Gran Interviewer

Gran Turino, seen Saturday evening January 3, 2009 at the Regal Gallery Place, Washington DC, Aud. #14, 2.5 slithy toads

Frost/Nixon, seen Sunday afternoon January 2, 2009 at the AMC Uptown (single screen), Washington DC, 3 sllithy toads

Fifteen years ago for the holiday season a fine movie called A Perfect World, starring Kevin Costner and directed by  Clint Eastwood came upon this world.  It followed Unforgiven.  The critical reception was at the time rather unforgiving.  I haven't seen it in a long long time.  Here in NYC, Film Forum has done its umpteenth Sturges revival since I moved to NYC so we can all see Morgan Creek once more, yet nobody wants to show us A Perfect World.  Well, why not try and find that on video instead of seeing Eastwood's somewhat overrated Gran Turino.

Gran Turino isn't bad. 2.5 toads is a mild recommendation, and I enjoyed seeing it, and I didn't fall asleep even though I was seeing it at the end of a long day when I'd walked around ten miles and schlepped to many bookstores, but it's not as good as all the fuss makes it out to be.  Eastwood is a 70-something guy living in Detroit, wife's just passed away, doesn't get along well with the kids or the grandkids or the in-laws.  Particularly hates all the Hmong (ethnic Asian group) that have moved into the nabe.  But he slowly finds himself warming to the boy who lives next door, who might be too smart for his own good in a culture where he's told by the girl who lives next door that the girls go to school and the boys to jail as a result of local gang activity.  When Eastwood tries to save the boys from the gangs, their interest slowly escalates, so what s Clint going to do about this?

Of course the 70-something Clint can't really do some of the things that he became famous for half his lifetime ago in the Dirty Harry movies, so these questions have resonance with Eastwood starring which they might not have with someone else in the role.  In that way, this is a good match of the material (a screenplay by Nick Schenk from a story by Dave Johannson).   Most of the pleasure in the movie comes from watching the Eastwood making the kinds of ethnic references that we aren't supposed to make any more, so are we enjoying this movie or are we enjoying the fact that we can watch Eastwood use that language in a movie and get away with it?

I'm not willing to give the movie extra credit for being a little bit naughty and risque with the ethnic language.  I'm not willing to overlook some of the weaknesses of the underlying material.  In particular, could we not have had a minute or two of screen time to tell us why the gang had particular interest in this particular kid?  The remark about how all the guys go to jail implies that maybe the gang tries to recruit all the boys, but then adding two lines to say that's specifically the case here wouldn't hurt. Were there no choices in action that could have kept the situation from escalating?  This isn't explored at all.  There's a subplot about the local priest trying to get Eastwood to confession at the request of his late wife, and one of the things Eastwood will admit to is not having done right by his relationship with his own children, but that doesn't make it any easier to buy what the ending says about his ability to find a do-over via the boy next door.

Maybe I'm going half  a toad too low in rebellion against all of the reviews that are praising so lavishly, but ultimately I think this will be seen as a decent coda to Eastwood's career but not very much more than that.

This was my first time seeing a movie at the Regal Gallery Place, which is a nice 14-screen stadium seating multiplex in downtown DC.  Auditoriums #1-7 are smaller, as few as 105 seats and going up to maybe 150.    Auditorim #14 was around 230 seats, and quite nice.  The screen was a little large for the space, so the sweet spot for viewing would really be only the last 2 or 3 rows, and the 100 seats in front of the aisle are very close to the screen, but it's nice.  This was one of the smaller screens in #s 8-14, a few of which have 300 seats and some of the others 250.

I went to see Frost/Nixon largely because it was playing at the Uptown, a large and wonderful big curved single screen movie theatre in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of DC.  I love to see movies there for the experience of it, and like any of these single screen theatres, or like each visit to a B. Dalton, you wonder if it might be your last.

Frost/Nixon is like Doubt based on a recently successful Broadway play, this one revolving around the David Frost interviews with Richard Nixon in the 1970s.  I saw the play and fell asleep for most of it.  The movie is I think better because it's able to take advantage a little bit more of the ability to leave the confines of the stage behind and go out into the world.  Footage of the LA beach, or of Frost's Australian TV shows, or of calling from a pay phone at an airport.  It retains the leads from the Broadway play, the fantastic Frank Langella and the equally good Michael Sheen (very good as Tony Blair in The Queen, now putting his gloss on another Brit in David Frost).  It still can't escape the essential boredom when it gets around to recreating the David Frost interviews on the stage or screen.  It's TV without the TV, so even though I fell asleep less during the play, only once in the middle toward the start of the interview recreations, I must say it was an unusually deep sleep for me during a movie.  When I was awoken by the phone ringing for one of the most famous parts of the play, an imagined late night call from Nixon to Frost, I was startled and thought I was in my hotel room and needed to find the phone on the table next to the bed.  Usually I doze off much more lightly during a film.  One review I read said this was a better adaptation of  a lesser play, and I think I'd agree.  I'm giving this the same toad ranking as I did Doubt.  I'm not sure I should, I'm tempted to give this the same 2.5 toads as Gran Turino, but...

In any event, it's in Panavision widescreen, and it was unfolding over the entire bigged curved screen at the Uptown, and I was reveling in the majesty of the moving picture.  If you are in DC, and if there's a movie you vaguely even maybe half want just a little bit to see at the Uptown, go and experience this theatre while you can.  It's right atop the Cleveland Park station on the Red Line, close to the national zoo, nice eating in the neighborhood.  I love after a movie to walk down Connecticut Ave. to Dupont Circle, past the zoo and over the bridge over Rock Creek which is just a magnificent place to stand and admire the view and think upon the world.  If you're young and energetic, start out at Dupont Circle and walk 2 miles uptown and uphill to the uptown, but there's something to be said for doing it in reverse so you've got that downhill thing going.  I love the Uptown!

Sole Survivor

When I first started going to the Washington, DC area on a regular basis in 1993/94, (and I've been at least once a year and often twice or more during the 15 years since, often on a long weekend visiting 30 or more bookstores).  the DC area was a major, major market for B. Dalton.  Union Station, Shops @ National in downtown, a Scribner in the Fashion Center mall, 2 in Crystal City, one in the Springfield Mall, the Montgomery Mall, the Ballston Commons, the Chevy Chase Pavilion, 18th & K St., Lake Forest, and more.  Within another week or two, not a single one of those original B. Dalton locations will remain.  The sole surviving Dalton outlet will be in Union Station, and that store wasn't there in 1993.  The current light-filled large space is a kind of Cadillac of B. Dalton stores that replaced a very very small shoebox in the center of the mall. 

The last of those Dalton locations from 1993 to close its doors is the Ballston Commons location, which is having a going out of business sale at the moment.  

Its indicative of the changes in the shopping landscape, both in general and for books in particular, during the past 15 years.

In 1993 the Ballston Commons was a pretty solid mall.  Over those 15 years, like a lot of malls, its gone downhill.  In 2009, it almost seems as if there are only 2 kinds of shopping mall left, the upscale thriving one that's ritzy enough for an Apple Store, and the decaying kind where the major chains have long since decamped in favor of tawdry clothing retailers and 99 cent stores.  How did these things happen?  Ballston Commons is at one end of the very walkable Clarendon corridor in Arlington, VA surrounded by office buildings and hotels and apartments for rich DC types.  The mall has a Panera that must get some upscale lunch trade.  But... the Regal Cinemas in the mall is more easily entered via the parking garage than by walking in from the street, which doesn't help the stores in the mall.  The same probably for the ice-skating rink.  Two miles away you've got more upscale new shopping in Clarendon and a ritzy outdoor promenade mall that does have an Apple Store and a B&N superstore.  It's hard to blame the B. Dalton for not thriving as its surroundings in the mall got worse and worse and worse.

Sadly, the Lake Forest mall which once had 3 bookstores, a Dalton, a Doubleday and a Walden, is also going downhill, as is the Springfield Mall that used to have both a Dalton and a Walden.  Each mall still has a Walden in it, but the decaying surroundings of each mall don't bode well for whether either of those can long survive.

When I first visited these malls 10 or 15 years ago, there was no hint of what was to come.  I couldn't have told you then that these malls would be dead while the Montgomery Mall and While Flint are not.

Besides that major change in the overall shopping environment, with malls giving way to power centers and lifestyle centers and whatever, there's also the superstore revolution.

In 1993, the superstore era was still in its infancy.  Borders was opening stores with double-digit store #s, #85 across the street from the Fashion Center and #50 a block from the 18th & K Dalton.  B&N was only just starting to emphasize the B&N superstores over the Dalton/Doubleday/Scribner locations they had purchased in the late 1980s.

And so it goes...

Are we now on the cusp of another retail revolution as even these superstores start to lose out to e-books?

As the years went by, I would go to the bigger B. Dalton in Crystal City and check if the smaller one was still there before walking to the far end of the mall.  I kept expecting the Ballston Commons store to close, and in fact thought it was going to do so a year ago because its shelves started to look depleted.  The Montgomery Mall store was having its Last Days sale 2 years ago when I visited with Brandon Sanderson.  One by one by one they've gone.  It was so exciting when I was in high school to have a B. Dalton open in the Orange Plaza Mall, and Dalton was always very good to sf/fantasy and maybe even more so than Walden in its heyday.  The Orange Plaza Mall store long closed, that mall redeveloped, the Lariats in the newer Galleria at Crystal Run was sold to Waldenbooks, and then the Waldenbooks closed in favor of a Borders location in the mall.  Drip by drip you hardly notice the changes, but now that the last of the B. Dalton that existed in DC in 1993 is going going and almost gone, you notice how the world has changed.

Many other Dalton locations appear to be closing to start the New Year, including one in the Bristol Mall  in Virginia, and in the Foothills Mall in Colorado, the Embarcadero in San Francisco, at the Parmatown Mall in the Cleveland area, one in the State College area of PA if I can tell right from Twitter and this blog post, the one in downtown LA that I walked by on my LA trip in September,  and several others like Alton Square in Illinois  (which also lost its Waldenbooks in 2008, going from 2 bookstores to 0) closed in spring 2008.  And probably more; in the DC area nobody notices or cares when a Dalton goes bye-bye in a decaying shopping mall and you can Google away without finding articles on all of them.

Better Late Than Never

I recommended in the spring that Borders give the boot to CEO George L. Jones.  Well, today, after a dismal holiday season that saw same store sales plummet, it finally happened.  I wish it had happened sooner.  I've always tried to give Jones credit for some of the good things he did on his watch, like actively trying to fix the mall stores and pulling the plug on the costly store remodels that weren't accomplishing much.  The new concept store he rolled out is an interesting vision in some ways but it will be hard to get a read on its success.  And in the fall, Borders was much better positioned with Sookie Stackhouse books than B&N.  But...  you can't surprise the world as he did in March with the news that your company is running out of cash.  His efforts to streamline inventory have been a disaster.  Right now for all of the Charlaine Harris books they are selling a signification fraction of stores aren't slotted to carry the entire Lily Bard series.  The company is finally rolling out a major upgrade on its in-store employee software called Borders Atlas after 25 years with Alta Vista Title Look-Up.  But the sluggishness of their supply chain and replenishment systems compared to B&N has yet to be addressed in any major way.

But hey, become a Borders Rewards member, because those 40% off coupons are coming fast and furious.  And shop at Borders if you will, because we need a counterweight to B&N in the business, and Borders is the only choice we've got for that.  Books a Million isn't in the same league.

I don't know what to expect from the new guy, but I'm glad there's finally some change at the top.

2 down...

So one Borders in Sacramento, CA is closing.  The employees found out when the signage package about the closing arrived to be put in the windows.  And now I see that store #97 in Gaithersburg, MD is closing as well.  The first time I visited the Gaithersburg store I walked out around 5 miles from the Shady Grove Metro stop, but later discovered that there were quick buses I could take.  Over the years, the store suffered from very inept management.  The receiving room was very slow so books were frequently not put out until after the first couple weeks on sale, thus costing sales.  The shelves were messy.  In recent years they hybridized the sf section shelving in such a way that it didn't have any usable backstock, so the shelves were always too crowded, and then they would go through and do store-initiated returns to clear up space, so they were frequently without books they were supposed to have.  It got to the point that I'd only stop by at that store because those buses then went 5 miles further out to a Borders in Germantown that grew in leaps and bounds.  When it first opened it was one of the stores that was skipped for books like the mass market of GUARDS OF HAVEN by Simon Green or CODE OF CONDUCT by Kristine Smith, but its business took off until it became a major sf/fantasy store for Borders while the Gaithersburg store withered away.  I'm not going to miss store #97, but does it make sense to take the Ride-On just to visit #384?  Do I still stop in the nabe to vist the Waldenbooks that continues to exist in the Lake Forest Mall across the street?  Philosophically I should be sad that Borders #97 is closed after 13 years, but isn't there a saying "good riddance to bad garbage?"  I feel bad for the employees who might have been doing their best, but I hope that the GM(s) who helped to mismanage the store into the trash heap of history won't be given new assignments.  Of course, the way the world works any hard-working employees will probably be put into the trash heap of history while the managers get to go on and ruin some other store.

Let me know if you hear of any other stores that are closing.  This article on a store closing in Cincinnati suggests that there are 5 scheduled to close in January, with stores in Santa Monica, CA, and  Tempe, AZ rounding out the list.  Santa Monica is the other that I've visited, and in its heyday it was quite successful.  I wonder if that's a lease expiring with more rent than a bookstore can pay?  If there are only 5 shuttering I'd consider that better than I'd predicted, but it remains to be seen if any post-holiday assessments will lead to more in March.

Film @ 11

We did it!  Eddie played around with a Sony Reader as well and said he liked it, so we got one this afternoon at the Borders at Park Ave., and I'm going to be curious to find out what he thinks of it.  I'll play around a bit with it myself, I'm sure.  Stay tuned for further updates, sometime or other.

A Game of Leapfrog

I think that my Kindle was/is better, certainly for me, than the first generation of the Sony Reader.  But I was playing around some with the new and improved Sony Reader at the Borders in Manchester, CT on Saturday night, and I think Sony has leapfrogged over the Kindle in many significant ways with their 2nd generation reader.

Instead of using buttons to move the pages back and forth, you can do that kind of iPhone touchy thing and drag across the screen to move forward or back a page.  Sweet!  The touch screen also can become a keyboard for searching for text.  Theoretically you can also bring that keyboard up to annotate text, but the fact that I wasn't intuitively able to figure out how to do that with the demo model suggests they might be able to improve upon that a tad (unless I was pressing the right buttons but the demo models don't let you do that so some 12-year-old won't look at the notes and find a pornographic treatise, which I'm thinking is a possibility?).  I worry some about the use of touchscreens, as I'm sure anyone would who's tried to use one at an ATM and found the corner with the button you need won't let itself be touched no matter what, but then again the little keyboard on my Kindle isn't exactly like new after eight months of vigorous annotating.  

The Kindle still has kind of a killer app with the whole wireless thing, while the Sony Reader requires hooking up to a computer as well as 3rd party intervention for use with Mac OSX.  And the subscription feature of the Kindle was a major plus for me as well.  I love having a Wall St. Journal and a Washington Post sent to my Kindle every morning; the Post is cheaper for a month on the Kindle than the NYC newsstand price of 3 Sundays.  And when I'm on the road I like being able to buy a full single issue of the NY Times instead of having to walk around with the National Edition in newsprint without the full NYC and Sports sections.  

So I'm not saying the Sony is a hands-down winner, because at least for me the overall functionality of the first generation Kindle still rates ahead of the Reader.  But if all you want to do is get books and read them, Amazon isn't the only player in this game right now, and we at JABberwocky may think on buying a Reader for my #2 for his manuscript reading using the 3rd party software that Charles Stross suggested in comment on my first Kindle post.  If Amazon gets too complacent about rolling out a new and improved 2nd generation Kindle, this is definitely NOT going to be a one-player game.

(All that being said with the caveat that playing around with the Sony Reader in its display at Borders may not be the same as the experience of actually using it, but even added display cuddliness is not a minor thing.)

Cinema under the tree

New York City is an island of little movie ecosystems on Christmas.  Walk down W. 13th St. and there's nobody around, until you get to the Quad Cinema.  Enough people milling around the lobbies of the Kips Bay or the Angelika you'd think they were giving something away.

One of the movies that opened in NYC on the 25th is Last Chance Harvey, which I'd seen Tuesday evening Nov. 18, 2008 at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square, Auditorium #2, "The Kings," Part of the Variety Screening Series,  2 slithy toads.  It's a star vehicle romance with Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman who had so much fun working together on Stranger Than Fiction (clearly more fun than I had watching the movie) that they yearned to work together so much that they chose this mediocre romantic comedy.  It's the very definition of a 2 toad movie.  It's not very good, but it does have star power and enough pleasant things going on that it's hard to regret spending 92 minutes with it.  I liked the first third of it the most, bcause it does an excellent job of establishing Dustin Hoffman's character.  He's a pianist who works on jingles and is close to being squeezed out for a younger generation.  So much so that it's kind of risky for him to leave work behind to go to the wedding of a long-estranged daughter he's clearly seen rarely since his divorce.  He's at a nice Marriott in downtown London, but that's only so nice when you consider that his ex and pretty much everyone else are at a country house rented for the wedding party for the occasion.  His daughter would much rather her stepfather give her away.  It's a series of small indignaties, one after the other, and Hoffman doesn't drown them in star power.  No, he shrinks just a little further into his not so tall self, his face droops just a little bit more with each passing moment.  Emma Thompson plays a lovelorn spinster who does polling of arriving passengers at Heathrow.  The two meet cute when Hoffman misses his plane home and loses his job as a result, and Hoffman's so desperate for something good to come of it that he breathes life into a relationship that shouldn't exist like somebody managing to regain fire from one drowning ember in a small pile of brush.  It's what comes after that  just doesn't work.  There's no impediment to the two of them having a relationship, and it's so preordained that it makes you yearn for the artificial complication of a bad romantic comedy.  The extent of the complications here is that Hoffman misses a date because of the most contrived circumstances imaginable, and there isn't all that much to the regaining of trust thereafter.  So don't let me keep you from this, there are way worse chick flicks out there, just don't expect much more than a short and pleasant exercise in star chemisty.  Q&A after, Emma Thompson was losing (more had lost) her voice, but that didn't stop Dustin and Emma from turning it into a love fest comedy routine tribute to their joy in one another's company.  It was certainly different than the usual Q&A, and not unpleasant, but when there were those few moments when Hoffman would begin to give a serious answer to a question by reflecting on his Method training or on The Graduate, it was hard for me not to wish there'd been a little more of the master classs from somebody who has a lot of stories to tell and a little less second rate George and Gracie.

On Christmas day, I commenced my movie-going with Let the Right One In, seen Thursday afternoon Dec. 25, 2008 at the City Cinemas Angelika, Aud. #6.  2 slithy toads.  This is an offbeat Norwegian vampire movie that opened 2 weeks ago and which had gotten some interesting reviews in NYC and in DC.  It's the kind of movie that six or ten years ago probably would have been gone from theatres by now, but since the Landmark Sunshine opened up a few blocks from the Angelika and added more screens to the dowtown NYC art house circuit, there's a little bit more room for a film like this with some decent reviews and some decent word of mouth to hang around.  And in this case to hang around long enough I decided finally to see.  The vampire is a 12-year-old who travels around with an elderly man who helps her out some.  Kills the occasional person and taps their blood, or cleans up after her own feedings, that sort of thing.  She moves in next door to a boy who's being badly bullied at school.  The two become attracted.  He offers her human companionship her own age which she's clearly had little of, she offers him encouragement and life coaching, like a little 12-year-old vampire version of Anthony Robbins for young people.  The first half is a little sluggish and could stand some tighter editing.  The second half is a little bit stronger as her presence in town begins to attract attention and his situation at school and with his new girlfriend both start to develop.  There are some nice visuals.  Certainly worth seeing for the die-hard vampire afficianado, and certainly interesting, but also a little too Euro-slow for me to give any kind of strong recommendation.

Then Doubt, seen Thursday evening Dec. 25, 2008 at the AMC Loews Kips Bay, Aud. #8, 3 Slithy Toads.  I had planned on only one movie for Christmas, but I stopped by the Kips Bay to see what was playing on their big screens.  This theatre has 5 passable small theaters downstairs, then the north side of the upstairs has six awful small theatres which I've kind of vowed never to pay to enter ever again. But auditorums #7-10 are all really big and spacious and comfy with nice big screens that I enjoy quite a bit.  It was a pleasant surprise to see that Doubt was on one of those big screens while (as an example) Marley was on one of the smaller downstairs.  Now, Marley was the #1 movie Christmas day and had sold out, while the showing of Doubt had 100 tops in the 350 seat theatre, so you never quite know but that management will flip-flop, so really if I didn't see Doubt on the big screen then no assurance I'd get to later.  Doubt is an adaptation of a play by Moonstruck's John Patrick Shanley about the principal of a catholic school 40 years ago who thinks one of the priests might be getting too affectionate with one of the students, the first black kid to be admitted to the school.  The idea is that there should be some uncertainty about weather the principal, played here by Meryl Streep, is right in her suspicions.  When I saw this on Broadway there was a lot of ambivalency.  Here, there's a little less so, and that throws off the balance of the closing scene.  In that way, it's not as perfect as the play may have been.  But, it's wonderfully acted not only by Streep but by Philip Seymour Hoffman as the priest and Amy Adams as a teacher in the school and Viola Davis as the student's mother.  It's wonderfully photographed.  I'm not sure I agreed with the decision to shoot with a lot of dutch angles (if you don't know the term please do follow the link; I think of these most of all from the old Batman TV show, but there's a lot more to them than that; impress your friends by studying up), but I did like the way that the movie was opened up from the more limited settings available to the stage version.  There's some added context to the whole ritual of the catholic school and the church itself which I liked, and I can assure you that the housing project near to the school where Meryl Streep and Viola Davis go for a walk in one of the pivotal scenes of both play and film is a quintessential examplar of NYC life.  So I would recommend, and I think people who are new to the material may actually enjoy even a little bit than I did, with the experience of the play having spoiled some of the surprises.

I attempted to see Valkyrie on the 26th, but the lines at the AMC Empire were so torturously long that I decided to come home and blog instead before heading out for the evening.  Also allowed me to do my weights.