RED / RED 2

RED (2010) is yet another comic book of a movie. Bruce Willis is a retired CIA troubleshooter and assassin who Knows Too Much and now They Are Out To Get Him. He gathers his old buddies --- John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman --- plus a former Russian adversary, plus the girl at the other end of the phone, Mary-Louise Parker. They go off and start causing trouble, including shooting up a campaign rally. Lots of laughs. Things blow up. Great fun all around.

        It was followed up by RED 2 in 2013, which was a satisfying sequel to a very entertaining movie. Willis’s relationship with Mary Louise Parker's character continues to morph --- he's happy to be retired from being a spy, she wants to continue the adventure they had when they met --- and they get thrown into rescuing Moscow from the threat of nuclear annihilation with the help of Helen Mirren, crazy John Malkovich, Catherine Zeta-Jones as a Russian General, and Anthony Hopkins as a seemingly-senile British scientist. All sorts of action, all sorts of amusement, lots of Zeta-Jones's legs and hair. We also get actual character development as Parker's character comes into her own.

        Must remember to dig up Walter Ellis and Cully Hamner’s graphic novel which was the jumping off point for these.

The Last Theorem

What happens when you take Arthur Clarke's "The Wind from the Sun", toss in a chunk of Fred Pohl's Heechee Rendezvous, add some of Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise and Pohl's Man Plus, top with some Olaf Stapledon, and then hit the frappé button? You get the not-quite-a-novel-but-more-a-series-of-sketches The Last Theorem from 2008. It's not as tight as the work that either of them has done in collaboration before, and I attribute that to their working on this solely by e-mail. Interesting ideas tossed hither and yon, but they don't hang together with anything like a completely coherent plot.  That's too bad, since it's virtually the last work either of them published, and they were capable of so much better.

9 Chickweed Lane

For a number of years one of my favorite comic strips has been 9 Chickweed Lane, drawn by Brooke McEldowney. It's the story of a woman named Juliette Burber, a biochemistry professor and dairy farmer, her mother Edna, her daughter Edda, a ballet dancer, and their various friends and relations. McEldowney doesn't write down to his audience --- he assumes some knowledge of music, he casually dropped a riff on Rupert Brooke into a strip a while back, he doesn't bother to translate German word bubbles. He's also willing to take the time to actually tell long stories: In 2009, over the course of several months, Edda's boyfriend Amos (a cellist at Julliard) was travelling to a competition in Europe and Edda came along as his accompanying pianist. Complications ensued, but Amos won on merit. Chickweed Lane is part of my daily reading, and I wouldn't miss it.

     The quality of storytelling reached what I thought was an apogee at the end of September 2010 when we finished eleven months of learning what Edna did in the war --- she was a spy for the USO, which is how she met her husband and Juliette's father. It was a wonderful story, with amazing subtlety and detail, and every morning for 271 weekdays and Saturdays (and frustration on Sundays) I woke up wanting to know what happened and was annoyed that I'd have to wait 24 hours to find out more.  That story was collected by McEldowney in a stand-alone volume Edie Ernst, USO Singer -- Allied Spy.

     What causes this reverie, though, is that we are now about a year into the parallel story of Edna's first husband, Bill, lost behind enemy lines between D-Day and the liberation of France.  He's been shot, hit on the head, shacked up with a French resistance operative, outrun retreating Germans, and is suffering from amnesia.  I have no idea how this is going to end, but it should be interesting, particularly given what we know about Edna's journey back in England and (after the war) in the States.

Veronica Mars

Earlier this week, I reviewed the Veronica Mars television show, noting that it petered out rather than resolving plot points.  The Veronica Mars movie from earlier this year has some of the same problem. We rejoin our characters at the time of their tenth high school reunion. Veronica, having graduated from law school is getting ready to embark on a career as a New York lawyer, far away from Neptune, California and its problems and dramas. But Veronica is dragged back into being a private detective because former bad-boy boyfriend Logan Echolls has been arrested for murder. This is a new plot, a new mystery to solve, and a satisfying soluton to the murder. At the end of the movie, Veronica decides to move back to Neptune, not to take up law there (rather than in New York), but to return to being a PI.  Even worse, the sense we're left with at the end is that we're not having a standalone story, but rather a way to set up for a movie franchise or another TV series.  

Veronica Mars

When our daughter mentioned the Kickstarter-funded movie Veronica Mars the other day, I sighed and said we'd add it to our Netflix list, even though I'd avoided the sixty-some episodes of the Veronica Mars television show, which she'd devoured when they were originally broadcast. Allie quickly waved me off the movie: the TV show is apparently a hard and fast prerequisite to fully understand the character interaction. So we hunkered down to start watching this series about a spunky blonde girl and I discovered it's actually pretty good. Picture Sam Spade being channeled by a seventeen-year-old high school girl in a California coastal town split firmly between the very, very rich Haves and the working-class Have Nots. Our heroine is also the daughter of the town's former sheriff, who was run out of office for failing to solve a high-profile murder. Solving that murder becomes the McGuffin for season one, since both Veronica and her father, now a private investigator, are convinced the guy who confessed didn't do it. The second season begins with the school bus returning kids from a field trip driving off a cliff on the Pacific Coast Highway into the sea. What actually happened and why? I was completely sucked in. 

        Having solved the second season bus-crash mystery with a death-defying finale on the roof of the luxury hotel in town, we leapt into the third season with Veronica heading to college, and a series of events that are complete mish-mashes.  I believe the showrunners were attempting to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the mix in a setup for the fourth season.  While the individual episodes are interesting, the whole falls flat.  To make matters worse, the show wasn’t picked up for a fourth season, so the show doesn't end so much as cliff, and we were left dangling. (Yes, some of this is resolved in the movie, which I'll review next, but it's still frustrating.)

I was hired when television was desperate enough to scrape the top of the barrel.

     --- Gore Vidal

Calder vs Michelangelo in 2010

Back in the winter of 2010, the Seattle Art Museum had two side-by-side exhibits, Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act and Michelangelo Public and Private.

     The first celebrated twentieth-century American sculptor Calder, whose sense of play and joy comes through in every jot-and-tittle of his wire sculptures, his "joolry", and his mobiles --- a form he invented. Daughter Alexandra and I were reminded of the winter day we spent in the National Gallery half-a-dozen years ago, where we chatted with the guards about Calder's work, and they encouraged us to lie underneath Calder’s mobiles and watch them from below as they moved in the air currents. And certainly, we've also wandered the hills and fields of Storm King Art Center in the Hudson River valley and absorbed their collection of Calder's massive stabiles sitting among other sculptures. This Calder-only show gave us a chance to see his work in isolation, to see pictures of him at work in his studios in New York and Massachusetts, to see the range in size from tiny to nearly room-filling. We get to see Calder's sense of play, expressed in metal just as Brendan Gill expressed his sense of play in words below. Calder's fun shows through like the sunlight breaking through the Seattle cloud cover.

     On the other hand, the Michelangelo show was a stupid idea. It was a scraped-together collection of Michelangelo's letters and sketches mostly aimed at showing his craftsmanship, but when viewed in contrast to Calder's work, it merely showed that Michelangelo was as much about self-promotion as artistry. Compared to Calder's light-hearted and literally light abstract ideas, Michelangelo's emphasis on anatomically-detailed painting and sculpture comes across as beautiful, but ponderous, particularly coupled with letters to and from him worrying about his reputation and legacy. We fled quickly.

     Sometimes, and with reason, I boast of never having done an honest day's work in my life. An honest day's play, oh, that I have accomplished on a thousand occasions or ten thousand. But work implies a measure of drudgery and fatigue and these are states as yet unknown to me.

     --- Brendan Gill on writing.

Man of Steel (revisited)

For the record, we went back and watched the part of Man of Steel after Kal-El gets off Krypton.  I’d heartily objected to the first part of the movie earlier. While Kevin Costner as Clark Kent's Earth dad is a little over the top, and Zack Snyder's direction means the fight scenes go on forfreakin'ever, on the whole, the thing didn't suck. Alexandra Katherine, my local speaker-to-comics-fans, tells me that this is all in service of starting a Justice League movie franchise, since the Marvel Avengers movie was so successful.  [Spoiler warning] I note that we will start that franchise with an interesting retcon: Lois already knows Clark’s secret identity. 

The Inside Ring / The Second Perimeter

The Inside Ring is the first of a series of thrillers by Michael Lawson, recommended by the Seattle Mystery Bookshop. An attempted assassination of the President is tied up too neatly and the Homeland Security secretary has some suspicions about what actually happened. Our main point-of-view character is Joe DeMarco, the “fixer” for the Speaker of the House, who --- like Robert B Parker's Spenser --- runs around asking questions, stirring up the waters, trying to find answers. However, unlike Parker, the writing is vivid, rather than snarky. The chapters are each reasonably self-contained, many of them written almost like stand-alone flash fiction. The third quarter of the book is predictable and gory, but overall, it's a very, very serviceable thriller.

        In the second of the series, The Second Perimeter, Joe and his friend Emma investigate some shady consulting contracts at a Washington state naval base. (This allows Lawson to give his own Congressman, Norm Dicks, formerly of Washington's 6th, a cameo.) It turns out that the shady contract is, in fact, a cover for an espionage ring, run by a Chinese agent who has past dealings with Emma. After Emma is kidnapped and the action bloodily moves across the border to British Columbia, things get more and more complicated. Our various plot threads are resolved in a shootout at a yacht basin on the Potomac River. I had great fun this time, not only with Dicks's cameo, but aligning various fictional politicians with their real-life counterparts. Again, not great literature, but a perfectly servicable thriller.

Particle Fever

Particle Fever is a lovely little documentary about the work of bringing CERN's Large Hadron Collider on-line. The point-of-view bounces back and forth between the theoreticians at Hopkins and Princeton and Stanford, and the experimentalists up to their hips in hardware at CERN outside of Geneva. We get to see the ups-and-downs of bringing the LHC beam on-line and the failure of super-conducting magnets that cause a delay in bringing the LHC to full power. At the climax, we get to see the seminar in which the two interlocking experiments searching for the Higgs boson present their results, both seeing the same energy peak. During that seminar, as the second team announces the confirming results, the filmmakers turn their camera to the audience breaking into applause and a shot of Peter Higgs, dabbing at the corners of his eyes with his handkerchief.

        One of the things that's only touched on here is one of the eternal struggles in scientific research, the struggle for funding. The question from those in Congress who ask, "what good is it? will it help us make better weapons? why should I spend money on this rather than on tax cuts, social programs, the war on drugs?" The answer is never easy, but it's pretty simple:

        The reason for doing basic scientific research is to understand our world. Learning things is what makes us human. Finding the Higgs boson is what we want to know next. To the reluctant Congressmen, I'd add, this is what makes America great: asking a big question, striving to find out something new, to bring new knowledge to light. It's things like this that bring students to our shores. The answers are ones that won't bear economic fruit tomorrow, or the next day, and perhaps not even directly, but they will make us richer both in spirit and in means.

Gambit

For Thanksgiving weekend amusement, I suggest Gambit, a lovely 2012 caper movie, with Colin Firth playing the art curator for a rapacious, annoying, ill-mannered Rupert Murdoch billionaire played by Alan Rickman, and Cameron Diaz as the Texas rodeo queen who is supposed to in possession of a long-missing Monet from his Haystacks series. Diaz's Monet is a forgery, perpetrated by Firth's accomplice, and Rickman already owns one of the series, for which he outbid his Japanese business rival at auction. Much hilarity ensues as Rickman tries to put the moves on Diaz, and Firth ends up on the ledge of the Savoy Hotel without his trousers. Eventually, the painting is delivered and Rickman brings in a second expert, who authenticates the fake. Then things get complicated. It's not deep and it's not a great plot, but it's amusing nonetheless, with good performances all around.

Buzz

Following from Anders de la Motte's Game, we have the second book in the trilogy, Buzz, in which our ne'er-do-well slacker, having taken revenge on the organizers of the Game and after a long foreign holiday, finds himself in a Dubai prison on murder charges after a night of drug-infused partying. Meanwhile, his sister, the bodyguard, finds herself brought up on charges for waving off the arrival of a Swedish diplomat to a meeting in an African country. The slacker takes a real job, under an assumed name, infiltrates a company he thinks may be involved in the Game, takes up with an attractive woman, becomes a party to some insider trading. His sister fights the charges, argues with her boyfriend, carries on a clandestine affair, meets a long-lost uncle, finds a plot to invade the royal palace on New Years Eve. Like Game, quite the page-turner, with a lot of local color from Stockholm, a city which I wish I knew better.

Presentation Zen

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds (2008, 2nd edition 2011) is a fairly short, very dense book about constructing your public presentations with skill and care to get your message across. Because he's studied zen, and mostly lives in Japan, he takes a very introspective view of how to develop a presentation. Reynolds certainly has some interesting ideas about how to make compelling slides --- including not using any slides at all in some cases --- and echoes some of the points I made in a Toastmasters speech I gave a couple of years ago entitled "PowerPoint PitFalls". He also introduces a trick I want to try from Japan called pecha-kucha (Japanese for "chatter") in which you do a presentation by talking through 20 slides for 20 seconds each, with slides on a timer so you have to get your talk completely keyed and timed to the images behind you.

Despicable Me 2

A little while back, I favorably reviewed Despicable Me, and have now had a chance to see the inevitable 2013 sequel, Despicable Me 2, which is just as much fun. Former arch-villian Gru, now a devoted father, is recruited to join the Anti-Villain League. He and his partner, Lucy, succeed in finding the bad guy despite his secret identity. Unfortunately, a number of Gru's minions are kidnapped in the process, and they must be saved, too. And, because this is a fairy tale, Lucy and Gru fall in love. As much fun as the original, with Steve Carell continuing to display his breadth as the voice of Gru, Kristen Wiig hilariously playing Lucy, and Benjamin Bratt as the bad guy, El Macho.

(And I note from IMDb, it looks like the Minions are set to have their own movie.)

What If?

Randall Munroe is, of course, known for the often hilarious web comic xkcd, but he's also been answering odd questions on his web site for a number of years. The questions and answers are now gathered in What If?, subtitled "Serious Scientific Answers to Absurb Hypothetical Questions." Most questions merit a several page essay considering issues such as how a longbow archer is an arrow generator with a frequency of 150 millihertz and how many archers you need to shoot enough arrows to block out the sun. Or what happens if the earth suddenly stopped spinning. Or how much Force power Yoda can output. He uses a lot of entertaining footnotes, including a number of pseudo-Wikipedia [citation needed] notes, and some more-or-less accurate calculations. His explanations sometimes take notable shortcuts on clarity, but this is, after all, in the interests of amusement, not scientific rigor. There are also some interjections of questions he chose to not answer, like: "what is the total nutritional value (calories, fat, vitiamins, minerals, etc) of the average human body?" All-in-all it's a lot of fun, but may require a certain nerd sensibility to appreciate.

zen pencils

For a couple of years, the excellent Australian free-lance artist Gavin Aung Than has been producing a several-times-a-week cartoon, zen pencils, each illustrating an interesting quotation. Not only are the quotations inspirational, so is Gavin’s own story: he quit a regular job to do this because he was getting no emotional fulfillment out of commercial art. He landed a syndication contract with Universal Press, and now appears on their web site, though he's still available at his own site zenpencils.com. Now many of his cartoons are collected in a volume of the same name, which I bought not only because the work is good and the illustrations add amazing depth to the text, but to encourage Gav to continue doing this. I recommend it to you for the same reasons.

Superfreakonomics

Superfreakonomics is Stephen Leavitt and Stephen Dubner's 2009 sequel to the wildly interesting 2006 Freakonomics. They discuss the economics of prostitution, how tracking bank fraud can also help you track down terrorists, and how the number of automobile deaths went up up in the months after September 11th, not because people were afraid to fly, but (as you find if you look at the numbers more closely and notice that they were clumped in the northeast and showed a larger-than-usual number of alcohol-related accidents) because of post-traumatic stress.  Currently, they’ve followed up with Think Like a Freak, about the metaproblems of thinking outside the economics box, which is in the to-be-read pile.

Feed

I was wrong. I read the first bits of Mira Grant's Feed before the 2011 Hugo deadline, but not enough to actually get the feel of it. And so I voted for Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear first for that year's Hugo. However, now that I've finished it, I can report that Feed is just a killer book --- in both senses of the word. Grant managed to tell a really compelling story about life in the mid-twenty-first century after the zombies have come. She manages to get enough Joss Whedon-style snarkiness in, particularly in the interactions between our point-of-view character Georgia (as in "George Romero") and her brother Shaun (as in "...of the Dead"), and their sidekick Buffy. Together they run a web site where Georgia is in charge of the news (the "Newsies"), Shaun is in charge of exploring the outside world and occasionally chasing zombies (the "Irwins", who give out an annual award called the "Golden Steve-o"), [As a tossoff, she notes about Shaun, "A good Irwin can make going to the corner store for a candy bar and a Coke look death defying and suicidal." Those of you who have seen Shaun of the Dead will note that scene sounds eerily familiar.] and Buffy runs the poetry and story side of the house (the "Fictionals").

     Then she leavens it with some swipes at thinly disguised versions of current political figures, like the congresswoman from Minnesota running for president who is described as a "publicity-seeking prostitute who decided to pole-dance on the Constitution for spare change." But it's not all lightness: she provides an excellent political thriller as a base, in which people die badly. And she manages to write it with some gut-wrenching passages like the quote below from Shaun's blog.

        She rounded out the rest of the "Newsflesh" trilogy with Feed and Blackout, both also highly recommended.

"If you ever start to feel like I have a glamorous job, that maybe it would be fun to go out and poke a zombie with a stick while one of your friends makes a home movie for your buddies, please do me a favor: Go out for your hazard license first. If you still want to do this crap after the first time you've burned the body of a six-year-old with blood on her lips and a Barbie in her hands, I'll welcome you with open arms."

The Thirteenth Floor

The Thirteenth Floor was one of the computer-mediated-reality movies in 1999, the year which brought us The Matrix and Being John Malkovich, all of which foreshadowed Inception. Based on a Daniel F Galouye book, a software company builds an artificial-reality based in 1930s Los Angeles, and their chief scientist discovers that, in fact, they're in an artificial reality themselves. "Wait! You mean it's turtles all the way down?" Well, maybe. The casting and acting are excellent, since we have each actor playing a different version of themselves in each of the levels of reality. We have a very young Vincent D'Onofrio and the lovely Gretchen Mol and versatile Craig Bierko and Armin Mueller-Stahl putting characters on and off like cardigans. Not as well-known as its contemporaries, but a more subtle story.

$

For this week's light Friday fare, we put together Warren Beatty and a very young Goldie Hawn in a 1971 caper movie named $. Beatty plays a bank security consultant who figures out how to empty the safe-deposit boxes of folks who are hiding ill-gotten gain. He's in cahoots with Hawn, playing the spacey hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold. Amusement ensues. Not great cinema, but worth an evening sitting on the couch with a bowl of popcorn.

Blackout / All Clear

I first heard Connie Willis reading pieces of what would become Blackout in the spring of 2002. It was one of the books I wanted to read on our fall vacation in Whistler back in 2010 shortly after it was published.  It might not have affected me as it did had I not spent the entire preceding week immersed in capturing my father’s memories of WWII as an Air Corps officer. To read her retelling (in part) of the stories of Londoners in the Blitz, of the guys who built a fake Army to convince the Germans the invasion was coming at Calais, of the ambulance drivers and air raid wardens and rescue workers is all pretty amazing. I timed reading Blackout carefully, knowing that it was only half the story, and that if I got sucked in at the cliffhanger, I'd only have to wait a few weeks for the second half, All Clear, to appear. I was and I did.

     Basically, a flock of time-travelling Oxford historians (see Willis' Hugo-winning "Fire Watch", et sequelae) are visiting Britain during the War. Things, of course, go wrong --- including the whole of the events in the "Fire Watch" taking place under their noses. Oxford don Mr Dunworthy traipses back into the past in an attempt to help and finds himself trapped, too. There was a point in the middle where I was getting frustrated with Willis for dragging us through day after day of the uncertainty of our time travellers dealing with the uncertainty of the Blitz. But then I realized: this is what it must have been like. Not just the uncertainty of the time-travelling historians, but the uncertainty of day-to-day life for Londoners in the Blitz, for everyone in southern England during the V-1 and V-2 attacks, for everyone while the threat of invasion was high. She manages to weave in the central mystery of why things are going wrong, with some surprising results. I blasted through the back half of All Clear on a Sunday afternoon, and when I was done and tears were streaming down my face, my first reaction was "How the hell did she do that!?" and my second was "I'm glad she did."

Manhood for Amateurs

Manhood for Amateurs is Hugo- and Pulitzer-winner Michael Chabon's 2009 book of essays, subtitled "The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son." It is, unfortunately, disappointing. While there is the occasional characteristic turn-of-phrase that makes me enjoy Chabon's writing, this smacks of little essays-as-writing-exercises that were tossed into a drawer and pasted togther to make a book. Some of them are interesting, to be sure --- his musing about how being elected President was going to take Barack Obama away from his daughters, his internal struggle about being honest with his children about smoking marijuana --- but overall, we expect far more from Chabon.

    As an aside, shortly after I finished this, there was a review in the December 2009 Atlantic for Ayelet Waldman's then-current book, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. I read the review, because it was by fellow Caltech alum Sandra Tsing Loh, though I did not intend to read the book itself. I note this only for the purposes of amused contrast, since it is out simultaneously with Chabon's book and Waldman is Mrs Chabon.

Enchanted

I finally had a chance to see Enchanted, Disney's 2007 movie about a cartoon princess who through the usual evil stepmother intervention ends up in our flesh-and-blood reality, dropped into New York City. Amusement and true love ensue, including a production number in Central Park which shares some moves with a Disneyland character parade, complete with calypso drummers and somersaulting ConEd repairmen.  Amy Adams (in an early role) plays the princess. Susan Sarandon as the real-life evil stepmother is pretty funny. And the bit in which our princess summons the woodland creatures to help clean the apartment by singing out the window is a wonderful riff on a classic fairytale cartoon meme: this is New York, so rats, pigeons, and cockroaches appear to help.

Back Channel

Back Channel is a new thriller by Yale law professor Stephen L Carter set during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It posits that the agent of back channel communications between Kennedy and Khruschev was actually a nineteen-year-old Cornell co-ed, whose cover was having an affair with JFK. It's very well-constructed, with an extensive note at the end detailing the ways in which he adjusted the timeline to suit his story and dramatize events. Nonetheless, Carter slips through a couple of anachronisms --- he has our point-of-view character use a Princess phone three years before they were available, and have a Kodak Instamatic camera two years early. He also assumes ubiquitous direct-dial long distance calling, which wasn't available in the New York area until 1964. Most grating of all, our heroine is African-American: even though Cornell was co-ed since it's founding, and also integrated early-on, a black teenager being able to navigate Washington circles without extra comment at the beginnings of the civil rights struggles --- six months before the letter from the Birmingham jail and a year before the March on Washington --- strikes me as unlikely. I solved that major suspension of disbelief by merely ignoring Margo's race for much of the book.

    That all said, it is a very well-told story, with a lovely convoluted plot. As hawks on both sides beat their drums for war and saner heads try to prevail, we get to watch the President and his brother and his national security advisor try to keep the lid on the boiling pot. Carter has clearly drawn some from An Unfinished Life, Robert Dallek's biography of Kennedy, and from the White House tape recordings in the JFK library. We watch JFK's efforts to steer the middle ground elegantly, with steel resolve, against the cajoling of McNamara and LeMay; we watch Bobby playing the devil's advocate to see the sense of the room; and we see a fictionalized McGeorge Bundy both advising and plotting.

The Dying Light

Based on a favorable review in The Economist I dug up The Dying Light, a 2009 thriller by British writer Henry Porter. Consider what happens when the British government starts gathering an unbounded set of information on everyone in the country on the grounds of protecting us all from terrorists. But that the data collection grows to the point where it's used to persecute everyone who shows any sign of protesting or being against the party in power. And that the head of the security services is forced out because he objects to the massive violation of civil liberties. Faked deaths, rigged coroner's inquests, loose organizations of protesters, small towns in England and Wales, people who care about rights and privacy. A call-to-action on our side of the Atlantic as well as to the British. Nicely done, and worth the read.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

How to describe The Grand Budapest Hotel? It is not a murder mystery, though there is a murder. It is not a drama, though there are moments of suspense. It is not a comedy, though much of it is grandly absurd. It is not a caper movie, though there is a theft, a hidden message, and a complicated getaway. It is not a period piece, though it takes place in a grand hotel between the world wars. It is not a comedy of manners, though there is quite a bit of interplay between the very rich and the staff. However, we can say that the story is intricate and amusing as we follow M Gustave, concierge of the eponymous hotel, on his outragous adventures with his lobby boy-in-training. The acting is exquisite, with a huge, varied, talented cast, excellent performances by Ralph Fiennes and F Murray Abraham, and stunning supporting work by Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, and Jeff Goldblum. It made for a lovely evening.

A Spy Among Friends

Cambridge, the 1930s. Young men dabble in Communism, with some of them taking it more seriously than others. Some of the serious ones ended up in high government posts, to wit, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and of course, Kim Philby. Philby's life and times are covered in the new volume A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre. Macintyre covers the whole of Philby's life, particularly his relationship with his life-long friend and MI6 colleague Nicholas Elliot (about whom John leCarré provides an interesting afterword), and his CIA colleague James Angleton. That Philby was able to get away with his perfidity for so long, spying for the Soviets under the nose of MI6 is (according to Macintyre) a tribute to the British class system: his colleagues in MI6 did not believe that someone of good breeding, who had gone to the right schools, was a member of the right clubs, could possibly be a traitor. The divide was that members of MI5 (roughly, in Britain, the FBI, to MI6's CIA), who were largely from less-prestigious backgrounds, had no problem believing the evidence that Philby was a double-agent. They were able to put together the trail of broken operations, murdered spies, leaked secrets, and hints from defectors, and see Philby. His drinking buddies and old school chums were not. And thus, Philby was finally fired by MI6 in 1951 when Burgess and Maclean defected --- after having been warned by Philby. But he was rehired in 1956 and sent to Beirut, where, as a correspondent for The Observer and The Economist, he also worked for MI6. In 1962, a Soviet defector was finally able to finger Philby, and in early 1963, he was interrogated by his old friend Elliot. After several rounds of questioning, and Philby's confession, the KGB managed to spirit him out of Lebanon and on to Moscow, where he lived out his days. It is the real history of the fictional wilderness of mirrors leCarré captures in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and as a vital part of cold war history, it's worth a read.

The Enemy Within

The Enemy Within is a 1994 HBO remake of Seven Days in May, giving a slightly different spin on the Knebel/Bailey novel. We have Forest Whitaker as the Marine colonel who uncovers the plot to overthrow the President, Sam Waterston as the President (attempting to affect a southern accent), and Jason Robards as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and leader of the coup attempt. This version substitutes shots of marching troops and rolling tanks through working-class neighborhoods and a conflict between the colonel and his son for plot development. While this wasn't a complete disaster, it suffers badly in comparion to the 1964 John Frankenheimer-directed, Rod Serling-scripted rendition. Watch that version instead.

The Lego Movie

The Lego Movie might seem on the surface like a piece of kid fluff. But it's actually a brilliant movie that works on multiple levels, like Rocky and Bullwinkle used to, with lots of puns: In Lego World, our hero, Emmett, has to search for the legendary Piece of Resistance, for example. Emmett and his band, led by wizard Vituvius (voiced by Morgan Freeman) are battling Lord Business (voiced by Will Ferrell). Lord Business wants to lock down everything in the world with the mysterious Kragle, so that the residents of the various Lego environments can't keep rearranging the carefully constructed buildings and spaceships. After all, it's vitally important to follow the printed directions and not have all this anarchy. But Emmett, Vitusius, Wyldstyle, and the other Master Builders want to go their own way and construct spaceships out of roadways, racecars out of saloons, and pirate ships out of buildings. In the end, Emmett and a small person convince The Man Upstairs that some amount of chaos in the world is not a bad thing.

Tampopo

Contrast The Ramen Girl with Jûzô Itami's 1985 masterpiece Tampopo, which is a brilliant, layered comedy. A truck driver happens upon a noodle shop operated by a widow. The widow is not a very good noodle chef but the truck driver agrees to help her improve. Her story is interleaved with other lovely comedic scenes involving food: a gangster gourmet and his beautiful girlfriend make sexual adventure in a hotel out of room service, a matron teaches debutantes to eat western style; executives can't read the French menu they're handed and are shown up by the office boy. Meanwhile, our cowboy truck driver and the noodle-cooking widow go on a quest to learn what how to make her better. They spy on other shops in the neighborhood, sneaking looks at their garbage. They are aided by a very wealthy patron whose life they have saved, not with the Heimlich maneuver, but with a vacuum cleaner. When they find the Ramen Master he's not in a limousine, but in a hobo camp among other epicureans, who wax poetic about the state of the dumpsters of various famous restaurants. In the end, of course, our heroine learns to make excellent ramen, her restaurant is successful, and the truck driver can ride off into the sunset.

The Ramen Girl

An American girl moves to Tokyo because her boyfriend is there, and then he breaks up with her, and then even though she knows no Japanese, she throws herself on the mercy of the man who owns the ramen shop across the street who speaks no English. The Ramen Girl, starring Brittany Murphy with dark circles under her eyes in every scene looking like she's hungover, is a low-rent, 'tweener version of Tampopo, with a few glimpses of Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Murphy begs to be taught how to make ramen, and doesn't want to expend the effort in the apprenticeship of cleaning the pots and washing the counters and mucking out the bathrooms. And yet, after a year of this back-and-forth with the noodle shop owner, she is making acceptable ramen, and the Ramen Master comes to visit and pass on her cooking ability. He arrives in a black limosine, and declares that she is good, but still needs work. So, after the neighborhood gives her a parade, she decamps to American to open a raman shop in the shadow of the Empire State Building.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

There are many books that are called classics, some of them even justifiably. For example, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which I recently reread. Robert Heinlein postulates a revolt at a penal colony, which organizes itself on libertarian principles with the help of a self-aware computer. The wrinkle is that the penal colony is on the Moon, and anyone sent there can't come back because their body has acclimated to the lower gravity.  This includes the guards and administrators. The Moon is hydroponically growing a large chunk of the grain needed in Asia, and literally drop shipping it via catapault back to Earth. The Loonies defend themselves with a superior understanding of their environment and gravity, and by the simple expedient of dropping rocks on Earth via the selfsame catapault. It is well-told, tightly-plotted, with appropriate suspense, including side discussions of Heinlein's alternatives to monogamy. If you haven't read it, make the time. If you have, it's time to re-read it.

    Alas, I read the Tor/Orbit reprint, which suffers from the perennial problem displayed by Tor: there was no human intervention between the optical character recognition of the text and printing the bound volume. This means there are innumerable typoes which would have been avoided by the simple expedient of proofreading. The most annoying example was references to "flat money" instead of "fiat money." (Those pesky "fl" and "fi" ligatures were obviously invented by medieval type designers just to confuse the OCR software.)

Moon

We see too many movies with too many special effects.  But back in 2009 Sam Rockwell and the voice of Kevin Spacey teamed up together in a little character study in a science fiction setting called Moon. It's got a couple of fascinating twists and turns, and is just very cool. Well worth the two hours, and it was high on my personal Hugo shortlist that year and took home the award. Amazing bang for the buck, considering that the movie was made for about the cost of a Big Mac.

Oblivion

Last year's Tom Cruise movie Oblivion has finally made it to viewing at our house. It's very pretty, as are Cruise and co-star Andrea Riseborough. Earth's been invaded. The Moon's been destroyed. Cruise and Riseborough are drone repairmen on Earth, protecting the water desalinization plants while everyone else resettles on Titan. And then a capsule containing hybernation pods reenters the atmosphere, leading us to the discovery of what's been hidden from our heroes. There were no plot twists, only telegrams. There were no revelations, only teases. There were no new ideas, only stolen rehashes. There isn't a single frame in these two hours that isn't completely predictable to anyone who has the slightest familiarity with the Big Book of Summer Blockbuster Sci-Fi Plots.

Taking Chance

By interesting contrast to The Hurt Locker and made in the same timeframe, we have Taking Chance (2009), a little movie starring Kevin Bacon for which he got a best actor award from the Screen Actors. Bacon is on screen for the whole thing playing a Marine colonel who volunteers to escort the body of Chance Phelps, a lance corporal killed in Iraq, home to Wyoming. He takes on the job in the mistaken belief that the kid was from his hometown in Colorado, except that's just where he enlisted. Bacon starts the trip not quite sure what to expect, but is met by respect and caring at every turn, from the airline clerk who upgrades his flight to first class, to the baggage agent who brings him a sleeping bag when he insists on keeping watch overnight, to the pilot who asks a planeful of people to wait so that the colonel and lance corporal can get off first, to the men of the VFW in the small town in Wyoming. Quite a nice, and very moving, little movie, speaking about the direct cost of war and respect for those who pay it.

The Hurt Locker

There was some amusement in these quarters that both James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow were nominated for best director Oscars, and that each of their respective 2009 movies received nine nominations. The amusement, of course, stems from the fact that Ms Bigelow was the third (of five!) Mrs James Cameron. However, now that I've seen her movie, I can unreservedly report that while Avatar is very pretty and a technical tour de force, The Hurt Locker is a much better film. It's the story of a guy who has been defusing bombs in a war zone for so long that he doesn't know anything else. The pain and confusion of the war zone is constant, and we watch the ways in which this team of bomb guys blow off steam and wander through the fog of war.  Deservedly, it won both best director and best picture.

Avatar

White European industrialists bad. Smurfs, er, native people good. That's the plot of Avatar (2009). A rehash of Disney's Pocahantas, (or, if you prefer, Dances with Wolves) with a swipe from Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe". That said, it's visually stunning and beautifully executed, but, boy, the evil Earthmen meme wears a little thin by the time we get to the third hour and the interminible battle scene.

Intelligence

Intelligence (subtitled "a tale of terror and uncivil service") is a fine first novel by Susan Hasler from 2010, out in paperback this year. It watches an unfolding terrorist incident from multiple points of view inside a US intelligence agency known as The Mines. Our hero, Maddie, her ex-father-in-law and mentor, Doc, among others, see the day-to-day happenings at this agency from their own points of view. They are unable to get anyone to listen to their warnings, are raked over the coals for their inability to prevent another terrorist incident on American soil, and then they get revenge. No actual idiot bureacats were harmed in the writing of this novel by a twenty-one year veteran of the CIA as a counter-terrorism analyst. Liz stole this from me the moment it came from the library, and we both laughed out loud a lot when we read it.

"Yes, there is a Starbucks in the Mines. Ours sells only beverages, no clever mugs with Latin phrases, espresso machines, or bags of beans, but you can still obtain a variety of pretentious concoctions distantly related to coffee --- the way a lemur is distantly related to a human. Coffee with caveats. I stand in a long line and listen to people roll off their lengthy orders, which must specify size of cup; percentage of fat; whether milk be of the cow or of the soybean; flavor and number of pumps of syrup; presence or absense of whipped cream, sprinkles, sugar, and a partidge in a pear tree.

It's my turn. I refuse to say venti. There is nothing wrong with the English word large."

     --- Susan Hassler, Intelligence

The Healing of America

Given the current policy debates, TR Reid's 2010 book The Healing of America (subtitled "a global quest for better, cheaper, and fairer health care") is worth revisiting.  It's a book comparing how medical care is delivered and paid for in several countries across the world. He argues that deciding to provide health care as universal coverage is fundamentally a moral decision, and then proceeds to show how delivering coverage works in places like Japan and France and Germany and England and Canada. Note that two of those countries --- France and Germany --- achieve universal coverage completely with private insurance plans. All of them tightly control costs by dictating what is covered by a standard medical insurance plan and the prices charged for services. France goes further and gives everyone an encrypted smart card with all their medical information so that your doctor can look at all your records immediately. Such a card also cuts the time for a bill to be paid down to less than a week. The next effect is that France, which is seen as profligate by its EU neighbors in its expenditure on health care spends half what the US does on healthcare (as a fraction of GDP) and a tenth what the US spends on administrative overhead.

     Net take-away for me: Anyone who calls European healthcare "socialist medicine" is lying. Anyone who says that cost control won't work is a shill for the insurance industry.

The Ghost / The Ghost Writer

Robert Harris, who wrote Fatherland and Enigma, both serviceable novels, has also given us The Ghost (2010), about a ghostwriter helping a former British Prime Minister with his memoirs. Any similarities between Tony Blair and the PM in this book, who was too firmly in bed with the Americans over the Iraq debacle, signed off on the torture and rendition of British citizens, got tossed out of office on his ear after Britain got pissed off over being sold a bill of goods in the "war on terror", and who has spent his year since retiring amassing a great personal fortune, are completely coincidental.  Our unnamed point of view character is the replacement ghost writer for a former British prime minister's memoirs. His predecessor, who had started the project, has died under mysterious circumstances, and the writer struggles to solve the mystery and turn in a serviceable manuscript. Things go pear-shaped for the writer when he actually figures out the mystery. 

    Roman Polanski's movie, confusingly titled The Ghost Writer, and then renamed The Ghost on re-issue, is a very good version of the book, preserving the story's backbone in a compelling way, with Ewan McGregor as the writer, Pierce Brosnan as the PM, and 

Rush

Rush was Ron Howard's movie last fall about the Formula One racing rivalry between James Hunt and Niki Lauda. I cannot imagine it was a commercial success, especially because the racing sequences are much more abbreviated than in either Frankenheimer's Grand Prix or Steve McQueen's Le Mans. This means Howard will have to make some stupid blow-'em-up movie to get back in the good graces of the studios. However, it is a great story, contrasting Lauda's Germanic heads-down attention to detail with Hunt's seat-of-the-pants, screw-every-woman-available style. They both accomplished amazing things on the race course, winning races and glory. This culminated in the 1976 season, in which there were a lot of rule book arguments, in which Lauda had a near-fatal accident at the German Grand Prix, and in which Hunt took the world championship by one point at the rain-drenched Japanese Grand Prix. My main frustration with the movie is the short shrift given to the two races which I saw in person that year at Long Beach and Watkins Glen.

Impossible Odds

Impossible Odds is a pair of stories on the same theme: people stuck and finding a way out, despite the chances. In the first, a tournament poker player's wife discovers a very unorthodox way to solve her fertility problems. In the second, a middle-aged, middle-class, mid-level manager at a technology company gets the better of an aggressive panhandler. They're by new writer Jenna Vincent and are short, engaging reads. In both cases, I want to know what comes next.  They're available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other purveyors of electronic books.

Full disclosure:  these are published by Bywater Press, which brings you this blog.  I've known the writer for years and enjoyed her work so much that these are the first thing I've published for sale under my own label.  Look for more work from Ms Vincent in the near future.

Despicable Me

Despicable Me (2010) is just delightful. Our archvillian Gru needs to defeat a new bad guy, Vector, in order to steal the Moon. A step in his plan is to adopt three orphan girls. Unfortunately, he becomes more attached to them than as just a means to his end. Things begin to go bad when Vector kidnaps them, and the shrink ray which is necessary to steal the moon acts oddly. And, of course, from there it gets silly and heartwarming. Not the quality of animation we've been spoiled into expecting by Pixar (since it's from Illumination, instead) but still quite good. Lovely voice acting by Steve Carell and Russell Brand, and by the three girls, Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier, and Elsie Fisher.

Marooned

Martin Caidin's novel of a rescue in outer space, Marooned, actually exists in two versions. There's the one that was published in 1964, and then the fixup based on the 1969 John Sturges movie. I've had the latter version, unread, on the shelf for a number of years, and read it a couple of months ago. Then I was curious and got the earlier version out of the library. They're both overdone a bit, very much products of their times. And once you've read the earlier one, the seams in the later one are even more obvious. However, they both suffer from "dark and stormy night" syndrome. Sample sentence: "In the growing absence of restrictive air, the stripped atoms and wildly agitated gases howled mutely in every direction, spreading in the form of a phantasmal spheroid, it surface and inner space rippling and turning with the light reflected from the blazing rocket."  That said, it's a good adventure story.

Green Zone

Green Zone (2010) is a nice Matt Damon thriller. Damon plays an Army NCO whose team is searching for weapons of mass destruction after 2003 invasion of Iraq. He discovers that the intelligence reports are completely made up by a Bush administration synchophant. It's an adrenaline fest. Stunningly good performance by Khalid Abdalla as the Iraqi civilian who brings the McGuffin to Damon's attention and comes along for the action as the not-completely-willing translator. Partially based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran's excellent non-fiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Life Inside Iraq's Green Zone.

The Kids are All Right

The Kids are All Right (2010) is Lisa Cholodenko's movie about the kids of lesbian parents wanting to meet the sperm donor who was their birth father. The plot is predictable, the direction and cinematography are pedestrian. The point seems to be that even lesbians can have dysfunctional families. Despite Comrade Tolstoy’s observation about unhappy families, the lesbian moms have worked actively to made themselves unhappy, which I find uninteresting. Much better to create characters who work themselves out of trouble, not dig deeper into it. The only draw are the performances by the principals, Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as the moms and Mark Ruffalo as the sperm donor.  

A Man, a Woman and a Bank

Because I like caper movies, Netflix's recommendation engine suggested A Man, a Woman and a Bank, which is a canonical 1970s boy meets girl movie, complete with goopy soundtrack, and running time of 100 minutes for easy sale to television. Boy meets girl, boy robs bank, boy loses girl, boy loses money, boy gets girl back. Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams appear as the first two characters named in the title. Unfortunately, the bank, which is under construction for most of the movie, does a better job of acting.

Replay

In the mainstream-with-sci-fi-conventions category, Lisa Roberts recommended Ken Grimwood's Replay, originally published in 1986. It is (in some sense) the serious version of the movie Groundhog Day. A man repeats a chunk of his life again, and again, and again. There's no clear-cut purpose, though. He doesn't need to make one perfect day or one perfect life so much as experience it from different angles and be grateful for what he's got. He can make money by betting on horse races he already knows the winner of and investing in unknown companies that will make it big, but he can't stop Kennedy from being assassinated. He can marry his college sweetheart, but not reconnect with the woman who is also caught in a similar time loop. In the end, when he pops out the other end of his loop, he has to deal with life as it comes, one day at a time.

     (Two anachronisms which pop out painfully, and I note because I'm a nit-picking pain in the butt: The desk in the hero's office features Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Chair, which is a lounge chair, not a desk chair. Our hero is drinking Glenlivet scotch in a New York bar in 1964 --- to the best of my knowledge, the only bottle available in the US at that time had been smuggled into my father’s liquor cabinet from Scotland as a gift by an Inverness-bred friend of his: it wasn't generally available until the late '70s.) 

The Secret History of Science Fiction

I picked up an anthology at the library edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel entitled The Secret History of Science Fiction (2009) which contains stories such as Kate Wilhelm’s "Ladies and Gentlemen, This is Your Crisis" and Michael Chabon's "The Martian Agent", which are mainstream stories in sensibility, but use the conventions of science fiction. You and I would recognize them as speculative fiction, but they could hide in plain sight in The New Yorker. Kelly and Kessel’s intention is to bring material in that middle ground to your attention. And they do a good job, providing some excellent stories, many of which I'd read before, but some, like the Chabon, Gene Wolfe's "The Ziggurat", and Connie Willis's "Schwarzchild Radius" were new to me.

Kahawa

Since I just posted a review of Donald E Westlake's Dancing Aztecs, it's worth also taking note of Kahawa.  He considered the pair of them to be his best work, and I'd have to agree. On the surface, this is a familiar Westlake caper: some guys steal a 33-car-long train of coffee in Uganda, and spirit the coffee out of the country during the era of Idi Amin. But it's not his usual light-hearted caper, since it graphically takes place amidst the backdrop of Amin's reign of terror. It is tightly plotted, with setbacks, double-crosses, mixed motivations from the principals, piracy and hijacking, romance, sex, and quite a bit of violence.  But, it's tightly plotted, and tells the fictional tale of what was, apparently, an actual robbery.

Dancing Aztecs

In all the years I've been mentioning it, I realize that I've never written a proper review of Donald Westlake's masterpiece, Dancing Aztecs. My opinion about it has varied, but I've always believed it's the pinnacle of Westlake's comic caper writing, surpassing even his Dortmunder books, because it stands in its own little universe. The story is that a shipment of duplicates of a pre-Columbian artifact from South America includes the smuggled solid gold original, and our large cast of characters spend the book trying to locate and cash-in on the find. It features well-drawn, amusing characters with quirks and foibles, and a fluid set of alliances among them. Entertainingly, it includes the lowest-speed car chase on record. It's a wonderful rendition of the lost treasure story told in a 1920s Russian novel (which was filmed as The Twelve Chairs by Mel Brooks). I've complained from time-to-time that Dancing Aztecs suffers from being stuck in the decade in which it was written, the 1970s, with a number of prejudices and dated ideas that come from that. However, that is a problem only in the way that Gatsby being stuck in the roaring twenties is a problem: it doesn't change the overall quality of the narrative and the timeless nature of the conflict.

Welcome to Temptation

Jennifer Crusie's Welcome to Temptation is a novel about the children of a con man coming to visit a small town in Ohio to make a movie at the behest of the town's success story --- the high school ingénue who went off to Hollywood. The hereditary mayor-for-life, his mom, his political rival, the other loony city council members, the police chief, the ingénue's self-important news anchor husband, the mayor's daughter, a boy dog named Lassie, and a freezer full of Dove bars round out the cast. Witty dialog, good sex, a pool table, and a tone reminiscent of Westlake's Dancing Aztecs make it worth a bit of a slog through the early pages that set up the action. But then they start to make the porn movie under the eyes of the burghers and it gets really amusing. The real attraction, though, is Crusie’s ability to actually capture human interaction, and show those flashes of insight when one character understands another.  While this isn't as good as Bet Me, it's still an excellent story.  And in a world where romance novels have been supplanted by "mommy porn," three-dimensional characters are a real pleasure.

The King of Sports

As an Atlantic Monthly contributing editor and columnist for ESPN.com, Gregg Easterbrook has the credentials to write The King of Sports, which, as its subtitle claims, analyzes "Football's Impact on America." He wanted to write about a college football program he could profile that had a reputation for being honest and graduating its players at a rate roughly equal to the general student body. He had a hard time finding one, finally resorting to Virginia Tech. He then compared the program at VT to other big money colleges, and examined the way in which the NFL treats it customers and players. To summarize his conclusions: The NFL exists as a monopoly organization to funnel money from television networks to the team owners. The teams are a way to funnel public money, in the form of stadium bonds, tax abatements, and free rent, into private hands. Lucrative money from cable television is further encouraging already-bad practices. College football exists in a region outside normal college life, where very few universities are actually interested in seeing that students playing big-money sports actually graduate, and the universities are happy to play along, paying their coaches more than their presidents, to keep the money rolling in. Except that the money doesn't benefit the universities as a whole, they only benefit the athletic programs. And the NCAA is a co-conspirator in this. The NFL teams and big money colleges regard their players as essentially disposable commodities. None of the football programs at any level are interested in making clear to starry-eyed players how unlikely it is that they'll get to the next level --- one in two thousand high school players eventually get to the NFL, and of those, very few play the four years required to vest their benefits.

"There are no words strong enough to express how little the NCAA cares about whether the football or men's basketball players who generate economic returns also receive an education. To the NCAA, the barometric pressure on the planet Neptune matters more than whether football and men's basketball athletes receive educations."

     --- Gregg Easterbrook, The King of Sports

The Intern's Handbook

Nobody ever notices the intern. That means if you're an assassin, you can sneak into the law firm as an intern, and kill one of the partners. And your guide for doing it would be Shane Kuhn's recently-published lovely black comedy, The Intern's Handbook, which is just wonderful. It's told from the point of view of "John" one of the operatives at HR, Incorporated, who place hitmen/interns at various companies. He's on his last assignment at a mob-connected law firm. This volume is the notes he is assembling for the operatives who come after him, giving them hints about his hard-won knowledge through multiple murders. It's also the story of meeting and falling for an FBI agent named Alice, who's investigating the law firm with the intention of sending someone to jail rather than the morgue. The whole thing is a black comedy of the first order, and a lot of fun.

Bet Me

I was originally induced --- though perhaps seduced would be a better word --- to read Jennifer Crusie's Bet Me when I leaned over in bed one evening to ask my darling wife what she was reading and she said "don't bother me now, I'm just to the part where she's tied up and he's eating donuts off her boobs." And the scene in question does not fail to deliver. However, what amazed me throughout the book was that Crusie has just used "romance novel" to hang a real story from, and in doing so, she has real characters who actually occupy three dimensions and undergo character development, even the supporting cast. The dynamics of the main characters' families is pretty amazing, and was magnificently written. And the development of the relationship between our protagonists is deep and affecting: they each understand the other’s family in a way that gives them insight into one another. Very good stuff on multiple levels. 

[[This review published today in honor of our wedding anniversary, because Liz recommended this book to me.]]

"There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection is the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted."

     --- Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, by Judith Martin

Inception

Normally, I avoid anything starring Leonardo DiCaprio like the plague, but encouraged by Liz's studio mate Karen, we recently watched Christopher Nolan's Inception, which won both Hugo and Nebula. And it deserved them. It builds a complete, complex, self-contained world in which DiCaprio's character is in the business of stealing industrial secrets by sneaking into people's dreams. Even though DiCaprio's name is above the title, it's an ensemble cast, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, and Marion Cotillard, and they succeed in carrying the movie. The dream within a dream within a dream within a dream is a stunning plot device. Cotillard's character appearing in DiCaprio's mind and in the shared dreams even though she's dead is a lovely on-going threat. This movie also succeeds in showing Nolan's scriptwriting and directing chops, which he hasn't done in the commercial Batman fluff he's been doing, or the crappy Superman reboot he wrote last summer. It has a brilliant, haunting closing shot.

Into The Night

We recently rewatched Into the Night, a lovely little 1985 movie about emeralds purloined from a Persian pasha and smuggled into the United States by a woman who has to escape from the Iranian thugs who are trying to steal them. She literally falls onto the hood of the car belonging to an insomniac aerospace engineer. The woman is played by Michelle Pfeiffer, and the engineer is played by Jeff Goldblum, both of them frighteningly young. There is much chasing around Los Angeles in the night (with just enough geographic errors to amuse me), there are cameo appearances by everyone imaginable, many of them directors of other movies. Carl Perkins and David Bowie have a lovely knife fight, though Bowie's scenes have a cheerfully understated menace. Director John Landis plays one of a flock of Iranian thugs, who provide comic relief.  Director Amy Heckerling plays a diner waitress at the landmark Ship's on Westwood Blvd. Dan Ackroyd turns in a funny performance as Goldblum's carpool buddy.  Richard Farnsworth does a nice job as Pfeiffer's sugar daddy with Vera Miles as his snarling wife. If you have not had a chance, find and watch this little-known thriller.

Double Feature: Deep Impact & Armageddon

Recently we had an interesting "compare-and-contrast" double feature over two evenings. We re-watched Deep Impact and Armageddon, 1998's two "oh my God! the earth is about to be smashed by a meteor" movies.

     First things first: Deep Impact is about people; Armageddon is about technology. The science in Deep Impact is somewhat more accurate. That NASA acquiesed in helping to push Armageddon out to an unsuspecting public suggests they're loonier than we've given them credit for.

     Téa Leoni gives an absolutely wonderful and nuanced performance as the newswoman in Deep Impact. She's ably supported by the likes of Vanessa Redgrave, Morgan Freeman, and Elijah Wood and Leelee Sobieski as the teenagers. Geologist Gene Shoemaker --- who figured out as a grad student what caused the thing in Arizona we now know as Meteor Crater --- acted as advisor on the film. It's a real story, with a beginning, a middle, an end, with intelligent characters doing the best they can under the circumstances. Best line: Mary McCormack as one of the astronauts, thinking about their choices, says, "Look on the bright side. We'll all get high schools named after us."

     On the other hand, in terms of emotional manipulation Armageddon is much more effective. It didn't help that there's a shot about nine minutes into the movie, at the end of a meteor shower hitting New York, of both towers of the World Trade Center in flames --- painfully too close to what we saw in real life only three years later. And, as I've observed recently, there's a shot in this movie at Launch Pad 34A, where the Apollo I fire occurred, that always leaves me in tears --- not because of the content of the scene but rather because of the setting and the realization that we haven't served their memory at all well. It's got Bruce Willis, running his usual emotional (non-)range, Ben Affleck, Steve Buscemi, and Billy Bob Thornton, giving the best performance of the lot. It's also got, as the sole respite from testosterone-laden grimaces) Liv Tyler. (Though Tyler appears to exist in the script for two purposes: to look fetching, and to wail "that's my daddy up there!" at the appropriate moments.) Best line: Buscemi, playing the brilliant, but crazy, geochemist, "Why do I do this? Because the money's good, the scenery changes, and they let me use explosives."

     They've both got their good points, but Armageddon is a thrill ride, while Deep Impact is a movie.

Cryptonomicon

The elapsed time to originally read its nine hundred pages was nearly three months, but Cryptonomicon was worth every word, and every minute. Neal Stephenson has written two parallel stories of nerds, one in the present day, and one in World War II, and both heroes are wonderful. The story operates in interlocking, intertwined layers as Stephenson stories do. There are simply too many good bits in this to recount them all, from Lawrence Waterhouse spending time at Princeton with some chap named Turing, to Randall Waterhouse bunged up in a jail in Manila; from Robert Shaftoe, haiku-spouting Marine raider, to scuba-diving America (Amy) Shaftoe; from a mysterious excommunicated priest named Enoch, to a dangerous-looking Chinese guy named Wing. I devoured the last two-hundred-odd pages in a binge, punctuated by my stopping, wandering around for fifteen minutes at a stretch and saying "wow!" Very nice. Deserving of its Hugo nomination. If you have not read it, do so now.  It's head-and-shoulders above some of Stephenson's later books.

Making History

A couple of years ago, old friend Stephen Walli and I were discussing Stephen Fry over coffee one morning. He asked if I'd read Making History, which I hadn't, so he delved under his desk and tossed me a copy. It's wonderful. Given that I'm fond of alternate history, this is a great book. It asks the question, What if you could invent a time travel technique that made Adolf Hitler never happen, but what you got instead was worse? It's told in two sequential tracks, matching the two timelines.  There are great characters, lovely dialog.  It's fascinating stuff, with a little less of Fry's usual wit --- see The Liar for that --- but it's still got all of his wonderful insight. 

Captain Phillips

We watched Paul Greenglass's Captain Phillips last evening and it was excellent filmmaking with taut scripting and cinematography. This is the story of the hijacking, by Somali pirates, of the Maersk Alabama in 2009, and subsequent rescue of the Captain from the pirates by Navy Seals. There is a lot of drama, and quite a few harrowing moments. Indeed, the last forty minutes of the movie are just excruciating in their tension, even though we know how the story turns out. Tom Hanks gives a magnificent performance as the eponymous Captain. The last fifteen minutes of the movie are outstanding acting, and Hanks should have gotten an Oscar nomination for the work. [[How Leonardo DiCaprio keeps getting nominated for Oscars, I do not understand. Is this by the same mechanism as L Ron Hubbard's nominations for the Best Novel Hugo in the 1980s and 1990s?]] I'm sufficiently impressed that I will now have to see Greenglass's movie United 93, which I'd been avoiding because of the painful subject matter.