by Janet Evanovich
I’m not sure who’s more foolish, Stephanie Plum or me, because I continue to read this silly series. Eighteen is more of the same-old slapstick, but what’s new is that, for some inexplicable reason, Evanovich has made her plot ridiculously complex.
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These are tough times for the “1 percent.” The economy still sucks, their presidential candidate keeps putting his foot in his mouth, and even Richard Gere, with his movie-star looks and charm, can’t portray one of them and garner much sympathy.
In Arbitrage, Gere is Robert Miller, a Wall Street hedge-fund magnate whose world begins to crumble when a bad investment — in a Russian copper mine, of all things — leads him to commit fraud during negotiations for his trading empire. Miller’s personal life is even messier: A car accident ends badly for his mistress, and when he attempts to cover it up, Miller draws the attention of a New York cop (Tim Roth) who has no love for “masters of the universe.”
What follows is The Bonfire of the Vanities meeting a 1970s episode of Columbo, but without much suspense. Arbitrage is slick, smart … and unsatisfying. It’s a curiously flat movie, always interesting but lacking tension. Susan Sarandon and Brit Marling, as Miller’s wife and daughter, are on hand, I suppose, to engender sympathy for Miller’s embattled family life. But it’s difficult to care much about the fate of people who rely so heavily on wealth for their self-esteem:
Says one character whom Miller enlists to help fool the cops: “You think money’s gonna fix this?”
Miller: “What else is there?”
As a viewer, I wanted some sort of resolution to this game of cat-and-mouse between Miller and the police. Either the bad guy should win or the good guys should win. That might not reflect reality, but it would make for a better movie. Grade: B-
Director: Nicholas Jarecki Cast: Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, Tim Roth, Brit Marling, Laetitia Casta, Nate Parker, Stuart Margolin, Chris Eigeman, Graydon Carter Release: 2012
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by Dan Ariely
In all honesty, this book was a letdown. The human propensity for lying and cheating should be a juicy topic, but Ariely manages to squash reader interest by (mostly) confining his experiments to sterile classrooms, where one group of student volunteers after another pencil in answers to one dull test after another, usually involving dotted matrixes, one-dollar bills, and paper shredders. When Ariely and colleagues do leave the artificial environment of the classroom – sending a blind girl into a farmers’ market to buy tomatoes, for example – their research yields some interesting results.
But back to that classroom … our intrepid social scientist’s big discovery is this: We all cheat, but only a little bit. And if we can just get a few reminders that cheating is bad, maybe we won’t do it so much.
That’s not exactly a scientific breakthrough; it’s simple common sense. And that’s the brutal truth.
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Headhunters Roger (Aksel Hennie, Norway’s answer to Steve Buscemi) is a little guy whose gorgeous wife Diana (Synnove Macody Lund, Norway’s answer to Sweden) has expensive tastes. So Roger, a corporate headhunter, supplements his income with a side business in stolen art. And then … things begin to go wrong for Roger. The twists in this clever thriller are unpredictable, and the action is relentless; in fact, things move so fast that I’m not sure whether the plot holds up. But hey, you could say the same thing about some Hitchcock classics. Release: 2011 Grade: B+
*****
The Silent House Young Laura and her father are hired to repair an abandoned cottage — but this is an old-dark-house movie (sort of), so we know that trouble’s afoot. There’s a fine line between “artistic license” and a storyline that cheats, so how you feel about the twist at the end of this low-budget chiller from Uruguay — shot in one well-choreographed, 78-minute take — will likely depend on what you feel is fair. But until its iffy denouement, this House harbors solid suspense and delivers a few genuine jolts. Release: 2010 Grade: B
*****
Heavenly Creatures The attractions here are Peter Jackson’s direction, the performances by Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey, and New Zealand doing what New Zealand does best — looking like New Zealand. But the dark story, based on an actual murder carried out by two teens in 1954, is less compelling than off-putting. Release: 1994 Grade: B
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by Margery Allingham
British mystery novelist Allingham is less interested in clever plot twists than in her characters, which is both good and bad. Good, because she’s created an unusually strong villain, the knife-wielding, tortured-soul Jack Havoc (a.k.a. “Johnny Cash” – I kid you not), but bad because her heroes are a bland bunch. Whenever the action shifts to the story’s quartet of lovebirds, I was reminded of those old Marx Brothers movies – pure genius whenever the boys were on screen, but barely tolerable when the obligatory lovers took center stage.
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by Thomas Harris
I suppose this is an example of why you should always read the book before you see the movie. Harris’s Lambs is intelligent, suspenseful, and clearly one of the better serial-killer novels. Yet in my Hollywood-influenced mind’s eye, F.B.I. trainee Clarice Starling has morphed into Jodie Foster, malevolent Hannibal Lecter is Anthony Hopkins, and every dramatic chapter is accompanied by images from the film. But kudos to Harris, because even though the book holds no surprises for anyone familiar with the movie, it’s still a gripping read.
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by Jess Walter
Pasquale is an insecure young man drifting dreamily through life in his small, Italian fishing village. Dee Moray is an up-and-coming starlet on the set of Hollywood’s infamous epic, the Richard Burton and Liz Taylor vehicle, Cleopatra. Pasquale and Dee would seem to have little in common, but in author Jess Walter’s capable hands, their journey from 1962 to the present is a fanciful treat. Ruins isn’t perfect; there are passages that resemble an old Doris Day-Rock Hudson farce with contrived situations, but Walter’s hopscotching, time-traveling story is mostly funny, bittersweet, and wise.
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by Hilary Mantel
This fictional account of life under England’s King Henry VIII, centering on royal advisor Thomas Cromwell, is an “admirable” book – but reading it was more chore than pleasure.
The upside:
Mantel’s dialogue is sharp and often witty. The repartee between members of the king’s court, Cromwell family members, and even lowly commoners, is consistently engaging.
The sense of time and place is vivid. I have no idea how accurate any of it is, but as a work of fiction, Wolf Hall opens the doors to palaces, chambers, and courtyards in Renaissance England and makes you believe that you are actually there.
The downside:
Mantel’s vocabulary is impressive, but I grew frustrated over her abuse of the simple pronoun, “he.” I challenge anyone to read this novel without, at least occasionally, being surprised to learn that the “he” Mantel is writing about is not the “he” you had imagined.
Wolf Hall snagged numerous awards, including the Man Booker Prize. But I side with scholar Susan Bassnett, who writes, “I have yet to meet anyone outside the Booker panel who managed to get to the end of this tedious tome.”
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Hachi: A Dog’s Tale If you’re not an animal lover, the first hour of this little-seen tearjerker about a man and his dog might seem an interminable bore because, other than scenes of Richard Gere playing with a furry little critter (stop it; I know what you’re thinking), not much happens. But if you do have a soft spot for pets, the last 30 minutes of this film … sorry, I have to go find some tissues now. Release: 2009 Grade: B+
*****
M The opening half of Austrian director Fritz Lang’s first talkie hasn’t aged particularly well — too much police procedural and a lack of interesting characters — but stay tuned for part two, in which bug-eyed Peter Lorre gives a performance that is absolutely riveting. Lorre plays Beckert, an androgynous pedophile who terrorizes Berlin with a series of child murders. The hunting of Beckert, Lorre’s deer-in-the-headlights flight, and his “trial” by the city’s underworld are the stuff of cinema legend. Release: 1931 Grade: A-
*****
The Divide Tenants take refuge in the basement of an apartment building when a nuclear bomb levels their city — and that’s just the beginning of their ordeal. Stretches of the film are like a nightmare: surreal and unsettling, but also absorbing. The Divide’s downfall is a screenplay with characters who are all unpleasant or bland, and a plot that degenerates into one disturbing scene of human depravity after another. Release: 2012 Grade: C
*****
My Life as a Dog Life is tough for 12-year-old Ingemar in 1959 Sweden, but the kid’s pain is our gain in this charming comedy-drama. Director Lasse Hallstrom finds the perfect emotional balance as he depicts the early adolescence of Ingemar, who is shuffled from one home to another when his terminally ill mother can no longer care for him and his brother. If that sounds maudlin, not to worry. The oddball characters Ingemar meets — and some marvelous acting — lift this movie out of the doldrums and into the realm of coming-of-age classics. Release: 1985 Grade: A-
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My name is Grouchy, and I am a politics junkie. My pusher is the media, and my enabler is cable news. If you tell me that you’ve got a political movie starring Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei and Paul Giamatti … I am there. I mean, I was a big fan of The West Wing — weren’t you?
Alas, watching The Ides of March is more like watching an energy debate on C-SPAN. It feeds the junkie’s habit, but that’s about it.
Gosling stars as Stephen, a hotshot campaign manager who, during a crucial Democratic primary in Ohio, uncovers political dirt that threatens his ideals and career. And therein lies the problem with The Ides of March. Gosling, attractive and talented as he may be, is not very convincing as some babe in the political woods; he’s too old and too savvy to be shocked or disillusioned by the antics of men in power.
Then, too, the screenplay itself (co-written by Clooney) seems about 20 years behind the times. In this age of Internet blogs and cable-news gossip, it takes a lot to shock an audience. So why are so many of the characters in this movie knocked off their feet by the plot’s “scandals”? And I’m not referring solely to an unsavory sex revelation.
Clooney could have used West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin to punch up his dialogue. Consider this line from Evan Rachel Wood to Gosling, which is supposed to represent flirtation:
Wood: “You’re the big man on campus. I’m just a lowly intern.”
Or this exchange between Gosling and Tomei, the latter playing a print journalist:
Tomei: “You met with Duffy.”
Gosling: “Who told you that?”
Tomei: “A little bird.”
And this bon mot tossed off by Hoffman, rising from his chair after a confab with colleagues: “And on that note, I’m gonna take a shit.”
Somewhere, Sorkin is rolling over in his HBO money.
The movie is watchable because Clooney gets some real juice out of the other actors, especially Giamatti. And, speaking as a politics junkie, it’s amusing to see the liberal Clooney make a film about Democrats who project the exact opposite of “hope and change.” And on that note, I’m gonna– Grade: B
Director: George Clooney Cast: Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Evan Rachel Wood, Marisa Tomei, Jeffrey Wright, Max Minghella, Jennifer Ehle Release: 2011
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