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.

The Inside Ring / The Second Perimeter

The Inside Ring is the first of a series of thrillers by Michael Lawson, recommended by the Seattle Mystery Bookshop. An attempted assassination of the President is tied up too neatly and the Homeland Security secretary has some suspicions about what actually happened. Our main point-of-view character is Joe DeMarco, the “fixer” for the Speaker of the House, who --- like Robert B Parker's Spenser --- runs around asking questions, stirring up the waters, trying to find answers. However, unlike Parker, the writing is vivid, rather than snarky. The chapters are each reasonably self-contained, many of them written almost like stand-alone flash fiction. The third quarter of the book is predictable and gory, but overall, it's a very, very serviceable thriller.

        In the second of the series, The Second Perimeter, Joe and his friend Emma investigate some shady consulting contracts at a Washington state naval base. (This allows Lawson to give his own Congressman, Norm Dicks, formerly of Washington's 6th, a cameo.) It turns out that the shady contract is, in fact, a cover for an espionage ring, run by a Chinese agent who has past dealings with Emma. After Emma is kidnapped and the action bloodily moves across the border to British Columbia, things get more and more complicated. Our various plot threads are resolved in a shootout at a yacht basin on the Potomac River. I had great fun this time, not only with Dicks's cameo, but aligning various fictional politicians with their real-life counterparts. Again, not great literature, but a perfectly servicable thriller.

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.

Buzz

Following from Anders de la Motte's Game, we have the second book in the trilogy, Buzz, in which our ne'er-do-well slacker, having taken revenge on the organizers of the Game and after a long foreign holiday, finds himself in a Dubai prison on murder charges after a night of drug-infused partying. Meanwhile, his sister, the bodyguard, finds herself brought up on charges for waving off the arrival of a Swedish diplomat to a meeting in an African country. The slacker takes a real job, under an assumed name, infiltrates a company he thinks may be involved in the Game, takes up with an attractive woman, becomes a party to some insider trading. His sister fights the charges, argues with her boyfriend, carries on a clandestine affair, meets a long-lost uncle, finds a plot to invade the royal palace on New Years Eve. Like Game, quite the page-turner, with a lot of local color from Stockholm, a city which I wish I knew better.

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 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 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.

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 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 

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 Intern's Handbook

Nobody ever notices the intern. That means if you're an assassin, you can sneak into the law firm as an intern, and kill one of the partners. And your guide for doing it would be Shane Kuhn's recently-published lovely black comedy, The Intern's Handbook, which is just wonderful. It's told from the point of view of "John" one of the operatives at HR, Incorporated, who place hitmen/interns at various companies. He's on his last assignment at a mob-connected law firm. This volume is the notes he is assembling for the operatives who come after him, giving them hints about his hard-won knowledge through multiple murders. It's also the story of meeting and falling for an FBI agent named Alice, who's investigating the law firm with the intention of sending someone to jail rather than the morgue. The whole thing is a black comedy of the first order, and a lot of fun.

Into The Night

We recently rewatched Into the Night, a lovely little 1985 movie about emeralds purloined from a Persian pasha and smuggled into the United States by a woman who has to escape from the Iranian thugs who are trying to steal them. She literally falls onto the hood of the car belonging to an insomniac aerospace engineer. The woman is played by Michelle Pfeiffer, and the engineer is played by Jeff Goldblum, both of them frighteningly young. There is much chasing around Los Angeles in the night (with just enough geographic errors to amuse me), there are cameo appearances by everyone imaginable, many of them directors of other movies. Carl Perkins and David Bowie have a lovely knife fight, though Bowie's scenes have a cheerfully understated menace. Director John Landis plays one of a flock of Iranian thugs, who provide comic relief.  Director Amy Heckerling plays a diner waitress at the landmark Ship's on Westwood Blvd. Dan Ackroyd turns in a funny performance as Goldblum's carpool buddy.  Richard Farnsworth does a nice job as Pfeiffer's sugar daddy with Vera Miles as his snarling wife. If you have not had a chance, find and watch this little-known thriller.

Cryptonomicon

The elapsed time to originally read its nine hundred pages was nearly three months, but Cryptonomicon was worth every word, and every minute. Neal Stephenson has written two parallel stories of nerds, one in the present day, and one in World War II, and both heroes are wonderful. The story operates in interlocking, intertwined layers as Stephenson stories do. There are simply too many good bits in this to recount them all, from Lawrence Waterhouse spending time at Princeton with some chap named Turing, to Randall Waterhouse bunged up in a jail in Manila; from Robert Shaftoe, haiku-spouting Marine raider, to scuba-diving America (Amy) Shaftoe; from a mysterious excommunicated priest named Enoch, to a dangerous-looking Chinese guy named Wing. I devoured the last two-hundred-odd pages in a binge, punctuated by my stopping, wandering around for fifteen minutes at a stretch and saying "wow!" Very nice. Deserving of its Hugo nomination. If you have not read it, do so now.  It's head-and-shoulders above some of Stephenson's later books.

Friday night double-feature: Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag / Snakes on a Plane

If you have not seen it, please allow me to recommend an amusing old Joe Pesci movie called Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag, in which a New Jersey mobster has to take proof of a gangland hit --- the aforementioned heads --- to the boss across the country. Of course, a medical student on his plane has the identical duffel bag, and they manage to exchange luggage. The medical student is heading to Mexico on vacation with his fiancé's parents, who are hilariously played by George Hamilton and Dyan Cannon. The mob boss is starting to believe that the hit never took place. The medical student's fiancé and her mother discover the heads. Pesci's character has to track down the medical student. Mexican gangsters and police, hotel staff, dogs and coyotes, and heads stolen from the medical school all add twists to the story. 

We watched this in a Friday night double-feature with Samuel L Jackson's Snakes on a Plane, which I'd never managed to see.  It is exactly what it claims to be. (Indeed, when the movie first came out and Samuel L Jackson was interviewed on The Daily Show, his answer to Jon Stewert's question about the movie was direct and succinct: "Well, Jon, it's about snakes. And they're on a plane.") Jackson is a character in the movie, rather than carrying the whole thing by himself, which is a good thing. Roughly, the plot is that Jackson is an FBI agent who has to transport a witness from Hawaii to Los Angeles, but the mobster he's going to testify against has put poisonous snakes on the plane to prevent that from happening. It's pretty much as you'd expect: the couple joining the Mile High Club are the first to get attacked, the obnoxious businessman passenger gets it, the mom with the baby are saved by a brave stewardess, the two brothers traveling to meet their mom in LA help each other. There is some suspense, but think of it as a suspenseful comedy and you'll be fine.

The Last Policeman & Countdown City

If you knew the world was going to end, how diligent would you be in continuing with your daily routines and responsibilities? Thus is the plot of Ben Winters's The Last Policeman. Our point of view character, Henry Palace, has just made detective in Concord, New Hampshire, when it is discovered that an asteroid is going to clobber Earth in nine months. And yet, he insists on finding who murdered the man he finds hanging by his belt in the restroom of the local McDonald's. As society collapses around him, he continues with his daily routines, attempts to corral his errant sister, starts a relationship with a woman he meets while investigating the murder, and tries not to take his fellow detectives' black humor too seriously. A wonderful character study, and a wonderful excuse to ask "what would I do if I was there?"

The immediate sequel to The Last Policeman, as society begins to break down, is Countdown City, in which Palace, now forcibly retired from the police force as local police departments are federalized, takes on a missing persons case. The husband of his childhood babysitter has gone missing, and he agrees to find him. He uncovers several plots larger than he expected and sees his sister off on her own last-ditch attempt to save the world. In the end, he is rescued from a tight corner by an old colleague from the Concord Police.

Through both books, the question kept coming up, "what would I do in those circumstances?" I'd like to believe that I'd carry on, as Henry does, doing what I could, continuing to discharge my responsibilities, even as those responsibilities changed with the world around me. To do otherwise would violate my sense of who I am, of what I'm about.

And now, World of Trouble, the third book in the series is due next week, on 7/15.  I'm very much looking forward to it.

The Numbers Station

The Numbers Station was a little thriller last year which I'd wanted to see because it stars John Kusack and Malin Ackerman. It was massively disappointing. A completely predictable thriller with predictable tension, a predictable huge plot handwave, and a pre-ordained outcome. Kusack plays a nearly washed-up CIA agent who's put out to pasture babysitting a cryptographer (Ackerman) out in the boondocks at a "numbers station" which broadcasts encrypted instructions to spies in the field as seemingly random digits over-the-air. I was not impressed. They should both know better.

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.

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.