We hadn’t seen a big, epic historical drama for a while, and this is one from the Eighties that we never watched. My fondness for war films is well-documented, too, so we gave EMPIRE OF THE SUN a try and I’m glad we did.
Based on an autobiographical novel by British SF author J.G. Ballard, the story centers around his childhood in Shanghai during World War II. The character, called James Graham in the film, is about twelve years old when the war begins and the Japanese attack and occupy Shanghai. Separated from his parents, young Jim is forced to survive in the devastated city on his own for a while until he falls in with some Americans who are somewhat shady characters. Eventually they’re all captured by the Japanese and forced to live in an internment camp for British and American prisoners until the end of the war.
Boiled down, that’s the plot of the movie, but it’s rich with characters and incidents that fill up its two-and-a-half-hour running time. There’s plenty of spectacle, as you’d expect in a film directed by Steven Spielberg, and yes, while some of it is a little hokey and overblown, it’s also pretty effective. When he tackles big historical dramas like this, Spielberg reminds me a little of David Lean (a director whose films I need to revisit someday soon).
A young Christian Bale plays Jim and does a good job. John Malkovich, eccentric as always, is the American who befriends him and saves his life more than once. The supporting cast is uniformly good, including one young Japanese actor who does a great job as a would-be pilot. (The internment camp is right next to a Japanese airfield, probably to discourage Allied attacks on the field, a strategy that doesn’t always work.)
EMPIRE OF THE SUN is an old-fashioned yarn that I enjoyed a lot. If you like historical dramas and/or war movies and haven’t ever seen it, you ought to check it out.
Word is getting around that Frank Frazetta passed away earlier today from a stroke. A lot of people will be posting about him, I'm sure, including some who knew him. I didn't, but over the years I've bought a lot of books with covers by him, including this one, which had quite an impact on my life because it introduced me to the work of Robert E. Howard. It was the Frazetta cover that caught my eye first, though, that day in Barber's Bookstore in downtown Fort Worth. A great artist who will be missed.
THE KILLING OF MINDI QUINTANA is attorney Jeffrey A. Cohen’s first novel, and not surprisingly, it’s a legal thriller – sort of. But it’s also a psychological thriller and a commentary on society and the justice system.
For the first half of the book, the focus is on Freddy Builder, the manager of the china department in a downtown Philadelphia department store. Freddy is an aspiring writer, and when he reconnects with Mindi Quintana, a woman he dated briefly in college who is now an editor for a literary magazine, Freddy is convinced that it’s fate. Not only is he going to be published and become famous for his writing, but he’s also going to make Mindi fall in love with him.
Well, of course things don’t work out that way, and since the title itself is a spoiler, it comes as no surprise when Freddy winds up murdering Mindi, although Cohen generates some decent suspense by making the reader wonder when and how the murder is going to take place.
Once it does, the legal thriller part of the book kicks in. Freddy is arrested quickly for the crime and prosecuted by a politically ambitious young assistant district attorney. The public defender assigned to Freddy’s case becomes the central character in this portion of the novel, as he struggles not only with the legal part of the case but also its ethical ramifications, because Freddy, while in jail awaiting trial, starts to write about what happened and becomes what he always wanted to be: a famous author. All he had to do was kill for it.
As a first-time author, Cohen sometimes has a little trouble keeping his plot moving along at the sort of pace I enjoy, and some of the book is so bizarre and almost surreal, especially the department store scenes, that they didn’t really work for me. However, he’s created some interesting characters and come up with enough plot twists and the occasional really good line that I was happy to keep reading. And the final resolution of the case is pretty satisfying, too. THE KILLING OF MINDI QUINTANA is a solid debut novel that promises even better things to come from Jeffrey A. Cohen.
I had vaguely heard of this but wasn’t really sure what it was. My daughter had a DVD of it, though, so we gave it a try and I’m glad we did. DR. HORRIBLE’S SING-ALONG BLOG originally appeared as a series of webcasts and has some top-flight talent behind it, including writer/director Joss Whedon. It’s a musical spoof of superheroes and supervillains, with an excellent cast headed by Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Simon Helberg. The songs are catchy, the dialogue is funny, and the ending is surprisingly poignant. This is another movie with a niche audience. You’ll probably either think it’s great, like I did, or you’ll be utterly bored. But it’s short (less than an hour), so you won’t have to spend much time finding out. Recommended.
Frank Loose recommended this book to me, and I’m glad he did. I’d never heard of it and probably wouldn’t have if he hadn’t read it first and liked it. As far as I know, it’s the author’s only crime novel, although he wrote a few other novels about the advertising business. Jack Dillon was a successful ad executive, responsible for, among others, the series of TV commercials for Polaroid that featured James Garner and Mariette Hartley. Those of you of a certain age are bound to remember those commercials, since Garner was so affable and charming and Hartley was, well, so beautiful. Still is, for that matter.
But to get back to A GREAT DAY FOR DYING. Don’t pay any attention to that Hemingway comparison on the cover. The only similarity I see is that the protagonist of this novel, Jimmy O’Niel, reminded me a little of Harry Morgan from TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. Jimmy is a friend and former associate of mobster Red Christian, but he’s trying to live a respectable life and start a charter boat business in Puerto Rico. People don’t want to believe that he’s no longer involved in anything crooked, though, but the only shady thing Jimmy’s mixed up in is running guns to anti-Castro revolutionaries in Cuba.
Unfortunately for Jimmy, he gets drawn into one of his former boss’s schemes and winds up on the wrong side of the Syndicate. From there, things just get worse for Jimmy, up to and including several murders and a hurricane.
The clipped style of the prose and the realistic dialogue remind me more of Elmore Leonard, although Leonard started writing crime novels about the same time as this book came out, so I don’t think his work was any influence on Dillon. A GREAT DAY FOR DYING also reminds me a little of a James Patterson novel, because the chapters are short and there’s a mixture of first person chapters from Jimmy’s point of view and third person chapters featuring other characters. That’s a technique I normally don’t care for, but Dillon makes it work fairly well. I don’t know if he was the first to do it, probably not, but this novel surely has to be one of the early examples of it. The pace is fast, even though there’s really not a lot of action except for an occasional short burst, and there are a lot of good lines.
A GREAT DAY FOR DYING is a fine book, worth seeking out, and it’s certainly good enough to make it a shame Jack Dillon didn’t write any other crime novels. Recommended.
Some of you are aware that I’ve been having some minor medical problems for the past few days. To be precise, every time I eat something, the side of my face and my neck swell up and hurt. I thought I was having an allergic reaction to something I was eating, but when it continued to happen no matter what I ate, that put me on the trail of a different diagnosis. (Hey, we’re all doctors now, since the invention of the Internet, right?)
A visit to a real doctor this morning confirmed what I had already figured out. I have an obstructed right parotid duct, which in turn has led to a minor infection of the duct and the adjacent parotid gland. This is the big salivary gland that curves around in front of and below the ear. So when I eat, the gland produces saliva as it’s supposed to, but there’s no place for it to go because the duct leading out of it is blocked somewhere, probably by a stone, leading to the swelling and hurting.
Now, the treatment of choice for a blocked salivary duct is not what you might think it would be. I’m supposed to suck lemons or eat sour candy (I’m opting for the candy) and drink lots of water. This will cause the gland to produce even more saliva and either dissolve the stone or force it on out of the duct. Should take a week or so. In the meantime, I’ll also be on antibiotics to knock out the infection. If that doesn’t do the trick, I’ll have to go to an ear, nose, and throat guy and have him locate and remove the stone. The doctor really seemed to think the situation would resolve itself and wouldn’t come to that, though. I’m hoping that’s right. Eating candy and drinking water sounds good to me.
So if I’m even more full of, ah, spit than usual for the next week, now you know the reason why.
This is another movie I’d never heard of. The description of it on Netflix makes it sound like a comedy, a parody of so many Fifties science fiction movies. The prologue reinforces that idea, setting up a framing sequence about how this is actually a movie made in 1957 that was thought to have been lost for the past fifty years. A little silliness ensues, and then the movie itself starts.
And as it plays out, you come to realize that although it has considerable humor in it, ALIEN TRESPASS isn’t a parody at all. Instead, it’s an affectionate, pitch-perfect homage to those low-budget sci-fi epics from the Fifties, complete with overacting, crude special effects, and a guy in a rubber suit playing a monster. If you watched those movies in the theaters or on TV growing up, you’ll recognize all the elements: the small town in the desert, the UFO crash-landing in the hills, the teenagers who are the first ones to see the monster, the skeptical cops, the local scientist (doesn’t every town have one?) who figures out what’s going on.
Now here’s the strange part: even though you know this movie was made a couple of years ago, it’s hard not to get drawn into it and start taking it seriously, or at least as seriously as you’d take the same sort of movie if it had actually been made in 1957. It does that good a job of capturing the era. There are a few tiny details wrong, but blink and you’ll miss them, and they don’t really have any bearing on the plot.
The biggest names in the cast are Eric McCormack from WILL & GRACE and Robert Patrick from THE UNIT and a ton of other stuff. Everyone does a good job, though, and they all seem to be having a wonderful time.
ALIEN TRESPASS strikes me as a movie with an extremely narrow target audience. If you’re a viewer of a certain age and a certain temperament, there’s a good chance you’ll love it and find yourself grinning all the way through it. I did. I think it’s a wonderful film. But if you fall outside that range, you’ll probably start watching this and go “Huh? What is this?” So consider yourself warned when I recommend this one highly.
This may sound odd, but bear with me. I'm starting to wonder if the brain can overload on fiction. Now, I've been a huge reader for fifty years and the vast majority of what I've read has been fiction. But I've noticed that the more I write, the more difficult it is for me to find books I want to read. This has been going on for several years now and has gotten worse recently. And even when there are plenty of books I want to read, need to read, I do my pages during the day and then find myself watching TV, playing games on the computer, reading blogs . . . almost anything except opening a book and immersing myself in plots and characters. Can the human brain only process so much of that stuff and no more? I can't help but wonder. I may have to start reading more non-fiction.
I’m not what you’d call a Sherlock Holmes purist, although I’ve read all of Conan Doyle’s novels about the character and most of the short stories. And I tend to like Robert Downey Jr. But when I heard that Downey was going to play Holmes, my first reaction was a dubious “I dunno about that.” The more I heard about the movie, the more skeptical I was.
Now that I’ve actually seen it, though, I have to admit that Downey’s eccentric portrayal won me over. No, he doesn’t match any physical image I ever had of Holmes (who in my mind will always look like Basil Rathbone, which tells you what movies I grew up watching on TV), and yes, I think the scriptwriters took some considerable liberties with Doyle’s version of the character. They also introduce a new villain, Lord Blackwood instead of Professor Moriarty, and the movie plays more like a Victorian-era James Bond adventure than a story of crime and detection. But despite all the action scenes and the occasional silliness, there’s quite a bit of detective work going on, too, as Holmes makes clear in several summations of the evidence late in the film.
I also liked Jude Law as Dr. Watson and thought the character was actually pretty close to Doyle’s version, a man of action who’s not as brilliant as Holmes but not exactly a dim bulb, either. Rachel McAdams’ performance as Irene Adler was panned by most people, including those who liked the movie overall, but I thought she was okay in the role, and Mark Strong made a good villain as well.
This is obviously the first movie in a series, so the set-up for the sequel is pretty blatant at the end. I enjoyed SHERLOCK HOLMES quite a bit and will certainly watch the next one. If you haven’t seen this one yet, I’d recommend giving it a try. You might hate it, but I found it very entertaining.
We hadn’t seen a big, epic historical drama for a while, and this is one from the Eighties that we never watched. My fondness for war films is well-documented, too, so we gave EMPIRE OF THE SUN a try and I’m glad we did.
