Joe's View

Your faithful blogger is taking some time off for R&R, plus my annual search for the best crabcake on the Delmarva Peninsula (above).

I’ll be back on Sept. 13 to pick up where I left off. I’ll also be micro-blogging on Twitter while I’m away. You can follow my Twitter feed on this page or on Twitter at @Joesview.

I’ve already seen some interesting stuff this week that I want to report on when I get back, including the terrific Broadway musical “American Idiot” and an amazing DVD collection of the best (worst?) drive-in movies put out by the long-defunct Crown International Pictures in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s (remember “The Pom Pom Girls”?). Crown made the other cheapo drive-in movie manufacturer of that period — American International — look like Warner Bros.  

In my beach book bag for reading and reviewing is a new oversized volume about the legendary Manhattan bar-nightclub, Max’s Kansas City. Also, a photo-biography of jazz great Sonny Rollins, and “Winged Obsession,” the much-anticipated, book-length non-fiction debut of Easton mystery novelist Jessica Speart.  

Have a great Labor Day weekend and try to savor these last few days of summer!

The new Jonathan Franzen novel “Freedom” has been so extravagantly praised for so many weeks now that the actual appearance of the book in stores on Tuesday felt slightly anti-climactic.

Not since Pauline Kael started raving about Robert Altman’s “Nashville” way in advance of its 1975 release date has there been so much negative backlash against a piece of popular culture before the populace had a chance to sample it.

Kael was attacked by other critics who weren’t invited to a private rough cut screening by Altman and some of the reviews that appeared a few months later took a what’s-so-great-about-that stance in relation to The New Yorker critic’s hysterically positive piece.

“Freedom” wasn’t leaked to one or two favored critics. An Advance Readers Edition landed on my desk a few months ago and a finished copy arrived a few weeks back.

What has stirred all of the discussion was the decision by a few journals to go public with positive pieces well in advance of the official publication date.

The strong pieces in turn generated an outpouring of negativity from other novelists jealous of the attention Franzen received with no apparent effort on his part.

I wrote in this space last week about other authors — such as bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult — who have been complaining about the two positive reviews (prior to publication) in The New York Times, the Time magazine cover story on Franzen a few weeks ago, and Sam Anderson’s New York magazine rave even before that.

Now that the book is available to be read I hope some of the craziness will subside because you only have to get 40 or 50 pages into “Freedom” to see why magazines and newspapers decided to jump the gun — this is one of those fabulous zeitgeist-defining novels that is both enormous fun to read and illuminating about life in our country over the past few decades.

By studying one American family closely from the 1980s through 2004, Franzen has exposed and examined our culture in a big, entertaining book in the vein of “Bonfire of the Vanities” and the same writer’s 2001 novel, “The Corrections.”

There’s even a bit of James Michener — believe it or not — in the way that changing geography and wildlife play a central role in the story (hence the rather strange cover that doesn’t mean much until you are deep into “Freedom”).

The tone of many of the other writers’ complaints about the advance praise was that once again a “literary” novel was being held up as a superior object in a culture dominated by pop romances and mysteries.

But there is nothing pretentious about “Freedom” — it’s a smart page turner that keeps shifting narrators so that we get the feeling of being taken inside the life of a family and being able to examine it from almost every perspective.

Patty and Walter Berglund — and their two children — live as flesh-and-blood individuals on every page, but they also serve as amusing and poignant stand-ins for a whole swath of American society that has been in permanent upheaval for the last 20 years and was given an extra couple of jolts by 9/11 and the subsequent financial collapse.

Certainly, there are ideas and behavior in the novel that can be debated, but the first thing readers need to do is get “Freedom” and experience the great pleasure Franzen affords us in delivering such a sheerly entertaining epic.

The 1964 Stanley Kubrick film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” is in my all-time top-ten movie list — or maybe even my top-five, depending on the mood I’m in.

The film remains the funniest and most sophisticated satire ever produced by a Hollywood studio. And, “Dr. Strangelove” earned big bonus points for addressing/mocking the greatest fear of the populace at the time it was made — i.e. an Earth-destroying nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

It’s very hard to imagine today’s Columbia Pictures — or any other major studio — releasing a comedy about al Qaeda or the collapse of the global financial markets.

Anyhow, over the past five decades, I thought I had seen every production still connected with the production of “Dr. Strangelove” but my pal Drew Taylor — of The Fairfield Weekly and the Media Wave video store in Fairfield — recently emailed me this rare color still shot during the making of the black-and-white feature.

Director Stanley Kubrick is in the wheel chair occupied in the film by the diabolical Dr. Strangelove and Peter Sellers is standing in his guise as the crazed and heavily accented military strategist said to be based in part on Henry Kissinger (years before he joined forces with President Richard Nixon).

In this particular case, it is sadly true that they don’t make them like they used to.

In an age in which pollsters and media pundits seem to demand snap judgements on even the thorniest issues — are you for or against the mosque at Ground Zero? — the new Laura Lippman novel, “I’d Know You Anywhere” (William Morrrow), revels in complexity and doubt.

Lippman first made a name for herself with a wonderful series of mystery novels featuring Baltimore journalist Tess Monaghan. The books quickly became popular with readers and widely admired by critics in a very crowded field.

Lippman wrote her first seven books while she still held down her day job as a reporter, soaking up the color and controversies in her beloved Baltimore.

Without showing any signs of tiring of Tess and more traditional genre fiction, Lippman left daily journalism behind and began making forays into what the publishing industry calls “stand-alones,” crafting non-Tess stories that were even richer — and, yes, more troubling — than the mystery novels.

“I’d Know You Anywhere” is as engrossing as any page-turning thriller, but in the course of telling her story, the novelist allows a reader the freedom to hash out one of the most troubling contemporary issues — whether or not America should continue to endorse capital punishment.

The book starts by introducing us to a happily married woman, with two children, living in a Washington, D.C. suburb (of course, this being a Laura Lippman novel, the protagonist has deep ties to Baltimore).

Eliza Benedict would appear to have everything going for her, but by the end of chapter one we learn that Eliza went through a living nightmare in her teen years — she was abducted by a serial rapist/killer with whom she was forced to travel for several months. She escaped death for reasons that were not clear to the girl or the authorities.

In the present-day scenes, the perp, Walter Bowman, has long since been captured and convicted and is awaiting the carrying out of his death sentence.

But the man writes to Eliza, hoping to communicate with her again before he is executed.

The novel begins shifting perspective — giving us Walter’s “side” of the story and taking us into the life of an eccentric woman who is desperately trying to re-open communication between the man on death row and Eliza.

Lippman also begins to take us back to the months in 1985 when Eliza was Walter’s captive and he was nearing the end of his crime spree.

“I’d Know You Anywhere” becomes a scary psychological drama as we travel in and out of the minds of the victim and the perpetrator and some of the people around them.

There is a very strong thread of suspense running through the novel — we don’t really find out what Walter and his ally are looking for from Eliza until the final pages. But, Lippman gives us something much bigger than a whodunit or even a “whydunit” like Ruth Rendell’s icy “A Judgement in Stone,” in which the British novelist tells us who the victims and the murderer are in the first sentence.

“I’d Know You Anywhere” is a brilliant, multi-faceted portrait of a culture that can’t make up its mind about the present or the past — and, perhaps, with very good reason.

The gimmicks and the super-villains in the James Bond movies were subjected to satire almost immediately after the series took off with “Goldfinger” in 1964 and the affectionate mockery continued through the Austin Powers send-ups with Mike Myers.

But, no one has satirized the Sean Connery Bonds with the wit and style of French writer-director Michael Hazanavicious in the two movies he has made with actor Jean Dujardin about the 1960s era agent known as OSS 117.

The pictures are technically a contination of a series of serious French spy movies of the 1950s and ’60s — featuring agent OSS 117 — but Dujardin is clearly doing a letter-perfect parody of Bond as played by Connery in the first five pictures.

“OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies” was a huge hit in France in 2006 and the follow-up film, “OSS 117: Lost in Rio” was equally successful in 2009.

Sadly, due to the growing resistance to subtitles in this country, neither film did much business in very limited theatrical release here.

On Tuesday, Music Box Films Home Entertainment is releasing “OSS 117: Lost in Rio” on DVD and I’m happy to report that it is even funnier — and more wickedly satiric — than the first movie.

Some reviewers have compared the “OSS 117” movies to the Austin Powers pictures, which is partially valid — the French films are full of low-comedy and slapstick similar to what Mike Myers did in his three spoofs.

What gives the French films an extra kick, however, is the sharp satire of the political and sexual content of the early Connery films.

Those pre-feminist, pre-cultural sensitivity movies contained casual racism and sexism that inspire some of the strongest moments in “Lost in Rio” starting with an opening sequence in which most of Agent OSS 117’s Asian female playmates are massacred in a gunfight and the spy picks up right where he left off with the one surviving woman.

“Lost in Rio” also has a lot of fun with James Bond’s bizarre resistance to the 1960s youth and pop cultures (in “Goldfinger,” for instance, Connery makes a crack that the only way to listen to The Beatles is with ear-muffs!).

On his adventure in Rio, the spy finds himself with a bunch of hippies on a beach who slip him some LSD — Dujardin plays this scene brilliantly and it ends with a terrific sex joke involving one of those split-screen montages that were so popular in the 1960s.

“Lost in Rio” pokes merciless fun at the “casual wear” sported by the ostensibly heterosexual spy when he got out of his suit to relax at a beach or poolside in pictures like “Thunderball” and “Dr. No.” Dujardin wears a short-short terry cloth robe and a genital-hugging bathing suit that are masterpieces of comic costume design.

Dujardin does an awesome job of both embodying and parodying the way Sean Connery played Bond.

Dujardin is a comic actor with real charisma so it is not surprising to learn that he has quickly become a major box office draw in his native country.

Dujardin’s performance as agent OSS 117 was so widely admired that he received a 2006 Cesar nomination — the French equivalent of the Oscar — a tribute that rarely goes to comic work.

The actor moved into film after achieving great popularity as a stage performer somewhat in the vein of Eric Bogosian or Lily Tomlin — one of the characters he presented in his stage act, the surfer Brice from Nice, served as the basis for a hit 2005 film that was never theatrically released in this country.

In each of the “OSS 117” movies, Dujardin manages to sustain a parody performance for a whole movie. I haven’t seen anything quite like it since the glory days of Peter Sellers who was able to erase the line between “comic” and “actor” in films like “Lolita,” “Dr. Strangelove” and the Inspector Clouseau series.

The advance rave reviews and, especially, the Time magazine cover story on Jonathan Franzen have prompted an interesting backlash from other novelists.

Instead of being happy that a novel has been deemed worthy of the sort of press treatment accorded to movies or TV shows in 2010, Twitter and Facebook have been filled with barely supressed writer jealousy over the way that the mainstream media have been gushing over a novel that isn’t even in bookstores yet (“Freedom” goes on sale Tuesday).

Bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult (below) seems to be the one who is most upset about the situation. She is especially annoyed by the fact that The New York Times has already published two rave reviews of “Freedom.”

“It is my personal opinion that yes, the Times favors white male authors,” Picoult told the The NYTPicker blog.

“That isn’t to say someone else might get a good review — only that if you are white and male and living in Brooklyn you have better odds, or so it seems.”

Novelist and agent Jason Pinter wrote a terrific piece for the Huffington Post earlier this week in which Picoult and another hugely popular novelist, Jennifer Weiner, vented their frustration over the way that commercial novelists — and commercial women novelists, in particular — are treated by the media.

Weiner is a terrific writer — and produces one of the best feeds on Twitter — and she wisely steers around attacking “white male authors” in favor of talking about the “double standard” faced by novelists such as herself.

“I think it’s a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it’s literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it’s romance, or a beach book — in short, it’s something unworthy of a serious critic’s attention.”

Compounding the irony of this situation — when it comes to The New York Times, specifically — is the fact that the paper’s top reviewer (Michiko Kakutani) and major back-up reviewer (Janet Maslin) are both women.

Weiner: “The only mention my books have ever gotten from The Times have been occasional single sentence and, if I’m lucky, dependent clause in a Janet Maslin flyover piece: ‘Look! Here’s a bunch of books that have nothing in common but spring release dates and lady authors!’ I don’t write literary fiction — I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about…life in America today. Do I think I should be getting all of the attention that Jonathan ‘Genius’ Franzen gets? Nope. Would I like to be taken at least as seriously as a Jonathan Tropper or a Nick Hornby? Absolutely.”

Perhaps the rising tension within the publishing industry — is the book dying? will devices like the Kindle and the nook really take off? what happens to the traditional business model when bookstores disappear? — is starting to get to even the most commercially successful novelists.

The writers are fighting among themselves rather than banding together to face the looming challenges.

Last week, one publishing industry executive speculated that a total switch to books-on-devices such as the Kindle would mean the end of the highly remunerative sales figures represented by the average reader who buys five or six paperbacks a year. Would those people, the exec asked, purchase a device that they would only use a few times a year?

Tomorrow, the ace programmer Bruce Goldstein at Manhattan’s Film Forum is neatly shifting from a two-week tribute to the 3D movies of the 1950s to a 10-day series devoted to the B-movies made during the late 1950s and early 1960s by producer-director William Castle.

If you are not a baby boomer, the name will probably mean nothing to you unless you happen to notice Castle’s producer credit on Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968).

50 years ago, however, Castle’s name meant fun and (mild) scares to the kids who loved horror movies.

A master of selling sizzle rather than steak, Castle thought up a new gimmick for each of his pictures, from $1,000 life insurance policies on anyone who died of fright during “Macabre” (1958) to a cheapo screen innovation for “The Tingler” (1959) that Castle called “Percepto” (it turned out to be a vibrating device placed under select theater seats that would go off during especially intense scenes).

Movie-mad kids were almost always suckered into seeing the latest Castle epic by the producer’s prodigious hype, but I can still remember talking with my very young friends about how ripped-off we felt by the cheap sub-3D gimmick Castle used for a few scenes in “13 Ghosts” (1960). Castle made me feel jaded at the age of 9!

I find the Castle movies unwatchable now, but understand why some of my friends in their 20s and 30s get a kick out of the primitive foolishness of the storytelling and acting. Alsom they are obviously amazed by the old-time movie marketing gimmicks that disappeared with the arrival of mass releasing of movies in multiplexes.

As I got older and watched some of the pictures on television, Castle’s hubris became less amusing in the introductions he filmed for each of his movies — he clearly believed he was in the same ballpark as Alfred Hitchcock. And yet, his 1961 “Homicidal” is a shameless quickie rip-off of the previous year’s Hitchcock smash “Psycho.”

Castle made a pile of money from his trashy flicks but faced a rather embarrasing episode in the late 1960s after he snagged the movie rights to the Ira Levin bestseller, “Rosemary’s Baby.” Paramount wouldn’t dream of letting him direct the major film they envisioned. After studio chief Robert Evans (below right on the set with Mia Farrow and Castle) brought Polanski on board, the Polish director would have nothing to do with Castle, who became the producer in name only.

Castle did press for a cameo in the hit horror movie — he pops up outside the phone booth where Farrow has one of her strongest scenes.  

Two years before he died in 1977, Castle had an even more notable cameo as the sleazy Hollywood operator who is sitting next to Julie Christie at the Election Night party in “Shampoo.” He’s the one whose grubby come-on prompts Christie to utter one of the most notorious movie lines of the 1970s (i.e. what she would like to do to her ex-boyfriend played by Warren Beatty).

Somewhere, Castle must be smiling in reaction to the idea of Manhattan’s most prestigious non-profit art house honoring him with a retrospective.

HBO announced recently that the cable network’s rancid Hollywood insider sitcom “Entourage” will be coming back for a seventh season — the show’s final season, thank God! — but there has been no word on whether or not we will ever see a third season of the hilarious “Flight of the Conchords.”

HBO Home Video teased and/or depressed fans on Tuesday with the release of a new boxed set they are calling “The Complete Collection” (implying that the show is over).

The new release packages the first two seasons — 12 half-hour episodes from season one and the 10 episodes that made up season two — along with the 2005 HBO special that launched the Conchords (aka Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie) in this country after a sizeable cult following had formed in the musicians’ home country of New Zealand.

The two artists managed to turn their hilariously whimsical folks songs into a narrative series about their adventures trying to make it in downtown Manhattan (the mix of reality and fiction is something like the Larry David series “Curb Your Enthusiasm”).

Clement (above, left) and McKenzie had been performing a comic musical act they call “Flight of the Conchords” for more than a decade.

It was the buzz from U.S. comedy festivals and TV appearances by Jemaine and Bret that led HBO to produce a first batch of episodes three years ago.

Although much of the musical material was written in New Zealand a decade ago, it’s a tribute to Clement and McKenzie’s skills as comedy writers that the tunes fit so seamlessly into stories that take place in New York City and seem so true to the lives of struggling young artists there.

Each episode contains a musical number in which the “Conchords” escape into a fantasy world of endless romantic opportunities and commercial success.

The HBO series benefits almost as much as “Sex and the City” did from on-location filming that captures the spirit of the city. In the case of “Conchords, however, no one is buying Manolo Blahniks or spending weekends in the Hamptons — the show takes us into a much lower-rung New York City of shared dumpy apartments, crappy jobs taken to support artistic work, and a life lived so close to the financial edge that using a debit card to make a purchase for $2.79 can trigger an economic disaster.

“Conchords” gently satirizes the Manhattan music scene, with the two singer-songwriters landing gigs in the tiniest and most far-flung clubs and finding themselves the object of a female stalker who is their only real fan (comedienne Kristen Schaal who is brilliant the role of Mel). Their manager is a fellow New Zealander, Murray Hewitt (Rhys Darby), who works in the tiny N.Z. consulate and who appears to know nothing about the music business.

One of the show’s running jokes — in seasons one and two — is the way that these folks from New Zealand come in at the very bottom of the vast New York City immigrant community (most people think they’re from Australia or England).

“Flight of the Conchords” is the sort of quirky comedy that sneaks up on a viewer — with some gags as broad as the side of a barn and others virtually subliminal (only to be be picked up in a second viewing). The mix of slapstick and sophistication — and the oddball musical numbers — sometimes recalls the Monty Python troupe. You definitely have to watch more than one episode to get on the show’s wavelength.

Season two was aired two years ago. There has been no official word on a third season — HBO said last year it would like one, Bret and Jemaine say they doubt they can come up with enough new musical material.

The two seasons are classic TV comedy but it would be a shame if such a terrific show died after only 22 episodes.