Movies
The Professional (Leon)
 Description:
Rogue cops kill a young girl/woman’s family. She enters into a strange
and really cool relationship with a hitman who is not dead inside, merely
stunted sleeping. Unable to grow to the inner life, because he is rootbound,
stuck in an emotional pot too small.
I love this movie.
I mean it's weird and you know, morally ambigue.
It fills me with some strange inward yearning, as my mind sends grappling
roots to analyze to think, to savor.
The relationship between Matilda, brilliantly played by Natallie Portman,
and Leon, the ever amazing Jean Reno, is just gem quality. Sparkling with
strange depths of cut and light and dark.
The wonderful shading of darkness and light throughout the movie. The
repetition of the Transformers Cartoon. Transformers, who are more than
meets the eye. Transformative. And yet, machines. And yet, and yet, machines
that love.
In the charades, that Leon neither recognizes Matilda when she acts
out as sexual Marylin/Madona nor the desexual Charlie Chaplin scamp. It
is when Matilda takes on the charade of Gene Kelly, who sang that love
is teaching him to see in new ways, that Leon can recognizes her.
And that’s it right there. This sense of the gorgeous possibilities
of love as a ineffable, indescribable light, dark, plant seeking yearning,
empty filling. As George Carlin says out, "Flapjacks, pancakes, griddle
cakes, waffles; we have four words that mean 'grilled batter' and only
one word for 'love.'"
That wonderful moment when Leon rescues Matilda from the police station
and he holds her two feet of the ground. So, loved, she’s floating.
The idea that they are both in their way dead people. Rootless plants.
That the world is terrible, “Always like this.” And that’s okay, because
they connect.
Okay. Cool.
Equilibrium
 Description:
In a world where the ability to feel is a crime, a cleric of rationality
wakes. And really, the government shouldn't tread on his dream.
Indeed and verily, excellent gun foo. Action as art.
There’s this moment in the movie, where after seeing paintings and books
destroyed and Farenheit burned, it seems such burning is irrelevant. Beauty
remains. Here is this grey city of utility and yet in the rain and the
play of light, the sublime remains. The curve of a smile. The feeling of
smooth metal on bare fingers. How many times have I run my own voluptuary
fingers across the spines of my books just to feel, to know, mine, mine,
mine? But, I digress.
For that matter the art of the clerics themselves. The katas of destruction
designed for their usefulness, nevertheless elegant in execution.
And the twists, the turns. Like a grey Escher. The sort of movie that
wants teasing. Untangle the yarn of perspective. The crowded grey halls.
The bolts of color. The horror of those twin beds. One fetal curling occupied.
One emptied and senseless.
The splashes of horrible red. A ribbon. A cut. The red riding hood that
leads not to the forest, but to the mawful wolf.
All the best and most horrible of 1984 and Brave New World
meets
in its aspect and celluloid eyes.
Plus, Christian Bale...total hottie.
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