MOVIES: Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009)

What a glorious movie this is, creepy and eerie and gorgeously animated.

Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) is an annoying little girl, perpetually bored and complaining about something or other. To be fair, she does have some reasons to be frustrated; she's just moved away from all her friends into a rundown apartment building, and her parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) are rather inattentive, constantly working at their computers.

So when Coraline finds a tunnel into another world, she's enchanted. The Other World is a slightly warped mirror of her own, but everything seems better. The Other Parents dote on her (and cook much better); the neighbors are entertaining delights instead of faded, drunken vaudevillians; the garden is a gorgeous, colorful delight instead of a barren, gray wasteland.

But gradually, it becomes clear that the Other World is not as warm and inviting as it seems; the Other Mother, in particularly, is revealed to be a sinister, demonic being who has been luring children into her world and stealing their souls for generations. Coraline finds herself struggling to escape (and to rescue her own parents) from this nightmare world.

The voice cast is excellent, and they aren't actors you'd expect to hear in this sort of movie. Hatcher is surprisingly effective as the evil Other Mother, and Hodgman drops his usual dithering, pompous intellectual shtick (it took me a few minutes to recognize his voice without it). The other tenants in the apartment building are played by Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, and Ian McShane (quite funny as a drunken, elderly ex-strongman who trains mice). Keith David is a standout as a mysterious cat who seems to be the only one who knows what's really going on; he's having a good year in animation, having also done fine work in The Princess and the Frog.

The stop-motion animation is gorgeous, and there are scenes of such intricacy that I can't imagine doing them in stop-motion -- a theater filled with a hundred or so terriers, the graying and disintegration of the Other World during the climactic battle. (Compare this with the clunky stop-motion of Fantastic Mr. Fox, and you'll realize just how bad that movie's animation really is.) Even simpler scenes, though, are done with great beauty; I loved, for instance, watching the unfolding of the tunnel to the Other World.

This is most emphatically not a movie for children; it's intensely scary and disturbing. From the opening credits, in which we watch a spidery, metallic hand disassemble a stuffed doll, it's clear that we're going into very creepy territory. But for older kids and grownups, this is a spectacularly good movie, a terrifying delight.

For anyone who might be eagerly waiting, there is a "best movies of 2009" list in the works; I'm giving myself the rest of January to catch up with all of the holiday releases -- still need to see Crazy Heart and The Last Station -- as well as a few DVDs of movies I missed earlier in the year.

MOVIES: Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)

I should begin, I suppose, by noting that I saw the movie in 2-D, because I have a lazy eye that keeps me from getting anything more than a headache from 3-D. But the stuff that works in Avatar would only be improved by 3-D, and the stuff that doesn't work wouldn't be helped at all by 3-D, so I feel like I can offer a reasonable opinion of the movie.

The story is a familiar one: There's a mining operation on the planet Pandora, which is inhospitable to human life. The miners wear oxygen masks, and there's a project to inflitrate the native population. That's done by creating avatars, Na'vi bodies made with some human DNA so that a human operator can be linked into and control the body. One avatar is controlled by Jake (Sam Worthington), who is a last-minute replacement for his identical-twin brother; since they share DNA, Jake can use his brother's avatar.

Jake hasn't gone through the extensive training that most avatar operators get, so he's improvising from the start. He meets the beautiful Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and falls so in love with her (and with the Na'vi way of life) that when the inevitable human military assault comes, he takes the Na'vi side.

If you're thinking of Pocahontas or Dances With Wolves or any of a zillion other "white guy goes native" movies, well, I told you it was a familiar story. And there's nothing inherently wrong with retelling an old tale, but if you choose to do so, it is incumbent upon you, I think, to find something novel or interesting in it, some new spin on old material. This is where Cameron and Avatar have failed spectacularly. The story is a painful collection of cliches; there's not a single story beat that you wouldn't have predicted after the first ten minutes, and you could probably have written more interesting and original dialogue for most of them.

The acting is adequate to the task, but almost never more than adequate. Stephen Lang brings the occasional glimmer of energy to his Evil Military Bastard, but it's the only remotely memorable performance in the movie.

Part of the acting problem is that so much of the movie is told through CGI characters and performance capture technology. I have yet to see a CGI character that I found convincing; here, as elsewhere, they lack the feeling of weight that a real body would have. The performance capture technology in Avatar is certainly the best I've seen, but it's still not very good at communicating subtle emotions, and the eyes are still cold, dead, and creepy. (To be sure, the dead-eye problem is less obtrusive since the characters aren't human.)

But on the other hand, the world of Pandora is a spectacular creation, filled with glorious landscapes and plant life unlike anything we've seen before. It's an entirely believable world, and I can only imagine how magnificent it must be in the 3-D version of the movie. There are one or two small design decisions I might have made differently -- I wouldn't have chosen to cover the entire planet in "Billie Jean" flooring that glows when you step on it, and the Tree of Souls isn't so much the awe-inspiring spiritual icon of a culture as it is a cheap fiber-optic toy from Spencer Gifts -- but there are so many remarkable ideas and images in Pandora that I think it's worth seeing the movie just for the visuals.

I say that with some reluctance, because I find myself increasingly frustrated by the current trend away from intelligent storytelling in the movies, and I fear that the success of Avatar well only exacerbate that trend. Certainly, we can already expect that by Christmas 2012, the theaters will be filled with Avatar ripoffs that use cut-rate versions of the new technology to tell even less interesting stories than this one.

Still, if you care about the movies as an art form, I think you have to see Avatar, on as large a screen as you can manage, and in 3-D if you can.

Supporting Actresses: Class of 2009

A fine blogathon today on the supporting actresses of 2009. A couple dozen bloggers have posted on their favorites of the year, and you'll find links to all that goodness over at StinkyLulu, who organized the whole thing.

MOVIES: The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)

I must admit to being utterly perplexed by this one. It's a parable of some sort, set in a small German village in the years immediately preceding World War I. It's a nearly feudal place, with most of the land owned by a local baron, who directly employs about half of the villagers.

It's also a cold, repressive place; children are harshly disciplined for what seem like relatively small infractions. The white ribbon of the title is worn by the two oldest children of the town pastor -- the girl wears it in her hair, the boy wears it as an armband -- as a reminder of the purity they have failed to maintain; this punishment is imposed for the crime of being late to dinner.

The movie is narrated (in the present day) by the now-elderly schoolteacher, who tells us that the strange events he will relate bear some relation to, and will perhaps explain, later events in his country's history. It's hard not to take that a reference of some sort to the rise of the Nazis (especially when you've got some Germans making other Germans wear colored armbands as a sign of impurity).

The village is stricken with a rash of strange and violent incidents. The doctor is seriously injured when his horse trips over a wire strung between two trees. A farmer's wife is accidentally killed in the sawmill. A mentally disabled boy is viciously beaten. There are hints throughout that it may be the children who are doing all of these horrific things, but nothing is ever proven.

And the connection of all of this to German history is a bit vague, too, at least to me; it may be that if I were German, I would be picking up on all sorts of subtle cultural and historical references that simply fly over my American head. But without that, all I can really get from the movie is a beautifully photographed (in black and white) Teutonic variation on Children of the Corn or Village of the Damned or any "the children are eeeeee-viiiil" movie of your choice. It's never boring from moments to moment, but damned if I can figure out the point of it all.

MOVIES: Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, 2008 / US 2009)

An understated, wistful movie about the weight of things and our obligations to the past.

Three adult children must deal with the estate of their mother, whose uncle had been a painter and art collector of some moderate renown. It will fall to Frederic to handle the details, as the other two siblings live abroad; their mother had urged him to sell the estate, or donate the art to a museum, so that the family would not be burdened with the upkeep of a summer home that is only rarely used. Frederic, however, wants to keep the home and the art intact, to be handed down to the next generation.

There's a layer of subtext throughout about globalization and how French culture is to survive if the nation's best young minds continue to leave the country, and whether culture can truly be said to "survive" if it's placed in a museum instead of used and lived in.

The four central performances are all superb. Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling, and Jeremie Renier are utterly believable as siblings, both physically and emotionally; their conversations about how to handle things after their mother's death feel spot on, just the right mix of emotion and rationality. Edith Scob radiates dignity as their mother; she is not always the warmest person, but there is no doubt that she loves her family -- the current generations as well as those who came before -- and wants what is best for all of them.

Not available on DVD yet, but Netflix has it for instant streaming. Well worth your time.

BOOKS: Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon (2009)

Ryan has just learned that the man he believed was his uncle is actually his father. In shock, he leaves his campus, catches a bus out of town, and disappears; the authorities believe him to be dead.

Lucy, fresh out of high school, is thrilled to be leaving her small Ohio town with her history teacher, and significantly less so when they wind up holed up in an abandoned motel in an even smaller Nebraska town. This is not the glamour and excitement she had looked forward to.

Miles is, once again, on the road in search of twin brother Hayden, who has been missing for ten years, only occasionally popping up with a postcard or a phone call. Miles keeps chasing these tenuous trails, only to find Hayden long gone by the time he gets there.

These three stories of identities lost and found, of personalities discarded and reinvented, are very cleverly woven together by Chaon; the sharp reader will see some of the connections coming, but not all. Chaon misleads us in a variety of ways, not the least of which is simply to allow us to make a host of unfounded assumptions.

The pacing is excellent here; just as one set of characters might begin to wear out their welcome, Chaon jumps back to another story. It's a thrilling ride, watching them struggle to make their way forward with options increasingly limited by circumstances and poor planning. (I particularly felt for poor Lucy, who flees Nowhere only to land in Outer Nowhere.) You'll find yourself wanting to back up and read again, just to see which connections you'd missed along the way. A delightful, clever novel.

MOVIES: A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2009)

There are very fine performances to be found here, but they are trapped in a movie that is far less interesting than they deserve.

It is 1962, and George (Colin Firth) is still mourning the death of his lover some eight months earlier; George's grief doesn't seem to have lessened any, but he thinks that he may have finally found the only way to move on. This is as good a performance as Firth has ever given. He is particularly heartbreaking when receiving the phone call that informs him of Jim's death (and tells him that he will not be welcome at the funeral); there is no melodramatic weeping or hurling of objects, just a terrifying, fragile stillness, as if to move at all would be more than he could bear.

Since Jim's death, the only real friend George has left is Charly (Julianne Moore), a fellow ex-pat Brit with whom he once had a brief romantic relationship, and who still carries a giant torch for him ("and if you hadn't been a giant poof, we could have been happy!" she screams at one point). They spend evenings together, taking inordinate pleasure in wallowing together in their own misery.

If there is hope for George to rejoin humanity and get on with life, it may come from Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), the pretty young college student who has the hots for professor George. Their scenes together are among the best in the movie. While I certainly wouldn't want to return to that era, there is something intensely romantic about the tension in their conversations; even the mildest flirtation must be hidden beneath countless layers of plausible deniability.

But as fine as these performances are, the movie itself is shallow and superficial. It is a lovely movie to look at, and its ultimate subject is its own beauty. There are endless loving closeups of eyes, beautiful young men (clothed), cocktail glasses, beautiful young men (partially clothed), children's shoes, and beautiful young men (naked). There are scenes and images that seem to be lifted from other highly visual filmmakers -- Almodovar and Wong-Kar Wai, among others -- but Ford has gotten only the visuals, with little of the emotional impact that those directors bring to them.

Mind you, I have nothing against beautiful young men, regardless of their state of (un)dress, but one can go overboard; after about the eighteenth interstitial shot of a man writhing sensuously underwater, I began to grow weary. (I also began to marvel that it was possible to film a man writhing underwater for so long a period without even the slightest glimpse of pubic hair, much less genitalia.) And though it is in keeping with the current gay aesthetic that all of the beautiful young men are completely shaved from the neck down, I think that choice is rather anachronistic for 1962.

If you are particularly fond of any of these actors, or if Tom Ford's aesthetic -- rather, the aesthetic that he has borrowed from better directors -- appeals to you, you may want to see this one in the theaters. Otherwise, it can certainly wait for the DVD.

BOOKS: Silver Lake, Peter Gadol (2009)

Robbie and Carlo have been partners, both personally and professionally, for 20 years now. Things are fine for the most part, but the architecture business has hit a slow patch, and their relationship is starting to feel a little worn around the edges.

Maybe that's why Robbie is so intrigued by Tom, a younger man who wanders into their office one Saturday morning. They chat and hit it off; Robbie invites Tom home for dinner. Everyone has a bit too much to drink, and rather than let Tom drive home, the men put him up in the guest room for the night. When they wake the next morning, Robbie and Carlo find that Tom has done something horrifying, and their relationship may not survive the fallout.

Gadol's novel is full of lovely prose, and the characters are well developed, but it's so self-consciously arty that I was driven nuts by it. I was also frustrated by the way Gadol hints at everyone's secrets for chapters on end; I find it's rarely a good sign when the author chooses to hide events from the reader, or describe things in cryptic ways that are wildly misleading, so that bombshells can be dropped later on.

A mixed bag. Can't say I'd recommend it with any great enthusiasm, but wouldn't be surprised if you found it deeply moving, either.

BOOKS: Knives at Dawn, Andrew Friedman (2009)

The Bocuse d'Or is a two-day competition in which nations are represented by a chef and his/her assistant; each team has five and a half hours to prepare two elaborate platters of food (one fish, one meat). Taste is important, to be sure, but the visual spectacle of the food matters almost as much. Most Americans, even a lot of foodies, have never heard of the Bocuse d'Or, but to the culinary world outside the US, it's a very big deal. If you're a Top Chef fan, you might remember the Bocuse d'Or-inspired competition from the show's most recent season -- the one with the ridiculously intricate garnishes and the shiny mirrored platters.

(Were the Food Network really interested in food, they'd be offering us coverage of the Bocuse d'Or, as several European TV networks do. It only happens every two years, and if they can cram an 8-hour cake decorating contest into a one-hour show, they can certainly fit the Bocuse d'Or into a 2-hour special.)

In Knives at Dawn, Andrew Friedman follows the US team -- chef Timothy Hollingsworth and his assistant, Adina Guest -- as they prepare for the 2009 competition. Going into this competition, the US team had never finished higher than sixth, but a small group of prominent American chefs (Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller among them) was determined to give this year's team the financial support and practice time they would need to reach the medal stand.

Hollingsworth faces a variety of challenges, not least of which is simply planning his menu. Should he focus on the food he likes to cook, emphasize American ingredients and flavors, or try to sway the judges with traditional classic technique? He also finds that even with the backing of Boulud and Keller's group, it's nearly impossible to find enough rehearsal and preparation time.

Friedman assumes a basic level of food knowledge. but really unusual techniques or foreign terms are always explained so that even the non-foodie can follow what's happening reasonably well. His book is a solid and entertaining piece of journalism, and he does a lively job of bringing his principal characters to life

MOVIES: O'Horten (Bent Hamer, 2007/US 2009)

For 40 years, Odd Horten (Baard Owe) -- that first name is relatively common in Norway -- has driven passengers up and down the length of the country. But now he's reached mandatory retirement age, and doesn't quite now how to cope with life when he's free to wander rather than forced to follow a track.

We spend a few days wandering around Oslo with Horten as he tries to adjust to his new life. Writer-director Bent Hamer gives us a clear sense of his discomfort and disorientation by gradually turning Oslo into a slightly surreal place, where everything seems to be just a few degrees off kilter. Strangers approach and start conversations that sound like coded messages from bad spy novels, asking if he likes some particular brand of butter. Routine events are disrupted in unexpected ways, as when police barge into his favorite restaurant and haul the chef away.

Through it all, Horten maintains a stoic deadpan, barely responding to anything, no matter how bizarre. There's something childlike about his response; to a 4-year-old, after all, the bizarre doesn't seem bizarre, because it's just one more in the endless series of things he hasn't ever seen before. "Oh, so this is what happens in the world," thinks the child. "Oh, so this is what happens away from the train," thinks Horten. It's a lovely performance from Owe, a marvel of calm and understatement.

I could have wished that the movie had ended one scene earlier; there is a beautiful, haunting, potent image at a popular Oslo sporting venue that should have been the final moment of the movie. But that's a quibble. O'Horten is an eccentric charmer.

MOVIES: Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009)

Wes Anderson is, notoriously, something of a control freak as a director, particularly with the look of his sets and costumes. So you can understand why stop-motion animation would appeal to him. Everything has to be made from scratch, and you never have to settle for filming in a room where the wallpaper isn't quite what you wanted. Heck, you even get to have perfect control over the movements and physical "performance" of your cast.

And Anderson has assembled a top-notch cast of actors to provide the voices for his characters. George Clooney is Mr. Fox, whose raids on the local farmers are becoming increasingly dangerous. Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) wishes he would slow down and take fewer chances, but as Mr. Fox reminds her, "I'm a wild animal." Their son, Ash (Jason Schwarzman, giving a listless, bland performance) is an insecure wreck with a massive inferiority complex that's only made worse when golden-boy cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson) comes to stay with the family. Also doing fine work in smaller roles are Bill Murray and Owen Wilson.

Those local farmers (who are British, oddly enough, though all of the animal voices are distinctly American) eventually get so fed up with Fox's raids that they destroy his home, and the rest of the movie finds Fox and his animal pals out to get their revenge.

The story's entertaining enough, though it sags in the last act, as the plotting against the farmers drags on and on. The real problem, though, is the clunkiness of the animation. There have been a lot of advances in stop-motion in recent years -- look at the quality of the Wallace and Gromit films, for instance -- but this movie is choppier than the Rankin-Bass TV specials of 40 years ago. All the painstaking attention to detail that makes the look of the movie so appealing is wasted because it's just so painful to watch such badly done animation. A serious disappointment.

MOVIES: The Young Victoria (Jean-Marc Vallee, 2009)

We cover about three years of Queen Victoria's life here, and eventful years they were, too. (And there will be no grumbling about spoilers here; this is history, for heaven's sake, and we all know how it turns out.) As we open, she is merely Princess Victoria, first in line to the throne. But she is only 17, and should her elderly uncle, King William, die before she turns 18, a regent will have to be appointed; depending on the circumstances, she may be forced to relinquish the throne to a regent for several years. William wants desperately to avoid a regency, because he doesn't trust Victoria's mother, the Duchess of Kent, and trusts even less Lord Conroy, the politician who would likely be pulling the Duchess' strings.

There are several other politicians jockeying for a possible regency (much credit to screenwriter Julian Fellowes for laying out the various factions and contenders very clearly), and of course, Victoria is also being courted by members of several other European royal families. They all have political motives, but some of them also seem to have genuine romantic interest in her; chief among this group is Prince Albert, whose uncle is King of the Belgians.

(He's always referred to in just that way, incidentally -- "King of the Belgians" as opposed to "King of Belgium." I have no idea if there's some particular historic reason for that, but it struck me as odd.)

William holds on long enough (by a few weeks) for Victoria to become Queen without a regency; she marries Albert; and the first two years of her reign are marked by an assortment of political and social blunders. The movie ends with the birth of the first of the nine children Victoria and Albert would have before his tragic death at a young age.

So, there's plenty of drama available to the filmmakers here. Unfortunately, virtually none of it makes it into the movie, which is a flat, lifeless exercise. Much of the blame falls to Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend, whose Victoria and Albert have no romantic chemistry, and who are never convincing as confused young royals struggling to do the right things in the right way. The only performance in the movie with much life comes from Jim Broadbent, who brings more energy to his few moments as King William than anything else in the movie.

The Young Victoria looks pretty. Sandy Powell does her usual fine work with costumes, and Maggie Gray's sets are opulent and lavish. But no matter how gorgeous, a costume drama without the drama doesn't offer much to the viewer.

MOVIES: The Princess and the Frog (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2009)

By now you've no doubt heard the twist this one puts on the old fairy tale; when Tiana kisses the frog, it doesn't turn him into a handsome prince, it turns her into another frog, and the two must set out together to restore their humanity.

Anika Noni Rose, as Tiana, is on the bland side even by Disney princess standards, but there are a few good voice performances here. Bruno Campos gives Prince Naveen more personality than Disney princes are usually allowed; Keith David oozes silky evil as the voodoo man, Dr. Facilier; and Jennifer Cody is quite funny as Tiana's best friend, Charlotte, whose obsession with finding a prince could almost be taken as Disney mocking its own princess obsession.

The old-fashioned hand-drawn 2-D animation is beautifully done, and comes across as charmingly retro in this era of 3-D and CGI. Particularly fine sequences include Dr. Facilier's final moments, a lilypad waltz for the two frogs, and a beautiful Deco-style fantasy sequence set in the restaurant Tiana hopes to one day own. Randy Newman's songs are competent, professional imitations of authentic New Orleans music -- all of the notes and rhythms feel right, but there's no soul to it.

Disney had reportedly been worried for years about doing an African-American princess for fear that they would somehow stumble into offensive stereotypes; I think they've avoided that (but I'm a white guy, so there may be something I've missed). For me, the character who crossed the line into offensive cliche was Ray, the Cajun firefly, who is a toothless, bumbling idiot.

This is certainly a vast improvement over Disney's most recent hand-drawn flicks, Home on the Range and Treasure Planet, and the crowd of 8- and 9-year-old girls in the theater certainly seemed to enjoy it. But the movie never soars in the magical way that the best Disney animation does, and if you're not a pre-teen girl with a princess fixation, you can certainly wait for DVD.

MOVIES: Nine (Rob Marshall, 2009)

Why is it that no one can find a Hollywood leading man who can sing when they're casting musicals? Richard Gere in Chicago, Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd, and now Daniel Day-Lewis in Nine. You'd think they wanted us to hate musicals.

Nine is based loosely on Fellini's 8 1/2, and tells the story of Guido Contini, a Fellini-esque film director in 1965 Italy who's suffering from writer's block. He runs off to a resort town with his mistress in search of inspiration, but finds none; he spends the weekend daydreaming about the women in his life, and his daydreams take the form of musical numbers.

Day-Lewis croaks his way through his two songs, and is fortunately not asked to do any real dancing. And even if he were a musical leading man, I don't think he'd be the right choice for this role. Guido should be suave and charming; we need to understand why all of these women are so drawn to him (not all of them in romantic fashion). Day-Lewis is a chilly presence, and his inexpressive woodblock of a face doesn't help any. In the show's Broadway revival a few years back, the role was played by Antonio Banderas; he would have been a better choice for the film.

The heavy musical lifting is left to the all-star cast of women, each of whom gets a musical number (Marion Cotillard, as Guido's wife, gets two). Coming off best are Fergie, who delivers a delightful performance of the score's best song, "Be Italian," which also offers the movie's most interesting staging/choreography, involving sand and tambourines. Penelope Cruz also does well with "A Call from the Vatican," which isn't much more than an excuse to thrash about the floor and be fabulously sexy, but hey! who does fabulously sexy better these days than Cruz?

Less successful is Kate Hudson, whose "Cinema Italiano" (one of the two songs newly written for the film) is little more than an excuse to put her in a 60s go-go outfit and remind us that her mother was a lot hotter during her own go-go days on Laugh-In. The biggest problem, though, and the reason the musical's more admired than loved, is that the songs mostly aren't very good; they aren't particularly tuneful (Go ahead, hum "A Call from the Vatican." I dare you.) and they have a tendency to bluntly spell out what ought to be subtextual. Both of Cotillard's songs -- "My Husband Makes Movies" and the new "Take It All" -- are particularly weak in this regard, clubbing the audience over the head with stuff that we'd figured out about ten minutes before the songs began.

The other women on hand -- Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman (who grows more creepily animatronic with every movie she makes), and Sophia Loren -- deliver their songs adequately, though you get the sense that Loren's number was written for someone who doesn't sing much.

So, a few good moments, enough that you might want to rent the DVD if you're a fan of any of the actors, and if you're a fan of the musical, you'll probably want to see it on a big screen just to see what's been made of it. But beyond that, I can't really recommend it.

Yes, I know; I've been a very naughty blogger over the last month, and have fallen behind in posting comments about the movies I've been seeing. The goal is to get caught up over the next week or so. So all of you who've been waiting with bated breath to find out what I thought of Fantastic Mr. Fox won't have to wait much longer.

BOOKS: Green Metropolis, David Owen (2009)

Back to nature! That's been the rallying cry of the environmental movement for decades now. If only we would all just return to the land and grow our own food and get out of those smelly, polluted cities, we could make a dent in the environmental crisis. And for the most part, we've bought in to that narrative; we're all convinced that living on a farm in Vermont or Montana would be a planet-friendly thing to do.

Not so fast, says Owen. It turns out that the most environmentally friendly place in the US isn't Vermont. It's Manhattan. On a per-capita basis, Vermonters use 3.5 times as much gasoline and 4 times as much electricity as Manhattanites do. New York City is so energy efficient that it is singlehandedly responsible for making New York state the lowest per-capita user of electricity.

There are two reasons for Manhattan's low energy use, and Owen argues that we need to find ways to introduce them to our other large cities. First, population density is high enough to make a truly efficient public transit system possible; second, mixed-use neighborhoods mean that it is more convenient to do most errands on foot or bicycle than by car.

Compare, for instance, Owen's current home in suburban Connecticut to his previous New York apartment. The closest thing to walk to in the suburbs is his mailbox, 150 yards away. Walking that distance from the front door of his apartment building could have taken him to "six or seven restaurants, a shoe-repair shop, a liquor store, two grocery stores, various doctors' offices, a pharmacy, and a half-dozen large apartment buildings."

And because there's so much to see, people are further encouraged to walk in the city; psychologically, walking through a busy landscape makes the walk seem shorter than a walk of the same distance through an empty one. One of the places that New Yorkers don't walk is through Central Park; anyone who needs to cross the 3/4 mile park is more likely to take a cab than someone walking the same distance along a busy avenue.

High-density population, combined with smaller living spaces, also saves energy because it's cheaper to heat/cool your home, and because you're less likely to buy a lot of stuff you don't need when you don't have anywhere to put it.

Owen also points out that many of the things we do, thinking that we're making things better, are only going to make things worse. Adding new highway lanes may decrease traffic in the short term, but what we really need to do is make driving less practical and convenient, not more. The various programs to certify energy-efficient building projects turn out to reward behaviors that do very little good for the environment, and may actually do a fair amount of harm. And Owen rips to shreds the nonsense of the "locavore" movement, the idea that we should eat only food that's grown and produced locally.

This is an eye-opening book that will reshape the way you think about what is and isn't good for the environment; it's a solid piece of contrarian journalism, and entertaining reading to boot.

BOOKS: Uglies / Pretties / Specials, Scott Westerfeld (2005 / 2005 / 2006)

Solid SF trilogy, targeted at the YA market, about the destruction of a repressive society.

Our heroine is Tally Youngblood, who at the beginning of the series, is about to turn 16 and become Pretty. Massive plastic surgery makes everyone Pretty, every face and physique corrected to fit the very narrow range of beauty allowed by society. The logic is that if everyone's pretty (and in roughly the same way, so that no one stands out), then people won't have to deal with the petty jealousies that so often led to violence and conflict in the old days.

Not everyone wants to be Pretty, though, and there have always been rumors of people living in the wilderness, beyond the safety of the city limits, who have never had the surgery and have remained Ugly into adulthood. Tally finds herself caught up in a plot to find and destroy one such community, the Smokies; she's forced to work for the Office of Special Circumstances, a sort of secret police who have had additional surgeries to enhance their senses and their fighting abilities.

Westerfeld's action sequences occasionally get repetitious, especially in the numerous hoverboard chase scenes (a hoverboard is like a flying skateboard), and the action of the trilogy takes place very quickly; I don't think it's more than a few months from beginning to end, certainly no more than a year.

But there are a lot of clever ideas to be found here, and Tally is an appealing heroine; her struggles to maintain her mental and emotional clarity in the face of unprecedented obstacles are compelling, and that aspect of the story made Pretties the most entertaining of the three books for me.

BOOKS: And Another Thing..., Eoin Colfer (2009)

The original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a work of comic genius, and survived its transition from radio play to the printed page surprisingly well. Douglas Adams showed a marvelous gift for writing goofy anecdotes, witty one-liners, and entertaining digressions. The plot was never the point; it was only there to be the minimal framework required for all of the meanderings, which is where all the good stuff was.

Alas, Adams wasn't content to have one brilliant success under his belt; he dragged the series on for four more books, each a further demonstration of the law of diminishing returns. The later books were never truly horrible, and there was always an occasional gem to be found in them, but those gems were fewer and farther between with every book. As sad as it was when Adams died at the young age of 49, there was a part of me that was almost grateful that at least we wouldn't have any more disappointing Hitchhiker books.

Ah, but these days, mere death needn't be an obstacle to cashing in on a successful series. New novels continue to be published under the name "V.C. Andrews," and she's been dead since 1986; Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne marches on in books by Eric Von Lustbader.

And here's Eoin Colfer with the sixth installment in the Hitchhiker's Guide series. Like the later Adams books, it's not unreadable. It's just uninspired and unnecessary. The familiar characters -- Arthur, Trillian, Ford, and Zaphod are all back -- don't feel quite themselves, and the jokes never land with the same zip that Adams gave them in his early books. Colfer has given us a second-rate imitation of an author who had already become his own second-rate imitation. For Hitchhiker completists only.

BOOKS: Locked In, Marcia Muller (2009)

27th (!) in the Sharon McCone mystery series.

Sharon survives being shot by an office intruder, but is left with locked-in syndrome -- she's alert and conscious, but unable to speak and almost completely paralyzed. All she can do to communicate is blink once for yes, twice for no.

Her friends, family, and colleagues -- not mutually exclusive groups -- begin digging even deeper into the cases they've been working on, hoping to find a connection to Sharon's shooting. Muller's narrative leaps back and forth among a half-dozen of the series' regular supporting characters, occasionally returning to Sharon's internal monologue as she lies in her hospital bed, frustrated at not being able to help with the investigation.

It's a nice way for Muller to put a new spin on the series, and it gives the minor characters their moment in the spotlight, which is entertaining. The many cases that everyone's been working on tie together into one giant case a bit neatly for my liking, but Muller juggles the puzzle pieces with enough dexterity that you aren't too distracted by the implausibility.

The last novel in the series, Burn Out, found Sharon wondering if she still had in her to be a private investigator, and at the close of this one, it seems unlikely that she'll be returning to full duty any time soon. Muller's been writing these novels for more than 30 years now, and surely retirement can't be too far away for McCone. Locked In suggests that Muller may be looking for a way to continue the McCone series with Sharon in a less central role, perhaps serving as an advisor to her younger colleagues who do most of the leg work themselves.