Weights of Buenos Aires

All you will see is a girl you once knew/Although she's dressed up to the nines, at sixes and sevens with you.-- Andrew Lloyd Webber's occult on history.

Juan Peron's rise and decline is not mentioned in Assassination Tango, yet I can't help but wonder if due to Coppola's influence in the production, we have an attempted unspoken allegory on the dynamic energy and tragedy of 20th century South America. Ebert's appreciation of Duvall's vehicle (a swan song?) echoes my own attraction to the aesthetic of the film. 

Professional critics voice discontent by claiming this is an indulgence for Duvall's ego? Name me a film with an A list celebrity which is not an indulgence for its star? It was not shot at an action thriller's pace, and I'm glad it was not. The hitman Duvall plays was run of the mill? Fuck that. Anderson is an old man who has his heart wrapped up in his little girl. He wants to retire. His capo, who I think was Frankie, talks him in to this foreign target.

The scenes Duvall plays with his wife are dynamic with an undercurrent. Warning: hard and dangerous sex ahead. They are also evocative of the glamour which Juan and Evita utilized to create a smokescreen around their dictatorship. There is also another dynamic, a paranoia of conspiracies which wrap around themselves, the ambiguity over who knows what, whether Frankie was trying to kill Anderson off, who might have wanted the general eliminated or panicked and changed their minds, whose strings the federal police were pulling, or who was pulling theirs. Does it truly say anything about the reign of the generals after Isabel Peron made a bid to reclaim power when I was an adolescent?

She was news then, just like a dowager empress. Should she be held accountable? Or are we supposed to be distracted by the absurdity of Pedraza filming Fellini like commercials? Does it spice up conjugal activity if you cast your wife as the threatening and subversive female against your pretend middle brow nuclear family unit? Are we being offered suggestions about despotism?

If social networking is just a complex communicating tool, why is it so much more disconcerting when we connect with those out of our past? I thought my immediate boss from Matrix would want nothing to do with me. I left Matrix in an emotional state, and critiqued, publicly, how my directors handled their project, not that they treated me badly, or discussed their erections. Dan wasn't a bad guy, as I've written. He solidified my cynicism (or skepticism) about the effectiveness of clinical psychology, but always played the decent man, perhaps due to the fact that he is a decent man. I'm tempted to IM him with an impertinence because though I've suspected Irv Rutman has been dead for a number of years, I have not found an obituary. Even if I had the gall to query that, in the sense of why it matters, or to ask for a reference so old, what good would it do me? Nevertheless, I reached out, reclaimed him. Odd, I suppose, less obtrusive than the telephone.