From Paris With Love

Seen at: Cinemark Greeley Mall, at 2:25 pm today

Hooboy...I've fallen behind on my movie write-ups. My goal is to get caught up completely by Sunday.

In the meantime I need to jot down some notes about From Paris With Love today in Greeley. It was a nice trip over in the afternoon, sunny and bright. Stopped in Windsor along the way to do some flat terrain hiking along the Poudre Trail. I walked until the current end of the trail, on State Highway 392.

For the movie itself, I got a private showing in a Cinemark auditorium with plush stadium seats. About 160 capacity. I didn't count the seats, only estimated, in the usual way. I've gotten good at it from repeated practice.

I moved around the theater a lot. First I sat in the very back row (way too hot). Then I sat in the very front row, first along the remote side by the exit door to get the most distorted view of the enormous screen (way too acute an angle, perhaps suitable for the blind ). Then I sat in the middle of various rows from row 2 up to row 10.

In between all this I kept track of the movie of course. It was enormously painful to do so.

Luc Besson wanted to make a hog-wild Hong Kong-style shootup in Paris. He used John Travolta in the lead. John Travolta is bald and wears a gold silk scarf and leather jacket. He is the "top agent" of an unnamed American intelligence agency (must say Travola is definitely better here than he was in Old Dogs, where one could see him straining in grief).

The protagonist is a Generation Y noobie who works for the U.S. Ambassador to France, but who is trying to break into the spook business. In this regard, somehow he has gotten his foot in the door. He is anxious to move up the spook ladder, frustrated that he hasn't been given "real" assignments yet. He gets all his instructions over the phone from a voice who is never identified, or shown.

Of course the guy has a love interest. He lives with a hot babe who cooks meals for him on the roof of their building, and who adores him. You can tell where that's going to go, of course.

At the climax of the story (spoiler) the protagonist must shoot his beloved in the forehead, William S. Burroughs style, killing her in front of an crowd of high-level delegates at an international conference for aid to Africa, specifically about the promotion of sterilization of African women for eugenics purposes (I added that last part, which they accidently left out of the movie).

In any case, the heroine dies a beautiful death.

Hhe had to shoot her. She was bad. Besides, that's the way things go, if you want to be a spook. You have to off the women you sleep with.

John Travolta, by then his mentor, is there to cradle his girlfriend's bleeding lifeless skull, in a way that says "you earned your stripes today, kid." We get a lingering closeup on the round hole in her forehead, with her open eyes and gaping mouth. The hero saves the day!

So there you have it---the ultimate postmodern love story. Like that Guns n' Roses song: "I used to love her, but I had to kill her..."

And of course also the logical result of the War, which this movie endorses without irony in a way reminiscent of the way the t.v. show Hunter in the 1980s promoted U.S. military involvement in Colombia in the name of the phony "drug war" (while simultaneously Oliver North was helping direct the whole damn cocaine operation). It's nice to see that some things never change.

Very good cinematography, I must say. Besson is a master director. Good camera angles, as Travolta's character wastes unnamed civilians by the dozen. But they're bad dudes, you see. If you get involved with the bad cause, you are going to PAY.

It's kill or be killed, to quote another movie I saw recently. We have to waste these guys before they get even the chance to waste us. The safety of ours daughters is at stake (or at least their ability to snort coke in peace).

My favorite part of this movie was the minor character of Ambassador Bennington, the aforementioned U.S. ambassador to France who is the employer whom the young protagonist wishes to escape. He's actually a benevolent character, who is obviously aware of what the young man is doing and is sympathetic to it (we know this from a scene involving chewing gum at the first ten minutes). He reappears just before the climax of the movie to serve a critical story function, to allow the hero past a certain plot obstacle.

He is played in soft but seasoned mature fashion by character actor Richard Durden who I decided during the film could possibly be smartly cast as an older Averell Harriman, say during the Vietnam War era.

You heard me---Averell freakin' Harriman.