The Condor

It can be astonishing to see how old books or movies or plays or poetry can suddenly become vividly relevant, or chillingly realistic. Its thought, previously collecting dust, suddenly springing forth and becoming as real as tomorrow's news.

Sidney Pollack is one of those prolific directors, and now a days mostly producer, who does it all monkey style: He hammers away at that proverbial typewriter, spewing out a few Shakespearean gems every now and then, just through the sheer volume of his output. He has produced more than forty films, e.g. They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Tootsie, Out of Africa, The Firm, and The Interpreter. He has also directed more than twenty pictures, such as Absence of Malice, Sliding Doors, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Quiet American, and Cold Mountain. He's even done some acting, in a dozen or so films. I liked him in the otherwise mostly banal Eyes Wide Shut. Mostly banal I say, although I've had it in the back of my mind to see it again, to give it another chance. What if most of it is actually a dream sequence?

But I digress. Just as I was starting to dose off tonight at the end of Pollack's rather predictable Three Days of the Condor, it suddenly became a startlingly realistic, relevant, and up-to-date film. In like just the last minutes of it. It rang horribly true.

Uncanny.

Find it. And see it.