{"id":5446,"date":"2009-09-14T04:42:53","date_gmt":"2009-09-13T20:42:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=5446"},"modified":"2018-03-14T11:20:49","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T03:20:49","slug":"duplicity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2009\/09\/14\/duplicity\/","title":{"rendered":"Duplicity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"blog-duplicity\" Duplicity<\/a><\/em> (2009) – on rental. I know a lot of film goers like watching Julia Roberts. She was a relative unknown until her breakout role as a hooker with a good heart in 1990\u2019s Pretty Woman<\/em>, winning a deserved Golden Globe award for Best Actress at it. Funnily, I\u2019ve never really had a thing for her or her films. She\u2019s been a very large range of roles, many of them either commercially very successful or critically well-received. But while I don\u2019t outright avoid films she\u2019s in, I don\u2019t go out of my way for them either.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s basically the reason why I gave Duplicity<\/em> a miss when it showed up in theatres here earlier this year. Matt said on MSN though that he enjoyed the film, so I queued it up as soon as it was available on rental, and gave it a go with Ling on Friday evening.<\/p>\n

What is this film about? Clive Owens and Julia Roberts star as Ray and Claire, two super corporate spies working for the same company Equikrom. The both have a mission: to find out what exactly is the super-secret product about to be introduced by Equikrom\u2019s bitter rival, Burkett & Randle. The story is presented through several flashback sequences intermixed with the current moment, with each flashback providing yet more information on the background between the two lead characters.<\/p>\n

The film has a wonderfully intelligent script that could require more than one viewing to fully digest, especially when the final scene reveals a whopper that\u2019ll have you scrambling for the DVD remote to earlier scenes to see if you really missed that \u2018thing\u2019.<\/p>\n

Owens and Roberts enjoy sizzling chemistry, helped especially by fun dialog. There\u2019s an early scene where they compare their battle scars and resumes as they\u2019ve both worked for rival espionage and spy agencies, and it\u2019s outright hilarious.<\/p>\n

The other scene that I rewound immediately to watch again was a scene when Claire as a double-agent in Burkett & Randle interrogates a staffer who was seduced by Ray into giving up company secrets. Claire doesn\u2019t say a word, but her rage at the woman\u2019s confession that she had no regrets as the sex was amazingly good is hilarious \u2013 especially since Ray and Claire are lovers! Too funny for words.<\/p>\n

The two leads are supported by veteran actors, Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson, who play the CEOs of Equikrom and Burkett & Randle respectively. Wilkinson doesn\u2019t show up much in the film besides its start and the end, but Giamatti has a lot of screen-time. And he dials in his usual frenetic, slightly crazed character obsessed with finding out what his rival CEO is up to. Coincidentally, I\u2019d just rewatched Shoot \u2018Em Up<\/a><\/em> several days earlier, and it\u2019s great to see Giamatti and Owen in the same film again, even though in Duplicity <\/em>they\u2019re not primarily playing off each other this time.<\/p>\n

On balance, it\u2019s a great, romantic spy drama though I still enjoyed last year\u2019s Get Smart<\/em> remake with Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway even the more. And at the film\u2019s end, Ling was lost and I myself was struggling to fully piece together what really happened in the story.<\/p>\n

Still, if you don\u2019t mind the mind-games the film plays on you, I’ll rate it a\u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Duplicity (2009) – on rental. I know a lot of film goers like watching Julia Roberts. She was a relative unknown until her breakout role as a hooker with a good heart in 1990\u2019s Pretty Woman, winning a deserved Golden<\/p>\n

Read More Duplicity<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-home","category-entertainment","wpcat-6-id","wpcat-10-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}