TSP2001: The Deep End

The Deep End. Scott McGehee. 2001.

This started off as a run-of-the-mill spiralling-into-complications film, but then it took a more original turn.

It’s weird seeing films from this area, though. Cell phone usage was prevalent, but script writers didn’t want to acknowledge that, because it makes all the traditional “person who can’t be reached” plot lines irrelevant. So instead of coming up with new plot points, they doubled don’t on the unreachability through exotic means. I remember Buffy episodes where Spike just couldn’t get his to work, so he’d throw them out the car window, and so on. In this one, they have one person be out on a military carrier which is… “out of range”… Yeah, yeah.

A couple years later, the writers just gave up on all those plots and came up with new ones that allowed everybody to be within reach of everybody else all the time.

This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.

TSP1999: The Protagonists

The Protagonists. Luca Guadagnino. 1999.

Absolutely fascinating. The levels of meta on display here are mind-boggling. And the different versions of the murder (the shouty American TV carjacking vs the European art movie killing) were… er… I mean. This is a film for film nerds, but it’s a playful, interesting and affecting one. It’s slightly let down by the last third, which has the “re-enactment” by the Italian film crew, which is (I guess) purposefully awful and quite funny. But purposefully awful can still be kinda… not as good as it should be.

This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.