I'm just chilling out with the cat and watching a movie, listening to the rain, when stock footage of the Pentagon shot from a plane or a chopper unrolled onto the screen in The Tailor of Panama and I flinched, and I sat up and stopped the tape before I realized what I was doing. The whole Pentagon, undamaged, five neat sides shot for movie stock use a few years ago. How long will it be before I don't jump at the sight of things from before September 11, 2001? And how much worse will it get from here?

I was born in Manhattan, but I was raised in DC. The crash at the Pentagon was less spectacular than the crashes and collapse of the World Trade Center towers and the media devoted less time to it, which I understand. But DC is my home town. And the Pentagon was supposed to be a fortress. Maybe they'll go for a monument next and fuck my head up even more.

The movie is depressing enough on its own. I love John le Carré and for that reason I stay away from movies made from his books, but Pierce Brosnan is another actor who's better than his pretty face implies. And the film is okay, but Brosnan is very good, unsettlingly so, as a manipulative and almost wholly unlikeable spy: the anti-Bond.

I don't mean the rogue you secretly root for; I mean the sleaze you hope will leave you alone. His mannerisms, his walk, everything about him is oily. And he looks older. I know, he's getting older like the rest of us, but he looks notably different, almost gaunt. Makeup and lighting, I suspect, helped a lot there. He manages to be both menacing and repulsive, and that's just too weird from Pierce Brosnan, people.

This is why the public stayed away from Harrison Ford in Mosquito Coast (an excellent film). They didn't want to see him as unlikeable.

Brosnan is good, but the result is a downer. And that footage of the Pentagon is still waiting on pause.

Okay, about the rest of the movie: if you like le Carré, this gets great. Le Carré himself admitted they'd "deviated from the book," and actually I noticed a couple of lines from another le Carré, The Night Manager, in the dialogue. Disengage from Andy (Brosnan) and follow the plot. By the time you get to the Pentagon view, the plot has become unbelievably complicated and is moving forward of its own weight. It's amazing to watch it fall together.

At least, it was amazing to me. I was a pool player. I like that stuff. I like strategy, which is why I like clever movies like this. The last movie I saw that gave me this much of a grin, plot-wise, was Snatch (insert joke about title here), which was complicated by the fact that Brad Pitt was unintelligible most of the time (he's so cool) and still it moved like a juggler with nine balls in the air, quick and smooth and complicated. This movie is just a satisfying puzzle\. A thinking man's thriller, reviewers say. They say that about a lot of movies I like, which I guess means most people don't like to think.

And you wind up liking Jamie Lee Curtis. When was the last time that happened?