1. Telephone manipulation has its place; but front-and-center as the chief elements of moving the plot is not it.

2. While I do like the telephone, and the freedom it has given the modern thriller plot, I am not so enamoured of ear wax that I must witness lots of it.

3. If you are a serious movie about foreign policy unrest, you may use the telephone, but you may also be required to be directed by Costa-Gavras, or else take place in black and white. (See Paragraph 31-B for regulations involving documentary exposés.

4. If you are a not-serious movie about foreign policy unrest, shit must blow up in a regular basis, unless you have received Intimate Fight Scene Exemption #2, or Silly Chase Sequence Exemption #3. Please see Appendix Q for forms to apply for these exemptions.

I liked Swimming Pool. I watched it with a friend, and we spent over an hour afterwards discussing exactly when the narrative went from watching the writer to watching what she was writing and discussing the color choices and so on.

I also liked that at the end, the protagonist was not shown to be a misunderstood curmudgeon hiding her heart of gold behind her crusty exterior. She seemed to be curmudgeon all the way through, bless her.

4. If you are a not-serious movie about foreign policy unrest, shit must blow up in a regular basis, unless you have received Intimate Fight Scene Exemption #2, or Silly Chase Sequence Exemption #3. Please see Appendix Q for forms to apply for these exemptions.

See what I'm talking about?

It's like you're a Rules Girl with movies.

t runs away

I also liked that at the end, the protagonist

Yes! That warmed my misanthropic curmudgeonly heart, it did.

It's like you're a Rules Girl with movies.

Nutty always wears lipstick to the movies, but never calls them back?

It's like you're a Rules Girl with movies.

No date on Saturday night for YOU!!

I just have a very sensitive "Oh come on" -o-meter, which is calibrated in inverse proportion to how seriously the narrative takes itself. Ronin, e.g., is a quick, efficient picture that postulates exactly zero traffic cops in all of Paris, to say nothing of the self-surgery; but it is also the sort of picture that never bothers to explain why it has been set in motion. Because it doesn't actually haev that close a relationship to reality, I do not feel compelled to point out the points at which it diverges from reality.

Whereas, sale of supermodels to rural Chinese prisons? Unless Brad Pitt is dressed up as Binky the Clown during the climactic rescue sequence, I feel the need to call foul.

I can see why it wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but I absolutely adored the storytelling, and the performances and camerawork just made me swoon.

I was enjoying it well enough until things went completely haywire, and when it ended, I couldn't figure out what had been real and what hadn't, but more importantly, I didn't feel like bothering to figure it out.

I just have a very sensitive "Oh come on" -o-meter, which is calibrated in inverse proportion to how seriously the narrative takes itself.

That seems fair since you do allow for movies and shows which consciously include some silly space in their narrative, like Alias.

Oh yeah! Alias is the original plate-spinning zowie enterprise. The bullshit meter also reserves safe space for psychological experiments like The Prisoner and parody like In Like Flint.

Actually, I was just writing about this elsewhere, I don't actually believe there is a fulcrum point for the tension between seriousness and frivolity in the spy genre, so the best one can hope for is a little bit of both in each movie.

See, I didn't think there was anything to figure out. I know that's how the movie was marketed, which is why I'm whitefonting, but I thought it was clear from the beginning that we were moving back and forth between reality and her headspace. The visual distinctions between the two were subtle, but I never found them confusing. I honestly don't think I would have assumed it was supposed to be a mystery if I hadn't read the back of the DVD case. (Which is why the only part I really disliked was the coda, with the waving. I found it completely unnecessary, and anvilly where the rest of the film had been so elegant.)