Your compliance is vital

I seriously doubt anyone’s going to be bothered, but just in case, I’m declaring spoilers for Eagle Eye.

I have a little Shia LaBeouf thing going at the moment. What a great manga-face. I looooove big eyes. To borrow a phrase from a young friend of mine, I would wreck that.

I mean, look at it.

Why am I boring you with my slightly sinister cradle-snatching lust? Because it represents a partial return to form for me.

You see, I haven’t been quiet just because I’ve been busy (though I have). Nope. I’ve been right off this whole bdsm&m thing. For a good month or so, my brain has been utterly refusing to engage with it at all. It hasn’t wanted to play. It’s been like, ‘You know, this thing is messed up. Let’s just not look at it. We can manage without sex. We can get by without intimacy. Wouldn’t that be easier? Move along now, nothing to see here.’

I’ve been feeling intellectually repulsed by it (I forget who called this ’social nausea’, but it’s perfectly descriptive), and sexually detached from it.

And then I saw Eagle Eye, and found my… um, ears?… pricking up. And it quickly became apparent that of course it wasn’t the manga eyes that did it (though that helps), but that good old pain/shame/powerlessness/self-sacrifice thing again.

Shia’s character, Jerry, is a drop-out who is weighed down by feelings of inadequacy, having being consistently outshone by his twin brother Ethan and ignored by their parents. At the start of the movie, after being estranged from his family for some time, he hears that Ethan has been killed. Cue funeral scene, with some really top-notch crying.

God, I love crying men.

He then gets ‘activated’ by a mysterious woman who turns out to be a near-omniscient and -onmipotent computer, and spends the next hour or so being a helpless pawn, making futile attempts at rebellion, but ultimately being outclassed and emotionally manipulated. If only the computer had gone in for a little sexual harrassment as well. Sadly, she is a computer and wastes the opportunity.

Learning that his brother worked with the computer as a super-secret Air Force secret agent type, Jerry decides to go along with it and finish the job for him. He then discovers that Ethan actually tried to foil the computer because it was trying to kill the president, and so he has to race to stop the planned assassination.

And this was the yummiest bit.

To do this, he runs into the State of the Union address, where a tiny crystal bomb in a necklace is about to be detonated by a trumpet (I know, mental), climbs on a table and starts firing into the ceiling, knowing full well that, while this is going to save the day, it’s also going to result in him getting shot by every secret service man in the room.

The look on his face as he does this is simply gorgeous. He knows what’s coming and he can’t bear to look. So beautiful.

So, as I’m sure you expected, here are some clips. Funeral (with tears) first and aftermath, then we jump forwards to see him confronted with childhood memories, and then, of course, the grand climax. (If all you want to see is the look on his face as he sacrifices himself for the greater good and his brother’s memory, skip forwards to about 6.45.)

(Edit: Gah! YouTube hate me. You can watch it here instead.)

So, I guess I’m back in the game, dipping my toes in the water once more. I’m still feeling pretty uncomfortable with a lot of stuff – which I’ll write about another day – but at least I seem to be coming out of lock down.

(Edit 2: It seems he’s likely to be playing the last man alive (after a ‘plague’ wiped out all the men but left the women alive) in an adaption of Y: The Last Man. I can see some potential with that concept – but probably the series is miles away from my fevered imaginings.