An Interpol agent attempts to expose a high-profile financial institution's role in an international arms dealing ring.An Interpol agent attempts to expose a high-profile financial institution's role in an international arms dealing ring.An Interpol agent attempts to expose a high-profile financial institution's role in an international arms dealing ring.An Interpol agent attempts to expose a high-profile financial institution's role in an international arms dealing ring.An Interpol agent attempts to expose a high-profile financial institution's role in an international arms dealing ring.
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Luca Barbareschi
- Umberto Calvinias Umberto Calvini
- (as Luca Giorgio Barbareschi)
In The International, Interpol Agent Louis Salinger and Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman are determined to bring to justice one of the world's most powerful banks. Uncovering illegal activities including money laundering, arms trading, and the destabilization of governments, Salinger and Whitman's investigation takes them from Berlin to Milan to New York and to Istanbul. Finding themselves in a high-stakes chase across the globe, their relentless tenacity puts their own lives at risk as the bank will stop at nothing - even murder - to continue financing terror and war. —production
Top review
Circularity
A life in film is a wonderful thing, in part because of the people you come to know intimately.
You learn how certain filmmakers twist ideas. How their imagination is shaped. Sometimes it is beautiful. Sometimes it stays beautiful and by not changing loses its luster. Then you have guys like Tykwer. He develops. He tries new moves. He thinks deeply about film. He's the guy who reimagined "Rashomon." He's the fellow who stood with Cate Blanchett looking as Kieslowski with a Kieslowski script by God!
He made a film based on sight as smell, and recently one on cinematic sight through blindness.
Now he makes an action movie with, guess what? No sex, no car chase, no fight on the top of a train, no gasoline explosions. And he doesn't rely on that newspaper notion of "a thinking man's thriller," because he deliberately makes the template so ordinary it fades from view. It hardly matters that there is a bank involved. Its all about that vanilla bugaboo, the conspiracy that compromises the authorities and (usually) involves arms. Really, the story disappears.
What we are left with is an amazing use of context. I've seen James Bond, Jason Bourne and Laura Croft traipse through famous cities, but their beings are never affected. Tykwer, I surmise, saw this as an opportunity to do a Kieslowski with cities instead of rooms. Look at what he does, its an entirely environmental film. Its not quite enough, but if you are there already, its sublime.
What else? Well, test audiences did not get it, so there was a scene replaced, the one in the Guggenheim. If you have ever been in that building it is remarkable. Its a failure, an intrusive imposition. You can see where Frank knew that corners were bad, but he so mismanages the eye that you retreat into the art, or try too. Its an amazing, disturbing experience. Tykwer exploits the very things about this space that make it so unnerving.
He pretty much gleefully trashes it. This one scene, added after the movie was finished, makes the whole adventure worthwhile.
If you know architectural cinema, you'll know it was invented by Welles and depends on planes and corners. These are absent here. We have a new method, a new eye.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
You learn how certain filmmakers twist ideas. How their imagination is shaped. Sometimes it is beautiful. Sometimes it stays beautiful and by not changing loses its luster. Then you have guys like Tykwer. He develops. He tries new moves. He thinks deeply about film. He's the guy who reimagined "Rashomon." He's the fellow who stood with Cate Blanchett looking as Kieslowski with a Kieslowski script by God!
He made a film based on sight as smell, and recently one on cinematic sight through blindness.
Now he makes an action movie with, guess what? No sex, no car chase, no fight on the top of a train, no gasoline explosions. And he doesn't rely on that newspaper notion of "a thinking man's thriller," because he deliberately makes the template so ordinary it fades from view. It hardly matters that there is a bank involved. Its all about that vanilla bugaboo, the conspiracy that compromises the authorities and (usually) involves arms. Really, the story disappears.
What we are left with is an amazing use of context. I've seen James Bond, Jason Bourne and Laura Croft traipse through famous cities, but their beings are never affected. Tykwer, I surmise, saw this as an opportunity to do a Kieslowski with cities instead of rooms. Look at what he does, its an entirely environmental film. Its not quite enough, but if you are there already, its sublime.
What else? Well, test audiences did not get it, so there was a scene replaced, the one in the Guggenheim. If you have ever been in that building it is remarkable. Its a failure, an intrusive imposition. You can see where Frank knew that corners were bad, but he so mismanages the eye that you retreat into the art, or try too. Its an amazing, disturbing experience. Tykwer exploits the very things about this space that make it so unnerving.
He pretty much gleefully trashes it. This one scene, added after the movie was finished, makes the whole adventure worthwhile.
If you know architectural cinema, you'll know it was invented by Welles and depends on planes and corners. These are absent here. We have a new method, a new eye.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
helpful•4437
- tedg
- Feb 15, 2009
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