Word: berlin
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...director Steven Soderbergh, The Good German is an exercise in style--retro style. Although his film is set in postwar Berlin, he made it, as the studios once did, on back lots and locations around Los Angeles. He used old-fashioned process photography instead of CGI for his special effects, and though he shot in color, he printed the movie on high-contrast black-and-white stock. He even dug up antique lenses, of the kind directors were obliged to use a half-century ago. By golly, if he shoots into the sun, he gets lens flare. He induced Thomas...
...style to distract us from the familiarity, not to say banality, of the narrative that Paul Attanasio has winnowed out of novelist Joseph Kanon's rather good thriller. What we have here are two standard noir characters. There's the hard-shelled antihero, Jake Geismer (George Clooney), returning to Berlin, where he was a foreign correspondent before the war. His ostensible business is to cover the Potsdam conference. His real interest is in seeing whether the great love of his life, Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett), has survived and might possibly still love him. It takes him about a nano-second...
...never a good idea for MacGuffins to grow into huge moral issues, lending false (and queasy) importance to what is essentially an entertainment. Not that the movie doesn't have its great performances. This being Berlin in 1945, there's a whole lot of whoring and black-marketeering going on, at the center of which is Jake's driver, Corporal Tully, who is played, in a striking bit of off-casting, by Tobey Maguire as one of those utterly chilling rogues who think they're charming...
...hopeful? Isaiah Berlin once said about Harvard students in 1941, “They are silly and sophisticated at the same time…They are skeptical about opinions and naïve about facts which they swallow uncritically, which is the wrong way round.” The fact remains that the military is more a means than an end; it consists of fighting men, who can use force for both good as well as evil. American universities, and Harvard in particular, have traditionally understood this. In fact, the University’s current anti-military paradigm is actually...
...Soviet Empire crumbled in 1991 along with the Berlin Wall, but Litvinenko’s career did not suffer. Actually, he even received a better position at the KGB’s successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and specialized in infiltrating organized crime syndicates, which proliferated in the post-perestroika Russia. After serving a nine-month sentence for “abuse of power” in 1999, Litvinenko pulled off a spectacular escape from Russia that took him to the United Kingdom via Turkey. His renegade life had begun...