To Lorraine's surprise, Spyglass's wife and child have come along. Percival tries to help Lorraine escort Spyglass to West Berlin. He inspects the watch himself and sees the names of all the agents. He must have known he'd be called a copycat, so in his own subtle way, he threw in this seemingly irrelevant bit of background chatter to get out ahead of his critics. Bakhtin tries to approach Percival with the watch in hand, but Percival sticks an ice pick in Bakhtin's head and takes The List for himself. We've already broken down some of his sources, and there's plenty more in this diverse mix of '80s references. What Leitch is doing here is a kind of cinematic sampling. It applies just as well to "Atomic Blonde" itself. Sampling, the act of reusing and remixing existing records, was the backbone of the growing hip hop genre, and the back-to-back releases of De La Soul and the Beastie Boys' collage-rap masterpieces "Three Feet High and Rising" and "Paul's Boutique" brought the anchor's question to the forefront. Even an event as historic as the fall of the Berlin Wall isn't enough to keep the fast-paced American media busy for long, and one anchorman promises to return after the commercial break with "an in-depth look at the number-one musical controversy of the year: Sampling - Is it art, or is it just plagiarism?" That's all spelled out pretty clearly, but there's another bit of symbolism in that scene that's easy to miss. An earthquake destroyed the locations he'd scouted in Tajikistan, and the abandoned Estonian power plant he used instead was full of toxic waste that likely caused his death seven years later. Tarkovsky's journey to create "Stalker" was just as perilous as Stalker's journey into the Zone. After seemingly completing production, he had to start all over again when the original film negative was ruined. Inside, there's a place known only as the Room that grants a visitor's wishes. "Stalker" takes its title from one of its three nameless protagonists, a guide who leads visitors into the mysterious "Zone," an area where the normal laws of physics don't apply. When Lorraine meets enemy agents in a movie theater and fights them silhouetted by the movie on the screen, film buffs may recognize it as Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 classic "Stalker." The great Soviet filmmaker pioneered what's now called "slow cinema" with classics like "Andrei Rublev," "Solaris," and "Ivan's Childhood," and at his best, he could make it downright thrilling to watch nothing happen at all. It might be time to give "Atomic Blonde" another look - after all, if you don't, you might miss all this. But while you're paying attention to all that, there's more you may have not been aware of. But that plot's just an excuse for former stunt choreographer Leitch to dream up some of the most elaborate and brutal fight scenes we've seen in years in a dream version of '80s Berlin. "Atomic Blonde" takes Theron to the city's last divided days as Lorraine Broughton, an MI6 agent (or is she?) tasked with retrieving a so-called "atomic bomb of information" in the chaos surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall. Dunkirk beat out two newcomers, Atomic Blonde and The Emoji Movie to win for a second weekend in a row at the box office with 28.1 million. "John Wick" co-director David Leitch proved his surprise super-hit was no fluke with this mesmerizing spectacle of people doing ugly things for ugly causes in beautiful clothes drenched in the beautiful neon lights of Berlin. Broughton uses whatever is to hand, and leverages her enemies’ own momentum against them, so you believe she could hold her own.Four years before "Black Widow," Charlize Theron gave us the definitive take on badass women navigating the debris left behind by the Cold War, this time in its last days instead of decades later. It would be deeply disturbing were it almost anyone but Theron she projects such formidable badassitude that it does not for a moment read like victimisation. Most of Lorraine’s opponents are male, and none hold back. And while it’s not a first to see a woman battered about to this extent on screen, it is unusual. Yet Lorraine is not a John Wick-alike unstoppable force or a Bond-ian pillar of the establishment, instead skewing closer to Indiana Jones - desperately battling bigger rivals.Īs you’d expect from the co-director of John Wick, the stunts are breathtaking, with one brutal fight shot in long, hand-held takes that roam down stairs, through an apartment and into a car chase. Eyes hidden behind a succession of great sunglasses, she’s explicitly painted as an ice queen, regularly dousing herself in medicinal ice baths, her cigarettes a rare sign of warmth. It’s best not to study the plot too closely - start pulling threads and almost everyone’s motivation falls apart.
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