the JEWSIAN FUSION INTRUSION

May 21, 2005
So I, being an avid Star Wars fan, wanted to go see Revenge of the Sith this weekend. However, since all of my friends are either a) lame or b) already saw it, I settled for The Interpreter. I really didn't expect anything special, so it was a bit of a shock when I saw that the movie had potential. Of course, Sydney Pollack made some very poor choices later on and the entire theater began to smell of rotten dreams in the end... but the movie had potential nonetheless.

Basically, it goes down like this. Silvia Broome (Nicole Kidman), an interpreter at the UN, runs back inside her interpreter booth to pick up her various African woodwind instruments and overhears men talking in the rare African dialect of her hometown (home... village?) about assassinating the important yet unpopular political figure Dr. Zawanie AKA "The Teacher" (Earl Cameron). She notifies the authorities and winds up working with a team of FBI agents led by Tobin Keller (Sean Penn) whose duty it is to protect her... AND LOVE HER.

LOVE HER?! Jesus. I hate the way the characters and their relationships were developed in this movie. Keller is like, the most emotionally unstable FBI agent I've ever freakin' seen. His wife died three weeks ago and he's already getting all up ons some poor innocent interpreter because he thinks she looks hot with blood all over her face. And this Silvia Broome lady... is quite the emo. Their little romance sub-plot didn't bring anything to the movie and only served to piss everyone off.

I mean, I know a lot of it was in the script, but you don't have to embellish it. Come on, Sydney. Come on.

But it has it's high points. All the African stuff was pretty cool and I appreciated it because my parents used to live in Kenya for like sixteen years before I was born so I've got all that crap in my house, too. And speaking from the technical side, it was very well-done. No little mistakes or anything. It was shot from really interesting angles and they threw in a nice rack-focus every once in a while to spice things up. Pretty cool shit.

Twenty minutes in, I had a suspicion of who was behind the assassination attempt. Even though I was right, I had kind of forgotten about him over the course of the movie so at the end it was like "Oh yeah, I remember that guy! I knew-- I-- ahhh!"

Overall: Main plot good, subplot bad; good suspense, a few jumpworthy places; Sean Penn says "You can't say things like that with blood all over your face"; rack-focus fun; awesome camera action; started off awesome and got worse as progressed.

And unto this cinematic venture, The Interpreter, I hearby bequeath three out of five snorts of coke.