Bywater Reviews
Friday, January 30, 2015
Up In the Air
George
Clooney is not his usual charming, humourous self in the 2009 film Up in
the Air. He plays a corporate road warrior, whose job is to lay people
off and whose goal is to get to ten million frequent flyer miles without having
any meaningful human contact. Things get weird when his company decides to
start doing its work by teleconference, he meets a woman in a hotel bar who he
begins to care about and his life starts to change. But at the end, nothing has
changed, and he's sadder for it. It's a thoughtful story, even if it doesn't
end well. Walter Kirn’s novel, interestingly, tells an rather different, and
perhaps deeper, story, in which our point of view character's flaws are more visible, though it doesn't make him more likeable.
Friday, December 19, 2014
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.
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
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.
Monday, December 15, 2014
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.
Friday, December 12, 2014
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.
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
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
Monday, December 8, 2014
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.
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