Category Archives: The Morgue

The Imitation Game

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Alan Turing, codebreaking, Bletchley Park

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Eagerly awaited general release of The Imitation Game (trailer), starring Benedict Cumberbatch in a superb bit of acting, and was not disappointed. The story, hidden for almost 30 years, is by now familiar—Alan Turing, the brilliant but eccentric Oxford student admitted to Bletchley Park’s code-breaking team, figures out how to decrypt messages generated by the Nazis’ super-secret Enigma machine, shortening WWII by two years, and, oh, by the way, inventing computers in the process.

Last month Andrew Hodges, author of the book the movie’s based on, was in town for a talk—a bit dazed about this great success 30 years post-publication—and his insights (summarized here) were, frankly, helpful. He powerfully described the homophobia that pervaded the British intelligence services (and society in general) in the 1950’s that made Turing a target. Also the greater significance of the apples, alluded to only glancingly in the movie and without context. Turing was fascinated with the Snow White story, and saying more drifts into spoiler territory.

I earnestly hope someone said to him what Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) says near the end of this film. Clarke responds to Turing’s lifelong struggle with being different from other boys and men, and says how he “saved millions of lives by never fitting in,” as Tom Long put it in The Detroit News. Or, “Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine,” says the movie’s tagline.

There’s a little too much standing in front of the marvelous prop constructed for the movie, which the producer says is like the original Turing machine, just not in a box, so you can see the works. The secondary characters are thinly developed and no doubt worthy of greater interest. However, the scenes of Turing as a young boy (Alex Lawther), trying to come to terms with his differentness, are heartbreaking. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 89%; audience score 95%.

Holiday Favorites!

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Nutcracker, Christmas

(photo: wikimedia)

“Tomorrow the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings: why, we’ll need a pony to pull the buggy home.” –Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory – Hear it here.

See this photo gallery: China’s Harbin Ice Festival.

“This,” said Mr. Pickwick, looking round him, “this is, indeed, comfort.”
“Our invariable custom,” replied Mr. Wardle. “Everybody sits down with us on Christmas eve, as you see them now—servants and all; and here we wait, until the clock strikes twelve, to usher Christmas in, and beguile the time with forfeits and old stories. Trundle, my boy, rake up the fire.” Up flew the bright sparks in myriads as the logs were stirred. The deep red blaze sent forth a rich glow, that penetrated into the furthest corner of the room, and cast its cheerful tint on every face. —Charles Dickens, “A Good-Humored Christmas” Chapter 28 from The Pickwick Papers.

Antiquity Now!’s 12/17 post gives a recipe for Sfeni—yeast doughnuts dipped in honey—a traditional Sephardic Hanukkah dish. Looks pretty yummy! Check out the Antiquity Now! Website throughout the holiday season for more cross-cultural celebrations.

“’Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung,
The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung
Our families back in England were toasting us that day
Their brave and glorious lads so far away.” –John McCutcheon, “Christmas in the Trenches.” See it performed here.

Don’t miss the ever-popular YouTube video: “Chinese Food on Christmas”!

Now I’m off to make an eggnog pie. Back in 2016!! Happy New Year! Celebrate with these Dancing Fireworks!

The Theory of Everything

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Stephen Hawking, Eddie Redmayne , Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything

Eddie Redmayne & Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything

The uplifting Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything (trailer) is well worth seeing. The basic outlines of the story are well known. In his student days at Cambridge, Hawking developed a neuromotor disease that affects the body, not the brain, and was given two years to live. Such a diagnosis would end the ambitions of most people, but he survived to become preeminent in the fields of theoretical physics and cosmology with numerous British and international honors, including a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian honor.

Hawking also has tried to make the complexities of the physical sciences accessible for non-scientists, and his book, A Brief History of Time, has sold more than 10 million copies. I have the Illustrated edition, and I’ve read it, picture captions and all. (So, I actually know what the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is: let’s see, you can know the speed of an object or its location, but you cannot know both at the same time. Please, no questions.)

Eddie Redmayne is superlative as Hawking, and Felicity Jones convincing as his devoted first wife, Jane. The film avoids the typical mawkishness traps, in large part because, as Rene Rodriguez says in the Miami Herald, “Redmayne keeps you focused on the soul of a man trapped inside a malfunctioning body.” The supporting cast is singularly excellent too.

The movie is based on a book written by Jane, whom Hawking met at Cambridge shortly before the neurological problems began to surface. The couple have three children, and he is portrayed as a loving father. It ends some 25 years later, in the late 1980s.

There’s only a smattering of science and mathematics in the movie; in general, it’s about coping against greater odds than a person can at all reasonably be expected to overcome. The movie suggests, not unreasonably, that Jane’s determination was a significant factor in keeping him alive. Not just surviving, thriving. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 81%; audiences 84%.

Reading Pathways

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path, forest, jungle

(photo: wikimedia)

After listening to Stephen King’s mind-bending 11/22/63: A Novel, and reading his book of advice for writers (reviewed here), I’m willing—eager, actually—to read more. But my tolerance for the horror genre is limited, and he’s written, a gazillion books, so where do I start?

You may feel the same way about Margaret Atwood, Nick Hornby, James Baldwin, China Miéville, or other notables. The folks at Book Riot see our confusion and want to help. They’ve created “Reading Pathways” for 34 notable authors that introduce the works of great authors in a thoughtful, non-random way.

Their three-book selections are geared to encourage affection for the writers’ best and most accessible works, so that new readers will want to keep going. I tested their method with the Reading Pathway for Charles Dickens, since I have read or listened to every one of his novels at least once. And their advice was pretty good.

But Book Riot doesn’t just cover authors you’ve heard of forever and the musty fusty classics. David Foster Wallace is here, as is Zadie Smith. A little sci-fi and fantasy, too.

A New Year is coming up. Maybe it’s time to follow a new Reading Pathway! Me, I’ll be reading King’s Under the Dome. Does that sound  like the right first step to you?

Life of Crime

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John Hawkes & Jennifer Anniston, Life of Crime

John Hawkes & Jennifer Anniston, Life of Crime

Netflixed this 2014 comedy (trailer), which slipped into and out of theaters this fall faster than a rumor. It’s based on Elmore Leonard’s novel, The Switch. Directed by Daniel Schechter, it features Jennifer Aniston (Mickey), Mos Def (Ordell), John Hawkes (Louis), and a strong supporting cast. (Several characters, including the two male leads were revisited in Quentin Tarantino’s considerably more violent Jackie Brown, based on another Elmore Leonard novel, Rum Punch.)

Much more The Ransom of Red Chief than Fargo, Life of Crime is about a kidnapping gone wrong. Louis and Ordell snatch trophy-wife Mickey only to find out her husband (Tim Robbins) is on the verge of divorcing her anyway. If they carry out their threats to kill her, they’ll save him millions in settlement costs.

Much of the humor comes from the bumbling characters who muddy the kidnappers’ scheme. They’ve sought the help of a Nazi-loving nut case (Mark Boone Junior) who has a spare room where they can stash Mickey, and she is pursued by a hapless and creepily smitten tennis club dad (Will Forte). The only sharp knife in the drawer is the husband’s new girlfriend (Isla Fisher), who’s just too smart for her own good. Rotten Tomatoes gave the movie a 65 percent rating, with critics mostly objecting to low energy, lack of real menace, and perhaps the false expectation of Jackie Brown/Tarantino-style violence. Instead, the film is an “amiable diversion” with “ambling charm.”

(Trivia note: The title may have been changed from Leonard’s original because Aniston starred in a totally different comedy titled The Switch in 2010, and in an eruption of self-referential promotion, the DVD for Life of Crime included previews for both The Switch and Jackie Brown.)

The Book Behind The Imitation Game

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Benedict Cumberbatch, Enigma, The Imitation GameIn wide release this Christmas will be the new film The Imitation Game (trailer), eagerly awaited by all serious fans of cryptography, World War II history-Bletchley Park division, spy stories, the invention of computers, and Benedict Cumberbatch. (My review of the movie.)Last week the author of the book on which the movie is based, Andrew Hodges, spoke here in Princeton. Hodges’s book—“one of the finest biographies of a scientific genius ever written,” said the Los Angeles Times reviewer—is Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film “The Imitation Game” published in 1983 by Princeton University Press, which is congratulating itself heartily over its three-decades’-ago decision.

As you may recall, Alan Turing was the young British scientist (incorrect to label him a mathematical genius, because part of his brilliance was in blending fields—logic, engineering, biology, and mathematics) who led the successful efforts to break the Nazi naval codes in World War II. The machine created to do this was an early computer, and a paper Turing wrote in 1936 laid the foundation for the theory of computer science, by imagining a field that previously did not exist.

In Princeton in 1936-38, he worked on speech-scrambling technology. His interest in these diverse topics led him to an interest in ciphers and artificial intelligence, and these interests led not just to the Turing Test (“the imitation game”), but to Bletchley Park and the team of scientists there. Turing’s pivotal role in the Allied accomplishment, like most information about the unraveling of the Germans’ Enigma machine, was not revealed until the 1970s. Hodges said some of his theories about the connection between mathematics and biology were so advanced they are only now receiving attention in science.

Turing’s homosexuality caused few problems in the tolerant environment of King’s College, Oxford, but after the war, that changed. He held vast amounts of wartime secrets in his head, and it was a period of intense anti-Soviet paranoia. The authorities worried about his vulnerability. He died at age 42 of cyanide poisoning, and Hodges believes the coroner’s conclusion that his death was suicide, although the pressure that may have been brought to bear on him is unknown. He left just enough mystery about his death that his mother could console herself it was one of his science experiments gone wrong and conspiracy speculators could ever since consider it part of the enigma.

Skylight

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Bill Nighy, Carey Mulligan, David Hare, Skylight

Bill Nighy & Carey Mulligan in Skylight

If Britain’s National Theatre Live version of David Hare’s remounted play Skylight, comes to a movie theatre in your area, don’t miss it! It’s a live performance filmed last summer, and, unlike the live opera shown in movie theaters, it isn’t “live, live.” But it isn’t just a camera set up in the back of the theatre, either. There are wonderful closeups of the three actors, and given who the actors are, you want to catch every nuanced facial muscle.

Carey Mulligan plays a 30ish woman (her first stage role), Kyra Hollis, who teaches in what is apparently a rather desperate London school and lives in rather minimalist circumstances in a British public housing flat, of a type familiar from U.K. crime shows. She’s visited by a young man—played briefly and brilliantly by Matthew Beard—who is the son in a family she once lived with. The young man urges her to return to try to help his father, who he says is lost in grief and rage over his wife’s death a year before. The son departs, and the father arrives.

Played flawlessly by Bill Nighy, the father is a successful restaurateur for whom Kyra once worked, and the sparring between the two over why she left his home and her work, the new life she’s constructed, and what was and is between them carries the rest of the play. When it was first produced in 1995, Skylight won the Olivier Award for Best New Play. Many funny moments. Tears, too.

Le Chef

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Le Chef, Michael Youn, Jean Reno

Jean Reno & Michael Youn in Le Chef

OK, so the critics didn’t much like this frothy French comedy (trailer) directed by Daniel Cohen, but the French can serve up a blundering wunderkind better than anyone else. Aspiring chef Jacky (Michaël Youn) is called in to save the day for the three-star wonder Alexandre Lagarde (Jean Reno), who may be on the verge of losing a coveted rating star and his restaurant in the bargain. There’s never a moment’s doubt how any of the plot lines of Le Chef will resolve, but it’s the whole meal that makes this movie fun.

It was released last summer in the United States around the same time as the American comedy Chef, which created some box office confusion. Sweet and light as a perfect dessert soufflé, this French offering is a good antidote to, say, the Nightly News. Curmudgeonly Rotten Tomatoes critics gave it a mere 48% rating, but audiences liked it more (59%). Said Moira MacDonald in the Seattle Times: Le Chef may not be a masterpiece, but it’s nonetheless a treat. Some days, that’s just right.

Map Out Your Holiday Gifts

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map, Paris

(photo: author)

OK, Santas’ helpers, if someone on your list loves New York, loves maps, loves travel, or just loves to get down with the details, that person might enjoy this wildly popular book of personal maps: Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers, by Becky Cooper, illustrated by Bonnie Briant, with an introduction by Adam Gopnik. Pointing to this book as a bellwether, The Guardian says hand-drawn maps are in. So much so, their creators even have their own association. “All maps tell stories,” Cooper says, and proves it with the creative contributions in this very book.

Alternatively, The Guardian story says Wellingtons Travel spent three years creating a map of modern London full of hand-drawn charm, using the 1800s style that shows individual trees and buildings. The photograph accompanying this article is similar to the Wellingtons approach, but it’s a portion of a map of Paris from a favorite poster of mine that’s so realistic, I’m sure I can pick out that little hotel I stayed at near L’Etoile.

Many people have participated in Cooper’s Mapping Manhattan project, contributing their own unique memory portraits, like the map of “My Lost Gloves.” (That one is available as a print from Uncommon Goods, which has an array of intriguing map gift ideas, including the “Single Malts of Scotland” or “Great Wines of France” tasting maps—bases for a couple of good tours, there.) Contribute to the collective mental map of the city by downloading a blank map of Manhattan on which to show the places where you took your own favorite bites out of the Big Apple. Download another and stick it in your love’s Christmas stocking.

Begin Again

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Mark Ruffalo & Keira Knightley, Begin Again

Mark Ruffalo & Keira Knightley

Writer-director John Carney’s Begin Again (trailer) is a music business movie that pushes the questionable idea that Talent Will Out—here, the talent-spotting talent of Mark Ruffalo as an out-of-luck music producer and the singer-songwriter talent of, unexpectedly, Keira Knightley. Knightley is less believable than the scruffy Ruffalo, but this is her least self-conscious performance I’ve seen.

The music-making partnership between them could easily devolve into cliché, but I’m glad to say it escapes that trap, as they set up shop in various outdoor Manhattan locations to record the tracks of her possible breakout album. Meanwhile, he defends her potential to his former recording-company partner, enjoyably played by Mos Def.

Both lead characters are separated from their significant others—Knightley from her success-obsessed boyfriend, played by real-life music star Adam Levine, and Ruffalo from his wife, played by Catherine Keener in too small a role. Everyone learns who they are. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ and audience ratings:  83%.