Aficionados of the private eye genre will probably have read,
if not memorized, The Maltese Falcon, the 1930 novel
by Dashiell Hammett that birthed the tradition of the hard-boiled
PI. And no doubt
watched the 1941 movie version, with Humphrey Bogart
playing Sam Spade.
But how did Spade get there? What was the deal with Archer, the
partner Spade so clearly despised? And not to mention the, um, complex
relationship between Spade and Archer's wife, Iva? How did he get
his sassy secretary, Effie Perrine?
With approval of the Hammett estate,
Joe Gores wrote this prequel to answer these questions and more.
It spans a number of years in the 1920's, mainly set around San
Francisco and environs. No bridges, so the only way to get to
Sausalito or Oakland is by ferry. (But who wants to go to Oakland?)
Spade is equally at ease in poolroom dives and swanky gentlemen's
clubs. He's especially good and handling delicate situations without
involving the cops, a fact that invites the ire of some cops.
While on his cases, Spade becomes aware of his Moriarty, a shadowy
figure who's willing—nay, eager—to brutally murder anyone who
might get in his way.
There are a number of amusing nods to Hammett readers. We get
the full Flitcraft story. When
Spade needs a nom de plume to investigate some
shenanigans down at the docks, he picks "Nick Charles". (Of course. What
else would he pick?) When visiting the Bohemian Club with a client,
he notes a bird statue on top of a bookcase; "A falcon?", he asks.
Nope, an owl.
The book is clearly a labor of love for Gores, a writer I've liked
for quite a while. It's the
result of meticulous research and respectful insight into
Spade's character.
Ellis and his friend Neckbone (really) are two Arkansas kids, living
near (or, in Ellis's case, on) the river. Life is far from perfect:
Neckbone lives with his goofy Uncle Galen, while Ellis's parents
are on the verge of splitsville. Their families make their living
from the river, and nobody's getting rich doing so.
But that doesn't mean kids can't do kid things. Specifically, they've
found an abandoned boat storm-stranded high in the trees on
a Mississippi River island. Cool! But their explorations uncover
a guy (Matthew McConaughey)
living on the island, dirty and uncivilized. His name: Mud.
Mud provides them more adventure than bargained for.
Mud's goal is to run off with the once-lovely Juniper (Reese
Witherspoon). Complicating things is that Mud is a fugitive
wanted for killing Juniper's abusive boyfriend, so he's hiding
both from the law and the boyfriend's rich and lawless family.
After two movies that were totally predictable, it was fun to
see something different, with complex and sympathetic
characters. There's an unexpectedly violent climax.
Michael Shannon plays goofy Uncle Galen, but does not once demand
to be Kneeled Before.
A request by Mrs. Salad, who failed to note the poor IMDB score
and the lousy reviews. (A stunning 7% on the Tomatometer.)
The previous
movie we watched (Trouble With The Curve) was an example
of how good actors can save a mediocre script.
Even Robert De Niro can't save this one. But, to be fair, he doesn't
try very hard.
So the plot is: Don (De Niro) and Ellie (Diane Keaton)
are long-divorced, and Don has a long term, but non-marital,
relationship
with Bebe (Susan Sarandon). Don and Ellie's
adopted son Alejandro (Ben Barnes)
is getting married to Missy (Amanda Seyfried).
This causes Alejandro's siblings Jared (Topher Grace)
and Lyla (Katherine Heigl) to also appear. (To add to
the amusement: Jared is
a thirty-year-old virgin by choice; Lyla's relationship
with her husband is strained because of her difficulty
getting pregnant.)
Let's see, what else? Oh yes: Alejandro's bio-mom (Madonna) is
coming up for the ceremony, accompanied by daughter
Nuria. It's assumed bio-mom is a big traditional Catholic,
so Don and Ellie must pretend to still be married. Nuria
is kind of a slut, who immediately starts hitting remorselessly
on virginal Jared.
And Robin Williams plays the officiating priest. Christine
Ebersole and David Rasche are the bride's bigoted parents.
(Filmmakers: "Maybe people will laugh if we put enough
actors in the movie who were funny in the 1980s.")
It's about an hour and a half of stupid sex jokes, dialog that
no human being would ever say spontaneously, and heavily contrived
situations.
I think I laughed once. (Robin Williams: "Hell it is, then.")
IMDB helpfully
points out that De Niro and Diane Keaton have appeared in the
same movie only once before: The Godfather: Part II. This movie
would have been helped immensely by sudden murderous violence.
Here's my semi-cynical take: There are only three or four reasons
to see this movie, and they are: Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams,
Justin Timberlake, and (arguably) John Goodman. Replacing
those folks with equivalently-aged
lower-downs on the Hollywood totem pole,
say Rod Taylor, Alyson Hannigan, Simon Helberg, and
Dan Aykroyd (talented as they are),
and you've got a straight-to-Lifetime-Network
movie. Or maybe the Hallmark Channel. Either way, the only way
I would watch it would be if I were bedridden, and I couldn't
get to the remote.
But there's a reason those folks are big stars. Because they
make this outstandingly lame script work pretty well, even
as you're realizing how lame it is.
Mr. Eastwood plays Gus. He's a cranky widower, and a baseball
scout for the Atlanta Braves, devoutly protected by
his boss, Pete (Mr. Goodman).
But all kinds of trouble is coming
Gus's way: his eyesight is deteriorating, and young
asshole whippersnappers in the Braves organization
have watched Moneyball too many times, and think
they can just crunch the stats and compute which players
to draft; no need for the old geezers like Gus to
actually watch them play.
Pete's concerned about Gus, and importunes Gus's semi-estranged
daughter
Mickey (Ms. Adams)
to visit while he's on tour in North Carolina, evaluating
a prospective young hitter. Mickey is a hard-charging lawyer,
and her visit puts her long-desired promotion in jeopardy.
Gus's and Mickey's interaction is tempestuous,
and things are further complicated by Johnny (Mr. Timberlake),
the scout assigned
to evaluate the same player. He quickly develops a Thing
for Mickey. (And who wouldn't? It's Amy Adams.)
Everything is extremely predictable. Personalities
are taken straight from Richard Scarry's Big Book of Stereotypes.
The only surprising thing: the ending
is driven by a deus ex machina so completely
coincidental and fortuitous that Dickens himself probably would
scoff at it.
Still, I had a good time. Because: Eastwood, Adams, Timberlake, Goodman.
Now and then I pick up a book by someone on the Other Side. Maybe
I'm trying to demonstrate, at least to myself, that I have an open
mind. Or maybe I'm trying to figure out what makes the Other Side tick.
In this case, I was spurred to pick up What Money Can't Buy
from the University Near Here's Dimond Library by this
Reason book review by Tom Palmer. Palmer's review was
very negative, so (in this case) I was also wondering: could it
really be that bad? The book's author, Michael Sandel, is
a famous Harvard philosophy professor, after all.
I was wrong to doubt Palmer. Sandel's book really is that bad.
I asked the Google's Autocomplete to weigh in:
But (as it turns out) Sandel's book isn't about that at all. The
subtitle is "The Moral Limits of Markets". A more accurate
title would have been What Money Shouldn't Be Able To Buy.
Even more on-target: What I Don't Think Money Should Be Able To
Buy. But nobody asked me.
Sandel is disquieted by a number of things. For example, in the book's
final chapter,
he reminisces about
getting Harmon Killebrew's autograph (for free) when he was a kid and
attending Game 7 of the 1965 World Series at Minneapolis's Metropolitan
Stadium for $8.
But nowadays, the Twins play at the corporate-named Target Field.
The Mall of America now stands on the gravesite of Metropolitan
Field. A kid can probably find a ball player who will give
a free autograph, but that's not the way to bet. And the Twins
haven't been in the World Series since 1991, but if they
somehow ever do again, a ticket would set you back more than $8.
On the other hand, by all accounts, Target Field is a much nicer
place to watch and play baseball than Metropolitan Field or
its successor, the HHH Metrodome.
But I digress. But so does Sandel.
Sandel bemoans corporate intrusion and big money
into all aspects of life: stadium names;
skyboxes for the fat cats who can afford them; big athlete
salaries; the explosion of the sports memorabilia market;
even how the economic analysis of baseball
player quality has resulted in longer at-bats, more
pitching changes, fewer base-stealing attempts, resulting
in a less-interesting game. And more.
[He doesn't mention the "Amica Pitch Zone" on the NESN Red Sox
game broadcasts, an automated computer-generated
replay of where a pitch fell
in relation to the strike zone. Don and Jerry probably utter
that phrase 20-30 times in your average game.]
And that's just in one chapter. It's almost like listening to
some old codger reminisce about the good old days, and
how these modern times are just no damned good.
Generally speaking, Sandel dislikes what he sees as the
encroachment of markets and money into areas where they were
previously less common. He views this encroachment as corrupting,
corrosive,
crowding out non-pecuniary values. To a lesser extent, it can
also be coercive, when a person is "forced" into the marketplace
(selling a kidney, for example) when he has no better alternatives.
Sandel's examples are interesting, but too often his critiques are
fuzzy handwaving to people (like me) who don't share his values.
In fact, Sandel never bothers to deal seriously with the fact
that there are people who
don't share his values. And he doesn't seem to recognize
the problems inherent in non-market systems for allocating
goods and services.
He (probably wisely) avoids specifically advocating
any legislation to limit the commercialization
and commodification he deplores. But one can't help but think
that's just around the corner from all the moralizing.
So I'm stuck in the Kansas City International airport, waiting
for the flight back to Boston, and I've only brought one book
with me (Sacré Bleu) which I've finished. I'm phobic about
getting caught without reading material.
So I go to the airport newsstand and break my rule about reading
series
in publishing-date order. I get A Wanted Man (cover screaming
"a JACK REACHER
novel") by Lee Child,
skipping over about six intervening Reacher novels. It probably doesn't
matter. Because it's the same Reacher we know and love.
And (once again) Reacher finds himself dragged into a situation
simply because he's hitching a ride. This time,
on an I-80 exit in the middle of Nebraska.
Reacher wants to go to Virginia
for some reason. (He doesn't make it, at least not in this book.)
Reacher attracts violence and trouble like a magnet.
I imagine I could hitchhike for years and never have anything
interesting happen to me. Not Reacher. Every damn time, it's
mayhem, duplicity, and murder.
His new fellow travellers are two nondescript
guys and a woman. The guys
are telling him stories that don't add up, obvious lies. And the
woman doesn't say much, seemingly cowed and frightened.
Meanwhile, down the road, local law enforcement has a grisly murder
to deal with at an abandoned irrigation pumping station, seemingly
committed by a couple of nondescript guys. The cops
are pretty good, and put out roadblocks to stop any car with
two guys. But (hah) that won't include the car Reacher's riding
in, because it now has three guys and a woman.
Reacher novels have a common thread, worth keeping in mind: things
are not what they seem. (If they were what they seem, the book
could have been a couple-three hundred pages shorter.)
You can try to figure out the story on your own, or you can wait
until Reacher tells you what he's figured out. At this point, I'm
going with the latter strategy.
We missed this when it came out in theatres in 2010, and didn't even
manage to pick it up when it first came out on DVD. But it worked
its way to the top of the Netflix queue, and guess what? Not bad at
all. Russell Crowe in the title role. Directed by Ridley Scott.
I can see being disappointed, as some viewers were. That's
a Gladiator combination, and… well, this is no Gladiator.
Still, taken on it's own terms, it's fun.
Oh, it also makes hash of the Robin Hood mythology and known history.
That's probably
acceptable, given the historical
haziness of the legend. Here, Robin is a skilled (of course) archer
fighting
in the Crusades under Richard the Lionheart. Sick of war, he just
wants to get back home to England. But a series of mishaps directs
him to Nottingham, where he assumes the identity of a local nobleman.
Nottingham, like the rest of the country, is cruelly oppressed by
the arbitrary thievery of
King John, who's assumed the throne in Richard's absence. (The Sheriff
of Nottingham doesn't have much to do here; he's not much of a villain,
just a fickle nebbish. The real baddie is a guy named Godfrey, played
by Mark Strong.)
Most of the plot is driven by political intrigue, as English unity
falls apart and a French invasion threatens. (One of the problems:
too much political intrigue, not enough action.)
Cate Blanchett plays Marian, very well. A minor good-guy role is
played by William Hurt, and I didn't recognize him under his beard.
Another win for the Interlibrary Loan system of the University Near
Here: they were able to snag a copy of this book from the Shapiro
Library of Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester. (The UNH
Library also
decided to buy the book.)
In the first part of the book, Naam points out the various imminent
challenges
that confront humanity: the greenhouse effect, running out of crude,
aquifer depletion,
fishery depletion, overpopulation,
drought—basically, the whole litany of environmental
disaster.
But remember, Naam is endorsed by Reason, so that's not the whole
story. In the remainder of the book, he provides plenty of reasons for
optimism, because he is a believer in the "infinite resource" that is
human innovation.
So: we will deal with global warming by slapping on a carbon tax and
transitioning to solar/wind/nuclear sources of energy. Advances in
desalinization and smarter commons management will give us plenty
of fresh water and fish to swim in it. Biotechnology will provide
plenty of cheaply-produced food. And, basically, if we manage
to avoid utter disaster, the planet's population will stabilize
and
most of the earth's inhabitants will live far better than today.
The book is an easy read, written in what I think of as USA Today
style, self-conciously chatty. It would be accessible to a bright
high-school student, so if you have one near you, push this book upon
him.
Major quibble: Naam is an anti-skeptic. In the first part of the book,
there's not a single bit of environmental hysteria to which he doesn't
enthusiastically subscribe. (Maybe you shoud also get
that bright high-school kid something by Bjørn Lomborg too.)
And, on the flip side, he may be
wildly over-optimistic about the potential panaceas—it's easy to
believe he never
saw a press release from a solar or biotech company that he didn't
swallow whole.
But, since he is not an idiot, he's evisceratingly critical of the right things
too: the corn ethanol boondoggle, organic farming, the
anti-GMO folks, etc.
But he doesn't have to be right about everything; even if
he bats .500 or so, he makes an impressive case for being optimistic
about the future. (And that USA Today style can occasionally
give way to a penetrating insight or a wonderfully on-target argument.)
A decent, if somewhat predictable horror/thriller. It stars a pre-Raylan
Timothy Olyphant, playing David, a sheriff in a small Iowa town near Cedar
Rapids. Regrettably, some of its citizens are turning into homicidal
maniacs. (I hate it when that happens.)
What turns out to be the cause—slight spoiler ahead, sorry—is a crashed
plane transporting a biological warfare agent. (Spray an enemy army
with it, and they turn into homicidal maniacs—good plan! What could
go wrong there?) The government is anxious to contain this outbreak,
and (above all) to also hush it up, because I bet this kind of thing
is way in violation of a number of treaties.
So the movie is a combination of your standard zombie plot (more and
more
of your neighbors want to kill you) and your standard
government paranoia plot (most civil servants want you dead too).
David must navigate this increasingly chaotic and violent
situation, escaping with his wife and a small band of survivors.
But, given the genre: you don't expect a lot of that small band
is going to make it to the end of the movie.
This is a remake of a 1970 George Romero flick, which I have not seen.
(As I type, it's IMDB-rated even lower than this one, so I'm not likely
to.)
Oh my goodness, what an insanely great idea: run Mark Steyn for
the US Senate seat from New Hampshire,
currently held by Jeanne Shaheen, who's
up for re-election in 2014.
That is, unless she decides to resign rather than face Steyn. I would.
Comment: OK, he might not win. As he points out, as a writer on matters
political, he has a long
paper trail. Even considering that small cohort, he's unusually unafraid
to offend, and he rarely (if ever) obfuscates. So opposition researchers
would have plenty to work with.
But, unlike the establishment
nebbishes the GOP is likely to nominate otherwise, he would
be someone I could enthusiastically vote for. And (since I've
seen him in action) I'm reasonably sure Steyn could
out-argue, out-charm, and outclass Senator Shaheen in a one-on-one
debate.
If you're unfamiliar with things Steyn, National Review
maintains an archive
of his stuff. Check it out.
It's always a pleasure to read a Christopher Moore book.
Like
nobody else.
Reliably funny, ribald, profane, demented, inventive.
And I mean that in the nicest way.
And it's another unlikely subject: mostly set in late
19th Century France, and built around the lives of
the Impressionists. A host of actual people appear:
primarily Toulouse-Lautrec, but also Van Gogh (briefly),
Monet, Pissaro,
Seurat, Renoir,… It was enough to make me wish I'd paid
more attention in Art History class. Oh, wait. I never
took an Art History class. (Mr Moore has a chapter guide
on the web to provide more background; his research
is impressive.)
I don't want to give the impression that the book is
overly intellectual and pretentious.
It's fun, even if you're an ignorant
philistine like me. Sacré Bleu is technically
a profanity,
but refers to the color associated with Mary, the mother
of Jesus. The plot of the book turns around that particular
shade of blue paint, available only
from The Colorman. The Colorman is a disgusting little
troll, and he's often in the company of a beautiful
woman. They have a complex relationship, and a near-complete
disregard for human life.
The hero of the book, Lucien, is a baker, but also
a gifted painter. He is enraptured and inspired
by Juliette, who poses for him, but also takes him
on inexplicable mysterious jaunts during which time
in the outside world
seems to stop. Lucien becomes a detective
(with sidekick Toulouse-Lautrec) to find out what's
going on. And, as it turns out, it's an era-spanning
tale, full of deception, violence, and art.
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