Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Clerks II, & A Canterbury Tale

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is pretty darn good. Mainly because of Alec Guinness and his voice. It was unbelievable just how much better that voice can be when he's delivering sensible lines rather than ridiculous Lucasisms. And the entire cast is outstanding. It's weird to see Patrick Stewart in a very minor role. Weird how that is. It's a pretty complicated, but, typical for le Carre, it's a well structured complicated mystery. If you can handle nearly five hours of spies, there's not many better ways to spend that time than watching this film. Just took me a very long time to find those five hours, as work was very long this week.

Clerks II was much better than I was expecting. It felt much more like an early Kevin Smith film than the last few. Not as good as Clerks or Chasing Amy, but not too far behind them. And the only part that didn't feel quite right was the ending, which seemed a little like a cop-out. I just think that it was a little too happy of an ending, one that just didn't quite fit right. Maybe it's just that I hate it when people have to learn a lesson in a comedy that was going along just fine beforehand. That switch from comedy to "life-lesson" is very tricky to carry out, and very few films have been able to do so. I can't even think of one right now, but I'm sure in a few days I'll come up with a few. If it weren't for that ending, I would have enjoyed it much more.

A Canterbury Tale is pretty darn special. I love that the Archers made movies like this to support the war effort, trying to promote Anglo-American unity. Man, if they could only make more great movies to promote friendship, we'd probably have a lot less conflict. Interestingly, the Criterion DVD has the prologue and ending from the American version, just going to show that American and English audiences just needed something slightly different. The opening stats to the American version were very funny. Although I kept wanting to know how they were doing these statistical analyses that came up with those numbers. Seemed a little made up to me. Apparently, though, the American version premiered in 1949, so maybe they were accurate, at least up until the time when it came to be very specific near the end. Anyway, it wasn't nearly as good as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or A Matter of Life and Death, two of their other war films, but it's still very good. Makes me want to read A Canterbury Tale.