The Lookout

While some crime dramas focus on the execution of the crime, others are more concerned with the human element and the people involved with the crime. Both elements blend together in The Lookout: how the people get brought into the situation is as significant as the situation itself.

Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a popular high-school hockey star whose reckless driving kills two passengers in his car, injured a third, and leaves him physically and mentally damaged. Four years later, Chris has trouble holding things, trouble remembering things (he keeps a notebook with important things to do), and trouble sequencing -- remembering the order of things as simple as his daily routine. Chris cleans a bank (that won't let him try being a teller), lives with his blind friend Lewis (Jeff Daniels), and dealing with his family. Chris is frustrated that his life has changed so much and feels helpless and angry at his situation.

Chris meets Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode) at a bar, and they seem to hit it off immediately. Gary shares some of Chris' frustrations, listens to him, and even hooks him up with an atttractive lady named Luvlee (Ilsa Fisher). It isn't hard to see that Gary has an ulterior motive, and it soon comes out: Gary and his associates are planning to rob the bank Chris works at, and they want him to help. They need Chris to act as the lookout, warning them if Deputy Ted (Sergio Di Zio) stops by. Gary plays on Chris' feelings of helplessness, offering him a glimpse of a better life: "My old man used to say to me, probably the only thing we ever really agreed on, was that whoever has the money has the power. You might wanna jot that down in your book. It's something you're gonna need to remember."

The Lookout does a very good job of drawing us into Chris' world. From his daily recitations of what he does each day ("Once upon a time, I woke up. I took a shower. With soap.") to his frustration with family and friends, Chris is a very real and very sympathetic character thanks to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's powerful performance. The supporting cast also does an excellent job, from Gary's effective manipulation -- it seems he spent as much time casing out Chris as the bank -- to Lewis' combination of pragmatism and optimism that is so lacking in Chris. If you want to check out a very good crime drama, take a look at The Lookout.

Overall grade: B+

Reviewed by James Lynch

The Big Bang Theory, Season 1, CBS Television

With the writer's strike halting production of TV shows for the majority of the TV season, I've not had too many shows to review lately. I also prefer dramas over comedies, as they're often just not that funny IMHO. At any rate, even given the above, and the abbreviated season, there was one show that I really enjoyed. A good comedy should mirror life, and this one hit the nail on the head.

The show I'm talking about is The Big Bang Theory. Here we have a group of four Cal-Tech post doctoral physicists that personify the nerd lifestyle. These guys have whiteboards with equations on them in their apartment's living room. Much of the plot focuses on roommates Leonard and Sheldon. They entertain themselves with Klingon Boggle, have their cereal organized by fiber content, and play Halo 3 every Wednesday. As much as they are alike, the tension develops because Sheldon is the child prodigy who truly doesn't fit into the real world outside the protective bubble of the college campus. Leonard, on the other hand, is not quite his intellectual equal, but wants to get romantically involved with their neighbor, Penny. She is far simpler, no intellectual giant, and rather pretty. While Sheldon is just about oblivious to her beauty, Leonard obsesses with asking her out, but never seems to be able to accomplish this.

Joining this love triangle of a physics sort are co-scientists Howard and Raj. Howard is socially inept and equates sex with love. Raj is foreign born, and I chuckle every time he talks about not liking Indian food.

There were eight episodes made this season, so we definitely got shortchanged. Still, reportedly it got picked up for next year, assuming that the writers will be producing scripts, which seems likely, and with some luck, we'll see a few more episodes this season. The Big Bang Theory makes me laugh, and think, which is quite rare these days (and I see a little piece of Sheldon in many of us).

Overall Grade: A

Reviewed by Jonas

See full episodes here.



More video clips here.

PS: I've never played Klingon Boggle.

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

Russell Crowe and Christian Bale star in 3:10 to Yuma, an old style Western. Forget that nobody makes a film like this anymore, put your spurs on, load up your six shooter and saddle up for this review. This film is a remake of a 1957 film by the same name.

Crowe plays Ben Wade, a Jesse James style Western bandit that spends his day robbing stagecoaches outside town with his gang. Even an armored stagecoach with a Gatling gun (kind of ridiculous, I don't think it was ever done) can't keep the boys from getting the goods and killing the Pinkertons guarding it. Bale plays Dan Evans, the honest rancher with the family, facing the drought and the bank getting ready to foreclose, etc, etc, etc- you know, the guy with the white hat in most Western flicks. He is a Civil War vet, an amputee, and a sharpshooter from his regiment days. This makes Evans the perfect guy to accompany the Pinks to bring Wade to catch the 3:10 train to the Yuma federal prison. Besides, he needs the $200 in cash to save everything his family has worked for.

Needless to say, it doesn't quite go down as expected. After bringing Wade home (????!) as a diversion, and meeting the whole family (kind of ridiculous), they take a cross desert trip. Along the way, even I wanted to shoot Wade a few times as he incessantly attacks his captors, and gets temporary control of their weapons until subdued again. I was starting to wonder if Evans was doing this job too cheaply! The film progresses past the railway, and takes us to the inevitable shootout in the town waiting for the train.

In many respects, 3:10 to Yuma is the classic American Western reborn for a more modern audience. As "The West" is so intricately embedded in the American psyche, I do occasionally enjoy seeing a film like this. However, at many parts it was predictable as I found myself shouting at the TV "Don't go outside, they're waiting for you!" right before some character gets inevitably shot. The only new ground here is that their is no moral absolutism here. The good guys have to bend their morals to get the job done, and the villain prisoner attempts to redeem himself by the film's end.

Overall, 3:10 to Yuma is a little too slowly paced and predictable for my taste. It's not that it's a bad film, it's just that it's not a really good one.

Overall Grade: B

Reviewed by Jonas

Trailer:



PS: There's a medical tie in here. After the stagecoach robbery, the Pinkerton gets shot with a pistol. A few scenes later, we see that his abdomen has been turned into hamburger meat. First of all, it was more consistent with a shotgun blast, and no single bullet from a pistol could produce that injury. Then we see the town vet pull the bullet out with a pair of blacksmith pliers. For the rest of the film, the character is fine. Huh? It was a severe injury which would be difficult to repair using modern surgical techniques including prosthetic mesh, antibiotics, and advancement flaps. And this is just for the abdominal wall portion of the wound. I find it completely implausible that nothing in the abdomen was hit, which would have been fatal in those days, as abdominal surgery, and even sterility were decades away. Sorry folks, but they should have just given the character a different injury if they needed him throughout the film.

Korea Strait (2007)

When we last left our self doubting protagonist, Dan Lenson, the Navy Commander that singlehandedly saves the world a few times, and continually deals with criticisms from his superiors, he was shoreside in The Threat. This time, Poyer gets him back on the ocean in Korea Strait.

As Lenson has lost a few ships along the way, they probably would force him into retirement, but that Medal of Honor that he got back in Black Storm keeps him around. The Navy assigns Lenson to TAG, also known as the "tactical analysis team" that runs wargames, collects data, and then looks at the results to advise the military on how to better utilize the assets (rather plausible, but as far as I can tell the name of the unit is fictitious, but more like this). Lenson ends up in the middle of a wargames involving the South Koreans, the Japanese, the US, and the Australian Navy. He's only a data collector, and has no control of the ship. The test is to practice tracking submarines off of the Korean coast. How much trouble could the guy end up in this time out when he's not even in command of a ship?

Well, if Lenson is involved, quite a bit, but of course it's never really his fault. First, the exercise almost gets canceled when the US sub is almost rammed by the aggressive South Koreans. Then an impending typhoon sends the Japanese and Aussies back home. After riding out the storm (which the author apparently did and inspired the novel), a pack of North Korean subs comes sneaking through the area, and we get a glimpse into what the start of the Korean War, Part II might look like, and how delicately peace is preserved in this region.

Overall, Korea Strait is one really strong novel. Aside from it being well plotted, and going at breakneck speed for a mere 300 pages, it feels like it's considerably longer, and more developed. If it did all that it would still be a good book, but what makes it awesome is that the paragraphs read like poetry. The prose is written in such a way that if you randomly pick a page, the vivid descriptions of the sea, the strong use of action verbs, and the emotions conveyed hardly seem like they would add up to a military thriller. This is the true genius of Korea Strait, and why it gets our highest grade. If you've never read Poyer's work, you should, and Korea Strait may be his best novel so far (there are ten in this series that he refers to as "the tales of the modern navy").

Overall Grade: A+

Reviewed by Jonas

Home of the Brave (2006)

Home of the Brave is a film that looks at what happens to soldiers after they come home from war, and attempt to pickup their broken lives, hampered by their emotional and physical scars. It stars Samuel Jackson, Jessica Biel, Brian Presley and 50 Cent. This theme, which has been done before in films like Born on the Fourth of July is told within the context of the current Iraqi conflict.

The film opens with our soldiers going on a humanitarian supply run, with the knowledge that they are going home in a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, they get ambushed in an urban environment, and severe casualties ensue. Biel's character, Vanessa Price, sustains a severe injury that results in the loss of her hand. When the dust settles, she ends up in rehab, and the unit of Army Reservists gets shipped back to their home state of Washington.

While all seems well at first, we see the emotional scars that they all bear. The soldiers manifest classic signs of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) with emotional outbursts, aggression, and insomnia. They all seek to self medicate with alcohol, which inevitably makes the situation worse. They are unfocused, and it interferes with their work, or even their ability to get a job. We follow the characters as they weave among the VA bureaucracy, and attend support groups, which they resist going to.

There are two medial tie ins to Home of the Brave. The first is that during the time I spent at the VA hospital, I did see plenty of manifestations of PTSD like this. While it was far more common among the Vietnam veterans, after the film Saving Private Ryan came out, and suddenly emotions had been stirred that were long ago compartmentalized, it got to the point that support groups for WW II veterans were started to deal with some of these issues. The other medial issue is that when Vanessa Price's hand is bleeding, they used QuickClot to control the bleeding and achieve hemostasis, which is a new topical hemostatic agent used frequently in the military, but only rarely stateside at this point.

Overall, Home of the Brave is a difficult film to watch. The acting was well done, and the theme of emotional battle scars is one that our nation needs to be more cognizant of. Unfortunately, I feel that at times the film gives things the made for TV movie approach to important issues. For example, Samuel Jackson's character, despite heavy drinking, never hits rock bottom. It would have been more powerful had he been involved in a car accident while under the influence, or been unable to perform his duties as a doctor due to being impaired. Instead, we just get that he decides to "quit the bottle," and he does with no adverse effects- hardly realistic. Still, Home of the Brave takes up an important topic that is far too often ignored, and it makes for a powerful film.

Overall Grade: B

Reviewed by Jonas

Trailer

A Pair of Musicals

Straying from the usual here, I'm going to group two reviews into one post. These two films go together under the general theme and disclaimer that while I like music, and I generally enjoy movies, for whatever reason, I just don't like movies that are musicals, and these two films didn't change that opinion by all that much.

Hairspray (2007)

First up is Hairspray. This is the 2007 film remake of a 1988 film, that was also a Broadway play. It features a plot that focuses on Baltimore in 1962, and racial integration on some American Bandstand knockoff show. It features John Travolta, Michelle Pfeifer, and newcomer Nikki Blonsky who was plucked from serving ice cream at a Cold Stone Creamery for the part in a real life "rags to riches" tale. While Nikki is well cast, I'm still wondering why we needed to have Travolta dressed in drag to play her mother. The novelty of this quickly wears off, and just didn't make sense to me. The highlight of Hairspray is the rockin' late 50's tunes, and proof that this endurable style of music can transcend generation, and that rock 'n roll is here to stay. Unfortunately, it can only save this saccharin sweet film that bases its theme on acceptance of all, by so much. Too bad the plot was too shallow, as a film like Talk To Me did a much better job of conveying this theme with the depth it deserves.

Overall Grade: C

Once (2006)

The second musical this week is less of a traditional one, the film Once. Instead of the snappy show tunes and the orchestra overture, we have two musicians turned actors, Glen Hansard, and Marketa Irglova, and not exactly well known ones at that. Hansard is the street performer by night with his guitar on the streets of Dublin, and by day he works at his father's vacuum cleaner shop. Irglova is a struggling Czech immigrant who cleans houses to support her daughter and mother. Together, they click, (after she gets her vacuum fixed of course). There is too much of a raw edge to this film that left me with a low budget feeling like we were making a rockumentary at some points. Also, too much of the dialogue gets done in foreign tongues, and with no subtitles that leaves us out of what is going on behind all the chatter. In addition, the plot kind of falls apart as the film concludes leaving us to wonder what this was all about. Still, the songs at least fit into the story better here, and don't feel as artificial as a singing squirrel in the forest that characterizes too many musicals. I'm thinking the bottom line is that this film is worth looking at Once if you're a fan of some simple acoustic folk rock. While the love affair between these two seems destined for the ages at the start, if fizzles faster than a stale pop rock.

Overall Grade: B-

Reviewed by Jonas

Civic Duty (2006)

Civic Duty is a thriller that takes a look at what happens when the war on terrorism gets a little too close and personal. It stars Peter Krause (the lawyer from ABC's Dirty Sexy Money), and Kari Matchett.

Krause portrays Terry Allen as a recently unemployed, generally boring accountant. He's working on getting back into the workforce when a "Middle Eastern guy" moves into the apartment downstairs. A series of events bring out Terry's paranoia of the possibility of his neighbor being a terrorist. While his wife ably explains the suspicious behavior away for a while, Terry is not so easily satisfied, and he gets more and more involved with the going ons of his downstairs neighbor, while his own personal life turns into a disaster. As the film progresses, the tension builds so thick we can cut it with a knife. Eventually, we have a showdown, but unfortunately, I still can't see the bullet ending up where it did. At any rate, Civic Duty does synthesize things at the very end.

While Civic Duty didn't get much attention, Krause's acting is first rate, as he successfully pulls off a more serious role than I often see him in. Fans of thrillers should seek this film out. While the words "nine-eleven" are never spoken in the film, that's clearly the undertone throughout.

Overall Grade: B

Reviewed by Jonas

There Will Be Blood (2007)

Few movies have captured the promise and dangers of capitalism like There Will Be Blood. This hisotrical epic sets its sights on Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) as the ultimate believer in ambition and greed.

We first see Plainview in 1898, silently toiling in his silver mine. Even injuring his leg means less to Plainview than finding silver; and when an accident turns up oil in the mine, Plainview reinvents himself. The movie jumps ahead a few years to find Plainview has reinvented himself, traveling from place to place with his young son H.W. (Dillon Freasier) to buy land and drill for oil.

Plainview gets a tip from a young man named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) about a mass of oil on Sunday's family's land in Little Boston, California. Plainview explored, finds oil, and buys as much land as he can; he also builds up the town, gaining the goodwill of the townsfolk. His biggest nemesis there is Eli Sunday (also played by Paul Dano), the creator and revivalist preacher of the Church of the Third Revelation. Eli may be genuinely religious, but he's always prepared for a donation or publicity for his church; and he feels jealous of Plainview and anger at his family for selling their oil-rich land to him.

This movie is all about Plainview, and he is an impressive character. This character could almost be a slick con man, except he delivers what he promises. Neither the appearance of his half-brother Henry (Kevin O'Connor) nor the permanent injury D.W. suffers during a drilling accident can slow or even distract Plainview from his work. And if this is greed, it's not just greed for money: Plainview easily resists a generous offer to buy off his land and oil.

This movie belongs to Daniel Day-Lewis, who brings an extraordinary focus and intensity to Daniel Plainview. When Plainview tells his brother, " I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people... there are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking," we can sense this undercurrent was through his character through the whole film even though it was never stated and rarely acted upon. Paul Dano makes Eli Sunday a pathetic foil to Plainview, preaching with a weak voice and showy acting while always looking to be given something. Director Paul Thomas Anderson departs from his usual quirky and offbeat films to make this a stark, strong movie with an epic feel.

There Will Be Blood is a thoroughly impresive movie with one of cinema's most memorable protagonists. This is one of the best movies of 2007 and an experience that will stay with you.

Overall grade: A

Reviewed by James Lynch

Delta of Venus by Anais Nin

In the 1940s a book collector offered Anais Nin a dollar a page to write erotica. She did so, ignoring his instruction to "leave out the poetry and descriptions of anything but sex." Delta of Venus is the collection of these erotic stories.

These stories are full of passion and poetry. While few of the tales involve romance, the characters explore many aspects of sexuality. There are promiscuous women, men only interested in one aspect of sexuality, shy people and promiscuous. Instead of skipping "anything but sex," the stories often include surprises and humor.

The stories also often include horrific elements of sexuality. In her preface Nin observes, "I began to write tongue-in-cheek, to become outlandish, inventive, and so exaggerated that I thought he would realize I was caricaturing sexuality." Some stories become violent, some are quite distasteful, and quite a few leave the reader feeling disturbed. It's an uneasy combination with the poetic elements of these tales.

Overall, Delta of Venus is an uneven view of the positive and negative aspects of the erotic. This is certainly not for everyone, and many readers will be put off by the extremes here. For the rest, Anais Nin gives her readers the poetry and quite a bit more.

Overall grade: C+

Reviewed By James Lynch

The 2008 Zlatne Uste Golden Festival, Good Shepherd School, Inwood NY, January 19, 2008

Once again, swarms of people converged on Good Shepherd School on the northern tip of Manhattan on a cold night in January to play, dance, and listen to many hours of music at the edition of the Zlatne Uste Golden Festival. The Festival has reached a level of popularity that required the organizers to limit the number of people who could be in the building at a given moment. Still, all three levels were quite packed. The music began at six and ended well after midnight. The audience consisted of a well-blended mixture of veteran participants in the local folk dancing scene and younger people eager some of the many exciting Balkan and Eastern-influenced bands populating the City today. And as usual, everybody appeared to get what they came for.

The Golden Room, on the middle floor, is reserved for the performers who required only a small amount of amplification. My group, the NY Spelmanslag, has made a habit of opening the show in this room. It's not a high-profile slot to say the least, but we can then relax and enjoy the whole rest of the evening without any worries. Our set appeared to go over well.


Shortly following us was a sister act. The Rosen Sisters are ace young fiddlers and dancers whose repertoire stretches from Balkan to Irish to Swedish to Glen Miller. They also wore tap shoes and did some synchronized choreography while fiddling. Their talent and charm made them a hit with the audience, which was still only a fraction of its eventual size at this point.


The Golden Room turned out to be the room to camp out in for the early hours of Golden Fest. Most of the focus at Golden Fest is on music from the Balkan region. Like most of the Balkan countries, Hungary has a distinctive tradition in instrumental folk music, complete with fiddles heavy on the vibrato and coarse, scraping bass lines. NA Folk are a Brooklyn trio who play Hungarian village music, featuring Jake Shulman-Ment of the mighty Romashka (they played later) on fiddle. They played a solid set in the Golden Room as well; fans of bands like Muzsikás would be impressed by them.

Besides the generally aggressive instrumental traditions instrumentals, there are plenty of singing traditions in the Balkans as well, most notably Bulgarian women's singing. Plenty of
women's vocal groups perform at Golden Fest each year, but Svitanya from Philadelphia have generally been the best of these groups, and were so again this year. While primarily a capella, this year the group branched out a bit and played instruments on one of the songs in their set.

The highlight of my many years of attending Golden Fest came two years ago when I discovered the amazing percussionist Raquy Danziger, so when I found out that her group Raquy and the Cavemen were playing a fairly early slot in the Golden Room, I made sure to secure a good seat ahead of time. Indeed, I've never seen that room as packed as it was for her performance. And the crowd loved every minute.

Whether all four musicians were drumming, or Raquy was playing a melody on an Arabic fiddle called a kemenche, the band had the audience mesmerized. Raquy would already be a major star in a better world, but she's definitely a performer to be reckoned with, and you have to go see her if she's playing nearby.

The main auditorium was tightly packed for most of the night. At least it was while I was there. But with the host band Zlatne Uste just starting as I left close to midnight, and Romashka and Slavic Soul Party! following, the crowd wasn't going to disperse too quickly. As always, the floor of the auditorium was filled with people dancing in concentric rings, and generally having a good time regardless of who was playing on stage. Merita Halili & the Raif Hyseni Band, shown here, specialize in Albanian folk music. Despite the language difference, plenty of people in the audience were singing along with them, including plenty of young people.

And I think the ability to lure in young people in addition to the veterans of the City's folk-dancing scene has kept the Golden Festival a massive success for twenty-three years running, and arguably the major musical gathering event on the calendar for those who know about it. Like I said last year, there is definitely a scene for Balkan-flavored music in the City, especially coming out of Brooklyn. The music is fun and creative, and even exciting in some cases, and the scene has more than enough going for it to start spreading. I was definitely encouraged to see the Luminescent Orchestrii become the first of the Brooklyn bands, at least that I'm aware of, to make it out to Long Island just this past weekend when they played at Huntington's Last Licks Café. They definitely shouldn't be the last.

reviewed by Scott

The Blue Butterfly (2004)

Since I saw William Hurt in the film, The Doctor, I've been a big fan of his work. That's what led me to watch The Blue Butterfly. In this film, he's an asocial entomologist who makes his living by sharing his love and knowledge of six legged creepy crawlies with his television audience. To get enough bugs, he makes trips down to the jungles of South America. Meanwhile, a wheelchair bound boy is diagnosed with brain cancer, and it's the terminal, really bad kind that even the local children's hospital realizes they've done all they can do, and it's simply not enough. The child decides he has one final wish before his imminent death: to see the rare blue butterfly.

Hurt becomes a reluctant hero as he gets cajoled into a trip way down South, and gives the disclaimer up front that in all probability they missed the butterfly season. Still, the kid's not making to next year's season, so why not give it a try, and give a dying boy his wish? What follows is a visually appealing journey through the Costa Rican jungle in pursuit of this most rarest butterfly. Without giving too much away, I was kind of surprised to learn that the child was cured of his cancer, and this was based on a true story.

“Huh?” I exclaimed. Next thing I know, I'm wondering exactly what type of cancer he had, and how aggressive it was. I'm starting to wonder how bad it had looked on CT, and what the resolution was like in 1989 when this reportedly took place. Also, this started in Canada, so maybe he didn't have the benefit of an MRI? Without having the benefit of rereviewing the path slides, or the original radiology, we can only guess if he was really cured of his cancer, or merely misdiagnosed somehow.

At any rate, it certainly was a worthwhile journey for the child, and Hurt grows in the process. I'm divided on the worthwhileness of this trip for the rest of us. It's visually interesting, but the end kind of left me flat. Still, unfortunately, I've seen far worse (with the writer's strike going on and on, maybe I'm running out of good films to watch).

Overall Grade: B-

Reviewed by Jonas

Rocket Science (2007)

Remember high school debates? I sure do, and I'm still annoyed about one of them. I was debating the wonders of nuclear energy, and I was pro (if I knew then what the price of gas was gonna do, I would have been even more for it). Anyway, I had several rebuttals all ready to go, and one was on Chernobyl as that was fresh on everyone's recent minds. I had enough info to stun my opponent on how that type of reactor didn't even exist anywhere in the US, and how several safety features had been disabled by low level technicians that shouldn't even been touching these devices. I'm still annoyed that my opponent, not by any grand plan, just forgets to bring this up until he was on his last rebuttal, and I was done. I still “won” the debate, but it could have been a much more resounding victory.

Ok, enough about my very brief debating career, and on to the review of Rocket Science. Here, we have one seriously competitive teen, Hal Hefner (Reece Thompson) who wants to vindicate her loss at last year's finals. However, she chooses an unlikely ally in the class stutterer who also is quite shy. Along the way we meet inept speech therapists who suggest such techniques of whispering, foreign accents, and singing the words to a familiar tune. Needless to say, this is of quite limited success. Still, the one thing that this guy has is persistence.

Unfortunately, he portrays the role of a stutterer a little too well. There were plenty of times that it gets overplayed, and we as the audience just want to finish the phrase for him, and to let it be over. As in, we'd like the film to be over. Seriously. If you want a reminder of high school than check it out, but otherwise this film is quite second rate, and offers very little that hasn't been done before and better.

Overall Grade: C-

Reviewed by Jonas

The Chase (2007)

Clive Cussler is no stranger to this Armchair Critic. Up until now, his books fit into a few series:

• The oldest and longest one is the Dirk Pitt series. The last few he has coauthored with his son, Dirk Cussler.
• The first offshoot is the Kurt Austin series. I've worked my way through most of those, and they're cowritten with Paul Kemprecos.
• The second offshoot is the Oregon files which I haven't read yet, but is coauthored by Craig Dirgo.
• The only other one off fiction of the Cussler universe is a children's book.
  

I went through the above to show you how unusual in Cussler's world a separate one off novel is. Perhaps it's because he has done so much cowriting lately that he wants to do something alone. I also think that after the Sahara fiasco, and his open heart surgery, he wanted a different change of pace. Whatever the true reason, that leads us to this author's latest work, The Chase, which incidentally is a treat for me as I rarely read something this fresh off the press.

Cussler decided to make a break, and start with a completely new character, Isaac Bell. This guy is kind of a Western detective, kind of like if Sherlock Holmes had lived in the Wild West. In addition, Cussler's works are pretty much present day, except for the intros. In The Chase, it takes place in 1906, which is by no accident one hundred years ago when the novel was being written. The setting draws upon Cussler's knowledge of the West, no doubt absorbed from living in Arizona and Colorado for many years.

One of the signature items of a Cussler novel is the background intro that sets the stage by planting some history of the past. Many are almost short stories on their own, but really enhance the novel. This time out, Cussler turns this technique on its side- he starts fifty years later, and then what follows takes us to 1906. It's interesting that he chose to do it this way as it uses one of his own techniques in a novel way.

The plot focuses on a series of bank robberies occurring across the West. Isaac Bell heads up the effort to catch the serial bank robber that kills and witnesses complicating the case, and earning him the title: "The Butcher Bandit." The descriptions are rich, and hearten back to simpler times without computers, cell phones, and cars everywhere. It was also nice to read about some gumshoe detective work that didn't involve a DNA match with a computer database.

The novel does live up to its title, The Chase. After interweaving among the San Francisco earthquake, and subsequent fire, that devastated the city, we have a first rate pursuit on railway tracks across the Wild West that made it difficult to put this book down.

My only disappointment with this whole thing is that reportedly this is a solitary novel. Too bad because I could have read a few more in this type of series with such a compelling hero. Maybe it just needs the right coauthor.

PS: This time the train underwater on the book's cover is accurate.

Overall Grade: A

Reviewed by Jonas

Perfect Stranger (2007)

I'm no fan of either Halle Barry, nor Bruce Willis. Maybe that explains why this disc sat next to the TV set for months, and never seemed to make it into the machine. The other reviews of this film aren't even good. This all makes me wonder why I really liked this film.

Halle Berry plays Rowena Price, an investigative reporter that writes under a pseudonym. When she gets shut out of exposing a Senator as a pedophile, she turns her attention to a childhood friend's murder. The trail leads to Manhattan ad exec Harrison Hill's doorstep, so Rowena infiltrates as a temp. Along the way she gets some help from Miles Haley (Giovanni Ribisi) who is her computer expert from the paper.

A thriller plot lives or dies on two things in my mind: can I figure it out halfway through, and am I on the edge of my seat for the majority of the film. On both counts, Perfect Stranger does succeed. The film did have me wondering till the very end, but in retrospect, there were clues to the final outcome throughout, which makes for a satisfying "aha" moment with only a few minutes till the final credits.

After months of avoiding this film, I'm surprised to say that this is the best film I've seen this week (although there wasn't much competition). Don't be a perfect stranger to Perfect Stranger.

Overall Grade: B+

Reviewed by Jonas

Daddy's Little Girls (2007)

Tyler Perry attempts to move past the comical stereotypes of Madea with Daddy's Little Girls. While the stereotypical jokes get nixed, the story still lacks the genuine depth and drama that it could have.

The plot centers around the daily struggle of Monty, played by Idris Elba. He does a good job of portraying this everyday hero that by circumstance ends up between a rock and a hard place. An honest guy that got a bad start in life when he went through prison, he has three daughters (hence the title). Monty is in a custody battle with his wife for the kids, made all the more important because his ex-wife is the girlfriend of the local drug gangster. He works as a car mechanic, and wants to buy the garage that he works for. To bring in some extra cash, he becomes the driver to a high power attorney, Julia, played by Gabrielle Union.

What follows has plenty of good themes including the ghetto, single parenting challenges, the difficulty of cleaning up a drug infested neighborhood, and the challenge of finding a suitable mate. For one film, perhaps there is a little too much is going on.

However, what really hinders this film is that the characters are simply too stereotypical, and too clear cut. It reminds me of a 16 color monitor with no shades in between. You lose subtlety and depth. Seriously, would a drug lord really beat up those that owed him money in his own apartment on light colored carpeting? If your daughter was injured and it was a court matter, wouldn't the better strategy be to bring her to an ER to get it documented? The school principal witnesses drug dealing, and he doesn't call the police? While Perry's screenplay is trying to portray everyday struggle in the lower class of Atlanta, I think he needs to make parts of the plot more plausible.

While I am being hard on Daddy's Little Girls, I really did enjoy the film. While it was not too believable or realistic at too many points, it did tell a good story, and I was emotionally involved to see what would happen next. Now that Perry has proven he can make a film without donning a fat suit with cheap jokes, I'm hoping his next effort hits it out of the park.

Overall Grade: B

Reviewed by Jonas