This is The Grouchy Editor’s 1,000th post.
In honor of this momentous occasion, we thought we’d post an old favorite, the image that we feel best represents what we stand for:
You’re welcome.
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12Jun
Category: Books, Movies, TV & Web
Kilo Two Bravo
Here’s a tense, realistic slice of war in which a small band of British soldiers in Afghanistan gets trapped in a riverbed littered with active landmines. This is the rare thriller in which the gore is not gratuitous, the special effects are actually special, and the term “nail-biter” can be taken literally — I was certainly biting mine. Release: 2014 Grade: A-
**
Victoria
Victoria has a gimmick, sure. It’s a 138-minute movie shot in one long take — no edits, no breaks. But once you stop marveling at the technical skill of the filmmakers, the single-shot gimmick actually aids the story, pulling you along with young Victoria as she impulsively hangs out with some bad boys on a night when things go horribly wrong in Berlin. The movie artfully transitions from playful lark to exciting heist to, most surprisingly, a touching finale. Release: 2015 Grade: A-
**
Everest
We’ll never know exactly what transpired atop Mt. Everest on May 10, 1996, the day that eight climbers expired while attempting to scale the peak, because survivors dispute the details. But I do know two things about 2015’s Everest: 1) as an adventure movie, it boasts climbing scenes that are spectacular and harrowing, and 2) as a human drama, the film is somewhat lacking. When people die every day somewhere on the planet from poverty, natural disasters and senseless violence, it’s hard to muster empathy for a bunch of rich adventurists who perished in pursuit of bragging rights. Release: 2015 Grade: B
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25May
by Agatha Christie
It’s an Agatha Christie mystery, so you know the drill: Someone gets murdered, the police are baffled, and so Hercule Poirot twirls his mustache and solves the crime.
There are a couple of unusual aspects to this Poirot outing, which was published in 1963, some 43 years after Christie introduced the persnickety detective. For one, I think the author might have been tiring of Poirot, because he’s barely in this novel. I think Christie might also have been impressed by a certain Alfred Hitchcock movie, because Clocks features a witness in an apartment across the street from the murder scene, a girl who is confined to her room by a broken leg and who spends much of the day spying on her neighbors with binoculars. Sound familiar?
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Neighbors
For a comedy, Neighbors has a decent premise: New parents Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne find their neighborhood peace and quiet disrupted when noisy, chaotic fraternity boys move in next door. But what follows is 90 minutes of adolescent humor, nonsensical plot developments, and off-putting gross-outs. If you make a movie this lame, you’d best not reference better comedies like Meet the Parents and Animal House, which only reminds us of what we’re missing. Release: 2014 Grade: D
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01May
by Malcolm Gladwell
How much you enjoy the essays in Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw could depend on how much you care about whichever subject he’s discussing. The New Yorker journalist gets praised for the clarity of his prose, but to me it doesn’t matter how accessible the writing is when the topic is ketchup. I still fall asleep.
I am also unmoved by Gladwell’s stories about successfully marketing hair dye and vegetable slicers and the masterminds behind their advertising campaigns. Sorry, but a tag-team of Stephen King and J. K. Rowling would fail to hold my interest if the topic is peddling mustard.
On the other hand, when Gladwell turns his attention to the psychology of criminal profiling, or to the root cause of homelessness, his counterintuitive conclusions are often surprising and sometimes enlightening.
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Trainwreck
Comedian-screenwriter Amy Schumer and director Judd Apatow try to please fans of modern gross-out humor — the twist is that, these days, it’s more often the girls than the boys who are delivering the gross-outs — and lovers of more traditional, fairy-tale romantic comedies with this movie about a cynical party animal (Schumer) who falls for a nerdy sports doctor (Bill Hader). The end product is a bit uneven, but the film’s heart is in the right place, its characters are likeable, and there are enough funny bits to make for an enjoyable two hours. Release: 2015 Grade: B
**
Dark
This psychological thriller about a New York model’s gradual descent into madness bears a strong resemblance to Repulsion, the 1965 classic from director Roman Polanski. But following an opening, steamy sex scene between stars Whitney Able and Alexandra Breckenridge, Dark’s slow-burn suspense dwindles to a snail’s pace, taking a long time to reach the climax. On the plus side, Able is quite good as the paranoid model, and it’s refreshing to absorb horror that takes place in the mind rather than in some blood-spattered setting. Release: 2015 Grade: B-
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31Mar
by Wilkie Collins
I do love me some Victorian literature. Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes — masterful writers, all of them. The Woman in White, published in 1859 by England’s Wilkie Collins, is not one of my favorites from that era, but it does have its charms.
The plot: A pair of plucky Britons does battle with an evil Italian spy when the corpulent con artist attempts to swindle a young heiress by replacing her with a lookalike impostor.
What I liked: The lengthy melodrama was initially published in serial form, and it’s easy to see how magazine readers of the day got hooked. Collins is a master at building slow-burn suspense: It can be a bit of a slog on the way to a chapter’s climax but, once you get there, the payoff is often rewarding. Collins also introduces a villain for the ages in the egotistical, silver-tongued Count Fosco.
What I didn’t like: The youthful heroes aren’t nearly as interesting as the malevolent count. The beautiful heiress is typical of so many “damsels in distress” found in Victorian literature, a fragile specimen who faints at the slightest provocation and must be shielded from anything and everything remotely unpleasant. (She’s an apparent precursor to some of today’s college students, with their “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces.”) Here is one passage describing the precious snowflake that is Lady Glyde:
“The effect of the good news on poor Lady Glyde was, I grieve to say, quite overpowering. She was too weak to bear the violent reaction, and in another day or two she sank into a state of debility and depression which obliged her to keep her room. Rest and quiet, and change of air afterwards, were the best remedies which Mr. Dawson could suggest for her benefit.”
And that’s how she reacts to the good news.
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Unfriended
For anyone who’s ever been creeped out by an anonymous lurker, or a troll, on the Internet, Unfriended will hit home – at least for the first half of the movie, in which a small group of tech-savvy teens find their Skype call invaded by an unwelcome visitor. Unfortunately, events that follow – involving a ghost and some vicious online behavior – grow more and more ridiculous. If nothing else, the movie, which occurs entirely online, is a good primer for novice users of Instagram, Facebook, and other sites where the kids hang out. Release: 2015 Grade: B-
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Kingsman: The Secret Service
A street kid is recruited by an international spy (Colin Firth) to combat an evil billionaire (Samuel L. Jackson) who plans to dramatically reduce Earth’s human population – ostensibly to combat global warming. This British spy movie is more in line with the sillier James Bond adventures starring Roger Moore than with the more recent, dead-serious Daniel Craig outings. The plot is outlandish and the villains cartoonish, but hey, that’s what we paid for. And besides, who doesn’t want to “do it in the asshole” with Swedish actress Hanna Alstrom? Release: 2015 Grade: B
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01Feb
by Umberto Eco
I love this book, much as I love the movie it inspired, mostly for the world it so vividly recreates: a 14th-century monastery in the mountains of northern Italy, populated by monks, peasants – and an apparent serial killer. Although this medieval community is a great place to visit in a book, you probably wouldn’t want to live there. Not unless you enjoy fetching water from wells, laboring from dawn to dusk, and adhering to the strict lifestyle of a monk.
Eco, a scholar specializing in signs and symbols, depicts this world of bookish monks and warring religious factions with painstaking detail. (Alas, at times the reader might also experience pain; Eco’s lengthy philosophical and historical conversations can grow tiresome.)
The plot is driven a la Agatha Christie – someone is picking off abbey denizens, one by one – and the protagonist is courtesy of Arthur Conan Doyle – a brilliant Franciscan friar named William of Baskerville investigates the murders – but above all it’s the atmospheric sense of time and place that makes this tale so absorbing.
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