Joe's View

Add Chris Morgan Jones to the ever-growing list of fine writers who have found ways to reinvent the international espionage thriller long after the end of the Cold War.

Fans of the genre probably recall the reports of the demise of the John LeCarre/Len Deighton spy story after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

What would they write about after the end of the Soviet Union?

Of course, the tension between the United States and Russia has continued long after the so-called “war” ended and the introduction of capitalism there has only made the old rivalries more interesting.

“The Silent Oligarch” — which was published Monday by The Penguin Press — is a beautifully written thriller about how the power of money has been replacing the power of the state in the former Soviet Union, and how the West is no closer to understanding the way things work there than we ever were.

Jones follows two characters, Richard Lock, an English lawyer who has helped to make Konstantin Malin one of the richest men on earth, and Benjamin Webster, a former journalist who once covered the vast changes in Russia but now works for a London corporate intelligence firm.

Lock has helped to build Malin’s empire through a web of shell companies, and various forms of banking chicanery, but he is tiring of the strain of dealing with a very sinister business partner. He secretly longs for a way out of his relationship with Malin and a way back to his ex-wife and child in London.

Webster is a tarnished idealist who once lost a Russian journalist he loved when she knew too much and was murdered for that knowledge. Now happily married and a father, the man is nevertheless thrilled when his company is hired to bring down Malin (who might have been behind the killing of the journalist).

Jones cuts back and forth between these two characters, making it clear that they have more in common than they know. The suspense builds as Webster tries to convince Lock that there might be a way out of the deadly Malin’s clutches.

Jones knows whereof he speaks, with a background in business intelligence that — according to his bio — included working for Russian oligarchs, New York banks and Middle Eastern governments.

“The Silent Oligarch” is a smashing debut that will leave most readers anxious to follow Webster on his next assignment.

Billy Corben’s 2011 documentary, “Limelight,” has just arrived on DVD via Magnolia Home Entertainment, and it proves to be as gripping as any fictional film.

Corben traces the history of Canadian nightclub operator Peter Gatien who came to New York City in the 1980s and quickly became one of the most important figures in the post-Studio 54 scene.

Gatien ran the Tunnel, the Paladium, Club USA and one of the dominant clubs of the era, The Limelight, which was in a deconsecrated church on Sixth Avenue.

The entrepreneur lost an eye when he was young and for many years sported an eyepatch that gave him either a stylish or sinister appearance, depending on your attitude toward nightclub owners.

During his rise, Gatien’s looks were probably an asset — he seemed to represent the slight danger people have always looked for in New York after dark. But when the club operator became the target of city and federal drug investigations in his places of business, the eyepatch made the man’s alleged connections to the drug underworld seem likely to the readers of the tabloid newspapers that covered the endless investigations and trials.

To Billy Corben’s credit, “Limelight” isn’t just Gatien’s story. The movie is about the changing pop culture scene of the last 30 years — particularly, the shift in club music from disco to electronica to hip hop — and the drug culture that went along with the transitions.

Cocaine was the dominant drug of the disco era, with the cost of the drug limiting its use to glitzier people with money to burn.

Ecstacy became much more widespread in clubs in the 1980s because it was a legal psychiatric drug (at first) and much cheaper and easier to use than cocaine. As one of the interview subjects says in the film, when you pop Ecstacy in your mouth, no one knows if you’re taking an aspirin or about to suck on a Tic Tac.

The use of the drug became so widespread and the side effects so serious that, like LSD, it was eventually added to the list of illegal drugs like coke and pot.

Ambitious, publicity-seeking DAs in New York City knew that they could get much more press by going after a celebrity nightclub owner than the low level dealers who operated in his clubs. As more than one person notes in “Limelight,” Gatien was making so much money on entrance fees and booze at his clubs that he had no need to mess with illegal pills.

Things got worse for Gatien and his peers with the rise of Rudy Giuliani and the crusading-DA-turned-mayor’s crackdown on “vice” of all sorts in New York City.

When Gatien was found not guilty on drug charges, the angry feds moved on to the tax evasion charges that are always easy to level against restauranteurs and club owners who work and live in a world filled with lots of cash that might or might not be accurately reported to the IRS. Gatien eventually was forced out of business not by criminal charges but by the huge legal fees he spent defending himself year after year — he ran out of cash and was then deported back to Canada.

Some foreign movies leave you thinking that there are few real differences between countries and cultures, but then there are films like the Australian docudrama “Balibo” that keep you at a slight distance.

Set mostly in East Timor in 1975, the film is about the disappearance of five Australian television journalists who were covering the violent upheaval in the country after Portuguese rule ended and neighboring Indonesia invaded the newly independent country.

East Timor is only about 400 miles from Australia, so when the Indonesians began to kill untold thousands of people — estimates run as high as 150,000 — political activists pushed hard for the Australian government to do something about the horrendous situation.

The journalists were trying to send filmed reports of the horror back to viewers in their homeland when they disappeared in the town of Balibo and were presumed dead.

Another prominent journalist, Roger East (played in the film by Anthony LaPaglia, above right) went to East Timor to investigate, and he disappeared, too.

The movie’s obviously fictionalized depiction of what might have happened to these men is terrifying. We are placed in the position of being trapped by violent events that are rapidly spiraling into chaos, with no hope of escape.

“Balibo” gives us a ray of dramatic hope in the form of the young idealistic Jose Ramos-Horta (Oscar Isaac, above left) who convinced East to come to his country and after many years eventually became one of its leaders (and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize).

The problem with “Balibo” is that this historic material is presented in a fragmented style that leaves the movie without a very coherent narrative. When you have flashbacks within flashbacks and no obvious protagonist in a movie about events that happened 37 years ago, on the other side of the world, it’s hard to stay connected.

Most of the film is devoted to the six white Australians who died while working in East Timor, leaving “Balibo” open to the same criticism that has been leveled against the Civil Rights Era dramas made in this country that have been about the problems faced by caucasian activists rather than the black people who were suffering the brunt of government-sanctioned racism.

We don’t find out about Jose Ramos-Horta’s historical importance to East Timor until the end of the film on a series of title cards.

What happened to the six journalists was awful, but to have their murders overshadow the deaths of tens of thousands of people in a country they were free to leave at any time seems insensitive.

Director Emil Chiaberi never appears on camera in his subtly subversive documentary “Murder by Proxy: How America Went Postal” (RF Releasing) which could be one of the reasons why it has a lot more punch than most of the Michael Moore films.

Moore is a showman who muddies his own left wing agenda by making himself a very large target for his conservative critics — Moore’s personality and ego are impossible to avoid in his movies and both have become increasingly unattractive in the years since “Roger & Me” put him on the map (all of his subsequent films could have “& Me” tacked onto the title).

Chiaberi (below, left, with postal union steward Charlie Withers) stays behind the scenes and uses interview subjects and archival footage to trace the history of the “going postal” wave of post office employee killings that began in 1986. He then shows how violence in workplaces of all kinds has been growing.

“Murder by Proxy” suggests that it was the demand for unrealistic levels of productivity in post offices that led to the outbreaks of violence. Chiaberi and his interview subjects believe that in the “lean and mean” business environment of the new century — where fewer people are expected to do more work and have limited options for other employment — violence will continue to increase in the business world.

Attempts at production sabotage have become more common in workplaces, according to Chiaberi, including at potentially dangerous sites such as water treatment facilities and nuclear power plants. The film quotes experts as saying angry workers are more likely to cause catastrophic damage in these facilities than terrorists because they already have security clearances.

“Murder by Proxy” shows how the balance of power between workers and employers began to shift in the 1980s when the Reagan administration pulled off some of the most successful anti-union actions in modern history and job-slashing business leaders like Jack Welch became culture heroes.

Globalization cut back on the number of possible jobs for American workers, making it more difficult to leave an abusive employment situation.

Many of the postal workers interviewed in the film say that they weren’t surprised when their debt-ridden, stressed-out co-workers pushed-back violently. With no power to change their work conditions, these frustrated and depressed people became ticking time bombs. In one of the film’s most shocking sequences, survivors of one attack tell us that one of the supervisors who was murdered had it coming.

For more information on the movie, go to: www.murderbyproxyfilm.com

Jan Kounen’s smart and sexy 2010 bio-pic “Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky” opens with a tremendous flourish — a recreation of the legendary 1913 Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” which nearly caused the audience to riot.

Kounen shows us Nijinsky and his patron Sergei Diaghilev getting the Ballets Russes dancers ready to perform to Stravinsky’s powerful and difficult music and then the curtain going up on this revolutionary dance/musical event.

“The Rite of Spring” triggered chaos because it was so unlike anything audiences had heard up until that time. Stravinsky’s innovations would soon be embraced, however, to the degree that Walt Disney would include the piece in his controversial 1940 animated movie “Fantasia.”

The explosive premiere in Paris marked a temporary career setback for Stravinsky, but it was the night that also brought him a new and powerful patron in the form of Coco Chanel (the designer who revolutionized women’s clothing and the perfume business).

Chanel was transfixed by “The Rite of Spring” and the emotions that it generated in the audience members around her. She contacted Stravinsky — who was virtually penniless — and invited the composer and his wife and children to live at her country home just outside Paris.

What starts as the act of a truly committed patron of the arts turns into a torrid sexual affair that undermines the focus of both legends.

Kounen presents the relationship without judgement. We can see the electric connection between the two great artists (although in a fit of anger Stravinsky puts Chanel down by saying, “You’re not an artist, you’re a shopkeeper”). The personal toll of the relationship is made vivid by the performance of Elena Morozova as Stravinsky’s long-suffering wife Catherine.

Basically, the whole movie hinges on the performances of Mads Mikkelsen as the composer and Anna Mougalis as the fearlessly independent designer.

Since there is so little dialogue in the movie — and very little exposition as well — most of the story is told on the faces of the two actors. Mikkelsen and Mougalis are superb and one of sexiest movie couples of recent years.

“Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky” contrasts two equally challenging lives in the arts — Chanel’s determination to live life independent of any permanent attachments to men, and Stravinsky’s attempt to juggle the creation of emotionally discordant music with a stable family life.

Unlike most bio-pics which tell us how we are supposed to feel about the characters from scene to scene, Kounen’s austere approach allows us to look at the characters rarther objectively, admiring the commitment to art but questioning the way Coco and Igor use the people around them.

Obviously any piece of comic material that has been performed continuously for 20 years has to have a lot going for it.

But it was still a very pleasant surprise to have such a good time watching Paul Perroni perform the Rob Becker piece “Defending the Caveman” at the Downtown Cabaret Theatre in Bridgeport last weekend.

While the show ran and ran on Broadway in the mid-1990s — with Becker starring in it — I resisted, thinking that “Caveman” must be just a younger guy’s version of a Jackie Mason-style nightclub-act-disguised-as-a-Broadway-show.

The durability of the material was proven, however, after Becker stopped appearing in “Caveman” and audiences continued to enjoy it with other performers.

Becker succeeded where other solo artists, like Lily Tomlin and Eric Bogosian, have not, in sending his vehicle off into the theater world without his participation (I know that there have been occasional presentations of Tomlin’s “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” by other performers, but not on the scale of “Defending the Caveman”).

The reason for the enduring appeal of “Caveman” was evident within a few moments of Perroni’s arrival on stage — the young actor was able to take possession of the material the same way he might with any other play.

For the 90 minutes or so he was on stage, we believed “Paul” was giving us his theories on the differences between men and women that have not changed since prehistoric times.

As played by Perroni, “Caveman” had a present-tense quality that belied the fact that Becker first started working on a rough version of the show in 1987 which he polished for more than three years before it took the form of its current incarnation.

Perroni makes us believe he is talking about his life — and his wife — as he kvetches about the way men and women shop, watch television, and hang out with their best friends. It’s the same sort of “nothing” that “Seinfeld” made hay out of for a decade on television — i.e. shocks of hilarious recognition about the tiniest quirks in human behavior.

Perroni physicalizes “Caveman” by working the whole stage of the Bridgeport venue and acting out scenes about his wife and his friends in a manner that takes the evening way beyond the realm of stand-up comedy.

The show becomes an acting piece in the same way that the David Sedaris monologue “The Santaland Diaries” became a play in the hands of fine actors like Timothy Olyphant and Thomas Sadoski.

(For information on this weekend’s performances, go to www.dtcab.com)

So far, we haven’t had much of a winter in the Northeast, but it’s still nice to dream of summers at the beach via the USA series “Royal Pains,” which restarts tonight at 10.

The Hamptons-based show has been a small but significant hit for the basic cable channel since 2009, reflected in Penguin’s decision to publish a spin-off novel series.

The third book in the series, “Royal Pains: Sick Rich,” has just been released through Penguin’s Obsidian paperback mystery division.

The novels are the work of the fine writer D.P. Lyle, who has won and been nominated for a number of mystery fiction awards for such medical and forensics thrillers as “Stress Fracture” and “Devil’s Playground.”

“Royal Pains” is a tasty mix of soap opera and medical drama, but without the heavy-handed theatrics of such network doctors-and-nurses melodramas as “Grey’s Anatomy.”

The USA show is no more than froth, but the Hamptons locations give it a real boost (unlike another ABC show “Revenge” which fakes its upscale Long Island settings in North Carolina). It’s fun to spend an hour fantasizing about being rich and famous beyond your wildest dreams.

Mark Feuerstein stars as Hank Lawson who operates an upscale medical concierge business with his brother Evan (Paulo Costanzo). The show earns points for not making a big deal out of the way the Lawsons enjoy the plush lifestyle that comes from tending to the ailments of the super-rich.

Feuerstein has that relaxed style and low-key charisma that marks a real TV star (traits he shares with Nathan Fillion of “Castle”). Once a memorable supporting player in films like “The Muse” (where he was very funny as Albert Brooks’ agent), the actor has found a TV role that fits him like a glove.

“Royal Pains” has a serial structure with plotlines running through several episodes, but the stories are light and breezy and easy to pick up or drop depending on whether or not you are home on Wednesday evenings.

Mary Jane Clark delivers another superior traditional mystery with “The Look of Love” (William Morrow), the second in the writer’s new series about Piper Donovan, an aspiring New York actress who moonlights as a cake decorator for upscale clients.

The first book “To Have and to Kill” took readers into the world of daytime drama when Piper was hired to do a cake for one of the performers on a just-canceled soap opera.

The debut novel was a very tasty blend of excellent mystery plotting and a behind-the-scenes view of TV production and the life of New York City actors (Clark worked for CBS News for many years before she turned to mystery writing and her daughter, Elizabeth, is an actress).

“The Look of Love” takes Piper to a deluxe spa in Los Angeles where the director, Jillian Abernathy, is about to get married on the grounds.

Just before Piper lands the gig, violence erupts in Jillian’s life when someone tosses acid in the face of her maid (the assailant mistook the domestic for his real target, Jillian).

Clark makes the spa setting and its clientele of beautiful people getting expensive treatments (and recovering from plastic surgery) a major part of the appeal of “The Look of Love.” Without ever getting preachy, the author shows us the downside of beauty-at-any-cost in subplots involving a young woman who had one nosejob too many (and is now afraid to show her ruined face to the world) and Jillian’s mom who died after a plastic surgery operation performed by her husband.

The novel has a large group of suspects with a good reason for wanting to get rid of Jillian. And, Piper is drawn into the mystery in a very believable manner (so far, Clark has done a great job of turning her heroine into a crime solver without making her look reckless).

Clark gives us an entertaining detour in the form of Piper’s audition for a TV commercial while she is waiting for the wedding at the spa (the book drops several hints that L.A. rather than New York might soon become the primary setting for the series). 

Although “The Look of Love” can be filled under the huge food-related mystery category — there are recipes in the back of the book — you don’t need to be interested in baking or decorating cakes to get caught up in this well-written and very satisfying concoction.