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.

Friday night double-feature: Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag / Snakes on a Plane

If you have not seen it, please allow me to recommend an amusing old Joe Pesci movie called Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag, in which a New Jersey mobster has to take proof of a gangland hit --- the aforementioned heads --- to the boss across the country. Of course, a medical student on his plane has the identical duffel bag, and they manage to exchange luggage. The medical student is heading to Mexico on vacation with his fiancé's parents, who are hilariously played by George Hamilton and Dyan Cannon. The mob boss is starting to believe that the hit never took place. The medical student's fiancé and her mother discover the heads. Pesci's character has to track down the medical student. Mexican gangsters and police, hotel staff, dogs and coyotes, and heads stolen from the medical school all add twists to the story. 

We watched this in a Friday night double-feature with Samuel L Jackson's Snakes on a Plane, which I'd never managed to see.  It is exactly what it claims to be. (Indeed, when the movie first came out and Samuel L Jackson was interviewed on The Daily Show, his answer to Jon Stewert's question about the movie was direct and succinct: "Well, Jon, it's about snakes. And they're on a plane.") Jackson is a character in the movie, rather than carrying the whole thing by himself, which is a good thing. Roughly, the plot is that Jackson is an FBI agent who has to transport a witness from Hawaii to Los Angeles, but the mobster he's going to testify against has put poisonous snakes on the plane to prevent that from happening. It's pretty much as you'd expect: the couple joining the Mile High Club are the first to get attacked, the obnoxious businessman passenger gets it, the mom with the baby are saved by a brave stewardess, the two brothers traveling to meet their mom in LA help each other. There is some suspense, but think of it as a suspenseful comedy and you'll be fine.