Maxwell's (again)

We had dinner at Maxwell's on Mothers Day. Having been there for drinks twice before, I was very excited for the chance to have a full dinner.

And I gotta say ... it was an incredible, incredible dinner. I think we ordered some form of steak all around, with sides of whipped potatoes, finger potatoes, and pasta shared between all of us. The wine (Maxwell's has introduced me to a great Washington red wine blend called Subduction, put out by Syncline), the beef, the wonderful potatoes, the atmosphere ...

One of the better dinners I've had in a long time. And it's just down the block!

Cloverfield

I wasn't sure I'd really wanted to see this movie, but I'd heard enough good things to make me want to see it. I'm glad I did. It was a good monster movie with a couple very scary scenes and general fun elsewhere.

That said, there is absolutely no way I could have seen this in the theaters. I can get pretty motion sick in movies (City of God, for example, was killer) but this was extremely shaky. I did fine on the TV, but I couldn't have handled it on the big screen.

Good use of special effects to keep the monster seen only in small bits and pieces as you're going along. All the traditional creaky plot and character devices you would expect. But there are some real scares here. Good flick.

Iron Man

I differ from my friends on certain superhero movies. For example, I found Daredevil much better than the original Spiderman, which I thought was really really bad (and Spiderman 3 was not so super either).

As far as I'm concerned, the best superhero movies have been Spiderman 2, X-Men 2, and Batman Begins. I'm not sure which order those three are in, but I'd probably put Iron Man at a solid 4th on that list. It avoids the pitfalls of an "origins" story, Robert Downey Jr. is danged good, and it's very fun. It's climactic scene is a little weak, but that's ok, because it's final moments are perfectly pitched.

I recommend the movie if you like summer blockbusters. It's one of the good ones.

Leif Enger's "So Brave, Young, and Handsome"

I read Leif Enger's latest book over the last few days.

So Brave, Young, and Handsome is set in 1915, and it is very centrally about the closing of the frontier. It is like Lonesome Dove in that respect, although you might say Larry McMurtry's book chronicles the last breaths of the frontier whereas this book is focused more on its death rattle.

There was much to appreciate about the book. Some set pieces and scenes will stick with me for awhile. The characters--Siringo and Glendon especially--will stick. And the story is most definitely a good one.

But I wasn't swept up like I was with Peace Like A River. I'm not sure what the difference was exactly. In so many ways they are similar--the journey across a nostalgic American landscape, the firm hand of the law on the trail as well--but So Brave didn't have the same purpose and drive as his first book. In So Brave the main character was along for the ride so much the moments when he consciously chose his destiny were hard to distinguish.

The book also touched two of my "literary hot buttons." I am growing more and more weary of writers in books/movies/plays. Especially when the writer at the end of the story thinks, "Maybe I should write this down." I could make a HUGE list of these stories, but off the top of my head I can think of: So Brave Young and Handsome, Wonder Boys (the film), Avenue Q (kind of), Stones in his Pockets, Elf (although fortunately he doesn't start as an author).

It's a tired conceit. Becket, in So Brave could have just as easily been a failed singer/songwriter who finally finds himself and begins to sing or write songs again, and it would have been that much better.

And I was also annoyed by the regular end-of-chapter foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is great when the character suddenly gets a sense of dread that he's never going to see his home again. It's more frustrating when the character knows that something in advance and just hints at us. A la: "It seems strange, looking back, that I ever believed I would soon be home again." or "How could I know he was indeed to take flight, and very soon, and that it would be I, and not Redstart, who went with him?"

Ending chapters like this is annoying. It works a shade better with a third-person omniscient narrator--"Little did he know, that this simple, seemingly innocuous act, would result in his imminent death." (That's from Stranger Than Fiction if you didn't recognize it.)

But when you are in a first-person story, you don't like your narrator consciously holding out on you like this. I'm all for dramatic chapter endings (my mystery novel is full of them), but I felt like Becket or Enger was breaking a compact with the reader.

I did enjoy the book, and it was fun to see Northfield's Cannon river at the beginning. It also made me interested in picking up Peace Like A River again. And it makes me look forward to his next book, which I hope comes sooner than 6 years (the space between his first and second books).

Movie Wrapup

This weekend we did a double feature--Forgetting Sarah Marshall followed by Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay.

I enjoyed both, although H&K was a little disappointed because I'd been hoping for more. Forgetting Sarah Marshall I probably enjoyed more, but that was because I was not expecting to like it that much. Expectations are everything sometime.

But it felt really good to get into the movie theater again. And some good movies are coming soon ...

An Irish brogue ... hardly

I watched Orson Welles' "The Lady From Shanghai" tonight. Weird. Crazy weird. First, Rita Hayworth is the Lady From Shanghai. That was a surprise. Second, she had short blond hair. Weird.

Third, what the f-bomb was Orson Welles thinking when he tried out this accent?



Jump forward to about a minute into the movie if you want to hear the worst Irishaccent and skip the scenes of Rita Hayworth in a swimsuit ...

Then, if you want to see the famous ending of the movie set in an abandoned funhouse, here's that for you to. It's got the slide, the hall of mirrors, all the good stuff ...

On Leatherheads

Leatherheads, it turns out, is surprisingly and unfortunately boring. It tries to capture the feel of an old-time classic Hollywood movie, but old-time classic Hollywood movies aren't boring. They are also not self-consciously trying to capture their feel. The music is retro-sounding rather than authentic, the shots linger a little too long ... it's just not that good of a movie.

Part of me also groaned a few times at George Clooney's airbrush of the past. Could Renee Zellweger really be an ace reporter in 1925 for the Chicago Tribune? Would the Duluth Bulldogs really be an integrated team in 1925? The answer to both these questions may very well be yes, but I doubt it.

It was a disappointing movie. Clooney did so well with Good Night and Good Luck, which actually felt authentic rather than retro, and his Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is really fun. This ... not so much.

Even so, Clooney really knows how to make a movie look great and he milks certain shots and scenes for all they are worth. But when there's not much there to start with, you're just as likely to get blood from a turnip.

The Wire: Season 1

On the whole television thing, let me say that The Wire was--as I'd been told many times--dang good. It took awhile to get into it, but I found myself thinking of the characters and the story regularly. Something about it feels real, as if I know these people. It's hilariously funny at times, but mostly sad and maddening. Watching homicide detectives use typewriters in 2002 because their department can't afford computers is depressing.

We're very happy to keep going through the series. It's a violent show, so it's not going to be for everyone, but I'd recommend it to anyone who got in to The Sopranos or is even ready to jump off the CSI or Law & Order bandwagons for a show that is not way way over the top.

The Black Swan

The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, has been on my nightstand for a little over a week now, and I'm nearly finished. The book makes many interesting points, but the most important is that we, as a species, royally suck at making predictions. We are good at looking back on things that happened and trying our best to tease out a narrative on why that happened. But we are really really bad at looking ahead and guessing.

He says that the highly improbable events that shape are lives are impossible to predict and can shift things dramatically. He of course mentions September 11, which is kind of an obvious example, but he has another point I like a lot as well. There was an interesting graph of the S&P 500 over the last 50 years that charted the actual history of the S&P 500 against the S&P 500 minus its top ten most active days. In 50 years, it turns out that the ten biggest single day jumps (either up or down) changes the graph by more than 40%. Taleb's point is that we act as if those 10 days are abnormalities but in truth, they make up a huge portion of that 50 year history.

His story of the turkey is pretty interesting too. If you're a turkey, let's just say you've had 1,000 days of feeding from your farmer. What possible evidence could you have that the 1,001th day (the day before Thanksgiving), he's going to chop your head off? Taleb is trying to argue that historical data and trends don't have anything to do with what's coming next because whatever's coming next is going to be different, guaranteed.

It's an interesting read. It's not a book like "The Tipping Point" or "Freakonomics" that everyone can pick up and probably enjoy. This one is just a little dense and math/philosophy heavy for that. But it's pretty well put together. I'll be finishing it up shortly, although I'm now in the section he says is for more of the technical reader (AKA, a reader who knows more math than I do) so I'll probably be done with it pretty quickly.

Vantage Point

We spent a few hours Saturday night at the movies seeing the thriller, Vantage Point, which came out last month sometime. We'd really wanted to see Be Kind, Rewind, but the closest theater was Auburn. Dang.

Vantage Point was a suitable stand-in. It was fun, but kinda empty. The NYT reviewer calls it "competent if not completely impersonal filmmaking" and that feels about right to me. There was a fun diversion in the middle, but the climactic scene was pretty hokey and got some laughs from our group.

As for me, I'm waiting for Indiana Jones in May and the next Batman in July. Maybe IronMan, depending on review ... and probably Wall*E. Although this month the mockumentary"The Grand" is opening, which is sure to confuse plenty of people in Tacoma, since it doesn't look like it's actually playing at ... you know, The Grand.

4 Movies, 2 Flights

Thanks to the miracle of in-flight movies and iTunes movie rentals on my iPhone, I watched 4 movies on the long haul back from Puerto Rico yesterday. In chronological order:

The Nanny Diaries -- This movie was far better than the script, if that makes any sense. And that's mostly due to Laura Linney, who did a really great job playing Mrs. X. Scarlett was pretty (as usual) but it wasn't a great part and she didn't add a lot to it. But fun.

Saved! -- This brutal comedy is set at American Eagle Christian School, a born-again high school. It's very funny, I felt. Mandy Moore is actually quite good as a high school queen bee whose Christianity is mostly used to attack others. She is sincere in her faith, but expects it to bring great rewards, like popularity and good skin. The movie doesn't really question faith or Christianity, but aims for the evangelical moral code that opens itself to hypocrisy, self-flagellation (figuratively) and self-delusion even.

Live Free or Die Hard -- The absolute silliest movie of the four (and that's saying a lot since the next movie I watched was Hairspray) but dang this is a fun action movie with bizarre set piece after bizarre set piece. It uses cars a lot. The car that took down the helicopter I could almost buy. The SUV that ended up in the elevator shaft was hard to take. That said the premise of the movie is actually rather terrifying, and the film actually captured some of that.

Hairspray -- Don't judge me, but I really liked this film. It's got fun music, it had extraordinary art direction and production design, and the characters were well drawn (for a musical). I'm still not exactly sure why John Travolta had to play a woman, but he did a very good job at it.

Zodiac: the Movie

I didn't know much about the Zodiac killer before seeing the movie Zodiac, with Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards, and Robert Downey Jr.

Now I know a lot. Like a whole lot. Zodiac is nothing if not comprehensive. At 2 hours 38 minutes it better be. But it's also engaging, interesting, well-acted, well-directed, and scary at times.

The movie came out in early 2007 and didn't get a lot of attention. But its director is well known (Se7en, Fight Club, The Game, Panic Room) and it's stars all good. The movie mostly sticks with the cops and the press, but every so often shows us the Zodiac murders. As I realized later, it only shows those that the Zodiac is known to have committed (turns out the guy reads papers and takes credit for unsolved cases). These scenes can be difficult.

I also didn't know that the Zodiac killer was the inspiration for Dirty Harry.

There is a lot of attention to detail, and the film really gets what newspaper reporting and detective work were like before the computer and then Internet age.

This is a very good true crime film. Its length can be forgiven by the sheer fact that every time a new title card comes on the screen "18 months later" or "2 years later" you groan--not for yourself, but for the characters in the movie who have to survive so much.

Good stuff. But long.

Neverwhere, the novel

Neil Gaiman's book Neverwhere was a good British fantasy, especially for an Anglophile like myself.

The central conceit of the book is that there are two Londons, and our hero has fallen from one to the other. The other London, London Below, is a piecemeal place of sewers and beggars who have fallen on hard times. London Below is full of the mythology that informs the world above, and you know that Gaiman had fun with the names. On Knightsbridge is Night (you should be afraid of the dark). We meet the Earl of Earl's Court, the black friars of Black Friars, the Angel Islington (two Tube stops there no less!).

It's a good fun fantasy trip that finds its own fantasy world (as opposed to knocking off JRR Tolkien yet again).

Good fun.

Oh yes, there will be blood

This weekend we walked over to the Grand to see There Will Be Blood. I'd wanted to see the movie for some time, but the Oscar nominations certainly made me want to get there.

It's ... it's a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. Weird, bizarre, and long. But nothing at all like Magnolia, save for the focus on family.

The movie starts quietly, with no dialog for 10 to 15 minutes. And then we get into the story. Daniel Plainview and his son HW who are some of the best oilmen in the business. If you've seen the trailer you get a sense of him. Daniel Day Lewis is incredible in the role. He sells it all the way through.

At some point, he goes a little off the deep end. Trying to pin where that happens exactly is a little hard, but good fodder for discussion afterward.

I did heartily enjoy this movie, although it's a tough one to recommend. The length, for one, and the themes for another. But the music, the acting, the visuals, and the wonderful directing (Anderson manages to make surveying look very very interesting) are all top-notch.

A very good film.

All roads ...

I finished HBO's Rome yesterday and have still been trying to figure out what to make of it. It's intriguing for a couple reasons.

First, the sets and the setting and the entire production really makes you feel like you are in ROME in 44 BC. And glad to have missed it, too. Life was very different back then. Violent and short.

Second, the starring duo Lucius Verinus and Titus Pullo are a great combo. They work well together, they are fun to watch, and the two actors pull off a legitimate friendship really well.

And third, the new look at historical people was pretty fun. I'm not exactly up on my ancient history, but I knew enough (and remembered some good bits from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar) that helped.

I'm not sure I can recommend it to people, the way I can Arrested Development, Veronica Mars, the Office, and Lost. It was pretty good TV, but not crazy good TV. And with all the crazy good TV out right now, why would I recommend anything less? It was also violent and packed with sex and nudity, like any HBO show.

Next up, The Wire, which has been raved about on-line by Matthew Yglesias and is supposedly Barack Obama's favorite show. But Marilyn Strickland has told me for awhile to watch it too, so I guess she's in good company there.

Sweeney Todd -- The Movie

The Demon Barber of Fleet Street lives up to his name. Johnny Depp is scary and funny as the barber. Helena Bonham Carter is a great pie maker. The throat-slitting is incerdibly gory … it’s a pretty dang good adaptation.

I’d seen the musical in college and was not sure what I thought of it. It’s a classic revenge tale. Like Hamlet, but with the blood of Macbeth. Because it’s so audacious, it’s full of life, even though it’s so much about death.

The music is pretty catchy (although the music is not up to the same standard as the other movie musical I saw this week — Across the Universe — but that shouldn’t be a surprise). The acting is good, the story fun. But man, the blood, the blood … proceed with caution.

Across the Universe

When the preview for Across the Universe, Julie Taymor's Beatles musical, played in front of Spiderman 3, I thought they absolutely missed their audience. And it was a really bad idea. Even the preview wasn't very good.

But the movie, now having seen it at a second run theater in Minneapolis, is a lot of fun. The music is (naturally) great. Joe Cocker, Bono, and the cast make you fall for the Beatles all over again. The story is full, the music adds to it, and some of the scenes work just perfectly.

Sometimes there are throwaway jokes and lines that fall a bit flat, because they are too obviously quoting lines. Working in phrases like "when I'm 64" and "she came in through the bathroom window" can get a little tired.

But there is real joy here, I think, in its creativity and storytelling. I'm pretty tired of stories about the "tumultuous 60s" and Vietnam, but this one does it pretty dang well. Largely by avoiding the drugs as a key part of its storyline.

(The tradition tumultuous 60s stories being those that start with innocent kids experimenting with sex and drugs before the war plucks them all off into the convenient roles of solider, hippy, college student, black militant, draft dodger, etc; this one handles the period the best, I think.)

I'd recommend it as a rental, if you like the Beatles. It gets better as it goes along too. Particularly Let it Be, Come Together, Dear Prudence, and Revolution.

"Juno" is a really wonderful movie

If you haven't seen Juno yet, you really should. I say that after two viewings at the Grand now, and after my my Roger Ebert calls it the best film of the year (here's his review, I'll also link to ensie's review for a more local perspective).

The movie gets its heart by taking exceptional people and sticking them in a "garbage dump of a situation" if I can quote Allison Janney from memory. The dialog is incredibly sharp--so sharp that the first time I heard Juno refer to "Bleeker" I didn't know if it was a name or piece of slang I was unfamiliar with (fortunately it's a name, played by the wonderful Michael Cera).

It's not a movie where you say the writer has an "ear for language." Because people don't talk like this. Just like Quentin Tarantino has his own kind of dialog, so does first time writer Diablo Cody. Like when Juno is shaking her home pregnancy test which just came out positive and the convenience store clerk tells her, "That ain't no etch-a-sketch. This is one doodle that can't be un-did, homeskillet."

But who cares if no one would actually say that?

The movie's really good laughs come from its honesty, with its secondary laughs in its witty dialog. Like Bleeker's response to Juno telling him he's the coolest person she's ever met and he doesn't even try.

I also have to nod to the soundtrack, which has its own funny dialog. Sufjan could have done the soundtrack--it has the same kind of cadence he achieves--but some of the songs written by Kimya Dawson are so fun you'll find yourself straining to hear the lyrics.

As I said, I've seen it twice now--the second time today with my parents--and the discussions about the characters, the story, plot and character developments, the dialog ... well, there was a lot to talk about ...

Go see it!

Charlie Wilson's War

I saw the new movie directed by Mike Nichols and written by Aaron Sorkin tonight. It is a good movie with good drama and funny laughs. It is tellingly a Sorkin film, but not just a rewarmed West Wing, which is a good thing (see Studio 60 for that).

Tom Hanks was very good, but Phillip Seymour Hoffman stole the show, as usual.

But let us thank Nichols and Sorkin for one thing especially: making a movie about the current war. Starting as early as 2004, movies about the Iraq War started to emerge, many (read: all) of them strong critiques. 3 years later, we still have them, and most people are skipping them.

I greatly respect Robert Altman who, when he wanted to critique the Vietnam war (and all war, really), set his movie during the Korean War 20 years earlier. Nichols and Sorkin have taken the same lesson, by making a movie set 20 years ago that stands apart from the current war.

If you want to read into it something about today, go ahead, but if you don't, it won't beat you over the head with it. I think the problem with most of the Iraq War movies right now is that they are all too preachy, too similar to each other, and feel way too much like watching CNN Headline News. I've only seen a few: Rendition this year was very good because it had a narrow focus (and excellent story-telling, acting, and direction). Control Room in 2004 was good because you actually get to learn something you didn't know before, in this case about Al Jazeera. I may end up seeing In the Valley of Elah, but the rest just look the same.

Anyway, Charlie Wilson's War is insightful, funny, and a good political satire that still manages to hit all the right points. I liked it.

The Golden Compass

I had ZERO interest in seeing this movie when I first saw the trailer.

Then I read the very fascinating article in the December Atlantic about its origins as an anti-religious book and how New Line had turned it into a family film "just in time for Christmas."

Then it got good reviews from most everyone, including my man Roger who gave it 4 out of 4 stars. Mary and I went to see it and came out rather happy to have seen it.

It's way better than Narnia, I'll say that right off. And the effects are good, the acting pretty good, and the story interesting. It made me want to read the book, which is apparently the problem a number of church groups have with the movie. Even though the anti-religious content has been removed from the film, it's going to make kids want to read the book.

I understand that the leader of a church here in Tacoma forbade his congregation to go see the movie. I'll quote Roger Ebert:

The books have been attacked by American Christians over questions of religion; their popularity in the U.K. may represent more confident believers whose response to other beliefs is to respond, rather than suppress.

A similar question has been asked by Andrew Sullivan about strict fundamentalists--are you that insecure in your own belief that you must oppress or kill those who believe something different? (that's my paraphrase, btw).

All in all, I thought it was a good film. I will read the book and I will be ready for the sequel, which I'm sure they'll film at the same time as the final film, thus following in the footsteps of The Matrix, Back to the Future, and Pirates of the Caribbean.