A pair of terrific space-opera McGuffins, with memorable characters and spectacularly lovely prose.By the time of Flynn's distant future, Terra is a distant memory -- more of a legend, really. As mankind has moved out into space, the cultures of old Terra have been mixed and combined in every possible combination. You get a sense of that just from Flynn's character names: Zorba de la Susa, Johnny Barcelona, Enwelumokwu Tottenheim, Shmon van Rwengasira y Gasdro, Cheng-bob Smerdrov. For some odd reason, Irish/Celtic culture seems to have hung on particularly strongly -- the lingua franca of this universe is called Gaelactic -- so it's probably not a surprise that one of our central characters is a harper, a woman who travels the universe playing traditional music and improvising new tunes about the exploits of those she meets.
As The January Dancer opens, the harper has approached a scarred man in a bar on Jehovah, and asked him to tell her a tale; he tells the tale of the title object, a piece of stoneware whose owner can give anyone any order and not be denied. In the nature of all good McGuffins, the Dancer itself isn't particularly important, and its powers play only a relatively small role in the actual story; the drama lies not in the object but in the quest. Up Jim River reunites the harper and the scarred man, and sends them on a quest of their own; one of the central characters from The January Dancer has gone missing, and our two protagonists each have reasons for wanting to find her.
The great strength of these books is Flynn's prose, which is delightful to read. Here's how he introduces one character, early in Up Jim River:
And so the story begins, if it did not begin elsewhere and at another time. The
scarred man sits in his accustomed place in the Bar, robed in shadows in a niche cut into the wall. The other niche-seats are favored by lovers seeking shadows -- but there is no love here. Or love only of the most abrasive sort.
The early morning is a somber and introspective time, and the scarred man's visage is nothing if not somber and introspective. He owns a gaunt and hollow look, as if he has been suctioned out, and not even a soul remains. He is all skin and skull, and his mouth sags across the saddle of his hooked chin. He has been known to smile, but not very often and never is it comforting to see. He is weathered, his skin almost translucent. His hair is snow-white, but not the white of purity, for that has been a long time lost. A checkerboard of scars breaks the hair into tufts like a woodland violated by streets and winding roads. Those scars and a sad story have kept him fed and reasonably drunk for a long time. He has changed the story from time to time just to keep it fresh; but his eyes are never still and the true story may have never been told.
You probably could get away with diving straight into Up Jim River, but there are details and plot points that will make more sense and resonate more strongly if you read The January Dancer first. I think Up Jim River is the more entertaining of the two books, but both are marvelous entertainment.
I often feel at something of a loss about what to say after reading non-fiction, especially history. If I knew enough about the period or events covered to have anything insightful to offer, I probably wouldn't be reading the book. So usually I can't really evaluate whether the book is accurate or unbiased. Often, I wait to see other reviews of such books before I pick them up, essentially letting those folks who are experts do the pre-screening for me. And for what it's worth, this one's been very well reviewed.It's the story of Franklin Roosevelt's mid-1930s attempt to pack the Supreme Court. Midway through his first term, the legal challenges to the various programs and regulatory packages that made up the New Deal began arriving at the Court, which overturned many of them. The decisions were often quite harsh, and left Roosevelt feeling that despite his enormous Congressional majorities and the apparent support of the public (a bit harder to gauge then than now, as polling was in its relative infancy at the time), anything he attempted to do would be overturned by the Court.In Roosevelt's eyes, this was a Constitutional crisis in the making; if the powers granted to the executive and legislative branches were to be as narrowly defined as the Court's rulings implied, then the federal government had essentially no power to deal with major national crises. He saw this as a problem caused in large part by the age of the Court. The "Nine Old Men," as they were known, were an unusually old Court -- average age above 70 -- and in Roosevelt's eyes, they were relics of an earlier generation who simply could not adapt to the realities of a new era.And so, midway through his second term, Roosevelt introduced his plan to increase the size of the Court to 15 members. The Constitution doesn't define the size of the Court, and during America's first 100 years, it changed fairly often. But it had been stable at 9 since roughly the Civil War, so a 9-member court was all that most people alive had ever known, and Roosevelt's plan seemed terribly radical to many, an attempt to turn the Court into a rubberstamp for his legislative agenda.I was often reminded of the recent debate over health care. In both cases, a popular Democratic president with large Congressional majorities (Roosevelt's were even larger than Obama's, and that at a time when the filibuster was still a rarely-used tool instead of the default opposition setting that it is today) fought to accomplish something he believed crucial to the nation's well-being. In the public arena, the conservative opposition seemed far more vocal and better organized than did the Democrats, who were sometimes so divided on the issues at hand as to be there own worst enemy. And in both eras, the president was accused of being a socialist who wanted to rule America as his own personal playground, a tyrant in the making.Roosevelt's Court-packing plan never made it through Congress, for a variety of reasons -- one of his principal opponents on the Court resigned; another suddenly seemed to switch sides on a host of issues, putting Roosevelt on the winning side of those 5-4 decisions; Congressional Democrats feared that the riled-up voters at home would throw them out of office if they voted for the plan. In an "...and as a result..." afterword, Shesol argues that the ensuing divisions in the Democratic party led to the party's gradual weakening over the next 35 years, and to the increased strength of the Republicans, who had been a very small minority party, culminating in the Republican dominance of the Nixon-Ford-Reagan era.Supreme Power is entertaining reading, and Shesol brings his characters to vivid life; Roosevelt comes across as an immensely intelligent and profoundly arrogant man, who finds it difficult to believe that his own party might not go along with his ideas. I thought it was an informative look at an important moment in American history.
Here's the Grand Jury Prize winner from this year's Sundance Festival, and it's a fairly typical Sundance winner -- low-budget, regional, a bit too satisfied with its own gritty authenticity -- but it's gone some terrific performances that make it absolutely worth seeing.The setting is the Missouri Ozarks, where 17-year-old Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) is raising two younger siblings and caring for her mentally disturbed mother; her father has disappeared, as he frequently does when he's hiding from the law. But this time, his bail bondsman tells Ree, he's put the family home up as security towards his bail, and if he misses his upcoming court date, Ree and her family will be homeless. So it's up to Ree to wade through the complicated maze of meth dealers and thugs who make up her extended family (everyone we meet seems to be a distant cousin of some sort or other), trying to find her father when everyone has their own reasons for not wanting him found.Lawrence gives a star-making performance as Ree; she has a spectacularly communicative face, and when she's silent, we know exactly what she's thinking and (often more important in this story) what she's trying to keep hidden. She gets equally strong support from John Hawkes as her uncle Teardrop, who finds that his natural tendency to let sleeping dogs lie is not quite as strong as his family loyalty, and Dale Dickey as Merab, a family matriarch who guards her husband's privacy and business interests with an iron fist. ("No, he won't see you," she tells Ree. "Talkin' to people just leads to witnesses.")(It drove me nuts the whole movie trying to figure out where I'd seen Dickey before; I had to look her up at IMDB to realize that she was Patty the Daytime Hooker from My Name Is Earl. I love being surprised when an actor I think of in one way knocks me for a loop with a completely different type of character.)Winter's Bone is being compared by a lot of critics to Frozen River, and the comparison is understandable; they're both movies with very strong sense of place, about determined women dealing with the financial problems left to them by irresponsible men. I think Frozen River is a slightly better movie; it lacks the undercurrent of condescension towards the rural poor that I sometimes feel in Winter's Bone, and I think the Ozark cliches are sometimes laid on a bit too thick. But Lawrence, Hawkes, and Dickey all give top-notch performances here, and they are more than enough reason to see the movie.
Stern and Sundberg followed Rivers for a year to make this documentary, and they appear to have nearly total access, making for an informative, entertaining look at the legendary comedian.I had not seen much of Rivers' early work, and have never been a particular fan of the more recent work I have seen, so the clips from her early years were a revelation to me. I think Rivers has not been well served by the cultural changes over her 45 years in the business. In her early years, when there were still some cultural restrictions on how blunt one could be (and especially on how blunt a woman could be), she could be no more than risque, and was spectacularly funny; as years have gone by and standards have loosened, I think she's gone from risque to vulgar. It's easier to get cheap laughs with vulgarity, but it's much harder to be genuinely witty or clever.That aside, there is certainly much to admire in Rivers' career, not least her remarkable dedication, persistence, and simple refusal to ever give up. Her agent sums it up best, I think, when he says, "You're never going to be struck by lightning if you're not willing to stand out in the rain, and nobody will stand out in the rain longer than Joan Rivers."But there's also a surprising amount of self-pity, more than would seem to be justified by her level of success; for all her longevity, she seems convinced that no one really respects her achievements or takes her seriously as a performer.The film is almost entirely from Rivers' point of view, and the few other people the directors do interview are her friends and colleagues; it would have been nice to hear from the other side (and as blunt and abrasive as Rivers can be, you know she must have been burned some bridges in her day). But it's still a marvelously entertaining look at a geniune comedy legend, and I'm very glad to have seen it, if only for those glimpses into the brilliance of her early years.
Very good animated tale of a teenaged Viking boy whose friendship with a dragon makes him an even bigger misfit than he already was.There's fine voice work from Gerard Butler, who's more charming and likable as the blustery Viking chieftain than he has been in his recent slew of romantic comedies; Craig Ferguson, particularly effective late in the film when he goes into full sycophantic mode; and America Ferrera, sounding unusually young and girly as the romantic interest. Jay Baruchel, in the lead role of teenaged Viking Hiccup, is less distinctive or interesting than his supporting players.The animation is superb, and the dragon flying sequences are nearly as exciting as the similar scenes from Avatar. The first big scene, in which Hiccup and his dragon Toothless figure out how this flying thing is going to work, is especially thrilling.What really struck me about the story is that, even more than most misfit-comes-of-age stories, this one reads very strongly as an allegory about a gay teen. You've got a scrawny, sensitive boy who can't win the approval of his father or the other more traditionally "manly" men in the community, and he's hiding a secret relationship that he fears would lead to his complete ostracism from a community that already mistrusts his unorthodox sensibilities.There's an "I know your secret" speech for Hiccup's father -- Hiccup thinks that dad has learned about Toothless, but his father's talking about something else entirely -- that would need only minor rewriting to be right at home in a gay coming-out movie.
Thought I'd try out a new look for the place. Whaddya think?And I have fallen shamefully behind on posting about lots of the movies I've seen over the last month, so the goal is to get caught up on that by the end of the week.
Third volume in the Madeline Dare mystery series. (My thoughts on the first two volumes here and here.)I find this one puzzling in the same way that I found the second, which is that Read seems to be going out of her way to make the series as non-series as it can be. This book gives us our third different setting (New York City), and another mostly new cast of supporting characters.Part of what I enjoy about series mysteries is the chance to keep revisiting a place and a group of characters, to watch them change over time. When it's done well, supporting characters can take on a life of their own. Heck, in her most recent book, Marcia Muller let her large supporting cast take center stage while her series character spent nearly the entire novel in a hospital bed, unable to communicate.So I'm frustrated by Read's reluctance to give us any of that. I understand the commercial imperatives that make publishers prefer series to stand-alones, but it's starting to feel as if Read has been asked for a series that she really doesn't want to write, so she's writing stand-alones in the guise of a series.Aside from that, how's the book? Not bad. It's 1990 in New York, and Madeline has volunteered to help a distant cousin clear out an overgrown family cemetery; on her first day there, she discovers the body of a small child, its bones broken in a way that strongly suggests the child was beaten to death. Our supporting cast (this time around) features the cops and lawyers working to bring the boy's killer to justice.Read is a bit heavy-handed in the way she sets up abuse as the theme of the novel. One of Madeline's friends may be being abused by her husband (or she may be crazy); Madeline's sister reveals that one of Mom's boyfriends abused her when she was young. And I was annoyed by the way Read and her characters paint men as the world's sole abusers; when the child's body is discovered, Madeline and her cousin immediately begin wondering whether the abuser was a father or the mother's boyfriend. Such "it had to be a man because men are evil" dialogue gets repeated way too often for comfort here, and it feels particularly clumsy because (mild spoiler here) when the culprits are revealed, the mother turns out to have significant culpability herself.But Read knows how to tell a story, and Madeline is as entertaining a character as ever -- witty in a mildly mean way, self-deprecating, smart. I enjoyed Invisible Boy just as I'd enjoyed the earlier volumes. I only wish that Read would Madeline settle down in one place for a while.
NBC's dumping this sitcom into the summer TV wasteland, suggesting that even they don't expect it to find much of an audience, and they're probably right. But it's not the absolute disaster that might lead you to expect.The premise is interesting: Each episode begins with Charlotte (Sophie Winkleman) in the office of a dating service, where her "dating counselor" (Michael Benjamin Washington) is giving her the 100-question personality test that will allow them to find her "soulmate." Each question (which is the title of that week's episode) triggers a lengthy answer from Charlotte in the form of a story about her and her friends, and that story makes up the episode, before the final scene returns us to Charlotte and the counselor.The supporting cast isn't terribly well developed yet, though that's not unusual after only one episode. They are a Friends-esque bunch of attractive 30-somethings. Jill (Colette Wolfe) is the tramp; Leslie (Smith Cho) is slightly ditzy, and a bit insecure about dating after the recent end of a long relationship; Mike (Christopher Moynihan, who also created the show) is the blandest of the group so far; and Wayne (David Walton) is the charming ladies' man. They're a likable group, and they work well together; Cho makes a particularly good impression, and has a nifty way of putting an odd spin on a punchline.But the writing isn't up to the level of the cast. It's not dismally bad, mind you, just sort of bland and uninspired. And at a time when the sitcom is making a creative resurgence, bland and uninspired aren't going to keep a show around for very long. I'll give the show another week or two in hopes that the writing might somehow improve to the level the cast deserves, but I'm not particularly optimistic.
Exit Through the Gift Shop starts as one movie before detouring into an entirely different story midway through, and it's entirely possible that the entire things is an elaborate hoax. Whatever is really happening -- and the very definition of words like "really happening" is a large part of what the movie's about -- it's a fascinating, hilarious commentary on the modern art scene.The movie focuses on the relationship between Banksy and Thierry Guetta. Banksy is England's most famous "street artist," the currently trendy label for practitioners of graffiti and other creative endeavors that sit at the intersection of vandalism and art. Guetta has been following Los Angeles street artists with his videocamera, with vague ideas about making a documentary about the street art scene (despite having no experience or prior interest in filmmaking).The two men eventually meet, and for a time, Banksy is amused by Guetta's near-obsessive devotion to his project (and to Banksy himself). But eventually, as much to get rid of him as anything, Banksy sends Guetta back to Los Angeles with the suggestion that he should be making art of his own and maybe "put on a little show." And suddenly, we're in an entirely different movie, a cautionary tale about how easily the modern art world can be conned into thinking that it's seeing something important.Because with a well-timed cover story in an LA newspaper and a few generous quotes from Banksy and his friends, Guetta -- now calling himself "Mister Brainwash" -- is suddenly the toast of the city's art world, and his debut exhibition is drawing enormous crowds. Banksy, meanwhile, looks on in apparent horror at the Frankenstein monster he has helped to create.Now, all of that would be interesting enough, but there has been much speculation that Guetta isn't exactly who the movie presents him as, and that he may actually be another creation of Banksy (some of the rumors go so far as to suggest that he actually is Banksy, who's never been caught on camera), and that everything we're seeing is simply Banksy's most elaborate art project, an enormous commentary on the role of hype in modern art. Certainly Guetta is almost too colorful a character to be believed -- a French native with giant sideburns, an Inspector Clouseau accent, and an all-too-convenient penchant for carrying his videocamera everywhere (and an even more convenient backstory to explain that quirk).So are we watching a documentary or a hoax? Is Guetta/Mister Brainwash an artistic discovery, or a participant in a brilliant con game? Either way, the movie's a terrific piece of entertainment, as we watch Guetta and his team of assistants put together a massive art show despite his own incompetence, and listen to Banksy's viciously dry commentary on the increasingly out-of-control whirlwind.
After seeing Andersson's You, the Living last fall (a movie that I liked very much), I wanted to go back and see this earlier movie. They're certainly the work of the same director -- the same visual style, with an unmoving camera; the same bleak, gray city; the same series of vignettes in lieu of plot -- and you'll enjoy (or hate) them both in about the same amount.If anything, the setting for Songs is even bleaker than that of Living, as Andersson's unnamed gray city is in the grip of an unspecified economic crisis, and people seem to be fleeing the city, causing unbreakable traffic jams in some neighborhoods. We have a protagonist of sorts (though still nothing that really adds up to a plot) -- a furniture salesman who has torched his own store, and struggles to bear up under the steadily increasing weight of daily existence.It's a comic nightmare in which the apocalypse may not have arrived just yet, but it seems to be just around the corner, and the sense of dread gives us moments that are horrific, hilarious, and poignant, often in the same instant. Imagine a collaboration between Ingmar Bergman and Charlie Chaplin, and you start to get a sense of Andersson's sensibility.
As we head into tonight's 2-hour "goodbye, Simon" festival (and, oh yeah, they'll be naming a winner, too), let's look back at the best and worst of the season. As always, only the singers and performances from the top 12 on are eligible.Best performance: Crystal, "Up to the Mountain"Runner-up: Andrew, "Forever"Worst performance: Tim, "Under My Thumb"Runner-up: new judge Ellen DeGeneres, who was just as dithering as Paula, nearly as incoherent as Kara, and even more blandly useless than RandyVoted off too soon: Katie, who was finally coming into her own when she got the axRunner-up: Paige, who got laryngitis at just the wrong moment(And if we were considering non-finalists here, I'd have to mention Alex Lambert, who really did deserve a spot in the top 12)Lasted too long: Tim, who milked the "such a nice boy" vote for all it was worthRunner-up: Andrew, whose one bit of shtick wasn't really all that interestingMost disappointing: Siobhan, who dazzled in the semifinals, then caught up in her own hype and insisted on shrieking her way to a big climax every weekMost pleasant surprise: No winner; there were no pleasant surprises this season
And at last, we've come to the end of a rather lackluster season, and it's hard to muster up any more enthusiasm than to say that Lee and Crystal are the least objectionable of the bunch. Can either of them generate any actual excitement on the final night? Let's find out...The rundown:Round One: The singers choose their favorite song from the season.Lee, "The Boxer" -- It's got a bit more energy than it did the first time around, but that's mostly due to the larger band, I think; Lee's vocal is still rather listless and blah. On the plus side, he's more consistently in tune than usual.Crystal, "Me and Bobby McGee" -- When 2/3 of your lyrics are "na na na na na," it's hard to do much more than sing a bunch of pretty notes, and Crystal does that, I suppose, but aside from an unexpected little moment of yodel, it's not a terribly interesting performance. Round One to Crystal, whose "na na na" was at least more energetic than Lee's "lie la lie." Neither one has made much of a case for themself, though.Round Two: Simon Fuller chooses a song for each contestant.Lee, "Everybody Hurts" -- Very smart song choice that suits Lee's voice beautifully. And it's a solid performance for the most part. There are a few moments when he's shouting rather than singing, which increases the rasp in his voice to an unpleasant level, but it's certainly a huge improvement over his opening number.Crystal, "Black Velvet" -- In the final two or three notes, we finally got a hint of the subtlety and the sultriness that would have been much appreciated throughout the song. Instead, Crystal chose to belt the whole damn thing, walloping us upside the head with a Stompy Footed Big Voice holler. Ow.Round Two to Lee, but mostly because Crystal handed it to him.Round Three: The first single, and oh joy! We've gotten rid of the annual nightmare that is the Official American Idol Anthem.Lee, "Beautiful Day" -- Technically, this is his best performance of the night -- he's pretty much on pitch throughout, and the rasp is under control -- but still, there's no real emotional force or passion behind it, and the notes just land there, limp and unexciting.Crystal, "Up to the Mountain" -- Well, if you're going to pull the season's best performance out of your pocket, I suppose this is the time to do it. That was an absolutely marvelous moment, impeccably controlled and deeply moving. Round Three to Crystal in a landslide.For the night: Crystal, on the strength of the final number.And the winner is: The conventional wisdom over the last couple of weeks seems to have shifted from Crystal to Lee, if only because Lee's thought to be more likely to pick up more of Casey's votes. I don't buy it, though. I think Crystal wins, but it'll be close.
Sports journalist Rick Reilly sets off on an international quest to find the world's dumbest athletic competition.Only one major sport makes the cut -- baseball, which Reilly describes as "more boring than Amish porn." Well, two, maybe, depending on whether you consider women's pro football to be a major sport.But generally, Reilly's targets are more obscure. There's the World Sauna Championship, in which Finns (all of the serious contenders are Finns) compete to see who can sit in a 261-degree room the longest; chess boxing, which alternates rounds of boxing with intervals of chess, the winner being the first to either checkmate or knock out his opponent; and an entire chapter on collegiate drinking games, for which Reilly goes to Las Vegas for the World Series of Beer Pong.Reilly's tone is breezy and comic, which is generally effective, though there are a few spots where it falls flat. He ends his chapter on the Angola (Louisiana) Prison Rodeo with a few quotes from the father of a young woman who was murdered by one of the rodeo's participants, raising the issue of whether it's appropriate for prisons to be providing this sort of entertainment (with cash prizes, no less) for convicted rapists and murderers, but Reilly's transition to that question is so abrupt, and the time spent on it so brief, that it would probably have been less insensitive to simply ignore the question. And a chapter on nude bicycling begins with a long digression on how difficult it is to be a sports reporter and have to interview (ick) naked men, in which Reilly comes across as rather homophobic. He does a much better job, though, when dealing with the question of lesbianism in women's pro football and how team dynamics are altered when team members are sleeping together (or even worse, when they suddenly aren't any more).Despite those few brief sour spots, the book is a reasonably amusing look at the varieties of human competition, and if you've ever wanted to pay a brief visit to the world championship of Rock-Paper-Scissors, or watch as grown men drop live ferrets down their pants (while wearing no underwear), this is the book for you.
At a time when the dominant tone in American comedy is that of embarrassment and humiliation, it's a refreshing surprise to see a romantic comedy in which nobody gets punched, nobody trips over anything, and nobody falls face first into a lake or a mud puddle or a pile of pig shit. Just Wright is a simple, low-key story about two nice people falling in love.Queen Latifah stars as Leslie, a physical therapist who meets Scott McKnight (Common) at a gas station one night. Scott is the star player for the New Jersey Nets. (I am told by friends who are more into sports than I am that the notion of the Nets as a playoff-caliber team is the movie's funniest joke.) Scott only has eyes for Leslie's gold-digging friend, Morgan (a nice comic turn from Paula Patton). But when Scott suffers a career-threatening injury and needs a good physical therapist...well, you can see where this is going.And it's true that Just Wright isn't a particularly novel or surprisingly movie, but Latifah is so extraordinarily likable that she easily carries you through the movie's weaker moments. Common isn't up to her level as an actor (and he's a good six or seven inches too short to be convincing as an NBA star), but this is a smart choice of role for a rapper making the transition to acting; he's not asked to do much heavy dramatic lifting, he can largely coast on his innate charm, and he's surrounded by a supporting cast (including Pam Grier, Phylicia Rashad, and James Pickens Jr.) who know how to make him look good.Just Wright isn't an important movie, and it's not going to make anyone's top ten list at the end of the year, but it's a pleasantly understated and well crafted piece of entertainment, and I had fun watching it.
The rundown:For round one, the singers choose their own song, and their performances turn out to be crystalizations of the strengths and weaknesses they've shown all season.Casey, "OK, It's Alright WIth Me" -- Give the guy freedom to pick any song, and he chooses this? At a moment when he really needs to make an impression, he goes with something that's not very challenging, not very exciting, and not very interesting. It is, in fact, Casey in a nutshell: Everything is OK and alright, but rarely is anything any more than that. Crystal, "Come to My Window" -- A solid performance; Crystal has certainly been the most consistent of the remaining contestants. I can't remember, though, when we've ever had a contestant get this far in the competition whose stylistic range was so narrow. There's a sameness to her performances, and they start to blur together in my mind. I'm rarely disappointed by Crystal, but I'm even more rarely surprised.Lee, "Simple Man" -- In the quieter moments, this is quite a lovely performance; but when Lee gets loud, his voice takes on an ugly, harsh rasp and his pitch starts to get shaky. He's been an uneven mess of a performer all season, and this gave us both sides of Lee. When he's good, you can imagine him winning this thing in a landslide; when he's bad, you wonder why he wasn't sent home three or four weeks ago.For round two, the judges choose a song for each contestant.Casey, "Daughters" -- He needed a terrific performance to have any shot at the finals, and this wasn't it. He was unusually mush-mouthed, mumbling most of the lyrics (maybe he hadn't really learned them yet?), and his unfortunate goat-bleat vibrato reared its head at a few moments.Crystal, "Maybe I'm Amazed" -- I suppose there's no graceful way to rewrite the "maybe I'm a man" passage, but it does make the song sound a bit odd coming from a woman. Aside from that, most of the song is shouted rather than sung; she doesn't sound so much amazed as she does angry. Not Crystal's best moment.Lee, "Hallelujah" -- The first verse was lovely indeed, but by the end, Lee was screaming at us, ends of phrases were just dropping away (in both pitch and volume), and I just wanted it to be over.For the night: Lee (but this is not so much a "best" award as a "least disappointing"), Crystal, Casey.For the season: Crystal, Lee, Casey.Let's send home: Casey. And then let's hope that the good Lee turns up for the finals; if he does, it'll be a reasonably competitive night.
A slightly different take on the "Who wrote Shakespeare's plays?" controversy.Shapiro isn't particularly interested in the arguments for or against Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Oxford (though it's clear that he believes Shakespeare really was Shakespeare); instead, he presents a history of the debate.It was nearly two centuries after Shakespeare's death before the arguments began, and Shapiro suggests that it all started with a 1790 edition of Shakespeare's complete works edited by Edmond Malone, who was one of the pre-eminent Shakespeare scholars of his day. Rather than present the plays by type -- comedies, tragedies, and so on -- as had been the tradition before, Malone attempted to arrange them chronologically, which meant that he needed to figure out the order in which they'd been written. No one had ever attempted that before, and Malone based much of his ordering on his own conjectures about which lines and events in the plays were topical references to historical events. Even more perilously, he attempted to date specific sonnets by cross-referencing the emotional states of the poems' speakers to specific events in Shakespeare's own life.Once you head down the road of assuming that things in the work are references to Shakespeare's life, Shapiro argues, it's nearly impossible not to take the next step, and assume that everything in the plays must have some grounding in Shakespeare's life and education; and from there, it's a simple step to arguing that Shakespeare couldn't have written X because he didn't know enough about the law (or sailing, or high society, etc., etc.).From there, Shapiro presents the history of the two major contenders to be the "real" Shakespeare -- Francis Bacon, who dominated the debate in the 19th century (Mark Twain was a Baconian), and the Earl of Oxford, who became the trendy favorite in the early 20th century (Sigmund Freud was a prominent believer in Oxford).Why does it matter? Ultimately, Shapiro argues, the debate over who wrote Shakespeare is a debate over what we believe literature to be. If we believe (as Twain did, among others) that great literature can only come from the author's personal experience and history, then the claims of Bacon and Oxford are understandably appealing. But in accepting that notion, we deny the power of the human mind to create worlds that never were and to imagine things which it has never known. Believing that Shakespeare the man was incapable of being Shakespeare the poet is a sadly limiting view of humanity, one which denies the existence of genius and creativity.Shapiro does a fine job of presenting what could be dry literary arguments in a lively style, and I very much enjoyed his overview of the debate.
Reasonably entertaining mystery novel, the biggest flaw of which is its implausible heroine.Our setting is Buckshaw, an English country estate that is home to the de Luce family. Colonel de Luce is a veteran of World War II (the book is set in 1950), and a widowed father to three daughters. A dead bird is found at the door one summer afternoon, with a postage stamp impaled on its beak; shortly thereafter, the youngest de Luce daughter, 11-year-old Flavia, discovers a man in the garden and witnesses his final breath.Flavia is our narrator and detective, and if you're thinking that an 11-year-old setting out to solve a murder is a bit of a stretch, well, you're right. It boggles the imagination that no one -- not her father, not her older sisters, not even the policemen investigating the case -- ever tells Flavia to butt out; Flavia's ingenuity and deductive reasoning skills also seem rather far-fetched for a child her age.But the mystery at the heart of the book is a good one; the plot is well thought-out and the clues are fairly placed (although Bradley has to get a bit Dickensian with some of his character names in order to make certain clues work). The period setting, while not strictly necessary, allows for a few nice details -- one possible suspect might have committed the murder without remembering it, as he suffers from what was then known as "shell shock," which we would now call post-traumatic stress.I even liked Flavia as a character, for the most part; her sibling rivalry with older sisters Ophelia and Daphne is amusing and believable, and she's an endearing child. But she's just too young to be convincing as the detective in a murder mystery. A second volume in the series was published this year (The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag), and Bradley's storytelling is strong enough that I might pick it up. I hope that he's jumped forward a few years, though; even making Flavia as old as 15 or 16 would go a long way towards making her a more plausible heroine.
Jamie Foxx is the mentor for movie night, and his advice usually boils down to "make contact with the audience;" good advice, as far as it goes, but it doesn't address any of the real problems with any of tonight's performances. We also get duets, which are presented as bonus numbers -- no voting phone numbers attached to them -- and they're both more interesting than any of the solo numbers.The rundown:Lee, "Kiss from a Rose" -- Lee is the most maddeningly inconsistent of the remaining contestants, so after having seen him do so well last week, I probably shouldn't be surprised that he doesn't quite have it tonight. He's mumbling some of the words badly enough to make me think he doesn't really know them, and his pitch is weak, especially on the more angular phrases ("...did you know / when it snows..."). And some of the falsetto notes are just plain ugly.Michael, "Will You Be There" -- Not a great song choice, I don't think; more than half of it is call-and-response stuff, which can get an audience excited, but doesn't do much to show off the singer. It doesn't give Michael any chance to build or to go anywhere, and the performance is somewhat lifeless. On the plus side, the first couple of lines are in a lower part of Michael's register than we usually hear, and he sound marvelous down there.Crystal & Lee, "Falling Slowly" -- The song suits them very well, and I like the slightly harder edge they're giving it. I'm not wild about the way they're breaking up the phrases in the verses, with the two trading off words mid-phrase. They both sound great here, but she's coming off slightly better than he is, mostly because he's still having a few scattered pitch problems.Casey, "Mrs. Robinson" -- It's very pretty, and I like the scaled-down intimacy. What's missing is any sense of what Casey thinks of the material (or of Mrs. Robinson). The song doesn't require the sarcastic bite of the original -- it could work with a sort of sincere vulnerability -- but there's got to be some discernible attitude there; all Casey is giving us is pretty notes.Crystal, "I'm Alright" -- The song's an entertaining little piece of fluff, and she's burying it under enough weight to crush "The House of the Rising Sun." The vocals, taken strictly as vocals, are well done, but her interpretation is so insanely disconnected from the song that the performance fails entirely. It doesn't even work as camp.Michael & Casey, "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman" -- An uneven pairing here, which may be due to the song as much as anything; it suits Casey much better than Michael, and we get one of Casey's better performances from it. The subject matter should work for Michael, and he gives it his all, but the sort of Latin tinge doesn't work terribly well with his voice or inflections.For the night: Casey, Michael, Lee, Crystal (but "Falling Slowly" was the only real high spot of the night)For the season: Casey, Michael, Crystal, LeeLet's send home: It's a very tightly bunched field at this point, but Lee's inconsistency makes him the weakest of the pack.
Sinatra's music is alien territory for most of the remaining singers, so they can use all the help they can get. And they get more than the usual mentoring from Harry Connick Jr, who not only does the standard sessions with each singer, but writes the arrangements and leads the band as well.
The rundown:
Aaron, "Fly Me to the Moon" -- Pitch is a bit wobbly throughout, but he seems unusually confident, and there's a lot more personality coming through than usual. It's a more grownup performance than his norm, and entertaining despite the flaws.
Casey, "Blue Skies" -- Oh, that didn't work at all. Pitch was consistently bad, and (Connick's opinion notwithstanding) a bluesy vibe with no connection to the lyrics is not enough to sell the piece. It was flat and lifeless, and you could see how badly Casey missed his guitar.
Crystal, "Summer Wind" -- Quite nice. A bit too much gasping between phrases, and the sound mix has the band just a shade too loud, but the singing has a nice swing to it, and it's a sultrier, more seductive side of Crystal than we normally see.
Michael, "The Way You Look Tonight" -- The opening verse is gorgeous; it falls a bit flat once the band kicks in, but it's still a very good performance, sweet and tender. Michael's biggest problem, though, continues to be his enunciation, which is very poor tonight.
Lee, "That's Life" -- Fabulous. Well sung, emotionally real, with just the right amount of swagger and balls. A mile ahead of anyone else tonight.
For the night: Lee, Crystal, Michael, Aaron, Casey
For the season: Crystal, Casey, Michael, Lee, Aaron
Let's send home: It's time for Aaron to go home and let the grownups fight to the finish.
There's not much to 44 Inch Chest, really. Five guys sit in a room, waiting for one of their group to decide the fate of a sixth. But when the five guys are Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, Stephen Dillane, John Hurt, and Tom Wilkinson, you don't really need much more than that to hold my attention.Winstone's wife (Joanne Whalley) has been cheating on him, and he and his associates have kidnapped her young lover; we spend most of the movie in the dilapidated flat where they encourage a devastated Winstone to take action and do what must be done.The movie's written by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, who also wrote Sexy Beast, so the dialogue is very entertaining. Nearly ever actor gets at least one spectacular speech -- McShane clarifying how his approach to sex and romance differs from Winstone's; Hurt telling the story of Samson and Delilah, illustrated by scenes from the Victor Mature film; Winstone explaining to their prisoner what it takes to make a marriage work -- and the interplay among them is magnificent; they're completely believable as a group of old friends.There are some fantasy/nightmare sequences that don't quite work, and the last 20 minutes of the movie is a letdown compared to the first hour. But that first hour is so damned good that the movie is absolutely worth catching on DVD or cable.
