****Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore

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books, bookshelves, library

(photo: PromoMadrid, creative commons license)

By Robin Sloan, read by Ari Fliakos – This book was on many “best books of 2012” lists, and it’s tremendously entertaining. The narrator, Clay Jannon, is an unemployed web marketer who finds work as the sole night shift clerk at a strange San Francisco bookstore. The store stocks little current or popular inventory and attracts few customers; however, it has masses of arcane, one-of-a-kind reading matter that is not for sale, merely borrowed. The borrowers are regulars, a “community of people who orbit the store like strange moons,” taking out volume after volume of the dusty materials. Clay has been warned not to read these texts, and any of you who recall Bluebeard’s wife know what’s coming next.

Lost in the shadows of the shelves, I almost fall off the ladder. I am exactly halfway up. The floor of the bookstore is far below me, the surface of a planet I’ve left behind. The tops of the shelves loom high above, and it’s dark up there — the books are packed in close, and they don’t let any light through. The air might be thinner, too. I think I see a bat.

I am holding on for dear life, one hand on the ladder, the other on the lip of a shelf, fingers pressed white. My eyes trace a line above my knuckles, searching the spines — and there, I spot it. The book I’m looking for.

The prohibited books are in code.

As he’s starting to suspect more going on than meets the eye, Clay meets Kat Potente, an expert in data visualization working for Google, and, determined to impress her, he creates a computer model of the store. When powerful computers match the book borrowing records against the store model, strange patterns appear. Together Clay and Kat embark on a quest to figure out the store’s coded secrets. They soon encounter a strange 500-year-old society of academics, the Unbroken Spine.

Against the society’s hundreds of years’ experience with OK (Google-speak for Old Knowledge) is arrayed all the creativity and computing power of the Googleplex, along with Clay’s colorful friends, and kindly Mr. Penumbra himself. The book “dexterously tackles the intersection between old technologies and new with a novel that is part love letter to books, part technological meditation, part thrilling adventure, part requiem” said Roxane Gay in The New York Times (though I disagree with her “requiem”). The plot isn’t really the point—it’s a flight of fancy—but the juxtapositions of old and new raise significant questions about the enduring power of print, about the value of the search as well as the answer.

On its journey, the novel gently skewers some of the greater pretensions of Silicon Valley and those who feverishly embrace—and reject—technology. But in a good way. Numerous times while listening, I laughed out loud. The reading by Ari Fliakos was breathless and eager, a perfect voice for the 20-something Clay. Since I listened to the audio version, I missed the clever touch that the book cover glows in the dark.

“He’s Got a Gun!”

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gun, firearm, weapon

(photo: r. nial bradshaw, creative commons license)

The late Elmore Leonard advised budding crime-writers, “when your story starts to drag, have someone pull out a gun.” Maybe too many of us have been following that advice, because several recent books aim to inject more accuracy into the portrayal of guns (and other weaponry). Errors make some readers swear off a writer and, as the introduction to The Writer’s Guide to Weapons: A Practical Reference for Using Firearms and Knives in Fiction
explains, “no wrath is greater than that of firearms enthusiasts.”

According to a recent post in Jane Friedman’s excellent “Resources for Writers” blog, written by Benjamin Sobieck, who also wrote the Writer’s Guide, above, here are key points about guns that writers should keep in mind to avoid those credibility-shattering results:

  1. Clip and magazine are not the same. A clip holds cartridges that go into a magazine. Most modern firearms don’t require a clip. But it sounds good, no? Clip: Manly. Magazine: Better Homes & Gardens
  2. Bullet is not the same as shell, round, or cartridge. You never find empty bullets on the ground after a shooting. Casings, yes.
  3. The whole pumping of a shotgun or cocking the hammer of a handgun is a sound cue from the movies, intended for intimidation, but, as Sobieck says, “less to do with looking tough and more to do with being stupid.” These extra and in most cases unnecessary pumps/cocks just “dump unfired ammunition onto the ground.” Why would anyone intimidate another person with a firearm, if it weren’t ready to fire? Good question. Ask your author.
  4. While this would seem to be an “it goes without saying” kind of thing, a character should never look down the barrel of a gun to see whether it’s loaded. Who’d be that stupid? I had a clip showing a tv character actually doing this, but it has disappeared. Sorry!
  5. And, perhaps the most pervasive of all gun errors in both news and entertainment media currently, the term “assault weapon.” This actually is meaningless. ANY weapon can be used for assault. The industry doesn’t use it. Sobieck says “tactical rifle (or shotgun), machine gun, submachine gun, fully automatic rifle,” or even “gun” are more meaningful than “assault weapon.”
  6. The term “automatic weapon” is often elided to mean either a semi-automatic weapon (which shoots one time with each trigger pull) or a “fully automatic weapon” which fires many times with a single pull. The idea of “automatic” weapons needs to be well defined. Fully automatic weapons are not very accurate after the first few shots because of recoil, so long, Rambo-inspired bursts of fire are actually useless if the goal is to hit anything.

Finally, in his book, Sobieck includes “Ten Golden Tips for Writing about Weapons,” which includes this advice: “If it’s in a movie or on television, it’s probably inaccurate.”

Novelist as Theater Director

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theater, stage

(photo: wikimedia)

A thrilling weekend in Williamstown and Lenox, Massachusetts, with a group of serious theater lovers—four plays in three days and rich presentations in-between. Unexpectedly, one of these presentations—a detailed review of the steps of play production—mirrored many of the challenges an author faces in preparing a work of fiction. Let me explain.

Once a theater company decides to produce a particular play its first step is to hire a director who will create the theatrical production. The director {the “author,” in this analogy and here you have to bear with me} helps build the creative team and find the cast {characters}, blocks the play and decides who does what when {plot}, and guides the aesthetic process of the production {editing}.

A large creative design team is needed to help put the play together. These designers take on various tasks, in keeping with the director’s vision for the play and what this specific production is to convey. While of course a director starts with a script, just as an author begins with a more or less firm idea, the way a play emerges in its staging is unique to each production. Literary critics have decided there are only about a half-dozen basic plots, which suggests much of what differentiates the tens of thousands of novels published each year results from loosely analogous attention to the same creative elements a play director must consider.

In theater, set design establishes the physical world of the play; costumes, makeup, and props help define characters. In novels, authors must use description of the scene, and the appearance and clothing of the characters for exactly the same purpose. Lighting and sound design help create a play’s mood and tell the audience “where to look,” just as authors establish mood and focus attention—or, in the case of a mysteries, misdirect it—on key information. Dialect coaches make sure the words come out the way a character of a given era, nationality, and class would say them, and on the page, dialog has to ring true, too.

Choreographers and fight directors design the more complex or risky stage action. Stage-fights have to be both safe and realistic. (Realistic is easy, we were told, safe is hard.) Fiction has similar problems. A battle between two people or a hundred has to seem dangerous—even when it involves a continuing character who we know will survive to appear in the next book. At the same time, heroes must escape in a plausible way. They can’t get off too easily. A recent thriller I read had a confusing scene near the end, in which it wasn’t clear which shooters were inside their cars, in the street, along the wall, or wherever. I couldn’t visualize it, even after three re-reads. In my writing group, we call this a problem in choreography.

While the theater director has a whole team to take care of these essential component parts, the novelist works solo.

In casting a play, a director thinks about the skills and personalities of potential actors, and whether they can fill their roles. The author likewise must decide what type of person to create for the role they will play in the novel. How much can people such as those they describe believably stretch when facing the demands the plot places on them? How are other characters likely to react to them? At the same time, they must avoid creating stereotypes and “stock characters,” who would move through the novel like cardboard cutouts.

The whole process of rehearsing a play—from the initial read-through, to the blocking, through final rehearsals—echoes the editing process. Plays aren’t rehearsed just once; it takes time and myriad adjustments and refinements for all the creative parts to mesh together. Similarly, thinking of a novel draft as similar to a theater production, it’s easy to see the kinds of editing an author must do: tuning up all aspects of design/description, focus, realism, choreography, and character development to best serve the ultimate product—that best-selling, award-winning novel taking shape in the theater of the author’s mind.

5 Forensic Science Myths

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forensic

Mystery: why is this trainer so clean? (photo: West Midlands Police, creative commons license)

CSI’s wise-cracking investigators, expensive cars, and sexy co-workers with great hair? High on the drama scale, low on reality. Crime and mystery writers striving for drama and accuracy have to get past such exaggerated expectations. Deborah Cole, a forensic scientist with the New Jersey State Police, spoke to a recent meeting of the Liberty States Fiction Writers Group about forensic science myths.

The first is how television has primed people to believe that forensic science is infallible. The reality is that it cannot always provide definitive answers. Nor is it true that scientists never make mistakes or mess up the chain of custody. Sometimes “a good defense attorney can find holes,” she said. (Interestingly, criminals have become aware of the power of forensics and have learned from tv how to cover their tracks more effectively.)

Response is not as fast as people expect. Some states have only one crime laboratory, and crime labs are often small and outfitted with, well, not-the-latest equipment. As a result, they may have a backlog of testing to do, which adds to the time needed to complete tests (or whether they are ever completed at all, with unexamined rape test kits a prime example). Some tests themselves take a long time to produce results. Tests for different toxic substances must be conducted individually, and all this may take a month or more to complete.

Forensic scientists do not interrogate suspects and witnesses, regardless of what tv suggests. Not their skill set. And they certainly don’t make arrests. They may be called to a high-profile crime scene, but they aren’t there first (unlike in the UK’s Midsomer Murders tv series where the ME and crime scene team is always working away—with findings!—by the time the investigating detectives arrive). When they do visit a scene, they collect evidence to bring to the lab for analysis by someone else.

One scientist cannot handle an entire case. Forensic scientists are specialized (in the lab, their focus may be toxicology, chemical analysis, ballistics, and so on), which means that the evidence from a single case may be tested by a number of different scientists. The New Jersey State Police lab employs 130 scientists in different disciplines, and they are involved in some 35,000 cases a year.

Another reason one person can’t do it all relates to the Locard exchange principle: “whenever two objects come in contact with each other, there is always an exchange of material.” The practical application of this principle is that material from the clothing, floor, furniture, car, or other environs of the crime, which is gathered from the scene, from the victim, and from the suspected perpetrator (if there is one) must all be processed in different rooms and even by different people, in order to avoid cross-contamination.

Finally, Cole said (and she laughed when she said this), tv gives the impression that every day is exciting!

Further Information:

♦Useful for writers: http://www.forensicsciencesimplified.org/onducting Forensic ♦Research: A Tutorial for Mystery Writers: http://www.writing-world.com/mystery/forensics.shtml
♦Forensic workshops, including “TV v. Reality”: http://www.crimemuseum.org/forensic-workshops
♦Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us about Crime, by Val McDermid (2015)

 

Related articles

Body of Evidence: Cameras in Policing

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angry man, police

(photo: Danny Hammontree, creative commons license)

State and local governments and police departments across the country are adopting body cameras for patrol officers. They can learn a lot about the benefits, risks, and unanticipated consequences of this policy from the several departments that have pioneered use of this technology, as Mike Maciag described in a recent Governing article.

In total, an estimated 22 to 33% of police departments are already using cameras. Rapid adoption without thinking through the necessary supporting policies, training needs, and long-term budgetary implications may cause this generally positive trend in policing to falter. The 7/31 release of body cam footage related to the death of Samuel Dubose in Hamilton County, Ohio, will increase calls for adoption.

Data Storage & Analysis

A hidden cost of the cameras is in the storage, retrieval, and analysis of data. “It’s the expense related to data storage—not the purchase of the cameras—that typically ends up being most costly for departments,” says Miciag, particularly for departments that keep footage for a year or more. (Video considered evidence in a court case might be kept much longer.) Writing up routine reports may take longer, if officers need to make sure their report jibes with the video. Departments must respond to requests for video from prosecutors, defense attorneys, the media (in some jurisdictions), and even citizens under state freedom of information laws or departmental policy.

Human Factors

Younger officers in tune with the YouTube era are more receptive to the cameras. “Typically, senior officers don’t see the value of the video or want the video unless it saves them,” said Kelvin Wright, police chief of Chesapeake, Va., which has used cameras since 2009. Traffic officers, accustomed to in-car cameras, also have been more welcoming. Policies need to be in place regarding when the camera should be turned on, as well as when it should not be turned off. In Daytona Beach, turning off the camera to avoid being recorded is grounds for firing. The cameras don’t record 24/7, because police need to be able to have private conversations and moments and to interview confidential informants.

Citizen Privacy

Not all jurisdictions/departments require that officers tell the public they are being recorded. A concern is whether people involved in a domestic dispute, for example, will not call police because they don’t want their grievances publicly available. Some departments require that cameras be switched off in medical facilities and other specific settings.

Benefits

On one hand, the Chesapeake department has found a sharp reduction in complaints against officers when citizens know their interaction is recorded, and many complaints can be quickly invalidated by the recordings. On the other, use-of-force incidents declined in a 2012 study of the Rialto, Calif., department. Analysts believe both police and citizens are more cooperative when cameras are present. And the footage is can be useful in other situations: letting community leaders see the imminent threat that led to a nonfatal police shooting in Daytona Beach defused a potentially confrontational situation. “Everybody behaves better when the cameras are on,” said Daytona police chief Michael Chitwood.

UPDATE 7/22/15

The disturbing footage of the traffic stop of Sandra Bland, which ended with her death in a Houston, Texas, cell a few days later highlights a number of challenges in using cameras in policing. Bland’s interaction with Texas state trooper Brian Encinia was captured not by a body-cam, but by a dashboard camera in his vehicle. The sound quality is excellent, despite the distance of the camera from the interaction.

Glitches in the footage–believed by some commenters to be “editing” of the video and by others as malfunctioning equipment–are sowing confusion in the case and beg for authoritative clarification. Trooper Encinia appears to lose his temper and escalate the situation quickly, when facing the initially uncooperative Bland. This is the opposite of how police officers are trained to behave.

Once he has her out of her car, the action moves to the side, and the camera no longer captures the video, though continues to record audio. A passerby recorded some of that interaction on his cell phone, however. Then, three days later, Sandra Bland dies in her cell, apparently between 7 and 9 a.m. Video of the hallway outside her cell reportedly shows no one in the area. Her death is called a suicide; friends and family don’t believe it.

People all over the country have seen this video now, as it was released to the media. However good the video is, alone or in combination with the cell phone footage, does it tell the full story of the arrest and trooper Encinia’s actions? What precipitated Bland’s death? Regardless of how incomplete information is so far, judgments will be made because people have “seen what went down,” and inevitably will interpret it according to their own experiences and opinions.

Philadelphia Gem

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museum, Jews, Philadelphia, National Museum of American Jewish History

(photo: wikipedia)

Right alongside Philadelphia’s Independence Mall (you know, National Constitution Center, Liberty Bell, Independence Hall), at Market and 5th Street is the National Museum of American Jewish History, a five-story exhibition space, opened in 2010. You start at the top, in the special exhibit space, and work your way down.

 

On the top floor currently is a exhibition of Richard Avedon’s portrait photos from the 1970s. Quite a rocky trip down memory lane seeing the pictures of the Nixon-era politicos practically giving off whiffs of scandal and napalm.

The next three floors are devoted to the permanent exhibition,a chronological exploration of Jewish history in America. They are a warren of connecting galleries that makes the most of the space and the creative display of information. The first (top) of these floors is themed “Foundations of Freedom,” about the earliest Jewish arrivals, in the period 1654 to 1880. Their experiences as immigrants, earning a living and becoming established in communities across the country were fascinating. While we think of the early 20th century Ashkenazi settlers from Germany, Poland, and Russia as representing American Jewry, many of the earliest settlers were Sephardic and came from Spain and Portugal via London and South America. Thus, Charleston, as a southern city, was an early settlement hub and in 1800 had the country’s largest Jewish population.

The “Dreams of Freedom” exhibit on the third floor covers the period 1880-1945, including the big migration years, the shift of the Jewish population center to New York, and the impact of two World Wars. A portion of this floor covers the contribution of Jewish people in many areas of life–manufacturing, industry, marketing, the labor movement–as well as to the arts and entertainment industries, including a film clip of Groucho Marx’s classic, “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It!” newly relevant today. The second floor reviews 1945 to today, and we’d run out of time and didn’t linger. There’s a lovely gift shop and a café.

We ate lunch a few blocks away at the Cuba Libre Restaurant and Rum Bar. It was too early in the day to take full advantage of the rum bar, but the Old Havana atmosphere was fun and the food and service good. This restaurant is an outpost of a small chain that also has restaurants in Washington, DC, Orlando, and Atlantic City, NJ.

***The Storm Murders

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farm, snow, winter

(photo: M Pincus, creative commons license)

By John Farrow – Farrow is the pen name that acclaimed Canadian writer Trevor Ferguson selected when he decided to try his hand at writing genre fiction, and, if I have this right, this is his fourth book featuring detective Émile Cinq-Mars and the first of a planned “storm murders” trilogy.

In this mystery/thriller, prickly retired Montreal Sergeant-Detective Cinq-Mars finds himself flattered and cajoled and inevitably drawn into helping in the investigation of a rural Quebec double-murder that culminated in the additional slaying of two young Sûreté du Québec police officers lured to the remote farmhouse by a phone call.

Perhaps Cinq-Mars decides to aid this investigation because he is intrigued by the crime itself, the lack of apparent motive, and the absence of the killer’s footprints in the newly fallen snow around the house. Perhaps it is the puzzling entreaties of a senior FBI agent, looking for answers in a case that’s way out of his jurisdiction. Perhaps it is the bleak persistence of a Canadian winter making the days weigh heavy on Cinq-Mars’s insufficiently occupied brain. Or perhaps it is his wife Sandra’s startling intimation that she might leave him, making the investigation a welcome preoccupation that might enable him to in some way resurrect the man she’d fallen in love with.

The FBI agent, frustratingly close-mouthed, at least reveals that the deaths of the Quebec couple share certain grisly similarities with a series of murders in the United States. All have involved a married couple, always they’ve occurred after a major calamity. As none of the neighbors know much about the couple, relatively new arrivals to the area, and in the hope of finding out more details that would suggest a connection among these deaths, Cinq-Mars travels to New Orleans. The first pair of murders occurred there, shortly after Hurricane Katrina. Sandra accompanies him, because the trip promises to be a semi-vacation. Both she and Cinq-Mars hope a change of marital venue will help them reconnect.

Booklist has called the Cinq-Mars books “the best series in crime fiction today,” and this is the first of them I’ve read. Farrow’s writing style, honed by writing literary fiction, is confident and sophisticated, and the book starts strong. In general, the characters and setting are interesting and well-developed, especially good-humored multi-racial NOPD detective Pascal Dupree and ambitious hotel security chief Everardo Flores, who enliven every scene they’re in. Unfortunately, the plot was not as robust as these other elements. I guessed early on (and I’m not a particularly insightful guesser) why the FBI was interested in this series of murders. Farrow receives praise from some reviewers for writing character-driven mysteries, but for my taste, Cinq-Mars’s examinations of his feelings about religion, his wife, and retirement are rather too long. The denouement also was drawn out past the point of believability, including both conversation and events that seemed unlikely.

While this book has much to recommend it, especially for admirers of the series, in the end it requires some suspension of disbelief.

A slightly longer version of this review appears—along with reviews of many new crime and thriller novels—at the Crime Fiction Lover website.

Inherent Vice

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Inherent Vice, Joaquin Phoenix, Thomas PynchonWhen this film (trailer) of a Thomas Pynchon novel was released in 2014, critics said it was undoubtedly the ONLY Pynchon book that could be corralled into a film. I’m a big Pychon fan—loved V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Mason & Dixon—but I started Gravity’s Rainbow three times and never got past page 100. So I can sympathize with the difficulties director Paul Thomas Anderson must have faced.

Joaquin Phoenix plays “Doc” Sportell, a private investigator subject to regular harassment from a police detective called Bigfoot (Josh Brolin). Doc’s ex-girlfriend Shasta has taken up with a wealthy married property developer, and the developer’s wife wants her to cooperate in a plot to institutionalize him so she and her new boyfriend can raid his bank account. Then the magnate disappears. Doc uses is slight investigative skills to search for both the developer and Shasta in a stoner’s 1970s Southern California.

This set-up takes you down colorful and unexpected byways, which I couldn’t possibly reconstruct, and a multitude of stars provide performance gems: Owen Wilson as a mixed up dude-dad, afraid to leave the drug cult that’s captured him; Hong Chau as the hilariously matter-of-fact operator of a kinky sex club; Martin Short as a cradle-robbing dentist, with his clinic in a building shaped like a golden fang; Golden Fang itself, a mysterious criminal operation that . . . None of this probably matters. Neo-Nazi biker gangs, yogic meditation, stoners. You just have to go with it. Joaquin Phoenix, understandably, displays about a zillion different ways of looking confused.

If you have a taste for the absurd and what Movie Talk’s Jason Best calls “freewheeling spirit,” this is definitely the movie for you! I try to guess whether audiences or critics will like a movie better. Right on the money this time: Rotten Tomatoes Critics Rating: 73%; audiences, 53%.

*****Elsewhere

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mother & son, city street

(photo: Thomas Hawk, creative commons license)

By Richard Russo – This memorable book thoroughly and compassionately deconstructs the complex and intense relationship of a son and his troubled mother in “one of the most honest, moving American memoirs in years,” said Michael Schaub for NPR. Russo’s mother Jean suffered from “nerves” throughout her lifetime. She was a demanding, needy person, not unaware of her own flaws and shortcomings, and intermittently troubled by them. Russo, an only child, was her rock. She was also a pretty, lively woman, who went to extraordinary lengths to maintain the illusion she was living an independent life.

Only after Jean’s death did Russo learn enough about obsessive-compulsive disorder to fit the facts of her behavior to the characteristics of this syndrome, making a post hoc layman’s diagnosis. And only then did he come to the heartbreaking realization that his way of helping her might not have been the help she needed. She may have been a frustrating parent, but she just couldn’t help it.

The writing here is smooth as silk and contains great deal of humor. The well-rounded picture of the complex and loving mother-son relationship that Russo creates makes the reader more keenly feel the guilt Russo has suffered, despite his heroic efforts to respond to her plea, It’s you I need. (Meanwhile, in my opinion, Russo’s wife Barbara is a candidate for sainthood.)

He also gives a vivid picture of his home town of Gloversville, New York—a back-on-its-heels former leather-manufacturing town, whose tanneries poisoned workers and the watershed alike (he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls, another post-industrial sad-sack of a town). Russo’s mother Jean couldn’t wait to get out of there, except when she couldn’t wait to get back. This cycle had a depressing regularity that continued for decades.

These are people well worth knowing and a relationship that’s understood far better than I understand what in the world went on with my own parents. Tiny bit jealous of Russo’s ability—the intellectual and emotional honesty and the depth of insight—to pull this one off so well.

A Little Chaos

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a_little_chaos_film_2015_versailles_garden_habituaOK, OK, the reviews are tepid, but for my taste, A Little Chaos (trailer) is a perfect light summertime romance. Impeccable acting (Kate Winslet, Matthias Schoenaerts, Stanley Tucci, and Alan Rickman), beautiful scenery, and gorgeous late 17th c. costumes. Settle into the comfy theater seats and the welcome theater air-conditioning, and let the film wash over you. No heavy mental or emotional lifting required.

The premise is that on a ridiculously short timetable and budget, France’s Louis XIV, the Sun King, has decreed that paradisaical gardens be created to expand the grounds at his Versailles palace. Garden design has been placed in the reliable hands of André Le Nôtre (Schoenaerts), a proponent of order in the landscape. His plans include an elaborate display of fountains. But he needs help. After interviewing numerous candidates, he chooses the wildly fictional Madame Sabine de Barra (Winslet) to create the garden’s ballroom, for the reason that she will introduce new ideas (a shaky premise, there)—and, as the title suggests, a little chaos.

The two of them are attracted to each other, but have vastly different temperaments and face a fairly predictable set of obstacles. Critics who pooh-pooh the film as a failed feminist fable miss its many pleasures: the absurd courtiers, Stanley Tucci as the king’s gay brother, the interplay among the women when they’re alone behind closed doors, scenery to drool over, the joy of bringing dirt and greenery to beautiful life, and, especially, Alan Rickman playing Louis XIV—“a character worthy of his imperious, reptilian charisma,” as Stephen Holden said in the New York Times.

Rickman directed and helped write the film, too. “Acting should be about risky projects as much as it can be about entertaining,” he told Joe Neumaier at the New York Daily News. “The risk is what makes you want to do it.” Bringing to life characters from another culture and long-past century in a revisionist history confection is almost as risky as thinking you can make water dance.

The real Salle de Bal (the Bosquet des Rocailles) at Versailles was inaugurated in 1685 and is the gardens’ only surviving cascade. PHOTO

If you don’t go with inflated expectations you won’t be disappointed. You will be well pleased. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 39%; audience score 49%.