The Challenger Disaster

A couple of years ago, I grabbed an audio book of Dick Feynman's The Meaning of It All, looking forward to listening to a familiar voice from my college days.  Alas it was read by a classically-trained voice actor, rather than someone with Feynman's dulcet Far Rockaway delivery. Right words, wrong voice. I couldn't continue. Thus it almost was with William Hurt in the BBC movie The Challenger Disaster, where he delivers Feynman in a cross between Brooklyn and Boston. That said he gets the mannerisms completely correct, down to the flyaway hair and rhythm of his speech, even if not the accent. Annoyingly, in the interests of drama, they collapse a number of details, waiting until the last 15 minutes for Feynman to discover the critical bit of data about temperature and O-ring integrity. The real story of Feynman going to Washington against his better judgment, even while he was critically ill, is of him working with Gen Donald Kutyna and drilling down at Marshall Space Flight Center to understand, systemically, what was going on at NASA, and building a case for the O-ring damage and organizational rot bit by bit. Nice TV movie, but too bad we escape from the historical record to get there.

Man of Steel

Man of Steel is the latest remake of Superman. I had wanted to see it because Amy Adams plays Lois Lane, but we didn't get that far. We barely got off Krypton, a planet created by sexually repressed set designers, featuring floating vulvas with faces and symbols for communications devices, two meter tall dildos as prison cells, spaceships that require rotating 270 degrees in three axes to prepare for launch, armor which allows knife blades to pass cleanly through it, and a ruling council wearing crowns from a McDonald's Happy Meal. Life is too short for movies that are intended only for audiences of 13-year-old boys.

Olympus Has Fallen & White House Down

One of the things I admire about the old Jodie Foster movie The Panic Room is that there are no stupid people in it: every character acts intelligently toward their particular goal in the movie. Alas, in last spring’s Olympus Has Fallen this is not the case. The only character who acts intelligently in context is the ten-year-old son of the President, who, when terrorists attack the White House, hides in one of the secret passages in the building. Let's run it by the numbers: North Korean agents manage to completely staff the South Korean president's security detail, so that when North Korean terrorists strike Washington, the North Korean agents are invited into the White House bunker with the US and South Korean presidents. The president being out of commission and the plot having hand-waved the vice president, the speaker of the house is in charge. First reasonable reaction? Nuke Pyongyang in response to this act of war, perhaps? No, considering the terrorists' demands to remove American troops and the Seventh Fleet from Korea. Then, when the terrorists achieve their goal and get the self-destruct codes for all the US ICBMs and set the destruct sequence countdown starting while the missiles are still in their silos, does anyone think to launch the missiles so they blow up over the polar ice cap? No, they run around trying to find the self-destruct sequence abort code. I wanted to see this for an evening of mindless entertainment. I could have used more entertainment and less jingoistic mindlessness.

Fortunately, later last summer we got the second "terrorists take over the White House" movie: White House Down, which I can happily report is nowhere near as stupid, has a sense of humor and a plot that holds together. The bad guys represent the military-industrial complex who want to keep the President from doing something that might actually make peace break out in the middle east. We've got Jamie Foxx as the President, Channing Tatum as the cop who happens to be in the White House interviewing for a job with his daughter in tow, and Maggie (Ahh) Gyllenhaal as a Secret Service agent. Mindless entertainment, perhaps, but not completely mindless.

Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim mixes Japanese monster movies, cyberpunk, and a dose of the Millennium Falcon’s decrepitude in Star Wars. Monsters are emerging from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and attacking the coasts. The response is to build huge robots to wade out and kill the monsters. So we have a lot of kung fu fighting between robots and monsters. With some hinted-at backstory between characters, Rinko Kikuchi playing a gorgeous Japanese scientist who is a robot co-pilot, and the underrated Idris Elba as the squadron leader, it's a classic "let's save the world" story as directed by Guillermo del Toro. As my son James put it on Facebook, "Epic monster mecha movie. Shit. Go. Boom. With a side of plot."  Like The Matrix, it succeeds at telling exactly the story it wants to tell, and nothing more. 

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyons purports, from its subtitle, to be about "The Origins of the Internet." Which it is. Alas, eighty percent of the book is about the mechanics of setting up the ARPAnet --- the existence of ARPA, the history of Boston consulting house Bolt, Baranek and Newman, the exchange of talent between MIT, Lincoln Labs, and Digital Equipment Corporation, the personal histories of some of the folks involved, the development of the first Interface Message Processors, which made the ARPAnet possible. It's only in the last chapter that they cover Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn inventing TCP/IP, the protocol that made it possible to connect the various computer networks together, Bill Joy's implementation of TCP/IP for Berkeley Unix, and the true birth of the Internet. I was initially dismayed by this imbalance, until I realized that the development of the other networks --- CSnet, the regional academic networks, NEARnet, SATnet, Alohanet --- is much the same story. The connection of those networks together into the Internet is just the application of technology. The real story, the real history, is in the invention of packet switching and the visionaries who decided to put together the original ARPAnet.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

James Thurber was one of the great American humorists, and in 1939 he wrote a lovely two-page, 2100-word story in The New Yorker entitled The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Most recently, the title has been co-opted for a film starring Ben Stiller, which is connected to the story only by the title character having daydreams. In the film, our Walter Mitty is in charge of the photo department at Life magazine, and is unable to find a critical negative from the star photographer on the staff. This allows him to stop daydreaming and start going out on real adventures in search of the photographer so he can ask where the negative is. In the process, he gets the help of the girl he's admired from afar. Once we get past the conceit of Mitty's daydreams the action can actually take off, and it becomes a very sweet movie, with some breathtaking photography.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a documentary in Japanese about an 85-year-old sushi chef who runs a ten-seat restaurant in the sub-basement of the Ginza subway station, where dinner starts at 30,000 yen.  [That would be about $300 to us gaijin.] Oh, and as a by-the-way, the place has three Michelin stars. Very simply, Jiro does nothing but spend his waking hours worrying about perfecting the craft of serving simple fish. He wants to continue to learn and get better at this. His only concession to age is that his son now goes to the fish market every morning. Jiro continues to be hard on his son, on his apprentices, expecting exacting work from them. He continues to use the suppliers he has known for years because they are the ones who understand his standards. And he, to all reports, turns out excellent food, and trains young men who go off and start their own excellent restaurants. I don't think that in thirty or forty years I will be as passionate about my craft as he is about his. But then, he has structured his life on his own terms, and only does what he cares about, without compromise.

The Monuments Men

On the weekend after D-Day, we watched The Monuments Men, written, directed, and produced by George Clooney from a book by Robert Edsel. It's the story of a bunch of art historians who both help the army figure out what buildings to be careful about bombing, and then helping find the art that the Nazis had plundered from the countries they'd overrun. Edsel's book details the whole unit of Monuments Men, even though the movie focusses on half-a-dozen of them. It was straight-forward, but arduous, detective work, but the guys doing it were heroes of western civilization. The movie should have been either longer or shorter. Longer would have given us more detail of their work and allowed us to get to know the team. Shorter could have cut through a lot of the long-winded setup, and gone straight to the detective work. Plus, it can't decide if it's a drama or a comedy. I'll report back on the book another day.  I also need to watch the documentary on the same topic, The Rape of Europa, available for streaming from Netflix.

All You Need Is Kill

All You Need Is Kill was "soon to be a major motion picture starring Tom Cruise," when I read it.  Which is too bad, because the book, by Hiroshi Sakurazaka is a lovely rendition of the old Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day on the battlefield against an alien invader. On the one hand, it's a video game of a story, but on the other hand it's got a lot of subtlety with great storytelling and nicely-drawn characters. I can't imagine that a Tom Cruise rendition, now released as Edge of Tomorrow, directed by Doug Liman (the Bourne movies, and Mr & Mrs Smith), will be anything like the book, save in the broadest of strokes.  Look for a future review of the screen version.

Game

So what is it with Swedes and thrillers? There seem to be a lot of them coming out of the land of long winters in the past decade, among them a trio by Anders de la Motte, beginning with Game. Our point of view characters are a ne'er-do-well slacker and his older sister who is a cop seconded to Sweden's elite bodyguard group, protecting dignitaries and royalty. The slacker finds a mysterious cell phone on a train and it invites him to play a game in which he is given assignments to wreak havoc in ways small and large. His story crosses over with his sister in dangerous ways as he tries to ferret out who's turning the crank of the Game and perhaps throw a monkey wrench into the works. It's quite a page-turner, and I look forward to the next two books in the sequence.

The Second Machine Age

The Second Machine Age, subtitled "Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies," by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee is an unmitigated load of business school crap. I waded through the first two-thirds, which is a rehash and regurgitation of every digital trend in the past twenty years, emphasizing (again and again) the ramp up of new technologies hitting us. It's, in effect, an update of Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, with all the awe, but none of the understanding. However, where I gave it up was in their last third, where they discuss the consequences of this brave new world. This part of the book could have been written by the American Enterprise Institute. It suggests (for examples) that companies should hire the most expensive CEO possible, because in the new digital economy it's worthwhile to pay top dollar to get marginally more economic performance out of the company. This despite constant proof that there is exactly no correlation between company performance and CEO pay. 

Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan

Pointed to it by a Pete Seeger video on YouTube, I picked up Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan, which is a four-disc set of covers of Dylan songs as a benefit for Amnesty International. It comes close to following Sturgeon's Law: not everything here is good. Part of that is that while Dylan has been prolific, not all his songs have been great. It's made worse by some performances attempting to mimic Dylan rather than having the artist put their own spin on a Dylan song. That said, it's worth it for Diana Krall's rendition of "Simple Twist of Fate," Ziggy Marley's "Blowin' in the Wind," Flogging Molly's "The Times They Are A-Changin'," and the Kronos Quartet's instrumental-only version of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and a few others. Kris Kristofferson's "Quinn the Eskimo" is a nice try, and as much as I love Pete Seeger --- who, after all, was one of Dylan's early supporters --- he invests his rendition of "Forever Young" with more feeling than melody. The real reason for the album to exist though is for the beneficiary: Amnesty International has been on the side of the angels for as long as I've been around. May they continue as long as necessary.

Heist

David Mamet is just the guy to scratch my itch for caper movies. Thus Heist, in which Gene Hackman and his crew are forced to pull one last job for Danny DeVito. But the kicker is that DeVito's nephew Sam Rockwell has to come along. Of course, there are complications, and things go wrong, and there are double-crosses, and double-double-crosses, and, because it's a Mamet screenplay, Ricky Jay plays the guy who gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop. The job in question is the theft of a shipment from a Swiss company. Much planning is involved, and much setup, and the payoff for the "why are they doing that?" in the first third isn't until the heist is underway in earnest. While some of the dialog could have been written by George Lucas, much of it is classic Mamet: witty, fluid, evocative. Well worth two hours of your time.

Where the Truth Lies

Where the Truth Lies is a ponderous, annoying piece of crap from ponderous, annoying writer-director Atom Egoyan. A journalist, who idolized a comedy duo in the '50s, sets to write about them in the '70s, and discovers the secret of why they broke up, the real reason there was a dead girl in the hotel suite they were about to occupy, their sexual predilictions, and other stupidity. It wants to emulate a film noir mystery, but can't quite get its act together. Don't bother, even with Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth playing the comedy team. Interestingly, it is from a book by usually-good songwriter and playwright Rupert Holmes --- who you know for "The Pina Colada Song" and the plays Drood and Accomplice --- so I wonder if the source material is equally bad. I'll report back.

(Note added later:  Egoyan apparently had trouble with the MPAA on the rating for this movie, which may explain some of the problems of flow, even though he ultimately released it unrated.  I continue to be amused that the MPAA doesn't have any problem with violence, but goes three bubbles off plumb about sex.  See, for example, the scene in The Cooler where Alex Baldwin brutalizes William Macy's son and son's girlfriend -- which was fine -- vs the scene where Macy gives Maria Bello oral sex -- which had to be recut to not show pubic hair or too big an orgasm.)

World War Z

World War Z didn't suck, which kind of surprised me since I was so highly impressed by Max Brooks's book and had low expectations because the film stars Brad Pitt. He actually acts, ending up as a reasonable action hero. Our point-of-view character, a retired UN investigator, is called back to find out where all these zombies are coming from. He travels the globe, fleeing from zombie attacks and other dangers, surviving plane crashes, arguing with World Health Organization officials and Mossad operatives, until he finds a temporary solution to the outbreak. Well done overall. 

Variable Star

Robert Heinlein was not a master prose stylist, but could tell a good story. Spider Robinson has some good plot ideas, but his story-telling can occasionally be predictable. That means Variable Star, the novel Robinson wrote from an extensive outline left by Heinlein, has some problems. It's a bit jarring, like a Frank Geary execution of a Frank Lloyd Wright design, or Kevin Kline performing a role written for Kevin Spacey. However, it is a good story: Young man flees earth for a new star system after he discovers that the woman he's been dating is actually secretly the heiress to the largest fortune in the solar system. He has adventures on the starship, gets to practice both his farming skills and his saxophone-playing ones. Disasters happen on-board and back around Sol, and he manages to cope with all of them, accepting the quest, completing the hero's journey, and rescuing the maiden. Robinson makes one annoying mistake, which completely ruins the urgency of the latter part of the story: an explosion in a vacuum should dissappate its energy with the cube of the distance. Thus, at ten light years away, the force of the explosion would only be a thousandth of the initial blast, and of little worry.

As a side note, Robinson Tuckerizes character names in a way that Heinlein never would have: The ship's captain is named James Bean; one of the ship's navigators prefers to be called George R; the ship in question is the RSS Charles Sheffield; and the colony's governor-general is a self-assured guy from a well-heeled family named Lawrence Cott, whose husband is named Perry Jarnell --- I had to see those names in proximity to realize any similarities to Laurence van Cott Niven and Jerry E Pournelle, PhD are probably just coincidental. Most interestingly, the girl our hero runs away from is named Jinny, who, in the end, turns out not to share many of Mrs Heinlein's virtues.

Roman Holiday

May the fourth is celebrated by nerds as Star Wars Day (for those who are unaware of the bad, dumb pun, "May the fourth be with you.") but it's also Audrey Hepburn's birthday. While a mashup would have been interesting --- oh, whether to watch Breakfast on Tattooine or Return of the Charade or Sabrina Strikes Back? --- I choose to go with the pedestrian Roman Holiday instead. Wonderfully, it stands up after sixty years. The young crown princess of an unnamed country is being dragged around Europe on a diplomatic tour, showing the flag. On her last stop, in Rome, she's had enough, yells at her minders, is sedated, and sneaks off into the night... where she falls asleep on a park bench and is picked up by an American reporter, who has no idea who she is. He finally figures out who is sleeping on his couch the next morning. They spend the next day touring Rome together, without him letting on that he knows her secret, while panic sets in at the embassy. Of course, the reporter and princess fall for each other and much pain and soul-searching ensue before they both continue their expected roles. This was a very early role for Hepburn, who shows her ability and earned an Oscar, playing opposite the much more experienced Gregory Peck.

Ten Years in the Tub

Nick Hornby, the British author who brought us High Fidelity and About a Boy, has been writing a monthly book column for The Believer (which I'd never heard of either) for about a decade. His columns are now all collected in Ten Years in the Tub, subtitled "A Decade Soaking in Good Books." It's a lovely and dangerous collection of columns reviewing books, where each column begins with a list of books purchased and books read, talking about the reader's life --- "We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too." --- and making suggestions and recommendations both interesting and funny. Alas, as I write this I have an even dozen physical books on the library shelf and three books being read on my Nook. As a result of reading the first sixty pages of Hornby's book, I've reserved another eight books --- eleven now that I tripped over more references while looking up that quote two sentences ago --- to the library reserves and downloaded three more. If I continue to read this book, I will do nothing for the next decade but reserve books from the library and read them. So I lob this hand grenade in your direction, dear reader, and wish you luck.

The Wicker Man vs The Wicker Man

As we approached May Day, it seemed appropriate to do a double feature of The Wicker Man (1973) and The Wicker Man (2006). The first was a nice mystery, in which a policeman is lured to an island off the coast of Scotland with the report of a missing child. The residents of the island practice a particular pagan cult, with a certain amount of carnal display and an attempted seduction of the policeman by a naked, dancing Britt Ekland (who, IMDb notes, called in a stunt double for the shots of her lower half and posterior, since she was a few months pregnant at the time).  The McGuffin, of course, is that the islanders, led by Christopher Lee, need a human sacrifice. The 2006 Nicholas Cage remake turns the pagan cult into a suppressive matriarchy, and the Scottish island to Bowen Island off the coast of British Columbia. Alas, other than the presence of Ellen Burstyn in the Christopher Lee role and the resplendent Leelee Sobieski in Brett Eklund's, there's nothing to recommend the remake.

The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination

The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination, edited by John Joseph Adams, is a very nice selection of short fiction from the point of view of the mad scientist. As with any collection, some of the stories are foolish, but quite a few are well worth the time. David Levine's "Letter to the Editor," has a supervillian delivering his monologue in the form of a newpaper op-ed and turning out to actually have the world's best interests at heart. "The Executor" by Daniel Wilson features an artificial intelligence administering the estate of a billionaire who wanted to cause trouble for his descendants. Mary Robinette Kowal, as usual, has a lovely character study in "We Interrupt This Broadcast," which takes place in the aftermath of the Manhattan Project.

Saving Mr Banks

Saving Mr Banks, while it features a stunning performance by Emma Thompson and an excellent one by Tom Hanks, is a disappointment. It is simply too pat, too hackneyed, too saccharine. That said, Colin Farrell's performance as Travers' hapless, unsuccessful father is good, and Annie Rose Buckley, playing Travers as a child, is both talented and turns in a credible performance As the story of the negotiation between Walt Disney and PL Travers over making a film of Mary Poppins, it is mostly fiction. She was angry and disappointed in the movie that resulted, and felt shabbily treated by Disney and his company. That the Disney movie of the making of a Disney movie might whitewash the process should come as no surprise.

R.I.P.D.

R.I.P.D. or "Rest in Peace Department" is based on a comic book. Dead cops, rather than spending time in purgatory, spend time in the Rest in Peace Department, preventing dead people from continuing to walk the Earth. Nice concept. Possibly interesting stuff going on, especially with a cast of Jeff Bridges, Ryan Reynolds, Kevin Bacon, and Mary-Louise Parker. But there was an amazing failure of suspension of disbelief, some amazingly foolish mechanisms for separating dead people and live ones, and a really stupid McGuffin. A waste of time, really. I would have been better off spending the time reading the comic.

Man on a Ledge

Man on a Ledge is a caper movie we watched because it looked vaguely intriguing in the trailer on another DVD. Ex-cop, convicted of stealing an improbably huge diamond from a real estate developer, escapes from prison and climbs out on the ledge of a hotel owned by the developer, pretending to be ready to commit suicide. It's all a ploy to cover-up actually stealing the diamond, which the developer hid and claimed the insurance on to cover losses in his deals. Aside from the numerous suspension of disbelief problems --- the cop is accused of cutting up the diamond and selling off the pieces? how?  and how many crimes did he, his brother, and her girlfriend commit in actually getting the diamond in their hands to prove his innocence? --- this is really nothing that's never been done before and better.

Astounding Days

Astounding Days by Arthur C Clarke is subtitled "A Science Fictional Autobiography", and is done in the form of reviewing the various years in which Astounding (back before it was Analog) was published, through John W Campbell's editorship, and reminisces about the stories in the issue or about people the issue reminds him of.  He also discusses some amount of what he was doing in his mundane or writing lives at the same time. He keeps looping back to some of the same stories and being non-linear in time. It's an incredibly off-beat way to do an autobiography, but does serve the purpose of providing a list of interesting stories to go back and read. The Clarke stories are easy, since I've got the Tor volume of all Clarke's short fiction and most of his novels on the shelf. But I've just grabbed a volume of Stanley Weinbaum's short stories based on Clarke's comments.

American Hustle

Given my fondness of caper movies, it was inevitable that I'd finally get around to American Hustle, starring Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, and Amy Adams's breasts. Very loosely based on the Abscam investigations of the 1970s, it follows con-man Irving Rosenfeld (Bale), and his partner Sydney Prosser (Adams), who are blackmailed into working for an FBI man (Cooper). In addition, Jennifer Lawrence is stunning as Bale's wife, and Jeremy Renner is spot-on as a New Jersey politician. It had a very densely plotted, stunningly well-written script, was excellently acted (Academy Award nominations for Bale, Cooper, Adams and Lawrence), brilliantly shot, and has an exceptionally complete 1970s soundtrack. I can't think of anything to criticize about the effort.

(Note added later, which makes me even more impressed: IMDb reports that some of the key scenes were actually improvised. That director David Russell trusted his actors that much and they trusted each other enough to pull it off is amazing.)

Blue

There was a little note in The New York Times a few weeks ago about how Julia Stiles's side project, Blue, has gotten picked up for a third season. I've always admired Stiles's work --- she's done commercial work like the Bourne movies so she can do smaller things like the reworks of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew and Othello, and, now, Blue. Blue apparently started as a series of 8-minute web episodes about a mother of a teenaged son who makes ends meet by prostitution. It's brilliantly written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia. Uriah Shelton plays the son like a real teenager --- we first see him as his mother catches him watching porn on his computer. David Harbour appears in early episodes as a man she knew in high school now hiring her as a trick. Kathleen Quinlan is delicious as Blue's mother. The 8-minute episodes end up being extended scenes, which don't suffer from the usual TV symptoms of short, choppy cutting. The episodes are available on Hulu, aggregated into 45-minute chunks. Unfortunately, the third season are being born as 45-minute episodes for Fox's website, which I suspect will take away all the spontaneity and artistry.

Midnight Riot

Ben Aaronovitch has written some fascinating urban fantasy set in London, beginning with Midnight Riot. Our point of view character is a young police constable named Peter Grant, who meets a ghost while investigating a crime near Covent Garden. He is recruited into a special branch of the Met which is responsible for supernatural crime, and begins his training as a wizard under the guidance of the last sanctioned wizard in England. All is not as it seems, of course, and not only must he track down a ghost committing crimes to the script of a Punch and Judy show, but he must broker a peace between the personifications of the rivers of London. Aaronovitch's writing is fluid, lucid, and evocative, with some truly delightful passages. Next up: Moon Over Soho.