Spy Stories, Both Boring and Fun (2011 and 2000)

Ok, this is a quick post to go over two spy film/TV...

Today I saw the first film I switched off midway through in a while!-Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy...

Now I'm not some narrow-minded dumbass who can't read and hates slow-paced movies, no, exactly the opposite-I've read the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy book, and it's very good! The recent movie though, BORING! For the first ten or so minutes, I thought it was going slow, but I figured that wouldn't be a problem, so long as it picked up-it didn't! For the next thirty+ minutes that I watched TTSS, I was bored, from the constant talking, to pretty much nothing happening other than George Smiley listening to people talk, people talking, Smiley talking with people, and a hilarious CGI bird in one scene! Also, the order that things happen in this movie is all over the place compared to how things happen in the book. One strange thing was the character of Inspector Mendel-the camera never films him properly! Either we only see part of his torso at the edge of the screen, or the camera's pointing from behind him, and we can see as much of him as we can of Anthony Dawson as Blofeld in From Russia With Love! The camera never shows his face!

So, yeah, 48 minutes into the film I called it quits and switched the movie off, with no intent to ever watch the film again! The worst crime a movie can commit is to be boring!...

On the other side of the spy spectrum is short-lived TV show Secret Agent Man! Released in 2000, SAM stars Costas Mandylor as Monk, an uber-cool ladies man super-spy! Monk, along with his two coworkers, Holiday and Davis, and their boss, Brubeck (jazz fans should find all those names familiar) does spy stuff, saves the world from nuclear annihilation, and has more sex than James Bond! Secret Agent Man is great fun!

I won't go into too much detail about SAM, because I'll be reviewing all twelve episodes of it in a while. But that'll be far enough away for me to want to at least mention it here and now.

So, that's all for now, and I'll get back to writing my movie script!