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timaeus123
Reviews
The Last Duel (2021)
Gender, Patriarchy, Consent, Swords, Horses and Blood
I'm not sure if this film is an interesting failure or a qualified success. One of my professors once remarked that Clint Eastwood's spaghetti westerns were more about the 60s counterculture than the horse culture of the 19th century.
Duel is all about the gender politics of the 21st century and has little to do with medieval values. Affleck and Damon's script gives each of the leads a chance to tell the story from their perspective. The male voices are self serving while Marguerite monopolizes virtue. I'm sympathetic to this critique of the patriarchy but was delivered rather bluntly, giving the male characters no nuance whatsoever.
The performances were all fine; I especially admired Damon's willingness to display his character's faults unflinchingly. Great movies can get away with a 150 minute running time. This one would have benefited from more disciplined editing.
Mercury Rising (1998)
A sloppy Ill-conceived collection of illogic and stereotypes but nice Chicago locations
Mercury Rising is a dumb movie in that it treats its audience as though they were dumb. The conceit that the NSA would publish a highly valuable code in a commercial puzzle magazine is the first of a series of logical outrages. We're also treated to a stereotypical autistic child who is largely nonverbal and given to tantrums but is of course also a savant who can almost instantly decipher the code when he sees it in his puzzle book.
The squinty wry Bruce Willis plays a rouge FBI agent who single-handedly rescues the boy after his parents are killed by NSA heavies though the boy somehow manages to hide. He's also a stereotype, the maverick lawman who bucks the system and has no patience for rules or protocol.
In this movie the heavies wear flattops or slicked back hair. Alec Baldwin plays the main heavy, a greasy glib NSA boss and former military officer who specializes in utilitarian ethics. Peter Stormare played a lesser greasy haired villain.
The story is set in Chicago and mercifully it is full of lovely shots of my home city. It's nice to see Chicago played by Chicago and not Toronto, or Vancouver or some blurred New York neighborhood. There's nothing on earth that looks just like a Chicago alleyway or apartment building.
We Were the Mulvaneys (2002)
One can't tell a big story in 90 minutes
It's unfair to compare a movie to a novel. Novels can more effectively escape the bounds of time and space, but in this case it's was just a terrible idea to compress a complex, nuanced novel into a 90 minute TV movie. The source material deserves more serious and thoughtful treatment.