Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (No commas - just like the DVD case)

Trust me, I wasn't the first to decide to throw my hard-won cash at Focus Features just to endure two hours of the film version of a book it took me three days to read and which I still don't fully understand. But then I saw the beautiful man-candy peopling the advertisements.

Colin Firth, you say? Michael Fassbender?! Benedict Cumberbasodiugqhdjkbnjhdskcxx?!?!

Take my money! PLEASE!

In the spirit of creating an experience that I could use as blackmail for the rest of my dad's life, I volunteered to watch one of his favorite movies with him in a kind of at-home Father-Daughter date night. As long as he made white russians and told me in advance when the scary head-shooting scenes and scarier British sex scenes were, so I could shut my eyes and not carry disturbing mental images around in my brain until the time when I should I finally lay my tormented soul in the grave.

In all seriousness, and the movie was ALL seriousness, it was a great flick. It would have gone well with a warm Guinness or better yet a Springbank 10 year pour. All I had was blackberry beer.

I think I would have understood more if I had had the single malt. Or ten of them.

No, no. You misunderstand me. I understood the movie, the characters, and the plot. I get it, I get it. Control ran the Circus until Percy the Scarlet Pimpernel started trying sneak into the main tent with his invaluable font of golden-gilded information. Jim is out there risking his nuggets to help Control track down the mole in the operation, and everyone except Smiley is poking everything with an orifice.

Seriously. Everybody is gay, straight but open to alternatives, having affairs, or just penetrating strangers, or breaking up with long-time lovers and partners so as to have no vulnerable spots in ones private life that could hamper ones professional world.

I just don't understand how they have any time to get the wire taps onto all those phone lines. Or how any of them have time to do their proper job, let alone spy out information to pass off to those damn Commies.

But the British are resourceful little bunnies. They seemed to make it work and in the end, of course, Smiley delivers on his goal of clearing up Control's legacy.

What was not delivered was pretty men. Or at least not in the excessive amounts I would have thought reasonable, considering those TV spots.

Of course, Colin Firth is a man apart. Especially when his parts are splattered all over the brick wall of the not-so-safe-as-we-thought-safe house.

Michael Fassbender was unrecognizable as Ricky Tarr, probably because the last thing I saw Mr. Fassbender in was a Hercule Poirot from the early 90s. And because Ricky Tarr was played by Tom Hardy. Who up until now, I thought was a professional football player.

The vast majority of the rest of the cast were, well... too realistic to be pleasing to the eye. Everybody looked like an old British spy, an old Eastern European spy, or a middle-aged office worker. It was depressingly believable.

I don't remember enough of the book to draw any parallels or comparisons or even commentary. And I have to jump on a plane any minute, anyway. So we'll leave it at that. A very good post-war/cold war espionage flick. My father should appreciate this until the day he dies.

And I'm still waiting on that White Russian.