Tag Archives: rachel weisz

The Deep Blue Sea Review

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[dropcap style="font-size: 60px; color: #9b9b9b;"] T [/dropcap] he Deep Blue Sea had the promise and potential to be a great film, but it fell short on several levels and ended up a significant disappointment. Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston are fine actors and they carry the bulk of the quality that makes this film interesting at all. The worst part about the film, and it seems trite to say, but the weepy and melodramatic violin music is so awful that it put me off from the first scene. The post-war (with blitzkrieg flashbacks) period is both dark and brooding….like the violin, it just over-states the heartfelt dilemma.

Does Rachel need love or does she need a life? The Gordian Knot here is that love is irrational and intractable…. She is caught between the devilishly self-centered ex-flying ace, whose high risk past somehow absolves him of any responsibility for caring….even caring about his suicidal girlfriend who has given up everything just to be with him, and the emptiness of The Deep Blue Sea, as the title implies.

This story is actually less Interesting as a movie and may have been better produced as a one scene play. It is indeed a very complex and deep human drama, but translated to the screen, it actually loses more than it gains. It loses seriousness, focus and……dramatic effect. Where Rachel’s ex-husband, a British lord and mama’s boy, could be a powerful shadowing device for the main drama of Rachel’s desperate need for love, it instead comes off as a somewhat implausible, very aloof and unlikely tidbit of disconnected past that serves only to say that Rachel has given up material things in favor of love.

Try as I might to always seek out hedge fund and market analogies in every story I review, I am somewhat stumped here. If I try hard enough I find myself contriving to suggest that Rachel is like the activist manager Phil Falcone that falls in love with a position. She loses objectivity and holds on to her righteous belief in the underlying value of LightSquared, giving up everything and becoming unhealthily obsessed. As right as she may be, the world does not respect or understand such fanaticism.

Short LightSquared and short this film.

The Whistleblower Review

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[dropcap style="font-size: 60px; color: #9b9b9b;"] T [/dropcap] he Whistleblower is a 2012 film staring Rachel Weisz and featuring Vanessa Redgrave and David Strathairn. It s about the burgeoning trade in human trafficking for the sex trade. It specifically deals with the true events that took place in Bosnia during the UN Peacekeeping mission after the most recent Balkan war. Weisz plays Kathryn Bolkovac, an American policewoman assigned to the gender crimes unit of the multi-national corporation with the multi-million dollar contract to do for the UN what it’s member states cannot do collectively….keep the peace. She uncovers a prostitute ring staffed by trafficked Eastern European girls and both aided and abetted by the UN local staff, but also servicing predominantly that same local staff ad local law enforcement.

This is a classic nowhere-to-turn movie that is filmed in the darkest parts of the human soul and the darkest parts of the night. We see the dominant evil that ranges from brutalizers and wanton murderers to falsifying executives and diplomats and the occasional ray of light in the few who will help Weisz. The director, first-timer Larysa Kondraki makes us know that Weisz is always skirting personal danger, but somehow does not make us feel it. It is as though her dark good looks and righteousness protect her. Had she gotten roughed up a bit it would have been more believable.

I liked the movie and I liked what it seeks to illuminate, but as entertainment it falls WAY short of Liam Nesson running around Paris fighting off the Albanian sex traffickers and Saudi sleaze bags in Taken. What I am most taken by is that this well-meaning film can’t help but undermine the good things that the UN tries to do.

I like commerce. I like the supply and demand equilibrium finding it’d natural level. In the same way that violence and brutality skew the equation, so does unreasonable restriction and regulation. If prostitution were legal and controlled, as it is in Holland or Germany, might there not be much less of this illegal trafficking, which the film post-scripts say exceed 2.5MM people a year? Moral indignation and Puritanical ethics have more to do with the harm being inflicted than anything else. I say, put it in the light and it will stifle the harm.