Sunday, December 9, 2012

Movies and spy novels

Watched Ben Afleck's Argo last night. Highly recommended. I'm too young to remember anything about that era other than "thank god we have Reagan, the Iranians won't mess with us now" (recounted with deliberate irony), but this back-story of the other hostage crisis was both compelling and fun.

Maybe I liked it because I've been on a huge John Le Carre kick for a while now. It started when I read Tinker Tailor in preparation for the Gary Oldman remake of that movie. Read The Russia House while keeping my legs propped up in the hotel room last Saturday -- a nice reprieve from the end of the semester crunch. (I vaguely remember the Sean Connery movie with Michelle Pfeiffer as Katya. It came out when I was in high school. I need to watch that again.) Working through The Constant Gardner now. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is in the stack somewhere.

Another movie I'm excited about is Anna Karenina with the incomparable Keira Knightley. It's a coincidence that I started re-reading that book when I couldn't sleep on the red-eye back from Sacramento. A random thought: Tolstoy, more than any author I know, seems to understand exactly what is going on in my head. Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead pegged me as well. Back to Knightley: there's a little known, or little known in my usual circles, BBC version of Zhivago with Knightley as Lara. It's excellent. She's also the reason I became a Jane Austen fan for a while a few years back (Hollywood's Pride & Prejudice). So I'm assuming her playing Karenina, of whom Tolstoy writes, "[i]t was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile," will be an experience.

I'm not as excited about Skyfall, but I'll be seeing it soon, maybe tonight.

UPDATE: Finished The Constant Gardner last night. Spent today looking for aid work opportunities in Congo! Bravo John Le Carre. Still haven't caught Skyfall.

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