Category Archives: The Morgue

HBO Steps in It

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Jonah from Tonga

Jonah from Tonga cast (photo: bbc.co)

HBO this month is demonstrating that political correctness has not yet smothered bad judgment. Instead, it’s showing why those acute sensitivities developed in the first place, by airing the unbelievably tone-deaf Australian Broadcasting Corporation program, Jonah from Tonga. Created by Australian actor Chris Lilley, the program is styled as a comedic mockumentary about a group of trouble-prone Tongan teens. Lilley—39 and white—plays 14-year-old schoolboy Jonah, by wearing a wig and “brownface.”

“All such attempts at making travesties of who we really are, perpetuate long-held and faulty assumptions of our values, self-worth, beliefs, culture and our tangible contributions to American life, Australian life, and Tongan life,” said the National Tongan American Society. According to organizers of a petition asking HBO to pull the show from its schedule, “All of the teenage ‘Tongan’ boys in the show are low achievers, gang members or in jail. Much of the ‘comedy’ is derived from Jonah’s acts of violence, sexual aggression, ignorance and profanity.”

The Japanese American Citizens League (representing another group of Americans affected by racist prejudices) weighed in, noting that satire can be “a powerful weapon for revealing and skewering the irrationality and absurdity of the racist ideas,” but pointing out that “the juvenile and crude characterizations in ‘Jonah from Tonga’ only reveal Lilley’s deep ignorance and disrespect for the Tongan people.”

In describing the show, HBO says “Jonah tries to leave his naughty ways behind and be a ‘good boy,’ but with Jonah, things never quite go as planned.” Let’s hope this fate applies to the series, as well. While it aired earlier this year in Australia and on BBC Three in the UK, it was a ratings “disaster” for these networks. The Australian producers’ defense, reported here, is weak.

Huh? In 2014? Who is HBO trying to entertain with this crude racism? You can sign the petition here. I did.

Winter in Wartime

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snow, Holland, bicycles

(photo: pixabay)

This award-winning 2008 Dutch film (trailer) sees the desperate, waning days of the Nazi occupation from the perspective of a 13-year-old boy. He despises his cautious father, the mayor of the village, for being friendly with the Germans and idealizes his uncle Ben, a member of the Resistance. When the boy finds a downed RAF pilot in hiding, he has to discover how much courage lies within himself, and the movie is a “complex exploration of the theme of heroism,” said Washington Post critic Michael O’Sullivan.

As directed by Martin Koolhoven, the movie is tension-filled, with the lead performance by Martijn Lakemeier a convincing portrayal of the mixed bravado and uncertainty of adolescence. It’s so beautifully photographed, with a thin icing of snow over everything throughout, I had to stop and think whether it was black and white or color (the latter). Based on a novel by Jan Terlouw. Nominated for an Academy Award. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 73%; audiences 78%.

Faraway Places

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York, England, Cityscape, roofs

(photo: author)

No doubt about it, setting a mystery in a faraway locale adds a touch of romance. Fans of the Venice-based detective stories of Donna Leon, Edinburgh’s Inspector Rebus series by Ian Rankin, or Tarquin Hall’s Delhi-based private eye stories, see their cities as practically another character. But these authors live or have lived in the places they write about. Can authors pull that off from afar? A panel of American mystery writers at last weekend’s Deadly Ink conference discussed where, why—and most important, how—they do it. This is of intense interest to me, because my mystery series character, Eugenia Clarke, is a travel writer, and stories about her take place where she’s on assignment—Alaska, Morocco, Rome.

For the most part, Annamaria Alfieri (writing about South America and colonial East Africa), Albert Tucher (beginning a series about Hawai`i—a great excuse for a tax-deductible research trip, he said), and Cathi Stoler (Tuscany and that foreign country, Las Vegas) have spent time in the places they write about, supplementing their own experiences with research. They talked about how the challenge is far greater than pasting on a few superficial references. Street names, landmarks.

When they’re really cooking, their research—on the ground, through interviews, background reading, online—will lead to a plot and characters uniquely of that place. They’ll end up with a story that could not have happened in Columbus, Ohio. Readers recognize that legitimate sense of place. For example, an estimated 500 English-language books—mostly mystery or suspense—are set in Italy, and this website rates them as to whether they really capture “the essence” or merely use Italy as a lure.

On the Murder is Everywhere blog, which features a group of far-flug writers, Alfieri recently quoted from John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in which he describes the fundamental reason writers write: “We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is.” Setting a story in a far-off place puts the writer’s head—every bit as much as the reader’s—in a place where that can happen.

Age of Innocence

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Michelle Pfeiffer, Daniel Day-Lewis, Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton, Martin Scorsese

Michelle Pfeiffer, Daniel Day-Lewis in The Age of Innocence (photo: 2.bp.blogspot.com)

The Age of Innocence must be really over, as it’s a little hard to sit through. Watched the 1993 movie of Edith Wharton’s classic (read it free here) over the weekend (Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder, directed by Martin Scorsese (trailer). Miriam Margolyes’s portrayal of the grandmother with her—was it five?—ever-present fluffy lapdogs was terrific. Credits were beautiful, sets and costumes the same. Some family discussion here about whether I’d seen this movie before, and I thought not. Remembered nothing until the final scene.

Not much happens on the surface in this story of repressed passion (though I’d nominate Henry James’s The Golden Bowl—at 632 pages—for the all-time “not much happens” award), and it could happen a lot quicker. You know where the story’s going from your first glimpse of Countess Olenska (Pfeiffer) at the opera—Faust, by the way, the very definition of temptation. Wharton’s book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921, an emblem of how tastes change.

Nevertheless, the photography, sets, and people are so beautiful, they’re fun to watch . . . for a while. Perhaps Scorsese wanted to do something totally different than Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, and didn’t quite know where to stop the pendulum. Still, at the time, he said it was the “most violent” film he’d ever made. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating, 80 percent.

The Honourable Woman

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Maggie Gyllenhall, Middle East, The Honourable Woman

Maggie Gyllenhall in “The Honourable Woman” (photo: bbc.co.uk)

Saw the first of eight episode of this new BBC production—“both mystery and spy thriller” says Willa Paskin in Slate (clip)—on the Sundance Channel last night (Thursdays, 10 pm). Reviews have been smokin, and certainly the first hour:fifteen was exceptionally strong, laying down a lot of tantalizing clues about what’s to come, with the backdrop “the incredible complexity, raw emotion, and intractability of the Israel-Palestine conflict,” Paskin says.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the head of a U.K.-based arms company and has recently been made a baroness, so is Lady Nessa Stein. She and her brother were orphaned young when their father, a major seller of arms to Israel, was assassinated in front of them. Now she runs the company, and her brother the company’s foundation. They are determined use their money for good, so are in the midst of a project to bring communications technology—cables for phone and internet access—to the Palestinians, including, she says at one point, “to the schools and hospitals we have built.”

The episode begins and ends with violence, including an early quick-cut of an event Viewer thinks might have been another violent act. In the middle, various people are trying to figure that one out, including Stephen Rea, as an over-the-hill MI6 agent assigned temporarily to the Middle East desk, as punishment it seems (I missed some muttered dialog, but I can read the script here). He and Gyllenhaal independently elude their handlers for frank conversation with what I suspect is a short list of people they can trust.

Lots of clues, lots of intrigue. Very promising. Says Paskin, “The Honorable Woman is in many ways, most of them cerebral, an extremely impressive piece of work” that “oversimplifies very little.” Cerebral? Reason enough to watch.

Converted_file_4913e22dDo you think the publicists tried–perhaps unconsciously–to replicate National Geographic’s most famous photo in that picture of Maggie Gyllenhaal above? There’s something odd about the eyes there.

 

 

I Know Where Your Cat Lives

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cats

(photo: author)

Owen Mundy, artist and teacher at Florida State University, has used the metadata attached to photos posted on the internet to track where a million of the world’s cats live, and he’s put their home lairs on an interactive world map. According to Mundy, the web has some 15 million images tagged with the word “cat,” with more uploaded every minute.

If this strange project were only about cats, Mundy’s experiment wouldn’t have received the media attention he’s been getting. Rather, the point of his experiment is to show how easily the locational coordinates embedded in these publicly shared photos can be extracted and linked to (pretty) precise locations.

When you look at the map, you see the streets and rooftops of houses and apartment buildings and back yards that are homes to these charming felines and their amusing antics, but anyone else—say, megacorporations who want to sell you something and scrape every scrap of information about you—are more interested in the cat owners. You watch the cat. They watch you holding the cat. You see the cat playing. They see the inside of your living room. Well, not my living room, Grant and Sherman’s picture isn’t on the map, but 22 other Princeton cats are. I’m going to take a look.

What first appears as an amusing meditation on the prevalence of fur turns into a biting commentary on privacy.

Thanks, Autocorrect!

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Though at times we pound our tiny screens screaming that autocorrect must have sprung full-grown from the forehead of Satan, this devil’s spawn actually has a long history, and Gideon Lewis-Kraus recounted it recently in Wired. The mistakes are shared, sometimes hilarious, and may eventually bring back proofreading, but maybe not.

According to Lewis-Kraus, “the real marvel of our mobile text-correction systems is how astoundingly good they are.” He believes they’ve enabled us to text so much, we of the “podgy fingers” and dimmest memories of sixth grade spelling tests. Our tiny keypads are possible “only when we have some serious software to tidy up after us.” Then, in a scary revelation, Lewis-Kraus admits he typed the whole first draft of his book (doesn’t say which) on a phone.

princess

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Then man behind autocorrect is Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch. He began his Microsoft career in the early 1990’s on the Word team and wanted to make typing “sleek and invisible.” His crew began with enabling fixes for common typing errors, which is why every time I abbreviate electronic health record EHR, Word “fixes” it for me. (And, yes, I’ve tried to add EHR it to my personal dictionary.) And there were consequences. Hachamovitch spoke to his daughter’s third-grade class and showed the youngsters how to make auto-fixes, and afterward received parental emails saying things like, “Thanks, but whenever I try to type my daughter’s name it automatically transforms into ‘the pretty princess.’”

Autocorrect’s developers went with primary spellings (judgment, not judgement—take that, Brits!), declined to give suggestions for correct spelling of vulgarities (ignore them), released their baby, and soon laid bare its eccentricities. Linguist now use the word cupertino as a term of art for autocorrection with incorrect words, after older spellcheckers repeatedly replaced “cooperation” with the name of Apple’s home town. Regrettably, my own last name (“Weisfeld”) more than once went out on the bottom of letters with its automatic replacement “Weaseled.”

Don’t abandon hope. Improvements still coming. Meanwhile, here’s the Damn You Autocorrect Hall of Fame.

 

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A Most Wanted Man

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Hamburg, port

Hamburg, Germany (photo: wikimedia)

Ambiguity, betrayal, characterization, desire—The ABC’s of John le Carré are all in place and working hard in this new film (trailer here). The setting is the gritty port city of Hamburg, from whence much violence rained down on America—and the dirty water of the first scene is the proper element for the dirty business to come—and the real world of espionage. I won’t say more about the plot. Acting throughout is exemplary. Perfect music.

(Must contrast this with the over-long, deeply implausible, and fundamentally boring Poirot mystery on PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery last night. What happened there? I get it that it’s just supposed to be fun. Wasn’t.)

A Most Wanted Man is both movie title and epitaph. John le Carré’s encomium is a must-read. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 90%

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In Summer, All the World’s a Stage

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Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, Learned Ladies, outdoor stage

Learned Ladies stage set (photo: author)

Outdoor theatre has tremendous pleasures—and perils. For once, the sun wasn’t broiling last Saturday when we saw Moliere’s The Learned Ladies at The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s outdoor stage (the charming 1932 Greek Theatre at the College of St. Elizabeth). Probably because I had with me the new sun parasol I’d bought in Vancouver! The STNJ does classic comedies in this venue, and the poor actors are always costumed in layer upon layer, wearing wigs—particularly hilarious in this production. It makes you light-headed to look at them.

Planes routinely take off flying low overhead from the small airport is near the theatre. This year, the players responded by yelling “Maestro!”, a harpsichord would play, they’d do some bouncy minuet steps, and a page would run by with a sign reading “Flying Machine Interval” until the noise subsided. Got a laugh every time.

I was in Regent’s Park, London, at a performance of The Tempest as a real storm approached, frightening the unprepared audience members, and at a performance of Doctor Faustus at Wolf Trap, when a giant Washington summer lightning-and-thunder extravaganza broke, just as the devil appeared (nervous laughter). We lived near a tiny outdoor theatre in Arlington, Virginia, where we could push our stroller and lurk near the back if a hasty departure was needed. We saw a sweet production of Carousel there. Baby slept.

Shakespeare is a staple of summer theaters, though many do history plays, and some do musicals or religious plays. Almost 1.4 million Americans attended an outdoor performance in 2013, according to 67 reporting members of the Institute of Outdoor Theatre (hardly a complete sample).

“An evening on the turf (is) real in a way indoor performances are not. We may think we’re distracted when we notice the pair of bunnies seated next to the stage earnestly observing the bipeds, but we’re actually becoming aware of the whole environment in which theater takes place,” said Kelly Kleiman in a comment on Chicago’s theater scene. And, you can have fireworks—onstage and off!

fireworks

(photo: Adam Baker, flickr, cc)

“Pulling the trigger is easy”

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Russian missile, Malaysia Airlines

Russian Buk missiles (photo: wikipedia)

Discovery of “shrapnel-like holes” on pieces of the fuselage of downed Malaysia Airlines flight 17 adds to evidence suggesting it was shot down using Russian Buk missile technology (which NATO calls the SA-11). A Wired article by Alex Davies reveals just how easy that would be. Says Davies, “The weapon in question is the SA-11, a radar-guided surface to air missile (SAM) system.” The system is mobile, as it was designed to protect troops near the front line from fighter jet attacks. It can hit targets up to twenty miles away and higher than 70,000 feet. It requires a crew of just four.

Once the system is set up, that crew doesn’t need much training to use it. It’s knowing what to fire at that takes the skill, because “the SA-11’s radar system shows the same ‘blip’ for all different targets,” Davies writes. He quotes Paul Huter a Lockheed-Martin aerospace engineer: “Once the radar picks up a target, it is a matter of telling the system that it should engage the target and issuing a fire command.” Another interviewee compared it to firing a gun. “Pulling the trigger is easy. Judgment is hard.”

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