirks and ripples. (He's no more human than any of the adjusters, who are careful never to identify themselves as angels, but he exits the film with the resignation of a man on whom a brick-ton of paperwork is about to descend: "You spend your whole career hoping someday you'll get a red-letter case, something you can really make a name for yourself with. Finally, you get one? It's booby-trapped.") And we've all seen the man who goes up against impossible odds to be with the object of his desire, but here it turns out to be critical that she understand and risk just as much for him, which I appreciated—and really appreciated that she's not required to do so as a sacrifice.
It's not a movie I'd have gone to see on my own, I think. I have no idea how much of it I'll remember in a year. It has one unnecessary chase scene and a couple of very nice ones; its fantastic elements are very simple and its special effects almost nonexistent; it has the right ending, but doesn't quite know how to get there, and in ways that made me wonder if last-minute rewrites had been involved. Another draft and it might have been a really excellent film, not just a decent hour and a half; so much of it was in the counterintuitively right places already. But it didn't give me brain damage, and it may have gotten me to notice a couple of actors, and sometimes that's all you can ask of a movie.
Today I am just exhausted and evidently not over this cold yet, so. I made an almond cake with apricot glaze. Re-read the Tractatus, to see if two nights ago had been some kind of sleep-deprived anomaly, but no. I just like Wittgenstein.
I don't know why all the trailers marketed this film as a sci-fi action thriller, because while its central conceit may belong to Philip K. Dick, as a story it descends directly from existential fantasies like Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) or A Matter of Life and Death (1946), where every now and then there are hiccups in the heavenly bureaucracy and chance slips through, usually in the form of death or romance. In this case it's almost strictly the latter, with the former held in reserve as a warning; not so much that our protagonist will be physically destroyed as mentally erased, tabula rasa'd to fit back in with the shadowy, all-commanding "plan" that dictates his life remain unentangled with that of the woman he met once, life-changingly, and was never supposed to see again. Cue free will vs. predestination, chase scenes at eleven. Actually, The Adjustment Bureau is surprisingly less stupid than it had to be—it's not as thoughtful or as screwball as either of its predecessors named above, but its director was clearly familiar with Cocteau's Orphée (1949) and its romantic chemistry is both endearing and believable, which I didn't think happened anymore. There's no urbanely reassuring Claude Rains or judicial Abraham Sofaer, but we do get Terence Stamp as a casually icy, blunt-force specialist in the breaking of illusions; the Edward Everett Horton/Marius Goring role is filled quite effectively by the sharp-faced, sardonic John Slattery as a mid-level adjuster, initially menacing, increasingly out of his depth as the case of David Norris develops unexpected quirks and ripples. (He's no more human than any of the adjusters, who are careful never to identify themselves as angels, but he exits the film with the resignation of a man on whom a brick-ton of paperwork is about to descend: "You spend your whole career hoping someday you'll get a red-letter case, something you can really make a name for yourself with. Finally, you get one? It's booby-trapped.") And we've all seen the man who goes up against impossible odds to be with the object of his desire, but here it turns out to be critical that she understand and risk just as much for him, which I appreciated—and really appreciated that she's not required to do so as a sacrifice.
It's not a movie I'd have gone to see on my own, I think. I have no idea how much of it I'll remember in a year. It has one unnecessary chase scene and a couple of very nice ones; its fantastic elements are very simple and its special effects almost nonexistent; it has the right ending, but doesn't quite know how to get there, and in ways that made me wonder if last-minute rewrites had been involved. Another draft and it might have been a really excellent film, not just a decent hour and a half; so much of it was in the counterintuitively right places already. But it didn't give me brain damage, and it may have gotten me to notice a couple of actors, and sometimes that's all you can ask of a movie.
Today I am just exhausted and evidently not over this cold yet, so. I made an almond cake with apricot glaze. Re-read the Tractatus, to see if two nights ago had been some kind of sleep-deprived anomaly, but no. I just like Wittgenstein.
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