BEFORE: The winter COVID surge kept me home for a week between the holidays, and I'm still not back to a full schedule yet, still working just three days a week. It feels like so many people are getting sick now, even the vaccinated people, even the boosted people, maybe being home the majority of the time could turn out to be a good thing in the end. Maybe everybody who did visit family over the holidays will get sick, not deathly ill but just sick, and then maybe this whole thing could burn out. I can almost hear the unvaccinated people saying, "I told you so..." and they can believe what they want to believe, but the truth is that if more people had gotten vaccinated when they had the chance, we might have beaten this thing, but now, because there were so many hold-outs, we've all but lost. Claims of the ineffectiveness of vaccines turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the people who believed they wouldn't work didn't get them, and therefore in the larger scheme of things, they aren't working. Or, viewed another way, they DID work because so few vaccinated people are dying, and the Omicron is less severe, so overall many fewer people are dying, it's just that now nearly everybody's mildly sick at the same time, which doesn't feel like a win, if I'm being honest. I'm going to financially feel this in about a month if I can't get back to my second job. No shifts are being scheduled right now, maybe it's time to go back on unemployment until I'm sure that there will be work for me during the spring semester. I'll have to think about it, but bottom line, I'm bored at home four days a week, still - might be a good week to double-up on movies to pass the time.
Willem Dafoe carries over from "The French Dispatch".
THE PLOT: A Chechen Muslim illegally immigrates to Hamburg, where he gets caught in the international war on terror.
AFTER: I've seen this movie described as a "slow burn" and quite often that's a euphemism for "boring". Well, of course intelligence work, anti-terrorism work is going to seem boring if it doesn't fit in with the big-budget Hollywood stunts and special effects formula. There's competition among the franchises to see which movie can have the biggest explosion, crash the most cars in a chase scene along a European canal, or bring down the largest number of buildings in a city's skyline. "Godzilla vs. Kong" probably won that last battle, but I think "Batman v. Superman" came in a close second.
What they don't really tell you about intelligence work is that in reality, it involves watching many hours of security camera footage, or doing background checks on suspects, or just spending hours in a car doing a good, old-fashioned stakeout. One of the more exciting scenes in this movie involves a team sneaking into a safe house and planting as many mikes and tiny cameras as possible before the surveillance suspect steps back inside from a rooftop. The rest is meeting with sources, making plans, interrogating possible suspects - let's face it, it's not really barn-burning stuff. I guess this film probably comes closer to reality - however, we've become conditioned to expect more from a movie - the plan is to see "Spider-Man: No Way Home" later this week, and another Marvel film as well, and if they don't pack a lot of action and thrills into their scenes, I'll be holding them accountable.
Let me TRY to adjust my standards for "A Most Wanted Man", which follows a covert German team of operatives as they follow a refugee from Chechnya after he enters Germany illegally via the port of Hamburg, and they find out that he's there to collect a large sum of money being held in his father's name. The team goes about recruiting various local informants - a banker, his own lawyer, and even the son of a shady Islamic businessman - to make sure that he does pick up the money, and that it doesn't fall into the hands of terrorist organizations. At first the refugee doesn't even want the money, it's "tainted" to him because it belonged to his father, and probably came from illegal Russian government activities. He just wants to disappear into the Islamic community and not get found, but whoops, that ship has sailed. So now the next best option is to get him to donate the money to Islamic charities, and only legit ones.
The leader of the team, Günther Bachmann, finds himself at odds with other factions of the German government, people who'd rather just arrest everyone and then sort the whole thing out in court. Günther would prefer to catch the little fish, offer them immunity if they'll help catch a bigger fish, and so on until he's got a big shark on the line. Germans love to be organized and logical about this, I know that's a stereotype but I feel it's true in a sense, they enjoy having a plan for things. And it seems like the team is well-organized, if nothing else - Bachmann also represents sadness and shame, because he's motivated by some past operation in Beirut that went bad years ago, and agents or informants that trusted him died. There's probably a German word for atonement mixed with regret turned to motivation, but I don't know what it is.
There's probably also a good debate to be had over which approach to keeping the peace works best, but it's not for me to say. The issues among the Islamic refugee community in places like Hamburg, Germany are probably complex ones, as this is based on a 2008 novel by John Le Carré, representing the role of government in a post-9/11 world, with connected issues of racial profiling and proper interrogation tactics. I'm going to have to just put a proverbial pin in all that for now and just treat this one as a sort of think-piece. We just had the first holiday season in 20 years where America hasn't been at war, but that's little solace when we don't yet know what any of the new political issues are going to be in a post-pandemic world, if we can even get there.
Also starring Philip Seymour Hoffman (last seen in "Jack Goes Boating"), Rachel McAdams (last seen in "Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga"), Robin Wright (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Grigoriy Dobrygin, Derya Alabora, Daniel Brühl (last seen in "The Cloverfield Paradox"), Nina Hoss, Herbert Grönemeyer (last seen in "The American"), Martin Wuttke (last seen in "Hanna"), Kostja Ullmann, Homayoun Ershadi (last seen in "Zero Dark Thirty"), Mehdi Dehbi (last seen in "London Has Fallen"), Vicky Krieps (last seen in "The Girl in the Spider's Web"), Rainer Bock (last seen in "Wonder Woman"), Franz Hartwig, Bernhard Schütz, Ursina Lardi, Jessica Joffe, Imke Büchel, Tamer Yigit, Max Volkert Martens.
RATING: 5 out of 10 safe deposit boxes
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