Hell or High Water

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Ben Foster & Chris Pine in Hell or High Water

Ben Foster & Chris Pine in Hell or High Water

This modern outlaw Western directed by David Mackenzie (trailer) is receiving high praise from critics. Like the faceless cattle barons and railroad tycoons memorialized in 1950s celluloid, today it’s the bankers who are handy villains bent on destroying the little guy. That’s true even if the modern cowboy rides a drilling rig.

Brothers Tanner and Toby Howard (Ben Foster and Chris Pine, respectively) team up to rob branches of the Texas Midland Bank, an institution that has drained the value from their late mother’s ranch and now (since corporations are officially people, I can anthropormorphize) sits rubbing its hands, waiting to foreclose. That would be a double catastrophe, because oil has been found on the land, and Toby is desperate to hang onto it so he can pass this valuable parcel to his kids. But he lacks the cash to save it. Thus, the robber scheme is hatched.

Jeff Bridges & Gil Birmingham, Hell or High Water

Jeff Bridges & Gil Birmingham, Hell or High Water

On the hunt for the robbers are two Texas Rangers—Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) and Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham). Hamilton is just weeks from retirement, and figures out the broad outlines of the plot. He just can’t quite put the pieces together. He rides his American/Indian/Mexican partner mercilessly, and you understand Parker’s stoicism in the face of these insults is part of the joke. He gets his own barbs in too. Early on, he asks Hamilton: “Are you going to do anything about these robberies, or just sit there and let Alzheimer’s take its course?”

Watching Hamilton and Parker is fun; watching the brothers is fun. They are real characters and they have real relationships here. For me, a big part of the fun is not knowing exactly what to expect, because the movie falls both within and outside the usual formulas. As Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer Stephen Rea says, it’s “at once a tale of desperation in hard times and a keenly observed character study—or studies.” I’d give it 7 stars out of 10.

I had a little flutter when the lawmen referred to Lubbock (home of my grandparents) and Young County (my great-grandparents). The filming, however, was in New Mexico. Not the same at all.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 98%, audiences 90%.

Mad-Town & Milwaukee

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UWisc marching band

photo: Vicki Weisfeld

A recent midwest trip took us to spots in Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, you might want to add to your touring agenda.

Madison

In town for a University of Wisconsin football game, we put on our red shirts and walked to Camp Randall stadium on a gorgeous fall day. There’s nothing like the Big Ten football game for over-the-top pageantry. The 300-member Wisconsin marching band is justifiably famous for both musicality and precision maneuvers, plus cheerleaders, pep squad, Bucky Badger, smoke cannon, and boistrosity.

When the opposing team took the field, taking note of the deafening roar from a sea of red, I thought they might just turn around and go home. The Wisconsin fans may have wished they had that day, because though the spectacle was great, the UW football was only so-so (video highlights). In the end, though, Badgers ruled!

The Wisconsin Veterans Museum (which currently has a special exhibit of World War I posters) provides a manageably sized, well designed tour of Wisconsin residents’ role in the military, from the Civil War to the present day. (30 West Mifflin Street on the Square).

Madison, state capitol

Wisconsin state capitol dome – photo: Vicki Weisfeld

The State Capitol is well worth a visit. We didn’t take one of the guided tours, and just walking around the building offered plenty to see. Beautiful murals throughout the Supreme Court and legislative chambers (missed it, if there’s a brochure explaining these). The rotunda I’m told that, of all the state capitols, is most like that in Washington, D.C. Building and grounds are in impeccable, restored condition.

 

Hungry? Great places to eat:

  • with kids: Ella’s Deli, 2902 East Washington Avenue
  • if you love Italian: Naples 15, 15 North Butler Street
  • for a casual, tavern atmosphere: Old Fashioned, Pinckney Street on the Square

Milwaukee

To recreated our experience in Milwaukee, I’d have to provide the contact information for a lot of friends and family members! Failing that, something all visitors might enjoy—either in Milwaukee or in a theater near you—is the IMAX National Parks Adventure, narrated by Robert Redford (trailer). This will be one of the last films to be fully shot on 70mm celluloid, rather than digitally.

It’s a terrific, dizziness-inspiring look at our nation’s jewels—from Hawaiˋi to Acadia, from the Everglades to Alaska, from hot, hot, hot to Lake Superior ice caves. And I’m not ever going to do that bicycle thing.

Reading on the Road

Nick Petrie’s The Drifter – a former Marine lieutenant visits Milwaukee after the suicide of one of his men and finds unexpected danger, starting with the vicious dog hiding under the widow’s porch.

Do I Need Your Love, Babe?

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eight-days-a-week, Beatles, Ron HowardThe new Ron Howard hit documentary about the Beatles, Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years (trailer), is a love letter to the musical group and the exuberance of youth. Using sometimes grainy footage of early performances up through the final live performance at Candlestick Park (and the final-final live performance for a few people, including unsuspecting passers-by, from the roof of their recording studio), the Beatles as a phenomenon still amaze. They not only had a brutal tour schedule in this period, 1962-1966, they transformed the music industry and changed the culture through their truly overwhelming and unprecedented worldwide popularity.

That popularity led to nearly riotous conditions for their concerts and forced promoters into using stadium venues for the first time. They just couldn’t risk the hordes of disappointed fans in a conventional, smaller-capacity concert hall. It also forced the band away from stage performances, where they made their money, and into the studio where they could actually hear themselves think. Right. They were musicians.

For a long time and during this intense period, they were also very good friends and colleagues. The members were strengthened by their closeness, always having each other to rely on. In an archived interview, George says something like, “I always felt sorry for Elvis. He didn’t have that. It was just him.” If a decision had to be made, they all made it, including the decision not to play in segregated venues in the United States, a provision included in their contracts.

It was 52 years ago that the Beatles’ first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, an event watched by nearly 40 percent of Americans. They came on the scene during a tumultuous time here, amidst civil rights and Vietnam War protests, and only a few months after the assassination of President Kennedy. And while the boys appear sweet and lively in these old clips, there’s that clap of nostalgic pain, too—knowing what happened later and knowing what was lost, including youth itself.

They were So Young when crushing fame and amazing music happened to, around, and within them. That they managed themselves with such grace is astonishing. Ron Howard and producer Giles Martin (son of Beatles’ recording producer George Martin) have done a great job in creating a film to introduce a new generation of fans to the group. Recent interviews with Paul (looks old!) and Ringo (looks great!) bring out new information and insights, and a worldwide call for footage from people who took their film cameras to the concerts brought lots of new visuals with a startling sense of unstaged immediacy.

And there’s lots of head-filling, memory-sparking music too.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 95%; audiences 86%. In theaters and streaming on Hulu.“Yeah, yeah, yeah!”

The Future of Facial Recognition: Man vs. Machine?

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cctv2

photo: Andy Roberts, creative commons license

DCI Mick Neville of London’s Metropolitan Police Service runs a unit of people with superior facial-recognition capacity. He believes that image recognition will turn out to be the third revolution in forensic science, after fingerprint and DNA analyses. (This is part 2 of a 2-part story. Read part 1 here.)

Currently, the Met solves about 2000 cases a year based on fingerprints, another 2000 using DNA analysis, and 2500 with imagery recognition, at a tenth the cost of the other two techniques, he says. Writers of crime fiction have a lot to work with here.

Can’t Computers Do It?

Can computers eventually take over this job? People in the super-recognizer community say no. Part of the reason is the sub-par environments in which many closed circuit television (CCTV) images are captured. Says Patrick Radden Keefe in The New Yorker, “After the 2011 London riots, the Met gathered two hundred thousand hours of CCTV footage. Computer facial-recognition systems identified one rioter.” Gary Collins, one of the Met’s super-recognizers, identified 190.

Of course, computers are becoming more skilled all the time. Facebook’s recognition program, is touted as one of the best. Unlike CCTV, it mostly has well-lit, good-quality images to work with. It has a further advantage because it can narrow the universe of possible matches to the friends, family, and friends-of-friends of specific users. Yet even FB’s algorithm consistently identifies the wife of a friend of mine as me. When I look at her picture, I don’t see it, but Facebook does.

Computers definitely have some role, though, and the Met combines machine and human expertise. It uses a specially created computer program to narrow the number of images by broad demographics and type of crime, for instance, then lets the human super-recognizers make the match.

And, if facial recognition software is prone to error, Keefe says, logo-recognition algorithms work well. “It turns out that many criminals not only commit the same crimes again and again; they do so wearing the same outfits,” he says. That shirt with the six-inch polo player stitched across the left chest? Dead giveaway.

Where Next?

As super-recognizer approaches migrate to the United States (as they have already to St. Petersburg, Florida), authorities will need safeguards against false identifications. In the U.K., a case is never made against someone based solely on facial recognition evidence.

No one wants a repeat of the situation that occurred after the Boston Marathon bombing when the F.B.I. crowd-sourced the identification process, and innocent people were fingered. In these hysterical times, that could be deadly for false suspects (another plot wrinkle for us crime-writers). In the recent New York City/New Jersey bombings, a fingerprint had given them a specific name.

Hiring people for sensitive security positions at airports and nuclear power plants perhaps shouldn’t rely on the assumption that everyone is more or less the same in facial recognition skill, just as we don’t assume everyone is just the same in other job-skill domains. We test for those.

Because millions of Americans have little or no ability to recognize faces (see earlier post), researcher Richard Russell believes “it is statistically inevitable that some passport officers at American airports are face blind—and that quite a number are significantly impaired.” Why not make sure people in such sensitive positions are especially suited for these sensitive jobs?

Further Reading

Have a scientific bent? Here’s the research paper that started it all: “Super-recognizers: People with extraordinary face recognition ability,” by Richard Russell, Brad Duchaine, and Ken Nakayama, published in 2009 in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

***The Art of Forgery

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paint-brushes

photo: Lynn Friedman, creative commons license

By Noah Charney – In this richly illustrated book, author Charney explores many of the most notorious cases of art forgery—a deception that dates to ancient Rome—and the often colorful characters bent on deception. Like all crimes, this one depends on opportunity and motive.

While Old Masters may be a forger’s more likely and lucrative target, what about modern abstract artists? Can you tell the fakes? Take this clever quiz!

Opportunity

Until very recently, the perceived value of artworks and religious objects was solely expert-driven, based on connoisseurship. If a recognized expert asserted that a painting was a heretofore undiscovered Rembrandt, for all intents and purposes (especially sales value), it was.

Today, science provides museums and private collectors with increasing protection. Chemical, radiographic, and other advanced techniques can analyze paper, canvas, pigments, wood, and other intrinsic attributes of a work. A common giveaway is the use of paints that weren’t available at the time the artwork was supposedly created. But science provides protection only if would-be buyers insist tests be performed before they write out their check.

Over the years, forgers have responded by becoming more skilled in reproducing the materials and techniques of the past, so that often their work can pass all but the most detailed examination. Detailed digital replicas pose a new hazard to unwary purchasers.

Those engaged in an art forgery racket also excel in producing false documentation and paper trails. These establish the spurious lineage and history of ownership (called provenance) of a work. Forgers rarely simply copy an existing work—it’s too easily identified as already hanging in a museum or private collection. Instead, they precisely mimic an artist’s style and favored subject matter. This new work is then passed off as a “lost” or previously unknown masterwork, with all the paperwork to prove it.

Motivation

Why do they do it, when the possibility of detection is ever-present? Charney says some simply like the challenge of pitting their skill against that of past masters. A German newspaper said forger Wolfgang Beltracchi “painted the best Campendonk that ever was.” Indeed, some forgers have been artistic geniuses, but underappreciated and undervalued in their own time. For that reason, revenge against an indifferent art establishment contributes to motive. Art forgery is not treated as a particularly serious crime and rarely results in lengthy jail terms (usually for fraud). Many former forgers have gained substantial fame after their misdeeds were exposed.

More rarely, copies of paintings are made and substituted for the real thing, delaying detection of the theft of the originals. At Prague’s Sternberk Palace, thieves skipped the hard part and substituted a poster for the original they stole; in Poland, more ambitious thieves replaced the painting they stole with a painted-over poster bought at the museum gift shop. It took days for anyone to notice.

Unscrupulous dealers—con artists, basically—persuade some artists to create works in a particular style. The excitement and pride collectors feel when they “discover” a lost artwork typically makes the seller’s job easier.

Charney describes numerous examples of fraudulent art from over the centuries, and his comparison photos add much to the book’s enjoyment. (Forgery of religious relics is a cottage industry in Israel and the Middle East, detailed in Nina Burleigh’s excellent Unholy Business, touched on briefly in Charney’s book.)

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur “The world wishes to be deceived,” the book’s cover says, “so let it be deceived.”

“Super-Recognizers”: A Crime-Fighting Super-Power

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cctv-cameras

photo: Kevan, creative commons license

The ability to recognize faces is a neurological trait that some people are simply better at than others. You can test yourself here. People at the lowest end of the spectrum lack this perceptual ability altogether. In these extreme cases, mothers cannot recognize their own children; colleagues don’t recognize someone they’ve worked with for years. At this level, the condition is called prosopagnosia, “face-blindness,” and some degree of difficulty recognizing faces may affect about 14 million Americans.

For many years, interest in this trait focused on people who have problems recognizing faces. When recent scientific advances indicated the trait exists on a continuum, this opened interest in people who have a superior ability to recognize faces. Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville of London’s Metropolitan Police Service (the Met) thought he had a job for them: identifying criminals.

London is the perfect place to test Neville’s idea, according to a fascinating article by Patrick Radden Keefe in The New Yorker. London has the densest concentration of closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras in the world—more than a million of them, mostly in the hands of homeowners and businesses. Keefe quotes former London Mayor Boris Johnson as saying, “When you walk down the streets of London, you are a movie star.”

Crime fiction writers will have a field day with this. The “super-recognizers” seem ideally suited for solving cold cases and identifying suspects in real time. On the other side of the courtroom, smart defense attorneys—I’m thinking Mickey Haller here—might chip away at the facial-recognition ability of “eye-witnesses.”

In the 1990s, installation of cameras was promoted throughout London as a crime prevention measure, but it turned out to be a weak deterrent. There were too many images, they were too hard to analyze, and though the camera recorded lots of crimes, nothing came of this evidence, because the images couldn’t be matched to specific people. Last weekend, NewYork/NewJersey bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami was captured on camera at both Manhattan bomb sites, but it was the fingerprint left at the scene that led to his identification and the match with the man seen on camera.

Early on, Neville headed a unit that analyzed this CCTV footage, trying to make identifications. It was slow work. But when he learned about super-recognizers, he saw the potential benefit of recruiting people who might be extra-skilled at the process.

Now a small, dedicated unit within the Met is assembling an image database, which has more than 100,000 pictures of unidentified suspects in crimes recorded by CCTV. Unit experts compare these images with mug shots of known criminals. They collect images of the same individual at different crime scenes; if the person in one of the images is finally identified, multiple crimes are solved. And, knowing when and where multiple images of the same person were captured gives clues to a criminal’s behavior patterns.

This is, says Scientific American, a very special super-power.

Friday: The Future of Facial Recognition: Man vs. Machine?

Red Velvet – Weekend Theater Treat!

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Red Velvet cast

Lindsay Smiling & Sofia Jean Gomez

Hop on New Jersey Transit’s Morristown line or jump into your car and speed out to Madison to see Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s production of Red Velvet, on stage through September 25. It’s a knockout! Directed here by STNJ Artistic Director Bonnie J. Monte, Red Velvet was the breakout success for London playwright Lolita Chakrabarti in 2012, was nominated for numerous awards, and garnered two “Best New Playwright” awards for the author.

Based on a true story, Red Velvet describes the career of Ira Aldridge (played by Lindsay Smiling), an African-American actor who relocated to Europe in search of artistic and personal freedom. In 1833, he was invited to play the title role in Othello at London’s Theatre Royal Covent Garden. While audiences loved him, the critics were merciless, and he never played London again.

Actor Charles Kean (David Andrew Macdonald) refuses to perform with Aldridge and derides his more natural, emotionally true, and modern acting style. Charles’s fiancée, Ellen Tree (Victoria Mack), understands and immediately adopts Aldridge’s approach. The play’s first act contains highly entertaining scenes in which the Aldridge style is contrasted with the affected, melodramatic style then in vogue, concluding with a key bit from Othello that demonstrates his technique’s tremendous power.

In the second act, the devastating reviews are in, and the conflict between Aldridge and his friend Pierre (David Foubert), who manages the company, comes to a dramatic, wrenching climax. Aldridge won’t temper his performance and the critics (and theatre backers) won’t countenance it. Chakrabarti has said the play is about personal fulfillment in the theater (never guaranteed), disillusionment, friendship, loyalty, and betrayal. It is, and all within an invigorating package.

The Covent Garden debacle takes place against the backdrop of England’s raging abolition debate. Red Velvet’s younger characters think slavery abhorrent; the older ones that cheap labor is the foundation of British prosperity. Further, though Aldridge and the younger actors believe “all theater is essentially political,” the others believe casting a black actor as Othello is going too far. Chakrabarti does not turn the play into a polemic, but provides useful context.

In real life, after the Covent Garden debacle, Aldridge became a much- admired tragedian and toured Europe extensively. Thus, Red Velvet begins and ends in a theater dressing-room in Łódź, Poland, in 1867, as a 60-year-old Aldridge prepares to play King Lear—in whiteface. Invading his privacy, a young Polish journalist (Sofia Jean Gomez) is determined to interview him; she makes the same plea for acceptance he might have made in earlier times. At one point, he caresses the red backdrop, musing that the velvet is like a “deep promise of what is to come.”

The cast members noted above were uniformly strong and received good support from Garrett Lawson, John Little, Shannon Harris, and Savannah DesOrmeaux.

STNJ provides an excellent “Know the Show Guide.” For tickets, call the box office at 973-408-5600 or visit http://www.shakespearenj.org.

***Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine – August 2016

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chalk outline, body

(image: pixabay, creative commons license)

Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine continues its 75th year celebration with another collection of classic and new stories. Collectively, they demonstrate many of the forms this genre can take. Whether you prefer cozies or police procedurals or amateur detectives or hardboiled, you will find them in EQMM’s pages. From the August issue, which celebrates past EQMM editors, here are four of my favorites:

• In “The Ten-Cent Murder,” the first EQMM editor, Frederic Dannay, teams up with his real-life friend Dashiell Hammett to solve a crime in 1950s Manhattan. Joseph Goodrich, whose play Panic won the 2008 Best Play award from the Mystery Writers of America, adopted a period tone for this amateur sleuth outing.
• I always enjoy Dave Zeltserman’s stories and their sly humor. This month Zeltserman deviates from his Julius Katz private-eye series to present a classic noir tale. In “The Caretaker of Lorne Green,” a man on the run from the mob poses as a home health aide and plans to rob his elderly, wheelchair-bound client, but which of them is more ruthless?
• Jonathan Moore’s compelling police procedural, “A Swimmer from the Dolphin Club,” begins with the discovery of a woman’s backpack, shoes, and neatly folded clothes underneath San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. Suicide? Murder? Disappearance? Will the truth come too late? Moore’s most recent book is 2016’s The Poison Artist, which Stephen King called “an electrifying read . . . I haven’t read anything so terrifying since Red Dragon.” High praise from the master.
• In Ruth Graviros’s psychological tale “Ted Bundy’s Father,” you are gradually overtaken by the same horror that grips the late middle-aged protagonist, Warner Chadason. Chadason has “enjoyed an unthreatened life,” as the author puts it early on, a life about to explode disastrously. His name reveals all. Graviros was a pseudonym used by EQMM’s second editor, Eleanor Sullivan.

EQMM regularly includes reviews of new books, as well as a monthly rundown of mystery/crime blogs and websites worth following up on, as well as additional features, especially in this 75th year. You can subscribe on the website or through Amazon. Or obtain the August issue here:

Miranda and the Police Interview

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No Miranda for you!? photo: Jonas Bengtsson, creative commons license

When Ernesto Miranda was arrested by the Phoenix Police Department in 1963, accused of kidnapping and rape, it’s a cinch that of all the things he thought might happen to him, the likelihood his name would become a verb was probably nowhere on the list.

In crime fiction, cops “Mirandize” suspects all the time. Too often, perhaps. Leslie Budewitz, a lawyer and president of Sisters in Crime, says that giving every character a Miranda warning is “one of the 12 common mistake fiction writers make about the law.”

Writers of crime novels and screenplays often don’t get their Miranda facts straight. The Miranda warning is based on the Fifth Amendments self-incrimination clause and the Sixth Amendment’s right to an attorney, in words familiar to any consumer of U.S. popular culture:

  • You have the right to remain silent;
  • Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law;
  • You have the right to consult with a lawyer and have that lawyer present during the interrogation;
  • If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be appointed to represent you

As John Schembra points out in the comments below, some states have slight variations on the core Miranda rights, cited above, particularly as they apply to juveniles. Some of those interstate differences are described in this Wikipedia article (and subject to change).

In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court decided (in Berghuis v. Thompkins) a controversial case involving the right to remain silent, which some scholars believe weakened Miranda protections.

At last month’s Writers’ Police Academy in Green Bay, Wisconsin, police training officer Mike Knetzger agrees that fiction provides Miranda warnings far more often than actually appropriate or used in practice. He outlined the three essential elements that must be present for a Miranda warning to be necessary.

Crime + Custody + Questioning

The occurrence of an actual crime seems an obvious prerequisite, but in many situations, police may simply want to talk to a person—for background or as a witness, not yet a suspect. Violations and infractions (civil offenses) are not “crimes.” Examples are traffic tickets and the one Knetzger gave—just possibly from on-the-job experience—running out of the Green Bay Packers’ Lambeau Field stark naked.

Individuals must be “in custody.” Even if they are at the police station, if they are free to leave, they are not in custody and, therefore, receive no warning. However, if they make “spontaneous statements” there—“He trashed my cooking one time too many and I hit him over the head with the frying pan”—those statements can be used in court.

The questioning of the individual must be intended to elicit incriminating evidence, not just make general inquiries. After a crime is committed, the police may ask a great many people about the events and the people involved. None of these are necessarily suspects—yet.

Next time you see, read—or write—that a fictional character receives a Miranda warning, ask yourself whether all three of the above conditions are met.

Indignation

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indignation, Logan Lerman

Tracy Letts & Logan Lerman

September heralds a return to more serious films, and this one, based on Philip Roth’s 2008 novel, eases you back in (trailer). It’s the directorial debut of James Schamus, who also wrote the script, and he does a fine job keeping the story moving.

Young Marcus Messner is leaving his staunchly Jewish home in Newark, New Jersey, to attend the Winesburg (Ohio) College. “How will you keep kosher?” a friend’s mother asks, astonished. In 1951, going to college was one way to keep out of the Korean War. His mother is sad her only child is leaving home, but it’s his father who has the most trouble letting him go. He’s losing both a son and his chief assistant and daily companion at the butcher shop.

Marcus is a scholarship student at the conservative college and focuses on his studies and working in the library, when he meets and falls for the delectable and emotionally fragile Olivia Hutton, who introduces him to certain extracurricular activities. Her background and assumptions about life are so different from his, he doesn’t know what to make of her.

For various reasons, mostly mandatory chapel attendance, Marcus appears on a collision course with the dean of students. The dean gives him a grilling in what The Hollywood Reporter calls “a stunner of a centerpiece scene,” adding, “It is characteristic of a film that is simultaneously erudite and emotional, literary and alive, that so much talk could be so enthralling.” It’s uncomfortable, too, as they talk past each other and stake out irreconcilable positions. Marcus defends his views with stubborn spirit, but you know where the power lies and wish he understood the virtues of diplomacy. “You have to go around these people,” a fraternity brother tries to explain.

What makes the film so powerful are the three main actors—Logan Lerman as Marcus, Sarah Gadon as Olivia, and Tracy Letts as Dean Caudwell. Linda Emond and Dan Burstein play Marcus’s hovering parents.

The period details are nice, particularly the costumes and lighting. I saw the trailer for this movie several times, and the film unfolds somewhat differently than it suggests.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 81%; audiences 89%.