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.

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.

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.

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.  

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

Particle Fever

Particle Fever is a lovely little documentary about the work of bringing CERN's Large Hadron Collider on-line. The point-of-view bounces back and forth between the theoreticians at Hopkins and Princeton and Stanford, and the experimentalists up to their hips in hardware at CERN outside of Geneva. We get to see the ups-and-downs of bringing the LHC beam on-line and the failure of super-conducting magnets that cause a delay in bringing the LHC to full power. At the climax, we get to see the seminar in which the two interlocking experiments searching for the Higgs boson present their results, both seeing the same energy peak. During that seminar, as the second team announces the confirming results, the filmmakers turn their camera to the audience breaking into applause and a shot of Peter Higgs, dabbing at the corners of his eyes with his handkerchief.

        One of the things that's only touched on here is one of the eternal struggles in scientific research, the struggle for funding. The question from those in Congress who ask, "what good is it? will it help us make better weapons? why should I spend money on this rather than on tax cuts, social programs, the war on drugs?" The answer is never easy, but it's pretty simple:

        The reason for doing basic scientific research is to understand our world. Learning things is what makes us human. Finding the Higgs boson is what we want to know next. To the reluctant Congressmen, I'd add, this is what makes America great: asking a big question, striving to find out something new, to bring new knowledge to light. It's things like this that bring students to our shores. The answers are ones that won't bear economic fruit tomorrow, or the next day, and perhaps not even directly, but they will make us richer both in spirit and in means.

Gambit

For Thanksgiving weekend amusement, I suggest Gambit, a lovely 2012 caper movie, with Colin Firth playing the art curator for a rapacious, annoying, ill-mannered Rupert Murdoch billionaire played by Alan Rickman, and Cameron Diaz as the Texas rodeo queen who is supposed to in possession of a long-missing Monet from his Haystacks series. Diaz's Monet is a forgery, perpetrated by Firth's accomplice, and Rickman already owns one of the series, for which he outbid his Japanese business rival at auction. Much hilarity ensues as Rickman tries to put the moves on Diaz, and Firth ends up on the ledge of the Savoy Hotel without his trousers. Eventually, the painting is delivered and Rickman brings in a second expert, who authenticates the fake. Then things get complicated. It's not deep and it's not a great plot, but it's amusing nonetheless, with good performances all around.

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.  

Trouble With The Curve

A very funny bit in In & Out is where Glenn Close rattles off the names of the Oscar nominees: fellow best actor nominee Paul Newman for "Coot", Clint Eastwood for "Codger", Michael Douglas for "Primary Urges". In Trouble with the Curve, Eastwood does indeed play his stock codger character, this time in the guise of a baseball scout who's going blind. His lawyer daughter, up for a promotion to partner, played by Amy Adams, goes on the road with him to scout one last player that the computers claim is the next star. Except even a blind codger can figure out some stuff with his ears that a computer can't. Justin Timberlake appears as a pitcher Eastwood recruited years ago, who (now that he's blown out his arm) is the scout for another team and the potential romantic interest for the daughter. Lots of predictable repair of the relationship between father and daughter. Lots of baseball statistics thrown around. Net net, though, we should have spent the evening bingeing on season 1 of Kevin Spacey's House of Cards.

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.