The Greengrass Identity

Last Night I saw "The Bourne Ultimatum" and, well, I should have seen Sunshine. What I didn't like about "The Bourne Supremacy" is the same thing I didn't like about "The Bourne Ultimatum." The action, and story are interesting and Matt Damon is great in the role. I think. The problem is that it's so overly shaky-cam than I can't actually see what's happening. I can't tell. That was a cool fight - I think. And it's not just the fighting, it's everything. I've never seen someone so dramatically brush their teeth before. It's also interesting, isn't it, to root for an action character you know nothing about. I guess by the third movie, we've see it all done before. Or rather, I should say, we didn't really see it before.

It's not to say that there's no "there there." Because there is something there. There's something about the confusion of the modern world, about there not being "good" or "bad" guys, and about having a fractured identity in a world of ever increasing communication. The more we use machines to mediate our personal communication, the more we fracture our identities. Cjfer, Ferry140, or Prince of Space, or whichever avatar you want to put on me, is not exactly the same as chris ferrantino. They're just screennames. The third movie also has a bit of a notion of what is right, what is wrong, and how do we know. My problem isn't with these points, which I think are valid and interesting, my problem is that they're ancillary to a nonstop pace with is visually mucky. They're good ideas that never get fleshed out. The movie never slows down or lets us catch up with it. These movies have good ideas in them and it's almost as if the filmmaker thinks that if he slows down, we'll be bored because we'll be forced to "think." Oh Damn.

That said, I think that Paul Greengrass, the director of the last two Bourne films, actually knows what he's doing, sort of. I just don't think it works for me. Greengrass seems to make films that are "artless." Normally, this would be an insult, but I don't mean Artless as meaning "without art" I mean it as "without Artifice." Greengrass's 2006 film, United 93, is not a good film, it's a great film. The lack of artifice serves that film so well. You couldn't make that film look like a normal hollywood film. The Bourne movies, I'm not so sure about. So what do you think? One wants to avoid artifice, or what is artificial, right? But yet, we love movies that have "art" in them.

-cjfer-