Double Take

Matthew Martens

Grimonprez and McCarthy are a couple of very knowing characters, so it's no surprise that they made such a knowing film together. Still, as amusing and clever as their cold war critique/pastiche/piss-take consistently is, it nevertheless feels a bit forced and faded, as dated in its way as the Folgers ads it recurringly mocks. Not quite fresh-perked, this cuppa postmodernism.

MATTEO BITTANTI

Grimonprez' meta-doc has prelingerian mood. There's also a bit of Paul Virilio - e.g. media and war, the discussion on what matters more, space exploration or television (obviously, television: => as we all know popular culture killed Communism in the Eastern block). Good stuff.

Christopher R. Smith

It gets off to an uneasy start, trying to interweave conventions of the archival documentary with post-modern pontificating. But eventually does coalesce into a very engrossing experimental work, though some elements are more compelling than others. Flawed, but fascinating.

El Biffo

"If I could just make a decent cup of coffee, I could relax". Any film featuring Laika, the cosmonaut dog, gets at least 3.8 stars from me. 3.8 stars!

mjgildea

I'm not exactly sure what the hell was supposed to be going on here but once I was no longer disoriented I kind of enjoyed it. Double Take definitely got an emotional reaction out of me (ganking the score from Psycho did most of the work) and by the end I didn't mind any of the nonsense along the way.

forksclovetofu

Barely narrative but still engaging, this deft and subtle bit of collage blends historical footage of the cold war, space race and Cuban missile crisis with Hitchcock's The Birds, television shows and advertisements, a pseudo-interpolated Borges short story and a credit roll that rapidly struggles to suggest little has changed since Sputnik went up. Utterly timely but a bit difficult and only moderately rewarding.

xrystyna

the cold war storyline surely was impressive, but all in all this film tried to tell us too much

Weston Campbell

Unique exploration of cold-war politics using the rich field of Hitchcockology as a template.