Category Archives: Culture

Weekend Movie Pick: One Battle After Another

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Even if this movie weren’t considered darn good, and it is, it’s almost worth it to see a filmmaker—in this case Paul Thomas Anderson—try to shoehorn a Thomas Pynchon novel into a couple of hours. He’s tried before. You need only recall Anderson’s 2014 messy and occasionally hilarious film, Inherent Vice, to award Anderson extra points for tackling the writer again.

This time it works. Partly by stripping out a lot, but there’s enough left to keep viewers’ minds buzzing. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob, a one-time anarchist/revolutionary and Sean Penn as a far-right army colonel determined to bring him down. Not because Col. Lockjaw is a law-and-order man. Oh, no. His reasons are much more personal. (One very-Pynchon touch is the outlandish names.)

In his revolutionary days, Bob was partnered with Perfidia Beverly Hills (played by Teyana Taylor), who ends up in witness protection, and they had a daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti) who is now seventeen. She lives with Bob in a remote community where he spends his days getting high. He’s been chased so relentlessly by the authorities that he and his friends have developed a sharp sense of paranoia, and when the warning signs come, Bob heeds them. At least as well as he can in his addled state. The plot has been updated from the book (feds chasing drug dealers) to today (feds chasing immigrants), and doesn’t suffer for it.

What so impresses me about DiCaprio’s work is that he’s able to set aside vanity and just be the character, rough edges and all. So many actors (male and female) persist in preening for the camera. They may be delivering the lines, but you can almost see them thinking, “How do I look? How do I look?” DiCaprio lets all that go. And Sean Penn? Creepy, creepy. Plus Benicio del Toro as a guy who knows how to get things done.

Surprisingly (it is Pynchon, after all), the story is pretty easy to follow, and while there’s some violence, Anderson doesn’t follow the Hollywood rule of maximum-to-the-ridiculous fire-power. Some of the strongest scenes are the quietist. It’s a story about people on the fringes, and many kinds of unraveling (security) blankets are out there. I won’t give away any of the plot. See it, and decide for yourself.

Nice music choices too, though I’ll never hear the Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy” the same way again. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 95%; audiences 85%.

The Railway Conspiracy by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan

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Second in this talented team’s genre mashup, The Railway Conspiracy builds on the characters introduced in last year’s The Murder of Mr. Ma. Set in London in 1924, the series’ main characters are Judge Dee Ren Jie, based on a real-life Tang Dynasty jurist and the traditions of Sherlock Holmes; Lao She, a university professor who plays Watson to Dee’s Holmes; Sergeant Hoong, owner of a shop selling Chinese goods, and the man you want with you when there’s a fight brewing; and Jimmy Fingers, whose business tends more to monkey but whose acquaintanceship with the London underworld comes in handy.

In this story, three great powers—Russia, Japan, and a power-hungry Chinese warlord are vying for control of the railways being developed in China. The precarious state of the Chinese Nationalist government and the persistent growth of the Chinese Communist party are ripe for political turmoil. Rumors of a conspiracy to take over the railways swirl about, including at the elegant dinner table of Madam Wu Ze Tian, to whom Dee, uncharacteristically, seems to be forming an attachment.

The next morning, one of the dinner party guests is dead. Bodies begin to pile up, and Dee and Lao must figure out how the deaths are connected and who is responsible. All they seem to have in common is an interest in the railway politics playing out several thousand miles east.

Rozan and Nee’s evocation of 1920s London is charming. Lots of cabs; lots of walking. The authors make especially good use of Dee’s ability to impersonate the Victorian folkloric character, Spring-heeled Jack. Lots of martial arts prowess is on display—perhaps a bit too much near the story’s climax—but it’s easy to follow. Jimmy Fingers always provides some humor, and Lao’s self-deprecating style doesn’t mask his substantial contribution to their investigations. The London constabulary is a source of both help and, as often, shortsighted decisions.

If Nee is well grounded in visualizing superheroes, Rozan is an award-winning writer of detective and crime fiction. Together their books are pure fun—Adventures with a capital A. Cultural insights along the way add spice.

Four times a year I send a short e-newsletter with the best in what I’m reading and viewing, news about my own writing, and other interesting tidbits. Subscribe with this link and receive a pdf of three award-winning short stories!

Merging Media Streams

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An article by John Koblin in yesterday’s New York Times says the days of separate subscriptions to multiple tv streaming service are waning. It’s just too complicated, too many passwords, too much keeping track. As a result, the bigger players are bundling popular services. Viewers need only one interface to find shows and movies on many different channels. For example, Amazon Prime Video users can watch HBO Max, Paramount+, etc.; Apple and other services are riding the aggregating train too.

According to research Koblin cites, nearly a third of all new streaming subscriptions are bought in bundles. So? And this will come as no surprise—media, tech, and cable companies are fighting to be the preferred one-stop shop. Media companies can offload marketing and other costs to the bundler. But they get smaller revenues because of the bundler’s cut. Amazon, for example, keeps from thirty to fifty percent of the subscription revenue. Netflix, as the largest subscription-supported company, with a wide variety of its own content, hasn’t needed to play with the bundlers so far.

I’ll have my eye out for where the streaming service MHz may land. We subscribe to it directly (along with a number of unbundled others, probably insanely duplicative). MHz offers foreign and international films and television series, usually with subtitles. We joined because it carries the whole Detective Montalbano series, set in Sicily. If you’ve missed this show, I’m sorry. A digression here: the producers scoured Sicily’s community theaters for good character actors. As a result, all the small parts (the landlady, the vamp, the car mechanic) are brilliant additions to the recurring cast.

We’ve watched the detective show Makari (Sicily again), and have started Imma Tataranni about a female deputy prosecutor in Calabria. All three shows have some over-the-top characters. They do involve murders but aren’t especially gory, and they include a fair bit of humor, created mostly by human ridiculousness, not snarky one-liners.

Another favorite is the French show, The Art of Crime, featuring a young Parisian police detective in the art crimes unit. He knows nothing about art (and cares less) and is teamed up with a young woman who works at the Louvre who knows everything and cares passionately. In a clever move, the artist involved (Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, etc.) “visits” the woman and they have interesting conversations. Weirdly charming. Her father is an eccentric Andy Warhol look-alike. We watched two episodes of the UK knock-off, Art Detectives, and weren’t impressed. In that one, the man is the art expert and the woman a former patrol officer. She’s smart, but most definitely second-fiddle. (Says a lot, right there.) No humor to speak of. We’re cutting our losses.

Whether you regard your televiewing as a buffet—one of this, one of that—or a full course meal of bundled choices, happy watching!

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The Seventh Floor

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Third in former CIA analyst David McCloskey’s riveting series of espionage thrillers, The Seventh Floor will grab your attention and hang onto it until the last page. Not only is the story a hair-raising exploration of international misdeeds, its underlying theme is how loyalty to friends, family, and country is tested.

In the book’s opening pages, two of the CIA’s Russian sources are dead. One had a message vital for the CIA, which he was to convey to American CIA officer Sam Joseph. Now Sam’s gone missing. The story’s protagonist is Sam’s boss and mentor Artemis Aphrodite Procter. Hard-nosed, hard-drinking, and profane, she heads the CIA unit Moscow X, a covert action program targeting Putin and his cronies,

Her unusual name was carefully crafted: Artemis (huntress) Aphrodite (love) and Procter (so similar to Proctor, someone who oversees students). The best expression of her hunting and caring sides is the row of nine stars tattooed between her shoulder blades, each representing one of her agents whose murder she’s avenged. (At CIA headquarters, in real life, a star is carved into a memorial wall for each agency officer killed in the line of duty. There are 140 of these stars, and the officers’ names are listed in an accompanying book. The names of 34 of them remain secret.)

A new CIA Director, Finn Gosford and his new staff occupy the agency’s seventh floor. He and his number two, Deborah Sweet, know Artemis and her best mates—Mac, Theo, and Gus—from their earliest days of training. Artemis and her colleagues have pegged Finn and Debs as true second-raters, and Finn and Debs hate them for it. The agency’s chief mole-hunter, named Petra, suspects this cluster of disasters may not be coincidental, but Finn and Debs refuse to investigate.

After several months of brutal interrogation and psychological torture, Sam Joseph is swapped for a Russian agent. He comes home to a very different organization. Petra and Artemis have been fired. And, in one of the most unexpected career turnarounds imaginable, she now works at a Florida alligator-themed amusement park. McCloskey is equally deft at conjuring a toxic workplace atmosphere, a dank underground cell in Moscow, and Artemis’s unsavory alligator-related tasks.

Sam visits Artemis in Florida and tells her what no one else knows. There is indeed a mole in CIA, but Sam’s Russian contact was assassinated before he could give pass on the name. With meticulous attention to tradecraft, Sam and Artemis develop a plan to identify the traitor. Risky, yeah. Worse, too close to Artemis’s inner circle.

While this action-packed story carries you along on a tidal wave of suspense, McCloskey makes his characters’ actions and choices totally plausible. Like real people, they have flaws and heroism, they’re capable of demonstrating loyalty and hiding betrayal.

This is a really good one!

Plums, Paprika, and Ghosts

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Plums, Paprika, and Ghosts, a wonderful book by my friend and fellow crime-writer A.J. Sidransky, is a success on many levels. This nonfiction book is part travelog, part family history, part culinary adventure, and part coming of age story, as seen through a father’s loving eyes, and it satisfies on many levels.

I particularly liked the author’s writing style. It was as if he and I were sitting at a tiny outdoor café table somewhere in Hungary and, over a plate of cherry strudel (not apple for me), he was telling me a story. It’s that personal, immediate, and written from the heart.

You don’t have to be Hungarian as he and I (not my Texas half) are to enjoy the touches of Old Europe he found, interspersed with enough history to make events unfolding there today more meaningful. He tells the story of his Jewish immigrant ancestors and how they came to America from Hungary and Slovakia (which was part of Hungary until after World War I) and made new lives here. Not all came, though, and many of those who clung to their homeland perished in the Holocaust.

My grandparents were likewise Hungarian and Slovakian, from the same part of the country, though they were Roman Catholic, and I treasured each detail and scene. But you needn’t share his family’s history to find a thrilling tale in his forebears’ determination, their courage in embarking on the long journey and starting their lives anew, their daily difficulties in a country whose language they didn’t speak. When Alan found remnants of the family’s homes and the businesses they left behind, it was compelling evidence of their past lives, like a lingering fingerprint in the community.

Alan had envisioned taking this trip ever since he became interested in family history several decades ago. Finally, as his son Jake graduated from law school, they decided to do it together. As a result, you see several Central European countries not just through Alan’s eyes, a man who has “lived it” vicariously for a long time, but through the eyes of his son Jake, who came of age more than a half-century after the Holocaust. Alan wasn’t sure Jake would be interested, but the young man’s observations proved him a perceptive, compassionate observer. In this way, it’s a story about the maturing of a father-son relationship that is heart-warming to read amidst all the tribulations and disconnects in the world, past and present.

Alan is also a trained chef, and you’ll be extra-pleased to find several family recipes he’s collected at the back of the book. They are just another way he transforms the abstractions of history and culture into something meaningful in daily life. Jó étvágyat!

P.S. I’m told my grandmother’s strudel dough was so thin, your could see the pattern of the cloth beneath it, as in this photograph. Alas, none of her six daughters did what Alan has done and preserved those precious recipes. — VW

Queen of Diamonds

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This is the third in Beezy Marsh’s trilogy inspired by a real-life female shoplifting gang that operated in London in the first half of the twentieth century. The first two books, Queen of Thieves and Queen of Clubs, deal with the gang’s activities during their heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, while this book describes how their leader—Alice Diamond—got her dubious start two decades earlier.

Alice, the future Queen of Diamonds, is an orphan working long hot hours in Pink’s Jam Factory. Aspiring to a better life, she shoplifts little indulgences for herself on her off-hours—silk stockings, colorful scarves, and the like. Alice’s story is interspersed with that of Mary Carr, another legendary leader of a real-life shoplifting gang whose career began several decades earlier. Mary grew up in one of London’s most notorious slums, Seven Dials.

In Marsh’s story, Mary is noticed by a Mayfair lady out slumming. She’s looking for subjects for her paintings of dirty, downtrodden, poverty-stricken children and finds Mary a perfect model for her art. By inviting the girl to her home and studio, the condescending Lady Harcourt exposes Mary to a completely different side of life, whetting her appetite for better things. Mary soon realizes she’s treated completely differently when she’s wearing Lady Harcourt’s daughter’s hand-me-downs than when dressed in her own dirty rags. From that point, there’s no going back for her.

Author Marsh evokes sympathy with her descriptions of the women’s sordid living conditions and unambitious, resentful family members. It isn’t surprising they aspire to glamour beyond the understanding of the people they grew up with. What’s remarkable is that both Mary and Alice are brash and determined enough to get it, with potential trouble with the authorities always right around the corner.

All that is fairly sociological. What about the story? It never flags and rests on the tremendous strength of the characters Marsh has created. She puts us right there, fingering those silks, decorating those bonnets, and running for our lives when the coppers appear.

An Irish Classic: the International

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hotel bar, barman
(photo: shankar s, creative commons license)

“If I had known history was to be written that Sunday in the International Hotel I might have made an effort to get out of bed before teatime,” writes Daniel Hamilton, an 18-year-old Belfast bartender and narrator of Glenn Patterson’s novel The International: A Novel of Belfast.

The history he refers to is the meeting to launch the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), an organization formed to focus attention on discrimination against Northern Ireland’s mostly Catholic nationalist minority. We call the succeeding three decades of violence and despair The Troubles, and The International “is the best book about the Troubles ever written,” says Irish author and Booker-Prize-winner Anne Enright.

Funny thing is, there’s almost no overt violence in this book, apart from the fact it’s set in a busy bar with lots of coming and going and football on the telly and political shenanigans where money changes hands and gay men and straight women hoping to meet someone and people who should have stopped drinking hours before ordering another and weddings upstairs in the hotel, at one of which the clergyman plays an accordion. In other words, enough latent violence in reserve to keep the average semi-sober person on his toes.

The principal action of the novel takes place during on Saturday evening, January 28, 1967, the night before the big meeting, larded with Danny Hamilton’s memories of other times and barroom encounters. His minutely observed portrayal of everyday life as seen from behind the bar is heartbreaking when, with the lens of hindsight, the reader knows how soon it will all be gone, sucked into a slowly unwinding catastrophe of bombs and gunfire.

The quote at the top of this piece opens the book, and these words about a barmen who was shot dead, Peter Ward, also age 18, help close it:

I can’t tell you much else about him, except that those who knew him thought the world of him. He is, I realise, an absence in this story. I wish it were not so, but guns do that, create holes which no amount of words can fill.

I wrote about this book and a visit to Princeton by Belfast author Glenn Patterson a few years ago, and it seems apt to return to it on St. Patrick’s Day, especially given his writing’s emphasis on history and politics and his deep sense of place. He said that “when history looks back at our present, it will see that what we thought we were at and what we were at, really, were entirely different.” When we think about our current moment in America, that is a sobering thought.

Here’s Glenn Patterson’s list of his top 10 books about Belfast, compiled in 2012.

More Thoughts on the Curse of the Curse-Word

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Is there an up-side? A few days ago, I wrote about how and why writers may choose to use curse words in their fiction, depending on plot and character. A recent Washington Post article by Sam Jones talked about the “value” of cursing under extreme circumstances. The author wrote, “If you stub your toe or slam your finger in a door, there’s a good chance the first thing out of your mouth is a four-letter word.”

The article points to academic studies showing that that class of taboo words and phrases “has long held a unique and colorful status in language behavior.” (“Language behavior” typifying the unique and uncolorful style of academic writing.) 

But although swearing is a near-universal feature of language, it is still considered taboo by many. This universality suggests that there are benefits derived from using the words, and one of those benefits is this: an increase in pain tolerance and decreased perception of pain. Swearing is “a drug-free, calorie-neutral, cost-free  means of self-help,” said Richard Stephens, a British psychology researcher. I’d add that it also attracts attention, so if you’re there bleeding or clutching your broken arm, someone is more likely to come help than if you mutter, “Ouch. That hurt.”

Swearing also “has been linked to bolstered social bonds, improved memory, and even an alleviation of the social pain of exclusion or rejection,” as well as increased strength. (All I can say is that the characters in the Academy Award-winning movie Anora must have the memories of elephants.) The increase in strength makes sense, because when someone swears because they’re in pain, their heart rate increases, adrenaline surges, and blood diverts to your muscles in the “fight or flight” response.

If you’re an author debating whether your character should be swearing so much, or if you’re a reader wondering the same, think about whether the circumstances are such that swearing is more than a habit; it’s a coping mechanism. Next maybe they’ll research whether constant swearing reduces the physiological impact and, for those who swear constantly, weakens that potential source of help just when they need it most.

Exposure: Navajo Crime-Solving

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This is the second in Ramona Emerson’s planned trilogy about Navajo crime scene photographer Rita Todacheene, a follow-on to Shutter, her impressive debut. Exposure again takes you on an intense ridealong with Rita, who uses her camera to meticulously and unflinchingly document the most gruesome tragedies. You may believe that the images themselves suggest clues to the commission of these murders, or you can accept Rita’s understanding, that the spirits of the dead are guiding her to see beneath the surface. Either way, you know she believes those ghosts are with her. (She and another popular indigenous author, Marcie Rendon, have discussed how their cultural backgrounds give them a different, intriguing way of seeing and interpreting the world, which I wrote about a few weeks back.)

Rita’s colleagues in the Albuquerque, New Mexico, police department are less-than-thrilled with her insights. They like simple solutions and quickly closed investigations. Worse, she’s not a cop. Their hostility has led to the requirement that she undergo psychological counselling to combat her “ghosts.” (Labelling a woman crazy in order to dismiss what she says is an old, old story, of course.) To keep busy while on this furlough, she’s been working in the office of the Medical Examiner, one person unable to dismiss her so lightly.

The story opens with Rita being unexpectedly called out to a murder scene. A mother, father, and their six children have been shot to death. The police believe the oldest son, alive, blood-spattered, and holding a gun, is the culprit. The spirits of the children, one in particular, lead Rita to a different theory of the crime.

In parallel with Rita’s story, alternating chapters recount the story of a man who, in childhood, witnessed the violent deaths of his family, followed by a back-breaking and spirit-quenching ordeal at a religious orphanage. An adult now, he’s a lay Brother doing outreach among the impoverished residents of Gallup, New Mexico. He’s determined to help the indigent people he encounters—alcoholic, too little food and shelter, and too much desperation. For them, wintertime is a deadly trial, and death too often comes from exposure (another meaning of the book’s title).

Meanwhile, the dead children so torment Rita that she returns home to her grandmother, who lives on the reservation, north of Gallup. There, perhaps, she can start to heal. As the clouds over her spirit begin to lift, she’s asked by a female Gallup police detective to help figure out a set of murders in the town.

Emerson so effectively describes the starkly beautiful country and the uncompromising weather, that you may need a hot cup of something as you read. She integrates Navajo traditions and beliefs into the modern tale in a way that gives science (the medical examiner), belief (the Navajo), and procedure (the police) their due. All three come together in Rita. But they are not easily reconciled, and her struggles make for a unique and compelling story.

I’m not personally a big believer in the supernatural, but I do believe unexplainable events happen. It’s Rita’s belief in the spirits that matters, though, and they have never led her astray.

The quality and sensitivity of the writing is much to be appreciated, and it persists despite the sometimes brutal subject matter. Shutter, Emerson’s 2023 debut novel, was nominated for numerous awards in the crime and mystery field, frequently appeared on “Best Books of the Year” lists, and received recognition from both the National Book Award and PEN Literary Awards programs. A Navajo (Diné) writer and filmmaker, she lives in Albuquerque.

Relatedly, the new season of Dark Winds, based on the Tony Hillerman characters, was scheduled to start 3/9 on AMC. We watched past seasons on Amazon Prime. Looking forward to the new one!

Oscars Live Action Shorts

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We squeezed in a trip to the local movie house to see the live action shorts the day before the awards ceremony. They were all fresh in our minds, and we both felt the Oscar went to the least interesting of them! Nevertheless, there’s something watchable for people of widely varying tastes. A characteristic common to four of the five nominees was that the ending was notably ambiguous. What happens next? We don’t know. Also, this year, none of them was particularly long. They’re in theaters so briefly, in case you missed them, here they are and how you can see them.

A Lien (USA)

A terrifying look at how America’s immigration crackdowns wield law and policy in unfair and dehumanizing ways. It involves a young couple—she’s American; he’s from Central America and has lived here for decades—visiting an immigration center with all their paperwork so he can get the green card he’s absolutely eligible for. What’s scariest is that you feel that such things happen not because the system is broken, but because it’s operating exactly as intended. (Watch it here.)

Anuja (India, USA)

Nine-year-old Anuja must choose between going to work in a sewing factory with her older sister and taking a test that may get her into a tuition-free school for gifted students. It’s a choice between the demands of the here-and-now versus the possibility of greater benefit in the future. The sisters—played by real-life street children—are charming. (Available for viewing on Netflix)

The Last Ranger (South Africa)

At a South African wildlife preserve, rangers engage in the dangerous job of protecting rhinoceroses from poachers. Stealing the horn is a lucrative business, and the film never lets you forget how noble are the rangers and how evil are the poachers. A young girl goes with the ranger one day. She’s charming, and the scenery is spectacular. (Apparently not available for streaming)

The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent (Croatia)

In 1993, a passenger train crossing Bosnia-Herzegovina is stopped by armed paramilitaries. They board, demanding to examine people’s papers. This conjures memories of every “escape from Nazi Germany” movie you ever saw. The people sharing a compartment with a man who admits he has no papers have to make choices, silence or courage. Based on the real-life Štrpci massacre and the death of Tomo Buzov, a former Yugoslav army officer. The film won the Short Film Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2024. (Watch it here.)

And now the winner: I’m Not a Robot (Belgium, Netherlands)

We see the action from the point of view of a woman working in the music business who fails her CAPTCHA test so many times her computer concludes she’s a robot. The absurdity of the situation spirals downward, as her grip on reality loosens. I wasn’t convinced. (See it here.)