Movie Review Roundup

I have delusions that I'm someday going to review all the movies I watch the same way I have been reviewing the books that I read. Fortunately, those delusions don't extend as far as thinking I'm going to go back to do lengthy individual reviews on the all the movies that I watched in the last month or too.

So......let's do them lightening round format, starting from the movie I watched most recently, proceeding in reverse chronological order until I can't remember what movie I watched before.

Picture from IMDB

1) A Fistful of Dollars -- a re-watch, with the in-laws because my wife had never seen it. Completely awesome! Action ahead of it's time; Clint Eastwood owns the steely eyed gunslinger, Sergio Leone is the master of making the desert town feel desolate, dangerous, and lonely. Only real misstep is the awkward dubbing, but what do you expect from a movie by an Italian director, an American star, filmed in Spain. 4 out of 5 stars but a bonus point for being ahead of it's time and aging very well.

What did the in-laws think? Wife seemed to like it; Brother in-law said, at minute 5: "I'm not seeing any explosions or robot fights." but he stayed to the end, so something must have kept him watching. Mother in-law was favorably inclined, but then, it was her idea to watch it.

 

(Picture from IMDB, where else)

2) Crazy, Stupid, Love. Also watched with the in-laws, this time at my request. I really enjoyed this movie as well. I thought the characters were very strong, I liked that it didn't shy away from lots of relationships, and types of love some very natural, some very awkward. I also thought it was pretty funny. I have a few complaints, mostly about the dialogue--I thought a little editing to get the pithy phrases just right would have gone a long way, and I am very curious about the rating. It was clearly PG-13, but I wonder if it was cut down from an R? If so, I'd love to see the directors cut with the jokes they weren't allowed to tell re-included. 4 out of 5 stars.

What did the in-laws this? Wife liked it (thankfully) but everyone else thought it was "not what they expected." Apparently this is a very bad thing. *Sigh*

You guessed it: IMDB!

3) Bridesmaids. Watched on an airplane. A very funny movie, completely disgusting. I wish there had been more substance to the plot and theme, though. 3 out of 5 stars.

IMDB again!

4) Senna. Also watched on a plane. In case you needed positive proof that I"m interested in cinema independent of subject matter (this is not necessarily a good thing). I'm sure I wouldn't have given this a second look if it hadn't been a Sundance winner or some such. As it happens, I'm really glad I watched it. Senna was a fascinating character. Still don't much care about Formula 1 Racing, though. Objectively, 4 of 5 stars, but if racing is your thing I'm sure it would be off the charts.

Image NOT from IMDB. Image from hrgiger.com

5) Alien III. 6) Aliens. 7) Alien. I'm embarrassed to admit this, but until last month, I had never seen any of the Alien movies. We fixed that right up, didn't we, and just in time for Prometheus (although I suppose I need to watch Alien: Resurrection, now....). I actually thought they were all good. Aliens, of course, is the best being: terrifying, exciting as all hell, and masterfully plotted, designed, and filmed. Likewise, I agree with the whole entire world that Ripley is a fantastic character. I even liked Alien 3. I was prepared to hate it, but actually it's a pretty interesting exploration of morality, life, fear, and death. Also, *spoiler alert* it takes some kind of chutzpah to kill off in the opening minutes of Alien 3 all the characters that you worked so hard in Aliens to keep alive. Damn. Alien 3: 3 stars, Aliens: 5 stars, Alien: 4 stars.

8) Moneyball. I thought the movie was great! (4 out of 5 stars!) I also thought it didn't make a whole lot of sense in the details. See my review of the book for more details.

9) Bull Durham. For some reason, I have been on a huge sports movie kick lately. So I watched Bull Durham! It was great! (4 out of 5 stars)


  

Book Review: The Quantum Thief

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


OK. For those of you paying attention at home, this is something like my 8th book review today. That's what happens when you go on vacation and read a bunch of books and delay until the holiday weekend to review them all, so here goes.

I liked this book, I even really liked this book, at least enough to get it over the hump from 3 to 4 stars. I really wish this book had been better.

This book has a great setting, and interesting plot, and reasonably well developed characters. This book also has some fantastically epic scenes and a couple of terrific plot twists/ big reveals. Unfortunately, in order to get to this you have to wade through about a million new vocabulary words*, visual descriptions that read like their blocking out the CGI for inevitable film adaptation**, some decidedly non-intuitive physics, and an Altered Carbon like representation of digitized resurrection that is never satisfactorily explained.

I also thought the Zoku were kind of dumb, but that's a minor quibble.

In many senses, the book was just too short. If the author had had 300 more pages to explain what the fuck was going on, the big reveals would have been bigger, the plot twists would have been twistier, the heroes would have been even more heroic, well, you get the picture.

Damned if I can't wait for the sequel though.

* http://xkcd.com/483/ I might actually read Anathem next...
** The inevitability of the film adaptation is soley in the author's imagination, I'm pretty sure.

Book Review: Voyeur

Voyeur by Daniel Judson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Aaaaargh, this had so much potential. A stoic, effective Manhattan Private eye is brutally assaulted. He retreats to long island where lives has a shutaway until he is called to get "back in the game" to find the girl the broke his heart and stole his $40,000.



The thing I really found disappointing is that the novel was filled with little hooks--there is a rash of violent armed robberies occurring at the same time as the main mystery, there are hints that the mystery might be connected to the violent incident that begins the novel--that seems like they ought to be connected to the major mystery. But this never actually materializes.



Now that I think about it, there isn't really all that much too the plot. The detectives proceed with their investigation in a methodical manner, they figure out the mystery, and then they deal with the consequences.



There are no real twists, no red herrings, (except maybe the ones I mention in the 2nd paragraph), and no real surprises.



The one thing I like about all this is that it means that unlike so many private eye novels (even some really good ones) there no Deus ex Mafia (get it?). Everything here happens because of the simple greed of small-time, unconnected individuals, which makes it imminently plausible that a private detective working alone could figure it all out and interdict it. So that was good, but, I think I like my detective fiction with a few more delusions of grandeur.



View all my reviews

Book Review: The Bad Kitty Lounge

The Bad Kitty Lounge by Michael Wiley

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Full disclosure, I thought the first Joe Kozmarski book, The Last Striptease was fabulous and was completely robbed by Bad City, Bad Blood for the 2008 Shamus award for best first novel. Consequently, my expectations for this were very high, and so the 3-star review is perhaps less-than-objective. It was a decent novel, but it wasn't as good as the first one. (Ironically, the sequel to Bad City, Bad Blood was fabulous.)

This is a perfectly serviceable private eye novel. However, any private eye series lives and dies on the strength of the main character. In the last novel, I though that Joe Kazmarksi was both heroic and human, and that his interesting and imperfect relationship with his nephew was icing on a cake made out of car chases, shootouts, and good old-fashioned detective work. In this outing, the relationships just don't make as much sense, consequently they are less believable, and much less engaging. Based on the first novel, I didn't think the detectives maturing relationship with his nephew was believable, and based on the actions of the characters I didn't find the love-triangle aspects at all compelling.

How about the mystery? Well, it's pretty good. Michael Wiley has a fantastic flair for action. Both this and the Last Striptease had some fantastically cinematic action scenes, which I love, but in this book, they didn't really make sense or flow into the narrative of the mystery. Finally, *spoiler alert* he kills off (in and inexplicable and unrealistic fashion) what might have been the best PI sidekick since Hawk. What the $%^&, Michael Wiley?





View all my reviews

Book Review: The Last Innocent Man

The Last Innocent Man by Phillip Margolin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Fun little legal thriller. Some of the plot devices felt a little contrived and the story could have used some more meat. However, it was a fast great and the plot had a good number of twists and turns, so I was reasonably well satisfied.



View all my reviews

Book Review: The Insider

The Insider by Reece Hirsch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Despite being about a lawyer, this isn't a legal thriller in the classic sense. That being said it was vaguely reminiscent of some of the good John Grisham novels. The best part of this book is that it was genuinely frightening with some of the best funny-scary villians in recent memory. Actually, that's not true; the best part of this books is the very beginning. Go read the first 25 pages of this book!

I also appreciated that the resolution at the end is complete and fairly satisfying, none of this, "well, I caught the bad guys but I'm going to be looking over my shoulder forever" nonsense. (Um, spoiler alert? although I thought it was pretty thoroughly foreshadowed.)

What's bad about this book? The plot gets a little convoluted in the second half, the author doesn't seem to know anything about how encryption works in the internet age, and the author makes some truly bizarre decisions about which characters to kill off when. Oh, yeah, and I figured out the mystery on like page 50.

But whatever, this is a beach-ready thriller that actually thrills for once and I liked it.



View all my reviews

Book Review: Ariel

Ariel: A Book of the Change by Steven R. Boyett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Don't read too much in the number of stars I gave this novel. The fact of the matter is, having finished this almost a week ago, I'm still not quite sure what to think of it.

In fact, I'll go one step further. I could easily justify any number of stars for this book: (*mild spoilers abound, particularly in the poorer reviews*)

5 stars: A brutal, but sympathetic, look at innocence, growing up, friendship, and sex that has the good fortune to sit on top of a rollicking post-apocalyptic action-adventure novel.

4 stars: A fun, pull-out-all-the-stops swords and sorcery novel! The author is trying too hard in places to be deep (but the afterward indicates he's aware of this), and while he succeeds only rarely, one can forgive this because it features a group of samurai hang gliding from the world tradecenter in order to mount an assault on the necromancer-controlled empire state building.

3 stars: A reasonably entertaining adventure novel, with some serious momentum problems. Both times I tried to read it I got seriously bogged down in the middle, due to the disappearance or death of a few beloved characters and a lack of momentum towards the finale. I'm ultimately glad I finished it because there is much to like about the finale and ending, but the journey (particularly the second half) could have been more engaging.

2 stars: Um, unicorns aren't really my thing. I did like a lot of the characters, particularly Malachi Lee. (Although, his story arc, while well foreshadowed did not do the character justice.) Beyond that? Some good action, and the setting of the post-change east-coast is treated well, but there was a severe lack of development for some key characters (Shaunessy and the Necromancer for two...)

1 stars: What the #$%^ Stephen Boyett? I don't care *how* thoroughly you foreshadowed it, the ending is an unsatisfying mess. (and I *DON'T* mean, it should have had a happy ending, it just should have had a DIFFERENT ending.) AND Malachi Lee is one of the most poorly treated characters in the last 50 years of fiction.

So, there you have it. My attitudes about this book are complicated and poorly suited to a value-based review. Did I enjoy it? Not really...is it worth reading? Maybe. Am I glad I persevered and finished it? I suppose so yes.



View all my reviews

Book Review: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



People like the bitch about Freakonomics because of the loosey-goosey, back of the hand, unscientific data analysis. As a statistician and data analyst, I suppose I should be more bothered by this than I am. The fact of the matter is, I actually think Freakonomics is great. They think of things in terms of hypotheses to be tested, the back up their findings with data, and if there's a perverse negative feedback loop that occurs where people are incentivized to do bad data analysis in order to get recognition by the freakonomics people, well, a) that's the sort of thing that's supposed to get caught in peer review, and b) it kind just proves the Freakonomics authors right (http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/11/22/beware-this-blog-apparently-causes-academic-fraud/).

This cartoon (source: xkcd.com, obviously) is about mythbusters, but it pretty much sums up how I feel about Freakonomics as well.

Book Review: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I really enjoyed this book. It's fascinating to see concrete examples of how conventional wisdom and "common sense" can be proven completely incorrect when faced with some simple data analysis. I also *really* liked learning about some of the founders of sabermetrics, who were writing and publishing on topics like these 30 years before Moneyball became a household term. The fact that baseball is my favorite of the major American sports, doesn't hurt either.

I also, thought this books complimented the movie nicely. The movie had a great dramatic arc, and fantastic dialogue, but didn't really make much sense in terms of explaining the relationship between the actions of Billy Beane and "Peter Brand" (The actual Oakland A's assistant GM, Paul DePodesta apparently didn't authorize the use of the image for the movie...) and the outcomes on the field.

However, I found that in some sense, Moneyball raises more questions than it answers. For example, none of the radical scouting prospects discussed at length in the book have had auspicious MLB careers since the book was published. Moreover, after 4 amazing years, 1999-2003, the Oakland A's have been pretty mediocre. (According to Wikipedia, Billy Beane says this is 'cause everyone else is using the strategies documented in Moneyball, and so the players he might of otherwise been able to sign for cheap are going to the richer teams, which I suppose is plausible.) However, the thing that I find the most mysterious is that, apparently, the "data mining" behind Moneyball involves selecting players that have a high on-base percentage and slugging percentage (and empirically tweaking formulae that rank players based on these stats). (And for pitchers, looking for many strikeouts and few walks.) I appreciate the thesis behind the books that There is Still New Knowledge to Be Discovered in Baseball, but the Knowledge discussed here doesn't seem that profound to me.



View all my reviews

Book Review: Turning Angel

Turning Angel by Greg Iles

Expected Rating: 5 of 5 stars
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ratio: 1.0

Holy crap this was good. I adored the Quiet Game, and this one was better. I loved this book. It has engaging characters, thoughtful discussions of issues relevant to the modern age, and it is packed with action, sex, violence, suspense, interesting character interactions, politics, and courtroom drama. Go read it!



View all my reviews

Book Review: The Warrior's Apprentice

The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Here is what you need to know about this book.

1) It is the first (in publication order, apparently the 3rd in in-world chronological order) of a massively long series about Miles Vorkosigan.

2) The voice of the character is incredibly engaging. I thoroughly enjoyed the clever military tricks, interactions between the characters, and especially Miles' wry sense of humor. I laughed out loud frequently.

3) The e-book is available, gratis, in the Baen Free Library.

That is all.




View all my reviews