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.