Despicable Me

Despicable Me (2010) is just delightful. Our archvillian Gru needs to defeat a new bad guy, Vector, in order to steal the Moon. A step in his plan is to adopt three orphan girls. Unfortunately, he becomes more attached to them than as just a means to his end. Things begin to go bad when Vector kidnaps them, and the shrink ray which is necessary to steal the moon acts oddly. And, of course, from there it gets silly and heartwarming. Not the quality of animation we've been spoiled into expecting by Pixar (since it's from Illumination, instead) but still quite good. Lovely voice acting by Steve Carell and Russell Brand, and by the three girls, Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier, and Elsie Fisher.

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 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.  

A Man, a Woman and a Bank

Because I like caper movies, Netflix's recommendation engine suggested A Man, a Woman and a Bank, which is a canonical 1970s boy meets girl movie, complete with goopy soundtrack, and running time of 100 minutes for easy sale to television. Boy meets girl, boy robs bank, boy loses girl, boy loses money, boy gets girl back. Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams appear as the first two characters named in the title. Unfortunately, the bank, which is under construction for most of the movie, does a better job of acting.

Replay

In the mainstream-with-sci-fi-conventions category, Lisa Roberts recommended Ken Grimwood's Replay, originally published in 1986. It is (in some sense) the serious version of the movie Groundhog Day. A man repeats a chunk of his life again, and again, and again. There's no clear-cut purpose, though. He doesn't need to make one perfect day or one perfect life so much as experience it from different angles and be grateful for what he's got. He can make money by betting on horse races he already knows the winner of and investing in unknown companies that will make it big, but he can't stop Kennedy from being assassinated. He can marry his college sweetheart, but not reconnect with the woman who is also caught in a similar time loop. In the end, when he pops out the other end of his loop, he has to deal with life as it comes, one day at a time.

     (Two anachronisms which pop out painfully, and I note because I'm a nit-picking pain in the butt: The desk in the hero's office features Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Chair, which is a lounge chair, not a desk chair. Our hero is drinking Glenlivet scotch in a New York bar in 1964 --- to the best of my knowledge, the only bottle available in the US at that time had been smuggled into my father’s liquor cabinet from Scotland as a gift by an Inverness-bred friend of his: it wasn't generally available until the late '70s.) 

The Secret History of Science Fiction

I picked up an anthology at the library edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel entitled The Secret History of Science Fiction (2009) which contains stories such as Kate Wilhelm’s "Ladies and Gentlemen, This is Your Crisis" and Michael Chabon's "The Martian Agent", which are mainstream stories in sensibility, but use the conventions of science fiction. You and I would recognize them as speculative fiction, but they could hide in plain sight in The New Yorker. Kelly and Kessel’s intention is to bring material in that middle ground to your attention. And they do a good job, providing some excellent stories, many of which I'd read before, but some, like the Chabon, Gene Wolfe's "The Ziggurat", and Connie Willis's "Schwarzchild Radius" were new to me.