Christopher East

It’s been a while since I’ve done a TV round-up post, so here’s a summer viewing report:

New seasons are underway for two shows I’ve been following casually for a while now, TNT’s Leverage and USA’s White Collar.  To me, the quality of Leverage has dropped a little this season, while White Collar has shown some improvement.  I wouldn’t consider myself a diehard fan of either series — taken as a whole, I still have more loyalty to Leverage –  but I’m still enjoying them both.

On the “catching up” front, Jenn and I are working our way through the second season of Chuck, a campy, funny contemporary spy series that has been steadily improving as it goes.  The early stages of season two feel like a show hitting its stride, to me.  Long way to go yet to catch up here, though — I don’t quite have the series marathoning chops that I used to!

My completism for 24 took me through the two-hour, between-season movie 24: Redemption, which bridges the gap between seasons six and seven of the show.   On the run after the events of season six, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) has settled in Africa, helping an old Special Forces buddy named Benton (Robert Carlyle) run a school for boys.  But civil war in the fictional nation of Sangala jeopardizes the kids, who are being kidnapped and press-ganged into military service across the border.  Fortunately Bauer is on hand to protect them.  It’s definitely a step up from season six — which was, on the whole, pretty awful — but lacks the complexity of a full, multi-threaded season arc.  Its main mission seems to be laying the groundwork for season seven — introducing the new president, the new villain, and some other figures — meanwhile delivering its usual doses of intense action and taking advantage of some refreshing scenery from its South African locations.

The main reason for this post, though, is the new AMC series Rubicon, which looks very promising indeed.  I’ve only seen the first two episodes, but I haven’t been this excited about a new show for a long time.  This dark, intriguing spy mystery centers around a New York City think-tank full of intelligence analysts.  The central figure is Will Travers (James Badge Dale), a brilliant, introverted analyst with a tragic past, who starts piecing together a complicated conspiracy involving his father-in-law (and fellow spy) David (Peter Gerety).  Slow, subtle, and mysterious, Rubicon builds with a kind of quiet intensity, taking its time to lay out its clues and develop its storylines.  It’s populated by immediately likeable and interesting characters, an office drama in a truly unique office, where the stresses of the secret life play out in quirky, awkward, tense interactions between the officers.  It conjures both the fascinating personal politics of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and the premise and paranoia of Three Days of the Condor. I will be following this series — which feels like it was made just for me! — with considerable interest.

Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) is a curious film, an Aaron Sorkin script largely populated by non-Sorkin-ish actors (with apologies to Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman), and dealing with a subject not exactly tailor made for Sorkin’s highly stylized dialogue and sense of humor:  the covert U.S. war to support Afghanistan in their war effort against the Soviets in the 1980s.  As an unlikely blend of subject matter and approach it’s not entirely unsuccessful, but it’s certainly an odd bird.

Texas senator Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) is a smarmy, sexist liberal hawk, whip-smart under his hedonist lifestyle.  On a whim, he doubles the CIA intelligence budget against the Russians in recently invaded Afghanistan — which doesn’t help them much, but does put him onto the radar of a wealthy, right-wing activist named Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts).  A militant anti-communist, Herring maneuvers Wilson into meeting with the president of Pakistan about the severity of the situation on their border, and Wilson — along with his erstwhile aide Bonnie (Adams) — is so moved by the plight of the Afghanis that he undertakes to clandestinely support their war effort with every means at his disposal.  To that end, he liaises with curmudgeonly CIA officer Gust Avrakatos (Hoffman), and they work together to secretly get the needed weapons to the resistance fighters, meanwhile escalating Soviet defense spending to unsustainable levels, which contributes to the collapse of the USSR.

Sorkin and director Mike Nichols bring an oddly cheerful, rah-rah aesthetic to this period piece biopic, which has all the earmarks of a bitter, grim spy tale but doesn’t play any of them up.  Unlike Sorkin’s The West Wing (which it resembles in tone), it’s hard to determine which political end of the spectrum the film is playing to; if this covert war is depicted as something of a Pyrrhic victory, it’s also shown as a heroic effort to down an evil regime, and the bizarre tone makes the message seem a little muddled.  (I’m not well schooled enough in the history here to know how accurate the depiction of events is, which makes it even harder to render judgement.)

Hanks performs adequately in the lead role, although he’s definitely not a natural fit for a “bastard with a heart of gold” role — as a persona, he might be just a little too nice-guy for this.  He’s also not a natural with Sorkin dialogue, nor is Roberts or most of the cast; there’s a certain rhythm to Sorkin’s writing that only Adams and Hoffman seem adept at rendering.  (The great Hoffman, by the way, is easily worth the price of admission.)

In the end, I enjoyed Charlie Wilson’s War without loving it.  If nothing else, its oddly upbeat tone makes it a refreshing change of pace to the genre’s characteristic cynicism.

There’s nothing earth-shattering about Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006), but I liked it, a low-key, low-budget comedy about a young man named Zia (Patrick Fugit) who commits suicide in despair over a break-up with his girlfriend Desiree (Leslie Bibb).  Turns out, though, that killing yourself only puts you into a purgatorial half-life where everything’s just like actual life, but worse.  Nobody smiles, nobody laughs, and nothing happens.  Nonetheless, Zia is stirred by the news that Desiree, too, has committed suicide, and with his Russian pal Eugene (Shea Whigham) at the wheel, he sets out to find her.  On the way, an attractive female hitchhiker named Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon) — claiming her arrival in this particular afterlife was a mistake, as her death wasn’t a suicide but an accident — joins them on their road trip, with her own mission.

Wristcutters is quirky, laid back, dark indie fun, its premise perfect for its miniscule finances – the suicides’ afterlife is a grimy, run-down place full of dilapidated buildings, clunky cars, and litter-strewn desert, which probably made location-casting easier on such a shoestring budget.  Despite the offbeat trappings, the plot is rather formulaic, what with the hero pursuing the wrong girl while the right one is right under his nose; but plot is less important than tone, which is extremely dry and just a little weird.  Fugit makes for a likeable slacker protagonist, and Sossamon an attractive love interest.  And Tom Waits makes an appearance, which improves just about any movie.  It’s not a great film by any means, but it’s an honest and likeable one.

I either didn’t read Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox or simply don’t remember it, so I had no idea what to expect going into Wes Anderson’s animated film version.  Well, except that it would probably be Wes Anderson-like.  My guess is that if you like the quirky, low key sense of humor of Anderson’s other films (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, etc.), you’ll probably like Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009).  I certainly got a kick out of it.

Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is a former chicken thief gone straight, now working a humdrum life as a newspaper writer to support his family.  But he can’t resist the lure of his wild animal youth, and behind the back of Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep), he masterminds daring heists against callous local farmers Boggus, Bunce, and Bean, which escalates into an all-out war between the humans and the animals.

Like most of Anderson’s films, the pacing is subdued and the humor is offbeat, although here the uniquely stylized stop-motion animation (which is occasionally creepy, but kind of inherently funny) lends a different kind of energy to the proceedings.  Intriguing visuals aside, it’s dialogue that drives the funny here, highlighted by the rivalry between Mr. Fox’s son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) with visiting, too-good-to-be-true cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson).  I’m generally not that big on anthropomorphized animal humor, but the take here is pretty clever.  It’s light, enjoyable fare, unique and fun.

Time for some quick Futurismic news!  A new month (insert obligatory “already?” here) means new science fiction at Futurismic:  stop over and check out a great new story by Nancy Jane Moore,  “Or We Will All Hang Separately.”

Oh, and by the way, Futurismic has joined the twittersphere!   Follow the site here:  @futurismic.

A well made film examining the intelligence war on terror, Body of Lies (2008) nonetheless feels slightly humdrum, perhaps because many of its themes and ideas have been dealt with more memorably by other films.

Roger Ferris (Leonard DiCaprio) is one of the CIA’s top men in the Middle East, and as the film opens his work in Iraq turns up a lead that may put them onto a major terrorist leader whose cell has been setting off bombs all across Europe.  Ferris is reassigned by his manipulative Washington control Hoffman (Russell Crowe) to Amman, Jordan, where he makes headway in the manhunt by initiating a tense alliance with the head of Jordanian intelligence, Hani (Mark Strong).  Between the hard-nosed Hani and the deceptive Hoffman, Ferris has his hands full accomplishing his mission, and things only get more complicated when his involvement with an Iranian nurse, Aisha (Golshifteh Farahani), finds its way into the intrigue.

The plot is stocked with clever gambits, its intricate machinations playing out neatly, and director Ridley Scott brings plenty of energy to the exciting action sequences.  DiCaprio — who keeps turning up in this blog lately! — carries the film with aplomb, and it’s generally well acted; Strong makes for a particularly formidable foil.  But there’s something a little bit expected about it all.  The film’s major mission seems to be contrasting the harrowing experience of the man on the ground (DiCaprio) with that of the distant, calculating higher-ups pulling the strings (Crowe), and there’s something a little heavy-handed about how that comes off.   Hardly in poor form, Crowe may nonetheless be a little too obvious a D.C. schemer for the film’s own good.  Similarly, Ferris’ ill-considered romance with Aisha seems a bit out of character, pro forma plot maneuvering.  A few on-the-nose turns of phrase in the dialogue also contribute to the sense of familiar thematic ground.

An earnest, well produced, and structurally satisfying film, then, but in the end Body of Lies doesn’t quite stand out from the crowd.

I’ll keep this post simple:

The first draft of Subnetworks is complete!

I slowed down in June, but started rolling downhill in July:  final word count for the month was 14,500.  Final word count for the novel?  Probably too long.  But who cares?  I finally finished it!

Is it normal, when you finish a novel, to feel like you should get like a month off from everything?

Easily the best big budget Hollywood film I’ve seen in years, Inception (2010) is a structurally fascinating blend of science fiction and corporate espionage, an intelligent and deviously complicated spectacle that satisfies on just about every level. (Spoiler note: If you haven’t seen the film yet, you might want to skip the next paragraph, if not the rest of the review. I don’t think it’s that spoiler-y, but I was very happy to have gone into the film with few preconceptions.  So, if you’re stopping here — great movie, go see it!)

The film depicts a world in which science has made it possible to infiltrate an individual’s dreamscape, and Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the best of the best in this field.  As the film opens, he and his team are attempting to steal secrets from the head of a major energy corporation named Saito (Ken Watanabe), but the plan goes off-track, and Saito turns the tables, recruiting Cobb on an entirely different mission:  rather than retrieving ideas, they are to plant one, in the mind of one Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), the heir to a rival corporation.  Cobb assembles a new team to accomplish this extremely difficult task, which comes for him with the ultimate reward.  But Cobb isn’t exactly mentally stable, his dreamscape consistently invaded by a projection of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), and his risky strategy of sending Fischer into a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream puts the entire team at a terrible risk.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan returns here to the grand conceptual structuring of his breakout film Memento, and the result is impressive:  a smart, challenging, complex story that is serviced, rather than sidetracked, by its larger-than-life visual spectacle.  There’s proof, here, that film audiences aren’t nearly as stupid as Hollywood generally tends to believe they are; the viewer is credited with the intelligence to put the pieces of this puzzle together, and indeed deconstructing the twisty plot mechanics is a huge part of the appeal.  It’s the ultimate Mission: Impossible, a task of intense con-game persuasion with a mindbending skiffy twist.  For the most part the film is briskly paced, although it does bookend its accelerating middle stages with some extended world-building set-up and a slightly laggy emotional wind-down; all things considered, though, it earns its two and a half hour running time, and its final note is pitch perfect.

DiCaprio shows once again why he’s become Hollywood’s go-to guy for intensely unhinged protagonists, and he’s surrounded with great support, particularly from his fellow team members, which include Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, and Tom Hardy.  I do wish the intrusively dramatic Hans Zimmer soundtrack hadn’t stepped on so much of the dialogue, but that’s my only major complaint about the film.  It’s visually stimulating, intellectually engaging, and emotionally satisfying — highly, highly recommended.

Mary Rosenblum’s second novel, Chimera (1993), focuses on virtual reality.  Jewel Martina is a medical aide who has wrestled herself up from poverty, trying to make a name for herself as an information broker in the VR web.  She works for a “web node” named Harmon Alcourt, a powerful controller of the internet economy who’s sequestered himself in a remote compound in Antarctica.  Jewel’s struggles to swing her own deals online are sidetracked when her fate becomes entangled with a virtual artist named David Chen and his loose-cannon lover Flander, a shifty designer of VR avatars who’s run into trouble with a criminal element.  Jewel’s past and David’s love for Flander thrust them into the middle of a complicated power struggle, in an adventure that leads them from Antarctica to the Pacific Northwest and back again.

I enjoyed aspects of Chimera, but overall I found it a slow read, and not all that enthralling.  For a novel seventeen years old, it holds up pretty well science fictionally, and certainly feels ahead of the game in its approach to VR and AI.  The internet as depicted in Chimera feels conceptually dated compared to modern reality; the way the web commodifies information doesn’t quite ring true, and the fact that the internet isn’t ubiquitous feels a little like a predictive misfire.  But considered in the context of its era, it still feels like a valid, earnest guess at the future, and the ideas Rosenblum plays with here are still being examined in depth today.  So even if its details aren’t quite right, it does strike me as a book that had its finger on the SFnal pulse.

Unfortunately, Chimera fell a bit short for me in its story-telling.  For much of the novel, Jewel and David seem to be one step removed from the plot’s real machinations, and the proceedings feel murky until its various threads come together quickly in the final chapters.  There is a sound plot running underneath it all, but it doesn’t quite propel the narrative.  I also felt its focus on the theme of illusion versus reality was a bit heavy-handed, and would have liked to see more contrast in its real world; the novel’s vision of its non-virtual world is uniformly bleak and dystopic, perhaps a bit too one-note.

The prose is quite well written, the characters are distinctive, and for the most part it examines its SFnal ideas effectively; it’s not at all a bad novel.  But ultimately this one didn’t thrill me.

One of the things I love most about watching a Coen Brothers movie is the sense that I’m definitely getting a focused personal vision, a film that definitely could not have been created by just anyone.  There’s a distinct personality to their movies that mainstream Hollywood just can’t replicate (even if it wanted to).  A Serious Man (2009) isn’t my favorite Coen Brothers movie, but it’s a good one, and it’s got such personality, I find it hard not to respect it.

Set in suburban Minnesota during the 1970s, A Serious Man is the story of Dr. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a math professor whose life takes a series of unfortunate turns — marital issues, professional strife, legal run-ins with his prejudiced neighbor, and on and on.  Gopnik, who hasn’t done anything to anyone, desperately seeks wisdom, but his every attempt to find it — especially from the local rabbis — only makes him feel more lost.  Will he find enlightenment…or even relief?

The sense of humor is as dark and quirky as ever here, but the laughs aren’t quite as frequent as usual.  Understandably so, though, for while it’s a comedy on the surface, it’s a pretty sad story at its core. Stuhlbarg is terrific as the beleagured protagonist, and as usual with the Coens there are tons of memorable bit characters — particularly funny is David Kang as a student attempting to bribe Gopnik for a better grade.  One gets the sense this is a very personal film.  I read somewhere that the Coens drew from their midwestern Jewish upbringing when they conceived the film, and the scenario certainly has a ring of authenticity to it.  Unfortunately, this one ends a bit clunkily, I suspect on purpose — but a bit unsatisfying nonetheless.  I don’t always love the Coen Brothers’ films, but I’ve learned to trust them to deliver interesting, unique films, and A Serious Man definitely fits the bill.