Many high-voltage thrillers revolve around men of action who are larger than life — Lee Child’s Jack Reacher immediately comes to mind — but Harlan Coben has carved out his own niche in the genre with a series of best-selling suspense novels set in the New Jersey suburbs where the writer has lived for years.
Although rooted in a quintessential American locale, the books have struck a chord all over the world, with Coben’s work translated into 38 languages.
Two years ago, a French film adaptation of “Tell No One,” starring Nathalie Baye, was a critical and box-office smash in that country (we’ll get to see the film here later in 2008).
Although he has been working on a punishing book-a-year pace, Coben’s new novel, “Hold Tight” (Dutton), might be his best thriller yet.
Publisher’s Weekly has praised the writer’s “this could be me factor” and that is certainly true of the immediately recognizeable situation that triggers the thriller plot of “Hold Tight.”
Suburban professionals Mike and Tia Baye fear their 16-year-old son Adam might be drifting into drugs and delinquency — and is using cell phones, email and the Internet to cover his tracks — so they decide to install spyware on the boy’s personal computer.
Mike and Tia have no idea that they are about to plunge into a nightmare situation that is vastly larger than they can begin to imagine.
Coben crosscuts between Mike and Tia’s crisis and several seemingly unrelated plot threads — a pair of killers targeting women in the community, a teacher whose thoughtless personal criticism of a student has caused the girl great trauma, a neighbor whose medical crisis uncovers apparent marital infidelity, and a grieving mother trying to understand why her teen son killed himself.
One of the amazements of “Hold Tight” is the way that Coben handles so many plot threads in his upper middle class suburban setting without losing focus on Mike and Tia and their son. Then, as we get closer to the end of the book, he brings everything together in a seamless — and completely believable — manner.
I read the 416-page novel in a few sittings, marveling at Coben’s ability to keep the thriller rushing forward in the context of such a mundane setting. And the whole thing is constructed around characters we grow to care deeply about, despite the fact that they are such “ordinary people.”
“Hold Tight” was published yesterday and deserves the tremendous success it is about to enjoy.
Joe's View
Suspense and horror in the suburbs
Role Model: Gene Wilder
Turner Classic Movies is unveiling an excellent special on the great comic actor — and Stamford resident — Gene Wilder tonight at 8 p.m.
“Role Model: Gene Wilder” consists of a long conversation between the actor and Alec Baldwin — taped in Connecticut last year — that covers the career and life of the star of “The Producers” (right) and “Young Frankenstein.”
Although Wilder has given some of the most intense, over-the-top comic performances in movie history, the star is a low-key and thoughtful interview subject who always seems willing to answer questions with an honesty and directness that is unusual in his profession (I was lucky enough to host a screening of “The Producers” at the Avon Theatre in Stamford three years ago and to conduct a public Q&A session with the star after the movie).
TCM is following tonight’s special with showings of “The Producers” (at 9:15 p.m.), “Blazing Saddles” (at 11 p.m.) and “Start the Revolution Without Me” (at 2:15 a.m.)
Wilder tells Baldwin how his movie career was launched by a chance encounter — while he was acting with Anne Bancroft in a 1963 stage production of “Mother Courage,” he met Bancroft’s husband, Mel Brooks, and they hit it off right away.
Brooks invited Wilder to read an unfinished screenplay he then called “Springtime for Hitler” and promised the young actor the plum role of Leo Bloom whenever he could get the financing together.
Three years later, Brooks kept his promise and Wilder’s sensational performance in “The Producers” earned him an Oscar nomination and sent the actor on his way to a series of great comic parts (the title “Springtime for Hitler” was changed because producer Joseph E. Levine thought it would offend Jews).
A lot of ground is covered in the hour’s conversation, including Wilder’s work with Lee J. Cobb on a CBS production of “Death of a Salesman,” the actor’s small but very flashy role in “Bonnie & Clyde,” and how he came to play the doctor who falls in love with a sheep in Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.”
The actor speaks honestly of the challenges of working with Richard Pryor on several films. Wilder adored Pryor but had to cope with the problems caused by his co-star’s drug addiction.
Now happily in retirement from the screen — but pursuing a new career writing books — Wilder tells Baldwin he would return to the screen if offered “something wonderful…But I don’t want to do junk.”
(“Role Model: Gene Wilder” will be shown by TCM at 8 p.m., with a repeat airing at 1 a.m.)
She let him continue
Hollywood got very nervous about movie violence 40 years ago as a result of the terrible events of 1968.
The year before, “Bonnie and Clyde” was condemned in some quarters for glamorizing violence, so when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both killed in the spring of 1968 — and riots erupted in cities all over the country — the studios backed away from pictures that explored gun violence, in particular.
Peter Bogdanovich’s debut film, “Targets,” was picked up by Paramount Pictures for distribution in the summer of 1968 and then had most of its bookings cancelled because the film studied a mild-mannered young man who kills his family and then starts shooting at cars on a Los Angeles freeway.
In the early fall of 1968, 20th Century Fox had a similar case of nerves about the low-budget thriller, “Pretty Poison,” based on Stephen Geller’s novel “She Let Him Continue” about a relationship between a high school cheerleader and a seemingly harmless drifter that ends in a murderous crime spree.
Fox dumped the Tuesday Weld-Anthony Perkins vehicle into drive-ins and B-level theaters, but a group of New York film critics wrote enthusiastically about the movie (despite the absence of any press screenings), shamed the studio into giving the movie a re-release, and in the following months it became an art-house and college film society favorite.
The picture remains an unsettling mix of comedy and drama with what are probably the best film performances of Weld and Perkins, two quirky talents who never got the attention they deserved but have sizeable cult followings. Writer Lorenzo Semple won the New York Film Critics Circle award for best screenplay, and would go on to such key 1970s films as “The Parallax View” (1974), but director Noel Black faded into obscurity.
Tomorrow night, I’m hosting a free screening of “Pretty Poison” as part of the Fairfield Theatre Company’s monthly “Martini & a Movie” series. It will be fun to see if the film still has the power to disturb and delight an audience.
(Doors will open for the Tuesday screening at 7 p.m. For more information, visit the non-profit organization’s Website at www.fairfieldtheatre.org)
From the street to the stage
What began many months ago as a possible new adaptation of John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” has become “Sidewalk Opera,” a new Yale Cabaret theatre piece by Jana Hoglund, Patricia McGregor and Brian MacQueen that takes the audience into the lives of people living on the streets of New Haven.
The show opened last night and will continue through Saturday in one of the area’s most adventurous — and comfortable — venues.
When I talked with Hoglund and McGregor the other day they said the show is in the journalistic theatre tradition of Anna Deavere Smith, who brought her latest piece “Let Me Down Easy” to Long Wharf a few months back.
“I worked with Anna and my concept of theater was revolutionized,” director McGregor said of Smith’s process of doing interviews with real people whose stories are then shaped into a theatrical narrative.
The director and her two collaborators decided to do a modern-day street opera — in the spirit of “The Beggar’s Opera” — but drawn from what is actually happening in the lives of people in New Haven.
The show that has emerged deals with themes of class and race narrated by a woman named Annette who is well known by the Yale and New Haven communities for selling carnations on Broadway.
“We just kept meeting every month (while doing the interviews) to see what was emerging,” the director reported of a process that extended for over a year.
Hoglund and McGregor have invited all of the people they interviewed to attend this weekend’s performances.
“We got some money from the New Haven Office of Cultural Affairs to open the show up to the public a bit — we’re inviting people from one of the soup kitchens. We hope there will be a real cross-pollination between the theater and the community,” McGregor said.
“There has been such a strong sense of responsibility in the room,” Hoglund said of the rehearsals leading up to last night’s first public performance. “There is a certain amount of nervousness…we are working from caring and consideration…We want to give voice to each person’s story.”
“Sidewalk Opera” begins with the conductor handing the Cabaret actors their scripts — a gesture designed to make it clear to the audience that the actors, in McGregor’s words, “can never make a complete transition to being these people…But we hope we’re taking a step that tries to understand the lives of the people.”
(“Street Opera” is being present tonight and Saturday night at 8 and 10:30 p.m. at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St. Tickets are $15, with a $3 discount for seniors and a $5 discount for students. Food and drink service is available before each show. To make reservations, call 432-1566 or go online to www.yalecabaret.org.)
Hard times for serious foreign movies
There was a time — 20 or 30 years ago — when a highly acclaimed Italian movie like Daniele Luchetti’s “My Brother is an Only Child” would have had a long and happy life on the U.S. art-house circuit.
In the 1970s, Italian director Lina Wertmuller became famous on this side of the Atlantic due to the wide acceptance here of her breakthrough films, “Swept Away” (1975) and “Seven Beauties” (1976). The latter film earned Wertmuller a glowing New York magazine cover story and a rare Oscar nomination for a female director.
No one thought twice about the fact that both Wertmuller pictures were in Italian with English subtitles.
These days, the market for serious foreign language films is so rough in this country that one of the most astute distributors of overseas productions — IFC Films — routinely releases its new titles on cable movies-on-demand services at the same time that it unveils films in New York and Los Angeles theaters.
Because the films are available for home viewing immediately, art house operators outside New York and Los Angeles often avoid IFC titles because they can’t really expect to do much theatrical business. This is why the great Romanian film, “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days” — which took the top prize at Cannes last year — had only one booking in this area, at the Cine 1-4 in New Haven, and never turned up at the two primary art-houses in Fairfield County: the Garden in Norwalk and the Avon Theatre in Stamford.
Yes, it is marvelous that a foreign film can be seen by cable subscribers all over the country at the same time as the New York and Los Angeles theater openings, but without slowly building national word of mouth and generating regional press support, the films don’t filter into the national consciousness the way a picture like “Seven Beauties” did in 1976.
So, if you love to see good pictures from abroad in a theater with an audience, make haste to Stamford starting tomorrow to support Avon Theatre manager and film programmer Adam Birnbaum’s belief that “My Brother is an Only Child” merits the same attention as an American or British independent film. It’s one of the best movies you’ll see this year, opening a door into Italian family life and politics, but in a thoroughly engaging and accessible manner.
Hooker with a heart of tin
Much of the moviegoing world fell in love with the French actress Audrey Tautou when she played the title role in “Amelie” seven years ago.
Tautou reminded a lot of people of the young Audrey Hepburn, with her combination of girlish good looks, winsome charm, and a smile that could light up the screen.
Since “Amelie,” however, Tautou has had a hard time finding a suitable follow-up role. She’s been in a lot of French films, but mostly forgettable fluff.
Although Tautou landed the female lead in Ron Howard’s movie version of “The Da Vinci Code” two years ago — and the film was an international hit — the success of the picture was more a matter of good marketing (and a pre-sold title) than widespread fondness for the movie itself. So far, the show biz wheels have not been put in motion to make Tautou a trans-Atlantic star in the tradition of Catherine Deneuve or Sophia Loren.
The latest Tautou vehicle, “Priceless,” has just opened in U.S. art-houses and it’s a weird misfire. Clearly meant to be a frothy charmer (the opening credits and music have a neo-1950s Hepburn/Doris Day feel), the movie presents its star as one of the least appealing comic prostitutes in the long history of movie hookers with hearts of gold.
When I was waiting to see the movie last weekend, I leard more than one person in the crowd leaving the previous screening complaining about how unlikeable Tautou was in the movie.
A mainstream hit in France, “Priceless” seems to have lost something in translation. Tautou comes off as one of the toughest and most venal golddiggers I’ve ever seen in a movie. As a result, the way that the sad sack hotel bartender (played by Gad Elmaleh) falls for her — and throws away his life savings to keep her in designer clothes and four star hotels — isn’t remotely credible.
The disconnect between the Tautou character and the frothy visual style and the sprightly soundtrack music is jarring, to say the least. The movie is clearly aping “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” but Hepburn managed to make us overlook Holly Golightly’s $50 “tips” from her many “boyfriends.” We could see right from the start why the George Peppard character fell for Holly.
In “Priceless,” the bartender’s determination to win Tautou seems like a form of madness, as the young woman blithely maxes out his credit cards and has him calling the bank to use some of his retirement funds to pay for her deluxe dinner and lodgings.
The movie goes even more haywire when the bartender is hired as a male prostitute by a rich woman visiting his hotel, and then he and Tautou gleefully exchange advice on keeping their clients hooked.
“Priceless” might have worked as a “American Gigolo”-style drama of mutual exploitation that finally ends in redemption, but as it now stands, the movie is one of the most bizarre bits of froth I’ve ever seen, and you don’t leave the the theater wanting to see more of Tautou (or her co-star).
From hunk to actor
The Iraq war drama “Stop-Loss” has done very disappointing business over the past two weeks, but it should elevate the Hollywood status of Channing Tatum, who up until now has been stuck in largely forgettable roles in pictures such as “She’s The Man’’ (2006) and “Step Up” (2006) that exploited Tatum’s handsome face and well-defined body rather than his acting chops.
When I interviewed director Kimberly Peirce a few weeks ago, she said that she had no idea who Tatum was when he auditioned for “Stop-Loss” two years ago — and it wasn’t easy to convince Paramount to give the actor the most intense role in the movie — but her hunch paid off with a memorable performance that demonstrates the emotional toll of service in Iraq.
The 28-year-old Tatum has been a teen idol for a few years now.
Tatum’s progress on screen has been closely followed by the very entertaining and well-designed Website, squarehippies.com, which is devoted to the celebration of movie and TV beefcake (“Sexy body, sexy lips, sexy voice, what more could you ask?,” the site asked — rhetorically — in a 2006 lay-out of stills from “She’s The Man”).
I thought about Tatum, and the whole issue of male beauty in movies, when Hollywood icon Charlton Heston died a few days ago.
Heston was something of a pioneer in the realm of male stars showing off their physiques — along with their acting prowess — in key movies such as “Ben-Hur” (1959) and “Planet of the Apes” (1968), where the performer spent long stretches of the pictures wearing very little clothing.
Heston was able to strip down without appearing to be narcissistic, so he was spared the barbs aimed at Victor Mature, who was mocked by some Hollywood peers for his beefcake roles in “Samson and Delilah” (1949) and “Demetrius and the Gladiators” (1954).
Heston was clearly proud of his body at a time when most male stars were reluctant to display much skin — indeed, he was the first Hollywood A-list actor to agree to a (brief) nude scene, in “Planet of the Apes,” a decision Heston writes about in his best-selling published journal, “An Actor’s Life.”
These days — the era of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt — gym time is almost as important as acting class for the young men of Hollywood, so Channing Tatum appears to be perfectly positioned for major stardom over the next few years.
New York from top to bottom
Colin Harrison has delivered another breathless page-turner in his latest New York suspense novel, “The Finder” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) which might be the most skillful combination of reporting and thrills yet from the author of “The Havana Room” and “Manhattan Nocturne.”
Harrison seems to be familiar with every nook and cranny of New York, from multi-zillionaire condos (owned by the rich and trashy) in the Time Warner Center to the farthest (and scariest) reaches of Brooklyn and Queens.
Like Richard Price in “Lush Life,” Harrison starts with a terrible crime — very late in the night — and then shows us how the act of violence ripples out across the city, binding together people you would never imagine have anything in common.
In the novel’s most extreme moments, Harrison’s vision of city life is pitch black, but he miraculously finds a way to take us out the other side of the urban nightmare in the final pages — there is enough hope at the end to leave us with the feeling that the horrifying journey in “The Finder” had an important point.
Harrison starts with the ultimate in reader-grabbing opening chapters — two immigrant girls blowing off steam at a Brooklyn beach, after a long night of cleaning Manhattan offices, are suddenly killed in an almost unimaginably grotesque manner (no details here). Their Chinese co-worker leaves the car to relieve herself in the bushes just moments before the two girls are killed; she very quickly realizes she was the one targeted for death, because of something she might have learned in one of the offices her crew cleaned.
“The Finder” introduces another half-dozen or so major characters, including one of Harrison’s greatest creations, the maniacal billionaire “master of the universe” Bill Martz, whose huge stake in a drug company stock is wired into the novel’s central mystery.
A man with unbridled ego, and lust for power, Martz is the blood brother of such fictional creations as Gordon Gekko (in “Wall Street”) and Max Herschel (in the woefully underrated Sidney Lumet film “Just Tell Me What You Want”). Martz also works as a stand-in for such real life Manhattan titans as Rupert Murdoch.
Harrison’s gift for character is so potent that he includes a terrific (and terrifically smart) minor character in the form of the well-connected female doctor Ann Reilly, who is sucked into the labyrinthine mystery by her businessman husband Tom.
Ann sees almost everyone she meets in terms of their visible symptoms of illness and decay. Harrison gives us a fabulous setpiece in which Tom and Ann attend a party at the Martz “Huge! High in the air!” apartment in one of Manhattan’s best zipcodes.
“She was too tired to be of much use to Tom. So she watched. She’d been introduced to Connie, the youngish wife of someone important there, so Ann studied her. The woman sported a very expensive boob job. How natural and yet grotesque! How impossible yet marvelous! One hardly knew who was responsible for this aesthetic state of affairs, men or women themselves.”
“And yet, equally strange to Ann, was the fact that the fake (boobs) worked. Men who were otherwise among the most sophisticated and brilliant, worldly and perceptive, lawyers, bankers, artists — men who had buried parents, friends, spouses, even children, and who thus knew the essential tragedy of the flesh — were themselves so often rendered helpless before these unnatural yet unarguably beautifully rendered falsies. Smart men! Thoughtful, sensitive men! Doctors!”
“…The response was hardwired in, kicking off testosterone pulses in the endocrine system. Couldn’t help themselves. Helpless. Helpless men. They lost the power of discernment and resistance. They lusted, and in the glare of that lust, women gained power, if for only a moment.”
What is so amazing about “The Finder,” and Harrison’s skill as a writer, is that he can so frequently find the perfect moments for such acute observations without ever stopping the momentum of the thriller plot that surrounds everything in the book.
