103 posts tagged “review”

The One From The Other by Philip Kerr

My rating: ★★★★✩

While on vacation, I read The One From The Other by Philip Kerr. Following the action of the brilliant Berlin Noir (Kerr's first books - March Violets, The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem), it continues the adventures of Bernie Gunther, a down in his luck investigator in pre-World War II Germany. He rubs shoulders with many of the evil men who were soon to make their dark mark on the world. The One From The Other picks up Bernie's life after World War II, where he is running a bed and breakfast just outside of Dachau, of all places.

One thing leads to another and he is quickly embroiled in the trials of the Red Jackets, war criminals held in prison. Soon he is beaten up and sucked into a bigger web of lies.

Once again, Kerr hits gold. Some of the ugly details of concentration camps and the pure evil of the SS can get a little hard to read. And I think the final web remains too big and random to have actually been planned, a common failure of many mysteries. I was never convinced there weren't much easier ways for the criminals to do what they wanted to do. But not enough to keep me from turning the next page as I blazed through it.

If you haven't read the Berlin Noir trilogy, I highly recommend it. And then follow it up with The One From The Other and, next on my reading list, book 5 starring Gunther, Hitler's Peace (wrong book - it's) A Quiet Flame

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Some recent movie viewings:

Duck Season (or, in its native language, Temporada de patos) tells the story of 3 teenagers stuck in a Mexico City apartment complex when the power goes out. The two boys are 14, and long time friends, while a neighboring girl, Rita, 16, comes over to try some cooking. Filmed in black and white, it's a very funny little comedy about life as a teenager, generally not something I find all that attractive. I love the little vignettes of life, the pizza guy, and the flirting that Rita does with Moko. It has been showing on Sundance recently and I highly recommend checking it out.

The Bourne Ultimatum is at the other end of the movie making spectrum - a megamovie with mega superstars like Matt Damon, and plenty of car chases and explosions. This third (and final?) chapter of the Bourne series starts literally minutes after the second one (The Bourne Supremacy, as Jason Bourne is limping out of the Russian girl's apartment. Thus begins another high speed action movie, as Bourne tries to uncover his nearly forgotten past and the CIA tries to erase their mistake.

A little too preachy for me, although it featured plenty of the Bourne touches, like trains and foot chases. A solid car chase, with a real bang up ending, although it didn't feel as wild as the one through Moscow in Supremacy. I also like the shtick where he shows how he is watching over them. This time it was something like

If you were in your office right now we'd be having this conversation face-to-face.

Those are always fun! Lots of exras on this Blu-ray disc, that's for sure. I like the 'backtracking' ones, that will fill in back story from the previous films when you select the icon. All in all, a good entry in the Bourne series, although it didn't have the standout moments of the previous two. I did finally get The Bourne Identity out of the library - it was an all time favorite book, but I haven't read it in quite some time. Wonder if I'll still like it after having been soured on Ludlum books?

Man on Wire is the fascinating Oscar-winning documentary on tightrope walker Philippe Petit's high wire crossing between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. It created quite the sensation, especially after he was arrested. The film does a great job of recreating the now 35 year old scene, as they snuck up the stairs and illegally set up the high wire between the towers using a bow and arrow. I would have liked to know more about what happened afterwards, as it seems the entire crew had a falling out, especially between Phillipe and his girlfriend. Phillipe, I guess, enjoyed the spotlight a little too much.
I was looking for a little light viewing late one night, so I flipped on The Devil Came on Horseback, a documentary on the genocide in Darfur - oops! It features Brian Steidle, an ex-Marine who went to work for the UN peacekeeping force in Sudan. He documents just sickening atrocities by the ruling military junta and tries to bring it to the attention of the American people and its ruling class, to little or no avail. The story is just incredibly tragic and yet hauntingly familiar. In the end, I just don't know what to think. Yes, it's an amazingly sad story, but just how many places in the world can we as a country rescue? Why do these awful things happen anyway? Just too sad. Not what I should have been watching at 1am on a Friday night! See it and be moved nearly to tears, trust me.
A friend and I saw Star Trek (aka the Reboot) at the local iMax theater. It wasn't 3d but it sure was big! The director Abrams loves his closeups, and I felt like a few times I was going to be sucked into someone's nostrils! The movie was a fun, mostly brainless, action sci-fi movie, with humor in all the right places. I'm by no means a Star Trek fanatic, so I just watched it as a movie, not a movement. It had the typically annoying Star Trek techno-mumble, and time travel just can't be pulled off without feeling broken, but I enjoyed it and you probably would too.
As opposed to Night At The Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, which was even worse than the first one, which I found only barely survivable. This one felt forced all around, as they struggled to find another way to get Stiller into a museum. The hook? He's not happy as the president and founder of his own very successful knick-knack company, he'd be much happier back as a museum guard - yup, it makes as much sense as all that. Nosiy, loud, and pointless, with only a very sexy looking Amy Adams in tight knickers as Amelia Earhart to redeem it. I saw this also at the iMax with my almost 9 year old daughter, but yet it wasn't in 3d. She wasn't even that impressed with it.
And finally, I tried Wall-E again and, once again, I just don't get the accolades. We (Mark, Marta and I) watched it via Netflix Instant on my Roku box. Neither Mark nor Marta had seen it before, while I had seen it in the movie theaters with my family when it first came out. I wasn't all that impressed the first time with the story of the little cleanup robot, his EVE friend who showed up looking for a plant, and the fat humans adrift in space waiting to come home again. And I wasn't moved this time either. A few giggles, some nice animation and a heavy handed point of view is really all that remains.

Chain of Blame: How Wall Street Caused the Mortgage and Credit Crisis by Paul Muolo

My review

Rating: ★★★✩✩

One of those books that make me wish there were 1/2 stars, Chain of Blame tells an important story, yet does it in a very dry and by-the-numbers fashion. Muolo and his co-author, Padilla, are financial reporters close the the mortgage industry and obviously know their stuff, yet the book lacks compelling human drama. The closest it comes is in the description of how many of the long timers in the mortgage industry, like Angelo Mozilo, head of Countrywide, got started.

But the book tends to devolve into a headspinning web of who bought who, who borrowed money from who, tranches, wholesalers, and the ilk, some of which is explained and some of which isn't. The amounts of money are staggering, especially in terms of real money lost. Yes, there were paper losses of value when the stocks tanked, but even more incredible are the stories of banks buying lenders for billions of dollars, only to just shut them down a year later.

I think the real story of the house & mortgage crisis has yet to be told. I still would like to know why, beyond sheer pigheaded greed, some of these mortgage veterans would agree to such crazy lending practices. I had never heard of "payment option ARMs" before this book, which are adjustable rate mortgages (ARM) where the option of what to pay comes up every month and you can choose to even go negative and move actual money owed to the end of the mortgage! It's all insane, and I'd love an insiders view of why these guys, who should have know that house prices weren't going to keep going up 25% every year, thought they could get away with it. And why the people taking out the loans thought they could as well.

I still say that This American Life's Giant Pool of Money and its follow up show, Another Frightening Show About the Economy are the best reporting done so far on this financial meltdown and many of the characters mentioned in these shows are featured prominently in Chain of Blame.

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The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway

My review

Rating: ★★★★✩

Solid memoir about growing up in 40s Australia, first in the Outback on a sheep farm that nearly collapses due to a long drought, then in Sydney as she tries to adjust to life a smart, pretty woman in a very chauvinistic academi world. She loses some important people way too early, and her mom begins to lose her grip on reality.

I enjoyed the book and it was well written. I definitely liked it better when it was in Coorain, the sheep farm her parents bought and settled about 10 hours west of Sydney. A very different world, well described from a ten year old's perspective. When her fatherless family moved to Sydney, leaving the farm in caretaker's hands, the book bogged down for me. It became more of a "normal" story of the youngest daughter trying to come to grips with many pressures. While my growing up years were perfectly fine, I don't have any desire to relive them, either mine or someone else's, so even most "coming of age" movies leave me cool. But I persevered as she entered college and tried to figure out her path.

The books ends as she gets on a plane to Boston, to begin her post-graduate work at Harvard. Oddly enough, she currently lives just down the road from me. A small world, and this book does a very nice job of explaining how it can become so.
 
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So I finally watched a couple of the new Batman movies. I don't think I've seen any since the first Tim Burton / Michael Keaton affair oh so many years ago. In general, most superhero movies leave me cold. I'm not a comic book fan (there goes my geek cred right out the window) and all the efforts to "ground" the superhero's story in some sort of reality just leave me cold and bored.

But I had been hearing so many good things about The Dark Knight, and I had a "free" coupon (oh, that reminds me - I need to fill that out and get it in the mail!) for a movie so I figured I'd give The Dark Knight a try using OnDemand HD. Big sound, big picture, lots of action, figured it would work well.

And it did. The movie goes on for about 30 minutes too long - 152 minutes of crash/bang action is a little over the top. No, make that a lot over the top. And while the Nolan brothers did a good job of infusing some strains of seriousness into the proceedings, at times it got a little too ponderous for its own good.

But enough niggling, it was still pretty good, for a superhero movie. And the accolades for Heath Ledger's final performance were certainly deserved - he was simply amazing as The Joker, infusing the character with a barely restrained insanity that was mesmerizing to watch. Wow, what an acting job! Christian Bale was solid, or even stolid, as Batman, but Michael Caine is perfect as Alfred.

The picture and sound were pretty amazing. Good thing my home theater is way downstairs, as I'm sure I would have woken up someone otherwise. As it was, the floor was almost certainly shaking upstairs!

So an enjoyable if a bit lengthy evening, with perhaps the highest body count of any movie I have seen recently!

And my first DVD from LendAround was the Blu-ray version of Batman Begins, the movie just before The Dark Knight, also starring Christian Bale as the Batman. This one describes how Batman came to be, from a somewhat spoiled rich boy who was bent on destruction after witnessing the cold blooded murder of his parents, to his brutal training in the Himalayan Mountains at the hand of a mysterious ninja cult leader. He breaks from the cult in an explosive fashion, then tries to defend Gotham City from destruction by the cult.

Much less frenetic movie than The Dark Knight and the better for it. Still a little overlong at 140 minutes. And I'm not convinced the DVD I got was really Blu-ray, as it didn't say it on the DVD anywhere and the normal red/blue/yellow/green buttons on my remote didn't do anything. But picture and sound were solid nonetheless.

In some ways, I enjoyed it more than The Dark Knight. It was more of a movie and less of an event. Liam Neeson, however, is no match for Heath Ledger in the villan department, although he did lend the character a certain debonair charm.

Neither movie has caused me to rethink my natural antipathy towards superhero movies. They are good for a quick (please be shorter next time!) action fix, but nothing really sticks. I don't get that involved, as, in the end, it'll all work out. So a lukewarm thumbs up for both of them, which is actually pretty good coming from me!

So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading by Sara Nelson

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fun book about Nelson's reading habits for a year. Her and I couldn't have more divergent tastes for books but it was still good to read about another read-aholic. Despite sounding slightly neurotic, she did a lovely job of explaining how books and life can get all intermingled. She writes a very honest, touching and heartfelt book.

She touched upon a few things that I want to talk about. The first was about sports. She has an 8 year old son who is just getting into sports like baseball and asks the reader if anyone has any good memories of sports, and comes to the conclusion (strangely enough for someone who admits to being pretty clueless about it) that no one does.

Well, I beg to differ. While certainly no All Star, or even a starter in some sports, I have very good memories of sports, from my earliest days playing soccer to my current days coaching my girls in it. From my days as a basketball scrub to being the goalie for a tournament winning hockey team just a few years ago, sports have always been fun and a big part of my life. I enjoy the camaraderie of the team sports and the challenges of the solo ones. I enjoy a good "real life" sports book, although I can't say as I've come across too many fictional ones.

She also surprised me by claiming many of her friends will actually read a book's ending and/or middle before (or instead of) reading it through. While she admits she never does that, it is still crazytalk! I had a high school English teacher who claimed you had to read the ending of a book first, and then read it through to see how well the writer did in getting to that point, especially with a mystery. But I'm not sure if he was just being his usual contrary self. That's just to bizarre a thing to even think about!

Ms. Nelson had a great idea that I am going to try and implement on a wider scale here. She read a book (Charlotte's Web) at the same time as her son (not aloud) and then talked about it together. I'd like to get my whole family to do that. A8.6 is reading Peter Pan and I think that would be a fun book to have the four of us read.

I also liked her very frank discussion of what book to bring out in public. While I like to think of myself as nearly immune to anything of the sort, I also find myself thinking about how I would look carrying around certain books. Like if I am going to read something while the girls are at basketball practice, I don't want to get too geeky by reading a programming book, or too cerebral by hauling out my War and Peace, so I try to find some middle ground.

I can't say as I have read too many of the books in her 2002 reading list and,for that matter, are not interested in reading too many of them. She's a huge Philip Roth fan, but I can't say as I've read any of his. She did like Disgrace by J. M. Coetze, but I wasn't too keen on it. It is kind of strange that the list in the back of the book doesn't really seem to coincide with the books she talks about *in* the book.

A few books did seem pretty interesting, and that I've added to my To-Read list. Heartburn by Nora Ephron sounds like bitter fun, while Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott sounds like it might be just the thing for a procrastinator like myself. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber sounds like an interesting historical novel. But despite our divergent tastes in books, I thoroughly enjoyed her description of a reading year.

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As far as movies goes, there's been a couple on the menu:

I finally watch Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and, despite dire warnings against it, I simply loved it. Now maybe it is because I am such an Indiana Jones fan boy, but Skull just resonated with me right from the beginning. It just *felt* like an Indiana Jones movie to me.

The basic synopsis, as if that matters, is that Indiana Jones, after getting fired from his job due to "Red" worries, gets conscripted into looking for the crystal skull because it was an old colleague's obsession (sound like any of the other movies, eh?). Of course, this being the 50s, the Russians are after it too and the chase is on.

Nothing Earth shattering about the plot but the execution was exquisite. Every few minutes was a reminder of the past, from the subtle (a huge, endless wharehouse anyone?) to the obvious (pictures and remincsing about Marcus and Dad). Plenty of Indiana Jones action, with perhaps the biggest flaw being that there was just too much. Some of the action scenes could have been cut by a bit without a loss. But that is a minor quibble.

I really wish I had seen this in the theaters when it first came out, as some of the surprises were no longer surprises. The sound and picture on the Comcast HD Movie channel were just swell, but I really want the BluRay version of it. That's how much I liked it.

The next evening, my wife and I actually went to a movie theater to watch a movie. Burn After Reading is a the latest Coen brothers movie and features such stalwarts as George Clooney, Brad Pit, and of course Frances McDormand. In it, Pitt and McDormand play a couple of fitness center losers who try to capitalize on a lost CD of information and get it all wrong.

The movie depended far too much on coincidences that just seemed far too unlikely. A very slight Coen Brothers effort, it did feature the typically stellar work from Brad Pitt, who really gave his character some depth, which is probably more than he deserved! There were a few twists and turns but nothing too hard too follow and, in the end, everyone got what they deserved, I guess.

The funny part about going to watch the movie is that I'm pretty sure a better experience would have occured in my home theater. It was a discount movie theater that had split its once grandiose theater into 7 or 8 tiny theater boxes. Only about 8 seats in each row, a screen only slightly larger than my relatively small 50" HDTV, a scratchy print and sorrowful sound all lent itself to wondering just why we would bother paying US$8 to see it. It worked, but only just barely!

So thanks to GrandCentralPub on Twitter, I got an early review copy of Malcolm Gladwell's newest book, Outliers. I am a huge Gladwell fan. His previous book, Blink, was a truly eye opening read, chock a block full of startling discoveries.

Here's the library summary for Outliers:

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band. Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.

A pretty interesting book, albeit with not quite as many "knock me over with a feather" moments as Blink. It starts off with a bang, as he discusses amateur hockey teams and how it was noticed that virtually all the players on an Under-18 hockey team came from the first three months of the year. Turns out the age cutoff is January 1 in Canada, so the older players (those born early in the year) advanced further due to their slight maturity advantage the continued to multiply, as they got better training, put on better teams etc.

This subject hit close to home, as I am a soccer coach and heavily involved in my daughters soccer league. My oldest has a birthday at the worst possible time, just a few weeks before the cutoff date, while the younger one has a birthday the month after the cutoff date. So far, it hasn't seemed to slow the older one's progress, but it is something I will certainly keep an eye on. Gladwell's suggestion is to have multiple cutoff dates, so other ages can play against others of the same age. Doesn't seem likely though.

He also explores how the timing of your interests can really change things. Something as simple as how available computer time was to early pioneers like Bill Gates and Bill Joy. Certainly, in the late 60s and early 70s, the amount of keyboard time these guys had pales in comparison to what would be available just a few years before that. He also talks about a major law firm in New York that benefited from getting the kinds of financial cases the other law firms wouldn't deal with, only to explode in popularity as the money days of the 80s and 90s struck.

I thought the book sometimes felt like it suffered from data mining, in that there didn't seem to be enough exploration of other equally successful groups that may not have had the same advantages. But still a fascinating look at what kinds of things influence success, whether we think about them or not.

I haven't been completely out of the movie watching loop, although there hasn't been much. Here's what I've watched over the past couple of weeks:

Doomsday, a BluRay movie, was a pretty reasonable, fast playing, end of the world viral outbreak movie. A quick acting virus that pretty instantly kills those infected strikes Scotland, so the British authorities move to cordon off the entire country. They end up building a huge wall and forgetting about the place. But when the virus shows up again in London, and it looks like there were survivors after all in Scotland, a small team, lead by a Scottish survivor herself, are sent to investigate.

They come across a very "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" kind of place, ruled by Sol (played with over the top manic energy by Craig Conway). Much mayhem ensues, as the small group, led by Maj. Eden Sinclair, Scottish survivor and borderline psychopath herself. Rhona Mitra, who looks like a new female action hero, shows enough swagger to carry off this very macho part.

While sufficiently action packed, and looking and sounding wonderful in BluRay, it wasn't really all that compelling. If beheadings are your thing, then this is your movie, as I lost track of the number of chopped off heads. A pretty star studded cast includes Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowell anchors the movie with sufficient gravitas, but I never really cared about any of the characters and Sinclair's revenge motive was rang strangely hollow. But worth a viewing if you're into a nice violent, apocalyptic show.

On the other end of the action scale was the heartfelt indie, Wilby Wonderful. Featuring a great cast including Sandra Oh, Maury Chaykin and Ellen Page, Wilby Wonderful tells the story of a tumultuous 24 hours in a small Canadian town on an island. The stories of a dozen or so characters are interwoven as secrets are unearthed, lives are forever altered and affairs grind to a halt. A nice little movie, perhaps a little too earnest but with some light touches, it reminded me of one of my favorite movies, The Station Agent, in the way it told its story. Not quite to that high level, but still a highly recommended, quiet little film.

Me and the girls watched The Kid, Charlie Chaplin's first "full length" movie. It clocks in at only a little more than an hour, but still far longer than his previous comedic shorts. The Kid tells the story of an abandoned child that The Tramp ends up raising. The Kid, played by a very young Jackie Coogan, who Chaplin discovered at a vaudeville show he was playing in, helps out The Tramp with his small swindles, like throwing a rock to break a window that the Tramp replaces. But he gets sick and then the Authorities try to take him away but alls well that ends well.

The girls really enjoyed this silent movie, recorded from TMC's "Silent Sunday Night", which I found heartening. I think they enjoyed filling in the blanks between the story cards and it was a good story too. The Roku box has some early Keaton movies that I think I'll try on them next.

I read my second, and probably last, book in the Saga of Seven Suns science fiction series by Kevin J. Anderson. This one, called A Forest Of Stars is set five years after the first book and continues following the adventures of many characters, a chapter at a time (although sometimes confusingly mixing in the point of views). It was okay, but I think I'll abandon the series for the following reasons:

• I got more and more annoyed with the fact that all the main governments discussed are either monarchies or some sort of corporate oligarchy. In other words, in the distant future, democracy doesn't happen. I realize it is probably easier to write about a single ruler, but it just doesn't feel right.

• Interbreeding of the species is annoying too. Unless at some point later in the series explains how this comes about, it just is too far fetched.

• Everything hinge too much off of too many wildly improbable coincidences, like the leader of the Hansa just happened to walk down to the launch deck to discover a rogue robot. Or the figurehead King accidentally uncovering an assassination plot. Just too many

And those above reasons, combined with my general apathy towards sci-fi, means I'm probably not going back. There's too many other books out there. If you like some good, "hard" sci-fi, a real sprawling space opera, with death, hardware, romance and some intrigue, you might give it a try.