Elvis & Nixon

Posted on by

Elvis & NixonIf you remember the Nixon presidency at all—the odd, stiff gestures, the way the man hunkered down like a turtle trying to duck back into its shell, his paranoia and cluelessness, and his straight-arrow staff (all criminals in the making)—you will appreciate how much this odd movie (trailer) nailed the early 1970s!

My expectations weren’t high, and perhaps that’s the key, because it surprises you at every turn, even though the premise is tissue-thin. It’s based, after all, on the fact that the photo of Nixon meeting Elvis in the White House on December 21, 1970,  is the most-requested photo in the National Archives. When you think of the treasures the Archives possesses, this is absurd on its face. A more incongruous encounter is hard to imagine, as Mark Olsen said in the Los Angeles Times, “one stiff in a businessman’s suit and the other relaxed in a velvet cape.”

What makes the film so strong are the performances. Kevin Spacey is Nixon in both body language and with his bitter, eye-popping rants. Michael Shannon is a less handsome yet ultimately powerfully sympathetic Presley. He visits the President to offer his help. He’s set on obtaining a badge as an At-Large Federal Agent so he can help combat the drugs and youth unrest he sees as destroying the country. In this goal he finds an ally in the President, or, as NPR reviewer Dave Edelstein said, “two lost souls connect.”Presley’s supreme confidence—arriving unannounced at the White House gate—makes an interesting counterpoint to Nixon’s lack of it.

The supporting cast—Colin (son of Tom) Hanks and Evan Peters as Nixon aides Egil Krogh and Dwight Chapin and Alex Pettyfer as Presley confidant Jerry Schilling—all play it so straight the two leads are free to let the absurdities of the situation have full rein:

Krogh (to Bob Haldeman): The King is here.
Haldeman: The President doesn’t have any appointments with royalty.
Krogh: No. THE King. Elvis.

No one knows what really went on in that session. Nixon hadn’t started taping his encounters yet, though staff were present for parts of it. The script by Joey Sagal, Hanala Sagal, and Cary Elwes is a plausible and imaginative recreation.Their humor can be subtle as well as laugh-out-loud (as I did, lots) and some great sight gags, too, like when Presley and Schilling run into an Elvis impersonator in the Los Angeles Airport. But it never goes for caricature or the cheap shot.

“Nobody really wants to see a big takedown of Elvis Presley,” director Liza Johnson said in the LA Times article linked above. “And nobody needs to see a big takedown of Richard Nixon because that happened already.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 76%; audiences, 77%.

***Sunset City

Posted on by
Houston, flock of birds

photo: Adam Baker, creative commons license

By Melissa Ginsburg — Lots of buzz about poet Melissa Ginsburg’s debut crime novel. In it, her home town of Houston becomes as much a character as the protagonist, Charlotte Ford, a young woman in her early 20s. Houston’s suffocating heat and dark corners, its breakneck freeways, its seedy bars and lush suburbs – a living paradigm of the income gap – are the kind of noir backdrop against which a multilayered story can play.

Narrated by Charlotte, the story begins in a terrific rainstorm when she encounters a man on the landing outside her apartment and unlocks her door in front of him – the first clue she’s missing a little something in the “ be a little careful” department.

Luckily for her, he’s a Houston police detective named Ash, but unluckily, he’s come to tell her that her oldest friend, the glamorous Danielle Reeves, has been bludgeoned to death. Charlotte and Danielle attended high school and took some drugs together, but Danielle drifted into heroin and didn’t get clean until she got caught. After four years in prison, her friendship with Charlotte had cooled, and she had taken up acting in porn videos.

Charlotte’s back story is handled mostly in a couple of awkward information dumps about her deceased mother, high school years, and growing up relatively poor. Danielle, by contrast, came from money. Her mother, Sally, from whom she is estranged, had a high-powered, high-paying job. What they had in common was that both of them were rather neglected–Charlotte because her mother was a chronic pain patient, and Danielle because of the demands of her work. No dads in the picture.

Work kept Sally so busy during Danielle’s childhood, she didn’t realize her brother was sexually abusing the girl–a plot choice that has become a cliché and, here, is not explored for its specific impact on Danielle. Now Sally wants to be in touch with Danielle and enlists Charlotte to do the outreach. That mission puts the two former best friends in touch again, just two days before Danielle’s murder. Did Charlotte’s visit begin a deadly chain of events?

She starts hanging out with Danielle’s new friends—fellow actress Audrey (another child sexual abuse victim) and video producer Brandon. To Charlotte these people seem exotic, but the first-person point of view limits readers’ access to their thoughts and feelings. Their motivations and experiences are always second-hand, filtered through Charlotte. I’d contrast this approach with John Schulian’s A Better Goodbye, which provides a fully rounded picture of people working in the sex trade.

Ginsburg attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Mississippi. In this novel, she mostly avoids literary flourishes, but occasionally her poetic side peeks through. For example, regarding the police station, Charlotte says, “Loud and ugly, the place banged against my eyes.”  Ginsburg does not shrink from discussing the seamier side of life and its difficulties, which is brave for a first novel, and in future perhaps her characters will be strong enough to carry that weight.

A longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover review website.

Words That Make People Grumpy

Posted on by
fingernails, blackboard

photo (cropped): redpangolins, creative commons license

Every reader—writers, too—have certain words that sound to them like fingernails on a blackboard. I have a thing against “hopefully,” though that’s a losing battle. I don’t like alright—the phrase is “all right already”—and I’m not a fan of the singular “they.” Most times making the antecedent plural fixes it:

NOT: The patient should fill out their own forms.
BUT: Patients should fill out their own forms.

That is to say, if you find “his/her” and “s/he” and their spawn hopelessly awkward, I agree.

Rebecca Gowers in The Guardian has compiled “An A-Z of horrible words,” and I’m happy to find both alright and hopefully in it. On my own mental list of horribles, I can usually identify which grammar zealot burdened me with carrying their torch. Some examples: “under way” is two words, not one; don’t use “over” when you mean “more than”; “presently” means “soon,” not “at present”; use “whether” not “if” when “whether” is meant. And so many, many more.

Gowers’s article isn’t just another listsicle. She explains her prejudices, how the words came to be, and provides amusing sidelights (that would be a “compound”). The entry for “euphemisms” is especially enlightening.

Under “finally,” I discovered I ran afoul of this one just yesterday, using it to mean “at last,” rather than “for the last time.” Oops. Fingernails and a screeching blackboard for some irritated reader. Fixed.

Take a peek at Gowers’s list and tell me what Really Important pet word peeves of yours she overlooked!

Good Crime News? The Amber Room

Posted on by
The Amber Room

The original Amber Room, photographed in 1917 by Andrei Andreyevich Zeest.

A Polish historian recently announced he believes he’s found The Amber Room (6-minute National Geographic video) hidden inside an abandoned Nazi Bunker. The Amber Room was a gift from Germany to Tsar Peter the Great, then stolen—or “repatriated,” as some would argue—in 1941 and subsequently lost in the waning days of WWII. Among the world’s most valuable lost works of art, if it could be found, it would be valued today at more than $500 million.

The Amber Room comprises panels of some 13,000 pounds of thin amber backed with gold leaf and mirrors and encrusted with carved amber and precious stones. It took more than a decade to create. The panels lined over 600 square feet of wall space in a room in Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo (the Tsar’s Village) near St. Petersburg. Many people considered Tsarskoye Selo the Russian equivalent of Versailles, and Tsar Nicholas II and his family lived there until forced into exile (and eventual execution) in August 1917 during the Russian Revolution.

Catharine Palace, St. Petersburg

Catherine Palace (photo: whereisemil, creative commons license)

On the eve of the Nazi invasions, Soviet officials tried to remove the precious amber panels, and when they were unsuccessful, attempted to mask them with nondescript wallpaper. The German military command occupied the palace during the War and immediately discovered the ruse. The Nazis rapidly disassembled the room (reportedly within 36 hours) and removed the panels to Königsberg, where they were put on display. In the final year of the war, Hitler ordered that looted art to be taken to a more secure location, but whether The Amber Room survived has been a matter of hope and conjecture for more than 70 years.

Many theories have been put forward regarding the fate of these panels, including that they were destroyed in wartime bombing, that they were hidden in the Königsberg castle’s basement. The palace was finally demolished under orders from Leonid Brezhnev in 1968, 23 years after Königsberg became the Soviet Union town of Kaliningrad. That act would make the panels, if they had survived in castle’s sub-regions, irretrievable. Time after time, individuals have claimed to know the Amber Room’s hidden location, but these claims have always been false.

Now Bartlomiej Plebanczyk, head curator at Poland’s Namerki Museum, has used ground-penetrating radar to find a previously undiscovered room within a large complex of undamaged bunkers and tunnels in the Masurian Lake District in northeastern Poland. The complex was extraordinarily well defended (with its own Panzer division) and considered a secure place for looted treasure. Now Plebanczyk awaits permission to drill into the bunker to insert a camera to check what is there.

After so many failed attempts to find the Amber Room, in 1979, the Soviets began an effort to recreate it based on photographs and drawings, and a touring group of workmen brought the story of room and its reconstruction to U.S. museum-goers (I saw this exhibit and the men working on the amber mosaics somewhere). The recreated room is now housed in Russia’s Catherine Palace.

You’ll recall that reclaiming looted art was a serious and ongoing endeavor after World War II, with the notable efforts of “The Monuments Men” (movie review) and continues up to today. Last year’s movie, The Woman in Gold, dramatized the heroic legal struggle to reclaim a single Gustav Klimt painting, now on permanent display at the Neue Gallery in Manhattan.

A Hologram for the King

Posted on by

Tom Hanks, Hologram for the KingNot every comedy is for everyone (at least I think this was supposed to be a comedy). Last week I saw The Big Lebowski (1998) at the local movie theater. Packed. People in Lebowski t-shirts, people who raised hands to show they’d seen the movie five, ten, twenty times, people anticipating the laugh lines. Eighteen years from now, nothing like that will happen with this film (trailer) from German director Tom Twyker.

Tom Hanks is American businessman Alan Clay, whose marriage is over and whose career as a salesman is on the skids. In what appears to be a last chance at success, he’s sent to Saudi Arabia to sell the king on a costly holographic teleconferencing system for a new city being built in the desert. He encounters bureaucratic delays, clandestine alcohol consumption, confounding cultural gaps, and unexpected romance.

Where I messed up was in thinking, “Oh, Tom Hanks. He’s always great.” Someone so talented just wouldn’t be in a mediocre film. Why would he? And, I thought, “Oh, Dave Eggers wrote the book it’s based on. Got lots of praise for it too.” For example, New York Times reviewer Pico Iyer called the book “an anguished investigation into how and where American self-confidence got lost and — in the central word another lonely expat uses for Alan— ‘defeated.’” And the Boston Globe: “True genius.”

Someplace along the way, the promise of the book and Hanks got lost, and a more disjointed and implausible narrative is hard to imagine. When we’re told that the crowds Hanks saw at a mosque were there because “that’s where the executions are,” it’s hard to believe that a Saudi woman would take the very great risk of being alone with him, an American infidel.

Hanks does get to drive a very sexy 2015 Audi R8, briefly. But even that isn’t worth the ticket price.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 62%; audiences 95%. (I can only assume they don’t have many viewer ratings yet. IMDb viewers give it 6.3 stars out of 10.)

Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person”

Posted on by
bookshare, Flannery O'Connor, peacock

Bookshare box outside Flannery O’Connor’s girlhood home with an adored peacock (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

Late last year author David Griffith wrote a timely essay in The Paris Review about Flannery O’Connor’s infrequently anthologized short story, “The Displaced Person.”* He was inspired to do so by the ongoing political debates over immigration. First published as a short story in 1955, the story was made into a tv movie with John Housman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Irene Worth in 1977.

O’Connor generally avoided stories that tried to make a particular point about social issues. Topical writing can sink unpleasantly into polemics or become outdated. Think about the reservations people now have about The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s play about the McCarthy era witch hunts. Griffith says O’Connor’s story “Everything that Rises Must Converge” is another exception. (It’s the unforgettable tale of the mother who gets on the bus wearing her distinctive hat.) It manages both to avoid lecturing the reader as well as remaining relevant, as the bigotry it lampoons has not disappeared and constantly shifts to new targets. As have suspicion and resentment of “the displaced.”

More important, says Griffith, “To be topical, (O’Connor) thought, was to risk arguing for social changes that couldn’t be brought about by mere idealism, but by the hard, messy, and sometimes violent work of transforming hearts.” We hear that in the current campaign as well. Idealistic, pie-in-the-sky proposals from politicians that have not a wisp of a chance to become anyone’s reality. When we think about the desperate parents of Guatemala, who were willing to part with their beloved children and send them impossibly far away to the United States to keep them safe (only to find they weren’t welcome here), the difficulty of transforming greedy hearts is abundantly clear.

Griffith, like other students of O’Connor’s works, would argue that in fact many of her characters are displaced persons—if not literally, he says, then figuratively: “morally rudderless, existentially lost, or both.” And their displacement comes from their inability to love their neighbor. One way Griffith describes displacement is being “without a community to care for you” and, I’d add, “to care about.” The loss of caring community certainly describes the situation facing migrants all over the world today. They did not ask for their home countries—their caring communities—to become disastrous, murderous places.

“The Displaced Person,” Griffith concludes,“carries a dark moral force without recourse to didacticism or sentimentality.” The character in this post-World War II story has been displaced through the intolerance and hatred spawned by the Third Reich. Yet O’Connor does not refer to the war itself, but instead focuses “on the long shadow cast by this kind of evil,” a shadow that at the time of her writing extended all the way to Milledgeville, Georgia, and that in 2016 is deepening across our beloved country.

*If you search for “The Displaced Person full text,” the Gordon State College link has it as a rather funky pdf.

The Night Manager

Posted on by

Tom Hiddleston, The Night ManagerHere at Tom Hiddleston Central this week, we’ve not only seen the Hank Williams biopic, I Saw the Light, but on Tuesday at 10 pm, AMC began its six-part series starring Hiddleston in John Le Carré’s, The Night Manager. The tv show is punctuated by Jaguar ads [DO watch!] starring a Hiddleston who looks awfully like a shoe-in for that rumored James Bond role. (But should he want it? Possibly not.)

Having seen episode 1 of The Night Manager, I eagerly look forward to more. The conceit is that Hiddleston’s character, Jonathan Pine, works as the night manager in upscale hotels—in the updated AMC version, in Cairo during the Arab spring, then in Switzerland—with ample motive to bring down a British arms merchant (Hugh Lorrie), “the worst man in the world,” who tends to stay in such posh places. A delightful surprise is Olivia Colman (she is police detective Ellie Miller in the UK mystery series Broadchurch) as head of an obscure London arms control agency.

Le Carré’s original, published 23 years ago, also began in Cairo in a much less turbulent era, though the double-dealing and “whom can you trust?” elements created excruciating tension in both the book (which I read ages ago) and now in the AMC version, which has a fresh new, LeCarré-approved ending. Says Judith Warner in the New York Times, the new version is “deeply appealing, and in substance and style, for this viewer at least, moved the book forward in a number of fortuitous ways.” For this viewer too. Loved it!

Related articles

Using Images in Your Online Media

Posted on by
Shu Qi, the Assassin, China

Shu Qi as The Assassin

Do we “judge a book by its cover”? Yeah, we do! In a blog post this week, author Kirsten Oliphant focused on the importance of visuals for attracting book purchasers, blog post readers, and social media shares. Posts and tweets with pix are almost twice as likely to be read, regardless of topic, as those without. Facebook users know this, uploading some 350 million photos every day!

Searching for the exactly right photo for my blog posts is a fun part of the process, a reward to myself for completing the writing. When the content doesn’t easily lend itself to visualization, it can be an interesting challenge.

I depend heavily on Flickr images licensed through creative commons, because the terms of use are so clear, and have found great images on Pixabay. Generally, “stock photo” images seem stiff and unnatural to me. The producer had a message in mind, and that doesn’t ever match my message.

Scrolling through my file of images from this year so far, I see several I especially like. One of my favorites is at the top of this post—a still from the movie The Assassin—just because it’s so beautiful. Others favorites: the memorial to Britain’s World War I dead, an art installation around the Tower of London (clicking on it takes you to a description of the installation), below, used to illustrate a review of the play Remembrance Day, which is Britain’s Veterans Day, celebrated with red poppies as in the U.S., traditionally.

poppy poppies Beefeater London

A small section of the 2014 London installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies, each representing a member of the British military who died in World War I (photo: Shawn Spencer-Smith, creative commons license)

Julius Caesar, bust

Julius Caesar (photo: William Warby, creative commons license)

And, this one, at right, such a powerful image of Julius Caesar, used to illustrate my March 15, “Ides of March” post about an exhibit of crime photographs at the Met.

Oliphant’s post reinforces the value of “branded visuals” that have a consistency of style that links them uniquely to an author. The image of the eerie, disused Eastern Penitentiary may be the closest I come to a branded approach, as it’s the header for my website and Facebook page, as well as appearing on my business cards. I snapped that picture; I own it.

Oliphant provides helpful sources for free stock photos, other guidance about using images, and reviews some of the top free image-editing sites. And, just think, if you’re doing a lot of writing, every great picture you come up with saves you, what? a thousand words?  Her complete post appears on Jane Friedman’s excellent website.

I Saw the Light

Posted on by

Tom Hiddleston, I Saw the Light, Hank WilliamsThe recent biopics of jazz musicians Chet Baker and Miles Davis (haven’t seen it yet) have been dinged for being impressionistic, improvisational, jazzy and showing only a limited period of their subject’s lives, in the case of Miles Ahead, 1979. With I Saw the Light (trailer), about country music legend Hank Williams, written and directed by Marc Abraham, we see the perils of the conventional treatment.

It’s a too familiar formula. Although this one skips over the difficult childhood and lacks the manager-as-ripoff-artist, we do have the rocky rise to stardom, wild success with 36 Top Ten singles, the lure of alcohol, drugs and dames, and missed shots at redemption—the whole gloomy self-destructive spiral. Truthfully, because Hank Williams died at age 29, his didn’t really have much chance to have a significant story arc to his life, which suggests something other than a chronology might have worked better. Instead, we have a movie that critic J. Olson says is “flatter than a silver dollar pancake.”

That fundamental problem is not redeemed by top-notch acting and the music. Tom Hiddleston (a Brit, no less) is a believable Williams—charming, uninterested in what people think of him (maybe he should have been)—and Hiddleston sings all the songs, which apparently were filmed live. Elizabeth Olsen is his wife Audrey Mae, tired of watching him lose the struggle with his demons and miffed he doesn’t support her singing career. She’s cute, but she’s a truly awful singer. Bradley Whitford plays Williams’s supportive manager, Fred Rose, and the guys in Hank’s band seem like the real thing, too.

Williams had a congenital back problem—a mild form of spina bifida—that may have made him prone to injuries. In any case, the injuries sure contributed to the development of chronic back pain, which explains that slight waist-bend in the movie posters, and exposed Williams to all the hazards associated with self-medication.

If you love country music, you’ll enjoy this film, even though you know the ending. If you’re not a fan, you know the ending too. This film makes the efforts to break out of the mold in the Baker and Davis films that much more appreciated.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 19%; audiences, 51%.

Related articles

****The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Posted on by
Thailand-Burma Death Railway, Pacific Theater

Hellfire Pass (photo: David Diliff, creative commons license, CC BY SA 2.5)

By Richard Flanagan, read by David Atlas – This epic tale from a Tasmanian author won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It centers on the life of Dorrigo Evans, a young surgeon, before, during, and after World War II, when he eventually becomes regarded as an Australian war hero.

A notorious womanizer in later life, Dorrigo can never recapture his early passion for Amy, the young wife of his uncle, and their lost love. Their affair was cut short when he received his orders to ship out and he had no chance to say good-bye to her then, or ever, because of two lies.

During the war, his unit is captured by the Japanese. Its members are forced, despite illness, injury, starvation, and dangerously impossible conditions to work on a railway “for the Emperor,” the infamous Thailand-Burma Death Railway. An estimated 112,000 Asian forced laborers and Allied prisoners of war died during its construction. If you’ve seen The Bridge on the River Kwai, you have an inkling. Flanagan’s own father was a survivor of the Death Railway and died the day Richard told him this novel was finally finished. “He trusted me not to get his story wrong,” Flanagan has said.

Because Dorrigo is a surgeon and an officer, the Japanese don’t require him to work on the construction, but he is plenty busy managing the desperately ill and dying men in his care.

After the war, the narrative takes a detour to tell us the fate of several characters from the camp—its head man, Major Nakamura; the reviled Korean contract guard the prisoners called the Goanna; and a group of ex-prisoners who have an alcohol-fueled rendezvous in memory of one of their fallen.

The climactic (or climatic, given its meteorological link) section of the book involves Dorrigo’s attempts to rescue his wife and children from the devastating fires overtaking a large swath of Tasmania near the capital of Hobart, another real-life event that took place in 1967.

Even though the book is described as “a love story unfolding over half a century,” I thought Flanagan’s best, most moving writing involved the prisoner of war camp. His detailed portrayals of several of the men, especially one named Darky Gardiner, are vivid and compelling. The author did a service in trying to explain the inexplicable when he also probed the character of the camp overlords.

Americans generally know less about World War II’s Pacific Theater than events in Europe, though it was no less horrifying. Some readers may be turned off by the violence of the book, but it’s a war story as well as a romance, and war is not romantic. Stick with it, and you’ll have an indelible picture of the suffering inflicted and endured. Atlas’s narration is straightforward and true.

The book’s title—a metaphor for the railway itself—comes from a famous book by Japanese poet Bashō, which Flanagan’s character Colonel Kota (a beheading expert) says “sums up in one book the genius of the Japanese spirit.” Flanagan explained in an excellent interview in The Telegraph, “I wanted to use what was most beautiful and extraordinary in their culture in writing a book about what was most terrible, because I thought that might liberate me from judgment. And it did help me.”