Review of Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (2000) by Josh G — 02 Apr 2008

There's a scene in Christie Malry's Own Double Entry where Christie is applying for a new job. His potential employer is asking him what makes him unique, and Christie can't answer the question. Likewise, the movie can't answer the question for the audience.

Malry is a banker, but then after an admittedly kind of cool imagined slaughter, he quits his job and begins working at a candy factory, which mainly consists of following another guy around and talking. A friend tells Christie that he should become an accountant because... he's good with numbers, I guess? Christie takes this to the logical conclusion: using the double-entry system to exact revenge on society. Yes!

What is the double-entry system? It's the system of credits and debits that one must use in everyday life. If you pay, say, $15,000 for a car -- you put "$15,000" in the debit side of your ledger and "car" in the credit side of your ledger. That way it all comes out even. Although that may seem easy enough, the movie feels that it's necessary for a second plotline set in the fourteenth century wherein Pacioli (the inventor of the system) explains double-entry in unneeded detail and his good friend Leonardo DaVinci worries mainly about whether his sixteen-year-old apprentice will have sex with him.

So, without warning, Christie (in the present) decides to exact revenge on society, only I don't really care much about him to understand what's gotten him so angry, and his system of credits and debits makes little sense. He'll debit himself something like "Wagner's lack of sympathy", then credit himself "Girl at butcher shop smiled at me". How are those two things related at all? You couldn't spend $15,000 on a car and then credit yourself "saw a rainbow on the way home!", so what is he doing? He also assigns monetary values to these intangible items -- say, $10.00 for being honked at by a car (I'm just making that number up, I don't know what he actually wrote). I'll key that car later, which will give me $11.50 worth of pleasure. Hold on, what?

But of course, the only reason that anybody watches this movie is because of the soundtrack created by the man-god Luke Haines. Well, the soundtrack is pretty awesome. It's just too bad that it sounds like somebody made this movie with another soundtrack and then added Luke Haines over it. It sounds so completely out of place with the movie.

All in all, I'm going to have to say that you'd be better off buying the soundtrack to the film than the actual film. It was an interesting concept that wasn't pulled off very well at all.

But maybe that's the point. Double-entry in action: debit yourself this movie, credit yourself the Luke Haines soundtrack.