one American's take on The American

last night, my yin and i went to see The American, a deliberately-paced film starring the impossibly handsome, and impressively flexible, George Clooney. as the film makes abundantly clear in the first half hour, George is the type of hitman who can do some push-ups, knock out a few pull-ups, and still have enough stamina to finish up a set of crunches with a seated forward bend. you know that yoga has truly reached the masses when assassins use it to alleviate their existential crises:

George's is even more impressive

but this is beside the point.

the point is that i saw Anton Corbijn's last film three years ago in a half-theater/half-concert hall in West Palm Beach. i have little recollection of Control, but after a bit of research i discovered this fragment written on 28 December 2007:

and from that day on she was inextricably - and inexplicably - linked to that shirt she wore and the band it endorsed. and therefore to Joy Division and Ian Curtis and so when there was a free screening of a biopic depicting his life, hers was the first number i dialed. but she didn’t answer.

i wonder sometimes, how many "she's" and "he's" are relegated to the graveyard of memory? i think of them as tiny anonymous tombstones marking all the divine beings we encounter – the ones whose names we never bother to remember. this, too, is beside the point.

the point, finally, is that The American was not a bad film, especially for its genre, and if nothing else the beautiful long shots of the Italian countryside and tasteful ample use of rack focus make it worth seeing. in the end, my largest qualm was neither the interruption of pointless gun battles, nor the heavy-handed Christian imagery that ends the film.

no, my biggest annoyance took the form of two steroid guido meatheads, who sat three rows in front of us with an empty seat between them. they were clearly on a date, obviously unable to admit it to themselves, and they talked throughout the film, in spite of my request to be quiet. i told my yin: i may have to take a beating for opening my mouth.

by the time i fell asleep, however, the meatheads had faded from memory; and, in an unconscious homage to the film's love scenes, i dreamed of exotic prostitutes in a bordello. Indian, Persian, Arabic – there is enough libidinal Orientalism in my dream life to make Edward Said blush with envy. sadly though, there was no sex to speak of, only the drift of bodies through the dreamscape as beauty faded into beauty dissolved into beauty...

i woke in the middle of the night.