Joe's View

Sandra Brown is both amazingly prolific and totally reliable — once a year, the novelist produces a thriller that is almost guaranteed to be a winner.

“Smash Cut” (Simon & Schuster) won’t be in stores until August 11, but I am happy to report that it is one of Brown’s best books — a terrific set-up that grabs you in the first chapter, an extremely cunning villain, and a plot that contains one surprise after another (including a lulu in the final few pages).

I was sent an Advance Readers Copy of the book to prepare for an interview with the author at this weekend’s ThrillerFest in Manhattan and it kept me happily turning pages over the July 4 weekend.

It would be criminal to divulge much of Brown’s devilishly tricky plot — involving the murder of a wealthy Atlanta businessman shortly after he has stepped into a hotel elevator — other than to note that the title reflects the book’s study of a killer and a culture steeped in movies and movie violence.

A “smash cut” is a shocking moment of transition in a film when we have been given no hint of what we are about to see. Brown pulls off the same feat throughout the book — leading us to expect one thing and then hitting us with something completely unexpected

The novel is packed with film references — from “Jerry Maguire” to “Frenzy” — that will make it especially interesting for movie buffs, but it is hard to imagine any reader finding it easy to put “Smash Cut” down once he or she reads the first few pages.

Last night in Waterford, fireworks started going off just a few minutes before the end of the final performance of “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” the new musical drama by Daniel Zaitchik (above).

The loud sounds outside proved to be only a temporary distraction for the full house that had gathered in a barn on the grounds of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center to experience a staged reading of the Zaitchik show (he is a triple threat who wrote the music, lyrics and libretto for this adaptation of the same Australian novel that inspired an eerie 1975 Peter Weir film).

“Picnic at Hanging Rock” is still being developed by Zaitchik — his two week residence at the O’Neill was designed to let him work on the musical away from the madding crowd in New York City and to revise it after seeing four staged readings by a brilliant cast of singer-actors.

Part of the deal between the O’Neill and the press is that the in-development shows not be subjected to reviewing, but it seems safe to say that Zaitchik has come up with a remarkable piece of work that stands apart from most contemporary musicals.

Zaitchik has not tried to simplify the based-on-fact story of an ill-fated Australian boarding school outing in 1900 — three of the female students and one of the teachers simply disappeared never to be seen or heard from again. One girl who went off with the other three was found but had no idea of what happened.

Were the girls murdered? Did the run off with their slightly odd teacher? Was there some sort of supernatural occurrence?

None of those questions are answered in the novel or the Peter Weir film because they were never answered in real life. Zaitchik follows the same path — he has created a musical about unresolved mysteries and the enigmatic longings of girls on the cusp of womanhood. I can’t wait to see a full-scale staging of this beautiful and tantalizing musical.

It’s hard to believe that the man who directed “The Insider” (1999) and “Heat” (1995) would be capable of making something as misguided — and as painful to sit through — as the new John Dillinger bio-pic, “Public Enemies.”

Then again, until I consulted his imdb listing this morning, I had completely forgotten that Michael Mann directed the unwatchable “The Keep” in 1983 (and I had done my best to forget his big-screen version of “Miami Vice” three years ago).

Mann is clearly determined never to make the same movie twice — a good thing — but his willingness to experiment with genres and styles has resulted in a disaster with the shot-on-video Johnny Depp gangster epic that opened yesterday.

It’s impossible to figure out what Mann was getting at in this shaky-cam eyesore that wastes what appears to be very expensive Depression era production and costume designs. The hand-held video camerawork makes it hard to see what might be behind the tight close-ups of the actors’ faces and the cutting is so fast (and the lighting levels so low) that it is often hard to tell Depp from Christian Bale (in the role of Dillinger’s FBI nemesis).

A camera style that might have worked for an Iraq war drama seems totally wrong for a 1930s era melodrama. The video-to-film footage often looks like a cheesy made-for-TV movie from 20 years ago (it is completely baffling in this age of the beautiful shot-on-video “Zodiac” and “Benjamin Button” to see such abysmal use of HD technology in an expensive Hollywood production).

The shaky close-up style wastes the talent of Depp and Bale and Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard (of “La Vie en Rose”) by rarely giving us a chance to get a nice clear and steady look at this high-priced talent.

Late in “Public Enemies” there is one good sequence when Dillinger goes to meet his fate at a Chicago movie house showing of “Manhattan Melodrama” starring Clark Gable and William Powell.

For once, Mann locks his camera on Depp’s face as Dillinger watches a Hollywood version of the gangster’s life he’s been leading. The contrast between the two Old Hollywood stars and one of our great contemporary movie stars is fascinating but too fleeting — soon Dillinger hits the street outside the Biograph Theatre  and we’re back in Mann’s perverse shaky cam universe.

Elinor Lipman’s tenth novel, “The Family Man” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is a Manhattan-set charmer about a happily settled single gay man named Henry Archer whose life is upended when he decides to reconnect with his grown stepdaughter.

Two decades earlier, Henry was closeted and briefly married to the zany Denise — a recent divorcee with a very young daughter, Thalia.

The only part of this mistake of his youth that Henry enjoyed was being a stepdad. When Denise remarried, however, her new husband decided Henry would be a bad influence on the girl and cut off his visitation rights.

Flash forward more than two decades. Henry thinks he is happily retired from his law career until Denise comes charging back into his life — her husband has keeled over dead just before Denise’s restrictive pre-nup would have expired and she turns to Henry for advice.

In the surprisingly small world that is Manhattan, Henry realizes with a shock that the receptionist at his local barber shop is Thalia.

Lipman has said she intended “The Family Man” as “something of a love letter to New York.” The author sees the coziness of life in a Manhattan neighborhood where there are often only one or two degrees of separation between people rather than John Guare’s famous six degrees.

Without ever seeming Polyanna-ish, Lipman presents the basic decency that is to be found in most people if you treat them kindly — even the loud and intrusive Denise.

Like some latter day Preston Sturges, Lipman takes a wildly disparate group of people and builds a delicious screwball comedy around them without ever going off the deep end into the silliness that mars most contemporary Hollywood attempts to explore this genre.

“The Family Man” reinforces my belief that Lipman is one of the sanest and smartest literary optimists to come along since the late great Laurie Colwin.