by Janet Evanovich
There is no point in my writing yet another review of yet another Stephanie Plum novel. Plum creator Evanovich has been phoning in series entries for years now, and so I will phone in this review. For more, you can go here. Or here. Or here.
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Blue Jasmine
You can take Woody Allen out of New York, but you can’t take New York out of Woody Allen – thank goodness. Cate Blanchett shines as a society snob who takes a tumble when her husband goes to prison and her finances vanish, forcing her to shack up with a sister on the West Coast. The setting is San Francisco, but the characters – each with his or her own idea of “the good life” – are pure New York. Release: 2013 Grade: B+
*****
Honeymoon
Here’s a spooky movie that’s refreshing both for what it is and for what it is not. It is not zombies and it’s not vampires and it’s not all special effects and gore. (OK, there is some gore.) It is a throwback to 1950s science fiction, in which the communist threat reared its ugly head in monsters and neighbors and plants. The story, in which newlyweds Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway find more than good sex at a secluded lakeside cottage, is a bit pokey at first, but the final act is chilling. Release: 2014 Grade: B
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TV late-night host David Letterman recently announced his retirement, but I think I’ll miss his follow-up act on CBS, Craig Ferguson, even more. Ferguson, who will be leaving his late-show gig in December, is a funny, affable guy, and that winning personality is on full display in this 2009 memoir.
Possibly I enjoyed the book because — aside from the born-and-raised-in-Scotland business — Ferguson and I share similar backgrounds: We’re about the same age and we both drank way, way too much alcohol in our younger days. I do have two quibbles with American on Purpose. Quibble 1 – the title is a bit misleading; it would more accurately be titled Growing Up Drunk in Britain. Quibble 2 – Ferguson gushes about former wives and girlfriends, understandably when you consider his behavior toward them, but also unrealistically. Were all of his former flames such stunning beauties and flawless human beings? But overall, this is a charming memoir, and I look forward to a sequel. There will be a sequel, right?
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All Is Lost
Robert Redford plays a yachtsman who struggles for eight days to survive in the Indian Ocean after his boat is punctured by floating junk. Redford was praised for his solo performance in this harrowing tale, and deservedly so, but All Is Lost is really a director’s movie … and a sound engineer’s movie, and an editor’s movie, and a cinematographer’s movie, et al. It’s a fine showcase for what only Hollywood can do: dazzle us with sight and sound. Release: 2013 Grade: B+
*****
Il Futuro
This is one of those artsy, low-plot foreign movies that suck you in because the characters are interesting and the images are striking. Sad-eyed Manuela Martelli plays an orphaned teen who, along with her younger brother and his shady pals, concocts a plot to rob an aging blind man (Rutger Hauer). The ensuing romance between old man Hauer and waif-like Martelli manages to be simultaneously creepy and erotic. Release: 2013 Grade: B-
*****
Wake in Fright
“He was a good guy. But then he fell in with a bad crowd.” John Grant (Gary Bond) is a good guy, a schoolteacher toiling in the boonies of Australia’s Outback. He goes on holiday, has a drink, does a little gambling … and then meets the menfolk of a community known as “The Yabba.” What follows is a harrowing, graphic look at just how low the human spirit can fall – disturbing stuff, but expertly realized by filmmaker Ted Kotcheff. Release: 1971 Grade: B+
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Happy Valley is a pretty good six-hour miniseries. It’s also a nearly perfect four-hour miniseries.
I make a distinction because Valley is terrific television for four hours, up to and including the nail-biting conclusion of episode four. But after that hair-raising segment, the final two episodes are a bit, well, anticlimactic.
You might have noticed that I just used two dreaded clichés: “nail-biting” and “hair-raising.” Movies and TV shows do not ordinarily have me gnawing my cuticles, nor is it likely that my greying mane has ever, literally, stood on end as I watched a piece of fiction. But man … I couldn’t swear that I wasn’t both chewing and sprouting during some of the more riveting moments of Happy Valley.
Ah, yes, the show. Valley is yet another cop drama, but instead of the omnipresent grizzled, male detective, a curmudgeon who is often divorced, alcoholic, and/or disgraced, in this BBC production we get an honest-to-goodness, middle-aged female as the hero. Yorkshire police sergeant Catherine Cawood does not resemble a supermodel; she is fleshed out – in more ways than one – as a complex, flawed, and compelling character. She is also a grandmother.
Cawood (played by an unforgettable Sarah Lancashire; don’t the British ever run out of talented actors?) has personal problems – lord, does she ever – but it’s refreshing to empathize with the struggles of an embattled grandma-cop, as opposed to the usual crap afflicting most male-cop protagonists. Cawood’s family dramas are nearly as gripping as her investigation of a kidnapping.
Ah, yes, the kidnapping. The plot, centering on the abduction of a businessman’s daughter that coincides with the prison release of a long-time Cawood nemesis, isn’t simply a matter of good guys versus bad guys. There is a third party involved in this dangerous triangle: timid, in-over-his-head accountant Kevin (Steve Pemberton), who puts the plot in motion by making a foolish decision when his boss declines his request for a raise.
From that point on, there are three suspenseful plot threads – the cops racing to find the kidnapped girl, the villains working to pull off their scheme, and the dilemma of poor Kevin, who vacillates between a desire to extricate himself from involvement with the crime and the faint hope that his foolhardy scheme might actually succeed.
My only complaint is that I think this stellar series (available on Netflix) should have wrapped up with four episodes. It builds beautifully to episode four, but once the kidnapping is resolved, the emphasis shifts to Cawood family dramas — intriguing stuff, yes, but also anticlimactic. Grade: A-
Written by: Sally Wainwright Cast: Sarah Lancashire, George Costigan, James Norton, Charlie Murphy, Siobhan Finneran, Joe Armstrong, Steve Pemberton, Adam Long, Derek Riddell, Sophie Rundle Premiere: 2014
Watch the Trailer (click here)
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The Den
Graduate student Elizabeth (Melanie Papalia) is researching online behavior at a video-chat site, but while she spends hours staring at a computer screen, the computer is secretly staring back at her. The first half of The Den – shot entirely from Web-cam/phone-cam points of view – feels a lot more like Skype than Netflix. But after tapping into our primal fears about invasion of privacy, the story devolves from clever and cool into a cliché-ridden amalgam of conspiracy silliness and Saw-like gore. Release: 2014 Grade : C
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by Jim Thompson
Nice title, because Thompson’s killer, a “good ol’ boy” deputy sheriff, certainly gets inside the reader – or the reader gets inside him — whether we like it or not. We go along for the ride as soft-spoken Lou Ford goes on a psychopathic binge in his West Texas town, providing first-person narration as he revenge-kills and then kills again in an attempt to cover his tracks. Ford is one repellant dude, but this Barney Fife from hell is also fascinating.
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by Michael Hastings
Michael Hastings’s roman a clef about his days as a young intern at Newsweek magazine is very much a product of his generation: full of snark, cynicism, and — man, I’m getting tired of this one — “irony.” Hastings, who famously brought down General Stanley McChrystal with a Rolling Stone article, in Magazine creates thinly veiled characters that skewer former real-life colleagues like Fareed Zakaria and Jon Meacham, exposing their gung-ho support of Bush’s war in Iraq, and revealing how ego and career trump ethics and morality in the world of Big Media.
But Hastings the news reporter’s book is short on motivation and depth of character, which are the novelist’s bread and butter. Are the editors he mocks truly so one-dimensional and without, apparently, any redeeming qualities? Hastings’s novel is not, however, short on something else: extremely graphic, off-putting descriptions of one character’s sex fantasies. Weird. And yuck.
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Tiny
There’s something romantic about chucking it all and adopting a back-to-nature existence, but I’m not sure I could follow the example of the young couple in Tiny who spend a year building a 130-square-foot cabin to call home in Colorado. They filmed their project, which is part of a “tiny house” movement in which ecologically minded (or financially strapped) folk build and live in miniature homes. It’s a fantasy with allure, but — there’s not enough room for my books. Give me Dick Proenneke’s cabin in Alaska, or perhaps Jim Rockford’s trailer on the beach – small, certainly, but not that small. Release: 2013 Grade: B+
*****
Black Rock
It’s “girls’ night out” from hell for three women whose bonding trip to a deserted isle goes sour when they encounter some Iraq war vets. Rock asks some good questions: Is a woman ever partly responsible for her own sexual assault? Is every military veteran deserving of our respect? But after an intriguing setup, director-writer-star Katie Aselton’s story degenerates into a silly, quite literal, battle of the sexes. Release: 2013 Grade: B-
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by Joe McGinniss
A fatally bloated book. The case of Jeffrey MacDonald, the “all-American” young doctor who was convicted in 1979 of slaughtering his family, is fascinating, but not enough to justify 900-plus-pages that too often read like dry trial transcripts. McGinniss crams Vision with page after page of often-repetitive legal minutiae – which is fine for aspiring lawyers but a drag for the true-crime aficionado.
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