A Walrus Darkly

BOOK REVIEW: 'You're Not Doing It Right' by Michael Ian Black

2012-02-27T11:22:00.000-06:00

Many (too many?) comics eventually turn their attention to crafting a funny/sad memoir filled with attempts at brutal honesty and bittersweet, uncannily wise introspection. The ones who get it right are the ones who understand that the funniest parts of life are often also the messiest, the ones most of us would genuinely prefer not to talk about so much. Michael Ian Black gets it, and You're Not Doing It Right is proof.

Like his previous book My Custom Van: And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays that Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face, You're Not Doing It Right is a series of vignettes, this time loosely connected by themes of love, sex, family and fatherhood. The title is a clever blanket description of the many awkward situations Black seems to have found himself in throughout his life, but it's also a warning to the reader. Black never attempts to tell the story of how he became a husband and a father in a typical way, because in his mind he didn't experience it typically (if there is such a thing). The result is a comic memoir of often astounding honesty.

The stories in You're Not Doing It Right range from tales of how Black first met his wife to how they came to opt for children to what their fights are like. The book is unflinchingly confessional, full of dark moments and uncertainties with very deep roots. The comedy stems both from Black's dry delivery (which comes across just as well in print as it does live) and from a sense of absolute sincerity that comes across on every page. He talks about how often the word "divorce" comes up in his house without flinching, but his love for his wife is never far from the reader's mind. Likewise, when he talks about the maddening sleeplessness that comes from having children, there's never doubt that he loves his kids. It makes for a remarkably real reading experience, something other comics might have preferred to gloss over with silly slice of life exaggerations or fantastic metaphorical rants comparing life with kids to something bizarre. For Black, his life is bizarre enough without the metaphors.

The point is that You're Not Doing It Right is a rarity among comic memoirs in that it never feels that Black is trying to be funny. He just is. His life (like everyone's, let's be honest) is filled with mishaps and disappointments and frustrations, and as you read about them you may find yourself often laughing in spite of how close to home those things hit you. But Black counterweights all that with a sense of sincere bemusement at the way his life has worked out. It's not a surreal treatise of silliness, nor is it a comedic pity party. It's a memoir in the most genuine and brave way, and that's a large part of why it's such fun to read.

You're Not Doing It Right is on sale everywhere Feb. 28.

BOOK REVIEW: 'Vanished Kingdoms' by Norman Davies

2012-02-24T00:03:00.000-06:00

The political map of Europe seemed to be shifting almost continuously from the fall of Rome to the fall of the Berlin Wall. That means a lot of names and regimes changed along the way, a lot of borders were redefined, and a lot of historians were left with serious headaches trying to make sense of it all.

In the midst of all this some European states are bound to fall through the cracks of history, or at least fade so far into the background that they’re hardly memorable to anyone but the most devoted of scholars. Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations is Norman Davies’ attempt to shed some light on this intriguing, often peculiar historical subset of European kingdoms that, for one reason or another, are lost.

But the book isn’t all some strange journey into obscure kingdoms the likes of which you’ve never dreamed. You’ll likely recognize a few names – CCCP, Etruria, Burgundia – but even if you don’t, that’s hardly the point. What’s happening here is more than just a spotlight on fallen nations.

With characteristic wit, insight and poised prose, Davies uses these pages to remind us that the nations we know now are often built on the broken backs of the nations that came before. If any one of the former kingdoms highlighted in this book still existed, something else likely would not. At the very least the world would be a different place in some fundamental way. Somewhere in the contemporary shape of Europe these cultures are still lurking. Davies knows this, and the greatest achievement of Vanished Kingdoms is his ability to show us so clearly.

This is a book that achieves the remarkable dual feat of being both remarkably entertaining historical writing and an enlightening look at pockets of history often overshadowed. You likely wouldn’t have missed these vanished kingdoms if you never knew about them, but after reading this book you’ll be all too happy that you know now.

Vanished Kingdoms is available in bookstores now.

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Descendants'

2012-02-17T01:34:00.000-06:00

Brad Pitt is off camera wearing a skirt...hence the look.

Films like The Descendants take a rather large measure of courage to make. Simple human dramas free of storytelling or visual gimmicks that actually achieve a measure of heart are harder and harder to find anyway, but what percentage of those ever feel like they capture the messiness of family life and the confusion that comes with loss and new beginnings?

Hollywood is the land of perfect little bows at the end of every story. The ending isn’t always happy (though that’s what audiences always demand), but the conclusions are supposed to arrive without ambiguity, without loose ends. It’s supposed to happen because moviegoers demand that it happens, because no matter how much ranting and raving against the blockbuster establishment you hear, most of the people in the theatre around you really don’t want the movies to be more like real life.

The Descendants never second guesses itself when it comes to the story it’s trying to tell. It never hedges toward Hollywood predictability, never tries to wrap things up simply and neatly. It’s not just a film about how messy the great dramas of our lives can be. It’s a film about why it matters that they’re messy, and why sometimes we need it to be that way.

Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu attorney in way over his head. His wife is in a coma after a major boating accident, and he’s not prepared for life as a single parent. His youngest daughter Scottie (Amara Miller) is acting out in a number of hostile ways in the wake of her mother’s accident, while his eldest Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) doesn’t want to see her mother at all after a mysterious fight the pair had sometime before the coma.

On top of this, Matt is overseeing a real estate dealing for a large parcel of “virgin” Hawaiian land that his family has maintained in a trust for decades. They’re descendants of Hawaiian royalty, you see, and this is all that’s left of the family legacy. Odds are the land will become a tourist spot, but all Matt’s concerned about is keeping his army of cousins happy with the sale.

Then two bombshells hit Matt over the course of two days. One, delivered by a doctor, is that his wife will never make up, and a provision in her will calls for her to be taken off life support. The other, delivered by Alexandra, is that before her accident her mother was having an affair.

What follows is a funny, heartbreaking and often chaotic journey in which Matt, accompanied by his daughters and a kid named Sid (Nick Krause), attempts to track down the “other man” in his wife’s life, find some closure, and learn to be a better father.

The key ingredient to nailing the tone of such a story was always going to be director Alexander Payne, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash. Payne is a master of bittersweet stories, as films like Sideways and About Schmidt prove. Both of those films are about men who have lost something too – faith, a loved one, confidence, youth – but neither of them go quite this deeply into the realms of confusion and dizzying frustration. Imagine needing so badly to confront someone that can’t answer for themselves, but their body is still right there, hovering over every decision you make. Elizabeth King (Patricia Hastie) never speaks, and she’s only shown with her eyes open once (in a flashback) throughout the entire film, but her presence lingers behind Matt’s eyes for every frame of this film.

Payne chooses to begin the presentation of this dilemma by having his hero spout a brief diatribe about people who think that Hawaiian citizens live out their days in a paradise. Matt King has a few choice words for paradise, and it’s very clear that he’s not living in it. Yet Payne fills his visual compositions with reminders of Hawaiian beauty, creating a duality that only makes the film more fascinating. By the time it’s over, you realize that The Descendants wasn’t just about beauty next to ugliness. It was also about beauty inside the ugliness.

The other key to the film is Clooney, who gives the performance of his career by becoming a believably ordinary man pushed to his emotional limits. The strong leading man melts away here, and in its place is a performance of absolute vulnerability and pain punctuated by subtle but often crackling humor. The other standout is Woodley, who matches Clooney in nearly every scene with an emotional depth many actresses twice her age can’t muster.

The Descendants is a challenging film for some viewers, but if you simply allow it to carry you on its journey of heartbreak, redemption and, ultimately, love, you will be amazed by the genuine heart you find. It’s a film of aching beauty and power from one of our most gifted directors.

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Drive'

2012-02-03T23:57:00.000-06:00

Hey girl...

Drive is acclaimed Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s entry onto the American film scene. He’s been making great crime films in Europe for years, and now – not unlike French New Wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Melville – he’s bringing his own sensibility to American crime cinema.

Drive here is both a verb and a noun. It’s a film with more than its share of horsepower, but it’s also a film about the driven man at its center.

Ryan Gosling stars as an unnamed driver (his lack of a name may remind you of Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars; it’s a worthy comparison) who spends his days working in an auto shop and doing car stunts for the movies and his nights as a getaway driver. His clients don’t know his name and he doesn’t know theirs. He arrives where he’s told to go, gives the client five minutes to get in the car, and then gets them out of whatever trouble they just landed in.

Much like Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, this film’s visual and spiritual ancestor, things begin to change for the Driver when he meets a woman. Irene (Carey Mulligan) lives down the hall from him with her young son (Kaden Leos). Their paths cross when he drives her home when her car breaks down. A relationship is just beginning to kindle when her husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) gets out of jail and comes back to mend fences with his family. One problem: he’s in debt to a gangster.

To save the family he’s come to care about, the Driver agrees to help Standard pull off a small pawn shop robbery to pay off the debt. But something goes horribly wrong, the robbery turns out to be not so small, and suddenly the Driver finds himself between a helpless woman and her son and a pair of gangsters (Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks) who are out to get their money back at any cost.

If you’re making a movie called Drive, it’s best if you’re able to do a good car chase. Refn doesn’t make his film about the cars or the major auto stunts, but when they do take center stage he tackles the sequences with elegance, poise and a firm restraint against “shaky cam” action sequences that American directors are so prone to. The action in Drive is controlled, precise and so well-choreographed that the crashes begin to feel like a kind of metallic dance. But here’s the other trick: it never feels like someone’s controlling it.

Refn also manages that all-important crime film balance between violence and humanity. The moments of brutality in this film are swift and resoundingly visceral, but so elegant in their execution that even someone with a weak stomach will stare on with admiration. Refn’s timing is so perfect that you spend the long spans of time between violent moments both shaking and itching for the next hammer to drop. When it hits, there’s a combination of disgust and exhilaration. That’s how on-screen violence should work.

But for all his brilliance, Refn himself can only take this movie so far. His cast is superb throughout, but it’s thoroughly dominated by Gosling and Brooks. As a nameless, often seemingly emotionless man, Gosling once again declares himself as one of the greatest – if not the absolute greatest – actor of his generation. His Driver is played with such an economy of physical expression that it almost feels like he’s doing nothing…until you see his eyes. And as for Brooks, don’t confuse how impressed you are with his work for surprise. Yes, you’ve never seen him in a role like this before, but that’s not why you’re so compelled to watch. This is an actor. This is a bold, savage performance, and that’s why you keep watching.

Drive is easily one of the best films of 2011, but it’s also an uncommonly good – and important – work of American crime cinema. It belongs in the same league as The Departed, No Country for Old Men and David Chase’s The Sopranos. This film goes beyond thrilling and becomes beautiful, and that makes it worthy of true immortality.

Drive is available on DVD and Blu-Ray now.

BOOK REVIEW: 'Daughter of Smoke & Bone' by Laini Taylor

2012-01-31T23:05:00.000-06:00

A good many of my reviews are autobiographical, but this one will be particularly so. There's a reason for it, though, and it's not like we bloggers aren't more than a little narcissistic anyway, so just indulge me.

A few months ago, with January 2012 approaching, I resolved to read more young adult fiction. This was not something I did when I actually was a young adult. I was too busy proving I was grown-up and intense, devouring Stephen King, Clive Barker and any other dark tomes I thought could impress my friends. My friends were never impressed (I wasn't surrounded by a lot of readers in high school.), but I did get some good reading done. The end result, though, was that I left young adulthood having read virtually none of the fiction written for my age group.

Now, firmly entrenched in adulthood (though doing my best to refuse to act like it), I'm surrounded by adults who read young adult. My girlfriend Kimberly reads and writes about it extensively , and she frequently leans over whilst in the middle of a new title to let me know that she thinks I might actually enjoy it. We're both ravenous consumers of all things genre fiction, so I tend to take those recommendations seriously.

At last all of these things converged: desires to read outside my comfort zone, to know more about a field of fiction the serious readers around me love and to simply find more good stories to devour. It just so happened that when these things did converge, the book that everyone was talking about was Daughter of Smoke and Bone.
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Kimberly was raving about it, it's a fantasy novel, it didn't involve sexy vampires of any stripe and, perhaps most importantly for me, it wasn't written in present tense. I have no objection to the decision of any writer to use present tense in their narrative, but I often find it tedious to read, and present tense YA novels are legion these days. But I have digressed long enough. On to the book...

Karou is a young artist living and studying in Prague, but she's more than just that unusual teenage girl these stories tend to begin with. Karou has spent her life in two worlds. In one she's a teenage girl with a talent for art and picking the wrong guys. In the other she's a kind of errand girl for Brimstone, a chimaera who collects (among other things) human teeth for a breed of wish magic not even Karou fully understands.

It's a strange life, but it's all Karou knows. She steps through magical portals to run errands for Brimstone throughout the world, he rewards her with her own small wishes. Things being to change when black handprints begin appearing on doors all over the world, and suddenly Karou is thrust into a war she never knew existed, a war between angels and chimaera that she happens to be a central part of.

That's all the plot description I'm attempting, mostly because the tale that Taylor weaves here is much too rich for book jacket copy. So many fantasy novels (YA and otherwise) fall into the trap of convenient plotting. You can see where it's going from the first page. For some readers that doesn't mean things are any less satisfying, but it does mean that you never feel like you're being told a real honest story.

With Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Taylor seems to be telling every other novelist working in her field that this is how it's done. This story doesn't dryly progress. It unfolds like a poisonous flower until you can't bear not knowing what happens next. This is thanks in part to Taylor's vivid and lyrical prose, but also to what seems to be a humble yet firm commitment to defy the predictability of paranormal fiction. This is not a story that you can easily sum up to your friends, or one that you can quickly recap in a review. This is a story that you experience, that you get lost in, page by page.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is proof that young adult fiction can resonate well beyond its intended audience. It's a staggering work of fantasy - imaginative, bold and surprising. Laini Taylor's gorgeously dark book will sweep you in and never let go.

12 Must-See Films of 2012

2012-01-20T19:20:00.000-06:00

Noomi Rapace in 'Prometheus'

Make no mistake, 2011 was a big year at the movies, but it’s nothing compared to what 2012 will be. It’s a year of big names pushing big movies with big ideas, and I can’t wait. Here are the 12 films I’m most excited to check out this year, in order of release.

John Carter (March 9)

Directed Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E) steps away from animation to get his shot at a major blockbuster with Disney’s adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars. It’s a major sci-fi epic co-written by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, and Stanton is a visual dynamo.

The Avengers (May 4)

Joss Whedon (the nerd god behind things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Serenity) takes the helm of the biggest superhero movie ever made, bringing together Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk and other Marvel Comics superheroes into one supermovie.

Moonrise Kingdom (May 25)

Wes Anderson is one of the most original cinematic storytellers of the last 20 years, and this is his latest, a period piece with a cast that includes Bill Murray, Bruce Willis and Edward Norton.

Prometheus (June 8)

Ridley Scott returns to science fiction with this epic tale of space explorers who encounter something they never expected. Loosely connected to his classic film Alien, this is Scott’s chance to play with big ideas about human existence, and it might be the best sci-fi film you see all year.

Brave (June 22)

After 15 years as the best movie studio in the world, Pixar Animation has finally made a film with a female protagonist. Early trailers for Brave promise it will be one of the best family-friendly adventures of the year.

The Dark Knight Rises (July 20)

Christopher Nolan concludes his Batman trilogy with what promises to be its most ambitious installment. A new villain, a new era and the end of the greatest chapter in Batman’s cinematic odyssey.

Twylight Zones (Oct. 19)

David Chase, the genius behind The Sopranos, makes his feature film debut this year with a rock ‘n’ roll coming of age story set in 1960s New Jersey.

Skyfall (Nov. 9)

This is the year that we finally get another Daniel Craig James Bond film. As an added bonus, it’s got a cast that includes the likes of Javier Bardem and Ralph Fiennes, and it’s directed by the great Sam Mendes.

Gravity (Nov. 21)

Alfonso Cuaron, widely viewed as a sci-fi visionary, directs George Clooney and Sandra Bullock in this tale of two astronauts trapped on a failing space station.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Dec. 14)

Peter Jackson returns to Middle-earth with the first installment in his two part adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s classic fantasy novel. Much of the original Lord of the Rings cast returns as well, including Sir Ian McKellen and Andy Serkis.

This Is Forty (Dec. 21)

Judd Apatow returns to the director’s chair this year with his fourth film, starring Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann reprising their roles from his second film – Knocked Up – and dealing with the perils and pitfalls of middle age.

Django Unchained (Dec. 25)

Quentin Tarantino is finally making a full-blown Western. That’s more than enough to get me excited.

My Top 10 Films of 2011

2012-01-20T19:11:00.000-06:00

It was an odd year for me, movie-wise. I didn’t see as many films as I planned to see, and some of them I saw far later than I’d hoped to. It was a year of jostling, and far too little time was spent at the cinema. This means I didn’t see all the movies people like me are “supposed” to see, but it also means that I saw 2011’s cinema scene in a different way. I ended up not focusing on the essentials, not following the critical beaten path, and in that way I think that makes my Top 10 list stand out, if only because I was too lazy or irresponsible to make it like everyone else’s. Whatever the case, here are the 10 best films I saw last year.

10. Hanna

Joe Wright is known best for English period dramas like Pride and Prejudice and Atonement. But then he turned his cinematic sensibilities on this sci-fi tinged thriller, and the results were astounding. Hanna might be derivative. It might even be predictable, but you’d be hard pressed to find another film of its kind more beautifully and grippingly put together.

9. 50/50

With 50/50, screenwriter Will Reiser took his own life story and spun something extraordinary: a comedy that takes the darkness of cancer and turns it into something life-affirming, bright and thoroughly funny. It might not be the first time it’s been done, but it might be the most effective.

8. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

This film and director David Fincher were made for each other. Following up his brilliant The Social Network with something much more visceral, Fincher brings all his raw power to bear on Steven Zaillian’s screenplay based on the international bestseller. The result is a primal, intense film of gorgeously dark visuals, strong performances and haunting moments.

7. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

It took a decade to complete the eight film saga that is the Harry Potter story, but it was worth the wait. With most film franchises, you’re lucky if the first three manage to maintain any kind of quality. This franchise just kept getting better, and with the final installment, director David Yates cemented his reputation as a fantasy master. It was the goodbye fans deserved, but it was also a film that overcame the pressure of sequelization and became truly great in its own right.

6. Bridesmaids

Last year will go down as the year that both Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy became superstars, and this movie is a large part of why. It’s truly one of the best comedies of the last decade, full of heart and courage and a genuine love of storytelling. Wiig and her entire band of co-conspirators absolutely shine.

5. Moneyball

Sports movies can be a hard sell, but Moneyball bypasses that difficulty by making itself about so much more than sports. Based on the true story of the man who built the Oakland Athletics from Major League Baseball joke to world class franchise, Moneyball is both inspiring and relentlessly entertaining.

4. Super 8

I didn’t expect to love this film as much as I did, but it was easily one of the most pleasant surprises I’ve had in a while. Nostalgic, magical and addictive, J. J. Abrams’ homage to creature features and Spielberg-style alien adventures is a true science fiction masterpiece.

3. Midnight In Paris

In his best film since Annie Hall, Woody Allen creates an intoxicating mix of romance and fantasy that sweeps you away from the first frame and never lets go. Midnight In Paris is a work of magic by one of our finest filmmakers, and a hefty blow to cynicism at the movies.

2. The Tree of Life

You will not take in everything The Tree of Life has to offer in a single viewing. It’s impossible, and it’s both a great virtue and a curse to Terrence Malick’s latest opus. It means some will never get their head around it, and others will never want to. But if you are patient, and if you are willing to simply allow the film to take you where it wants to go, you will be rewarded. It’s nonlinear, it’s abstract and it’s often puzzling, but Tree of Life is also lyrical, gorgeous and simply awe-inspiring.

1. Hugo

Before last year, the idea that Martin Scorsese would make a family film was ludicrous to some (including me). The idea that he would knock it out of the park was even more ludicrous, but Hugo proves everyone wrong. In many ways it’s Scorsese’s most personal film, a love letter to visual storytelling and to the history of the movies. But beyond the obvious intimacy of its subject is a fantastical film that proves once again that Scorsese is America’s greatest living filmmaker. For its ambition, its beauty, its power and its spellbinding emotional weight, Hugo is the best film of 2011.

The Best Books of 2011

2012-01-05T21:22:00.000-06:00

In 2011 I read 212 books. I mention this because I’m often asked about my reading frequency by readers of my book reviews, but also because I’m frankly quite proud of it. It’s the most I’ve ever read in the space of 12 months, and in 2011 more so than any other year (so far), I made a very conscious effort to read currently, to try to keep up with new releases even as I tracked down old books that I hadn’t yet trudged through. Of the numerous new releases I read last year, these were the best. They include everything from nonfiction to children’s literature to comic books (do not be cynical about comics, please), and I believe the range of subject matter is broad enough that there’s something for nearly every reading taste here. In no particular order, these are my best books of 2011.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

Too many people have written Stephen King off as a dinosaur, a once titanic writer churning out the last few pellets of story he has left before he fades away. I never believed that, but for those of you who did, this is the book that will change your mind. The thrilling story of a man who travels through a portal back in time to the late 1950s and attempts to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 11/22/63 is King’s most ambitious novel since “The Stand,” and cements him back at the pinnacle of great American storytellers.

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton

Step away from the TV. Turn off your “Chopped,” your “Top Chef” and your “Hell’s Kitchen.” Forget everything you think you know about chefs. Now read Gabrielle Hamilton’s raw, warm and exhilarating memoir spanning her entire life and detailing how everything along the way taught her not just how to cook, but how to take care of herself and everyone she feeds. This book will seduce and embrace you. For a particularly addictive experience, find the audiobook and hear Hamilton read the story herself.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

Darkness in children’s stories is a trend that’s not going away anytime soon (it's been there all along, really), but few storytellers can tackle that darkness with the tenderness that Patrick Ness can. Taking the final idea of the late author Siobhan Dowd and spinning it into a tale all his own, A Monster Calls is Ness’ magnificent fable about loss, life and taming our own demons.

Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean is one of the most gifted American nonfiction writers working today, and she tells the story of one of America’s first superstar dogs with enthusiasm and beautifully rendered prose. Rin Tin Tin is both an entertaining biography and a powerful study of American celebrity.

Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba

Daytripper was originally published as a limited comic book series in 2010. The trade paperback that collected every issue was released in 2011, and quickly won most of the major comics awards such a collection can win. If you think comics are only about superheroes, don’t miss this lyrical, heartbreaking story about how quickly a man’s life can change, and how easily we can all forget the moments that matter most.

Zombie Spaceship Wasteland by Patton Oswalt

I read a number of books by funny people in 2011, but it was Patton Oswalt’s that rose above the others and presented itself as a truly great work of humor writing. Part memoir, part collection of biting, uproarious and often simply insane observations, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is proof that Oswalt can be funny in any medium he tries.

The Cut by George Pelecanos

George Pelecanos might have more soul than any other crime writer working today. The Cut is only the latest in a series of almost unbelievably good novels. If you’re not reading Pelecanos, you’re missing one of the most important voices in crime fiction.

Down the Mysterly River by Bill Willingham

Bill Willingham is best known for his work on the critically acclaimed fairy tale comic book series Fables. With his second novel, he has charted new territory for himself as an exciting children’s writer. Drawing on L. Frank Baum’s Oz and a number of other influences, Willingham crafts a tale that’s both a complex allegory for the life of a story and a thrilling adventure for readers of nearly any age.

Life Itself: A Memoir by Roger Ebert

The world’s most famous film critic has always been autobiographical in the way he writes about the movies, so it comes as no surprise that his autobiography would be just as insightful and beautifully rendered as any of his hundreds of reviews. “Life Itself” might be the best thing Roger Ebert’s ever written, because he approaches the potentially ego-stroking exercise of memoir writing with grace, courage and uncommon humility. The result is an uplifting and inspired book.

A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin

Readers of George R. R. Martin’s acclaimed fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire (basis for the hit HBO series Game of Thrones) had to wait half a decade for this, the fifth installment, to finally arrive. It was worth the wait. In his most sweeping novel yet, Martin charts the course of dozens of characters in a broad range of locales and does so with sharp, vivid prose and his addictive, characteristically unpredictable storytelling. After 15 years, this series just keeps getting better.

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo'

2012-01-04T14:19:00.000-06:00

The "I'm James Bond" line doesn't work on her.

The last time David Fincher made a crime film, it was the vastly underrated Zodiac, a film about obsession made with obsessive precision. There, the challenge was making a convincing, gripping crime thriller without a truly satisfying ending. Now, as he tackles the first novel in Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson’s ultra-bestselling trilogy, the challenge seems to be making a convincing, gripping crime thriller that seemingly everyone always knows the ending to.

A sizeable number of people who go to see Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are there to either prove that the book is better, or to prove that the 2009 Swedish film starring Noomi Rapace is better. As with any film popularly termed a “remake,” skepticism is the prevailing moviegoing attitude. But there are remakes and there are adaptations, and Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian (who won an Oscar for Schindler’s List) have made a film that is decidedly the latter. Their Dragon Tattoo mines Larsson’s often overstuffed book for what’s best in it – the deepest, darkest, juiciest parts – and the result is a compelling, often harrowing thriller.

After a court case damages both his reputation and his financial future, journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) retreats from his life in Stockholm to take an intriguing but seemingly futile assignment. Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), a wealthy but fading tycoon with a family full of dark secrets, recruits Blomkvist to attempt to discover who murdered his great-niece Harriet on the family’s remote island some 40 years earlier. Her body was never found, no suspect has ever been narrowed down, and there are few clues.

As Blomkvist dives into his assignment, we get to know Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), Larsson’s iconic character, the titular Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She’s a computer hacker and surveillance expert doing research work for an investigation firm, but she doesn’t enjoy visiting the office. She’s different, as her employer says, “in every way.” Her body is a mass of pale flesh, ink, piercings and awkward, often paranoid movement. She doesn’t get along well with other people, and mental issues have made her a nearly permanent ward of the state.

Lisbeth’s early struggles in the film center on her relationship with her new state-appointed guardian. She was friendly with her old one, but a stroke incapacitated him, and now she’s stuck with Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), a slimy man who forces her to trade sexual favors for access to money in what are among the most excruciating scenes you’ll ever see in a mainstream American film.

As Blomkvist interviews members of the Vanger family, including Henrik’s great nephew and Harriet’s brother Martin (Stellan Skarsgard), he feels his work on the case deepen and broaden. He asks for a research assistant, and the family lawyer recommends Salander (she did the background check on him). The unlikely pair meets, Salander agrees to help, and they set out on a mission to catch the killer who murdered not just Harriet, but a number of other women throughout Sweden in a series of bizarre, religion-motivated killings.

Dragon Tattoo is a dense web of story packed with characters, chronology, clues and dark themes centered on darker deeds. The filmmaker who can successfully commit it to the screen needs patience, and Fincher has it in plenty. For more than two hours he deliberately and skillfully constructs a mystery, building it to a crescendo with gorgeous photography, an outstanding cast and the precise intensity that defined his work on films like “Seven.” Zaillian aids in this effort with his beautifully honed screenplay, drawing out all the details of the story that make it powerful, while paring down what’s unnecessary. It’s a master class in true adaptation.

The search for an actress to play Salander made national entertainment headlines. Every actress even close to the right age seemed to be vying for the role. Scarlett Johansson, Keira Knightly and even Harry Potter star Emma Watson wanted the part. Fincher picked Mara out of this star-studded field, a virtual unknown who he worked with briefly on The Social Network, in part because he didn’t want the stigma that came from placing a big star in such a distinctive and rough role. Scarlett Johansson as Salander would never have been Salander. It would have been Scarlett Johansson with black hair and a few fake tattoos. But as you watch this film, it becomes clear that he also picked Mara because she owns this character.

Mara vanishes into Salander’s skin with a fearlessness that matches Fincher’s own. She maintains a constant intensity without ever once overacting, and her performance is often so subtle that you can’t see that she’s changing until after she’s deep into a new phase. Salander may seem like an archetype, but there are deeper things to explore here, and Mara nails that search time and time again. She understands this role, she embraces it with courage and confidence, and she rules this movie, which is no small feat considering every other member of the cast – including Craig – is performing at the top of their game.

Though it might be too slow for some, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a rewarding experience for those with the patience and the stomach to experience it in full. David Fincher has once again proven that he deserves his place among America’s best filmmakers. Forget everything you might have been expecting and just experience this film. Dragon Tattoo is bold, dark, rich with detail and honed to an almost laser precision, and never once does it feel exploitative or even close to a remake. If you want to see a master director bringing all his powers to bear on a massively talented cast and an internationally renowned story of uncompromising brutality, don’t miss this film.

BUY THIS/GIFT ALERT: 'Alan Moore: Storyteller'

2011-12-20T20:53:00.001-06:00

I became greedy for this book, and the publisher was kind enough to send it to me. Now I must tell you all to buy it, not because they sent it to me, but because it really is something extraordinary.

Alan Moore: Storyteller is the kind of book we always wanted to see about comics wizard Alan Moore. We just didn't know it until Gary Spencer Millidge wrote it. From Michael Moorcock's forweword to every lovingly crafted page that follows, it's a feast for Moore worshipers, fanboys, comics guzzlers and people who love a well-made book.

Starting with his Northampton childhood and continuing through his brilliant but still thoroughly Northampton adulthood, the book charts Moore's extraordinary evolution from upstart kid spinning graphic tales to magician who changed the face of comics. Everything is here, from his work on Marvelman to his reinvention of Swamp Thing to the groundbreaking production of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and more.

Other Moore biographies exist, and they're good, but never before has the evolution of perhaps the most important writer in modern comics been charted with such concise poise. The enigma that is Alan Moore has never seemed clearer, but Storyteller is more than a simple chronological construction. This is a glimpse inside the life and mind of Moore the likes of which you never hoped to see. His handwritten notes on many of his most important works are presented here, as are rare photos and glimpses of his creative process that true believers like me always chalked up to magic. With the addition of these things, this book becomes more than just a study of Moore's importance as a writer and literary magician. It becomes a dispatch from the unknown, a remarkable collection of glimpses into one of comics' most fascinating creators. That alone makes it worth the journey.

READ THIS: 'Tinsel' by Hank Stuever

2011-12-16T15:43:00.002-06:00

I first learned about Tinsel at the 2010 Texas Book Festival, when I heard Hank Stuever read a small section of the book as part of a Literary Death Match event. I was already intrigued by the premise of the book, but after hearing a portion of the tale of Tammie, an enthusiastic woman in Frisco, Texas who charges to decorate other people's homes, it was a definite addition to my to-read list.

Shortly before Christmas my local library tracked a copy down and I enthusiastically dived in. This Christmas, the same thing happened. Next Christmas I expect it will happen again, although this time I think I'll purchase the book rather than borrow it (if you read something three times, you should probably be allowed to keep it on your home shelves.). I toyed with writing something about the book last year, but Christmas business intruded and another year passed. Now, with two readings under my belt and a little bit of time, I feel better equipped to recount to you why I was so taken with this book.

It's not just that Stuever is a world-class journalist (he's the current TV critic at the Washington Post, where he writes brilliantly and hilariously), or that he managed to do the reporting for this book right at the tail end of the last economic comfort most of us can remember. Tinsel is the first piece of Christmas reading I've ever done that tackles every aspect of the holiday - the commercial, the spiritual, the social and the familial - without a hint of cynicism. It was clearly difficult at times for Stuever to immerse himself in the lives of the people of this book, many of whom he seems to have little in common with, and be away from his own loved ones for months at time and during the holiday season. He alludes with characteristic wit to the fact that he's a member of the fabled and dreaded East Coast Liberal Media Elite plopping himself smack in the middle of a Red State boom town. Yet the perspective he achieves throughout Tinsel is one of warmth, sincerity and good humor.

Though he does not promise any solution to the question, Tinsel is Stuever's "Search for America's Christmas Present," a quest to discover where we are now culturally, financially and even spiritually in modern Christmas. To that end he attempts to cover everything from decorations to shopping to belief (or lack of belief) in Santa Claus. He chooses Frisco, TX (which in 2006, when he begins, was enjoying a period of immense prosperity) as his testing ground and hones in on three particular families. Jeff and Bridgette Trykoski (mostly Jeff) are responsible for this utterly gobsmacking light display each year. Caroll Cavazos is a single mother who embraces her children and her faith every Christmas. And Tammie Parnell is a work for hire decorator who juggles a hefty workload of decking halls with making Christmas special for her own family.

Stuever tails each of these families with equal enthusiasm. He hangs out in Black Friday early bird shopping lines with Caroll and her daughter Marissa. He helps to decorate the Trykoski house. He acts as Tammie's "efl" as she visit house after cookie cutter house, placing gold cones on mantles and wrapping garlands around banisters. In between he peppers his text with bits of Christmas history, notable monetary facts about the shopping season and bits of Christmas pop culture that add depth and brightness to the holiday display he's building.

Every facet of modern Christmas is approached without fear. Stuever writes about the "fake is OK here" mentality of pre-fab shopping centers, franchise eateries and endless malls. He writes about the deep religious fervor of shopping and Christianity with equal weight. He walks the shopping centers, drinks in the bar at Chili's, gives himself over to all things Christmas.

But this book is not about being critical of people who choose to celebrate this way, or any other way. Tinsel is not a search for the "true" Christmas among all the manufactured holiday hooplah drifting through America. This is a search for the truths that are still to be found amid all the overenthusiastic spending, eating and decorating. There are scenes of deep love, conviction, admiration and real power in Tinsel, right next door to scenes of real hilarity, things that resemble the Yuletide farce of films like National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Stuever weaves it all together with grace and commanding prose, and in the end Tinsel is not a book about answers, but about the search itself. Every Christmas we search for the perfect one, and as close as we may come we never get there. Tinsel lets us know that Stuever knows how we feel, and if nothing else reading this book every year makes the season a bit brighter.

'The Sitter' brings too little, too late

2011-12-16T11:22:00.000-06:00

Jonah Hill does much better with Michael Cera.

I am an unabashed lover of raunchy comedies from Porky’s all the way to Superbad. I don’t care if you don’t like them. You will not convince me of their worthlessness. I will likely be an advocate for dirty jokes well into my 80s and beyond (if I make it that far). But because I’ve seen so many of these films, all the major ones from the last decade or so, I know immediately when something isn’t working.

Director David Gordon Green began his career with acclaimed indie dramas like George Washington, but for the past three years he’s been on a comedy kick. He directed the fun but ultimately mediocre “Pineapple Express” and followed it up with the joyless Your Highness earlier this year. He’s latched on to the slacker comedy trend, and he keeps right on riding it with The Sitter, a film that holds a few genuine charms, but waits far too long to reveal them.

Noah (Jonah Hill before he lost weight) is a loser by all accounts. He pants hopelessly after a girl (Ari Graynor) who uses him, he got a DUI that means he can’t drive, he was suspended from college and he has no job. When his single Mom has a chance to go to a fancy party and meet a nice man, but only if he babysits for a family friend, Noah actually attempts an act of selflessness and takes the job.

It seems like a cushy gig until he meets the Pedulla children. Slater (Max Records) complains of severe anxiety issues that make him allergic to responsibility, Blithe (Landry Bender) wants to be a celebutante and go to “hot clubs” (she’s not even 10 yet) and Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez), the Pedulla’s new adopted son, really likes fireworks.

Of course, the kids begin their mayhem immediately after their parents leave. Noah, immature jerk that he is, responds with threats. But when his so-called “girlfriend” calls and asks him to deliver drugs to a party she’s at, Noah is forced to get the kids to cooperate as he ventures out into the New York night on a mission to get laid.

Now, if you can get past the fact that a guy with a suspended license just stole another family’s minivan with three young children inside in an effort to go buy drugs so he can have sex with a girl, there are a few laughs in here. Hill’s comic timing hasn’t faded at all, but this time he’s not playing off other raunchy grown-ups. He’s got kids to deal with, but honestly you can’t blame them for the comic failings. That comes from the fact that most of the jokes are clichés (the kids won’t stop talking, the kids won’t listen, the kids keep wandering off). Hill saves some of the jokes just by being Hill, but the first half of this film is largely devoid of any real comedy.

Things brighten a little when Noah actually begins to develop a relationship with the kids. He learns that they each have problems and fears, and that they’re each dealing with a deep crisis in their own lives. Amazingly, he finds a way to help each of them feel better, and the film develops some sense of heart. Add in some amusing sequences with some thugs at a nightclub, and the tail end of the movie actually kind of comes together…if you last that long.

There’s nothing wrong with the film’s cast, but none of them particularly shine. The exception is the great Sam Rockwell, who is unpredictable and hilarious as an unstable cocaine dealer. Max Records, who was wonderful in Where the Wild Things Are, is underused, and never really gets to test his comic meddle. Bender and Hernandez are funny, but it’s the kind of funny that you forget after about 30 seconds. It’s cute funny, fleeting funny, which is more the fault of the script than the actors. Hill saves a few struggling scenes, but even he can’t rescue the movie entirely. It’s not that the jokes aren’t landing. It’s that they weren’t well-aimed to begin with.

The Sitter should serve as a lesson for why we should stop making films that blend foul-mouthed slackers and mischievous children. The two can work separately, but together they make a mess.

The Sitter is among the most uneven films made this year. Every time it goes in a promising direction, it veers off again into something far less interesting. Just as it seems to be coming together it falls apart again. But most importantly, it’s just not all that funny. I’ll laugh louder and longer than anybody at a tasteless joke. It just has to be a good tasteless joke, and The Sitter missed that mark.

'The Muppets,' a refreshing blast of movie fun

2011-12-16T11:15:00.000-06:00

No, you don't see his penis in this one.

(Author's Note: Yeah, I'm late to this party. No, I don't care.)

Until this year, a Muppet movie hadn’t been made for 12 years. A beloved franchise that once commanded substantial pop culture influence had been relegated to the status of dinosaur. Kermit was trotted out every year for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Miss Piggy and the gang sometimes popped up for a commercial or cameo appearance, but other than that, Jim Henson’s iconic creations were part of something decidedly bygone.

This was both a tragedy that needed to be reversed and a unique challenge for whoever decided to revive the franchise with a new cinematic adventure for The Muppets. It was no longer just a question of giving Kermit and pals a new adventure. This adventure had to have some kind of weight to it, a sense of returning, of revival, of reverence for what passed before.

The task fell to the somewhat unlikely pair of Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, who previously teamed up for the hilarious but very adult Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Rooting their story in the throes of Muppet fandom and unabashed giddiness at the thought of being able to meet these characters, they managed to make a film that not only treats the return of the franchise with devotion and care, but also presents that rarest of cinematic gems: a film rooted completely and fearlessly in the fun of the moment.

Gary (Segel) is a nice guy living a happy life in Smalltown. He loves his brother Walter (voiced and operated by Peter Linz) like crazy, but they’re a little…different. Though he never explicitly seems to realize it, Walter is a Muppet. This means he never grew along with the kids, and he can never live the same kind of life his brother does. He finds solace in The Muppet Show, in the thought that someone out there is like him, and in the process becomes the world’s biggest Muppet fan.

When Gary and his girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) invite Walter along for their trip to Los Angeles, he gets the chance of a lifetime: the ability to visit and tour the legendary Muppet Studios. But when the trio arrives at the studio, they get an unwelcome surprise. The studio is rundown and empty, tourists don’t come anymore, and Walter’s beloved Muppets are nowhere to be seen.

Then Walter gets even more bad news. After sneaking into a studio building, he overhears the callous tycoon Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) as he plots to buy the property up to drill it for oil (he’s pretending that he’ll build a Muppet museum, but of course he won’t). The only way to save the studio, and the Muppet name, is to raise $10 million, and fast.

So Walter, Gary and Mary visit Kermit (played by Jim Henson’s successor Steve Whitmire), who agrees to recruit the rest of the gang for an emergency telethon at the Muppet Theatre. Gonzo has become a toilet mogul (really), Miss Piggy is the plus-size editor of Paris Vogue, Fozzie is playing dive bars in Reno and Rowlf is…well, just lying around. Together they restore the theatre and prepare to put on a show, and Kermit even offers Walter a chance to take center stage.

This deceptively simple premise is the perfect stage for Segel, Stoller and director James Bobin to explore things like redemption, friendship, love and overcoming the fear of stepping back into the spotlight. Between and beyond all that are some catchy Muppet tunes (including a chill-inducing rendition of “Rainbow Connection”) and enough cameos to nearly fill a full season of The Muppet Show.

Part of the genius of how Segel and Stoller structure their tale is its unabashed joyfulness. Everything about the film is uplifting, even the moments of doubt and fear that each character faces, because it all ties into that old Muppet magic. The moments of absolute corniness aren’t counterweighted with cynicism, but instead with tongue-in-cheek real world interruptions and breaks in the fourth wall. It’s a combination of deft comedic pacing and an attention to the inherent silliness of the Muppets that makes for an addictive storytelling style.

Add that to performers at the top of their game, endless nods to the ghosts of Muppets past and more than a few cheerworthy moments, and this is a rare, stirring and absolutely fun film. Nothing about it feels forced or cynical or tried and tested in a focus group. It’s heartfelt and genuine and thoroughly good, and with any luck it will prove to be a real rebirth for the franchise.

BOOK REVIEW: 'Pariah' by Bob Fingerman

2011-12-09T22:45:00.000-06:00

The best zombie novels are never about the zombies.

A zombie novel doesn't work the way a zombie film does. It's easier to get bored with the gimmick. The whole shotgun blast to the head thing just isn't as compelling on the page. That's why the best zombie writers, like Bob Fingerman, make the zombies feel less like a plot point and more like a setup for exploring something far more interesting: people slowly going mad together.

Pariah opens when zombies have already overrun New York City. They walk the streets, millions of them, crammed in together like Black Friday shoppers, waiting for a meal that seems to never come. We see glimpses of how all this happened, but it's not where Fingerman's fascination lies. One of the keys to a great zombie story is choosing the right microcosm, the right fragment of a survivor's society to call home for the course of the narrative. For Fingerman, it's a classic New York apartment building.

Some of the survivors inside called the building home before the world went to hell; others came as a last resort. They made it into their fortress, their refuge from the onslaught. Now it's slowly turning into their coffin. Food is in short supply, stifling heat is wearing them down and misery is permeating everyone. Fingerman visits each of them as hope dwindles - a mother who lost her child, an elderly couple living out their final days, a pair of perverted slimeballs, a guy who's trying to make jerky out of pigeon meat on the roof - and then introduces something unexpected and wholly paradigm-shifting.

Suddenly, into this story walks a teenage girl, earbuds stuffed in her ears, walking nonchalantly amid the zombies as the undead horde parts before her. They don't just ignore her. They actively avoid her. She has free reign of this dead city. The tenants of what might be the last inhabited apartment building in New York manage to get her attention, and suddenly everything begins to change.

We live in a world overrun by zombies, and Bob Fingerman's book is a welcome distraction from the humdrum genre puff pieces that permeate bookshelves and DVD racks. With Pariah, he's made zombies an instrument of sincere social exploration and told a tale of invention and wit that's evidence of an enduring talent. Pariah is engrossing from the very first page, and never once does it fall into the predictability that the zombie genre has come to be almost comfortingly counted on for. If you're sick to death of zombies, Pariah will shock your system. In a genre filled with things that are literally and figuratively without life, this is a jolt of new energy.

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Hugo,' an imaginative masterpiece

2011-12-01T16:14:00.000-06:00

Asa Butterfield, Chloe Moretz and a very small Keanu Reeves

Martin Scorsese is the greatest living American filmmaker in no small part because he seems forever capable of surprising us. We associate him with gritty, street-based films, the stuff of crime and blood and urban battlegrounds, but he is more than New York’s resident cinematic poet.

Scorsese is a great filmmaker because he is a tireless and devoted student of all things cinematic, and nowhere is that more evident than Hugo. In Scorsese’s first family film, and his first experiment with 3D shooting, he proves himself once again to be a director of astounding versatility, a towering cinematic presence, and a brilliant, tinkering wizard never satisfied with what’s expected of him.

Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan who lives in a Paris train station, climbing through the walls and steam pipes and winding the clocks. He was happier once, when he and his now-dead father (Jude Law) spent their spare time repairing a clockwork automaton said to be able to write when it was wound up. Now his father is gone, the uncle who was supposed to care for him (Ray Winstone) is an absentee drunk, and he has little to do but spend his days tending to the station’s clocks (to keep up appearances that his uncle, who is supposed to be tending them, is still there), scrounge for food and steal small gears and other parts from a toymaker (Ben Kingsley), who runs a shop in the station.

The toymaker, Papa Georges, is part of a broader world within the train station that Hugo is largely just an observer of. It includes a self-important station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), a café owner (Frances de la Tour) and a newspaper vendor (Richard Griffiths) who harbor a not so secret affection for one another, a sweet flower seller (Emily Mortimer), a distinguished bookseller (the great Christopher Lee) and Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), Papa Georges' goddaughter, who will soon play a rather large role in Hugo’s life.

Things begin to change for the young orphan boy when Georges catches him attempting to steal something one day. To pay off the debt of his thefts, Georges makes Hugo work in his shop, using his considerable mechanical prowess to fix toys. But it soon becomes apparent that Georges is more than he seems, and that the past he is determined to keep hidden has something to do with the enigmatic automaton hidden in Hugo’s train station apartment. Together, Hugo and Isabelle set out to solve the mystery, and find wonders they never imagined.

It seems odd at first that the director of gritty, very grown-up classics like Goodfellas and The Departed has turned his attention to a family film about an orphan and a toymaker, but as “Hugo” unfolds it becomes clear that no one but Scorsese could make this film. He knows more about the history of cinema that most professional film historians could ever hope to forget, and this film turns out to be the stage on which he can not only showcase that knowledge, but pay tribute to the cinema pioneers that inform and inspire his work and the work of every other filmmaker in history.

Visual references to a host of classic films (including Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last) resonate through Hugo, but the entire second half of the film is deeply immersed in the work of cinema pioneer Georges Melies, most famous for his 1902 short film A Trip to the Moon, which includes the iconic shot of a rocket crashing into the eye of the Man in the Moon. Melies was, and is, more than just one of the first men to tell a fictional story with a motion picture camera. He was a brilliant and bold “cinemagician,” pushing the boundaries of what anyone in cinema at the turn of the 20^th century could ever have dreamed of doing. He was a tinkerer, an explorer, a student of the medium.

These same words could describe Scorsese, and Hugo is his ultimate playground. Here is able to throw aside his street-driven image in favor of something more whimsical. He films 3D like a master even though he’s never touched it before, weaving in subtle details with the technology while never letting it overwhelm. It’s perfectly suited to his perpetually energetic camera, and no one has done it better yet.

Scorsese’s visual magic is the soul of the picture, but the cast is its heart. Butterfield carries the film with a maturity far beyond his age, and Kingsley gives one of the most moving performances of his distinguished career. Moretz continues to impress as she grows into stardom, and the supporting cast, headed by Cohen, delights.

Hugo is Martin Scorsese’s ultimate tribute to the magic of the movies. It’s a film about how stories can save us, about how something beautiful can completely transform the way we see the world. It’s about how film is a universal language, and though it’s easy to be cynical about it we can always find a reason to celebrate it. It’s fashionable to treat Hollywood as a broken, money-hungry machine with no soul, but Martin Scorsese always finds a way to keep us believing. At its heart, Hugo is a film about believing in the resurrection of broken things, and if we learn anything from what Martin Scorsese has done with this miracle of a movie, it should be that there’s always some magic left.

MOVIE REVIEW: 'J. Edgar,' a rare Eastwood stumble

2011-11-17T19:01:00.000-06:00

Sorry, Leo...Brando's jowels were better.

I don’t know what a bad Clint Eastwood movie looks like.

The man is an anomaly, the rare instance of movie star transitioning into filmmaking and becoming a better director than he ever was an actor. He makes films his way, rarely using terms like “action” and “cut,” keeping his sets relaxed, and his methods have resulted in Oscars, seemingly endless critical acclaim and a reputation as one of the finest directors of our time.

With J. Edgar, Eastwood turns to the enigmatic life of one of the most powerful men in American history, and the results are sadly and perplexingly underwhelming. Despite all the might of Eastwood’s direction and Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance, J. Edgar ends up feeling cold and cobbled together.

Much of the film is structured as a frame story by screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (who wrote the brilliant Milk). We meet J. Edgar Hoover (DiCaprio) near the end of his life, in his imposing office at the U. S. Department of Justice. He brings in a young agent and begins dictating the story of how the FBI became strong, how he rose to be its leader, and how he revolutionized Federal crime-fighting in America.

The film then begins to zip back and forth between Hoover’s early years in the 1920s and his later years as he clashes with the likes of the Roosevelts, The Kennedys and Richard Nixon. Along the way we meet his associate director, partner and rumored lover Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), his hypnotic mother (Judi Dench) and his long-serving secretary (Naomi Watts), the only people he keeps close in a world he considers wrought with enemies, spies and “radicals” bent on dismantling America from within.

The film chronicles many of the FBI’s earliest struggles, investigations into organized crime and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, its rise to power and public glorification in films like The G-Men and finally Hoover’s descent into self-insulation and paranoia as the world begins to change in the midst of the civil rights movement.

J. Edgar lacks much of the emotional drive of most of Eastwood’s other films, but that might be the point. Hoover was a man who never married, who rarely expressed affection, who kicked people out of the FBI for things like facial hair and drinking. He was a distant man, but even as Eastwood and Black attempt to take inside his mind and heart, they seem to rarely really peel back any of the layers. Not until the final 20 or so minutes does J. Edgar hit any kind of emotional core, and by then it’s too late. The film is slick and structured with obvious purpose, but the objective is missed.

Much of whatever heart this film does have is placed in DiCaprio’s hands. He performs capably as Hoover, but it’s far from his best war. Perhaps the encumbering and obvious-looking prosthetics used for the later Hoover years have something to do with that, but it’s frankly hard to tell. Hammer is also equal to the task, but Watts is painfully underused, confined to any outer office for much of the film while DiCaprio declaims and lectures his way through the often word-heavy, impact-light tale.

Part of why the impact is so tough to feel is that J. Edgar never seems to move in one particular direction. It’s going everywhere. Black focuses much of the early years story on the Lindbergh kidnapping and how it influenced the development of Hoover’s bureau, but it’s hard to find a cohesive point amid stories of film premieres, congressional hearings and other crimes. Likewise the later years focus in on Tolson’s illness and how it affects Hoover, the power of the Kennedys and how Hoover contends with them, and the changing of the guard as Nixon is sworn into the White House. All of these could be titanic events that pivot the film into new territory, but they serve as mere benchmarks of time, touchstones that allow the viewer to connect with film’s chronology, but not with the man at its center.

I still don’t know what a bad Clint Eastwood movie looks like, because J. Edgar is not a bad film. It is likely one of the best mediocre films ever made, and the explanation could be that Eastwood simply overreached. The enigma of Hoover isn’t solved by this film, nor is any clear sense of what he really stood for deep down portrayed. This is an aggressively timeline-driven biopic that has no coherent timeline, but also a love story that has no clear romance and a coming of age tale that has no clear line of development. It tries to be too much and ends being very little more than a well-polished docudrama. In the end, you walk out of J. Edgar feeling intrigued, as intrigued as you were when you walked in, but feeling like you missed the payoff.

BOOK REVIEW: '11/22/63' by Stephen King

2011-11-04T09:21:00.000-05:00

What if you could alter one pivotal event from the past? Would it change everything that came after? Would you be able to alter the course of human history by preventing the death of a single, very important, person? In one of his most ambitious and challenging novels, Stephen King asks the question, gives the answer, and does so much more.

Jake Epping is just a high school teacher in Maine when his friend Al, the owner of the local diner, changes his life by offering him a chance to travel back to 1958. Al’s been selling hefty hamburgers for $1.19 for years, and everyone’s always wondered how the burgers could be sold so cheap (unless they were made of cat). It turns out Al’s been buying his beef from the 1950s, and at 1950s prices.

In back of Al’s diner there’s a portal to the past that only opens on the exact same spot on a single day in 1958. Every time you go through the portal, you walk into 1958. Once you’re there, time passes normally, but once you leave, everything resets. Al’s spent years researching the portal, figuring out its time travel rules and the implications of what he can achieve with it.

Al decided long ago that the ultimate positive change he could affect would be to go through the portal, wait five years, travel to Dallas in the fall of 1963 and stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He reasons that if he did this, everything would be different. Vietnam might never have happened, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. might also still be alive, the whole trajectory of United States history would shift. But Al has terminal cancer, so someone else has to do it for him. That’s where Jake comes in.

After experiencing life beyond the portal for himself, Jake takes the assignment and spends the next five years in a bygone era. He gets a new job, he moves to Texas, he falls in love, but all the while his eye is on a man named Lee Harvey Oswald, and the dark deed he’s planning.

The bulk of King’s story – which adds up to more than 800 pages – isn’t about Oswald or Kennedy at all. It’s about one man’s very curious relationship with time. Throughout Jake’s life in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, time seems to be getting in the way of everything he’s working toward. It’s as if the universe is standing in the way of his quest. His new and old lives are blending together in his head, events are making it more and difficult for him to focus on the task at hand, and his relationship with a woman who lived her early life a full 40 years before he did is changing the way he feels about everything.

King brings these phenomena to life with an intoxicating array of historical, cultural and emotional details. It would be easy to make this book a simple thriller filled with the rush of stopping an assassination and the daunting task of overcoming history, but what King cares about most – and what he makes us care about most – is the life Jake lives before that fateful day ever arrives. In true King fashion it all links together in the end, but in the years before that day in Dallas we are left to follow a man through a new life in a new time. That King chose to tell his story this way is proof of his guts. That we care so much about it is proof of his gifts.

Though horror is his bread and butter, 11/22/63 reveals King to be an elegant, self-assured and often surprising practitioner of the science fiction tradition. Time travel stories are all too often clunky with technical mumbo jumbo and scientific quagmires, but with his simple invention of a portal to another age in the back of a Maine diner, King has created something both astoundingly simple and endlessly intriguing. Jake carries the story, but that portal is its backbone, and it remains forever sturdy.

With 11/22/63, Stephen King has once again affirmed his place at the pinnacle of American storytellers, and he does it with a story that’s as much about America as it is about the intrigues of time travel. This is a towering, masterful book told by a towering American master, and it is not to be missed.

11/22/63 is in bookstores everywhere Nov. 8.

Advance reading copy courtesy of Scribner.

BOOK REVIEW: 'I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution' by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum

2011-10-28T22:09:00.000-05:00

Though it’s often hard to see now through the haze of Jersey Shore-induced frustration, MTV was once a revolutionary cultural benchmark. It changed music. It changed film. It changed our concept of celebrity. It changed our very attention spans, and it did all even as almost everyone called it a crazy idea.

The chief brilliance of I Want My MTV is a glorious and purposeful absence of journalistic posturing. Marks and Tannenbaum appear only in brief introductions to the material in each of their book’s chapters. The rest is left up to the people who lived it.

The book is really a series of compelling vignettes, stitched together by a loose sense of the history of the broadcast network that premiered quietly and quickly shot itself into the pop culture stratosphere on the wings of pop superstars, cocky filmmakers and way too many drugs. The creators of the network, the producers and directors who shepherded it through the often tumultuous early years, are here, as are rock and pop superstars like Def Leppard, Duran Duran, Pat Benatar, Billy Idol and Phil Collins.

The picture they paint is a kaleidoscopic, ever-shifting portrait of a revolution birthed out of an often chaotic network that no one thought would succeed to begin with.

It launched in 1981 with a very obvious first video – The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” – and then continued with a second meant as a message to the record companies – Pat Benatar’s “You Better Run.” From there it grew through blockbusters like Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and duds like Billy Squier’s infamous “Rock Me Tonite.” It saw the rise of the VJ, the birth of the superstar video director (names like Michael Bay and Dennis Fincher, who are working on a much bigger scale now), the shifting landscape of music and the cultural explosion that is the music video.

But MTV did more than change television and music forever simultaneously. It also changed lives. Musicians, personalities, executives and directors all find their place to explain why in I Want My MTV, from stories of cocaine vials dropping live on stage to massively overproduced videos to the (often reluctant) promotion of hip-hop as a new driving force in the music industry.

Marks and Tannenbaum get out of the way and let all of this happen in their pages, but more significantly, they guide it where it needs to go. The book is a massive sheaf of material ranging more than a decade and featuring more than a few huge personalities. They find a way to craft all of that into a cohesive, compelling and often madly entertaining volume that will make even the youngest reader long for the days when they could actually turn on cable and see these things playing out.

MTV will never be what it was again. Reality television has, for better or worse, overtaken the age of the music video. I Want My MTV strikes a chord of nostalgia for those of us who remember it, but it does more. It calls for everyone reading it to look up and realize that what happened in those TV studios in the ‘80s and ‘90s thoroughly changed media, perhaps more than any other development since the advent of television itself. The MTV age was a revolution, and I Want My MTV is its energetic, often messy, manifesto.

BOOK REVIEW: 'Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson'

2011-10-26T12:59:00.000-05:00

To casual readers, Hunter S. Thompson is best known for those drug infused days in Las Vegas that he turned into a now legendary novel, but to anyone who wants to really understand what the man was about, the writings he contributed to Rolling Stone magazine over a period of more than 30 years are the true heart of the legendary Gonzo journalist.

Gonzo journalism, when it’s done right, is a first-person hand grenade of experience, insight and often simple, unfiltered chaos. Thompson was the form’s original master, and its original advocate was Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s editor who brought Thompson on board in the publication’s early days and sent him to follow the dueling campaigns of Richard Nixon and George McGovern in 1972, the fallout over Nixon’s Watergate scandal, and finally – in his final report – the results of the 2004 presidential election.

These are the elements that tie together Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone – lovingly edited by Wenner himself – and in between are many smaller stories, including Thompson’s memories of shooting with fellow counterculture legend William S. Boroughs, and a large collection of memos, letters and other correspondence between Thompson, Wenner and the staff at Rolling Stone.

Together these elements build a picture of a true American storyteller, bending and often breaking the rules of journalism to get to the heart, the real truth, of whatever he was writing about, and then telling it with unabashed mad joy alternated with vicious fury. Working with Thompson could not have been and was not always easy, as Wenner’s letters pleading with Thompson for copy often reveal, but the end result was something magical.

Thompson helped define the scope of Rolling Stone’s political writing throughout the 1970s, a tradition carried on today by writers like Matt Taibbi. But more than that, he defined journalism for a new age. It was no longer about standing at the steps of City Hall in a coat and tie, scribbling in a notepad as someone talks from a podium. It was no longer even about rooting out corruption through meticulous paper sifting. Those things all still have their place, but Thompson refused to play by those rules.

He launched himself into the story, became a character literally and figuratively in his pieces, charged headlong into whatever was happening. People have analyzed and mirrored his methods for decades since, and today those methods are legendary, but as Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone proves, it wasn’t a matter of technique. For Thompson, it simply couldn’t happen any other way.

BOOK REVIEW: 'Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend' by Susan Orlean

2011-10-25T00:54:00.000-05:00

The story of canine film and TV star Rin Tin Tin is unique and mythic even by American standards. Born on a World War I battlefield (that’s not a legend, it actually happened) and rescued back to the US by American solider Lee Duncan, he became an immortal, a movie star, a TV star, a hero beloved by millions.

Susan Orlean, a staff writer for The New Yorker and devoted lover of animals, sets out to explore how and why this legend was born, how and why it’s lasted, and how and why the name Rin Tin Tin still rings in America. She does this by charting Rin Tin Tin’s birth in France, his first brushes with showbusiness and eventual blockbuster success and his death, which was such a major event in 1932 that radio broadcasts were interrupted nationwide to announce it.

But the story of Rin Tin Tin doesn’t end there, and neither does Orlean’s. She continues on to follow Duncan as he presses forward with his faith in the Rin Tin Tin (or “Rinty,” as he called him) name and bloodline, taking Rin Tin Tin Jr. and future descendants – including The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin TV star Rin Tin Tin IV – on into their own careers, with varying degrees of success. And then the book goes further still, chronicling the efforts of producer Bert Leonard to get The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin on television, and finally on to the modern admirers of Rin Tin Tin, including owners of the remaining descendants of the bloodline.

The lasting effect of Orlean’s book is a unique, immersive and thoroughly engrossing chronicle of how a legend is born and then refuses to die. It’s a very American tale. Rin Tin Tin, the original, died nearly 80 years ago, but the name and the image still linger. The dog is a kind of god, a restless spirit that fades but doesn’t vanish. Orlean is fascinated by this, and her elegant, natural and often witty prose makes that fascination infectious.

We study human celebrities constantly, either out of envy or out of some attempt to understand how a person lives in such a bright and unforgiving spotlight. What Orlean does in Rin Tin Tin, through the study of a beloved animal with uncommon charisma and spirit, is not only fascinating in itself, but also a welcome new angle on the phenomenon of celebrity and cinematic immortality.

BOOK REVIEW: 'Damned' by Chuck Palahniuk

2011-10-18T13:22:00.000-05:00

Chuck Palahniuk, author of cult classics like Fight Club and Choke, is known for taking broad and often taboo concepts and morphing them into playful, shocking tales that challenge our understanding of civilized life. With Damned, he goes further conceptually than he’s ever gone before, creating one of his bravest books that – even when it misses the mark – still packs a punch.

Madison is 13, and she’s just landed in hell. She died, she thinks, from a marijuana overdose. She sits in her cell, watching rivers of excrement roll by (no, really), contemplating her millionaire parents, her social awkwardness and the boy she had a crush on before she left the world of the living. She meets a few friends: a jock, a pretty girl, an angst-ridden outsider and a nerd. It’s The Breakfast Club meets Dante’s Inferno, and as the novel wears on Palahniuk makes it even more than a clever pop culture analogy.

Madison’s adventures in hell traverse everything from the sexual preferences of giant demons to how telemarketers often originate from the very pits of Satan. It’s equal parts funny and shocking, and it’s all helped along by Madison’s playful , melancholy voice. Palahniuk is famous for his first person narratives, and with Madison he’s found a character that he can once again master, even if she is a 13-year-old girl.

The only downside of Damned is that sometimes Palahniuk seems to be trying a little too hard. Some of the themes he’s trafficking in here are clichés, like the idea of calls from telemarketers originating from a phone bank in hell, that he’s deliberately trying to treat in some new and amusing way, and most of the time it works. But there are times when it seems he’s going the extra mile just to shock, and it doesn’t always serve the story. Palahniuk has always been that kind of writer, but this time it seems he’s going deeper simply because he’s literally in hell, and he wants to make the most of it. Still, when in hell, do as the demons do, I suppose.

That aside, Damned remains an enormously entertaining book that’s part Jean-Paul Sartre, part John Hughes, a trippy adventure into a literal abyss of teen angst, corporate worship, greed and power. Chuck Palahniuk remains the great American literary trickster god.

Damned is available in bookstores everywhere Oct. 18.

BOOK REVIEW: 'Down the Mysterly River' by Bill Willingham

2011-10-16T18:54:00.000-05:00

Bill Willingham is best known for his acclaimed comic book series Fables, the story of a band of fairy tale characters living in the real world after the world they came from is overtaken by an evil force. It’s an adventure tale, a war story and a romance all in one, but it’s also a story about the nature of stories, about creations and how they become bigger than their creators.

Down the Mysterly River, Willingham’s new novel for children, is a variation on the same theme. On the surface it’s a boyhood adventure tale filled with talking animals and sinister adults and sentient trees. But beneath all that, wrapped in this idyllic childhood romp, is another story about stories.

Max is an adventurous boy who loves solving mysteries, but when he wanders too far in the woods and into an unfamiliar landscape, he finds himself in the midst of a case he can’t solve. Things get even stranger when he meets a talking badger, a talking cat and a talking bear, and finds himself pursued by sinister humans called Blue Cutters, who have swords that do far more than simply cut flesh. They cut out parts of people, memories, qualities, feelings. They edit people like editors do characters, and they want to change something about Max.

The book is essentially a road story, as Max and his new friends travel down a river that Max himself has named the “Mysterly,” as they try to find answers with the Cutters in hot pursuit. As the tale builds, Willingham makes it clear that he’s not just telling an amusing tale for children. He’s meditating on the magic of stories, the magic of making something out of nothing.

But the tale itself is what propels the exploration of ideas as living, breathing things. Down the Mysterly River maintains a leisurely but compelling pace, fueled by its characters and their bemused, energetic dialogue.

Willingham’s comic book roots make him a distinctly visual storyteller, and – with the help of gorgeous illustrations by his longtime collaborate Mark Buckingham – Down the Mysterly River is a distinctly visual book. It seems to crawl out of the pages at you like a fairy tale all its own, and that’s more than good writing. That’s a little bit of a magic.

A child might pick up Down the Mysterly River and find an enthralling adventure to get lost in. Adults might pick it up and find a layered contemplation of fantasy and imagination. But everyone who picks it up will find a story they can’t put down.

Down the Mysterly River is available in bookstores now.

'50/50,' one of the year's best comedies

2011-10-07T00:39:00.000-05:00

Tragedy makes fools of us. Whether we wish to ease the tension or simply become unraveled in the chaos of the unthinkable, we all become jesters in the face of it. Think back to any really horrible time in your life – the death of a loved one, the loss of a house or a job, a really tough breakup – and you’re bound to remember a few moments that were just plain embarrassingly goofy.

This is the comic well from which 50/50 draws, a potent cocktail of pain and unpredictable joy that feels more genuine than most films about tragedy ever will (perhaps because screenwriter Will Reiser based it on his own life; perhaps because it’s so good). It’s a film that captures with breathtaking ease the inherent madness of living with a deadly illness. It’s about laughing through the pain, about how to let the pain go, and how to make as many dirty jokes as possible along the way.

Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has a nice life. He has a good job at a Seattle Public Radio station, he’s got a gorgeous girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard) and his best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen) is always willing to indulge his fear of driving by chauffeuring him about town. When persistent back pain sends him to the doctor, Adam finds that he’s been stricken with a very rare form of cancer at the age of 27. He will begin chemotherapy and attempt to shrink the tumor clinging to his spine, but first he has to tell his overbearing mother (Anjelica Huston) and begin taking meetings with a student therapist (Anna Kendrick) working on her doctorate and trying very hard not to screw up.

The film charts the course of several months as Adam takes his course of chemo, deals with the side effects, shaves his head, has relationship troubles, gets a dog, makes some new cancer patient friends and simply tries to deal with the emotional and physical strain of it all.

At times he feels light-hearted, optimistic, even going so far as to play along with Kyle’s scheme to use his new bald head to help get girls. At other times a kind of numbness falls over him. He realizes his chances are slim (50/50, get it?) and that there might not be any point in attempting to forge new connections in his life if he’s just going to sever them with his own death.

It’s in this dichotomy that 50/50 finds its greatest strength. Films about dealing with illness are too often so message packed that even the sick people in the audience find them kitschy and self-indulgent. This is not one of those films. This film does not attempt to dissect the cancer experience as a psychological or spiritual or even philosophical condition. Nor does it seek to portray life with a deadly disease as a kind of Terms of Endearment journey to inner peace. This is a film about how hard it is, and about how in the midst of all that hardship you can find a way to survive. It never preaches about it, never forces it. It just is.

Levitt gives the performance of his young career, and he’s had plenty of great roles before. Adam is not an inspirational figure by nature. He’s just a guy who caught a tough break and has to face the fact that he might die. There are no grand speeches, no declarations of turning over a new leaf or great epiphanies about the nature of life. There’s just a guy struggling, but Levitt’s natural and unadorned performance is so genuine and so committed that the lack of loftiness in his story doesn’t matter. Rogen was tailor-made to play the goofball best friend, and he shines in the role once again here, but he also manages to find something emotional in all that goofiness that masks the fear for his friend. Without weeping or pontificating, Kyle manages to become warm. Kendrick also shines as a young student who, unpredictably and somewhat frighteningly, faces counseling someone not much older than herself on how to deal with a poisonous mass inside their own body. She is vulnerable and funny and easy to fall in love with, and she continues to declare herself as a rising talent.

It’s intentional that 50/50 is an unembellished account of illness. It’s meant to be that way. It never attempts to bring you to the kind of seize the day moment that so many films about death do. It’s a comedy, after all, and comedy is the great life-affirming thing that happens even when we’re all at rock bottom. There are times in this film when you laugh in spite of yourself, when even the gloomy moments spark some inner memory of your own vulnerability to the awkward insanity of the hospital room and the friend whose hair is falling out. It feels like maybe you shouldn’t, but you laugh anyway, and that’s the point. It’s the great thing about comedy. Even at our very lowest, we can rise with a laugh.

MOVIE REVIEW: Conan O'Brien Can't Stop

2011-09-30T01:33:00.000-05:00

There's a moment near the beginning of Conan O'Brien Can't Stop when director Rodman Flender (a college buddy of Conan's) asks Conan - recently deposed as host of The Tonight Show - if he's ever thought about what would happen if he just stopped for a little while.

Conan, behind the wheel of his car, literally in motion as he answers, replies: "What does that even mean?"

In that one moment, the span of 30 seconds, you learn almost all you need to know about Conan O'Brien.

Almost, but not quite.

Conan O'Brien Can't Stop is a documentary of frantic, almost exasperating energy. It reveals Conan O'Brien as the manic, accidental genius true believers have always seen him to be, but more than that, it reveals him to be someone who almost literally hungers for performance, for making people laugh, for getting that rush of being a delivery system for delight.

The film begins in the days after Conan has left the tonight show. He's angry, he says, sometimes more than he can believe, but he's already planning something new: The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour, a cross-country journey of music, comedy and madness that will bring Team CoCo directly to the people who fought for Conan's place as host of The Tonight Show.

What follows is a whirlwind of a film that follows Conan through the highs and lows of the tour. At times he is so bursting with energy that even backup dancers half his age don't seem to be able to keep up. Other times he's so broken down from the grind of meeting and greeting and taking photos with fans and supporters that he seems ready to collapse. Maybe he is, but he keeps going anyway. Even on his days off he's still performing, doing secret shows with Jack White and performing in the talent show at his Harvard class reunion.

Why? Because it's what he does. Flender isn't out to make a film that answers the question of why Conan doesn't just take his monetary settlement from NBC and live out his days as a ginger-bearded couch potato, or why he can't simply wait six months to go back to what he was doing before on another channel. It's not about those questions. It's about a man who lives for the work he's doing.

One question the film does answer, particularly for people who have never understood the Team CoCo phenomenon, is the question of why Conan O'Brien is a star. The answer is because he never seems to feel entitled to his status, or complacent in his role as a professional goofball. He's always trying to make it better, funnier, closer to perfect. Even in moments of sheer exhaustion (and in this film, there are many), he's still pushing for more connection with his fans, better performances and bigger laughs.

But he's also very human beneath the comic varnish. The deep, roaring belly laughs that come with Conan O'Brien Can't Stop are accompanied by another side of the man, one that's frustrated, driven and even a little vulnerable. He reveals how he uses humor to express displeasure and mask discomfort, how little patience he has for being railroaded by producers and show organizers, and at times, even just how tired he gets.

But it all only adds to his allure. Just as Flender isn't interested in making a flashy documentary that seeks to answer the big questions about the motivations of a TV comedian, Conan isn't out to portray himself as an innocent lamb butchered by the network TV system. He's at work, and it's work he loves in spite of its pitfalls. Flender's film is the story of a man who's still going to work, and who never stops feeling the rush of that work. That's why Conan O'Brien can't stop.

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Moneyball'

2011-09-29T18:48:00.000-05:00

It was at this moment that Jonah Hill decided to lose all that weight.

In the fall of 2001 Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane was in a tough spot. His team had just a lost a critical playoff game, and the Yankees and Red Sox – both teams with budgets more than double his own – were poaching away the only legitimate stars on his squad. With less than $40 million and no major talent, Beane had to, as he says in one particularly vital moment in this film, “adapt or die.”

Moneyball is a movie about baseball, but the genius of it is that – without ever really trying – it’s also a movie about everything but baseball. The true story of Billy Beane and the way he changed not only the Athletics, but professional baseball, is a gambler’s tale, a redemption story, a buddy comedy, a family drama and a chronicle of a revolution all at once. That it fits all of this into its runtime is proof enough of its importance. That it does all of it well is proof of its greatness.

The film begins with Beane (Brad Pitt) in crisis. There’s no new money at his disposal, his team of old school scouts is using the same old methods to attempt to replace his lost talent, and he’s convinced the only way is to manage the team like no one has ever thought to manage it before. The problem is he doesn’t know how.

That changes when he meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a young stats guru with a Yale degree in economics who advises him to rethink the way he looks for talent. Instead of looking for stars, look for runs. Instead of looking for the same talent everyone else is after, look for hidden talent that other teams shunned.

Beane and Brand begin to recruit from what Brand calls an “island of misfit toys.” Players that lack in one skill but succeed incredibly in another, players who wouldn’t look good on a baseball card or a poster, players who other teams have cast off as too old, too short, too risky. Their methods immediately begin to alienate Beane from the rest of the Athletics management, including manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and as the 2002 season begins, Beane risks his job, his future and his entire reputation.

It may be a film about misfits, but Moneyball is loaded with top shelf talent. Director Bennett Miller (“Capote”) tackles the film with an intoxicating blend of compositions, from handheld documentary shooting to smooth, patient camerawork. I’m tired of shaky cam movies. They’re everywhere these days. But I’m also tired of movies that force a series of intricate and often unnatural compositions on the eye until the story is just background. Miller knows what his camera is doing, he knows what he wants it to do, and he- along with the brilliant cinematographer Wally Pfister – knows how to master it. It’s something a good many viewers don’t notice, but I saw it, and I was both relived and delighted.

Then there’s the screenwriting double whammy of Academy Award winner Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and fellow Academy Award winner Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List). They’re the reason this is a baseball film that’s just as effective as a film about almost anything else. Their dialogue is pitch perfect, their pacing is smooth and their story is graceful. This is how screenwriting should be done.

But in the end it all comes down to Brad Pitt. I’ve always admired his ability to project an extraordinary naturalness into his roles, whether he’s playing a pothead or a man aging in reverse. His Billy Beane might not be the real Billy Beane, but Pitt nails this role of a former player who never found his stride trying to change the beat of the game that’s been his life. He is captivating, charming and brilliant in his simplicity. Hill matches him step for step, stepping out of his professional goofball image to reveal an actor of surprising vulnerability and range. With a sound supporting cast at their back, they carry this film, and all of the true story weight behind it drops into nothing without them.

Sports dramas – even when they’re rooted in powerful true stories – are a hit and miss game. They’re like taking that final swing on a full count with your eyes closed. Moneyball works because it’s a gamble of a movie, just like its source material was a gamble of a game. It helps that it’s a story rooted in America’s pastime, but that’s not what makes it shine. I barely know baseball, but this film reached me, and it would likely reach people who know even less about baseball than I do. Moneyball works because it’s a film about a revolution, a quiet revolution that wasn’t just about victory, but about changing minds. We need more films like this one.

COMICS: Aquaman #1

2011-09-29T01:17:00.002-05:00

I read a lot of comics today, and if you had told me when the day started that the star book would end up being Aquaman, I would've rammed a trident through your neck (well, probably not, but I would've said you were wrong). I approached Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis' reboot of the perpetual punchline of the Justice League with a kind of cautious curiosity. I've always been intrigued by Aquaman, beyond all the jokes and seahorse riding silliness, and when it comes to breathing new life into dud characters, Geoff Johns has always been successful. I expected it to be intriguing and funny and original.

But I never expected it to be this good.

From the very first glimpse of his hero, Johns latches on to a simple but ingenious method for shattering the "Aquaman is lame" stigma. He tackles it directly, first by having his hero exhibit incredible strength (on dry land, no less) and then sitting him down in a seafood restaurant where he's first asked to clarify that whole talking to fish thing, and then grilled by a geek blogger on his status at the bottom of the Justice League totem pole. It's funny and smart and remarkably similar to every conversation you've ever had about Aquaman, but at the center is the hero himself, which drives the point home.

Aquaman, needless to say, doesn't appreciate the way the public treats him very much, and it's clear that Johns doesn't either. He's got admiration and even love for this character, and he seems to be having even more fun telling this story than he does with Green Lantern, who's become his signature character. In just a few pages he manages to break the old Aquaman mold and place the character on a path to superhero legitimacy all over again.

Then there's Ivan Reis' art. Like all of his work, it's tinged with a sense of classicism, with the books that these characters first appeared in, but it has a modern energy manifested in the glares of the hero and the rush of the action. There's nothing grounbreaking about it, but there doesn't need to be. It's a great artist at the top of his game.

It might seem like I'm trying to trick you here, like I'm heaping praise on a book that everyone's been suspicious about. But of everything Geoff Johns has done so far in The New 52 reboot, Aquaman is the clear winner. It joins Animal Man, Batman, Action Comics and Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E. in the top tier of these books, and it proves that, in the right hands, Aquaman can be badass.

COMICS: Batman #1

2011-09-22T01:54:00.000-05:00

Scott Snyder did fantastic work on Swamp Thing #1, but Batman was always going to be the measuring stick for just how well he fits into the New 52 scheme. I'm a Batman geek, and have been since I was two, so it was also my measuring stick for how he fared with me.

He knocked it out of the park.

Greg Capullo's art was clean in all the right places (the polish of Wayne Manor and the Batman family in tuxedos) and dirty in all the others (Arkham Asylum), and Snyder managed to do something with his writing that I really didn't think could be done with this whole reboot thing: move Batman in what's actually a new direction (not a new version of an old one) while still rooting his story in the Dark Knight traditions I love.

He begins to get it right from the very start by making Gotham City into a character in its own right. It always has been, of course, but it's a concept that artists have always owned more than writers. This time Capullo and Snyder share it, and drive the point home.

Snyder is doing here what Matt Fraction did over on Invincible Iron Man. He's using Bruce Wayne's billions to their fullest advantage, putting Batman in charge of bold new technology and giving Gotham's favorite son a chance to be the public face of change. It's a melding of private and public justice, and the beginning of a hero truly taking on the world. Whether these two things will intersect more deeply as the series wears on is anybody's guess, but Snyder clearly has some very deep ambitions for the title.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Batman #1 is that is truly does live up to its hype (an area where more than a few DC titles have failed in the last four weeks). I wanted a Batman that I could really dig into, and I got one, and that's the best thing about this. It's just a thin monthly issue, but it feels like the start of something great.

BOOK REVIEW: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

2011-09-16T12:46:00.000-05:00

A Monster Calls was meant to be the final work of award-winning children’s author Siobhan Dowd, who died in 2007 at the age of 47 of breast cancer. She began the book, and Patrick Ness, author of the blockbuster Chaos Walking trilogy, finished it. The result is a gorgeous, imaginative, heartbreaking novel that’s both a tribute to and celebration of Dowd’s work, and a herald of Ness’ continued presence as a force in children’s literature.

Conor’s life is hard. His mother is very sick, his father left them a long time ago, and even though he remains optimistic, things don’t seem to be improving. His mother’s illness makes things harder in school, where he’s alternately pitied and bullied, and his grandmother, the only functioning adult in his life, is cold and practical and difficult to talk to.

Things get even stranger when a monster begins to visit Conor at night. The monster shares stories with him, stories supposedly about justice, about the right thing, but Conor remains skeptical. He’s both frightened and intrigued by the monster’s power, by the idea of what the monster could do if it decided to invade his life.

The novel jumps between Conor’s nighttime conversations with the monster and his daytime struggles with his family, and as his mother gets worse, Conor begins to hope for a miracle, even as fear grips him from all sides. Woven through it all are metaphors of loss, death, resurrection, hope and healing, highlighted by gorgeous and grim illustrations by Jim Kay.

It’s a fitting story to be labeled Dowd’s final. She lived with the illness that would take her life during her most productive years as a writer, and it weighed on her mind every day. A Monster Calls is an attempt to take the constant shadow of terminal illness and weave it into something fantastic and imaginative. It’s as potent as any of her completed work, and it’s made all the more potent by Ness, who writes with all the intensity and magic that made his Chaos Walking novels so powerful.

In an era when shallow paranormal polish seems to dominate books for young readers, A Monster Calls is a reminder of just how powerful children’s literature can be when the tale is told well and told with heart. It’s among the most heartwrending, beautiful books you’ll read all year, and it will stay with you every night for weeks.

COMICS: Buffy Season Nine #1

2011-09-16T02:28:00.001-05:00

The first thing you notice about the first issue of Buffy Season Nine, the Joss Whedon scripted "Freefall," is that there are no punches thrown.

You might expect to see Buffy back where she belongs, patrolling among the gravestones for a vamp to dust, but instead you find her throwing a party with her new roommates, inviting her old friends (many of whom are changed forever by the events of Season Eight) to see her new life and, most importantly, trying to start over. It's the absolute opposite of the epic, cosmic way the Season Eight ended, and it's the perfect start to a different kind of Buffy story.

All the elements are still in place for something big to happen, including more than a few subtle hints of something big lurking in the shadows and lying in wait for the Slayer. The characters we love are present - Xander, Willow, Dawn and Spike - but they're all dealing with a new kind of universe. It's a magic-less universe in which they're all learning to live without something, and it gives Whedon a chance to showcase more than just the unlimited budget of comics.

Buffy Season Nine #1 rivets you to its page with the classic Whedon-style dialogue that made you fall in love with the characters in the first place. With almost no supernatural elements at his disposal (something he imposed on himself), Whedon immerses his characters in everyday drama, relishing the chance to let the soap opera qualities of Buffy shine through for a change. The art of longtime Buffy artist Georges Jeanty ties it all together, making a seamless transition into a new era for the series.

It might sound boring, but it's not. Buffy Season Nine opens with a bang; it's just a different kind of bang. It's the start of something different, but a something different that's also rooted in many of the concepts of the television series. Whedon proves once again that he knows what he's doing. All that's left is to follow.

COMICS: Batwoman #1

2011-09-15T01:33:00.000-05:00

I think J. H. Williams could illustrate a boy band biography and I'd buy it. The man has a gift. His panels are dreamy, nonlinear trips that somehow wind up making perfect sense. His world is gorgeous yet filled with monsters. He just gets it right, and it all seems to fit with Batwoman.

Williams returns to Kate Kane's crimefighting career as artist and co-writer of the new Batwoman solo title, working alongside writer W. Haden Blackman to craft a first issue that - while not particularly ambitious - is among the more beautifully crafted things in DC's relaunch so far.

Drawing on the events of the Batwoman: Elegy arc, the book begins with Kate Kane estranged from her father and mentoring her cousin Bette (the former Flamebird) in the ways of female vigilantism. The pair leap through Gotham, fighting low-rent hoods for the sake of Bette's training, but all the while Batwoman is on the hunt for clues in the case of a mysterious female spectre that seems to be abducting kids and drowning them, and a certain shadowy ops group is on the hunt for the Batwoman.

Williams' art is the star of the show. That might not be deliberate, but it's true. It just screams out at you to be stared at. As with his past Batwoman work, he constructs elaborate full-page spreads that swirl and swoop through panels like no other art in mainstream comics. His characters look simultaneously real and magical, like they're being seen through some kind of fantastic veil.

As far as the story, it works, but it feels in places like Williams and Blackman are trying to cram too many things into one issue. Kane's issues with her father, training her cousin and trying to solve a deadly case are all given as much time as possible, and it feels like if just one of them could have been played down, the story would've been much more immersive. As it is, it feels like a sampler of what's to come, which might work out, but at this point it's hard to tell.

Despite that, Batwoman #1 comes out at the higher end of DC's relaunch material. Brilliantly drawn, well-scripted and, though shakily plotted, good enough to make you want to keep reading.

COMICS: Green Lantern #1

2011-09-15T01:06:00.000-05:00

Geoff Johns is the Green Lantern guy. He has been for a while (seven years or so), and he's been the guy responsible for returning Hal Jordan and the Lantern Corps to the land of ambition and cosmic scope. Green Lantern #1 isn't the best thing he's ever done with the Corps (that would probably be Sinestro Corps War), but it maintains the same ambition, energy and pace of all his work with the character, and that makes it more than worth reading.

One of the interesting things about DC's whole New 52 relaunch is getting to see where each writer chooses to start the character up. Some opt to begin at the very, very beginning, others take the in medias res approach. Which way they shift says a lot about how they feel about the character, and what kind of story they want to tell. For Johns, who's basically owned the Lantern universe for a while now, it's about starting with major drama in the rearview mirror and forging a new path forward.

Hal Jordan was a Green Lantern, but when we meet him he's just a guy trying to pay his bills. His old nemesis Sinestro, on the other hand, is being invited back into the Lantern Corps by the Guardians of the Universe after trying unsuccessfully to wipe them out. The Guardians (most of them, anyway) are insistent that he is needed back in the Corps, and he is insistent that Hal Jordan must also return. Why, we don't know.

It's not exactly inventive for Johns to place the Green Lantern title's two most famous faces side by side once again, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that it feels like he's trying something here, like he's got the ambition to reach for a new direction. Who knows where it's headed at this point, but it's the reach that counts. Longtime Green Lantern artist and Johns collaborator Doug Mahnke keeps the look of the universe in line with Johns' past triumphs on the title, delivering solid cosmic visions that heighten the sense of energy in the title.

Though his Justice League #1 writing was underwhelming (some readers would say I put that mildly), Johns proves here that when it comes to Green Lantern, he still seems to know what he's doing. It's not groundbreaking or world-changing, but it's enough to make you want issue 2.

BOOK REVIEW: 'Life Itself: A Memoir' by Roger Ebert

2011-09-08T23:06:00.001-05:00

Since losing his ability to speak after cancer-related surgeries in 2007, Roger Ebert’s writing has become his voice. His online presence has swelled to include more than just film reviews. His blog, where he writes about everything from politics to celebrity encounters to his daily life, receives millions of hits. He doesn’t talk, but he communicates like never before.

Life Itself is in many ways the result of this new paradigm. It’s not a linear autobiographical recollection, but rather a series of interconnected vignettes that in some way help define Ebert’s life, work and outlook. Reading it, I’m reminded of why he’s America’s greatest film critic. It’s not because of his expertise or insight, though that’s always been a part of it. It’s because he writes with his soul. A Roger Ebert film review is always genuine, witty and focused on what the film does, not what it is. Every page of Life Itself is infused with the same kind of wit, the same energy, the same wisdom and candor that have made Roger Ebert one of the great cultural commentators of his time.

Ebert journeys through his childhood in Illinois, to his school days and early friends and finally to his work at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he received the film critic job without ever asking or hoping for it. Readers expecting a “this is how I got famous” path won’t find it. Ebert isn’t interested in why everyone reads what he writes. What he tries to do instead is chart his path of deep immersion in the movies through the people who helped immerse him. Chapters are devoted to towering figures of cinema that he’s had the privilege of rubbing shoulders with: John Wayne, Woody Allen, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese. He writes about what these people taught him, what they mean to him, how they helped him understand the movies.

He writes with love about the great film critic Pauline Kael and how her work influenced his own. He writes about his father. He writes about his partner and brother in arms, the great Gene Siskel. He writes about his wife, Chaz, about love and loss and the cancer that warped his face and took his voice.

But it never feels like navel gazing.

Life Itself is an adventure of a book by a truly great writer who proves once and for all that his chops go far beyond the realm of thumbs up and thumbs down. Ebert may not have ever set out to tell his story this way, but his voice is louder than ever.

Life Itself is available September 13 in bookstores everywhere.

Advance Reading Copy courtesy of Grand Central Publishing

'Midnight in Paris' a film of pure enchantment

2011-09-08T13:07:00.001-05:00

Owen Wilson doesn't know that he's in Leonardo DiCaprio's dream-crime right now.

The cinema of Woody Allen has always been a slight form of fantasy for me to begin with. His films about New York intellectuals grappling with neuroses and romantic entanglements under Manhattan’s watchful gaze, or Americans rushing through European adventures that challenge their understanding of life, always feel to me a little like depictions of another world. And in a way, I suppose they are.

Allen has always flirted with fantasy in his films, even the ones deeply rooted in real human experience. From the animated sequence and the flash backs of Annie Hall to the fictional characters coming to live in Deconstructing Harry, he’s never been afraid to let his work take off, however briefly, into the realm of the fantastic.

Midnight in Paris is the purest form of this blending of fantasy and reality yet. In one of his most vital and energetic films, Allen takes his archetypal protagonist – a guy who often wishes his reality would alter – and quite literally drops him in another time and place. The result is a charming, imaginative and surprisingly warm film by one of America’s most distinguished directors.

Gil (Owen Wilson) is, like many other Allen leading men, a guy uncomfortable with his life. He’s a successful screenwriter but he’d rather write his novel about a guy who works in a nostalgia shop. He’s engaged to the beautiful but often shallow Inez (Rachel McAdams), but while she keeps shopping for the perfect Malibu home, he’d rather have an attic apartment in Paris. He lives in 2010, but he longs to be a part of the legendary “Lost Generation” of the 1920s.

Gil’s desire to live a life other than his own seems to reach its peak when he and Inez travel to Paris with her uptight, wealthy parents (played hilariously by Mimi Kennedy and Kurt Fuller). Inez wants to shop for obscenely expensive furniture with her mother and visit museums with her arrogant and often pedantic friend Paul (Michael Sheen), who’s so sure of how smart he is that he’ll even argue with tour guides.

Gil would rather romanticize about Paris in the rain than indulge in his fiance’s tourist clichés. One night after dinner, he wanders off and gets lost on a deserted Parisian street. A little drunk, he sits down on some steps as the clock strikes midnight, and suddenly a car that looks like it’s from another time pulls up, and some people invite him to get in and go to a party.

Improbably, Gil gets in, and even more improbably suddenly finds himself drinking with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill) and listening to the grand and cocksure declarations of Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll). He thinks he’s cracking up, but the next night it happens again, and the next night, and Gil finds himself rubbing shoulders with an extraordinary cast of characters including Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Pablo Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo) and Picasso’s lover, an enchanting young woman named Adriana (Marion Cotillard).

Gil’s world becomes all about his second life, and as it does he sees even more things wrong with his first. He’s falling for Adriana while Inez becomes more distant. He’s giving his manuscript to Stein to read while his practical working life seems to fade. He’s in love with his strange new world, and he’s in love with the life he could have there.

Allen is no stranger to making films about men who’ve had to compromise, and who often wish for some sort of ideal existence that’s just out of reach. With Midnight in Paris he brings those ideals to life and then pokes holes in them, a literal spin on always wanting what we can’t have and always thinking that the Golden Age has long since passed us by. It’s a film about learning to make the most of the present, but rarely has such a message been conveyed with such vitality and humor.

Wilson shines as the in over his head dreamer. He fits into the Allen movie machine nicely, carrying the film and somehow managing to keep his presence vital even as the screen is packed with stars. McAdams is convincingly nasty, but not in a hateful way, and the supporting cast revel in their chance to portray icons. Everyone in this film is having fun, and it’s particularly evident in the smaller moments, as when Adrien Brody (as Salvador Dali) savors the chance to say the word “rhinoceros.”

Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen in top form, taking his second favorite city (after New York, of course) and painting it in seductive tones of fantasy, love and nighttime dreaming. His iconic dialogue style melds with soft and beautiful camerawork by the great Darius Khondji to create something lush and magnificently life-affirming. More than four decades after he began making movies, Allen is still capable of greatness, and Midnight in Paris is destined to be listed among the very best of his films.

COMICS: Justice League International #1

2011-09-08T00:48:00.000-05:00

Team books are always hard to start. It's not an enviable task. You've got to convincingly introduce a host of characters, give them all some sense of identity and then give them something to fight, and you've got to do it all in less than 30 pages.

Justice League International #1 comes a week after Geoff Johns and Jim Lee led into DC's "New 52" with a mediocre Justice League #1 that groaned under the weight of high expectations and too much ambition crammed into a very small space. Dan Jurgens - the DC Comics veteran most famous for writing and drawing the Death of Superman story - and fellow veteran artist Aaron Lopresti, manage to get their book off the ground with a little less trouble, but they do it by sacrificing their opening pages to exposition hell.

In response to the rise of the Justice League of America as an independent organization of superheroes, the United Nations decides it needs its own team of heroes, one that it can control both from a public relations and tactical standpoint. Andre Briggs, the U.N.'s Intelligence Director, brings his superhero team proposal before the U.N. Global Security Group, who will make the final decision. He proposes a number of intriguing choices (among them Plastic Man, Green Arrow and Blue Beetle) for the team's lineup that are shot down for various reasons. His proposal that Batman come on board is also shot down, but the rest of his prospective superhero squad is approved. The new Justice League International will be led by the image conscious, cocky Booster Gold, and will include Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Rocket Red (Gavril Ivanovich), Fire, Ice, Godiva and August General in Iron (because, you know, every superhero team worth its salt needs a Chinese superhero with iron skin).

The team sets up in the Hall of Justice amid public protest, and is almost immediately handed their first mission: find a missing U.N. Research Team that's gone missing in South America. Despite U. N. objections, Batman stows away for the trip (because he's Batman, and he can sneak in anywhere he wants) and pilots the jet into the jungle while Booster Gold begins to cope with the pressures of being a leader.

The biggest problem with this book is that the first five pages are basically a board meeting. Briggs has a teleconference with Global Security Group members, and the images of each of the JLI heroes flash on screen like a high school yearbook. When the team is finally picked, the reader knows their faces (the point of the whole exercise), but might be too bored to want to carry on.

If you do make it past the brief slogging introduction, Justice League International #1 turns into a solid first issue, and sees the JLI taking on monsters in the jungle as they try to figure out what's happened to the missing scientists. It's a set up for an adventure book, but Jurgens is also weaving in bigger elements. Batman is poking his nose in, probably just as much to screw with authority as to mentor any of the JLI members. Booster Gold is trying to balance his own ego and his need to keep control of his team. The team itself is experiencing a number of language barriers (most of them quite funny, actually), and the political implications of a superhero team sanctioned by the governments of the world are already beginning to rumble in the background.

Jurgens strikes a fun tone for the first issue, hitting enough strong comic notes to overshadow some heavy handed, rushed plotting. He's also clearly aware of the fertile ground this book has beneath it, and the issue ends with the promise of something bigger up ahead. Lopresti's art also strikes the right tone. His work is bright, clean, classic superhero pencilling, just what you want from a straight-up hero team title.

Justice League International has a lot going for it, even if it does get off to a bit of a rocky start. It's got a few cracks showing, but it's also got the promise to turn into something bigger.

COMICS: Action Comics #1

2011-09-07T23:19:00.000-05:00

When DC unveiled Rags Morales' (excellent) cover for Action Comics #1, more than a few readers saw it as a cheap attempt to freshen up the Man of Steel by simply dressing him down. Gone were the iconic tights and the bright red boots, and in their place was the lower body gear of a farm boy from Smallville. For some fans, they may as well have put him in some pre-distressed Abercrombie denim with holes in the knees.

What Action Comics #1 actually reveals when you sit down to read it is that the jeans are only the beginning. This is not the noble, statuesque Man of Tomorrow who hovers above Metropolis like a square-jawed, blue-eyed Christ. This is a new hero fighting as much to find his own way as to deliver justice, tearing through Metropolis at the ground level with all the cocksure determination of a high school quarterback. This is Grant Morrison exploring Superman's infant stage, and the result is an energetic, bold new comic by one of DC's most imaginative creators.

We don't know when the issue begins how long Superman has been in town, but clearly it hasn't been long. He's still trying to make a name for himself among Metropolis' less savory characters, the police are still trying to figure him out, and somewhere in the shadows Lex Luthor is still learning his weaknesses.

Morrison also makes it clear that Superman simply hasn't been Superman for long. Like the Siegel and Shuster version of the late 1930s, this Man of Steel doesn't fly, but leaps. His strength is monumental but far from unlimited. His body is tough, but definitely not invulnerable. This Superman is still incubating, both physically and emotionally, just as his alter ego Clark Kent is still trying to find his way. He's a reporter, we learn, but he's not yet working with Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen. He's also living in a less than luxurious situation where he's struggling to pay the rent. It's an all around transition phase.

Morrison has a knack for carefully constructing stories and then structuring them to look like chaotic frenzies of action and intrigue. Action Comics #1 is dominated by chase scenes, close calls, and moments of real danger for the young Man of Steel. It's also punctuated by a number of visually and emotionally important symbols. Superman grabs a corporate crook from a skyscraper penthouse and then leaps to the street below, literally bringing the man down to the level of the commoner. He glares at villains with heat vision one minute, then smiles as he scopes out the internal organs of a Metropolis cop (to let him know he's got a bad ulcer he should get looked at).

What's most brilliant about these moments is how they show a Superman in the making. He's cocky, he's clumsy and he's even a little mischievous, but the nobility that so defines the mature version of the character is there in a rough form, waiting to be sculpted into something big and grand and immortal.

This is all highlighted, enhanced and driven home by Morales' crisp, bright art. His Superman is a working class hero with a twinkle in his eye, still reveling in the reach of his powers, but with a layer of uncertainty lurking underneath that red and yellow insignia. That Morrison understands this, and makes us understand it, is almost a given. That Morales is able to drive it home with nearly every pencil stroke is a gift.

Action Comics #1 is first and foremost just a damn fine comic book, but it's made more important because it shows the work of creators who took the marketing phrase "The New 52" seriously. While other writers seem to be using the mantle simply as a chance to start over with the same old dynamic and no continuity burdens on their shoulders, Morrison and Morales are here to present something innovative, something fresh and bright and full of promise. Action Comics is one issue old, and it's already proving to be a sign that great work can come from this reboot.

'Our Idiot Brother,' a comedy with refreshing heart

2011-09-04T23:06:00.000-05:00

Paul Rudd in the role he was born for: Slacker Jesus

Comedies like Our Idiot Brother seem to come as a reaction to ultra-raunchy blockbusters like The Hangover Part II. It’s a film that still works to cater to adults through its language, plot and thematic concerns, but it attacks from a different, more mature angle. There’s nothing wrong with raunch (What was wrong with The Hangover Part II had nothing to do with it being gross and everything to do with it being bad.), but sometimes adults like to see an adult comedy that’s less about the extravagant vulgarities of adulthood and more about the struggles of it.

Paul Rudd is the idiot brother of the film’s title, a lazy but good-natured guy named Ned who gets suckered into selling pot to a cop and winds up in jail for a few months. When he gets out, he finds that his organic farmer girlfriend has dumped him, leaving him without a place to stay. He turns, of course, to his family, largely to his three sisters, each of whom have problems of their own to deal with. Nat (Zooey Deschanel) is a bisexual aspiring comedian struggling to commit to her girlfriend (Rashida Jones). Miranda (Elizabeth Banks) is a reporter looking for her big break. And Liz (Emily Mortimer) is holding a family together while her uptight documentarian husband (Steve Coogan) seems to be losing interest.

Each of the sisters take their turn with Ned, offering him a place to stay and a chance to earn a little money. He, in turn, seems to be ruining their lives, not so much through laziness and freeloading as through a very uncomplicated sense of honesty.

What begins as a comedy about the foibles of sibling relationships gradually evolves very nearly into a full-fledged, very moving drama with a few comedic elements. Ned is never portrayed as a buffoon, but rather as a very simple guy who just wants to get along with everyone. He doesn’t fit in Miranda’s corporate political sphere, or Nat’s pansexual communes or even Liz’s domestic struggles. He doesn’t see the world their way. This is the source of much of the film’s comedy, but more importantly it’s the source of its heart. “Our Idiot Brother” starts out looking and feeling like every other slacker comedy you’ve ever seen, and ends up something much more.

The flick is filled with stellar acting talent, but Rudd truly carries this one. Until Our Idiot Brother, nearly all of his starring roles were as the straight man (see Dinner for Schmucks and I Love You, Man), but he embraces the opportunity to be the odd duck in a group of people all far too wrapped up in the “real world.” His instant likeability is used to its fullest, and even against acting titans like Deschanel and Mortimer, he manages to own every scene.

Our Idiot Brother isn’t the funniest film of the year, or the happiest, but it is among the most genuine. This is a movie that finds its stride not in its laughs, but in its relationships. It’s a rare feat for a comedy, particularly in a world where most funny pictures bank on nudity and profanity. While it’s not perfect, Our Idiot Brother is a reminder of where comedies can go when they reach for something beyond laughs and hit the mark.

COMICS: Justice League #1

2011-09-01T01:28:00.000-05:00

Let's clear the air, kids. The New 52 is happening. Pull your heads out of the sand. We're still here. The world didn't end, the multiverse didn't collapse all over our nerdy little skulls and comics are still alive and well (well...surviving, anyway). I've held off talking or writing about DC's companywide reboot for most of the last three months simply because I didn't understand why there was such a big debate to be had. It's not like such things haven't happened before (on some scale or another). And yes, they're renumbering and that's a little odd to think about for characters that have been around for more than 70 years, but come on...we know where things stand.

DC is trying something in an effort to reinvigorate their business, and many comics fans are crying foul. They're saying "This is just a stunt. Why don't you guys just try telling good stories?" For many DC fans (myself included), the good stories were already there, but DC wanted to push in another direction and wrap up a few new readers, and that's fine. This is comics, after all. We can always just pretend it didn't happen later.

But now it's over. The first issue of The New 52 is here, 51 more will follow in the next four weeks, we will read them, discuss them and get on with our lives. The reboot is upon us. All that's left is to talk about the work.

And now...to the work.

Justice League #1 is the center of this New 52 universe DC is rolling out. It's a logical place for it to stand. All of the DC blockbuster characters are gathered in its pages, giving its creative more opportunities for storytelling on a grand scale. It's the All-Star squad, and in an effort to further project a blockbuster image on it, DC put it in the hands of two of their creative superstars. Jim Lee, possibly the most famous comics artist of the last 20 years, not only drew the issue, but also redesigned the costumes of each of the League's members. Geoff Johns, who revived Green Lantern and The Flash for DC and has a played a major editorial role in most of the company's recent major event books, helms the book from the scripting side. It's a Dream Team of sorts, they've got the world's biggest heroes and a massive battleground to work with. This is what they're pitching:

It begins "Five Years Ago." So, we're starting the first issue of a supposedly new universe with a flashback? It's not explained, but hopefully it'll merit something more than just a tedious timeline issue. Batman is fighting a bizarre alien threat in Gotham City when Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) shows up to help. The two have never met, and spend much of the issue debating who should handle the situation and discussing the overall situation with superheroes in this new universe.

In the universe Lee and Johns are introducing us to, the world still lives in fear and misunderstanding of superheroes. The heroes themselves haven't yet crossed over into each other's territory (Lantern wasn't even sure Batman was real) and they know next to nothing about each other's powers and abilities at this point. It's essentially a blank slate fully populated with demigods. Not a bad start.

The problem is the issue basically goes almost nowhere. Apart from what amounts to a cameo appearance (that will pay off next issue, to be fair) by Superman at the end, it's just Batman and Lantern chasing down aliens and arguing with each other. This wouldn't really be a problem, except that the cover also includes Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg. So, we don't get to see a big, cool Ocean's 11 style roundup of the powers that be. We're starting off slower. Fine.

Most of the book is action, fight scene after fight scene, flights and hurdles across the cityscape and alien threats wreaking havoc. That's cool, but this is where we come to the problem of Jim Lee drawing it. He's a legendary artist, but his panels just feel too crowded. I'm not talking just about the number of people walking through them, either, or their size. It seems crowded with too many pencil lines, too many strokes, too many needless overdetails. This is thanks in part to the costume redesigns. Superman and Batman both seem to have a number of odd lines running through their suits. Whether these are for aerodynamic purposes or for armor or what, we don't know (though why Superman would need armor is a mystery). They're just there, these weird little crevices that seem to serve little purpose. It's just too busy, and it makes some of Lee's more elegant art (like his work in Batman: Hush, for example) seem like a distant memory.

Yet despite all of this, despite everything that feels overly hyped and underwhelming about this comic, I came away with a sense of deep anticipation for what's next. Johns and Lee have set the right tone, against all odds, and if only because the issue is too short (this is a massive reboot; we couldn't have added a few pages?). It makes you want to keep reading, and that is, after all, the point. The New 52 is here, and it's rolling forward now. All that's left is to get on board.

COMICS: Secret Avengers #16

2011-08-31T22:42:00.000-05:00

Leave it to Warren Ellis to kick off a run on a superhero comic with a massive underground city that no one knew about.

Ellis began his run on Secret Avengers with artist Jamie McKelvie this week, and his first issue is full of promise. The Secret Avengers team of Captain Steve Rogers (Super-Soldier), The Beast (Mutant Genius), Black Widow (Super Spy) and Moon Knight (Crazy Person) are descending a mile beneath Cincinnati (because that's really where anyone would go in Cincinnati, I guess) to investigate a hidden, seemingly deserted city where the Shadow Council has evidently been planning something big and very explosive. They run into trouble and have to make a few tough choices about how to deal with said trouble. That's the story, but the way it's told is where it gets fun.

Ellis has an infatuation with breaking the skin of the world and peeling it back to reveal something new. You see it in Planetary most obviously, but it's everywhere in his work, and it makes its way into Secret Avengers as well, in a dynamic and compelling way. It's all, of course, helped along by the often nightmarishly intricate pencils McKelvie has to pull off as the Secret Avengers zip and fly through a city that's all angular buildings and looping highways. It's a story about secrets, and the secret heroes that have to dig them up, and it's the start of something big (or bigger, anyway) on this title.

But it's more than just a conceptual victory. Ellis is full of those. It's also some of the best dialogue I've seen in a comic all year, filled with humor and technological gobbledegook (mostly from Beast, of course). And yes, we get to play up Moon Knight's inherent madness, because Ellis loves slightly mad characters (and, perhaps, is a slightly mad character).

It's bad luck that this title dropped the same week that DC launched its "New 52," because this is the kind of quality comic that rises above the inherent publicity stunt quality of companywide events. Great storytelling, great art, superheroes doing what they do best.

BOOK REVIEW: 'The Cut' by George Pelecanos

2011-08-25T11:27:00.001-05:00

George Pelecanos has established himself as one of America’s most distinguished crime writers, rising above the crowded halls of thriller bestsellerdom to create works that balance primal authenticity with unpretentious literary prowess. The Cut is a no frills detective story about a tough man in a tough situation. It’s the kind of tale that few can do as well as Pelecanos, and it’s more proof that he’s among the very best American writers working today.

Spero Lucas is a Greek kid from Washington D.C. who served in Iraq and then came home to a life as a private investigator. It’s not a bad gig. He sets his own hours, spends time with his brother and his mother and gets lucrative work from a D.C. defense attorney. When Lucas’ keen eye for detail helps the son of an imprisoned crime boss avoid jail time, the boss offers him a job: find out who’s been stealing big shipments of drugs from their drop-off points. Lucas agrees and asks for his usual cut of 40 percent of the recovered property. In this case, that amounts to just over $50,000.

What begins as a simple mystery of stolen goods quickly begins to unravel into a chaotic mass of murder, secrets, crooked cops and threats. Spero finds himself in deeper than any of his investigations have ever taken him. It’s almost like he’s back in Iraq. Suddenly, he’s at war.

The Cut as a title begins as a reference to the percentage Spero charges for his services, but as the novel becomes more dangerous, and Spero wades deeper into a treacherous game, it also becomes a reference to the psychological wounds he already bears, and the new ones beginning to make their mark as a simple job becomes a fight for his life.

There’s nothing complicated about The Cut. It’s a detective story, and it works well as a detective story, but it’s not ornamented with any of the tired gimmicks that dominate modern crime thrillers. What makes The Cut special is the way the tale is told.

Few crime writers working today can muster the simple narrative power Pelecanos brings to a work. It’s a perfect balance of hard-boiled punch and literary sophistication, without any sense of lingering too long on either. The result is a story that’s taut, gripping and addictive.

The Cut cements George Pelecanos as a titan among American crime writers. This book will keep you up late reading and then stick in your head like a bullet.

The Cut is in bookstores August 29

Advance Reading Copy courtesy of Little Brown

BOOK REVIEW: 'Spycatcher' by Matthew Dunn

2011-08-18T23:34:00.001-05:00

Spy thrillers are legion in the world of popular fiction, like serial killer stories or military adventures. This one is receiving much of its buzz based on the fact that the author, Matthew Dunn, is an actual ex-agent for British intelligence, who is using his real name and his real experiences to pen fictional accounts of spies.

Spycatcher is Dunn’s debut, and the debut of his hero, Will Cochrane. Cochrane is more than just your average spy. He is Spartan, an elite agent put through a one-man training program to become the most highly skilled and dangerous operative the British have. So basically, he’s James Bond, but the suave, the card playing and the vodka drinking go out the window from page one.

Dunn’s hero is a hardened soldier, a warrior trained to carry out the mission and not stop until the job is done. This particular job begins when a long-time Iranian informant dies, and Cochrane himself is nearly killed in the ensuing scuffle with terrorists. With the help of higher-ups in both MI6 and the CIA, Cochrane uncovers a massive terrorist conspiracy centered around one man: Meggido, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general who is a legendary force in the spy world. And what’s more, he might just be the man responsible for a dark event in Cochrane’s own past. With a ticking clock winding down to a massive terrorist event, Cochrane has to bring Meggido down or risk the death of hundreds.

Spycatcher has all the trappings of a conventional spy thriller – exotic locales, shadowy meetings, even a damsel in distress (of sorts). Where it breaks away from the rest of the genre is in the rawness of Dunn’s writing, something that’s both a blessing and a curse for the novel.

You can tell that Dunn has been in the spy game, and the reason you can tell is that a great many moments, characters and descriptions in Spycatcher are seen through a different lens than that of any other thriller author working today. Dunn’s world is one filled with shadows. People aren’t fully formed, places are seen in terms of what they mean to the mission. In Will Cochrane’s eyes, everything is the objective, everything is getting the job done. This is the result of Dunn’s attempt to bring a truer version of a spy story – where things are much more businesslike and done with much less finesse – to life.

The downside of this, of course, is that it doesn’t always make for the most entertaining reading. The often half-formed, shadowy men that populate Cochrane’s world become wooden characters. The locales become names and not places. The mission becomes a roadmap and not an experience. Most of the time the story’s simple uniqueness of spirit shines through, but occasionally it gets lost in the attempt to make things seem more real.

Spycatcher is an entertaining and fast read, but one that’s definitely the work of a beginner. If Dunn can learn how to be a writer telling a spy story rather than a spy writing down what it’s like to be a spy, then his next works will be even better. As it is, his debut effort still manages to pump out a good bit of fun.

'30 Minutes or Less,' funny but not exactly fulfilling

2011-08-18T23:33:00.000-05:00

Jesse Eisenberg and Aziz Ansari working to rob Michael Cera of all his movie deals.

Take an everyday schmuck, put him in way over his head and watch him fight and wise crack his way out. It’s a common comedy device these days, and 30 Minutes or Less is another addition to the heap of new slacker comedies that feature very ordinary characters in very extraordinary situations.

The comedy of this flick lies in both the absurdity of its situation and in the absolute panic of its characters as they try to muddle their way through a series of bizarre hurdles. The comedy works (most of the time), but the rest of 30 Minutes or Less might leave a bad taste.

Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) is a pizza delivery boy who hates his job, where people are constantly trying to cheat him out of money by ordering pizzas that he can’t possibly deliver in his company’s promised “30 minutes or less” time frame. He kills time hanging out with his best friend Chet (Aziz Ansari) and Chet’s sexy sister Kate (Dilshad Vadsaria), who he’s had a crush on since high school. It’s never made clear why he’s just a pizza boy, or what he’d rather be doing, but what is clear is that it’s something else.

While Nick is a slacker who at least seems to have some semblance of a brain in his head, there are two other slackers in this flick unburdened by intelligence. Dwayne (Danny McBride) is an unemployed half-wit constantly berated by his lottery winning, ex-military father (Fred Ward). When a stripper gives him the idea that he could help his father into the grave and get his million dollar inheritance a little early, Dwayne enlists the aid of his friend Travis (Nick Swardson) to raise $100,000 to pay a hitman to get rid of Daddy. Their plan: find some guy, strap a bomb to his chest and force him to rob a bank under the threat of blowing up at any moment.

Their unlucky victim happens to be Nick, who’s just trying to deliver a pizza when he gets knocked out cold and strapped to high explosives. He’s given a 10 hour timer and a threat that he can be blown up by a speed dial detonator at any moment, and set on his merry way to get the money. Naturally, the first person he goes to for help is Chet, and the two set off on a chaotic odyssey of desperate crime, laughing all the way.

Well, not exactly, but close enough. The comedy in films like this comes from the crazed reaction that comes when ordinary people get bombs strapped to their chests, and it’s here that 30 Minutes or Less succeeds most. This is largely due to the efforts of Eisenberg and Ansari, who are both endearing enough to make the chaos of the situations work in their favor. The comedy flows through them, and they milk it for all its worth, particularly Ansari, who’s a scene stealer to the last.

The problem comes when you realize the movie has no real heart to back up the darkness of the jokes. We have no real reason to care about anyone other than the easy visual reference that tells us that Eisenberg and Ansari are the good guys and McBride and Swardson are the bad guys. The movie’s flow relies entirely on the careening criminal scenarios and the jokes that spin off them. After a while, you’re still laughing, but you don’t remember who you’re laughing at, and that’s the difference between a good comedy and great one.

Still, director Ruben Fleischer (who made the brilliant Zombieland) and writer Michael Diliberti manage the feat of taking a story about something ugly and making it into something funny. It’s crude and tasteless most of the time, but 30 Minutes or Less keeps you laughing, and even though it sometimes leaves you with a less than wonderful feeling about humanity, the laughs are worth the trip.

BOOK REVIEW: 'Cold Vengeance' by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

2011-08-05T11:31:00.001-05:00

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child write the kind of relentlessly fun books that some people feel guilty for reading. They’re filled with improbable plots, out of this world characters and concepts that push the limits of plausibility. But they’re also firmly grounded in the heart and passion of good storytelling, and that makes all the difference.

Cold Vengeance is just what the title suggests: a revenge story, but a revenge story layered with a search and sewn throughout with the seeds of mysterious shadows that will come to light in future books. It’s the kind of thing Preston and Child have gotten ridiculously good at over the course of the last five or six of their novels featuring preternaturally smart FBI Agent Aloysius X. L. Pendergast.

Picking up after the events of the last novel, Fever Dream (don’t worry, you can still follow it pretty well even if you didn’t catch that one), Cold Vengeance follows Pendergast as he attempts to prove that his wife Helen was never killed by a lion, as he always believed, but was murdered. After a near miss on a hunting trip in Scotland that sets him on the trail of a killer, Pendergast begins his journey for revenge, a worldwide chase that takes him from Scotland, to New York and to his ancestral home in Louisiana, and begins to reveal a conspiracy deeper than even he could have ever guessed.

The novel flits between the hunter (Pendergast) and the hunted, with occasional glimpses into the lives of Pendergast’s old pals Vincent D’Agosta and Corrie Swanson (a Pendergast collaborator from an earlier Preston and Child effort, Still Life with Crows) as they both attempt to help their determined friend and do a little digging of their own into the situation.

Cold Vengeance is a continuation of Preston and Child’s efforts to dig deeper into their favorite hero’s past, something that was kept hidden for several books, and which the character himself often avoided discussing. It’s a successful effort, in part because it offers a refreshing change from the Pendergast who traveled the world solving random crimes, but also because it gives a glimpse into a different side of the character. So many authors are content with letting their thriller heroes languish in the same existence over two dozen novels, holding themselves with same air of indestructibility or in over their head enthusiasm. Preston and Child are daring enough to roll the dice with a Pendergast consumed by his mission, driven by his desire to not only find vengeance, but to find the truth. His cool exterior begins to crack in this book, and even though it’s always fun to see everyone’s favorite Southern aristocrat crime solver be a snooty cracker of jokes, it’s both refreshing and surprising to see him in a darker mode.

Though the character is changing, the old Preston and Child fun is still there. The authors keep everything hurtling forward at a breathless pace, making this yet another of their books to keep you reading late into the night. And by the end, you’ll only want more.

Preston and Child’s books are seen by too many readers as a kind of guilty pleasure, as something they read to escape from more sensible books. But they shouldn’t be, because despite over the top concepts and superhuman characters, they’re still among the best thrillers you can find.

BOOK REVIEW: 'Carthage Must Be Destroyed' by Richard Miles

2011-07-29T15:36:00.000-05:00

When we remember ancient Carthage in modern textbooks and documentaries, it’s usually seen through the lens of Roman dominance, a warped shell of a culture with little more to do in history but fall to the greatest power of the ancient world.

Richard Miles takes the title of his detailed exploration of the rise and fall of the Carthaginian city-state from the declaration of Roman statesman Cato the Elder: “Carthage Must Be Destroyed.” Carthage and Rome can’t exist in the Mediterranean together. This town ain’t big enough for the both of us, so let’s run them out before they run us out.

It’s a tale as old as civilization. Cultures compete, they clash, the victor writes the histories. It is with this understanding that Miles sets out to chronicle the true history of the power that nearly toppled a young Roman Republic, using sources from throughout the ancient world to document the roots and ascent of Carthage, followed by its legendary clashes with Rome in the Punic Wars, and finally its devastation at the hands of the Romans in 146 BC.

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Carthage Must Be Destroyed is its completeness. Miles’ ambitious agenda is to chronicle not just Carthage as it relates to the rise of Rome (the dominant perspective of many historical texts), but Carthage as it relates to the whole of the Western world at the time. Carthage, he shows us, was a vibrant power all its own, and very nearly triumphed in the Punic clashes. It’s astounding, though not surprising, that Carthage’s tremendous influence over the Mediterranean world during its heyday is not looked upon with more significance. Miles is a gifted historian with the storytelling power to explain not only how this happened, but why it happened, and why it matters.

Though you might find yourself reading through the book’s early chapters with a desire to get on to the wars, the ultimate result of Carthage Must Be Destroyed is a rewarding, fully formed historical text with the power to reinvigorate interest in a lost empire and add color to the already vibrant field of ancient history. For fans of tomes devoted to the ancient Western world, “Carthage Must Be Destroyed” is sure to become indispensable.

BOOK REVIEW: 'Shock Value' by Jason Zinoman

2011-07-23T15:15:00.000-05:00

In the mid 1960s, horror films started changing. The creature features and camp classics of the past three decades were fading, and in their place were arising new and brutal visions of uncompromising vision. Wes Craven (known best now for his work on the Scream franchise) made his debut with the unflinching and bloody The Last House on the Left, George A. Romero produced his indie classic Night of the Living Dead and Roman Polanski lent cinematic and artistic credibility to the genre with the satanic tale Rosemary’s Baby. Together, this unlikely trio helped give birth to something Jason Zinoman calls “The New Horror.”

Shock Value is Zinoman’s attempt to produce a cohesive, analytical history of The New Horror, from its roots in the early films of Craven and Romero, to its peak in films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween and its eventual decline as films like Friday the 13^th became carbon copies and spoofs of an age of originality and primal creative energy.

Shock Value would be entertaining enough as a simple chronology of The New Horror age, charting its rise and fall through the films that made it great and the filmmakers who made it them. It would be interesting enough to hear how Tobe Hooper made The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with very little money in the midst of stifling Southern heat, or how Roman Polanski defied the odds and produced both a commercially and critically successful horror film with Rosemary’s Baby, or how John Carpenter defined a genre with Halloween. But Zinoman isn’t satisfied with stopping there.

Shock Value is a thoroughly detailed and well-written history of a fascinating segment of modern horror cinema, but it’s also a revelatory analysis of a genre that’s often taken for granted. Zinoman isn’t just interested in the popularity of these films, but in why they were popular, what they did right, and what was so scary about them. From the often overlooked Black Christmas to the perennial “scariest movie of all time” The Exorcist, Zinoman digs deep to find the details about the films, and the filmmakers, that matter most both to their initial success and their eventual status as classics.

The conclusions he reaches aren’t always original, but the way they’re presented is both unique and surprisingly insightful. Shock Value presents an understanding of the nature of evil and the masochistic pleasure that millions of viewers take from seeing it portrayed on film. But Zinoman is eloquent in pointing out that there’s more than masochism at stake. There’s a kind of psychological freedom at work in these films, and Shock Value is as much about the shock of that freedom as it is about the value of it.

Even if the depth of horror cinema isn’t something you’re interested in, Shock Value is an entertaining, highly accessible piece of commentary. Few writers could say so much in so brief a span, and few books could leave the reader having so much fun.

BOOK REVIEW: 'No Rest for the Dead,' or How 26 Bestselling Authors Can Manage Astounding Mediocrity

2011-07-05T02:12:00.000-05:00

No Rest for the Dead is a well-paced, competent thriller groaning under the weight of a marketing gimmick for the ages. Whatever promise it might have had is shrouded in the bulky cloud of writers looming over its 250 or so pages, and the result is a book that comes to a close with an emphatic shrug. It’s not an uncommon trait in the oversaturated thriller market, but it is both improbable and sad when you consider the all-star cast recruited to produce this book.

A roster of writers including Jeffery Deaver, Sandra Brown, J.A. Jance, Diana Gabaldon, Kathy Reichs, Faye Kellerman and R.L. Stine team up to tell the tale of the murder of Christopher Thomas, a notoriously arrogant museum curator who turns up dead and rotting in an iron maiden in a German museum in the late 1990s. Suspicion immediately lands on his wife, Rosemary. All the usual symptoms are there: he wasn’t exactly faithful, they quarreled right before he disappeared, and so on. Rosemary is tried, convicted and executed for the crime thanks to the work of Detective Jon Nunn.

Cut to ten years later. A memorial service is about to be held in memory of Rosemary Thomas. Jon Nunn’s life is in shambles. He drinks heavily, he lost his wife, and the thought that he may have wrongly convicted (and thus killed) Rosemary haunts him. As the anniversary of her death draws closer, Nunn sets out to re-examine the case, to find other suspects, to prove himself wrong and exorcise his demons.

It’s a short, lightning fast book, the kind that you almost don’t remember when you’re done, and this might be its chief selling point. You get to say you read something by all of these authors at once, you might even finish it in one sitting, and by purchasing it you support a good cause (more on that later). These are all (except for the not remembering part) good things when it comes to thrillers, but what makes No Rest for the Dead so disappointing is the squandered potential.

There’s nothing bad about this book, but there’s tragically nothing very good about it either. The characters are interesting enough to follow but probably not interesting enough to care about, the plot is sufficient but not gripping, the pace is fast but not white-knuckle all-nighter fast, and the writing is passable but so bland that you might forget you’re reading the work of dynamos in the field. Everything is editorially glossed over to flow together, and while individual styles do peek through now and then, the talent often gets lost in the shuffle.

Proceeds from the book are going to The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, which is in itself a reason to buy the thing (or you could just send them a donation), but good causes aside, this book could have really been something. Where’s the ambition? Where’s the seizing of the chance to get 26 of the hottest writers on the planet together and do something unforgettable? Where’s the most outrageously unpredictable and grandiose thriller plot in human history? No Rest for the Dead is by no means the work of hacks, but it could have been the work of masters.

INTERVIEW: James Boice, author of 'The Good and the Ghastly'

2011-06-30T01:47:00.000-05:00

Photo by Michael Turek, courtesy of Scribner

I reviewed James Boice's new novel The Good and the Ghastly here a little while back, and he was so happy with me being happy with his book that he was happy to do this email interview, which made me happy. Happy.

A Walrus Darkly: When did you start writing and what do you feel formed your style and your outlook as a writer?

James Boice: I’ve been writing all my life. I started making a more concentrated effort at it after I dropped out of college to do it. I figured since I dropped out of college to do it, I should probably do it. And so I did it.

Some writers who I blame for putting it into my head at 13-18 years old to do something so stupid and absurd and futile as devoting my life in late 20^th- early 21^st-century USA to fucking writing fiction: Jack Kerouac, Hunter Thompson, Jim Carroll, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, John Fante, Charles Bukowski. That’s who I was into as a teenager.

AWD: Your work is deeply tied to Northern Virginia, even if it's often a futuristic, crime-ravaged Northern Virginia. What's the significance of that part of America for you and why does it keep finding its way back into your work?

JB: Because I hate Northern Virginia. No I don’t. Yes I do. No I don’t. Yes I do.

In Northern Virginia is the quintessence of the United States of America: a carefully designed, affluent, soul-sucking, uber-convenient, super-striving, cut-throat, safe place in which nothing happens to you that you have not chosen to happen to you.

AWD: Critics have compared your writing to Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk. What writers have influenced you most?

JB: I don’t know if critics have compared me to them. Critics—whatever that means today—have compared me to some of the most outlandish contradictory people, some of whom I have never heard of. Sometimes I wonder where the hell they get this stuff. My publisher, however, has made those comparisons and that is only because publishers spend a lot of time coming up with such comparisons and find them very important to make, no matter how true they are. I have a complicated relationship with both those two writers, as a reader. Then again I have a complicated relationship with everything and everyone except my wife, who is my number one partner in crime. Other influences: Faulkner, Shakespeare, Cormac McCarthy, Don Delillo, Hemingway, Hubert Selby, Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, Bruce Wagner, Joyce Carol Oates, etc

AWD: What inspired The Good and the Ghastly?

JB: The life and 16-year-long search for Whitey Bulger which ended one week after the novel’s came out. Also George W. Bush's illegal, bloodthirsty, empirical “presidency.” I started the book in 2005. Whitey Bulger was free and, it turns out, living the high life on a beach Santa Monica, Osama bin Laden was living the high life in Pakistan, George W. Bush was living the high life in a big white house in Washington DC: A stink was in the air. Doom. Everywhere you looked there was some ghastly evil guy doing some horrible evil thing followed by a big cover-up to make sure he did not pay the price for it. WMDs, Tillman, Abu Ghraib, every word out of Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s mouth, and so on. The ghastly were ruling the earth. The good were pawns. It was a horrible fucking time. Just depressing as hell. I wanted to express everything I felt about the state of the world and the way the country had just become thoroughly fucking rotten after someone’s act of evil (9/11).

AWD: What was your process for writing this book? Does your working life vary from project to project or are you a more ritualistic writer?

JB: Process: Wrote it. Two years. Big, big crazy manuscript. Sprawling, weird. 1,200 pages. It sat around for two years. I edited it, rewrote it from top to bottom. Made it 288 pages.

Maybe .03% of what I write ever ends up published, in general. The process of how a book begins and how it ends up on a shelf is mystifying to me. So I have to say it varies from project to project. I have nothing figured out. Sometimes I think it’s all a fluke or a mistake that anything I’ve written has been published at all. I try to keep a regular schedule. If I don’t, I become unglued. “I write to keep myself from total madness.”

AWD: Your writing carries a great deal of brutality, both thematically and in terms of its depiction of violence. Is this something that comes naturally to you or is it a deliberate attempt to make some statement about violence, human cruelty or the corrupting influence of power?

JB: If I wanted to make a statement about anything, I’d write an essay or better yet just post something on Twitter—not write a novel. So I guess it’s something that comes naturally to me. It comes creeping out of my media-saturated upper-middle class pampered suburban crybaby white male American subconscious like a monster from a swamp.

AWD: Junior Alvarez, your protagonist in TGATG, is inspired by Alexander the Great to carry out his own conquests. Did you see this story as a timeless sort of parable for all conquerors or did that grow organically during the writing?

JB: Grew organically.

AWD: Much of Junior's life eventually becomes about paranoia, and he lives in a futuristic world dominated by corporate control. Why was paranoia an important theme for you to explore with this book?

JB: Probably because I am paranoid and the world we live in is corporately controlled.

AWD: What are you working on now?

JB: I have two novels finished since The Good and the Ghastly. Will they ever see the light of day? I don’t know. My agent situation is a little confusing and unclear at the moment, so I should probably get that resolved. I’ve been writing short stories recently. My head has been in about 1000 directions, 999 of them not good ones.

AWD: Any advice for aspiring writers?

JB: Read, write, and keep your balls to the wall.

AWD: If you had to sell TGATG to a reader in 140 characters or less, what would you say?

It’s about gangsters and vigilantes and the future and evil. It’s funny and warped and fucked up and good.

The Good and the Ghastly is in bookstores now.

BOOK REVIEW: 'Revenger' by Rory Clements

2011-06-23T15:58:00.000-05:00

Revenger is billed as a “novel of Tudor intrigue,” a cloak and dagger crime story set in the back corridors of power in Elizabethan England. Its star is John Shakespeare, the fictional brother of William Shakespeare and noted intelligencer to Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s legendary spymaster. It’s a foundation that carries immense historical charm, and though Revenger is not a perfect thriller, its charms go a good deal deeper than a conceptual hook.

Following up his acclaimed debut Martyr, which also stars John Shakespeare, Rory Clements begins Revenger by taking a classic thriller plot device and reframing it in Tudor England. After saving the crown in his last adventure, Shakespeare has left the spy game. He’s attempting to live a quiet life as a schoolmaster, spending his days with his students, his wife Catherine and their infant daughter.

The “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” hook comes when Shakespeare is almost simultaneously invited to the homes of two powerful nobles at once. The Earl of Essex, a dashing young lord who has won Elizabeth’s favor, wants Shakespeare back in the intelligence business, and enlists him to solve the mystery of the lost colony of Roanoke. Shakespeare is then summoned by Sir Robert Cecil, one of the queen’s highest councilors, who tells Shakespeare of what he believes to be a plot by Essex to take the crown for himself.

Shakespeare takes both jobs, working on the Roanoke mystery for Essex while simultaneously spying on him for Cecil. To add to his worries, threats from Spain are still rampant in the kingdom, his fervently Catholic wife may be secretly harboring a priest in the midst of Protestant England, and Shakespeare comes to realize his own family might be a target of the intertwining conspiracies at work in the kingdom.

Clements sets the tone for Revenger through deft attention to detail. His Tudor England is not just a vague historical veil achieved through name dropping and descriptions of clothing. City streets, weapons and manor houses all come to life under his pen. Every page is a chance at a new discovery, even in the thick of tension.

At first glance it might seem that Clements’ prose is an odd, even arcane, way to approach a thriller. But as you read Revenger you realize that might have been the point. Here is a writer with the guts to take his time, to make the reader be patient as he brings the world to life. Revenger feels like it might have been written as a fanciful Victorian adventure. It’s a fascinating combination of elegant language and shadowy machinations, and that makes it a rare find.

Clements’ courage to refuse to rush his book does make it suffer at times. There are sections of Revenger that drag for pages, and long pauses in the action as Shakespeare and his friends or enemies or accomplices take the time to converse about the goings on. The chats are still interesting, but at times the novel slows down to an almost unreasonable pace.

But if you are patient, the rewards of Revenger are great. It might take its time getting there, but it delivers the thriller goods and even takes the time to set up more adventures for John Shakespeare. For history buffs with an eye for palace intrigue, the next volume won’t arrive soon enough.

Revenger is available now from Random House.

BOOK REVIEW: 'The Good and the Ghastly' by James Boice

2011-06-12T11:34:00.001-05:00

The future James Boice imagines in The Good and The Ghastly is a sterile, uniform world in the full force grip of corporate whitewashing. It's 1,400 years in the future, and a nuclear war in the distant past (our present) hit the reset button on civilization. The world has returned to a modern existence, but now Visa owns everything, companies have generic names (Expensive Car Company, Expensive Hotel, and so on) and the past is seen only through a muddy, chaotic lens colored by the devastation that came before.

Into this semi-dystopian landscape Boice paints two figures whose primitive ambitions color their world like bloodstains. Junior Alvarez is a young criminal fresh out of juvenile detention. Inspired by his readings on Alexander the Great (Alejandro el Grande, he calls him), Junior makes a vow to conquer his own world, and to do it by any means necessary. In his first street-fight since his return to his Northern Virginia neighborhood, Junior critically injures another young man, leaving him brain damaged. The boy's mother, Josefina, is a dutiful landlady and parent until she learns the fate of her son. Then, without even knowing the name of his attacker, she becomes something else: a huntress.

The Good and the Ghastly is a dual portrait of Junior and Josefina as their lives rise and fall and swirl around each other. Both have an ultimate goal in mind, both have a kind of bloodlust coloring their every move, and both are somehow doomed by their respective quests. It's not an unfamiliar concept, but in Boice's hands it becomes new and gripping.

Boice's prose carries the kind of energy that you always want in good crime fiction. It's fast without being hasty, smart without being pretentious and brutal without being overwrought. His scenes and characters have power in themselves, but it's the prose that gives them weight, from Junior's post-empire paranoia to Josefina's desperate, violent hunt for the man who wrecked her family.

There's nothing more this book really needs, but Boice's rebuilt future is so fun to walk around in that you almost wish for more of it. His characters discuss the works of Bob Dylan (including ones he didn't actually write, like "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"), visit a giant statue of Garfield in the Midwest (historians postulate that it was used for religious purposes) and even see a kind of post-apocalyptic Pompeii, a whole town frozen in time by a nuclear blast filled with, well...us. It's a shame there's not more darkly comic moments of futuristic imagining, but in a way any more would cheapen what Boice is really writing about.

The Good and the Ghastly is not a book about the future, nor is it really a book about crime. It's a book about the brutality of the human spirit, the desperate, clawing side that will always lurk in us no matter what era we live in. It's a book about violence and power and revenge and what they do to us, packaged in a compelling crime story artfully told by one of the most magnetic voices in modern fiction.

The Good and the Ghastly is available June 14 from Scribner.

Advance Reading Copy courtesy of Scribner

'Super 8': Don't call it a throwback.

2011-06-11T12:22:00.000-05:00

At least they don't have to deal with Matthew Fox and a giant smoke monster...

There’s no doubting the nostalgic appeal of J. J. Abrams’ Super 8. Whole swaths of the film play like a dual love letter to Stand by Me and E.T., and with Steven Spielberg in his corner as producer, Abrams no doubt had plenty of material for crafting an admiring tribute to the sci-fi icons of his youth.

Prominent and entertaining though it is, honing in on the familiar, homage-laden elements of Abrams’ film is a mistake. The nostalgia is there, and it’s deliberately prominent, but Super 8 is more than just an effort to recreate the Spielberg glory days of fearless boys and misunderstood creatures. It’s also a film filled with thoroughly original, energetically new things, and one of the best science fiction movies of the last decade.

Summer has begun in the small town of Lillian, Ohio, and five friends are borrowing their parents’ camera to make a zombie movie. Abrams hones in on 13-year-old Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), a boy still struggling to live a carefree life after losing his mother months earlier in an industrial accident. Joe isn’t close to his father, Sheriff’s Deputy Jack Lamb (Kyle Chandler), so he immerses himself in sneaking out to make a movie with a cheap Super 8 camera.

The movie is the brainchild of Joe’s best friend Charles (Riley Griffiths), an ambitious chubby geek who inspires his friends to meet at an empty train station outside of town at midnight to shoot a key scene. When Joe finds out that his crush, Alice (Elle Fanning), is along for the ride, the trip becomes about more than the movie.

As they set up to film, a train rumbles in from the distance. Charles, anxious to get the free production value of the train in his shot, rolls camera. As his film plays out, Abrams’ film makes its leap from boyhood romance to creature feature. Joe watches in horror as a pickup truck swerves out onto the train tracks and crashes into the engine, derailing the train in a mass of twisted metal and explosions. The small band of filmmakers barely survives, and when the chaos ends, Joe glimpses something strange seeming to escape from one of the cars…a car bearing a United States Air Force logo.

The group escapes from the crash site just as military personnel arrive, and they make a pact to tell no one about what they saw. But it’s not as simple as just ignoring what happened, because soon things start disappearing in Lillian. Power lines vanish, car engines are lifted from their vehicles, dogs run away and people start to vanish in violent ways.

As their secret knowledge eats at them, the kids keep working on their movie even as the terror (and the military) creeps into the town. And all the while a roll of film is being developed, the film from their camera that night, film that holds a secret.

The magic of Super 8 is its ability to be so familiar, so reminiscent of its great forebears, and so filled with energy at the same time. It moves with the kinetic power of a completely unpredictable film, and yet it’s filled with things we’ve seen before: a father and son divided by tragedy, a boy nervously battling for the heart of a pretty girl, a monster on the loose in the night, a group of friends who are hurled into a world of danger. The difference is in the telling of the tale.

Abrams assembles his story, visually and otherwise, with the kind of slick drive of the glossiest modern blockbuster, but he packs it with enough heart to make it bigger than 10 of those blockbusters. It’s a labor of love, but it’s also a labor of intense filmmaking craft, and that makes all the difference.

None of this works, though, without a cast of kids that can carry a film with very few grownups running around, and every member of this little ensemble shines. Courtney and Fanning have the makings of genuine stars, Griffiths has the energy and presence of an actor twice his age, and the remainder of the quintet of boys (including Ryan Lee, Zach Mills and Gabriel Basso), give the kind of comic relief that these films are made for.

Super 8 is brilliant not just because it’s a well-crafted popcorn flick with lots of big budget pop, but because it’s got the kind of depth that allows it to work for nearly any viewer. It’s got the buzz of a childhood adventure story, the sizzle of a government conspiracy tale and the terror of a damn good monster movie, all in a tight, clean and sophisticated sci-fi package. Super 8’s nostalgic elements might be its chief selling point, but they’re only a small part of a very big picture.

'Bobby Fischer Against the World,' a Bit Like 'Rocky IV' with Chess Boards

2011-06-10T00:15:00.000-05:00

Bobby Fischer in one of his epic clashes with Boris Spassky in 1972. No, epic is not used sarcastically.

Bobby Fischer's mystique is not unique among the world of tortured, eccentric geniuses. It is unique in the world of chess. Fischer almost single-handedly focused international interest on the sport in the early 70s when he took part in a highly-anticipated, epic-scale match for the World Chess Championship with Russian champion Boris Spassky. It was billed as a Cold War battle of minds for the ages, the hopes and dreams and ambitions of superpowers hanging in the balance. In those tense moments of two men from two different worlds seated across from each other, a board between them, the world watched, and Fischer became a star.

But beyond the brilliant chess master, beyond the boy who could play like a man and the man who could play like no man had ever played before, was a troubled soul teeming with neuroses and fears. When the world turned their cameras on his narrow, intense face, Bobby Fischer became something more than a chess genius. He became a man battling with his own psyche, struggling to land the ultimate check-mate.

It is with this understanding of the Fischer's puzzling and often disturbing duality that Liz Garbus crafts her documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World. Her portrait of Fischer is at once flattering and condemning, embracing both his mastery of his chosen obsession and his consuming paranoia, fear and ultimate alienation of everyone and everything around him, even the country he once competed for.

Like most films about brilliant but ultimately doomed personalities, Garbus' contains both the meteoric rise and the inevitable downward spiral, documenting Fischer's self-imposed 20 year exile from chess, his forced exile from the United States and, finally, his degeneration into a raving, often frightening man who cares more about political conspiracy than chess.

In what is perhaps the film's most telling moment, an aging Fischer (shortly before his death in 2008) tells the camera that he never thought of himself as a chess-playing genius, but rather as a genius who plays chess. He talks about his fleeting dream of becoming a songwriter, and his confession to a successful songwriter that he can't ever seem to come up with anything. The songwriter replies "because you haven't lived." Fischer cackles and says "he was right."

Bobby Fischer Against the World is a portrait of a life dominated by a game that ultimately became consumed by it. For all his ravings, all his controversies, all his idiosyncracies, one thing is never in doubt in this beautifully done film: for Bobby Fischer, the chess pieces in his head never stopped moving.

'Too Big To Fail,' a compelling American fable

2011-05-26T20:14:00.000-05:00

Unless you’re in the banking industry, or someone with lots of money that’s heavily dependent on the machinations of the banking industry, a film about bankers, CEOs, federal regulators and other miscellaneous big wigs might seem like a pointless, bland exercise. Too Big To Fail, the latest offering from HBO Films that premiered Tuesday night, is proof that such a film can be dramatic, taut and downright exhilarating.

In the late summer of 2008, Wall Street was in a tailspin. Banking titan Bear Stearns had spiraled down into a cheap sale, and Lehman Brothers, an even larger financial behemoth, is headed for its own doom.

Lehman’s CEO Dick Fuld (James Woods) is doing everything he can to stem his company’s bleeding, including asking world’s richest man Warren Buffet (Ed Asner) for help. As the Lehman Brothers decline starts to spread into other companies, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson (William Hurt), Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke (Paul Giamatti) and Federal Reserve Bank of New York President Timothy Geithner are facing the pressure to come up with a solution before the entire United States financial system breaks down.

Of course, it’s all much more complex than that, but part of the brilliance of Too Big To Fail is its ability to take one of the most complex issues of our time and distill, entertainingly and intelligently, into a feature-length story spanning some of the most frantic days in recent American history.

Just as he did in his classic L.A. Confidential, director Curtis Hanson shapes the film into a series of interlocking portraits of determined, if desperate, American men. Paulson is the sleepless wanderer, searching constantly for solutions and finding only a set of new compromises. Fuld is the seasoned warrior in the fight of his life, clawing for victory with weapons he no longer knows how to use. Geithner is the young gun, energetic, battle-ready and bold. They each have their own struggles (Paulson perhaps most of all.), but it’s their mutual struggle that defines them.

But beyond the storytelling brilliance at work in Too Big To Fail, one of the most insanely talented casts in recent memory has been assembled to pull this off. None of the film’s gallery of bankers, Wall Street manipulators and federal honchos are portrayed as heroes or villains. The actors who walk in their shoes take pains to make each sympathetic against the epic proportions of what they’re facing, even as the film is pulling in the opposite direction, presenting a desperate struggle to find a band-aid for a gushing wound. Even among giants like Giamatti, Woods, Asner and Tony Shalhoub, Hurt is a star. His Henry Paulson is nothing like the somewhat slimy, bespectacled man that American met on CSPAN three years ago, but neither is his portrait one of sympathy. Each of these actors faces the portrayal of a real person that has been in one way or another demonized in the American public eye, and each of them deftly portrays a man (or, in the case of the wonderful Cynthia Nixon, woman) trying to find his way out of a maelstrom.

Too Big To Fail is the kind of film in short supply in Hollywood: a gripping, intelligent story that’s both topically and philosophically relevant but still maintains a level of entertainment that many blockbusters can’t boast. It might be a TV movie, but it’s also one of the best films of the year.

'EP' by The Anthemeers

2011-05-18T14:12:00.000-05:00

The Anthemeers are a rare occurrence among indie bands looking for a breakthrough in that they didn’t rush their first record out for the world to hear. They spent years recording, re-recording and honing their songs like daggers. EP has only six songs, but they cut deep.

The record’s opener, the haunting, slow-burning “Becoming Something,” begins with a murmur and builds into a dense, lyrical cloud of sound. Right away the band sounds big and lush and bright, and makes you want more.

What follows is an eclectic blend of folk, indie rock, spiritual and primal tunes ranging from the blues-tinged “Coyote” to the deeply-layered, symphonic “Peace.” Every track has a healthy dose of heart and care. You feel the work in the tunes, but you also feel something organic at work, a primal expression of a band in its earliest stages already grasping at bigger things.

EP is also unique among debut releases for another reason: The Anthemeers really sound like a band. The trinity of vocalists (Josh Jackson, Kevin Dixon and Nathan Huff) intertwines like brothers, and the sounds – ranging from the twang of a banjo to the hum of a tuba – all come together in a chorusing wall of sound that’s both synergized and delightfully odd.

EP is a portrait of a band that’s still growing, but already much further along than most acts in their league. Listening to it is hearing a band clawing toward transcendence, and very nearly reaching it.

EP is available now. To get the record or learn more about the band, visit www.theanthemeers.com.

'Not Dead and Not For Sale' by Scott Weiland

2011-05-17T03:07:00.000-05:00

Not Dead and Not For Sale is a portrait of an artist taking stock after two decades of hard living. Scott Weiland (frontman for Stone Temple Pilots, then Velvet Revolver, then Stone Temple Pilots again) is widely known for both his flamboyant stage persona and his stream of run-ins with the law through years of on and off drug use. In this remarkably lucid and emotive memoir, he doesn’t seek to hide any of it, or glitter his addictions with mystique, but with the help of liberal use of family photos, lyrics from his own tunes and a rough-edged book design, Not Dead and Not For Sale feels at times less like a book and more like one of the greatest performances of one of rock’s greatest frontmen.

It’s a slim book, but Weiland leaves little untouched in his life. He begins with his childhood, his roots in rock and punk music, his often rough teenage years, his college explorations and his final passion: music. He chronicles the meteoric rise of Stone Temple Pilots (including how they got the name), tells the stories behind many of his lyrics (yes fans, “Too Cool Queenie” is about Courtney Love), and documents his fall from grace in not one, but two bands, not to mention failed marriages, rehab stints, jail time and trying to be a good father in the midst of his chaotic existence.

Weiland juggles his moments of absolute triumph (the births of his children, the success of STP’s early records, his passionate second marriage) with all the public and private tragedies that have plagued him, but never does the book seem like the work of a sad sack seeking redemption, or even a man who’s stared into the abyss trying to teach his legions of fans a lesson in just saying no. Part of the book’s charm is Weiland’s unflinching honesty about his own (still developing) world. He doesn’t have the answers. He’s still looking for them, and as the title suggests, Not Dead and Not For Sale is an extension of that search. It’s a declaration that he’s survived, and he’ll keep surviving.

Matched with this kind of brutal but unpretentious truth is an honest writing style that melds Weiland’s natural talent for imagery with his desire to keep his checkered past unvarnished. Things that would sound self-indulgent from another rock star memoirist seem more like a confessional for him, and even the passages chronicling his darkest moments still manage the same kind of raw charm that’s made him one of the great live performers of his age.

Kurt Cobain is hailed as a revolutionary, Eddie Vedder as an activist. In the eyes of the rock world, Scott Weiland is nothing so grand. His legend is rooted in darker, more muddled stuff, and he knows it. But he doesn’t want to apologize. Not Dead and Not For Sale reads like a performance, but it might just be the most honest and passionate performance of Weiland’s career. It would have been easy for this book to be another clichéd memoir of rock excess. What it is instead is the story of a man still chasing his passions and fighting his demons, and that takes it beyond the realm of tabloid juice and transforms it into something inspiring.

'Twenty Thirty' by Albert Brooks

2011-05-10T02:35:00.000-05:00

Twenty Thirty is a novel set in a world that seems almost unimaginable now, one in which many of our greatest problems seem to have been solved. But Albert Brooks’ imagined future is far from a utopia, and it’s at the tipping point between everything being fine and everything nose diving toward hell that Brooks begins his story.

Cancer was cured in 2014, and this and other medical advances have made 80 the new 40. Baby Boomers who should have died decades prior are still kicking, and the generation that followed them is even more active and vibrant. This means, among many other things, that more active seniors are walking the Earth than anyone ever imagined. Healthcare has become so expensive that it’s nearly impossible to get when you really need it, and social security expenditures have skyrocketed. For the first time, the younger generation is faring worse than their forbears, and some of them are very, very pissed off about it.

Violence against the “olds” – shootings, beatings and the like – is just beginning to become a national issue in the United States when a bigger problem literally shakes the earth. A massive earthquake hits Los Angeles, leveling the city. The flattened site of the Rose Bowl becomes a mass dormitory for exiled Californians, diseases dormant in America for centuries are popping up amid the lack of sanitation, and the new half-Jewish president has to find a way to rebuild one of his largest cities with a treasury already irrevocably in the red.

This is Brooks’ not quite apocalyptic backdrop, on which he weaves the stories of the president, his charming new secretary of the treasury, a young man on a crusade to restrict the power of “olds,” a cancer-curing scientist trying to solve a new set of problems, an Asian businessman trying to reform healthcare and a senior citizen stuck in the tented ruins of the Rose Bowl while the government tries to sort out what’s left of his home city. It’s an ambitious intermingling of worldviews, passions and deep concerns with the kind of well-developed scope that few first novels have. Even if the scenarios played out in Twenty Thirty seem unlikely to those of a certain political, moral, economic or scientific disposition, the internal conviction of the story keeps the pages turning.

Brooks also brings his skill with dialogue, which pervades his films, to bear on his prose. When the characters speak, each speaks with a dynamic and genuine voice, from the wise-cracking president to the overzealous equal rights crusader. Where Brooks reveals his status as a new novelist is in his narration. It’s the kind of stripped down, plot-only prose that would weigh down or even doom a lesser storyteller. Luckily, Brooks has the personality and confidence of story to outweigh such a fault, and as obviously unadorned as Twenty Thirty seems at times, its lack of narrative varnish almost becomes one of its charms.

Most impressive of all is Brooks’ ability to somehow craft an entertaining and even funny book out of such a grim scenario. He never glosses over what his characters are facing, and yet Twenty Thirty ranges from being a wise amusement at worst to an inspired joy at best. It’s at once prophetic and satirical, and though (mechanically, at least) it often seems like the work of a beginner, the insight and moxie of the overall work makes it shine.

'Bullfighting' by Roddy Doyle

2011-05-05T23:57:00.000-05:00

Bullfighting, in the simplest terms, is a book about men. Each of the 13 tales in Roddy Doyle’s new collection give a different, often grim, view of manhood, from intense insecurity to deep fear to simple, unapologetic relief, all told in Doyle’s distinct witty voice that brims with insight into the struggles, the bullfights, of modern men.

The stories range from funny to heartbreaking to simply disturbing, but all are at their core a simple depiction of domestic life. Doyle reveals himself to be a master of the mundane, weaving entire tales out of a single exchange or observation.

In “Blood,” a man begins to realize that he wants his meant cooked rare, then begins to realize he wants it altogether raw. In “The Joke,” a man sits alone and thinks of the days when he could make his wife laugh, plotting the best way to finally do it again. In “The Slave,” perhaps the most powerful in the collection, Doyle tells the story of man who finds a dead rat in his kitchen, and spends the next several days obsessing over what might have happened if his young son had discovered the rodent instead. He feels robbed of his power, of his ability to protect his own house, and his anxiety makes up the core of the story that is essentially a fight for a man to take back that most precious thing: comfort.

Doyle’s confident, aggressive prose hones each story to the hardness of a bullet. Every tale is like taking a punch, the kind that makes you feel alive. Bullfighting is not a collection of happy stories to read in a cozy chair. It’s a book that makes you grip the pages tighter as you read, not just because the stories are so deftly told, but because each one is in its own way universal. Doyle’s leading men are for the most part faceless, yet that seems to be their greatest virtue, because they are any man, the man getting sick as he ages, the man losing his taste for his wife, the man confused about his relationship with his now grown up children. They’re all here, and at times the resemblance to the people we know is eerie.

But the appeal, the powerful presence, of Bullfighting, likes in more than the inherent relevance of each tale. Doyle weaves each one like a rollercoaster, taking his characters and his readers from tears to barks of laughter and back again, and each story has its own alchemical blend of emotion. Bullfighting is a genuinely masterful expression of the short story form, an anthology of tales rich with passions and battles, told by a dominating talent.

This is a Book Review of 'This is a Book' by Demetri Martin

2011-04-22T02:03:00.001-05:00

Fans of comedy books might almost instantly draw comparisons between This is a Book and Woody Allen’s classic comedy texts. It’s a fair parallel. Like Allen before him, Martin presents a bemusedly skewed version of the world, all bent to meld with the ironies and ambiguities of the information age. Allen envisioned a moose mingling with a married couple dressed as a moose and an alien race demanding that the population of Earth do their laundry. In This is a Book, Martin throws out such gems as a set of frequently asked questions a genie gives to his lamp’s new owner, and a conversation between an alien and a human on what exactly pets are, if not slaves.

Known well among hipsters, sardonic teens and even intellectuals (the book jacket includes an endorsement by Malcolm Gladwell) for his standup specials and his delightfully oddball Comedy Central show, Important Things with Demetri Martin, it would be easy for Martin to simply recycle his stage show into book form, to present something that’s little more than a volume of gags from his live act that can be easily pored over while on the john. This is a Book has all the things fans love about Martin’s standup, to be sure, but the author also embraces the book form to take his humor in bolder directions.

All the Martin hallmarks are here: doodles of things like what varying lengths of beard mean and what a Christian beach towel looks like, ironic stating of the obvious (it’s called This is a Book, for God’s sake) and observant one-liners that are both zany and freakishly wise (“CHALLENGE: To wear a visor and appear credible at the same time.”).

But there’s something more at work in This is a Book. Though most of the “chapters” or just snippets of gags or conceptual flights of fancy, some of them are full-blown stories with a solid voice and the kind of bizarre insight we’ve come to expect from Martin’s comedy. Also present are plenty of gags that just don’t work when you’re saying them. But they work when you read them, and Martin proves here that he’s just as funny in prose as he is live.

This is a Book is the perfect companion for any Demetri Martin fan, and the perfect introduction/antidote for someone who isn’t yet a fan. It’s the kind of book that would be just as satisfying in one sitting as it would be over weeks, reading a Demetri-ism a day like some strange new platitude system. This is a Book is more than its title; not just a book, but a good book.

This is a Book is on sale April 25.

Advance Reading Copy courtesy of Grand Central Publishing

'The Conspirator,' an American parable

2011-04-22T00:09:00.000-05:00

The Conspirator is a film set in 1865, but its message, its rhetoric and its arguments could just as easily be transposed to 2011. There’s little doubt that director Robert Redford intended this, but what makes the film particularly impressive is that it manages to take an argument that’s literally at least a century and a half old (in all honesty it’s surely much older than that) and give it fresh voice in the guise of a classically conceived courtroom drama.

Everyone knows that John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre on the evening of April 14, 1865. Most people remember that Booth met his end in a barn in Virginia, but often forget that several other conspirators were tried before a military tribunal, found guilty of conspiring to kill Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward, and hanged in the summer of 1865.

Among those conspirators was Mary Surratt, a Southern woman running a boarding house in Washington D.C. where the conspirators met to plan the crime (several of them lived there). Though Surratt was placed on trial as having an equal role in the assassination, it’s still very much a question just how much she knew.

The Conspirator documents the trail of Surratt, played here by Robin Wright in top form, as she is defended by the reluctant lawyer and former Union solider Frederick Aicken (James McAvoy). Though initially convinced of her guilt, Aicken is urged by a US Senator (Tom Wilkinson) to dig deeper, and soon discovers that the truth is not so easily arrived at. As the trial goes on, and the lack of judicial process becomes more and apparent, Aicken’s job becomes less about Surratt’s innocence or guilt and more about the moral imperative of a fair trail for everyone, even as he is alienated from his best friend (Justin Long), his girlfriend (Alexis Bledel) and a man he once respected, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline).

It sounds like it might be boring, but in Redford’s hands it becomes both a convincing costume drama and a parable about American liberties that’s less about sides of the political aisle and more about a search for universal truth. Aicken hates that his president is dead, hates the people who dead, but knows that when all rationality and rule of law falls away, the chaos that’s left is worse than the death of any leader. As he sinks deeper into the quagmire of the case, fighting against the ever-increasing futility he faces, he fights to keep hold of the belief that, guilty or no, Surratt deserves true justice, not a quest for vengeance against a fallen icon.

Authentically photographed and well-acted, The Conspirator is a film in the tradition of 12 Angry Men and Inherit the Wind, a film that’s less about the acts and more about the effects of the acts as they ring through history. This gives it a timeless quality that rivals even the weightiest of its predecessors. Never does it feel dull, or forced or overwrought, though Redford sometimes fudges details of Surratt’s imprisonment and treatment.

McAvoy and Wright must carry the movie together, and the young McAvoy does a stellar job of sticking with his older, more experienced counterpart. Wright’s dignified restraint and stalwart self-assuredness are the perfect foil for McAvoy’s uncertainty, determination and simple passion for finding the truth, regardless of what it may be. Wonderful supporting performances are also turned in by the likes of Wilkinson, Kline and Evan Rachel Wood, who is wonderful as Surratt’s fiery daughter Anna.

There’s little to complain about when it comes to The Conspirator. It’s the kind of film that stopped showing up in theatres long ago, the straight drama that’s been replaced by thrillers and blockbusters of the more explosive variety. A lesser filmmaker would have attempted to make this into something John Grisham would construct, a breakneck legal thriller with lots of intrigue and suspense. Redford chose to go another way, and The Conspirator is all the better for it.

'The Pun Also Rises' by John Pollack

2011-04-14T23:29:00.000-05:00

John Pollack’s new book The Pun Also Rises is more than just a defense of the humble pun, considered by many to be among the lowest forms of humor. It’s a study of the evolution of the English language, how words came to have two meanings in the first place, how our brains deal with double entendres and just how and why we find things like knock knock jokes, “Swifties” and other wordplay funny in the first place.

Pollack, a former champion of Austin’s world famous “O. Henry Pun-Off,” begins by examining just how a pun comes together, in all its various forms. He examines the origin of many of the most famous varieties of pun (yes, they have names), how they evolved, and how they’re assembled in the brain. He also provides plenty of examples, among them: “’Next time, I should probably use a chair to fend off Leo,’ the lion tamer sighed off-handedly.”

After establishing the basic structure of everyone’s favorite kind of wordplay, Pollack examines the history of the pun, from its roots in the ancient world to its heyday in the Shakespearean age to its decline and denigration. And then it really gets interesting.

The Pun Also Rises would be entertaining enough if Pollack just stuck to the history and evolution of the pun, and threw in a few choice examples for added chuckle. But he goes further, delving not only into how puns are constructed, but why they work on us at all. It’s a curious thing for your brain to consider when someone hands you one word with at least two meanings. Strange things happen up there, and Pollack explains how and why in an engaging, plainspoken fashion peppered with puns of his own.

The Pun Also Rises is one of those simple pleasures of the book world: a thoroughly entertaining book that’s also academic, so you can feel smart and learn new jokes at the same time.

'The First Clash' by Jim Lacey

2011-04-09T00:40:00.000-05:00

Marathon is inarguably among the most pivotal battles in the history of Western civilization. It’s also one of the most shrouded in legends and ancient historical mist. In The First Clash, Jim Lacey seeks not only to break down the myths and speculations surrounding the battle through a mixture of contemporary accounts and military historiography, but also to bring both sides of the battle – the Greek and the Persian – into sharper focus.

It’s a surprisingly slim volume for an exploration of one of the ancient world’s most important engagements, and as a result much of The First Clash is a build-up, a history of the rise of the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states, as well as a history of the military power that each packed in the age leading up to the battle and how events led to the pivotal clash at Marathon. The story of the actual battle, as well as its immediate aftermath, is reserved for a thin section at the tail end of the book.

This is irritating only to the extent that it means the book doesn’t live up to its subtitle: “The Miraculous Greek Victory at Marathon and Its Impact on Western Civilization.” The impact is almost to obvious to bother being explored, and as a result Lacey’s treatment of it is reserved for until the very last. What remains is a contextualizing of the battle itself.

It’s in that contextualization that Lacey shines, explaining how the growing might of the Persian Empire and the loose alliance of the Greeks came together, as well as how the Greek and Persian systems of government and even their fighting systems came to bear on the process. From a meticulous examination of how exactly the Greek phalanx would have functioned to an understanding of just how and why the Persians swelled and expanded as they did, Lacey manages to prove himself an insightful yet concise historian with an eye for detail.

For fans of a more sociological kind of history writing, The First Clash might seem incomplete, or even disappointing. But for those looking for a stirring volume of military history that delves deep into a legendary clash, Lacey’s work is a highly entertaining, lightning-fast read.

'Your Highness,' unworthy of any throne

2011-04-08T01:38:00.000-05:00

The're watching this year's Oscars. It's not pretty.

If there’s a secret to making a good spoof movie, it lies somewhere in finding a way to deliver the same good the films you’re spoofing did. A war spoof has to have choice explosions. A horror spoof has to have a suitably creepy setting. And a fantasy spoof like Your Highness needs to have all those things that make an epic fantasy fun: swordfights, creatures, sweeping visuals and a general sense of heroism and daring.

Your Highness has some of these things, but what makes it a misstep is not what it lacks, but what it has too much of: overly crude, repetitive jokes, cursing for cursing’s sake and the kind of derivative plot that makes you wonder if they stole it from a junior high school student’s Dungeons and Dragons notebook.

Danny McBride (Tropic Thunder) co-wrote and stars in the flick as Thadeous, a lazy prince who would rather spend his time drinking and whoring than embark on epic quests. The opposite is true of his brother Fabious (James Franco), who has just returned from another triumphant victory with a new bride to be, the beautiful Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel). On the day of the wedding, the evil warlock Leezar (Justin Theroux) crashes the party and abducts Belladonna, leaving Thadeous and Fabious no choice but to go off on a quest to rescue Fabious’ love and slay the villain. Along the way, they meet monsters, wise wizards and the sexy but standoffish Isabel (Natalie Portman), who might be a better fighter than either of them could ever dream of being.

The plot is basic, and theoretically that’s a good thing, since it means there’s plenty of time to set up gags along the way to the resolution of the story. Where Your Highness fails is the gags themselves. Every one of them is a variation of a sex joke, a toilet joke or a drug joke, and after a while they stop finding ways to make it seem clever. What begins as chuckle-worthy devolves into boring and redundant. It’s not that it isn’t funny anymore, it’s just that you’ve heard the joke already…about 15 times, and it’s lost its zing.

On top of that, the good just aren’t delivered. The action sequences (apart from a carriage chase that is actually pretty cool) seem to just be roads to more zingers about the male anatomy or opportunities to somehow work pot smoking or breasts into the plot. No offense to pot smoking or breasts, but it just gets tiresome after a while. What’s the point of posing an elaborate fantasy setting and the ability to get really imaginative if you’re just going to squander it on jokes one might hear in a movie half this size?

The case (even McBride, who had this idea in the first place) is wasted on this flick. Franco seems to be going through the motions with almost as much boredom as his Oscars hosting gig. Portman is just as capable an actress in this film as she is in any film, but it’s wasted on what she’s left to do, and Theroux isn’t convincing enough to make his jokes matter.

Perhaps the greatest sin of this film, though, is its failure to pay homage to the genre it claims to spoof. It doesn’t feel like a fantasy film. It feels like a stoner film in chain mail, and a stoner film that’s not very funny at that. It’s not that the content is objectionable, or that the people involved are talentless, or that the execution of the jokes fails. It’s that the whole thing is just an empty exercise in cursing, penis humor and clichés, and by the end the whole film feels like a waste of time.

Matt’s Call: It’s a cross between Lord of the Rings and Pineapple Express that fails to be even half as good as either of those films. I could endorse it, but since you’d probably have to be on an illegal substance in order to enjoy it, I just can’t.

Where I've Been

2011-04-03T23:13:00.000-05:00

I know my faithful readers (all four of you) might be wondering why the stream of posts that previously wound up here have slowed to a trickle. Well, there's an explanation, and it's not that I've been lazy.

Two weeks ago I was offered a chance to begin contributing to NerdBastards.com, a growing nerd culture blog where I can write about superheroes, time travelers and Star Wars to my heart's content. I accepted, and a week later I was made a full-time writer.

This means that I will have less time to devote to A Walrus Darkly, but by no means is this site going away. My weekly movie reviews, as well as all my book reviews, will still be here every time I write them, and I've been told by NerdBastards' illustrious editor that I should feel free to repost anything from there here.

So, that covers it. In the meantime, I encourage you to visit and subscribe to NerdBastards.There's lots of fun nerdy stuff besides what I write, but if you're exclusively in love with my work, you'll probably find an average of two new bits of writing a day from me.

So, that explains it, I suppose. Happy reading.