BEA 2009, Pt. 3

There were two trends in evidence at Book Expo that I'm not fond of.

One is the switch to the electronic catalog, which was exemplified by HarperCollins, and which I started to see with some UK publishers at London Book Fair in April.

In some ways, the paper catalog is a relic of a past age, and I can admit that.  It's fixed.  The London catalog for JABberwocky will always be out of date by the time I actually get to London and start handing it out.  An electronic catalog can be updated regularly.  It's very expensive to mail.  Postage goes up every year, and my catalog gets bigger every year.  With the percent of sales coming from major accounts as big as it is, you spend that ever-increasing sum of money to attract orders from a smaller pool.

So yes, if I can cut back on the number I mail overseas after the Fair because more of my sub-agents are comfortable sending a PDF to more of the publishers they work with in a world of translation markets, that makes me happy.  Why, we even tried to enhance the PDF this year by turning the author names into links to the author's web site and by adding links from the contents page to the pages.  I'd even like to go further in coming years by maybe turning each book or series title into a link to the bibliography and/or review quotes on the JABberwocky web site.  Even if I might not want to pay to have the catalog updated along with the web site on a constant basis, it would make it very easy to get to the web site with the latest information, and most of those links would only need to be set up once and could then hold over as the catalog is updated in subsequent years.

But...  I cannot envision that I would ever go to London Book Fair without a printed catalog to talk over during my meetings, or that I would ever go to a major or minor convention without a few catalogs in my bag to give away.  If you worry about your catalog being on the bottom of some big pile, how much do you have to worry about the little postcard you give away with the URL to surf to later to get the catalog?  At London Book Fair,  Random House UK gave out postcards that often said "go to Randomhouse.co.uk" to get our catalog, which is just a generic home page link that requires you to find the right places to click to actually and finally get the on-line catalog.  Didn't anyone think for two seconds that they should at least give a dedicated link on that postcard that would go right to the catalog?

Yes, the unit cost for printing 500 catalogs or 5000 is more than for printing 15,000.  But it's penney wise and pound foolish not to print a single old-fashioned dead-tree version and rely entirely on electronic distribution.

I'm not a big fan of Harper's experiment in doing electronic galleys.  The good news is that they can give out a lot more postcards for the featured books with the link to the electronic galley than they can of an actual physical galley copy.  But I don't think any of the people in my family whom I traditionally scout galleys for at BEA will have an avid interest in being wed to their computer in order to read the books on offer from HarperColllins.  I meant to bring up some of the postcards last week when I was visiting family to see maybe if, but forgot.  This doesn't bother me quite as much as the catalogs because there is some clear possibility to end up distributing more free copies to the people who are willing, but I still think Harper would have been better off using these electronic galley cards to supplement some kind of old-fashioned print component instead of going entirely electronic.   I mean, one of the biggest flaws to me on the Kindle is that you can't tell what it is that somebody's reading.  I'd love to have,  maybe with user option, a little screen on the back side that can display the cover of whatever it is you're reading.  I hate that people don't know I'm enjoying The Washington Post on my Kindle, or that I had no way of knowing what the guy with a Kindle 2 was reading on the subway ten days ago. Harper may know how many people decide to download each electronic galley, but the rest of the world won't be seeing any visible sign of Harper's big new books.

BEA 2009, Pt. 2

I did promise some more posts about Book Expo America...

One of the most important questions of all is whether BEA has a future.

BEA was once known as ABA, and was the official annual show for American Booksellers Association.  The Book Expo America thing was intended to broaden the event.  It still has ABA involvement but is run by the same Reed Exhibitions people that do London Book Fair and many other non-publishing shows.  It was intended as the big opportunity for booksellers and librarians to connect with publishers, find out about their fall lists specifically, meet authors and one another, place orders, etc.

I've never seen BEA as entire essential myself.  In large part because I can probably do 90% of what I'd like to do in a single day, so if it's in NYC and you can go for a day you can go for a day, but it's not something really worth traveling very far to attend.  DC, quick train ride, maybe.  Chicago enh.  LA not.  But the show would move around to these various places, theoretically so that booksellers from different parts of the country would have it near them every once in a while.  

But there are big problems with all of the long-time theoretical purposes for having BEA.  There are fewer independent booksellers in the world, and major publishers certainly don't need a BEA to sell their lists to B&N, Borders, Amazon, and other major national accounts.  BEA is expensive.  Especially if you're a big publisher used to having a big booth and dozens of staff members in attendance, and maybe flying in authors as Tor did this year with Brandon Sanderson.  Especially in the current economy, a lot of libraries and small booksellers and smaller publishers have a much harder time justifying their expenses.

So I am hugely worried that we're going to see a downward spiral start to take root that may end up killing off BEA.  And even though I don't think BEA is essential, I'm not sure the publishing industry would be better off without.  But there are signs.

Some big publishers decided not to take big booths.  Macmillan USA was entirely off the show floor, and doing meetings invitation only in a basement meeting room.  I got to go in because Brandon Sanderson and I were meeting with Macmillan audio people.  But it wasn't very welcoming.  No food or drink, really.  I asked at a Holt table if I could take a galley for a book I thought my sister might find interesting, and I wasn't made to feel very welcome.  Tom Doherty at the Tor imprint of Macmillan explained to me at length how a floor space cost $x to try and sell to the 10% of their sales that might be resulting from independent booksellers, and how that $x might be able to buy two more field reps to sell books.  Knowing how publishers work and how many of them under-invest in their sales efforts, I have my doubts that the money saved by having no floor presence for Tor, St. Martin's, Holt, Farrar Straus and other Macmillan imprints will be spent on two field reps.

Harcourt/Houghton Mifflin was somewhat better, with a two-sided meeting room with a private section and a public section.  You still had to traipse to the basement, but at least you could go in, look at tables with catalogs and some galley copies, and have some serendipitous exposure to their lists.

Random House cut their floor space back to a few tables for author autographings and some catalogs available for pick-up but did most of their business in a basement meeting room.

Other publishers like Wizards of the Coast and Kensington did not have their traditional presence on the floor, either skipping or going the meeting room only route.

The upshot of this was that there were distinctly fewer people on the exhibit floor giving away distinctly fewer quantities of things.  I still did OK getting galleys for my book-group sister and my Amazon Vine younger brother and my media specialist older brother, but it was definitely harder.  If it's harder to score swag, it makes BEA less appealing to booksellers and librarians, and even for that matter to me.   That might reduce attendance, which might make it less attractive for any of these publishers to return to the exhibit floor or for publishers like Harper and Hachette that still had major floor presences to continue to have in the future, etc. etc.

After a disappointing attendance in LA last year, the organizers decided to keep BEA in NYC only for the near future.  This reduces costs for the major NYC publishers and puts the show in the media capital of the world (well, LA kind of is, but in a different way) and is probably a good idea.

The internet is a wonderful thing, but it does lend itself to finding things you already know you want to find.  I think there's a benefit to showing the flag, to opening yourself to serendipity, to see and to being seen.  For all of these very fuzzy reasons that have a hard time competing with $x to have a big booth on the floor, I think the industry needs BEA. 

We'll see what happens.  There were still hundreds of publishers and thousands of attendees and I do not think a disappearing act like BEA Canada is in the future.  But I worry.

More to come...

Cold Stone Timbits

I am a big Tim Hortons fan.  I love just thinking about precious little Timbits, only 60 calories in a banana cream.  You can read what I said here about the genius idea of having Wendy's spin off Tim's.  

I am not a Cold Stone Creamery fan.  I prefer Ben and Jerry's, where Ben and Jerry do the hard work of picking yummy flavor combinations for me.  I think it's too much work to have to select the mix-ins at Cold Stone, and I don't think the ice cream is particularly wonderful that I've wanted to wait on line for 45 minutes as I once did with my niece.

But it looks like I'll be going to Cold Stone a little more often now that they've announced plans to roll out a co-branding initiative to three Manhattan stores, including the one on 42nd St. across from the AMC Empire theatre.

I don't know how much space each brand will get, but let me say right now loud and clear that they better have room for some Timbits.

I worry a little about having temptation so close at hand, or that the bloom will go off the rose when I can get Timbits more easily.  But hey, life is full of risks.

A Bookscanner Darkly

A week or so ago, another agent I know, Andrew Zack, blogged about a negative experience he had with Bookscan.  A book he had on submission was rejected by at least one house because the author's prior sales on Bookscan were not very good.  This frustrated Andrew because the actual sales were much better than what the Bookscan numbers were saying.  There is nothing more frustrating to an agent than to have a book you like rejected for a not very good reason.  Here at JABberwocky we had a manuscript by Fred Durbin rejected by one house because marketing vetoed it even though everyone on the editorial side was enthusiastic, and I found this rather an odd thing to do because a chunk of the book had just been serialized in Cricket Magazine, which to me you'd think maybe the marketing people would think was a nice hook.

I've known Andrew for a very long time.  He was one of the last young publishing up-and-comers to cut his teeth working for Donald I. Fine, and for some categories of work I'd unhesitatingly suggest him; I quite envy in particular the breadth of his non-fiction offerings.  But I don't agree with his assessment of Bookscan at all.

There is one major problem with Bookscan, which is that a fairly full access for one user ID costs a small fortune.  Several thousands of dollars, in fact, so the cost is really prohibitive for a lot of literary agencies.  There are some ways to get some information for less; but if you want to really have fun with this you've got to pay big bucks.   For me, for that kind of thing, cost is almost no object because I've always been fascinated with numbers.  In college, before I had a career in publishing, I would always enjoy looking at the index cards used to track ordering activity at the Community Newscenter locations in Ann Arbor, and it's not like I stopped doing that sort of thing once I actually had a real professional reason to do so.  Imagine how happy I am every Wednesday morning when I can have a week of actual POS sales data for the entire JABberwocky list delivered to my computer.

And yes, the information is flawed.  It doesn't include Wal-Mart, which guards its sales data zealously.  It doesn't include Larry Smith's table at a convention.  It doesn't include a lot of grocery or drug store or similar channels, though they've kind of gone from 0 to 25 MPH in the past couple years first by adding a few supermarket chains like Kroger and Stop and Shop and this January adding Hudson News.  It doesn't include a lot of non-traditional channels, so I was out of luck the same way as Andrew Zack when I tried to market a sequel to a book that was selling mostly through Motherhood Maternity.  Maybe if you as an agent subscribe to Bookscan you can be aware of possibe situations like this and try to address them with a line in your marketing letter, but that may or may not work.  It could just force a house that wants to reject to come up with some other "polite" but silly reason to say "no."  Or maybe they'll believe Bookscan before they believe the agent.  Agents do lie sometimes.  A baseball free agency season hardly goes by when some GM isn't complaining about the mysterious other suitors Scott Boras claims to have, and I'm sure some editors feel that way about some literary agents.

But Bookscan is a tool, and like all tools it can be used right and used wrong.  Right about the time I first got my Bookscan subscription, I noticed that the just-published Crossover by Joel Shepherd was selling pretty danged well for a book that had been taken by Borders but not by Barnes & Noble.  I was able to go to Lou Anders at Pyr and point this out, and Lou was able to go to the sales people at Prometheus Books, and they were able to go to B&N and get them to take some copies of the book.  And this helped turn CROSSOVER from a dubious proposition into a solid enough performer that it's now been chosen to launch the mass market program from Pyr.  A lot of things had to go right for this to happen, but it all started with somebody paying attention to those Bookscan numbers.

And now this year, I was able to notice a sales spike for Adam-Troy Castro's Emissaries from the Dead after it won the Philip K. Dick Award, and I was able to make a good numbers-based case to Diana Gill at Eos and she was able to go to her sales people, and we've gotten some renewed support from Borders for Emissaries and its sequel The Third Claw of God.  It's too soon to know if this will have the long-term payoff that I saw with Joel Shepherd, but again this is at least getting some good use out of the tool.

Of course it costs so darned much, that I'm not sure on strict cost-benefit terms that I can justify how much I pay in order to achieve these victories.  It's a no-brainer for me because of the weird wiring of the Joshua Bilmes brain.  But does it really pull my fat out of the fire near often enough to start saying cost should be no object?

Citi Field

Many years ago I was a regular at Shea Stadium with a 60-game ticket plan.  That ended in the mid-1990s.  No money when I started my own business, and the baseball strike cooled my ardor as well.  The ardor is still cooled some.  The "security" restrictions (i.e., the Yankees and Washington Nationals are among the teams that will let you bring in a factory-sealed water bottle but not that same bottle empty) after 9/11 make going to a game less pleasant.  At least with the Kindle I can now bring plenty of reading material just like the old days, gone post 9/11, when I could take in a backpack full of manuscripts and other reading which ain't so easy to fit when the allowable bag size is 16x16x8.    Even though I can now afford even over-priced NYC ballpark tickets, I wasn't rushing to go to the new Yankee Stadium, and the Mets' Citi Field.  (& yes, the Mets do allow plastic bottles full or empty, but no glass or hard containers.)

But when one of my friends ended up with extra tickets for Yankee Stadium this upcoming Wednesday and another told me last weekend the Mets still had seats if we wanted to go for last night's Subway Series game...  Well, I wasn't complaining.

So Citi Field:

Annoyance #1, the city has spent all kinds of big bucks helping to support these stadiums in ways that avoid saying they're actually paying for them.  Providing city-backed bonds, or "infrastructure" improvements, or sweetheart rent deals, etc.  Yet, they haven't found the money to really upgrade the subway stop that's now called Mets/Willets Point.  If you can't navigate stairs, you can kind of get to the stadium from Manhattan or closer-in parts of Queens by taking existing ramps on the wrong side of the stop that lead to a new ramp to street level where you have to cross the street.  Going home, there's still no wheelchair access at all to the Manhattan-bound platform so you would have to take the train one stop further out and then head back in.  That's incredibly obnoxious.  This could easily add a half hour or more to a return trip if you even want to bother trying.

Nice touch #1. while the 60s era circular stairs were taken down in favor or a straight staircase, there's now a really nice promenade leading from the subway to the main entrance, which is much closer to the subway.   If you want to get to the early-opening gate 2 1/2 hours before to see batting practice, you are just steps away from it.

Enh #1.  The exterior of the ballpark is very attractive, but it follows designs intended to relate to a cityscape that doesn't exist around Shea Stadium.

Nice touch #2.  You can circumnavigate the stadium.  I think there's something nice and festive about being able to walk around the entire perimeter of a ballpark and take it all in.  I don't like places like the new Busch or the new Comiskey which turn one wall into a private dead end preserve.  And the new stadium does present a real street front to 126th St.  There's nothing across 126th St. but auto parts junkyards that the city's never bothered to supply with sewers and which they hope to relocate (maybe then the exterior will relate to some cityscape) but at least right on 126th St. there's some real sense of place.  The official entrance to the Mets offices is on an actual city street instead of facing a massive parking lot.

Enh #2.  It's like going to a Marriott.  Everyone's wearing a name tag with the place they live on it.  They're somewhat friendly.  Friendly is nice, but do we need the places on the name tags?  & the vendors (or are we supposed to call them "Hospitality Attendants" now, according to one namem tag I looked at) still have garish uniform colors that make them look like escapees from an Alabama chain gang.

Enh #3.  Nice wide main concourse with good views of the field and plentiful rest rooms and room to walk around and etc. etc.  I would give this a Nice Touch, except this is stuff every new ballpark has so it doesn't make me feel at all special that for these ticket prices and the public subsidies and everything else that we in NYC get to now use a baseball stadium that looks like Camden Yards or Seattle or Nationals Park or...  

Nice Touch #3.  Like many of the new stadiums there's a plaza area back behind the outfield.  What makes this one nice is the Shake Shack.  Some years ago a little outpost by this name opened in Madison Sq. Pk in Manhattan where all the people from Tor Books can wait on line for their entire lunch to buy burgers and fries of rare quality.  Now you can wait on line for the same thing for 30 minutes at Shea Stadium.  Dang this stuff is good.  The burger was very good.  The fries tasted like pieces of potato and had no need of ketchup to be totally chow-downable, and the shake was excellent.  $17 for the meal, but the best food I've ever gotten at a baseball stadium.  

Annoyance #2:  But with all the people waiting on line for Shake Shack and BBQ from Blue Smoke and picture-taking with Mr. Met, the centerfield plaza had no sense of place and no comfort.

Annoyance #3.  And it's hidden behind an advertising bedecked back of one of the scorecards.

Annoyance #4.  And the pre-game music like the during game music was loud and blaring and assaultive and obnoxious and makes me never want to go to Citi Field again.

Enh #3.  For old times sake you do get a nice view from one end of the plaza to the UHaul sign that used to be the Serval Zipper sign that used to be one of the things off in the distance beyond Shea's outfield fence.  I doubt most people will care about this.  But if they do redevelop the auto junkyards I hope they put a street down there so it will protect the view corridor.

Annoyance #5.  We paid $98 for a seat beyond the edge of the outfield fence near to the left field foul pole.  We couldn't see right below in the left field corner.  We couldn't really see deep center field very well. We could see all of the scoreboards with lots of head tilting.  Yeah, tickets are overpriced big time.  This might have been field level, but it wasn't a good seat.  The raking wasn't even so good, so if a tall person were sitting in front of me I wouldn't have seen much.

Enh #4.  But I learned quite a bit about the operations of a Canon HD 100 Camera with Sony monitor attached.

Enh #5.  Way too many advertising signs all over the park, but that's to be as expected as the wide concourse.

Annoyance #6.  Mets got only one hit.  That was one too many.  I'd have rather seen a no-hitter at that point.  And the stadium was full of Yankee fans.

Annoyance #7.  No ramps.  I like walking up and down ramps in ballparks, not stairs that are encased in stairwells with views of nothing.  Not elevators, not escalators.  Ball parks should have ramps.

Nice Touch #4.  We exited thru the Jackie Robinson rotunda, which is very grand and attractive.

Nice Touch #5.  I noticed on my way out more than on my way in how the plazas surrounding the stadium are full or benches or circular floral displays with actual nice places to sit.  It makes waiting for somebody to meet much more pleasant, or to just people watch after a game.  Very very nice.

Because I was going with a friend and waiting on line for Shake Shack, I didn't explore the view from the top row or walk around the entire inside of the stadium.  Because of the head-tilt for the main scoreboards I can't really comment on that part of the experience.  With more annoyances than enhs or nice touches, and with the overpriced tickets, I'm not even sure if I'll be in a great rush to return to the stadium to kind of do the full thing.

Funny-book round-up

Haven't done one of these in a while...

The Muppet Show, #1-3 (of 4).  This is a pleasant surprise that does a not-at-all bad job of replicating on the comic book page the experience of watching the classic TV show from 30 years ago.  You've got Statler and Waldorf, Pigs in Space, backstage shenanigans, Muppet Labs, running jokes (can Gonzo's species be identified to qualify him for insurance?), pretty much everything except the comic doesn't sing the Muppet Show them when you open it up.  It's written and drawn by Roger Langridge, whom I am otherwise not familiar with.  It made me smile, and it gets 3 slithy toads.

DMZ #42 launches a new three-part story arc.  The book's had some nice multi-parters since I last commented upon and gets an improved 3 toad ranking on this issue, which explores some new territory in the DMZ.  The Empire State Building is the site of group therapy for mercenaries that we find out is designed to keep them all sulking in their misfortune to make their trigger fingers just that little bit happier.  There's a guest artist, Ryan Kelly, and he does a good job of channeling regular artist and series co-creator Riccardo Burchielli.  And writer Brian Wood chugs along.  This has been one of the most consistent Vertigo books I've read over the past several years.

The same cannot be said of newer Vertigo title Air, which has had more ups and downs in 10 issues than DMZ in four times that.  Air #10 is an issue to hate.  It seems to have hardly anything to do with the story as we know it so far.  I gave issue #2 a solid 3 toads, but this issue gets 1 slithy toad.  DC/Vertigo's been totally behind the book with an extensive preview program and a special-priced issue down the road, and anyone who sampled that issue will probably wonder what's going on after reading this.  Lots of good ideas in the series, but no focus.  I'm not sure I'll keep paying.

I'd gone on hiatus with House of Mystery when it started an arc that seemed really really bad to me, resumed with the special 13th issue, and now am back for issue #14 that starts a new arc.  Looks a little more interesting, but still good for only 2 toads in my book.  Do I want to shell out for a book that's mediocre in hopes it might accumulate to something better?  Enh.  Really on the fence.  

Ex Machina #43 sees this usually solid series from Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris in the midst of what will be an off arc.  Seems a little too obtuse to me, really requiring a vast familiarity with the series continuity to understand a lot of what's going on, and with less of the alternate-NYC elements that make the series fun.  Though I'm giving this issue only 1.5 toads, maybe 2.5 for the most careful students of the collected Ex Machina, I'll probably keep going with the series because it's often been very good.  Yet I really worry that this series, like Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man, will end up drifting into disappointment as it heads toward its conclusion.  I read Y to the bitter end, but if this arc doesn't pick up...  I don't know quite what happened either, since I wasn't so negative on the first two issues of this arc, and yet this one has me really put off.

The Unwritten is a new Vertigo series, also with a lot of previewing and support from the company.  It has an interesting premise, in which the son of the creator of a Harry Potter-like series may be a direct model for the series, or may be the character himself, or may... well, we don't really know and finding out what's going on is the idea of it all.  The first issue was excellent.  This 2nd issue not as good.  There's some sense of mystery and weird bad guys and plots, but I wanted something a little bit more.  2.5 toads, will keep going and hope it settles at a high level instead of drifting down.

The Simpson's Summer Shindig #3 has one really good story, two so-so stories, and one with a cute idea that didn't end up working for me.  Final grade, 2 toads.  The best story has Moe looking to get rid of stale beer by starting to make and sell beer-flavored donuts from the bar.  And then Scott Shaw! spoofs his own Captain Carrot and the Simpsons' Radioactive Man.

Simpsons #155 was a pleasant 3.5 toad surprise.  It launches a 3-part crossover in which the purveyors of Radioactive Man decide on a major crossover event where the main gimmick will be secrecy, all of the other gimmicks having been done to death.  It's a little bit Hembeck or Ambush Bug, starting out with the Kruller (a shot at the big Marvel thingie) before visiting death, new costumes, parallel worlds, and oh so much more.  

And my final books, Superman: World of New Krypton #4 and Action #878, are prime examples of the whole gimmick stuff that I think is strangling the DC Universe.  The current thing in the Superman books is that the Kandorians have been enlarged and have moved to a planet orbiting Earth called New Krypton.  Superman has moved there, where he fights with and for General Zod.  And of course Earth is without Superman.  This story-line crosses from book to book though each book has its own separate story-line, and these are the two books I've been reading while not paying attention to Supergirl or Superman.  It's big event after big event in the DC Universe, and a never-ending series of mini-events in the different individual books, and since I don't/can't read 28 DC books a month to keep track of all of it I keep trying something for 2 issues then giving up when it ends up crossing over with something else.  The fact that I've actually read 4 issues of New  Krypton with plans to be back for a 5th, that's a rare good sign.  But the fact that I'm so doubtful on the whole affair...  These are 2-2.5 toad books and for old time's sake to be reading an old line superhero book I'll keep going.  But I just know it will end badly.

Implausibility and Amiability

So the implausible first...

The Taking of Pelham 123, seen Saturday afternoon June 20, 2009 at the UA Midway, Auditorium #1.  If you Love NY 1 Slithy Toad.  Else 2.

Talk about finding laughs in all the wrong places. 

The 2009 remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 has its virtues.  The lead performances by Denzel Washington and John Travolta are quite pleasant to watch.  That almost goes without saying for Denzel Washington.  With Travolta, you never know quite what you might get.  But here, he's a good foil, playing a subway train hijacker against Denzel Washington's subway dispatcher.  There are some nice turns in the supporting cast, like James Gandolfini as the Mayor of New York City.  If you can live with the fact that 2009 is simply not 1974 in any way or shape or form, you can accept that the movie is acceptably updated and remade.  Oh, it goes too far.  The first movie ends in an almost anti-climactic and certainly very subtle kind of way, and the new version goes all the way into loud 21st century movie-making.  Something in-between might have been nicer.  

But...

My oh my but...

for all the money and talent and resources that were spent on this, did it have to treat NYC geography so stupidly, so sillily, so cavalierly, so ineptly? 

Some things, you can give the filmmaker artistic license.  My movie-going companion, editor extraordinaire Moshe Feder (he discovered Brandon Sanderson for Tor), noticed which I did not that some of the Grand Central subway scenes were shot at the #7 train platform instead of the Lexington Ave. #6 platform.  That we can live with.

But here is a movie where:

1.  The midtown HQ for the subway system is located at the tip of lower Manhattan in the Staten Island Ferry terminal.

2.  After the #6 train is hijacked, the authorities continue to run express trains on the adjacent tracks.  Even if they don't stop at Grand Central, this is ludicrous.  The Lexington Ave. line would be shut down in the neighborhood.

3.  The captured train goes south from Grand Central to some secret "Roosevelt" station that goes into the Roosevelt Hotel.  Which is North of Grand Central, and not on Lexington Ave.  Except that this secret Roosevelt station leads into the Waldorf Astoria hotel, which has a private platform for the Metro North commuter rail but not for the the subway system.

4.  The movie invents a Brooklyn Federal Reserve bank.  And then the NYC police that I've seen do incredible street-clearing jobs for things like the UN General Assembly somehow manage not to be able to do a decent job of clearing a route for a motorcade carrying $10M from this fake Federal Reserve bank, solely so that there can be Exciting Illogical Crashes along the motorcade route.

5.  It takes less time to drive from the Waldorf to the Manhattan Bridge than it does for a half dozen policeman to walk 20 yds. along the Manhattan Bridge bike/walkway.  

6.  And of course the police don't stop subway trains going across the Manhattan Bridge even though they know that's where the villain is heading.

7.  The hijacked #6 train is somehow going to head off to Coney Island, even though there is no way that  I know of for a train on the Lex. Ave. IRT lines to switch on to any of the lines that go out to Coney Island.

8.  When the train emerges from underground on its way to Coney Island, it does so where the #7 train emerges from the tunnel leading into Main St. Flushing in Queens, with a brief glimpse of Shea Stadium in the background.  Poor Shea Stadium, perhaps its final screen appearance and it has to be here. 

9.  The Mayor takes a train to 57th or 59th St. in order to go to the Staten Island Ferry terminal 5 miles away.

10.  Neither the Mayor nor his aide have a cell phone while riding the subway, so the only way to alert the mayor to what's happening is to have cops run up to an elevated platform and hop on a train just moments ahead of the doors closing.

You get the idea.  

The filmmakers had the money and the cooperation and everything else they needed to make things right, or at least a reasonable version thereof.  And instead, they make it wrong.

I got a lot more laughs out of this than I think I was supposed to.

After a little bit of a break to visit the Barnes & Noble in Forest Hills, I returned to the Midway and saw...

Hangover.  Seen Sat. evening June 20, 2009 at the UA Midway, Auditorium 4.  3 slithy toads.

The Proposal.  Seen Sat. evening June 20, 2009 at the UA Midway, Auditorium 9.  2.5 slithy toads.

Neither of these movies had as many laughs as Pelham 123, but both had me smiling for pretty much their entire duration.  Hangover gets the edge in my ratings because it doesn't wear out its welcome while I was occasionally checking my watch in The Proposal.  Also, Hangover is kind of ludicrous at every level but intentionally so, and when you buy into it you buy into it.  While The Proposal too often stretches plausibility even within the parameters of its premise.

But I enjoyed both and was glad in both instances to have seen.

Some random observations on both...

I haven't seen this mentioned in the reviews I've seen, but Hangover is a comedic retake on a 1998 movie Very Bad Things, which is a much darker but similarly conceptualized Vegas bachelor party gone bad from director Peter Berg, who later went on to such Much Better Things as Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom, and Hancock.  Will Hangover director Todd Phillips (Old School) take a similar turn in his career.

Hangover may be one of the best Vegas travelogues I've ever seen, certainly since James Bond film Diamonds are Forever.  Oh, a lot of movies do Vegas from the standpoint of a casino, but the views from the Caesar's roof in Hangover are a different animal entirely, sexy and vibrant and seductive in a way that the baccarat table is not.  And you see the city from a gritty street level view as well.

The end credit sequence in Hangover is excellent.  Kept the entire audience in its collective seat, and made it hard for me to watch the credits because I kept wanting to look at the other side of the screen.

Ryan Reynolds grows on me as I see him in movies like Definitely Maybe and The Proposal, to the point that I almost regret not seeing Van Wilder.

We don't see enough of Mary Steenburgen.  I've been fond of her from the earliest days of her screen career in Time After Time and Ragtime, thru her excellent turn in Philadelphia.   She did several films with John Sayles, but it was another Mary, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (also not seen enough) who was in Sayles' Limbo and disappears in Alaska.  Yet I feel as if that Mary disappeared to be reincarnated in Alaska as this Mary here.  Does this make any sense to you?

Yet neither Mary Steenburgen nor Sandra Bullock really seem to be aging, which is one of those unfortunate facts of Hollywood life that women are never supposed to age.  The men can and do, but heaven forbid you age as a woman in this business.

The depiction of the publishing business in The Proposal is probably as unrealistic in its way as the depiction of NYC in Pelham, but this movie isn't really about publishing while Pelham is supposed to be living and breathing NYC.   

After my movies I ate at Pizzeria Uno for the first time in an unusually long time, and it was like comfort food to me.  It's 26 years now since I first treated myself to a sit-down meal at an Uno's, and the one in Forest Hills has the Michigan Daily Weekend section "Best of Ann Arbor" thing on Uno's from 1994.  I love walking into an Unos and seeing this hanging on the wall.  It connects me to my youth.  I would have compiled the campus film listings in that same issue of the Weekend section.

Oh, to be young again.

It was a good day.  I'm still smiling about it.

Oh, a quick final note on the Midway.  This movie theatre on Queens Blvd. in Forest Hills was a semi-grand mid-size movie palace in its day with a very nice lobby.  When I first started to see movies there in 1986 or 1987, it was one of those awful hack job quads.  The two downstairs screens were narrow and tunnel-like leading to small screens at the far end.  The balcony theatres had larger screens but like a lot of those theatres the movie projected from the center out while the balcony seats were designed to face toward the center so you kind of had to tilt your head the entire time you were watching the movie.  Some people in the comment section at Cinema Treasures praise the balcony theatres because those old balconies did have stadium seating, and I don't entirely disagree, but I also never entirely liked the geometry of those balcony twin jobs.  In 1997, the theatre was rebuilt from the ground up.  The lobby was kept, but the theatre beyond was demolished and rebuilt into a surprisingly pleasant 9-screen theatre.  The theatres aren't particularly big, but they all have at least a decent-size screen, the sound is usually good, and the nice lobby with its grand staircase is still intact even though there's a certain modern movie-house tawdriness that detracts some.  It compares quite favorably to some of the fully modern theatres in NYC like the smaller screens at the Kips Bay or the dreadful Kaufman Astoria.  Every time I do get out there I think I should get out there more often, except there isn't a truly large screen like at many of the Manhattan houses, and there's more to do heading in to Manhattan than further out into Queens.