MOVIES: Wordplay (Patrick Creadon, 2006)

Charming documentary about crossword puzzles and the people who solve them.

The movie revolves around Will Shortz, who edits the New York Times crossword, hosts the weekly Sunday puzzle on National Public Radio, and organizes an annual crossword tournament in Stamford, Connecticut. He's a lifelong puzzle fanatic, having gone so far as to design his own major at Indiana University, making him the only person with an academic degree in Enigmatology.

We also watch Merl Reagle, one of the top crossword constructors, at work creating a puzzle. That's a fascinating process to observe, and you begin to understand that solving the puzzle is the easy part; creating it is the real challenge. Shortz talks about the fact that every puzzle is really a collaboration between the creator and the editor. As an editor, Shortz re-writes as many as half of the clues for each puzzle, to correct factual errors, to conform to Times style, and to make the clues match the needed level of difficulty for the day on which it will appear (puzzles get progressively difficult from Monday to Saturday, and re-writing the clues might be all it takes to turn a Monday puzzle into a Thursday puzzle).

Later, we sit in as several celebrity crossword fans solve Reagle's puzzle. What's amusing about those scenes is the way in which working the puzzle seems to concentrate the personality. Jon Stewart is funny and mock-angry, treating each puzzle as another battle in an undeclared war with Shortz; Bill Clinton is thoughtful and articulate, explaining what the crossword can teach us about diplomacy and human relationships. The Indigo Girls are earnest and a bit self-absorbed, reminiscing about the first time they saw themselves as a puzzle answer; documentarian Ken Burns crams so much smugness and pretension into his brief appearance that it's like being forced to sit through another one of his 12-hour monstrosities.

The second half of the movie focuses on Shortz's tournament, and the movie benefits immensely from Brian Oakes's animated graphics, which allow us to follow along as the contestants work on the puzzles. Oakes's work is very smartly conceived and executed, and contributes greatly to the tension that builds in the last half-hour of the film. Creadon also had the good luck to be present for a tournament in which the final round was particularly dramatic and hearbreaking.

Do you have to be a crossword fan yourself to enjoy Wordplay? I don't think so, not any more than you had to love spelling to enjoy Spellbound, or know how to tango to enjoy Mad Hot Ballroom. Keith's Rule to Live By #26 tells us that people talking about their passion are almost always interesting, even if their passion is something that would normally bore you to death. Wordplay has a lot of colorful personalities, a suspenseful ending, and some insights into the longevity of the crossword puzzle. It's a lot of fun.

BOOKS: Dark Tort, Diane Mott Davidson (2006)

13th in the series of mysteries featuring caterer Goldy Schulz.

Davidson's usual method is to give us two or three chapters of groundwork, introducing the new setting and characters who will be featured in that book before bumping off one of them and finding a way to involve Goldy in the crime. Not so this time, as Davidson dives right in from Goldy's first sentence: "I tripped over the body of my friend Dusty Routt at half past ten on the night of October 19."

Dusty was in training to be a paralegal, and works at her uncle's high-class law firm, where Goldy serves breakfast for lawyers and clients holding early-morning meetings. She was also Goldy's neighbor, and Dusty's mother, knowing of Goldy's frequent involvement in helping to solve murder cases, begs Goldy to help find Dusty's killer. There's no shortage of suspects, most of them the lawyers and secretaries at the law firm, and Goldy once again, against the usual protests of her policeman husband, begins investigating the murder.

As always, the book includes about a dozen or so recipes for goodies that Goldy serves to her catering clients during the course of events; there's a novel twist this time, as Davidson finds a way to make one of those recipes an integral part of Goldy's detective work.

The Goldy Schulz series isn't the place to go for groundbreaking, brilliant writing, but they're solid, reliable entertainment. The regular characters are a pleasant family; the suspects and red herring characters are a mix of colorful personalities; and the mystery itself is cleverly presented, with clues laid out fairly enough that the reader has a good shot at solving the puzzle himself.

MOVIES: Cars (John Lasseter & Joe Ranft, 2006)

Pixar has set such high standards for itself that it seems a disappointment that Cars is only a very good movie, and not a brilliant one.

The story is familiar: A young hotshot from the city is stranded in a small town that's seen better days. From him, the town learns to take pride in itself and takes the first steps towards a general sprucing up; from the town, he learns that old-fashioned values and friendship are more important than money and fame. It's a common movie plot -- Doc Hollywood and Sweet Home Alabama come to mind -- and Cars does it reasonably well.

The hotshot this time is Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson), a rookie racecar on the Piston Cup circuit; he's on his way to California for the championship race when he gets stuck in Radiator Springs ("the cutest little town in Carburetor County"). There's a wise old mentor car, Doc Hudson (Paul Newman); a pretty girl to flirt with, Sally Carrera (Bonnie Hunt); and a local yokel to serve as best friend, Mater the tow truck (an extremely annoying Larry the Cable Guy).

And in Pixar tradition, there's an ensemble of supporting cars; there's Cheech Marin as the Latino lowrider who enters every scene with a different flashy paint job; George Carlin as the VW bus who's into Hendrix and organic fuel; Paul Dooley as Sarge, the jeep; Tony Shalhoub as Luigi, the Italian sportscar. They're a bunch of rather cliched types, but within the limits of those cliches, some of the performances are good; Shalhoub is the standout, stealing every scene he's in.

There are some nice touches in the animation; the use of windshield wipers as eyebrows is effective, and I love the way that the hippie van's license plate hangs from its front bumper like a goatee. The movie's biggest problem is that as hard as the animators have worked, cars just aren't capable of being very physically expressive. They've got no limbs and their front ends don't allow for much facial expression. So the voice performances have to provide even more energy and expression than usual for an animated film, and the principals here don't bring quite enough life to their characters.

Cars is the least of the Pixar films to date, but even with its unexpressive characters and familiar story, it's still a moderately entertaining movie, and better than most of the family films we get these days.

BOOKS: My Latest Grievance, Elinor Lipman (2006)

Lipman is one of our best comic novelists, with a gift for creating vivid characters and planting them in awkward positions; it's great fun to watch her characters squirm their way out of the messes they've gotten into.

Her principal character this time is 16-year-old Frederica Hatch, who has grown up in a dormitory at a small women's college in Boston, where her parents are professors and house parents. She has been something of a campus mascot since birth, and is beginning to feel frustrated by the confines of the campus; Frederica longs for a little bit of excitement and turmoil. She certainly doesn't get that from her parents, who are kind and loving people, but occasionally too busy with campus politics -- they are chief organizers of the faculty union, which makes them the campus radicals in 1978 -- to pay as much attention to Frederica as she would like.

Excitement finally comes to Frederica's life in the form of Laura Lee French, the new housemother at the neighboring dorm. Laura Lee is glamorous, flamboyant, and free-spirited to a fault. She also turns out to be a distant cousin to the Hatches, with a connection to Frederica's parents that she never could have expected.

As always, Lipman's writing is elegant and entertaining, and her characters are lively and entirely believable. Her plotting falls a bit short this time, I think; the resolution is a bit of a deus ex machina, and the final chapter zips through thirty years -- bringing the characters to the present day -- rather hastily and artlessly.

Second-rate Lipman is better than a lot of what's out there, and My Latest Grievance is a pleasantly diverting book, but if you haven't read her before, there are better places to start; I'd suggest The Inn at Lake Devine or The Ladies' Man.

MOVIES: A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman, 2006)

I don't think that I've ever had such mixed feelings going into a movie as I did with this one.

On the plus side, it's an Altman movie, so it's likely to be good, and even if it's bad, you can count on Altman to be bad in more interesting ways than most directors. And there's that cast: Streep, Tomlin, Kline, Madsen, Harrelsen, Reilly.

But on the bad side, I despise Garrison Keillor. The radio version of A Prairie Home Companion has its moments -- much of the music is lovely, and some of the comedy sketches are amusing -- but Keillor's on-air personality is so smug and unlikable that I can't get through the show. Especially awful are his interminable monologues about Lake Wobegon, which are meant to be heartwarming pseudo-nostalgia for a small-town life that doesn't really exist anymore, but which are laced with an undercurrent of anger and cruelty toward the small towns that Keillor is claiming to love.

And when the movie was over, I came out with pretty much the same mixed feelings I had going in; much of the cast is superb, there's a lot of delightful music, and there's Keillor at the center of it all, so morose that you'd think he was deliberately trying to suck the joy from the movie.

The setting is the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, from which the real Companion is broadcast. Keillor is playing a version of himself, usually referred to just as "GK," and Companion is similarly playing a version of itself; the movie's PHC really is the small-town, small-audience local radio show that the real PHC pretends to be.

In this fictional universe, the radio station's new owner is tearing down the theater and shutting down the show, and tonight will be the last broadcast. All of GK's guests and regular cast are saddened at the impending death of the show, and urge him to make some acknowledgement of the event on the air; he refuses. "Every show is the last show," he says, "that's my philosophy."

Some of the actors are playing characters who appear in sketches on the real radio show (but who are not played on that show by these actors); Kevin Kline plays Guy Noir, who appears in private eye sketches, but for the movie, is moved into the "real" world as the show's security chief (the role's not terribly well conceived, and Kline is stranded in a series of bad slapstick scenes); Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly are charming as singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty, constantly pushing the boundaries of taste. There are also actors and musicians who appear on the real show, some as themselves (singers Robin and Linda Williams, and Jearlyn Steele; sound-effects wizard Tom Keith), some in fictional roles (Sue Scott as the show's makeup woman).

And there are actors who appear in new fictional roles, best of all Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as Yolanda and Rhonda, the "Johnson Girls" who are all that's left of what used to be a quartet. If you saw Streep and Tomlin introducing Altman at the Oscars this year (he received an honorary Oscar), then you have some idea of their relationship in this movie; they're constantly interrupting each other, finishing each other's sentences, and telling long, drawn-out anecdotes about their childhood and life on the road. They are a magnificent comic duo (and Streep, in particular, is a fine singer), and some smart director should build an entire movie around them.

Keillor, on the other hand, isn't much of an actor; his scene with Virginia Madsen, who plays a mysterious presence credited only as "Dangerous Woman," is painful to sit through. He's got the saddest face I've ever seen, all heavy jowls and eyelids; even when he smiles (which isn't often), that only manages to elevate his mood from suicidal to glum. You understand after this movie why his career is in radio.

So the movie's a big sloppy mess. There's no real plot; it's more just a series of semi-random character interactions. If there's a theme, it's death and how we deal with it, though I wouldn't say there was any particular coherent statement being made. There's a lot of music, so much that the movie almost feels like a weird concert film; most of it is very well done, though if you don't have a taste for old-fashioned Americana, folk, and sentimental ballads sung entirely without irony, you're likely to be bored. Performances range from stellar to dismal, with Streep and Tomlin at the top of the peak and Kline and Keillor at the bottom.

If you're a fan of Keillor and the real Companion, by all means go to the movie, which you will love. If you're not, you'll have to decide whether it's worth putting up with him to get what good the movie has to offer.

A fine post on the same-sex marriage issue from John Scalzi at Whatever, making the point that with the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts two years ago, it is now the anti crowd that is fighting to change the very definition of marriage (since that definition in the US now includes same-sex marriage), and to destroy thousands of existing legal marriages.

BOOKS: The Girl in the Glass, Jeffrey Ford (2005)

This year's Edgar Award winner in the Best Paperback Original category.

That's a category that may be obsolete soon. Ten or fifteen years ago, when paperback always meant mass-market, and paperback originals were generally considered to be (and usually were) the dregs of the publishing world, the category made some sense as a way to single out for praise the relatively few good books published in the format.

But now, the trade paperback format doesn't carry nearly the stigma that mass-market does, and major authors are seeing their work published as paperback originals; the playing field is relatively level now, and the best paperbacks are being acknowledged when they're published. There's less need today for a special category to rescue good paperbacks from obscurity. Ford's Depression-era novel is certainly as good as any mystery I've read in the last year.

Our narrator is Diego, a 17-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico who has lived since childhood with Thomas Schell. Schell is a con man, providing phony seances to the grieving wealthy of New York; Diego works as his assistant, "Ondoo," a turban-wearing mystic from India. (It is a running joke that none of Schell's clients are able to tell the difference between a Mexican and an Indian; brown faces are all the same to them.)

During one seance, Schell sees something that isn't part of his fakery, the image of a young girl in a pane of glass, silently beckoning for help. A few days later, the same face appears in the newspaper; the girl has disappeared and is presumed to have been kidnapped. Despite the fact that he has no actual psychic abilities at all, Schell volunteers his "services" to the girl's family.

Ford's prose is delightful to read. Diego's English has the precision that often comes when someone learns a second language, and the elegance of his era and milieu. The story is nicely plotted, with villains whose motives are historically apt and sufficiently evil to make the stakes high. I'm always fond of con-artist stories, and while Schell's con games aren't the principal focus of the story, there are some fascinating details of how he pulls off some of his effects. The final confrontation with the bad guys is a grand, exciting set piece with some very clever chicanery.

MOVIES: The Break-Up (Peyton Reed, 2006)

OK, the movie's called The Break-Up, so it's not surprising that it's mainly about the break-up of its central couple, but that poses a structural problem that the movie doesn't solve. We see virtually nothing of Brooke and Gary (Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn) as a happy couple -- their 2-year relationship is compressed to a series of snapshots during the opening credits -- so when they start fighting, we don't like or care about either of them.

And since they're not just fighting, but deliberately going to great lengths to hurt one another, we're seeing them at their worst, which only makes it harder to give a crap. That can work, if the movie's willing to completely commit to a very dark sense of humor -- The War of the Roses, for instance, got away with it for the most part -- but The Break-Up wants to be loved as a sweet-natured romantic comedy, and wants us to love its characters. The result is a tone that yo-yos back and forth from slapstick to emotional brutality, and while each extreme works moderately well in its own right, the writing doesn't manage the transition between extremes very well.

But by the time the characters get to their moments of redemption -- each of them gets one, an attempt to salvage the relationship they've spent the entire movie trying to destroy -- I hated both of them so damned much that I was actively rooting for them to fail, and for both of them to spend the rest of their lives alone and miserable.

There are some funny performances scattered around the edges of the movie. Aniston and Vaughn each have a best-pal sidekick, played by Joey Lauren Adams and Jon Favreau, and they're both very charming; unfortunately, the chemistry between either of those pairs (Vaughn and Favreau especially) is stronger than the chemistry between Aniston and Vaughn. Justin Long, an actor who I've never much liked before, is funny as Aniston's flamboyant idiot co-worker; Judy Davis is all brittle edges and sharp clavicles as their boss, a self-absorbed gallery owner. John Michael Higgins gets the movie's best scene; he's an a cappella singer who drags an entire dinner party into joining him in a horribly embarassing performance.

That scene reminded me that director Peyton Reed has always had a knack for staging musical numbers; think of the marching-band opening from Bring It On, or the McGregor/Zellweger production number over the closing credits of Down With Love. I'd really love to see him go to town on a witty musical. I wonder what he'd do with Sondheim's Into the Woods, for instance.

MUSIC: a virtual cathedral

This is fascinating. Computer technology has been applied to a new CD -- an organ recital -- to create a virtual cathedral, a simulation of what the organ might sound like if it were located in a different room with different acoustics.