Business Stuffs

So one question people ask is whether reviews sell books.  I recently had a good chance to look at that when Jeri Westerson's fine debut mystery VEIL OF LIES was reviewed in the Boston Globe.  Like a lot of in-genre debut hardcovers, the initial orders have been modest.  At the major chains, the main ordering was by B&N, which took a few copies for their better stores in the mystery category.  This wasn't the first good review for the book by any means.  It is quite a fine debut novel, and it had gotten a starred review in Library Journal and good reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, Mystery Scene and Crimespree, and the Richmond (VA) Times Dispatch and Historical Novels Review, among others.  It had a decent and steady Amazon ranking; most times I've checked it's been in the mid-20Ks as it is now, which I consider to be a very good showing for a first genre novel especially since it has been steady.  Prior to the Globe review running, it had sold 7 copies in Boston, according to Nielsen Bookscan.  In the two weeks since the review ran, 49 copies have sold in the Boston market.  So yes, the review has definitely sold some books for Jeri Westerson.    Down in Richmond, the Times Dispatch review saw sales reported to Nielsen Bookscan go up from 1 copy in the Richmond market to another 3 selling the week following.  So all told, 8 copies before, another 52 after.  It's possible to look at that and go "big whoop, 50 copies."  But I think it's pretty exciting to know that there are 50 people reading a review and picking up a book pretty much for that reason alone, and there are probably more copies than that.  Bookscan isn't capturing any sales at Kate's Mystery Books in Cambridge, MA.  There might be people in Hartford, CT or Washington, DC who are in the distant circulation areas of the newspapers that also picked up a copy.  What about the people who went to their local library, and the libraries that took an extra copy or two because of the review.  So I'm pretty psyched by this

The same week I was tracking the Boston market for Veil of Lies, I noticed another book that saw an unexpected and inexplicable 1000-copy increase in sales, a mass market paperback that had come out a few months ago where you don't expect to see sales spurt up like that.  So I did some asking around at the publisher, and found out that Target had taken a position on the book.  So now you know that reviews do sell books, and that having your book on the shelves at Target can sell even more.

Epic Movie

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  Seen Thursday evening December 11, 2008 at Landmark's Sunshine, Aud. 1, part of the Variety Screening Series.  1.5 slithy toads.

Australia.  Seen Tuesday evening December 16, 2008 at Regal's UA Kaufman Astoria Stadium 14, Aud. 13.  2.5 slithy toads.

I'd say Benjamin Button was a disappointment except that I wasn't sure to expect very much from it.  With Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, and directed by David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac, others), this is an expensive big risk of the holiday season.  I doubt it's a worthwhile one, though you never know sometimes what award buzz might do, and the movie does at least have the good grace to have a better last half hour than first half hour, and is long enough you might leave with your fond recollections and have long since forgotten the less fond.  Brad Pitt plays a baby who is born as a small very old man, then grows in size as he grows "older," i.e., becomes younger even as he gets taller and bigger.  During the middle of his life he is Brad Pitt and has torrid Great Romance with Cate Blanchett, and then he grows up to become a small young man with Alzheimer's before ultimately dying.  His story is told via the lips of Julia Ormond, who doesn't yet know it (and takes far longer to guess than the audience probably will) that she's the daughter of the man whose diary she is reading to her mother (yes, Cate Blanchett in old person make-up that makes her look like one of the aliens from Close Encounters) who is the one and only Benjamin Button.

The screenplay is by Eric Roth, who hit the jackpot once upon a time with Forrest Gump.  That's a movie which to me was nice seeing once, especially at my beloved  Loews Astor Plaza, but which I don't think stands up much to the test of time.  For all the awards and the fuss and bother this isn't something that makes me watch when it's playing on TNT on a Sunday night.  I'm rather fonder of other movies Roth scripted like The Insider and The Good Shepherd, while Ali I remember mostly for inspiring me to get out an Analog to read during the brigher-lit scenes.  Fincher I've always found interesting, and I don't want to say that Benjamin Button isn't interesting, only that it isn't particularly good.

The essential problem for me is that there really isn't much to do with the Benjamin Button character between birth and the age of 40ish, coming or going, up or down.  So the movie introduces his family and sends him off to Paris and has him fighting the sea war during World War II, but I couldn't say I cared for any of it, and as the years slowly ticked by all I could think was "20 years down, and there are still 60 long years to go."  The great love story that finally emerges is a little better, though it's no Rose and Jack in Titanic, shall we say.  It ends tragically, and tragic ends to great romance are often worth a little emotional investment, but it ain't no Love Story, either.  There's a nifty running joke about lightning strikes, but there's also a framing device with a clock that runs backward which isn't sufficiently connected to the rest of the film to succeed as metaphor.  

The Q&A afterward was a "special" one with director Spike Jonze (Weezer "Sweater" video before going on to do movies like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation that are overrated to the extreme) interviewing David Fincher.  But why was Jonze there?  He didn't ask hardly any questions of his own, hardly seemed to have prepped, did they offer him free popcorn to come to the theatre?  So I found out that they had a really long script, which they needed to cut.  And then a really big budget, which they needed to cut.  And then a whole lot of film, which they needed to cut.  And since the movie was set in New Orleans and they couldn't decide whether to have it before Katrina or after Katrina they settled on putting it during Katrina.  

Australia is an in-between effort by Australian director Baz Luhrmann that on balance worked for me.  Lurhmann's first film as director was the delightful Strictly Ballroom.  If you're married, or dating, or something like that, rent this movie, snuggle up with your better half, and you'll enjoy yourself immeasurably and have a much nicer relationship after the two hours are up.  Then see Muriel's Wedding (not directed by Luhrmann) and you'll have a crash course in the new wave of Australian cinema that crested on these shores in the early 1990s.  That was followed by an offbeat Romeo and Juliet, the very very very very bad Moulin Rouge, and now this.  I might have gone to 3 toads with this if it had just a whiff more Strictly Ballroom to it, and a little less Moulin Rouge.

Because the thing I didn't like about Moulin Rouge was its artificiality, which is the same thing I don't like in Wes Anderson movies or Napoleon Dynamite (can that opinion be distilled to earn someone a million dollars?), and this movie starts out drowning in it.  Little planes flying around the globe in ways that make the little planes in the Indiana Jones movies look real.  Overdone acting.  Nicole Kidman prancing into Australia like a bride singing in the middle of an open pit coal mine.  When she and Hugh Jackman ride off to their home, a cattle station in north Australia called Faraway Downs, it's the most stylized car ride I've seen on screen since Kermit and Fozzie Bear started their ride to Hollywood while singing "Moving Right Along" in The Muppet Movie.  If Big Bird had said hello to Hugh and Nicole, it would've fit right in.

But ever so slowly the movie settles into a kind of grand Hollywood artificiality of the kind that works, or works for me at least.  CGI-gorgeous starry skies during the nighttime scenes.  A cute kid, in this case a half-breed Aboriginal whom Nicole Kidman wants to keep safe from the government-sponsored program of taking the half-breeds to be re-educated to serve white people.  Cattle driving across the Austalian wilderness.  A Gone With the Wind moment between Hugh and Nicole to be followed by the Cold Mountain 15 minutes.  Japanese planes bombing Darwin Harbor.  I can't believe as I'm typing that I can actually fall for this sort of stuff, but I did.  I wouldn't say this is interesting; Benjamin Button is more "interesting."  But I think Australia is funner and better.

Movies That Begin With The Letter W. Or Not

What Doesn't Kill You.  Seen Sunday Afternoon December 14, 2008 at the City Cinemas Village East, Auditorium #1.  1.5 Slithy Toads.

Were the World Mine.  Seen Sunday Afternoon December 14, 2008 at Cinema Village, Auditorium #2.  2 Slithy Toads.

Even though my movie-going is down quite a bit from its peak years when I used to do on toward 120 per year (this year will be over 80, I think, but not above 90), I do still try and see the occasional unheralded movie that gets somewhat interesting reviews that suggest it doesn't suck and may actually be an unsung gem.  So this weekend I decided I had some open weekend nights ahead to maybe visit the nearby multiplex and better to go far afield on the weekend, so I headed downtown to dsee these two movies that you've likely never heard of.

There was one pleasant surprise in store.  The City Cinemas Village East is a former playhouse devoted to Yiddush Theatre.  It has four very small theatres with very small screens in its basement.  On the former stage,  it has a relatively small screen on the bottom and then a kind of interesting and larger one directly on top of it, an arrangement which I'm surprised wasn't used in more old movie palace conversions.  The UA Lynbrook and the now-deceased UA Astoria are two other theatres which plexed in the old stage area.  But to my surprise this unheralded indie movie was playing on the big and still very richly ornamented main auditorium, which is a stunningly gorgeous place to see a movie and one of the few really gorgeous places left in Manhattan for viewing a movie.  So if the drama flags, you can look up and down and all around and enjoy the surroundings.  Alas, the drama flags in What Doesn't Kill You.  It has two good lead actors in Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke, both of whom count as points in deciding whether to see a movie, but the true story is just not very interesting.  It's like Goodfellas or The Departed playing at too slow a speed.  The two leads are errand boys for a South Boston hood; doing it since they're kids.  Unfortunately the pay isn't always so good, the job security isn't so good, so they start to do some stuff on the side without cutting in the boss.  They end up being arrested (probably a coincidence?) and after they do their time one of them eventually chooses to go straight and enjoy his family while the other decides to do one last big score that can give him the seed money to maybe do better things.  Even if you haven't seen this movie before, you feel as if you had.  Because the writer/director knows the movie itself is dramatically inert he tries the same trick as many of the writers I've worked with, which is to goose the start with an Exciting Prologue that will be So Exciting it will Carry You Along In Its Wake.  That rarely works in writing a novel, and it doesn't work here.  I read that the Yari Film Group, which is releasing the movie, recently went into bankruptcy court.

I was a tad upset with the Cinema Village, because the ticket seller claimed to have no knowledge of the discount for Museum of the Moving Image members.  I've written to complain.  Also, I am pretty sure that the projector in this theatre is running with a bulb that's weak than it's supposed to be.  The movie I saw there on the little theatre cut into the mezzanine area of the main screen, is called Were the World Mine.  It's a gay Shakespearean take on the High School Musical sub-genre.  It's set in a private school where a gay student suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune from his jock classmates.  When he's chosen to play Puck in the senior class play production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, he finds a recipe hidden in the play for some kind of potion that turns people gay or lesbian for a bit of time, which becomes a bit of wish fulfillment that turns the town upside down.  The play must go on, the town returns to a kind of heightened normalcy, and boy gets boy at the end.  Alas, it's so 1990s or 1980s.  You have the members of a high school basketball team breaking into song and dance, but we have that now in the High School Musical movies, so we don't need it here.  The cast isn't bad, per se, and the English/drama teacher is played by Wendy Robie channeling Katherine Helmond from Soap and Who's The Boss and I will never complain to be reminded of Soap.  But Robie's biggest role was perhaps a recurring one in Twin Peaks many years ago, and that's the overall level of achievement when you look at the cast credits, so totally cheap kids movies like if you look at the IMDB bios for the cast of Benji.   I was suffering a cold this week and a little drowsier than I'd really like to be when seeing a movie, so both movies have been given an extra 1/2 toad so they don't suffer totally if my own drowsiness was unfair.

& I have to say it again:  what is this movie really adding to the world when we have big Disney movies as gay as...

High School Musical 3: Senior Year.  Seen Sunday morning/afternoon Nov. 9, 2008 at the AMC Hoffman Center 22, Aud. #1.  2.5 slithy toads.

I hadn't seen the first two movies in the series on TV because, um, I've aged some past the target audience and totally don't get why anyone would groove to Zac Efron and in fact didn't see Hairspray in part because I didn't want to see him doing Link Larkin.  But I am more inclined in general to see movies in theatres than on TV, the coming attraction for this made it seem kind of fun, I have a warm spot for the director Kenny Ortega on account of his choreography for the wonderful I'm-Having-the-Time-of-My-Life-Whenever-I-See-It Dirty Dancing (and I really should see Newsies again some day), and I do occasionally see things in order to be part of the public dialogue.

& I'd have to say that the movie wasn't as bad as I feared it could be but nor was it quite as good as I'd hoped it might be.  The plot wasn't very interesting to anyone who hadn't gotten caught up in the trials and tribulations of Troy Bolton's life from the earlier two movies, and then those uninteresting plots had to be grafted uneasily with other story-lines to help introduce new younger characters for future HSM movies.  The music wasn't all that good.  It does end up achieving a certain emotional power through sheer repetition, kind of like the way Andrew Lloyd Weber beats you into submission in The Phantom of the Opera, and there isn't anything in the movie musically that still sticks around five weeks later.  But it is full of good spirits.  There was some nice choreography as I'd hoped; I was particularly impressed with a kind of "dance worm" that was a particularly cinematic piece of choreography that took advantage of being a film musical over a stage one to provide an effect that you wouldn't get on stage.  

But can we talk about the character of Ryan Evans, played by Lucas Grabeel.  Just as a matter of talent and ability, many of the reviews I'd read for this movie singled out Grabeel's performance as being of particular note, and I do think he has more stage presence and more inate talent than Zac Efron, though my own dislike of Efron aside I do think there's a little more "It" (see my recent post on The Reader) to Efron.  But going beyond that, there's nothing gay at all about HSM 3 because God Forbid and all that, but here's a character who wears very interesting outfits and leads the cast of the high school musical in what one character terms a "yoga Fosse" thing, which is a joke that nobody in the film's target audience will remotely understand but which some of the accompanying adults might.  And to all of the characters in HSM 3, Ryan Evans isn't even worth commenting upon.  He's a part of the scenery.  

& that creates a problem for a Were the World Mine.  In the world outside of East High, I'm still not sure how receptive the senior class would be to a Ryan Evans lookalike leading the ensemble in a Yoga Fosse thing, so insofar as the real world is concerned the issues that confront the lead in that movie are legitimately real world.  This is one reason why I give a little bit more toad to that movie over What Doesn't Kill You, which is superfluous in 68 different ways so many years after Goodfellas.  But culturally, when Disney is giving us HSM 3, and HSM 3 is giving us Ryan Evans, it becomes a lot harder to justify putting a Were the World Mine before the cameras.

A few weeks later I saw a good chunk of HSM 2 on Disney in an annotated pop-up version, and I think it may be a better movie than HSM 3, or it might just be that law of diminished expectations in watching something on TV where it doesn't have to be such an exclusive focus of attention.  But it seemed to me that the plot-line of HSM 2 was a little more universal in its appeal or use of archetype (rich v poor, etc.) than HSM 3.  HSM 2 has a little less music in it, perhaps because the made-for-TV sequel had a little less of a budget.  But I thought the baseball diamond dance in #2 was head and shoulders above anything in #3 in its creativity and verve and joy, and I'd say the same for the finale as well.

Lucas Grabeel in turn has as small role in...

Milk.  Seen Thursday Evening, November 20, 2008 at the Landmark Sunshine, Aud. #1, part of the Variety Screening Series.  3 Slithy Toads.

This is a film that's been getting some rave reviews from far and wide, and which along with Slumdog Millionaire has been leading an end-of-year box office resurgence in specialty films.  I like it perhaps a little less than a lot of the critics.

The story of Harvey Milk is a very powerful one, and this is at least the third time it's being put before us, following on the book The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts and the excellent documentary The Times of Harvey Milk.  An emigre to San Francisco from New York City, Harvey Milk organized the gay community in the Castro District of San Francisco, won a spot on SF's city council (well, they don't call it that, but...), and was then martyred along with Mayor George Moscone by a former member of the Council who subsequently helped bring national attention to the Twinkie Defense.  Moscone has a convention center named after him, but Milk's mark on US politics will likely endure longer.

This movie is directed by Gus Van Sant, who's been kind of all over the place in his career.  I'm very fond of  his Good Will Hunting (and in my usual way I could bore you with my "the night I saw..." story but won't right now), I regret not seeing his Columbine-inspired Elephant in addition to the interesting Zero Day, Drugstore Cowboy was a pioneering indie flick, but other movies of his like Paranoid Park and Last Days are elegiac odes to elegism that are acquired tastes at best.  

While Milk benefits from an amazing performance in the title role by Sean Penn and other excellent performances by Vincent Garber at Mayor Moscone and Josh Brolin as Supervisor Dan White, it suffers because it has in miniature some of the same tensions in intent that have kind of bedeviled Van Sant's career as a whole.  There's a little hint of this in the opening minutes of the movie, where you've got some very Van-Sant-y shots of gays in the Castro that are there for atmosphere but which have a little too much of the artsy-fartsy skateboarding scenes from Paranoid Park in them.  And then as the movie progresses, Van Sant can't decide whether to cater to or ignore the most conventional cliches of the biopic.

So Lucas Grabeel from HSM 3 is playing the role of Danny Nicoletta, who in real life was an important associate of Harvey Milk's but in terms of this movie (at least as it survived the editing process; I don't know what we have in the script) has hardly any role at all.  There's so little of this performance in the movie that I'd have to say it should have been deleted entirely, consolidated with some other character, something or anything other than what happened to it.  That's the kind of consolidation that happens a lot in biopics or sports movies because you want to make them dramatic and therefore do in your "based on a true story" movie the same kinds of things I might ask authors to do in tightening their novels.  Take two secondary characters that are weak, make a strong one out of them.  Van Sant doesn't want to do that here because he and the screenwriter are trying to be very true to the historic record.  Alas, just as in a novel the time and space and lines and itty bitty pieces of screen time devoted to this character with little import to the story of this movie end up taking time and space and lines and pieces of screen time away from other characters who are more important to the movie's story, and so to me the movie is weakened.  Goodness knows we could have wished for more of an effort to define Milk's relationship with Jack Lira.

And yet at other times Van Sant can't avoid some biopic cliches.  Is it really the case that there was a memorial service for Milk in city hall with all of three people attending at the exact same time that 30,000 people were marching from the Castro to city hall?  That's the way it's portrayed in this movie, where we see a couple of Milk's colleagues saying "oh, look, nobody cares," only to add dramatic heightening to them walking outside and seeing the candle-lit marchers spreading miles down Market Street, with of course some of the other major characters hand-in-hand in the front row.  Cue tears now.  In other places in the movie, Van Sant uses actual historical footage, including a scene of Diane Feinstein, now a Senator from California, announcing the news of the deaths of the Mayor and of Milk.  Here, I would have found archival footage of the memorial march to be more moving than the Hollywood recreation of it.

People should see Milk.  Many more people will find out about Milk's story courtesy of this movie than ever would by reading Randy Shilts or seeing the documentary, and that's a fact.  Sean Penn's performance is very good.  Josh Brolin's is very good, and that's a fact.  But I did see the Times of Harvey Milk, over 20 years ago in MLB 3 at the University of Michigan when the campus rep circuit hadn't yet lost out to the VCR, and in my memory that was a 4 toad movie that got me a lot more teary-eyed than today's Milk does, and even though I recommend Milk, I can't help but think you'd all be better  off finding your way to the documentary.

My Fair Weather Friend

Rather to my dismay, I have discovered that my Amazon Kindle is a bit of a fair weather friend, not as up to the rigors of wintertime as I might wish.  I first noticed several weeks ago while Kindling on a walk to Costco that the refreshing of the pages got a little bit sluggish.  Instead of a kind of "flash" from one page to the next, you had the image of both the old and new pages overlapping.  That also means you can't time as well for hitting the next page button a line or two from the bottom because you can't read either page when they're superimposed.  I came to realize that this was because the Kindle did not like even a moderately chilly 40 degree temperature.  The offical specs in the fine print of the manual say it works from 32 degrees, but it's safe to say there's need of an asterisk.  It might work, but start to get below 45, and it's going to show some degradation in its performance.  Seattle doesn't have some of the temperature extremes we have in New York, so maybe the people at Amazon don't need to worry about using at the Bellevue Transit Center while waiting for Sound Transit to wisk them to their office downtown, but anyone wanting to Kindle on the LIRR platform at Woodside in mid-January may want to do a rethink.

Beyond that, the specs say that the device can be stored at temperatures upward of 14 degrees.  That might be as generous as saying it works above freezing.  We had a couple of cold days in NYC a week ago, one with temperatures in the 20-30 degree range.  I knew better at this point than to try reading on my Kindle, but I did have it in the back pocket of my backpack while I was walking around.  Come Tuesday, I couldn't get the battery to fully recharge.  The charging light would stay on and on and on, and within five minutes of starting to read the device went from having four battery charge lights (of 4) to being down to 3.  After a couple of days the battery unfroze and has been charging and drawing down as it's supposed to.

I've already gotten used to the fact that I have to adjust my reading for the possibility of rainy weather, but for the next two months it looks like I'm going to have to spend a lot of time planning around having a useless piece of plastic in just about any outdoor waiting situation.  I'm not happy about this, and I think it's a significant enough issue that Amazon may want to reconsider its official specs for the device and maybe be a little more forthright about discussing weather issues in its marketing.  This would not be a good holiday gift for your friends in Wasilla.

German Wheat, Winter Crop

The Reader, Seen Wednesday evening December 3, 2008, at Landmark's Sunshine, Aud. #1, as part of the Variety Screening Series.  3 Slithy Toads.  

Good, Seen Wednesday evening December 10, 2008, at Landmark's Sunshine, Aud. #1, as part of the Variety Screening Series.  1.5 Slithy Toads.

So I've gotten to spend the past two Wednesdays in WWII.  

The Reader, which stars Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes and a very talented young German actor named David Kross, is a rather meditative movie about the aftermath of the war and of Nazi Germany.  It draws on questions of guilt, innocence and redemption, it goes places where not too many other movies on the subject go, and while not successful in all ways and every way is nonetheless a film that grew on me as it went along.

Good is a more prosaic piece of work set during the thick of the Nazi reign from the early and mid 1930s thru to 1942.  It stars Viggo Mortensen as an academic who is roped into the SS at the possible expense of his friendship with a German Jew.  Based on the Q&A afterward, it's too much one of those movies Samuel Goldwyn was talking about in his famous quote "If you want to send a message, call Western Union."  It's a movie with a message, but not really with a purpose.

There's no denying Viggo Mortensen's talent as an actor.  As was the case here, I was able courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image to see screenings of two earlier films of his, Eastern Promises and A History of Violence.  We've all seen him in The Lord of the Rings.  I also saw him in Appaloosa, another 1.5 toader.  His range and variety in all is quite stunning, to the extent that you'd hardly know it's him in Appaloosa if you didn't stay around for the credits.  This isn't his best performance, or maybe he's just putting on a show that doesn't interest me.  He seems to be channeling his inner William Hurt, doing a kind of mousy performance with bad glasses that reminded me of Hurt in The Doctor or other movies of his from twenty-some years back.  He's scared when he's called in to an interview in the German chancellory, and then relieved to discover that their interest in him is purely professional.  He's written a novel that dealt with right to die issues, which dovetails nicely with Hitler's idea on euthanasia, and thus is enlisted to write a paper on ethics that can be used to guide party actions on this issue.  But you know, if they're going to have him do this maybe it would be good of him to join the party, which he kind of forgot to do because he wasn't happy about book burning and his mother was ill and his marriage was breaking up on account of his relationship with a young student and etc. etc. etc.  So he joins the party, becomes a good soldier, slowly becomes more of a Nazi without ever fully becoming one or ever fully realizing what he's doing.  He has a Jewish friend played by Jason Isaacs (wow, I wish I'd known before I'd gone to the movie where he and Viggo were the 2 Q&Aers that he's been playing Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies) who is worried about what's happening and wants to get out and hopes his friend Viggo can help.  But Viggo doesn't realize how important it is until the eve of Kristallnacht when it's kind of too late and he has to rely on his student lover wife who everyone except him knows won't want to help the Jew, and it isn't until he gets to a concentration camp in 1942 that he finally realizes what he's gotten involved with, at which point the movie ends.

This is all Very Worthy.  But unfortunately the idea of somebody joining the Nazis unwllingly and then getting into it has been done before.  I think first in that subject of the underrated movie Swing Kids.  The movie is fraught with complication to make up for its absence of same so we get scenes of the tubercular and dementia-suffering mother being cared for and of the book burning and of other things that aren't entirely on point.  During the Q&A Jason Isaacs talked about how we had this thing going in the US with torturing people and tapping their phones, and what was he doing about it but being very upset at dinner parties, and a little of that as well from Viggo Mortensen, but all of their worthy intentions don't make this a worthwhile movie to see.  I'm not fond of the Bush administration's balance of civil liberties and securities needs, and I've limited my actions on that front similarly (well, I've also ranted against hotels asking for photo ID and made scenes at front desks about it, for all that's done), and I've called Rudy Giuliani a fascist but not to his face.  But it seems to me the slippery slope has to get a lot steeper still before I'd call the US a Nazi regime, and making this movie as a Lesson To Us All doesn't make it for me.

All that being said, Jason Isaacs may give the best performance in the movie.  Mortensen doesn't do it for me here, his mother is a caricature of a person with dementia, the two main women seem to be channeling Katharine Hepburn, and maybe if 20 years ago she had played the mother with dementia and William Hurt had played the academic this would have been a movie worth seeing.

The Reader was rather better, I think.

David Kross starts the movie as a 15-year-old stricken with scarlet fever while returning from school one day, and the moment we see our first glimpse of him on screen, it's clear that he has It, that indefinable It that you find very early on in Tom Cruise's career or that Shia LaBeouf radiates.  Granted as the camera pans along the bus where he's getting ill we are supposed to find him because he's one of the stars of the movie, but it's not just some cinematographer's extra bit of spotlight that makes him leap out at you.  The fact that he has It is a very good thing, because he is given succor and helped on his way home by Kate Winslet, several years older than he and a tram conductor, and following his months of recovery from his illness he returns to thank Winslet, and the two are instantly having quite a lavish sex thing going with one another.  Kate Winslet (Titanic, you know) isn't the kind of person we'd want to see having torrid underage sex with somebody who doesn't have It.  In any case, he and Daniel Brühl are my German actors to watch.

Perhaps the author of The Reader was inspired by Bull Durham, in which Susan Sarandon likes to read Walt Whitman as foreplay.  Here it's the reverse.  Kate Winslet likes to have David Kross read to her, and then they have sex and read more, and there are far worse things to do than watch 15 minutes of the two of them with little clothes on having sex and doing the live in person book-on-tape thing.This is not as good for the very middle class parents and siblings of David Kross who are mostly ignored for the period of time that this relationship endures, and he is not very happy when she suddenly disappears and he is forced to return home and be bourgeois instead of a matinee idol.

Spoilers follow:  Several years later Kross is in law school, and his class attends a trial of several women accused of being SS guards in Auschwitz.  In the final days of the war, trying to march some of the prisoners ahead of the allied troops, they house 300 of them in a church one night, the church catches fire, the guards refuse to let the prisoners out, almost all of them die in the fire.  And guess who was one of the guards, none but the character of Hanna Schmitz played by Winslet.  She is terribly unrepentant of her acts, not of leaving her department store job to join the SS, not of her selection of prisoners to go to the gas chambers, not of her decision not to unlock the church doors.  And the kind of scary thing is that her arguments on all three accounts almost sound reasonable.  But they're reasonable in the way of a fifth grader, the kinds of arguments that make perfect sense and are utterly logical so long as they're utterly divorced from any moral component or any depth of thought beyond the utmost blind adherence to rules.  

Kross is rather shaken to see his high school sex partner in this new light, and reluctant on those grounds alone to mention any connection between he and the accused to his classmates or his professor.  But there's more to it than that.  There's a kind of Sixth Sense moment in the movie where we and Kross realize something about Winslet's character, which I deduced fractionally ahead of the reveal.  Why in the movie does Winslet have Kross read to her?  And why in my review have I referred to her rationalizations as being those of a child?  Can you figure out something about what Hanna Schmitz can and cannot do in her life?  When Schmitz/Winslet confesses to something to her detriment and to the benefit of her co-defendants that she clearly could not have done, Kross is totally shaken about what to do.  Does he speak up to her benefit and his detriment?  Does he remain silent himself, as silent as all those who Knew what was happening during the War but chose not to speak up?  

Some years pass, and the adult version of Kross' character is now a lawyer with a daughter from a failed marriage who is played by Ralph Fiennes (and we've seen Fiennes and know this, the movie is a kind of memory play relayed in flashback from the adult version).  Fiennes takes up a correspondence with Winslet in prison, and becomes virtually her only link to the outside world.  The nature of their correspondence ties in to the reveal about the character during the trial.  

I wasn't inclined to like this movie from the start.  While I did like Kross very much, there was a whiff of starchy literary adaptation to the film (the critic in The Village Voice would say more than that).  Even worse, having the switch from Ralph Fiennes scenes to Daniel Kross scenes did not work at all for me because the two just don't look like the twenty-something and fifty-something versions of the same character.  Kross himself is only 18 (shooting had to be rearranged so some of the steamier scenes could be filmed after his 18th birthday), and as he's asked to play a character very much older than himself there's something about that transition that removed  little bit of his It factor.  Winslet does much better playing a character at many different ages, but I think it goes without saying that it would be easier to play from 20 to 80 if you're 30 or 40 than if you're 20 or 90.   But when the film gets into the trial and into the ethical meat of its story it gained strength and power.  When in the last third or quarter of the movie we are with Fiennes alone as the older version of the character, I was no longer distracted by the poor match between the young and old.  Evidence of this is the fact that I've come to some realizations of my own about the movie as I've been chewing it over while writing this post that are deeper and more layered than even what I'd felt a week ago while watching the movie and thinking on it immediately thereafter, and that to me is a sign of a film that has some sticking power to it.

Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella were producers on the movie, and both passed away during the development process.  Both had a tendency to stuff their turkeys a little too much, especially when doing literary adaptations, Pollack with Out of Africa and Minghella with The English Patient and Cold Mountain (his Talented Mr. Ripley on the other hand was quite good).  Minghella was originally supposed to direct but ultimately passed the baton to Stephen Daldry, whose film credits include Billy Elliot and The Hours.  I'm glad of this.  I think this film would have brought out the worst in Minghella.  Daldry got a little bit starchy but ultimately gave enough life to the film and material to make it surprisingly good, and much better for the whole of it than I might have thought from the first 15 minutes.  I would recommend.

A worthy reminder that even stupid questions may have merit:  during the Q&A somebody asked which of the two characters left the relationship (it was obvious that Winslet had walked out on Kross) and why.  The answer given to the why tied in to the reveal during the trial and something that was going to happen at Winslet's day job that would have revealed sooner.  It was obvious in retrospect, and Winslet during the Q&A gave one of those "struggling to be polite" responses.  But... as I thought about it further the gap between Winslet's leaving and us getting the reveal during the trial was more than long enough for the connection to be rather hard to draw without having it specifically pointed out, and if not for this "stupid" question being asked I think I might have gone through life thinking "well, she just left, and who knows why."

The Sound of Music

Maybe the Borders web site would have more customers if it came with a Mute button?

No Shame, No Gain

So Dec. 5 was the day when Merrill Lynch and Bank of America shareholders voted on BofA's purchase of Merrill.  I had a vested interest in this.  For my bar mitzvah I'd gotten 2 shares of Merrill Lynch, and with dividend reinvestment over the years I'd accumulated a few dozen shares that a year or two ago were actually worth something and by today really not very much.  And I consider myself lucky because I'm ending up with a much better deal than if I'd gotten two shares of  Lehman Bros.

I'm not happy with the management of Merrill.  E. Stanley O'Neal has watched whatever stock he had drop in value just like the rest of us, but he made salary and bonus in the tens of millons of dollars for years of profits under his watch that have all but disappeared in a sea of black ink and write-offs.  

But here's the thing.  You know how many directors of Merrill Lynch showed up at the stockholder meeting where the vote took place?  According to this article from Bloomberg news, one.  One.  Bank of America did a tad better, with two of their directors willing to take any credit for buying Merrill.  To me, this says something pretty awful about the state of moral accountibility in America right now, that you can take home a $265K board retainer for a year when the stock of the company you run has lost 80% of its value, and you don't even think for that much money you can show up for the funeral a half hour of lectures from the shareholders.  Is there no shame?  Any sense of decency or responsibility or accountability?  It makes me sick.