Screenhead

The International, despite what you may think, is not the kind of movie that comes along every day.  One part cerebral crime drama, one part insane shoot-em-up action film, and one part corporate drama, it’s a grand and sweeping epic that’ll cover a couple different continents.

This time around, an Interpol agent, working along with the Assistant District Attorney of Manhattan, thinks he’s finally caught onto who’s behind a massive arms dealing ring, a ring so massive that it’s actually keeping terrorist cells on the payroll. But the closer our sleuthing duo gets to the bottom of the vast mystery that separates one of the world’s largest banks from a terrorist conspiracy that includes greed, death and corruption, the more twists and turns they run across.

It’s hard to talk very specifically about a movie like The International, which is basically a whole lot of movies wrapped up into one.  On a plotline level, it’s actually fairly unique—seriously, when’s the last time you heard about a bank being a villain?  And no, the nightly news about the mortgage crisis doesn’t count.  After all, this is a lot more villainy than even foreclosing on the elderly.  This is gunrunning and bombmaking and assorted similar whatnot.

Even more interesting, The International will do some really amazing things with landscaping and whatnot—you’ll get to see just about every kind of land and terrain and everything else, and it will almost frame the whole thing.  It’s actually a real surprise how they make the surroundings work alongside the plot—there’s this one absolutely priceless sequence involving a gun battle in the Guggenheim that needs to be seen to be believed.

And I’ll tell you THIS much, I definitely liked the pacing on this one.  It felt like watching that recent Russell Crowe thriller, State of Play, but with more gunplay.  There were plenty of new pieces of the grand puzzle being revealed at regular intervals, just rapidly enough to keep it from getting boring.

However, The International’s not without its down sides.  While it does resemble State of Play but with more gunplay, it’s clearly hoping to be more like the whole Bourne trilogy, and frankly, it doesn’t have the snowball’s chance.    The “network of twists and turns” I described earlier, pretty much all of them are twists and turns that you’ll see coming from a mile away.  After most every one of these twists and turns that happen, you’ll shake your head in bemusement, wondering how they could’ve trotted out more of the same old same old.

The International isn’t really a bad movie.  There’s plenty to like about it, frankly—with some really solid suspense movie elements to it and more than a little crime drama with an unconventional villain.  It’s not a bad guy here, no SPECTRE head stroking his cat, but rather a system gone horribly awry.  It can’t quite muster a whole lot of originality, but give it credit for trying—it did manage to bring something new to the table, and these days, that’s at least worth a rental.

Walking into Duplicity, I couldn’t shake this incredible sense of déjà vu, like I’d been here before.  I looked at this clever little spy thriller of sorts and said, you know, this looks FAMILIAR.

But more on that later—the plot awaits us!  A pair of spies–Julia Roberts for the CIA and Clive Owen representing MI6–have left their lives of governmental espionage in exchange for a master plan of huge profit and high adventure in the corporate espionage field.  And they think they’ve found their honey pot in the form of a conflict brewing between two rival consumer product firms, one headed by a true zealot of efficiency and corporate dogma, the other a freewheeling publicity hound desperate to sink his rival.  How desperate?   The two get in a small fistfight within their first minute on screen together.  Meanwhile, we’ll also get a look at the surprising history that Roberts and Owen’s spy counterparts share on their way to the (hopefully) eventual fruition of their dreams.

The first thing I thought when seeing this was that it was to be this year’s version of Catch Me If You Can, a compact if somewhat trite punchy rollout of a couple spies going after corporate secrets with all the verve and élan that only spies could muster.    But what I got was an oddly fragmented but still somehow charming story of two spies who didn’t trust each other farther than they could throw each other, and yet, somehow, despite it all were still MADLY in love with each other.  Me personally, I say that each one loved the challenge that the other represented—they had to be on top of their game constantly around each other, and that they continually kept each other guessing kept both from getting bored with the other.

And that’s the really amazing part about Duplicity—almost all the fun here is had from Roberts and Owen’s constant wordplay.  It’s almost like watching them duel with rapiers at close range; the flourishes and the clashes and the occasional disarming that causes the other to fall silent…but it doesn’t last long as the temporarily silenced half of the conversation quickly recovers and launches a flurry of new blows.

Yes, the action in here doesn’t come from explosions or bloodshed or gun battles, but it’s no less exciting for the lack.  It comes almost exclusively from conversation.  Oh, sure, there are a couple of really spiffy action sequences where tension is jacked through the roof—watch Julia Roberts try to make a copy of a secret formula, for example—and you’ll be downright surprised just how exciting watching a woman look for a copier can be.  Guys out there, take note—this is the kind of movie you could take your girlfriend to and BOTH of you will enjoy it.

I’ll be honest with you—if ALL chick flicks were THIS entertaining, you’d never get me out of a theatre. But they’re not, so nyeah.

And I’ll tell you this much: the ending will be a total masterstroke.  Seriously, total masterstroke; the chances of anyone seeing this coming are so slim as to be laughably low.  In fact, I have a hard time picturing ANYONE who wouldn’t enjoy this movie, unless you’ve got an attention span on par with that of a gerbil or something.  This one has a lot of incredible, punchy moments to it that’ll grab hold and won’t let go.  I loved Duplicity, and chances are good you will too.

Clive Owen is attached to a story centering on an undercover agent in the midst of Columbian drug cartels. The title of the film is Cartagena, a city on Columbia’s northern coast, which has one of the most vibrant histories of Columbia wars, robust economic activity and tourist trade. 

Owen’s character gets caught in a multifaceted plot and must elude drug dealers and international agents if he hopes to survive,  as stated in the Hollywood Reporter.

Duplicity looks like a fun film to watch on the big screen. The casting makes the film while it appears to have Tony Gilroy’s twists, suspense with a hit of comedy.

The trades are reporting that Miramax Films has acquired North American and Western European rights to The Boys Are Back, a drama by Scott Hicks.

An adaptation of Simon Carr’s seriocomic novel, the film will have Clive Owen playing a widower struggling to raise his two sons.

The project also sees Laura Fraser and Emma Booth starring. It is being shot in Australia.

Interpol Agent Louis Salinger and Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman are determined to bring to justice one of the world’s most powerful banks. Uncovering myriad and reprehensible illegal activities, Salinger and Whitman follow the money from Berlin to Milan to New York to Istanbul. Finding themselves in a high-stakes chase across the globe, their relentless tenacity puts their own lives at risk as their targets will stop at nothing — even murder — to continue financing terror and war.

Will the success of the patchy but watchable Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles start a trend of U.S. TV networks adapting films into TV series? The answer seems to be yes.

Sci Fi Wire are reporting that David Eick, exec producer on Bionic Woman (which has been gladly cancelled), is writing a pilot for a TV series of Children of Men. You may remember the Alfonso Cuaron directed and Clive Owen starring science fiction film of last year, in which a man attempts to rescue the last pregnant woman on the planet. It did reasonably well in theatres and is becoming quite the cult classic.

Eick’s script will not, however, be an extension of the feature film, but rather will revert back to the source novel, written by PD James, a member of UK Parliament. The TV series, if made, will deal with the political and social upheaveal that was left in the background for Cuaron’s movie.

It’s an interesting idea for a series- the charting of a dystopia which collapses when the human species becomes infertile. However, what made Children of Men (the movie) so enjoyable was the excellent direction, in which the extended action sequences were shot in one, complex take, maximising the tension. A TV series could never be as ambitious.