journal features

movie review - The Union

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Kokubunji, 2024.08.31

This is a movie about an aging loser who's still plying his hometown for women and holding down a job that feels beneath his abilities. Out of the blue, an old girlfriend from high school shows up after thirty years. She involves him in a spy agency of unclear purpose and allegiance, and he joins her in the would-be exhilarating life of spy-craft. Who can't relate to wanting a second chance.

The movie does one thing well, which is to have the agency beset by real danger. Our hero has no time for a miraculous transformation, he instead spends every minute one step behind developments. All the while, the chemistry between the two leads is good and the tone remains the right note of tongue-in-cheek self-awareness.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)