The Synthetic Librarian

In the past month I have seen a number of movies worth noting. Closer is about infidelity and love triangles (parallelogram maybe?), Suspect Zero is a really really bad movie about a remote viewer who kills child killers, Thomas in Love is an incredible French film about a shut-in forced to use the Internet for dates by his insurance company, The Village is a simple and effective horror/mystery with delightfully slow pace.

Don’t bother seeing suspect zero unless you are obsessed with child killers. Even then, you probably get your fix watching Law and Order: Icky Crimes Unit. It stars Ben Kingsley as a remote viewer from the CIA who has gone insane and is obsessed with killing child killers. How on earth did they get Ben Kingsley for this movie?

Closer is surprisingly interesting. Films about infidelity can attempt to whitewash the consequences of cheating on relationships and people (High Fidelity is an example of a whitewash) and that annoys me. This film made no such attempts and avoided all the cliches and traps I thought were awaiting me. The film kept me interested and thinking and entertained. It prompted reaction without promoting premature judgement. The film is about two couples who marry and all have affairs with each other and the how their relationships evolve. The actors give good performances. I cannot stand Julia Roberts but she was good in this roll.

Thomas in Love is a gem. The premise is that Thomas is agoraphobic and never leaves his apartment. He made a lot of money designing some high-tech stuff and turned it all over to a health insurance company who pays for his disability needs. All of Thomas’ interactions take place over a video-phone and we see only what Thomas sees on screen; the entire story is told with the audience seeing only what the protagonist sees. The movie is funny and enjoyable.

I expect The Village to be tedious and predictable as hollywood horror tends to be. It wasn’t very predictable and had a satisfying ending. Not an outstanding film but entertaining. It was really well paced, and by that I mean that most people will find it slow. I thought Unbreakable, from the same film maker, was a bit slow paced but effectively slow. This is not as slow but if you were bored by Unbreakable this might seem slow (though perhaps more bearably). I really thought at about four places a really bad ending was about to be revealed but it never happened. The sense of tension and is not overly high but it is maintained right until the end.