The new movie, Sicario (2015), is about the labor of U.S. operatives in trying to wreck a horrifying Mexican drug cartel.  I don’t entirely believe the film any more than I entirely disbelieve it:  for example, is it not true that Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), an FBI agent, is a little slow in catching on to certain things the more mysterious federal operatives are doing?

The film propounds the idea that the only way the U.S. government can bring down those intractable drug lords is to use a vengeful Mexican sicario (hit man) who has personal reasons for killing Mr. Big.  Nothing very sophisticated about this, yet I cannot deny that Sicario offers a certain sophisticated naturalism.  It’s powerful.  One wishes it were better, but it is not the “dismal thriller” I called Denis Villeneuve’s previous movie, Prisoners.  

English: The Merida Initiative, a U.S. Counter-Narcotics Assistance to Mexico. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That tour de force of commercialism, Jane the Virgin, is back for a second season.  Gina Rodriguez is older (31) and looks it.  Andrea Navedo, the woman who plays her mother, is only 38 (!) though she could pass for 44.  Which doesn’t mean Navedo isn’t pretty; she certifiably is.  Yael Grobglas (Petra) is the same age as Rodriguez but seems older, and is still lovely.  Past their twenties, these women have had a lot of time to develop their acting chops, and develop them they did.

At the end of Season One, Jane’s newborn baby was kidnapped, but it’s okay.  He’s back.  And Jane is naturally shaken and nervous over motherhood, and given to frank talk (in last night’s show) about breastfeeding.  It’s just too bad it was a rather uninteresting episode.  It wasn’t scintillating or adventurous.  But I believe the writers tried—-and that tour-de-force commercialism, the naked drive to entertain, won’t let us down.  Hope not, anyway.

Future technology permits five elderly people to go back to age 20 and thus elude death, but the supervisor of the project, Dana, has difficulty making these people happy about it and even keeping them in line.  This constitutes part of the action in Lee Blessing’s splendid play, The Hourglass Project (2015), mounted for a very short time, as college theatre is, at the University of Tulsa.

What happens as well is that Dana fights to prevent her parents, who paid for the creation of the rejuvenating technology, from wholly erasing the subjects’ memories.  Mom and Pop are cruel—just like the society in Never Let Me Go, another work which warns about the uses of technology.  With the looming erasure, though, the play disappoints a little, but not much.  It is still fresh and incisive enough, not to mention tragicomically sad.  The same shattering effects that life brings to people near the end of their earthly time (Alzheimer’s, for example) emerge for these people after this particular scientific intervention.

TU’s production is the premiere of The Hourglass Project for regional theatre. The talented Blessing himself helped with the staging, and indeed it was—last night, October 10th—a fine production.

The first time I read Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I enjoyed it; when I started it a second time I was bored—an effect I don’t think any of the great classic novels of earlier decades would ever have on me with further readings.  In some measure this may be because I don’t accept that an “unbearable lightness of being” exists, or might exist, as Kundera does.  As a Christian I believe that being has decisive weight, which is another way of saying it means something.

However, even if it didn’t, Philip Kaufman’s 1989 adaptation of the book is not the film to convince us of it, of anything philosophically dark and enigmatic.  The novel is suffused with thought; the film is only superficially thoughtful.  For example, only once or twice is the titular lightness mentioned, which is hardly enough for the concept to be dramatically emphasized.  Like the book, the film gets boring, though only after the first hour and a half, and the mitigation of this boredom, I must admit, comes with the occasional nudity and sex.

But via these elements Kaufman says virtually nothing; he just thinks he says something.  A nexus between sex and thematic meaning seems as wispy here as the shots of the 1968 Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia are fancy and cloying—wretched, in fact.  The movie was a mistake.

Cover via Amazon