Television: Mad Men Premiere

Happy people are boring. You don't read a book, watch a movie, or go see a play to see people who are happy. You go to see people who have problems, issues, flaws.

Until now, Mad Men's Don Draper was an "all of the above" kind of guy. But the season 5 premiere reduced him to happily married and terribly boring. Okay, yes, he and his young new wife had a minor spat over her throwing him a surprise birthday party (he didn't like that), but by the end of the episode they were besotted once again. Boooooring.

One could argue (a) this episode has set Don up for a fall, and/or (b) the focus is no longer Don so much as other people in the office. And my father would point out the show has always been boring. But I've always found it to be an interesting kind of character study—except, based on the premiere, Don is no longer an interesting character.

Okay, point (a): Don's being happily married has blunted his edge in his work. ::shrug:: Now that he's happily married, he has something to lose (namely, Megan). ::shrug:: I kind of don't care.

As for point (b): It is an ensemble cast. And I wouldn't mind seeing more of Peggy and Roger. But Pete is a drain and Lane . . . He could be interesting, if they'd give him better story lines than worrying about money all the time. Joan, meanwhile, just made me want to roll my eyes.

I was told by various fans that the premiere was simply meant to set the stage. Sure, okay, but those two hours dragged. Advertising is a form of economic communication—it's about getting a lot of information across in very little time or space. The Mad Men preem could have, should have done the same.

The Annotated Entertainment Weekly

We still get Entertainment Weekly because I hate their Web site. HATE it. It's ugly and badly organized. Would it kill them to consider tabs across the top so I don't have to slog through a bunch of reality television crap I don't give a shit about? Jesus. Seriously, I HATE EW.COM.

Okay, so rant over, here's the thing: I do enjoy EW's iPad interface. It's very nicely done. BUT . . . I can't annotate it.

See, our copy of Entertainment Weekly comes on Fridays, and it's a house rule that I get to read it first. Then it goes on the bathroom shelf for reading material. And sometimes I like to leave little notes for people to find . . .

It's sort of an Easter egg hunt.

Now when the EW people make it possible for me to add comments to the iPad version? We're golden.

Movie Review: The Decoy Bride

Starring: Kelly Macdonald, David Tennant, Alice Eve
Directed By: Sheree Folkson
Written By: Sally Phillips, Neil Jaworski
Isle of Man Film, 2012
NR; 89 minutes
4 stars (out of 5)
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A toe-curlingly cute, if rote, rom-com about hack writer James (Tennant) engaged to superstarlet Lara (Eve). In an attempt to mask their nuptials from the paparazzi, they select the remote Scottish island featured in James's only novel as the setting for their wedding. As an aside, I found this a rather silly plot device because it seems to me the tabloids would surely check that out as a possibility? But maybe those types of journalists aren't that smart.

Meanwhile, Katie has come back to the island of her girlhood and moved into the local bed-and-breakfast run by her mother. Soon she finds herself roped into standing in as the titular decoy bride when the press becomes alerted to James's and Lara's presence. And as expected, Katie falls for James, James falls for Katie, hilarity ensues.

To be fair, though, Decoy Bride is a sweet-natured movie that is exactly the right length—it doesn't tire the viewer with ongoing farce. There is just the right balance of pathos and humor, and while any number of secondary characters could have been more fleshed out, the fact that the film sticks with the story and doesn't much meander makes it immanently watchable.

Decoy Bride currently shows a release date of 9 March, though my guess is it will be limited in the US; last I looked there wasn't even a distributor for a US outing. Too bad, but some cable companies do have it On Demand. Would be perfect for Valentine's Day. If you're looking for something light and not too lengthy, this fits the bill.

Books: The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and The Looking Glass War

I've been making my way through John le Carré's George Smiley novels. Not a whole lot of George Smiley in these past two; he's sort of a peripheral figure in them, a contact person for other, newer characters. I suppose it can be difficult to build too much around George himself, since he's so quiet and staid. He's a thinking man's hero, so if one is looking for action, one must turn to someone else. Which is what le Carré did in these two books.

They aren't bad. Cold is better than Looking, but they both go along about the same way. Each novel begins with a situation wherein the reader is immediately prompted to think, This can't end well. And it doesn't. After all, an inciting incident is required, particularly in spy fiction.

But, in fact, both novels continue with the this-can't-end-well feeling. A lot of work, a lot of risk, and the question of whether it will pay off—these are the shared themes between the two. The idea appears to be that there are no winners in the game of international espionage; it is a chess game that never ends because pieces removed from the board can always be replaced by new pawns.

And yet despite the lack of happy endings, the books are not unsatisfying. There are places where they become pedantic and long-winded, though I can also admire le Carré's detail. But even so, they are good, solid reads. Perfect for, say, a plane or train trip. And their chilly feel makes them right for fall and winter. (I don't know if you feel books have a season, but I certainly do.)

After the fact one is inclined to think the books could end no other way than as they do, and that is their one large fault: a sort of predestination is embedded in the lives of the characters le Carré creates. They seem to have no other options, no ability to make better choices. There is no moment when a reader might say, "If only," because what happens seems meant to happen; like a long, straight road across open country, there are no turns. Just a dead end. The characters seem to know it, and the reader does too, but the journey pulls them all along—the watched and the watchers—together to the end.

Book Review: The White Devil

Justin Evans
Harper, 2011
380 pages
hardbound
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I picked this one up when I saw it on the library's New Releases shelf for a couple reasons: (a) the cover looked interesting, (b) the title was vaguely familiar. Later I would remember that Entertainment Weekly had said it was really good. But I brought it home because the flap said it was a ghost story, and I do love a good ghost story.

In truth, The White Devil is part ghost story and part murder mystery. Seventeen-year-old Andrew Taylor has been shipped off from Connecticut to England to attend a boarding school. Which, of course, is haunted. Apparently Andrew's presence has roused the dormitory ghost, and . . . Well, I won't give too much away. But it has to do with Lord Byron, if that interests you at all.

Despite the fact that my synopsis makes it sound like a bad YA novel, The White Devil is a good read. The novel is populated with flawed adults as well as rowdy teenagers. And while the build is better than the finish, and some of the situations are predictable (the girlfriend is in danger!), as a whole the book is solid. The mystery does intrigue, as it is meant to, and the ghost is a real menace; some of the descriptions are not for the faint.

If it says anything to the quality of writing, I'm now considering looking up Evans' previous novel. He shows talent in The White Devil, and I'm curious as to whether it extends to his other work.

Movie Review: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Jared Harris, Noomi Rapace, Stephen Fry
Directed By: Guy Ritchie
Written By: Michele Mulroney, Kieran Mulroney (screenplay), from the characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle
Warner Bros., 2011
PG-13; 129 minutes
3 stars (out of 5)
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Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is a fun movie. Entertaining. Which is what it's supposed to be. But it's not a great movie. I found my mind wandering at moments. And when you're talking Sherlock Holmes--a man whose mind moves so quickly that one should have to pay attention to keep up--well, it's kind of a shame that it didn't engage me more or require more effort.

The movie brings us back to Jude Law playing Watson to Downey's Holmes. (View my review of the first film for a refresher.) Watson has removed himself from Baker Street in advance of his coming marriage. Meanwhile, Holmes has become obsessed with the nefarious dealings of Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris). When Moriarty threatens Watson and his new bride, Holmes has no choice but to hijack their honeymoon. Mrs. Watson is shipped off to Holmes' brother Mycroft (Fry) for safe keeping while Holmes and Watson trek from Paris to Germany to Switzerland, putting together the pieces of their adversary's great puzzle. There is no question how it will end--anyone who knows anything about Sherlock Holmes knows Switzerland means only one thing, and Mycroft mentions Reichenbach early in the movie--but the getting there is half the fun, right?

Well, yes and no. A lot of the film is a game of dress up more than shadows; Downey sports innumerable disguises throughout. Meanwhile, what passes for intrigue is thin indeed, hence my ability to check out a couple times without really having missed much. Rapace as a Gypsy in search of her missing brother is an excuse for the plot, leaving her to act as so much wallpaper during much of the movie. Still, there is humor, and while some of the visual effects are gimmicky (the fight between Holmes and the Cossack can barely be followed due to cuts, dark lighting, and sped up film), the scene in which they run through the forest is optically interesting, making a scene that would otherwise be too long seem just right.

SH:AGOS attempts a nod at the bromance aspect of Holmes' and Watson's relationship (sharing tight quarters! and they dance together!) but it falls short of homoerotic, probably due to not wanting to risk the male audience's discomfort. Here Holmes and Watson are more like frat brothers than anything romantic.

To summarize: the dialogue is clunky in places and the plot is thin, but SH:AGOS still manages to please on a few levels. The chemistry between Downey and Law is distinct and almost tangible, entertaining enough in its own right. Paul Anderson did an especially fine job as sharpshooter Colonel Sebastian Moran. And watching Holmes and Moriarty play chess--both literally and mentally--is compelling at times as well, making one wish they'd interacted a bit more. Also, if they'd played Holmes as a bit more manic, more obsessed with Moriarty, almost to the point that one would have to wonder if he wasn't just losing it . . . That would have added some dimension and made the whole of the story that much more involving. Alas, the down side of having a well-known character with an equally well-known nemesis is that you can't really pull something like that off very easily; everyone knows Moriarty is evil. Right? (Maybe with the next one they can have Holmes insisting Moriarty is alive, but nobody believes him?)

The first film had a stronger plot and was better written. That one also had a sort of "play along" feel that allowed the audience to gather the clues along with Holmes, something SH:AGOS sort of cheats on. But this one is still fun, a solid enough entry in what is looking to become another big franchise for Downey & co.

Movie Review: Midnight in Paris

Starring: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard
Directed By: Woody Allen
Written By: Woody Allen
Gravier Productions, 2011
PG-13; 94 minutes
4 stars (out of 5)
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IMDB has this movie listed as a comedy, which surprised me because I didn't see a whole lot of funny in it. But then again, comedy has a lot of different flavors, and Woody Allen isn't known for belly laughs. His comedy tends toward the more thought-inducing and neurotic.

I'll start out by admitting I'm no huge fan of Woody Allen; I haven't seen more than a handful of his movies. We had to watch Annie Hall in film school, of course, and while I thought that was an okay film, I had a difficult time understanding all the hype around it. Maybe I was born in the wrong era, or maybe I just don't think that way.

But I really liked Midnight in Paris. This is probably because I'm a writer in love with a foreign city myself and so I could completely identify with Wilson's character. He plays Gil, an established screenwriter who is taking a sabbatical of sorts in Paris so he can write what he hopes will be a great literary novel. Tagging along are his fiancée Inez and her parents, as well as some other friends of hers . . . Gil evidently has inherited all friends and family and has none of his own.

If I have one bone to pick with Midnight in Paris, it's that I cannot for the life of me figure out why Gil and Inez are together. They have nothing in common, and she has a terrible habit of making fun of him by relating sensitive and embarrassing anecdotes to others. Gil is a nice-guy liberal; Inez and her family are stuck-up right-wingers. If I had to guess, I'd say Inez was originally drawn by Gil's prospects, his connections as a screenwriter, which is likely why she fights him so hard when Gil mentions (repeatedly) that he might prefer to settle in the City of Lights indefinitely.

This is all prologue, of course; the real story here is how every night at midnight, Gil gets magically swept into the 1920s Parisian scene. While there he meets Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Dali, the Fitzgeralds, Cole Porter, and Gertrude Stein (portrayed quite well by Kathy Bates) among others. Meeting these icons gives Gil a shot of literary mojo. In fact, it seems almost addictive for him; Gil begins retreating from the modern world more and more as he begins to dwell on and within this fantastical space.

Of course, the underlying theme in Midnight in Paris is about the grass being greener. When Gil and a 1920s artists' model named Adriana (Cotillard) get swept back into the 1890s, she proclaims that she never wants to return to the present--her present, the 1920s. After all, the "now" is boring; things were so much better in the good ol' days. As Gil tries to convince her otherwise, he comes to the realization that escapism is no answer to life's problems.

It's a delicate balance; as a writer I know the value of living within one's imagination, sometimes for long periods of time. Breaking the dreamy concentration can be costly to a story or script. Interruption is generally unwelcome. But one also has to surface now and again, participate in real life, and be present in the present, else life can come crashing down while you're living and breathing an otherwhere.

Midnight in Paris is a gentle film, and beautiful in a cinematographic way, even if it carries no heavy insights into life. The motion in the film, both outward and introspectively, is slow, like a dawning. This is not a movie designed to jolt, or even to prompt great discussion; instead it is a love letter to the creative mind, and to all the influences that crowd it.

Movie Review: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Starring: Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, A Bunch of Other British Dudes
Directed By: Tomas Alfredson
Written By: John Le Carré (novel), Bridget O'Connor & Peter Straughan (screenplay)
Focus Features/Studio Canal, 2011
R; 127 minutes
4 stars (out of 5)
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I recently read and reviewed the book this movie was based on, and I have to say it did help that I was already familiar with the source material because the movie has the potential to be confusing to those who don't already know the story. And yet the writers made enough alterations from the novel that, having just read it, I was very aware of what was different and missing, too. It was a little like one of those picture games where you have two images and are told to find all the changes.

As a film, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a Cold War-era tale of British espionage in which Oldman plays "retired" (read: booted) MI6 agent George Smiley, who is pulled back into the world of "The Circus" in order to help smoke out a mole working for the Russians. That sounds like a simple enough story, but these are spies, remember, so everything becomes very convoluted very quickly. And while the film is good—better than good, actually—it suffers a little in comparison to the book, not because of the changes that have been made (the changes work very well), but because the characters don't get enough of an introduction for the viewers to necessarily follow them easily or get any real sense of them at all. If I hadn't only just read the novel, I would almost certainly have been asking myself, Which one is that guy again? and Wait, what was his story? Maybe even, Why should I care about him, exactly?

TTSS requires undivided attention. There are a lot of people and a lot of cuts between past and present. Still, the story is good enough to hold an audience's interest, which makes it somewhat better than the book in that respect, since parts of the novel were prone to drag. As Smiley, Oldman is able to pull all focus to him; his smallest motions convey as much as any length of dialogue might. Flashbacks to what must have been the worst Christmas party in history add a strange weight, a sorrow, to the whole of the film.

Along with Oldman, Mark Strong, whom I usually think of as a villain, has a small, non-evil role, and the quiet strength of his performance is lovely. Tom Hardy, too, shines a bit as a rogue agent whose emotions get the better of him, even as he tries to do the right thing.

It's a nice-looking film, too, the bad 70s haircuts notwithstanding. A sort of sodium filter gives everything the tint of an old photograph, which lends itself to the story quite well.

Still and all, it isn't edge-of-your-seat spy thriller entertainment. Nothing is exploding. There are one or two tense scenes in which someone is in jeopardy—and maybe I would have felt it more if I hadn't already known the outcomes—but the overall feel is one of quiet reflection and semi-nostalgia. Which sounds boring, but somehow TTSS (and Oldman) pulls it off.

And at the end of the day, as the credits roll, one could easily imagine another George Smiley movie to follow. Even hope for one. Just give me enough warning so I can read the novel first, please.

Two Questions

If I could ask Benedict Cumberbatch two questions:

1. Would you name your son Timothy?
2. What did you do for Speech Day?

Book Review: Thomas and Friends On Track with Phonics: Fox in the Box

This is a little book that came in a set of 12 I bought for my 2-year-old at the book fair at his school last week. He loves Thomas the Tank Engine, and the minute he saw these books he had to have them. They were produced by Random House, copyrighted 2010.

Tonight I read him the book titled Fox in the Box, and I have to say: it is a terrible book. I understand the need to use certain words and sounds when teaching phonics, but they could have done better than this.

The story begins with Thomas and Percy (another train engine, for those not versed in Thomas lore) wanting to have a party. There's no clear reason for this celebration; they're just party animals, those two. Lucky for them they have a box filled with nuts, bags, and caps. Woo-hoo! Bring it!

Things go awry, however, when a fox comes along and gets into the box. This fox eats the nuts and "nips and rips" the bags, which sends tattle-tale Thomas running to Driver Dan to beg him to do something. But before Dan can come up with a plan, it starts to rain.

Turns out the fox doesn't like rain. So he runs off to another box—this one empty—seeking refuge. It's not entirely clear why the fox didn't just stay in the first box, which appeared to be inside and sheltered from the rain. But we'll let that pass and focus on the truly dreadful outcome of this story.

The fox is in the empty box, hiding from the rain. Driver Dan then comes along and puts a lid on the box so that only the fox's tail is hanging out. Meanwhile, Thomas and Percy get to throw their wild party, nuts, bags, caps and all. And the final page? It reads: "The party was fun. But not for the fox."

Sure enough, with confetti flying, there are Thomas and Percy having a party and the box with the fox's tail sitting in the middle of it all. Instead of letting this poor fox go free somewhere, Driver Dan and the tank engines have apparently decided to subject it to captivity and mockery. (They also haven't invited any of the other trains from what I can tell.) It's not a terribly edifying lesson, is almost baffling in its bizarre "twist ending."

I haven't read any of the other books in this collection, though my husband assures me Go, Bertie, Go features Dan wielding a bat for no apparent reason. I'm starting to think Dan needs a holiday or therapy or something. I fear he's encouraging anti-social behavior in the sheds.

Book Review: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

John Le Carré
Alfred A. Knopf, 1974
355 pages
hardcover
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This book was kind of excruciating to read, but I dogged my way through it because I wanted to know the story before the film opens in the U.S. in December. I'd never read anything by Le Carré before, so I don't know if all his books are as much of a slog as this one. Or maybe it's just that I'm out of practice with the whole spy thriller genre; I go through cycles with what I read and haven't done Clancy and his ilk in at least a decade or more.

While reading TTSS, I could absolutely picture how I would script it for film, but it works better that way than in prose, I think. A lot of the story involves the main character—a British spy named George Smiley who has been forced into retirement—reading old dossiers and interviewing witnesses. Not terribly engaging in and of itself, but easy to fix with visuals within a movie.

There are a handful of honestly intense moments, but they are outweighed by the long intervals of reminiscences. I think some of the flashbacks are intended to be intense, too, but since the reader already knows who came out alive, there's little to sustain the tension.

The core of the story is Smiley attempting to ferret out a double agent, or "mole," but finding out who, or even why (and admittedly the "why" is flimsy in any case), ends up being not so interesting as how.

I know TTSS was not Le Carré's first novel, and knowing so little about his catalogue of work, I have no idea if I was supposed to know Smiley and some of the other characters from previous tales. If so, this may have been one of the reasons I found the book a bit thin on character development. All these potentially interesting people, but it was more tell than show when it came to interior dialogue and motives. I wanted to see them do things that would inform me about their characters, but it was a lot of sitting and talking, or sitting and reading, or walking and talking, or riding in cars and talking (which is more or less the same as sitting and talking), or the author simply telling the reader what the character felt. In the end, all this gave the feeling that the characters lacked depth.

Or maybe that's the point. Maybe spies lack depth because they're all façade in any case. But really, that makes the meal somewhat unsatisfying. Considering the time I'm devoting to the story, I'd like to think all the people I'm reading about have complex makeups, even when showing only one facet—the reader should be led to believe it's one facet of many. In TTSS, whether it be the British rectitude or secret agent reserve, the reader may not be convinced there's any more to the men than the little that is shown.

Movie Review: Thor

Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Anthony Hopkins
Directed By: Kenneth Branagh
Written By: Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz, Don Payne (screenplay); J Michael Straczynski, Mark Protosevich (story); Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Jack Kirby (comic book)
Paramount Pictures/Marvel Entertainment, 2011
PG-13; 115 minutes
2 stars (out of 5)
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This is how I envision Thor having been written: J Michael Straczynski (creator of Babylon 5) sketched out the story on a napkin while spending a good deal of time at a bar, probably celebrating however much they paid him to do the job. All well and good until he set his drink on the napkin. Then some of what he wrote got a little blurry. And by the time Protosevich got hold of it, he could only read about half. He made some additional notes—that may or may not have had anything to do with anything JMS had written—then faxed the napkin to the screenwriters, but of course it got shredded by the fax machine. This left the screenwriters with no choice but to try to piece together what they could of what had probably been something decent if not brilliant but was now the screenplay equivalent of mincemeat. They threw in some filler for the parts they couldn't find or decipher. The end result: the mess that is Thor.

Truthfully, it's a textbook movie. It's so predictable one thinks it must have been written by film students who only just learned about plot and three-act structure. And it's streamlined all to hell—most character development has been cut in favor of action sequences. If we're supposed to believe there's some kind of chemistry between Jane Foster (Portman) and Thor (Hemsworth), well . . . Let's just say even my rather extensive ability to suspend my disbelief doesn't stretch quite so far.

As my husband put it, a lot of the movie is about a woman who doesn't drive very well. And I just had that "Rainbow Road" video from YouTube stuck in my head the entire time.

It probably didn't help that our cat's name is Loki. He would have made a much better villain, I think; especially if we got him that horned helmet and a cape.

All the scenes in Asgard look like cut scenes from a Final Fantasy game. And everything there is very shiny. Are Norse gods also magpies or something? They seem to really, really like shiny things is all I'm saying.

It wouldn't have hurt if Thor had had a tad more humor, either. I wanted a reason to laugh, even just once or twice, but most of the dialogue falls flat. That is to say, the stuff that maybe is supposed to be funny isn't, and none of it is unintentionally funny either, so the movie ends up feeling monotonous in overall tone.

As a whole, the feeling is they made Thor simply because they felt they had to in order to introduce the character in advance of The Avengers. If you do bother to watch, wait for the scene after the end credits; it was reportedly done by Joss Whedon (uncredited) and is in the style the rest of the movie should have been. Not that I don't love Branagh, and I'm sure he did the best he could with what he had for material, but . . . Seriously. Does Asgard really need to be that shiny?

Book Review: Becoming Jane Austen

Jon Spence
Continuum, 2007
312 pages
trade paperback
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This is the book the film Becoming Jane was based on. Now to be fair, my husband and I had tried to watch Becoming Jane a couple years back and couldn't get into it, so we turned it off after 15 minutes. Maybe we were just in the wrong frame of mind, or maybe this is the kind of story that doesn't translate so smoothly. Dunno.

I picked up the book because at some point it occurred to me that although I like Austen's writing (and yet I haven't read all of her work, though I probably should), I knew very little about her as a person. So I got curious. And then I went to the library, and this was one of the most recent books they had on the biography shelf. I figured recent information was probably better than, say, books from the 60s and 70s, so . . .

Becoming Jane Austen is good. It's well written, thorough, but not dry. Very accessible. It's almost a shame there's not more concrete information about Austen's life, but Spence does very well with what's available.

And I have to say I find it a fun fact that Jane and I were born almost exactly 200 years apart, plus one day . . . I guess I'd better hope I don't die at age 41, though.

Bottom line is I now know more about Jane Austen than I did, which was the goal. And had a nice time learning, thanks to this book.

Television: Doctor Who finale

All right, let's start from the tippy top. My dad used to watch Doctor Who when I was a kid, and I'd sometimes sit with him (we only had the one television), but I never did follow what was going on exactly, and it all looked a bit silly to me. Still and all, when the program was rebooted in 2005, my husband and I tried it out. We didn't get more than a couple episodes in, however. Maybe it was that we had other demands on our time—our first son was born that November—and/or that, in the list of shows we had time to fit in, Doctor Who fell toward the end.

NOW, a few years later, with kids a little older and us having a bit more free time to ourselves (and our almost 6-year-old finding DW to be a treat), and also the advent of streaming video, we've had the chance to catch up. And as a rule I do enjoy Doctor Who. I could debate the pros and cons of Tennant versus Smith all day, I could delve into the darker side of the Doctor and his psyche, what-have-you. But I really want to focus on the two Smith finales, by which I mean that of the last series (what we in the States would call "last season") and this past one as well. Because they seemed remarkably similar in tone and execution, which makes me worry that Steven Moffat might be dipping too often from the same well.

Here's the thing: last year the finale was "The Big Bang," in which the Doctor was in the Pandorica, but then he wasn't, and then he was going to die in 12 minutes, but then he didn't, and they had to recreate the Big Bang so the world could go back to normal. This year's finale was "The Wedding of River Song," in which the Doctor was once again going to die on a certain day and time, but then he didn't, and that messed things up in the world, so he had to fake his death so time could go back to normal.

Point 1. In each case, at least part if not most of the tension was predicated on the anticipation of the coming death of the Doctor. If this is your go-to crisis for every series finale, something is wrong. How many times can he die, or almost die, but not really die, or else come back from the dead, before the audience ceases to care? The only time this works is (a) if the program is in real danger of cancelation and the audience isn't sure if it's ending, and/or (b) there's a real chance the actor is leaving and the audience wants to see if there's a new Doctor.

Point 2. In both these finales, the pseudo-science causing the problem was, er . . . Jumbled? Not compelling? The core plots seemed flimsy. They were excuses for the characters to have long-winded conversations about their emotions. If you pay attention, that's how Doctor Who functions: the science is rattled off at light speed while the soapy interactions are prolonged. I don't have a problem with this as a rule; I'm the kind of person who enjoys character development. And if any of these characters were actually developing, I'd be ecstatic. But they all appear to be a bit stuck in their ways, forms and functions these days. River Song will always save the day and Rory will always be the underdog, while Amy usually has to step in and help him. If Rory does happen to rescue someone or something, it's generally by accident, a happy byproduct of his own clumsy existence. For once I'd like to see River Song not so sure of herself. I'd like to see Rory put his foot down in a way that the others can't railroad him. It's not in his established character makeup for him to walk away, but what if he finally did? That would be interesting. Not only because it'd be new for the character, but because the situation that would cause such a fundamentally changed reaction in him would have to be fascinating in and of itself.

Point 3. This is a more general point, but I do wish Moffat and company would give the audience a tad more credit. I mean, the minute they started talking about "the question" (a few episodes back), it was clear to me that they meant the show title. And it's no stretch to go from there to the Doctor's name. (That's old school mythology right there: look at Isis and Set.) So when the question was finally "revealed" at the end of "The Wedding of River Song," it was really more of a confirmation. The excess of drama around it was unnecessary. It smacked of a smugness that was unmerited, rather like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat with an exaggerated flourish while the audience sits there and says, "Uh, yeah. We know. Rabbit. Duh."

Okay, so to sum up: I like Doctor Who and want to continue to like Doctor Who, but in order for that to happen, we need some real shake-ups as opposed to these sort of smoke-and-mirror tactics. Let's get out of the comfort zone here, people. Really surprise us. If he can do that—if he can make us go, "Holy s***, really? I never saw that coming!"—Moffat and his crew will have earned the right to pat themselves on the backs.

Book Review: Instruments of Darkness

Imogen Robertson
Pamela Dorman Books, 2011
384 pages
hardcover
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This was one of those books I lucked into at the library while browsing the "new releases" shelves. Picked it up, read the flap, and added it to my stack. That's what's grand about libraries--getting to taste-test the wares at no cost.

And so here was this book that I'd never heard of by an author I'd never heard of, but once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. It's always nice to find one of those kinds of books now and then.

The story is a sort of murder mystery set in 1780 England, a twisted rope made of three distinct strands: a series of murders in Sussex, another murder in London, and a dark past history of some of the characters involved. All very engaging, particularly for someone like me who (a) likes historical stories, (b) is an Anglophile, and (c) likes anything that smacks even distantly of Sherlock Holmes, which one of the chief characters certainly does. Indeed, I would say Robertson split the archetypical Holmes into two: a man with a scientific and methodical mind and a woman with an intelligent and inquisitive nature. Together they make a formidable crime-solving team. Maybe they could get their own TV series on the BBC.

While some of the story seemed obvious by the time the explanations began to trickle through, and the end of the book sways somewhat toward the Gothic in flavor, the whole of it is satisfying. Definitely worth the read.

Movie Review: Fright Night

Starring: Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, Toni Collette, David Tennant, Imogen Poots
Directed By: Craig Gillespie
Written By: Marti Noxon (screenplay), Tom Holland (story)
Albuquerque Studios/Dreamworks SKG, 2011
R; 106 minutes
2.5 stars (out of 5)
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I went into Fright Night wanting to like it, and I did, but not as much as I hoped.

The story itself is pretty rote: high school nerd-turned-cool kid Charlie (Yelchin) discovers the new neighbor Jerry (Farrell) is a vampire. Hilarity ensues. Except not really because the movie wasn't very funny. At least, not in any intentional way.

Marti Noxon, best known for her work on Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, does a fair job of delivering an even-handed script for this remake (and to be clear, I never saw the original and know nothing about the original, so I have nothing to compare this to in that sense). But the jumps are minimal; viewers can see what's coming from a mile away, so there are few surprises.

It seems like the movie isn't sure how seriously it wants to be taken, so it skimps on both horror and humor and instead ends up rather flat. Farrell does an amusing job of vamping it up, Collette is great as Charlie's mom, and Tennant is underutilized (way to throw in a quick backstory and then drop the ball, guys). Meanwhile, Charlie and his girlfriend Amy (Poots) get the most screen time but are the weakest links. Yelchin does a so-so job of portraying someone whose whole life has been turned upside down by a horrific revelation--he even sees a neighbor burst into flame after he rescues her from Jerry's house and brings her out into dawn's early light--and while Poots is believable as the sweet girlfriend, she's mostly a plot device. In fact, all of Fright Night is so carefully plotted one can pretty much recreate the beat sheet from memory.

However. Because I went in with little or no expectations—just a desire to have fun—I did enjoy the movie. Fright Night flies on autopilot, sure, but it's a smooth enough ride. It entertains, though it could have taken me farther in any direction without my protesting too much. It functions mostly as an extremely diluted R or a trumped-up PG-13. (In fact, I thought it was PG-13 while watching it and found out later it was R, more likely due to all the swearing rather than any excess of gore.)

As for the 3D aspect, this movie, like so many others, really didn't benefit from the added dimension. But at least it didn't give me a headache either.

Fright Night is solidly middle-of-the-road fare, more a rental than a big screen flick.

Book Review: Bespelling Jane Austen

Featuring Stories by: Mary Balogh, Colleen Gleason, Susan Krinard, Janet Mullany
HQN, 2010
378 pages
trade paperback
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I totally picked this one up off the library shelf as a "maybe," you know, the way one does when one is browsing and begins collecting a giant pile of stuff that might be interesting. It's the same thing that happens when you're at the grocery store and aren't entirely sure what you might be hungry for later, so you toss anything that might seem likely into the cart.

Okay, so first off, I'm not familiar with any of these authors. I do read romances from time to time--used to read Regency romances quite regularly before so many of the romance publishers nixed them. And I do like Jane Austen. And I like a little magic and/or magical realism every now and then, too. So this one seemed like an interesting mix.

The conceit of the collection is that the four authors have each taken a Jane Austen novel and rewritten it in some way while also inserting a sort of paranormal or Gothic/horror element into it. Think of that whole Pride and Prejudice and Zombies phenomenon that occurred a couple years back and you're on the right track, but this is on a smaller scale, the stories much reduced to fit the collection.

So taken one by one, Mary Balogh turned Austen's Persuasion into a story about soul mates and reincarnation. It's a nice idea but I didn't love the execution. As I've mentioned, I'm not familiar with Balogh's other works--according to the blurb she's written 70+ books, many of them set in Regency England. But this one just didn't ring right to me somehow. There seemed to be a lot of tell and less show. Or maybe the problem was she showed and then, just to be sure the reader understood, she then told as well, so it seemed like overkill.

Gleason took Northanger Abbey, which quite lends itself to the whole idea of Gothic horror, and had Catherine hunting vampires at Bath and then, naturally, at Northanger, which for the purposes of the story became a castle. This one was cute, and I liked it, but I felt it could have been fleshed out a bit more; the ending seemed rushed.

Krinard did a nice job of turning Mr Darcy--and numerous other characters--of Pride and Prejudice into a vampire. Though the story is set in modern day Manhattan, Darcy is able to keep all the lusture of his prim and exacting personality by dint of the fact that he is 200 or so years old and, as they say, old habits . . . While I didn't 100% believe the way these "modern" Bennet girls talked and behaved, the story as a whole was well done.

And finally, Mullany cast Emma into modern day Washington D.C., where the title character is a witch running an online dating service for paranormal creatures such as vampires, elves, werewolves . . . Now, I've never read Emma (though I know she is supposedly a would-be matchmaker), so I can't say whether the characters in Mullany's story bear any resemblance to the originals--their magical abilities notwithstanding. But honestly, there wasn't a single person (creature) that I could like in the whole thing. They were all of them obnoxious. (My husband assures me this is true of Austen's book as well.) At any rate, the tale seemed a bit cobbled and cliched.

All in all, I'm not sorry I took the time to read it. Out of sheer curiosity I might consider taking a look at any one of the authors' other books to see how they measure up.

Movie Review: The Other Boleyn Girl

Starring: Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Eric Bana
Directed By: Justin Chadwick
Written By: Peter Morgan, from the novel by Philippa Gregory
BBC Films, 2008
PG-13; 115 minutes
2 stars (out of 5)
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The Other Boleyn Girl was the first of Philippa Gregory's novels that I ever read—I picked it up at an airport bookstore, as I recall, prior to some trip—and probably still my favorite. So maybe this movie already had a strike against it going in, or at the very least some prejudice to overcome.

But here's the thing: while I can remember liking the book quite a lot, it's been long enough since I read it (and I've read enough other stuff since then) that I only remember a few details from the novel. So it's not as if I were watching this movie and saying to myself, "Well, in the book . . ."

What I was doing was thinking, "None of this rings much of a bell."

That is to say, the movie itself felt vague and without substance. I know enough about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn to pick out the historical blurs in the story, but that didn't bother me so much; it's happened often enough that film and television punch things up, move things around, for the sake of a better story. Fine. But this didn't feel like a better story. It felt like a mishmash, a jumble of events that were weirdly disconnected, or maybe only thinly connected, like pearls held apart from one another on the same string. For example, William Carey at some point dies, though one either has to know the history or watch the deleted scenes to figure that out.

Johansson, for her part, did a lovely job as the demur Mary Boleyn. And Portman is believable as someone underhanded and nasty, though her luring of Bana's Henry didn't play quite true. The tension was lacking. In fact, every actor did a fair to fantastic job, but when put all together, the movie fell short of the sum of its parts. Baffling.

Makes me want to go re-read the book.

Book Review: A Little Folly

Jude Morgan
Review, 2010
384 pages
hard cover
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I have a fondness for Jude Morgan. I especially enjoyed his novel Indiscretion, and I rather liked this one as well. Morgan takes on the mantel of a would-be Austen with relative ease, peppering his prose with just the right balance of wit and sensibility. His characters are flawed and quirky and interesting enough to pull the reader through the story, even when it starts to be clear exactly how and where that story is likely to end.

At first I could see A Little Folly going in any number of directions, but at a little shy of halfway through it became clear where Morgan was aiming. I don't know how much of this was due to Morgan tipping his hand and how much was simply because I've read enough of these kinds of books to see what's coming. In in case, it only diminished the enjoyment very slightly. The prose bears up even when the reader knows how the story will finish.

An example of Morgan's pitch-perfect humor:

To excite in a man a state of violent loathing was, as any novel-reader knew, to stand in a fair light of winning him at last; but no woman could ever recover from the humiliation of being respected.

Morgan's writing is full of these lovely tidbits, and I often recommend his books to friends who enjoy Austen or Regency stories in general. A Little Folly is, then, another in a list of his good works.

Movie Review: The Adjustment Bureau

Starring: Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, John Slattery
Directed By: George Nolfi
Written By: George Nolfi, from the story by Philip K. Dick
Universal Pictures, 2011
PG-13; 106 minutes
3 stars (out of 5)
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I wanted to see this in the theater when it came out but never got the chance. That's okay. It's not some big spectacle movie that benefits from a big screen.

The story is solid, thanks to Philip K. Dick's "The Adjustment Team." The directing is textbook, which is to say it isn't bad and isn't particularly memorable, either. Some of the dialogue, particularly toward the end, is a bit of a groaner. It takes a special kind of actor (Damon) to deliver such lines evenly and sincerely.

In short, The Adjustment Bureau is the story of politician David Norris, played by Damon, whose destiny is to be great . . . Except he has a run-in with a ballerina (Blunt) that throws him off course. And her, too, by default. Meanwhile, the whole "plan" is maintained by pseudo-angelic businessmen in natty suits and hats (which I suppose are stand-ins for halos), including Slattery. When Norris accidentally gets a glimpse inside the mechanism that maps his existence, he becomes determined to change his fate. It seems he can be a great politician or get the girl but not both.

Of course, the movie is designed to be a discussion piece. Free will? Preordained destiny? But The Adjustment Bureau is almost too sweet-tempered to foster any dialogue. There's nothing in it to get fired up about. Which is a shame, because with a little more punch, it would have been a great movie instead of just a good one.

Guess it wasn't meant to be.