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.