Bywater Reviews

Up In the Air

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 16:00:00 +0000

George Clooney is not his usual charming, humourous self in the 2009 film Up in the Air. He plays a corporate road warrior, whose job is to lay people off and whose goal is to get to ten million frequent flyer miles without having any meaningful human contact. Things get weird when his company decides to start doing its work by teleconference, he meets a woman in a hotel bar who he begins to care about and his life starts to change. But at the end, nothing has changed, and he's sadder for it. It's a thoughtful story, even if it doesn't end well. Walter Kirn’s novel, interestingly, tells an rather different, and perhaps deeper, story, in which our point of view character's flaws are more visible, though it doesn't make him more likeable.

RED / RED 2

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Sat, 20 Dec 2014 00:39:00 +0000

RED (2010) is yet another comic book of a movie. Bruce Willis is a retired CIA troubleshooter and assassin who Knows Too Much and now They Are Out To Get Him. He gathers his old buddies --- John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman --- plus a former Russian adversary, plus the girl at the other end of the phone, Mary-Louise Parker. They go off and start causing trouble, including shooting up a campaign rally. Lots of laughs. Things blow up. Great fun all around.

It was followed up by RED 2 in 2013, which was a satisfying sequel to a very entertaining movie. Willis’s relationship with Mary Louise Parker's character continues to morph --- he's happy to be retired from being a spy, she wants to continue the adventure they had when they met --- and they get thrown into rescuing Moscow from the threat of nuclear annihilation with the help of Helen Mirren, crazy John Malkovich, Catherine Zeta-Jones as a Russian General, and Anthony Hopkins as a seemingly-senile British scientist. All sorts of action, all sorts of amusement, lots of Zeta-Jones's legs and hair. We also get actual character development as Parker's character comes into her own.

Must remember to dig up Walter Ellis and Cully Hamner’s graphic novel which was the jumping off point for these.

The Last Theorem

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Wed, 17 Dec 2014 16:00:00 +0000

What happens when you take Arthur Clarke's "The Wind from the Sun", toss in a chunk of Fred Pohl's Heechee Rendezvous, add some of Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise and Pohl's Man Plus, top with some Olaf Stapledon, and then hit the frappé button? You get the not-quite-a-novel-but-more-a-series-of-sketches The Last Theorem from 2008. It's not as tight as the work that either of them has done in collaboration before, and I attribute that to their working on this solely by e-mail. Interesting ideas tossed hither and yon, but they don't hang together with anything like a completely coherent plot. That's too bad, since it's virtually the last work either of them published, and they were capable of so much better.

9 Chickweed Lane

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 16:00:00 +0000

For a number of years one of my favorite comic strips has been 9 Chickweed Lane, drawn by Brooke McEldowney. It's the story of a woman named Juliette Burber, a biochemistry professor and dairy farmer, her mother Edna, her daughter Edda, a ballet dancer, and their various friends and relations. McEldowney doesn't write down to his audience --- he assumes some knowledge of music, he casually dropped a riff on Rupert Brooke into a strip a while back, he doesn't bother to translate German word bubbles. He's also willing to take the time to actually tell long stories: In 2009, over the course of several months, Edda's boyfriend Amos (a cellist at Julliard) was travelling to a competition in Europe and Edda came along as his accompanying pianist. Complications ensued, but Amos won on merit. Chickweed Lane is part of my daily reading, and I wouldn't miss it.

The quality of storytelling reached what I thought was an apogee at the end of September 2010 when we finished eleven months of learning what Edna did in the war --- she was a spy for the USO, which is how she met her husband and Juliette's father. It was a wonderful story, with amazing subtlety and detail, and every morning for 271 weekdays and Saturdays (and frustration on Sundays) I woke up wanting to know what happened and was annoyed that I'd have to wait 24 hours to find out more. That story was collected by McEldowney in a stand-alone volume Edie Ernst, USO Singer -- Allied Spy.

What causes this reverie, though, is that we are now about a year into the parallel story of Edna's first husband, Bill, lost behind enemy lines between D-Day and the liberation of France. He's been shot, hit on the head, shacked up with a French resistance operative, outrun retreating Germans, and is suffering from amnesia. I have no idea how this is going to end, but it should be interesting, particularly given what we know about Edna's journey back in England and (after the war) in the States.

Veronica Mars

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Fri, 12 Dec 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Earlier this week, I reviewed the Veronica Mars television show, noting that it petered out rather than resolving plot points. The Veronica Mars movie from earlier this year has some of the same problem. We rejoin our characters at the time of their tenth high school reunion. Veronica, having graduated from law school is getting ready to embark on a career as a New York lawyer, far away from Neptune, California and its problems and dramas. But Veronica is dragged back into being a private detective because former bad-boy boyfriend Logan Echolls has been arrested for murder. This is a new plot, a new mystery to solve, and a satisfying soluton to the murder. At the end of the movie, Veronica decides to move back to Neptune, not to take up law there (rather than in New York), but to return to being a PI. Even worse, the sense we're left with at the end is that we're not having a standalone story, but rather a way to set up for a movie franchise or another TV series.

Veronica Mars

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 16:00:00 +0000

When our daughter mentioned the Kickstarter-funded movie Veronica Mars the other day, I sighed and said we'd add it to our Netflix list, even though I'd avoided the sixty-some episodes of the Veronica Mars television show, which she'd devoured when they were originally broadcast. Allie quickly waved me off the movie: the TV show is apparently a hard and fast prerequisite to fully understand the character interaction. So we hunkered down to start watching this series about a spunky blonde girl and I discovered it's actually pretty good. Picture Sam Spade being channeled by a seventeen-year-old high school girl in a California coastal town split firmly between the very, very rich Haves and the working-class Have Nots. Our heroine is also the daughter of the town's former sheriff, who was run out of office for failing to solve a high-profile murder. Solving that murder becomes the McGuffin for season one, since both Veronica and her father, now a private investigator, are convinced the guy who confessed didn't do it. The second season begins with the school bus returning kids from a field trip driving off a cliff on the Pacific Coast Highway into the sea. What actually happened and why? I was completely sucked in.

Having solved the second season bus-crash mystery with a death-defying finale on the roof of the luxury hotel in town, we leapt into the third season with Veronica heading to college, and a series of events that are complete mish-mashes. I believe the showrunners were attempting to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the mix in a setup for the fourth season. While the individual episodes are interesting, the whole falls flat. To make matters worse, the show wasn’t picked up for a fourth season, so the show doesn't end so much as cliff, and we were left dangling. (Yes, some of this is resolved in the movie, which I'll review next, but it's still frustrating.)

I was hired when television was desperate enough to scrape the top of the barrel.

--- Gore Vidal

Calder vs Michelangelo in 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Back in the winter of 2010, the Seattle Art Museum had two side-by-side exhibits, Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act and Michelangelo Public and Private.

The first celebrated twentieth-century American sculptor Calder, whose sense of play and joy comes through in every jot-and-tittle of his wire sculptures, his "joolry", and his mobiles --- a form he invented. Daughter Alexandra and I were reminded of the winter day we spent in the National Gallery half-a-dozen years ago, where we chatted with the guards about Calder's work, and they encouraged us to lie underneath Calder’s mobiles and watch them from below as they moved in the air currents. And certainly, we've also wandered the hills and fields of Storm King Art Center in the Hudson River valley and absorbed their collection of Calder's massive stabiles sitting among other sculptures. This Calder-only show gave us a chance to see his work in isolation, to see pictures of him at work in his studios in New York and Massachusetts, to see the range in size from tiny to nearly room-filling. We get to see Calder's sense of play, expressed in metal just as Brendan Gill expressed his sense of play in words below. Calder's fun shows through like the sunlight breaking through the Seattle cloud cover.

On the other hand, the Michelangelo show was a stupid idea. It was a scraped-together collection of Michelangelo's letters and sketches mostly aimed at showing his craftsmanship, but when viewed in contrast to Calder's work, it merely showed that Michelangelo was as much about self-promotion as artistry. Compared to Calder's light-hearted and literally light abstract ideas, Michelangelo's emphasis on anatomically-detailed painting and sculpture comes across as beautiful, but ponderous, particularly coupled with letters to and from him worrying about his reputation and legacy. We fled quickly.

Sometimes, and with reason, I boast of never having done an honest day's work in my life. An honest day's play, oh, that I have accomplished on a thousand occasions or ten thousand. But work implies a measure of drudgery and fatigue and these are states as yet unknown to me.

--- Brendan Gill on writing.

Man of Steel (revisited)

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 16:00:00 +0000

For the record, we went back and watched the part of Man of Steel after Kal-El gets off Krypton. I’d heartily objected to the first part of the movie earlier. While Kevin Costner as Clark Kent's Earth dad is a little over the top, and Zack Snyder's direction means the fight scenes go on forfreakin'ever, on the whole, the thing didn't suck. Alexandra Katherine, my local speaker-to-comics-fans, tells me that this is all in service of starting a Justice League movie franchise, since the Marvel Avengers movie was so successful. [Spoiler warning] I note that we will start that franchise with an interesting retcon: Lois already knows Clark’s secret identity.

The Inside Ring / The Second Perimeter

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 16:00:00 +0000

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

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

Particle Fever

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 16:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Gambit

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 16:00:00 +0000

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

Buzz

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Wed, 26 Nov 2014 16:00:00 +0000

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

Presentation Zen

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds (2008, 2nd edition 2011) is a fairly short, very dense book about constructing your public presentations with skill and care to get your message across. Because he's studied zen, and mostly lives in Japan, he takes a very introspective view of how to develop a presentation. Reynolds certainly has some interesting ideas about how to make compelling slides --- including not using any slides at all in some cases --- and echoes some of the points I made in a Toastmasters speech I gave a couple of years ago entitled "PowerPoint PitFalls". He also introduces a trick I want to try from Japan called pecha-kucha (Japanese for "chatter") in which you do a presentation by talking through 20 slides for 20 seconds each, with slides on a timer so you have to get your talk completely keyed and timed to the images behind you.

Despicable Me 2

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 16:00:00 +0000

A little while back, I favorably reviewed Despicable Me, and have now had a chance to see the inevitable 2013 sequel, Despicable Me 2, which is just as much fun. Former arch-villian Gru, now a devoted father, is recruited to join the Anti-Villain League. He and his partner, Lucy, succeed in finding the bad guy despite his secret identity. Unfortunately, a number of Gru's minions are kidnapped in the process, and they must be saved, too. And, because this is a fairy tale, Lucy and Gru fall in love. As much fun as the original, with Steve Carell continuing to display his breadth as the voice of Gru, Kristen Wiig hilariously playing Lucy, and Benjamin Bratt as the bad guy, El Macho.

(And I note from IMDb, it looks like the Minions are set to have their own movie.)

What If?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Randall Munroe is, of course, known for the often hilarious web comic xkcd, but he's also been answering odd questions on his web site for a number of years. The questions and answers are now gathered in What If?, subtitled "Serious Scientific Answers to Absurb Hypothetical Questions." Most questions merit a several page essay considering issues such as how a longbow archer is an arrow generator with a frequency of 150 millihertz and how many archers you need to shoot enough arrows to block out the sun. Or what happens if the earth suddenly stopped spinning. Or how much Force power Yoda can output. He uses a lot of entertaining footnotes, including a number of pseudo-Wikipedia [citation needed] notes, and some more-or-less accurate calculations. His explanations sometimes take notable shortcuts on clarity, but this is, after all, in the interests of amusement, not scientific rigor. There are also some interjections of questions he chose to not answer, like: "what is the total nutritional value (calories, fat, vitiamins, minerals, etc) of the average human body?" All-in-all it's a lot of fun, but may require a certain nerd sensibility to appreciate.

zen pencils

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 16:00:00 +0000

For a couple of years, the excellent Australian free-lance artist Gavin Aung Than has been producing a several-times-a-week cartoon, zen pencils, each illustrating an interesting quotation. Not only are the quotations inspirational, so is Gavin’s own story: he quit a regular job to do this because he was getting no emotional fulfillment out of commercial art. He landed a syndication contract with Universal Press, and now appears on their web site, though he's still available at his own site zenpencils.com. Now many of his cartoons are collected in a volume of the same name, which I bought not only because the work is good and the illustrations add amazing depth to the text, but to encourage Gav to continue doing this. I recommend it to you for the same reasons.

Superfreakonomics

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Superfreakonomics is Stephen Leavitt and Stephen Dubner's 2009 sequel to the wildly interesting 2006 Freakonomics. They discuss the economics of prostitution, how tracking bank fraud can also help you track down terrorists, and how the number of automobile deaths went up up in the months after September 11th, not because people were afraid to fly, but (as you find if you look at the numbers more closely and notice that they were clumped in the northeast and showed a larger-than-usual number of alcohol-related accidents) because of post-traumatic stress. Currently, they’ve followed up with Think Like a Freak, about the metaproblems of thinking outside the economics box, which is in the to-be-read pile.

Feed

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 23:49:00 +0000

I was wrong. I read the first bits of Mira Grant's Feed before the 2011 Hugo deadline, but not enough to actually get the feel of it. And so I voted for Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear first for that year's Hugo. However, now that I've finished it, I can report that Feed is just a killer book --- in both senses of the word. Grant managed to tell a really compelling story about life in the mid-twenty-first century after the zombies have come. She manages to get enough Joss Whedon-style snarkiness in, particularly in the interactions between our point-of-view character Georgia (as in "George Romero") and her brother Shaun (as in "...of the Dead"), and their sidekick Buffy. Together they run a web site where Georgia is in charge of the news (the "Newsies"), Shaun is in charge of exploring the outside world and occasionally chasing zombies (the "Irwins", who give out an annual award called the "Golden Steve-o"), [As a tossoff, she notes about Shaun, "A good Irwin can make going to the corner store for a candy bar and a Coke look death defying and suicidal." Those of you who have seen Shaun of the Dead will note that scene sounds eerily familiar.] and Buffy runs the poetry and story side of the house (the "Fictionals").

Then she leavens it with some swipes at thinly disguised versions of current political figures, like the congresswoman from Minnesota running for president who is described as a "publicity-seeking prostitute who decided to pole-dance on the Constitution for spare change." But it's not all lightness: she provides an excellent political thriller as a base, in which people die badly. And she manages to write it with some gut-wrenching passages like the quote below from Shaun's blog.

She rounded out the rest of the "Newsflesh" trilogy with Feed and Blackout, both also highly recommended.

"If you ever start to feel like I have a glamorous job, that maybe it would be fun to go out and poke a zombie with a stick while one of your friends makes a home movie for your buddies, please do me a favor: Go out for your hazard license first. If you still want to do this crap after the first time you've burned the body of a six-year-old with blood on her lips and a Barbie in her hands, I'll welcome you with open arms."

The Thirteenth Floor

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 16:00:00 +0000

The Thirteenth Floor was one of the computer-mediated-reality movies in 1999, the year which brought us The Matrix and Being John Malkovich, all of which foreshadowed Inception. Based on a Daniel F Galouye book, a software company builds an artificial-reality based in 1930s Los Angeles, and their chief scientist discovers that, in fact, they're in an artificial reality themselves. "Wait! You mean it's turtles all the way down?" Well, maybe. The casting and acting are excellent, since we have each actor playing a different version of themselves in each of the levels of reality. We have a very young Vincent D'Onofrio and the lovely Gretchen Mol and versatile Craig Bierko and Armin Mueller-Stahl putting characters on and off like cardigans. Not as well-known as its contemporaries, but a more subtle story.

$

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Fri, 07 Nov 2014 16:00:00 +0000

For this week's light Friday fare, we put together Warren Beatty and a very young Goldie Hawn in a 1971 caper movie named $. Beatty plays a bank security consultant who figures out how to empty the safe-deposit boxes of folks who are hiding ill-gotten gain. He's in cahoots with Hawn, playing the spacey hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold. Amusement ensues. Not great cinema, but worth an evening sitting on the couch with a bowl of popcorn.

Blackout / All Clear

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 16:00:00 +0000

I first heard Connie Willis reading pieces of what would become Blackout in the spring of 2002. It was one of the books I wanted to read on our fall vacation in Whistler back in 2010 shortly after it was published. It might not have affected me as it did had I not spent the entire preceding week immersed in capturing my father’s memories of WWII as an Air Corps officer. To read her retelling (in part) of the stories of Londoners in the Blitz, of the guys who built a fake Army to convince the Germans the invasion was coming at Calais, of the ambulance drivers and air raid wardens and rescue workers is all pretty amazing. I timed reading Blackout carefully, knowing that it was only half the story, and that if I got sucked in at the cliffhanger, I'd only have to wait a few weeks for the second half, All Clear, to appear. I was and I did.

Basically, a flock of time-travelling Oxford historians (see Willis' Hugo-winning "Fire Watch", et sequelae) are visiting Britain during the War. Things, of course, go wrong --- including the whole of the events in the "Fire Watch" taking place under their noses. Oxford don Mr Dunworthy traipses back into the past in an attempt to help and finds himself trapped, too. There was a point in the middle where I was getting frustrated with Willis for dragging us through day after day of the uncertainty of our time travellers dealing with the uncertainty of the Blitz. But then I realized: this is what it must have been like. Not just the uncertainty of the time-travelling historians, but the uncertainty of day-to-day life for Londoners in the Blitz, for everyone in southern England during the V-1 and V-2 attacks, for everyone while the threat of invasion was high. She manages to weave in the central mystery of why things are going wrong, with some surprising results. I blasted through the back half of All Clear on a Sunday afternoon, and when I was done and tears were streaming down my face, my first reaction was "How the hell did she do that!?" and my second was "I'm glad she did."

Manhood for Amateurs

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Mon, 03 Nov 2014 23:25:00 +0000

Manhood for Amateurs is Hugo- and Pulitzer-winner Michael Chabon's 2009 book of essays, subtitled "The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son." It is, unfortunately, disappointing. While there is the occasional characteristic turn-of-phrase that makes me enjoy Chabon's writing, this smacks of little essays-as-writing-exercises that were tossed into a drawer and pasted togther to make a book. Some of them are interesting, to be sure --- his musing about how being elected President was going to take Barack Obama away from his daughters, his internal struggle about being honest with his children about smoking marijuana --- but overall, we expect far more from Chabon.

As an aside, shortly after I finished this, there was a review in the December 2009 Atlantic for Ayelet Waldman's then-current book, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. I read the review, because it was by fellow Caltech alum Sandra Tsing Loh, though I did not intend to read the book itself. I note this only for the purposes of amused contrast, since it is out simultaneously with Chabon's book and Waldman is Mrs Chabon.

Enchanted

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 15:00:00 +0000

I finally had a chance to see Enchanted, Disney's 2007 movie about a cartoon princess who through the usual evil stepmother intervention ends up in our flesh-and-blood reality, dropped into New York City. Amusement and true love ensue, including a production number in Central Park which shares some moves with a Disneyland character parade, complete with calypso drummers and somersaulting ConEd repairmen. Amy Adams (in an early role) plays the princess. Susan Sarandon as the real-life evil stepmother is pretty funny. And the bit in which our princess summons the woodland creatures to help clean the apartment by singing out the window is a wonderful riff on a classic fairytale cartoon meme: this is New York, so rats, pigeons, and cockroaches appear to help.

Back Channel

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Back Channel is a new thriller by Yale law professor Stephen L Carter set during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It posits that the agent of back channel communications between Kennedy and Khruschev was actually a nineteen-year-old Cornell co-ed, whose cover was having an affair with JFK. It's very well-constructed, with an extensive note at the end detailing the ways in which he adjusted the timeline to suit his story and dramatize events. Nonetheless, Carter slips through a couple of anachronisms --- he has our point-of-view character use a Princess phone three years before they were available, and have a Kodak Instamatic camera two years early. He also assumes ubiquitous direct-dial long distance calling, which wasn't available in the New York area until 1964. Most grating of all, our heroine is African-American: even though Cornell was co-ed since it's founding, and also integrated early-on, a black teenager being able to navigate Washington circles without extra comment at the beginnings of the civil rights struggles --- six months before the letter from the Birmingham jail and a year before the March on Washington --- strikes me as unlikely. I solved that major suspension of disbelief by merely ignoring Margo's race for much of the book.

That all said, it is a very well-told story, with a lovely convoluted plot. As hawks on both sides beat their drums for war and saner heads try to prevail, we get to watch the President and his brother and his national security advisor try to keep the lid on the boiling pot. Carter has clearly drawn some from An Unfinished Life, Robert Dallek's biography of Kennedy, and from the White House tape recordings in the JFK library. We watch JFK's efforts to steer the middle ground elegantly, with steel resolve, against the cajoling of McNamara and LeMay; we watch Bobby playing the devil's advocate to see the sense of the room; and we see a fictionalized McGeorge Bundy both advising and plotting.

The Dying Light

noreply@blogger.com (Jeffrey Copeland) — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Based on a favorable review in The Economist I dug up The Dying Light, a 2009 thriller by British writer Henry Porter. Consider what happens when the British government starts gathering an unbounded set of information on everyone in the country on the grounds of protecting us all from terrorists. But that the data collection grows to the point where it's used to persecute everyone who shows any sign of protesting or being against the party in power. And that the head of the security services is forced out because he objects to the massive violation of civil liberties. Faked deaths, rigged coroner's inquests, loose organizations of protesters, small towns in England and Wales, people who care about rights and privacy. A call-to-action on our side of the Atlantic as well as to the British. Nicely done, and worth the read.