History Is Made At Night
I've never been very good at understanding espionage at the best of times, so maybe the fact that I didn't like History Is Made At Night is something to do with that. It's supposed to be a romantic comedy, but it's not very romantic and it's definitely not very funny. It stars Bill Pullman as Harry, an American secret agent, and Irčne Jacob as Natasha, a Russian secret agent. They are camping in northern Finland while Harry does some kind of radiation tests. Meanwhile in New York, some people are making a porn video. When it's finished a nasty man shoots everyone and takes the video. He gives it to a guy called Max and tells him to deliver it to Helsinki. A couple of CIA agents are spying on him, and one of them follows him to Helsinki. He has taken with him a variety of surveillance devices, computers and guns. How did he get through customs? Never mind. He teams up with Harry and Max and starts trying to decode the secrets hidden in the porno tape. Eventually he figures out that there are secret codes hidden in the wallpaper in various scenes of the video which are designed to enable remote control of various satellites. They then set out to trick the Russians by making a new porn video with different secret codes in it. It's obviously all supposed to be very funny, but it isn't. It's tedious, uninteresting and embarrassing.
Having already enjoyed Irčne Jacob's acting talent many times in The Double Life of Veronika and Three Colours (Red), I was all set for another entertaining film only to be disappointed by a complete waste of her abilities. Perhaps it's me, perhaps I'm losing my sense of humour, but lately I have been having trouble with many of the so-called "comedy" films.
Some of the scenes in History Is Made At Night just don't make any sense to me. For example, the scenes which involve teddy bears. Why are there microchips inside the bears? Who put them there? Why did the bad guys shoot off the bear-maker's ear at point-blank range? I've no idea.
I always try to look for something good in every film, so I must mention that there are some very nice special-effect shots in this film, as the camera occasionally zooms at high speed from a satellite to the ground, or vice versa. And I did actually laugh at the Finnish couple who were screaming Finnish swear words in each other's faces, complete with English subtitles.
However, all in all, History Is Made At Night was a complete disappointment.