Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for July, 2009

Spying in the post 9/11 world

Thursday, July 30, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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Remember when the “Iron Curtain” fell and book columnists wondered if that would mean the end of the line for great espionage writers like John LeCarre and Len Deighton?

Well, here we are 20 years later and not only is the spy novel back, it seems to be expanding. (The genre is hot in movies again, too, with recent announcements of Ron Howard adapting Robert Ludlum’s “The Parsifal Mosaic” and Steven Spielberg taking an option on the old Matt Helm novels of the 1950s and ’60s.) The failure of our own intelligence agencies to stop the 9/11 attacks demonstrated the fatal limits of organizations that had been built on an us-against-them pattern in which spies and counterspies focused almost entirely on the U.S.-Soviet conflict for a half century.

Americans were shocked to learn that the CIA had been unable to infiltrate Al Qaida because, we were told, the language and the culture were too complex. Of course, young American civilian John Walker Lindh (above) made hash of the CIA’s claim by getting within shooting distance of Osama bin Laden without any special training and on his own dime (I still think it might have been better to use Lindh to train agents instead of having him spend the next two decades in prison). rules

Now that it is clear we are in a very dangerous and ever-changing post-Iron Curtain world, the need for intelligence is greater than ever and readers are gobbling up terrific novels by contemporary writers such as Daniel Silva and Steve Martini (and old master LeCarre has found lots of things to write about over the past two decades as well).

I just added Christopher Reich (below) to my list of favorite espionage thriller writers after reading last year’s “Rules of Deception” and the new “Rules of Vengeance” to prepare for an interview earlier in the week (Reich will be featured in the “Winning Authors” series at Mohegan Sun on Aug. 5).

Reich has found a way to add romantic and sexual conflict to the genre through his husband-and-wife team of Jonathan and Emma Ransom. In the first book, they are happily vacationing from their work for Doctors Without Borders when Emma appears to die in a skiing accident.

Jonathan soon finds out that the woman he married and the “real” Emma are two entirely different creatures — Emma’s life with Jonathan is revealed to be an elaborate cover for her work as an agent for a top-secret U.S. intelligence group known as “Division.”

Reich mixes the political realism of LeCarre with the one-thing-after-another dizziness of a James Bond movie. The books also contain echoes of the great old British spy TV series “The Avengers” in which agent Emma Peel was constantly saving her male partner John Steed through a combination of superior intelligence and acute martial arts skills.

The first “Rules” deals with tensions in the Middle East and a plot to start a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran; the new book centers on the implications of the political instability in Russia with the planned assassination of a Russian politician in London serving as the story’s trigger mechanism.

But, the novels are built on the sexy, mysterious and dangerous relationship between Jonathan and Emma — Reich adds strong emotion to a genre that is often dominated by action and technology.

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‘In the Loop’: grading on the curve

Wednesday, July 29, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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Film critics tend to get a little punchy by midsummer.

Who wouldn’t feel the stress of sitting through one overblown special effects kiddie picture after another?

The late July/early August madness of professional movie watchers is the only explanation for the mostly rave reviews for “In the Loop,” a rather toothless British satire — a leftover from the Bush II/Blair era — that some critics have been comparing with “Dr. Strangelove.”

There are a few lively performances in the movie — James Gandolfini (above) is always fun to watch and he’s good here as an angry military man — but “In the Loop” is nothing more than a feature-length expansion of a British TV series called “The Thick of It” about a ranting Scottish politco named Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi).

The movie is more about the personal lives of government people on both sides of the Atlantic than the excesses of the real power brokers in London and Washington, D.C. Clearly worried about the end of Bush/Blair, writer-director Armando Iannucci has cooked up a generic contemporary plot about the eagerness of desk-bound politicians and generals to launch wars in foreign countries.

During much of “In the Loop” I felt like I was watching a David Mamet rewrite of “The West Wing” — a glossy soap with F-bombs going off in every other line of dialogue.

The Capaldi character overuses profanity to the point where we stop taking him seriously — would a Brit media pro really storm around Washington verbally assaulting everyone the way the Malcolm Tucker character does? Apparently, this guy doesn’t realize that his antics would be recorded by camera phones all over D.C. and end up on every wonky Website in the U.S. within minutes.

So few smart satires reach the big screen that the 1964 Stanley Kubrick nuclear war satire “Dr. Strangelove” still pretty much stands alone. It took real guts for Kubrick and Columbia Pictures to put out a black comedy about nuclear brinksmanship at the height of the cold war.

Shopping as theater (or beach porn?)

Tuesday, July 28, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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When some in-the-know friends were visiting Manhattan from the Heartland recently, they told me that the first thing on their sightseeing list was the new Hollisters store at Houston St. and Broadway.

“What’s that?,” I asked.

They looked at me like I had just fallen off a turnip truck before explaining that the new flagship store of the Abercrombie & Fitch subsidiary was supposed to be setting new standards in retailing as entertainment.

Lower Broadway has become so clogged with stores and shoppers that it’s hard to believe the area was — not all that long ago — a funky haven for artists and art galleries.

I can still remember visiting the neighborhood in the late 1970s and staying in the very primitive loft of a friend’s dancer sister. This was just before a series of New York-based films, starting with “An Unmarried Woman” (1978), made SoHo more widely fashionable.

Before you knew it, the rundown lofts were transformed into expensive condominiums and the ground floor galleries were turned into boutiques.

Lately, the ground-floor boutiques have been replaced with giant stores filling whole buildings.

Kids and their parents who used to come to the city for cultural purposes now spend the day browsing at downtown retail meccas such as the new Topshop (the British version of H&M that features duds by supermodel Kate Moss).

Hollisters is something else entirely — an environment that makes shopping feel like being inside a movie, complete with pounding music and surf sounds and staff who appear to have been “cast” for their physical attributes rather than hired for their expertise at selling clothes.

Hollisters was created in 2000 by A&F as a completely fictional entity with a made-up founder — J.M. Hollister, who supposedly opened his first store in 1922. Actually, the whole thing is just a way of pitching cheaper versions of the A&F style to teens.

The walls in the store play a live video feed from Huntington Beach, California, to provide customers with a flavor of the place where old J.M. opened his first non-existant store.

The greeters at the door are flip-flop-wearing pseudo-lifeguards and everywhere you go inside the store there are beach boys and beach babes who appear to be there simply for local color.

The whole scene felt surreal to me — why go to New York to pretend to be in Southern California? — but kids in the 14 to 18 demo targeted by Hollisters/A&F looked like they were having a great time spending lots of money on standard-looking casual wear.

‘Orphan’: Stupid Americans!

Monday, July 27, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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Various groups representing orphans and adoption agencies protested the Warner Bros. horror picture, “Orphan,” before it opened Friday, but the movie is too dumb to merit such serious attention.

The poor souls who see the Z-grade flick are not going to think any less of 9-year-old Russian orphans — a last reel “surprise” deconstructs the movie’s whole premise in a ludicrous manner — but I was offended by the sheer stupidity of the Connecticut family in the movie (not to mention the heroine’s wacky psychologist and the dopey nun running the orphanage where the little monster is found).

I can imagine audiences in Russia — and Estonia (part of the twist ending that I won’t reveal here) — clutching their sides laughing at the idiocy of the well-heeled Americans who take such a suspicious little girl into their home.

The kid who calls herself Esther wears bizarre vaguely Eastern European clothes that must have gone out of fashion there 40 years ago (even the villagers in “Borat” were better dressed). And the girl never removes the thick neck and wrist bands that add to her weird look. Where in the world does a poor orphan girl find these clothes in suburban Connecticut!

It’s a sign of how bad things are for really good actors that two of New York City’s finest — Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga — were reduced to taking roles in this unsavory little dud.

Why would a 15-year-old boy kill himself?

Thursday, July 23, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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That’s the question that is posed but never answered in Dana Perry’s extraordinary new documentary, “Boy Interrupted,” that is being screened at the Bantam Cinema Saturday at noon, in advance of its TV premiere on HBO Aug. 3.

Evan Perry left behind a lucid suicide note on his laptop computer before he jumped to his death from his family’s New York City apartment in 2005. The boy’s commitment to killing himself was spelled out in a shockingly cool style but the act was at odds with the bright, witty and charismatic teen loved by family and friends.

In recent years, there has been a wave of quite amazing books written by major literary figures about fresh catastrophes in their lives — including Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” and Christopher Buckley’s “Losing Mum and Pup.” But I can’t recall another case in which an artist has tried to come to terms with a tragedy through the use of a filmmaker’s tools.

Perry puts herself and her family on the line in “Boy Interrupted.”

By going into a public arena with such sensitive material, she has opened herself up to charges of exploitation — Didion faced the same thing after the first wave of positive press for “Magical Thinking.”

I think most viewers will find value and unusual intelligence in the documentary, however. The mystery of what is really going on under the surface with a troubled friend or a loved one applies to all of us, whether or not we’ve known a suicide.

“Boy Interrupted” also leaves a viewer wondering what sort of help can be given to someone who is depressed from earliest childhood.

The movie is grueling but that may be partly due to the fact that we are so unused to having such primal material dealt with in public. “Boy Interrupted” also works as a memorial to a kid who was clearly special to a wide circle of people who will never understand what happened to him.

(The noon screening Saturday at the Bantam Cinema will be followed by a question-and-answer session with the filmmaker. For more information, go to www.bantamcinema.com)

A legal thriller with a difference

Wednesday, July 22, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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The just-published “Guardian of Lies” (William Morrow) is the tenth novel Steve Martini has written about the San Diego attorney Paul Madriani, but this is no ordinary legal drama.

The writer has shifted gears in a big way, moving his wry hero out of the courtroom and into the center of a breathless high-stakes thriller in the Lee Child vein.

The book alternates first-person sections featuring Madriani with omniscient narrator chapters in which we see a much bigger picture — involving nuclear terrorism — that gets scarier with each page that is turned.

As a newcomer to Martini, I appreciated the fact that “Guardian of Lies” works as a stand-alone experience.

The book has all of the elements of a good thriller — a wonderful protagonist, a terrifying villain (a hitman known as the “Mexecutioner”), lots of unexpected humor, and an author who clearly knows how things work in the world of politics and law.

The story opens with a contract killing in San Diego — that scary “button man” referred to above is sent to murder a rich San Diego man who might have vital information that could threaten a coalition of drug dealers and terrorists. The target has been keeping a Costa Rican woman named Katia under virtual house arrest — she may be the source of the photographs everyone is looking for.

In a terrific opening, Katia plots her escape from the house just as the legendary assassin — Liquida — is creeping in to kill her rich jailer. Katia sneaks out without crossing Liquida’s path but soon finds herself as the top suspect in the murder.

After this tightly focused opening, the book expands to the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. and Latin America as is becomes clear that the mystery surrounding Katia has global implications.

Martini shows a respect for the work of the FBI that is rare in crime fiction and movies. One of the strongest characters in the novel is the FBI’s executive assistant director for the National Security Branch — Zeb Thorpe — who has to cope with D.C. politics as well as security issues. When we meet Zeb, he’s in the middle of helping to confirm a new FBI director and is sick of the whole scene:

“As far as Thorpe was concerned, the political parties that occupied the House and the Senate reminded him of two retarded Siamese gorillas sharing the same brain. Together with their feeders and handlers on Wall Street, they’d spent a decade toying with the national economy, trying to get everybody in the country into houses they couldn’t afford. When this set fire to the national economy, crashing markets, destroying whole industries, and generally torching the entire circus, they’d tripled the national debt in order to smother the flames with money.”

Getting out of the courtroom has freed Martini to give us a thriller with broad implications and a very high entertainment quotient.

‘Pittsburgh’: decent movie or diminished expectations?

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” arrives on DVD next week as seriously damaged goods.

Shot in 2006 and screened at the Sundance Film Festival last year, the picture received mostly withering reviews and was barely released in this country.

The trade papers Variety and The Hollywood Reporter liked the movie, but if you look at the Rotten Tomatoes Web site, “Mysteries” gets a pitiful 14 percent rating and the reviews there include words like “stillborn” and “clumsy.”

Earlier this year, the picture had a kiss-of-death booking at that downtown Manhattan direct-to-video graveyard — the Sunshine Theater — no doubt to fulfill a DVD contract that insisted ”Mysteries” be theatrically released somewhere.

In last month’s Vogue, leading lady Sienna Miller semi-trashed the film as something she wouldn’t do now — she was depressed at the time, she explained to her interviewer, and wanted to get away from the “media intrusion” of her life as a New York City and London fashion plate.

Through all of this, I found it hard to believe that a film version of Michael Chabon’s fine debut novel, starring Sienna Miller, Jon Foster, Peter Sarsgaard and Nick Nolte, could be as bad as most of the reviewers suggested.

I popped an advance screener into the DVD player last week and expected to hit the “off” button ten or fifteen minutes in.

My first surprise was the beauty of the cinematography and the other strong production values of this 1980s era coming-of-age tale about recent college graduate Art Bechstein (Foster) who spends a summer in Pittsburgh working in a menial job, pondering the next stage of his life. Dad (Nolte) is a gangster who only comes through town once in a while to take Art out to a fancy catch-up dinner.

Miller and Sarsgaard play a troubled but very charismatic couple who become Art’s friends for the summer. The young man finds himself drawn to both friends and he acts on the sexual attraction (the casual bisexuality of the Chabon story might be one of the things that turned some early moviegoers off — it’s an unusual development in an otherwise fairly standard summer-I-became-a-man remembrance piece).

Rawson Marshall Thurber’s direction seemed solid to me and the three leads are very good. Sienna Miller has had a troubled film career to date, with her best work going largely unseen in flop indies like this one (and the 2006 bomb “Factory Girl” in which she gave a very good performance as the Andy Warhol “superstar” Edie Sedgwick).

Maybe if I had gone out and paid $12.50 to see “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” last winter I might have felt gyped. But at home on TV it was a perfectly acceptable viewing experience with memorable acting.

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In the silence of my lonely room

Monday, July 20, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

nicko I saw a very impressive new play, “Songs & Statues,” at the Stella Adler Studio in Manhattan Saturday night.

The piece by Peter Nickowitz (left) was developed over the last year at the famed acting studio as part of the Fairfield native’s position as playwright-in-residence.Since there were only two weekends of performances and the play was being done at an acting school, I expected some sort of modest semi-staged reading, but “Songs & Statues” was given a very polished production in a small theater space at the studio. The production elements were impressive, but it was the play and the performances that made the night so special.

Nickowitz takes us back to 1958 suburban Connecticut and into the life of a Jewish family struggling to fit into the community. The father (Tom Oppenheim) commutes in and out of Manhattan where he is expecting a major promotion. In anticipation of the added income, Frank has allowed his wife Ann (Angela Vitale) to hire a maid to help out with the housework. The maid Helen (Elizabeth Shepherd) is a recent Hungarian immigrant.

Ann’s mother, Rachel (Elizabeth Parrish), is a German Jew who worries that her daughter and her family is losing its heritage through assimilation. Rachel dotes on her grandson Day (Chase Fein) who is home for a visit from the Massachusetts prep school he attends.

Nickowitz takes us into what appears to be a happy and prosperous family of 50 years ago — reveling in the good life of the Eisenhower era — but then he reveals the cracks just under the surface.

We get to see that the family is not as comfortable in Connecticut as they might appear to be. Anti-Semitism isn’t overt in their upscale community, but it is still all around them — Frank’s promotion is not as certain as he thinks it to be and his Jewishness is a key factor.

The beloved Day wants to be a sculptor, but Frank wants him to plan a career in the business world. The boy also turns out to be under a cloud at his school because of a “decadent” sculpture.

The shocking and tragic events of the second act are triggered by a seemingly innocuous dinner guest, Andrew Wilbur (Ben Rathbun). Andrew is an Ohio business acquaintance of Frank’s who delivers the shocking news that he’s “heard” Frank will be passed over for the promotion — Andrew suggests that Frank come to work with him in the Midwest.

Nickowitz starts the play in a very realistic vein and then subtly introduces surreal elements that become more powerful and more disturbing as the story progresses. It is to Nickowitz’s credit that despite a huge and very upsetting surprise in Act Two, everything fits together at the end (and we can look back at all of the portents we overlooked in the first act).

“Songs & Statues” finished its limited run at the Stella Adler Studio on Sunday, but I hope we will be seeing it again soon in a commercial or regional theater production — it’s a very powerful drama with the sort of challenging and substantial roles that actors hunger to play.

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