Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

To the movies yesterday with Clare and my mother to see the John Le Carre adaptation.


Reviews have drawn attention to the gritty, dark rendering of the movie - seedy, run-down settings like a succession of under-funded secondary schools. The atmospherics are well done but there is a problem with plot-development: the four suspects are so thinly drawn that it's impossible to come up with a founded view as to which is the mole.

Smiley occasionally comes up with an insight but he never shares it with the audience, so there's little involvement with the search per se. Still, the ride is fun: probably more so if you didn't see the BBC TV series. Clare and myself knew the plot to death, though, so there were no surprises.
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I've been working hard on my general relativity book this morning, chewing through one-forms and general tensors.