the adjustment bureau

Behind the curtain. Because there is a curtain and not simply the cell membrane of our ego, behind that curtain of the world we see are the movers who define our helpless existences. And they are exhausted bureaucrats, Vogons, Agent Smiths, designed via cinematic precedent and the widest audience's deepest fear: the suits at the end of the universe, men in this case and typically, here impersonally calculating and criticising our failures to achieve: that greatest failure, to fail to be the you you could be, you are obliged to your potential fame, potential power, potential personal wealth. God has a wonderful plan for your life and it as impossible and as it prescriptive and joyless: damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Chance and the one. That narrow road that leads to a New Yorker's marital bliss is 9 million to 1, a lost cause, 3 years on the same bus is foolish love unless we believe in fated love. Do we?

Run Lola, Run Neo, Run Forest, Run. Modernity and its goons are both the where and whence of our frenetic running, modernity is exhausting and pervasive and in that way cannot be fixed by a vacation. We become the sabbathless striving that we consider the world to be made of and made for.

Hollywood humanism's selective history. The most interesting of this film's betrayals of its true affections was the suggested threshold of 1910, at which point adjustment was paused until 1962 which lays bare a lingering faith in the modernist project. The world wars were not a hiccup in our Enlightenment, but an inseparable product.

Love wins. The climax sees these persistent widows get their justice from that chairman who neither fears God nor respects men. Happy would I have been to let brief love be love's reward, as better as it is to have loved and lost, but here Hollywood promises a time coming when we will have our love cake and eat it, when love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears, when we will be free to win love unlimited.

See this film for a tidy clever little plot, see this film for its dance. Dance here is as music in the Lives of Others, it is why we are, oh to carry our bodies through space creatively. Brief moments of sheer beauty in this blockbuster.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1385826/