Breach

This was a fun movie to watch. Based on a true story, the way that Hollywood productions are based on things, but it actually stays closer to the facts than I expected. Chris Cooper plays FBI agent Robert Hanssen, perhaps the most notorious mole within the American intelligence community. Hanssen was arrested in 2001, and was convicted to life without parole for spying for the Russians for more than 20 years.

The movie tells the story of Eric O’Neill, the FBI agent who was ultimately responsible for obtaining the evidence that led to the arrest of Hanssen. It shows several of the methods that Hanssen used to pass information, the tactics that Special Surveillance Group used while following Hanssen, Hanssen’s almost fanatic religious beliefs, and even some of his peculiar private customs.

I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. On the other hand, The Good Sheppard, released at about the same time, a fictional history of the CIA that I was looking forward to and received a much larger amount of publicity,  proved a peculiar disappointment.

Venus

Peter O’Toole is old, and here he plays an old man. Seriously, that is all he does throughout the movie: Look very old. People nominated him for an Oscar based on that. Very disappointing.

At least, it is not O’Toole’s last role. The movie is well written, and all the actors are very good, which stops it from being a complete failure. The story, on the other hand, did not seem believable to me in the least, and was far from being engaging.

The painted veil

This movie is a very nice adaptation of  W. Somerset Maugham’s novel. It only ran in Pasadena at the second-run theatre; apparently it only had a limited release in the States.

I’ve seen recently a few movies or theatre plays based on Maugham’s works, and they have all been satisfying. This one is primarily a love story, which surprised me a little at first. The acting is impecable, of course. I imagine even The incredible Hulk might be near tolerable thanks to Edward Norton. The cinematography was gorgeous. The exteriors alone justify watching this film.

Seraphim falls

The best western I have seen in recent years is the extremely violent Australian movie The proposition. What made that movie interesting in my mind was the air of freshness that the new surroundings provide to the genre. Seraphim falls starts promising, and for a while I expected it was going to end up as satisfying an experience as watching The proposition was. It did not.

This movie ends in absurdity, which more and more looks like what Hollywood confuses with depth. The problem is that a metaphorical ending in a story of this sort feels like a cop out. For more than an hour and a half the movie has established the storytelling framework in which it occurs, and the end destroy this. More skillfully executed, it would have been an interesting post-modern take on the western genre. The way it is, you feel an unfulfilled promise and disappointment. It reminds me a bit of the end of 3:10 to Yuma, where suddenly the characters stop being characters and decide to serve as moralizing stand ins for… I don’t know… the scriptwriter? 

That being said, the first hour and forty minutes or so is a very good western, it is well acted and very nicely shot.

The big kill

I decided a while ago to get a good working understanding of noir fiction, which among other things means to read the classics. The lady in the lake was entertaining. This one… well, this one was not good.

The end was ridiculously, portentously, absurd. It would have made a cute joke in an early Woody Allen movie, I think. The one liners get old rather quickly, although I suppose they may have been a bit of a novelty back when. It is funny how the over the top language that is used throughout Sin City ended up not being a caricature but rather very close to what we have here. 

All the dames fall for Mike Hammer, the hero of Mickey Spillane’s novels. They fall just because that’s how it is, which makes the tale rather silly, a not particularly clever wish fulfillment adolescent fantasy of sorts. And the writing is quite pedestrian.

There is more violence than in other noir stories I had read. I now believe the explicit violence, nothing too unusual by today’s standards, was actually a selling point for Spillane’s pulps. There is also a lot of anger; Mike is so angry all the time that you fear he’ll end up hospitalized with a serious ulcer. He does not. It would have been a better ending. 

In any case, it was entertaining for what it was, but clearly Raymond Chandler is much better writer than Mickey Spillane.

Suicide kings

The memory I had of this movie is much better than what it turned out to be. I remember I went to see this movie when it came out, and it seemed decent. I guess I was younger and foolish, because this was just ridiculous; I think it fails in that it is hard to take it seriously. But, of course, maybe it is intended to be a comedy, in which case it fails because it is not particularly funny.

Anyway, it has Christopher Walken on it, so at least it makes you smile every now and then.  

The last kiss

I do not really have much to say about this movie; I found it kind of mediocre. It presents itself as more than it ends up being, and rather than having characters that face their problems in interesting or challenging ways, it felt dissapointing, a bit cliched. It is not a bad movie, though. I suppose there are worst ways of spending two hours. 

God grew tired of us

This is an excellent documentary about a horrible ongoing tragedy. But there is a lot of hope in the story; John Bul Dau, one of the “lost boys of Sudan” the movie is about, is inspirational, a great leader. In the midst of all their suffering, I could not believe how much energy and optimism he displayed. He is truly an admirable person.

Part of the documentary follows several kids that are relocated to the States (thanks to Catholic Charities International). I found particularly interesting to see the culture clash that the group suffers, arriving to and having to survive in the States with what looks like very little assistance.  

Although they are very grateful, we learn that the older ones have to hold one or two jobs in order to pay back the cost of their move. Of course, the jobs they find are not particularly appealing or well paid, plus they have to face discrimination and ignorance. The younger ones, on the other hand, get to go to school and several of them try very quickly to absorb the American life style, leaving behind their roots and traditions, which leads to an interesting clash with people like John Bul Dau, who makes every effort to keep their memory and connections alive.

I highly recommend this moving and sovering documentary.

Intersecting families and definability

I have made some changes to my webpage and now my papers can be found here, on a page in this blog.

I have updated my paper Defining small sets from -cc families of sets, joint with Clemens, Conley and Miller. I would like to mention one of the questions we leave open.

Consider a family  of sets and let . We say that is intersecting iff any two members of share at least an element of . In our paper we are interested in how definability conditions restrict the size of intersecting families. In particular we show that, even if and are infinite, if all the members of are finite, then from we can define a finite subset of .

Let be such that there is a set in of size at most . Then our arguments also show that there is a finite intersecting family definable from , and we find upper bounds on how large such is.

Say that is -minimal iff is intersecting and any intersecting definable from is at least as large as itself. It follows that there is a finite bound on how large such a family can be.

Question. Is a (strictly) increasing function?

We can show that and a few similar results, but whether is monotone is still open.

Boise

I accepted today BSU’s offer.