In hopes that I can somehow magically impel my thesis to finish itself by leaving it untouched in the next room while I lie on the couch in front of the television, I am watching Breaking & Entering, a strange and beautiful film I’ve been meaning to Netflix* for a long time, ever since I bought its score simply because it’s by Underworld (actually, a collaboration between them and Gabriel Yared). This is always a strange and kind of lovely way to discover a movie, so that while watching it I am hearing music with which I’ve become intensely familiar—jogged to, slept to, included in mixes—cast in a new context.

Like I said, it’s a beautiful film, both for its music and its cinematography, but also for the pretty people who populate it, and who are pretty to look at. It’s a difficult film to describe or pin down—one moment an urban crime drama, the next a portrait of a troubled family, the next a postmodern morality play—a shapeshifter that grabs me in the manner of any art that resists simple characterization, like You Shall Know Our Velocity or For Hero: For Fool: I can’t quite say what it is I like about it because I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to hit “pause” and check to see if my thesis has typed “THE END” at the end of itself like I politely and magically willed it to.

Underworld & Gabriel Yared - “Happy Toast” (mp3)

* (”Netflix” here being a colloquialism meaning “to let a DVD languish in an envelope atop of one’s television for six weeks so that one’s Netflix subscription does rather the opposite of paying for itself.”)