The Fredösphere

We watched House of Sand and Fog over the weekend because Movielens told me to.  (And if you haven't figured out the awesome wonderfulness of the whole collaborative filtering thing, I suggest you read up on it.)  And another reason was because some bozo movie reviewer named Roger Ebert in some provincial backwater called Chicago said it was good.

If you read Ebert's review, you will be told that the tension of the movie lies in the sympathy you will feel for all characters in the conflict.  You will be deceived.  On one side you have a hard-work and responsibility; on the other you have repulsive fecklessness and the emotional intelligence of preschoolers.  I wished the latter had shown a bit more sang froid and a little less whininess and tendency to panic.

The characters in this film are fascinating and the performances are all excellent, with Ben Kingsley's Colonel Behrani standing out as a flawed but ultimately strong, almost heroic figure.  The movie fails in the plot, which has holes as big as the Caspian Sea.  Several times the characters are required to make the worst (or most unmotivated) of all possible choices so the dramatic denouement can be reached.  (And it was the county government--apparently Marin county government--that screwed up; why can't they just sue them? The bureaucrats sit there in their fancy-pants administration building and they can't figure out that business taxes should apply to people who, you know, have businesses.) The contortions of the plot, plus my lack of sympathy for the feckless weenies on one side of the conflict (and have I mentioned already that they are feckless?) caused me to disconnect emotionally from the movie fairly early on.  Only Kingsley's handling of the Colonel's increasingly desperate situation kept me watching. At last: Kingsley proves he can handle the strong-willed Asian leader type.

I can't recommend this movie.