The Safdie Bros. film, Uncut Gems is a impressive piece of work. Crazy energy and the insanity of gambling are seen here in stark terms. The rush of hitting a big score hooks some people and they can’t get over it. The sense of addiction is palpable. Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a character who scrambles to get the money to pay off to the mobsters (a nice touch having one of them be his brother in law), but he can’t resist the rush and the addiction of one more big throw. The film shows he’s got talent at sports betting but he ultimately pays dearly for his addiction. It’s a Shakespearian level tragedy set in a nasty, lowlife world. As the film begins the camera enters the fabulously iridescent black opal of the title and travels through on of the embedded gems before coming out the other side to show a monitor screen depicting Howard getting a colonoscopy. It’s a self-deprecating joke by the Safdie’s telling us that Howard has just entered a world of shit!
The novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami is a strange and immersive ride. Murakami’s writing is subtle and almost artlessly naturalistic. There are few huge twists or outsized dramatic moments, but he draws you in with steady, ingratiating details about the characters that make it impossible not to read on. The dreamlike, otherworldly nature of his prose is masterful. Even though I didn’t think the various threads of the story came together in a standard storytelling way, they did all work to present a sense of completion. The parts about the Japanese soldiers in Manchuria in WWII and later in the Soviet prison camp are gripping. The struggles of Toru and Kumiko and her family are elliptical and strange, yet also engaging and ultimately moving.
Here's something you may not know: The U.S. nuclear industry is recognized as one of the safest industrial working environments in the nation.https://t.co/tOJEGMnU6g
The Netflix movie 6 Underground is Michael Bay in default feverish overload. If Bay possessed something like restraint, his films would improve exponentially.
There’s no question that Bay knows how to compose kinetic, visually stimulating sequences. Critics have called this style is Bayhem: wildly kinetic images with an overloaded frame and spinning camera spinning. This Bayhem overload is taken to the Nth degree in his Transformer movies where robots reconfigure their physical structure as they’re falling, flying and rolling at high speed and smashing through skyscrapers, bridges or other urban ephemera. The prolonged effect of Bay turning it up to 11 produces boredom, not excitement.
6 Underground has an opening car chase in the streets of Florence that’s 30% longer than it needs to be. But with $150 million budget, black Suburbans need smashing and Bay is happy to step up. A fellow film nerd noted that Bay has his car driving through the Uffizi gallery and smashing art. A wry bit of self commentary by Bay. He knows where he stands and revels in it.
A signature use of the Bay style was in his retelling of the Japanese attack on Hawaii in 1941: Pearl Harbor. Here, the Bayhem not only turns the events into a chaotic visual mess, they also change the historical nature of the event. Bay shoots the air attack as if it carried out by thousands of aircraft. In Bay’s images we see Japanese planes at low altitude, medium altitude and up high. The sky is filled with planes. This might be considered more visually interesting, but it’s not close to what actually happened. The Japanese attacked with only 354 aircraft. and those were in two waves: 183 in the first wave and 171 in the second. Not the massive numbers Bay shows us.
Hey, it’s just a dramatic movie, not a documentary. It doesn’t have to be historically accurate, right? No. There’s never been an accuracy law in Hollywood. But Bay’s vision is unfortunate for two reasons: 1) it makes it seem that there was no stopping the massive Japanese onslaught, yet, in fact, if U.S. forces had been more competent and had gotten their aircraft airborne, they could have greatly blunted the attack; 2) it belittles the incredibly effective military operation carried out by only 354 planes. You don’t have to agree with the Japanese war aims to be impressed with what they accomplished via excellent planning and operational skill.
My eerie story “Shell Hole” is included in the new surreal and fantasy A Land Without Mirrors. And of all of the stories, mine leads the pack at page 1. Thanks to editor Cara Flannery for putting my World War I tale first.
In the story, a British soldier gets lost on a night patrol and runs across someone he thinks he knows in the blasted waste of No Man’s Land.
Charlotte Bronte as a detective? (Still from the 1943 film Jane Eyre with Joan Fontaine in the title role.)
From private eyes to police detectives to determined amateurs like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, there are many great women detectives in mystery fiction. A clever twist on the literary detective is turning a real historical figure into a sleuth. The meta value of seeing them as a detective increases the story’s appeal.
Elliot Roosevelt picked a well-known woman — his mother, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt — and re-invented her as a sleuth (write about what you know, right?). His series of books with Eleanor solving crimes ran from 1985 to 2005. The real Eleanor was courageously outspoken and tirelessly interested in people, plus she had what you’d call “great access” — excellent attributes for an amateur detective.
Some authors have been even more inventive by converting famous authors into detectives. Writer Laura Joh Rowland has Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre, running down clues on the moors of Yorkshire in The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë. Stephanie Barron takes a similar tack by giving Jane Austen the task of not only writing a slew of great novels, but solving crimes, too. Barron has written 13 Jane Austen mystery novels, starting with Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor. Poor Jane must have been dead on her feet.
And then Carrie A. Bebris takes this trend and wraps around a famous fictional character of Austen’s. Bebris has Mrs. Elizabeth Darcy (nee Bennet) teaming with her husband in a seven novel series that debuted in 2004 with Pride and Prescience.
What other historical figures or famous authors would make an intriguing model for a sleuth?
Was doing some reading on clavichords and harpsichords today (a friend is building a clavichord from a kit!). This led me to thinking about how finely humans can slice a subject (like that prison garlic in Scorsese’s Goodfellas) and name the smallest variations of a thing.
The practice of slicing, sorting and classifying things is called taxonomy. From the Greek taxis meaning order or arrangement and nomos, law or science. In mathematics it is also called a “containment hierarchy.” And that name might be the best in describing how people think about categories. Categories and sub-categories are useful in describing different types of butterflies or music or movies or novels. But the highly specialized categorization also tends to limit or contain people’s thinking. Sometimes the containment hierarchy becomes almost more important than the thing it’s attempting to describe
Take the mystery genre. While you can call a book a mystery and leave it at that, there’s a universe of mystery sub genres extending beyond that simple label. Common mystery genres are: cozy mystery, amateur sleuth, professional sleuth, police procedural, legal, medical, suspense, historical, private eye, noir, caper, whodunits, hard-boiled, etc. And that’s only the top level of sub genres — they go far deeper than that, with various permutations. It’s fascinating that we as a species have a absolute mania for containment hierarchies.
I’m currently working on a mystery series that is something of a hybrid of a historical and a private eye mystery. More on that soon.
[dropcap]H[/dropcap]istory is rich with the odd and ironic. One small example is the U.S. Coast Guard recently transferring ownership of the 378-foot high endurance cutter Morgenthau to Vietnam. Morgenthau has what you could call a “complicated” history with its new homeland.
Nothing unusual in transferring an old ship — U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels nearing the end of their service lives are often given to other nations. It’s an easy way to curry favor. “Hey, instead of turning Morgenthau into razor blades, let’s give it to the Vietnamese. Maybe they’ll like us.”
What makes this transfer intriguing is that the former cutter Morgenthau once vigorously attacked Vietnam. Morgenthau was equipped with a 5-inch naval cannon in a forward turret. This is the same size and type of gun that U.S. Navy destroyers would carry. Guns that were used in World War II, for example, in firing on Japanese and German positions during amphibious landings like Iwo Jima, Normandy and many others. Called naval gunfire support, it assists troops ashore.
The cutter Morgenthau was deployed to South Vietnam in 1970-71 during the Vietnam War. The ship carried out a variety of missions. Once of which was naval gunfire support: blowing up stuff ashore with its 5-inch gun. Attacking the country under whose flag it would later serve.
Maybe this transfer is more than just an historical irony, perhaps it’s also a hopeful example of people putting the past aside and moving on.
The FBI may have finally given up on finding famous hijacker D.B. Cooper, but he’ll always remain one of history’s worst skydivers. After hijacking a Northwest Airlines flight in 1971 and receiving a demanded $200,000 and several parachutes (was he planning to take someone with him or just shopping for fit?), the Coop doffed his clip-on tie, lowered the rear stairs of the Northwest Boeing 727 and jumped into the night.
Weather conditions were miserable that night (the Pacific Northwest, and all) and Cooper only wore a suit and loafers. Perhaps worst of all, jumping from a jet airliner isn’t like stepping out of a pokey Cessna 172. The 727 was flying at 200 mph and at an altitude where the air temperature was -70° F. Coop had no protection against the cold and no helmet and probably landed in a pitch dark forest. There was even a drawback to the parachutes he failed to notice:
“No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 200-mile-an-hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and a trench coat,” Special Agent Larry Carr said. Carr was leader of the investigative team from 2006 until its dissolution in 2016. “It was simply too risky. He also missed that his reserve ‘chute was only for training, and had been sewn shut—something a skilled skydiver would have checked.”
So, either Coop was some daredevil genius who had it all figured out — or one lousy skydiver whose ‘chute incompetence likely caught up with him.
A few years ago it seemed ebooks were going to overwhelm printed books. Big bookstores like Borders, and many small bookstores too, were closing and Amazon’s Kindle E-reader was a breakout product. After the initial surge, though, print books made a comeback. Some readers were never going to give them up.
Now my humorous historical novel George in London is getting with the times and is available in a print, softcover version. It’s a George in London you can hold in your hands, spill coffee on, break the spine of (if you must!), use to swat a fly, impress your friends with, and generally show your superior taste in secret histories of young George Washington set in London in 1751 yet still wildly funny and entertaining. Get yours today!
The Safdie Bros. film, Uncut Gems is a impressive piece of work. Crazy energy and the insanity of gambling are seen here in stark terms. The rush of hitting a big score hooks some people and they can’t get over it. The sense of addiction is palpable. Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a character who scrambles to get the money to pay off to the mobsters (a nice touch having one of them be his brother in law), but he can’t resist the rush and the addiction of one more big throw. The film shows he’s got talent at sports betting but he ultimately pays dearly for his addiction. It’s a Shakespearian level tragedy set in a nasty, lowlife world. As the film begins the camera enters the fabulously iridescent black opal of the title and travels through on of the embedded gems before coming out the other side to show a monitor screen depicting Howard getting a colonoscopy. It’s a self-deprecating joke by the Safdie’s telling us that Howard has just entered a world of shit!
