The story is secondhand Scorsese, hitting all the familiar tropes even the most casual audience member will recognize: Loyalty will be questioned, stool pigeons will get what’s coming to them and the hero learns a valuable lesson about the life he chose for himself.
To this end, he brings a documentary crew along to an isolated farm, where a troubled father is convinced his gentle but sorely repressed young daughter, Nell (Ashley Bell) is possessed of a demon and mutilating his cattle. Marcus walks us through his exorcism con game, unbeknownst to the father and daughter, who swallow the act all the way. His job done, he counts his absurdly large fee and hits the road. Everyone is happy. Until Nell shows up, much worse off than before.
Former criminal compatriots Adam ‘Kane’ Marcus and James Seth Lynch are brought together again after spending a few years trying to forget the dismal sales and controversy of their original outing, 2007’s Dead Men. The roles of the two get heavily reversed and the focus is on a sober Lynch, who has set up something resembling a peaceful life in Shanghai; at least as peaceful a life as a lunatic enforcer working for a local ex-pat mob boss can get.
The exhibition brings such elements together to form a compelling meditation on the extreme reaches of art, technology, and militarism, and on the role of the vast, sun-struck spaces of the American West as an arena for all these forces.
For while the game is about a futuristic death sport, it’s light and upbeat, full of wacky characters and doesn’t dwell on the carnage as much as the fun that comes from causing it. It’s wholly derivative, but doesn’t care; it’s too concerned with trying to provide a maximum of fun in a minimum of time while looking good doing it.
Overkill is the name of the game in this gleeful throwback to the shoot-em-up favorites of the 1980s. Director, star, and co-writer Sylvester Stallone gathers action stars old and new, wrestlers, professional fighters and football players in the dueling ring. Wind them up and watch them go!
Scott Pilgrim may be a “ladykiller wannabe” with no cash, aspirations of rock stardom, and a slightly emo outlook, but he’s also the most awesome thing in theaters this weekend.
Step Up 3D is a good movie. Not an instant classic, but a genuine celebration of music, dance, filmmaking, and yes, even 3D, and their power to entertain. Step Up 3D will leave audiences smiling from ear to ear, and probably bobbing their heads in residual rhythm to the movie’s pounding soundtrack. The best part is that you don’t have to feel guilty about it this time.
The amount of factual detail and insights that Ball brings to the themes under discussion is impressive in the extreme. On just one page, in the chapter dealing with rhythm, he weaves relevant examples ranging from Gyorgy Ligeti’s composition used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s electronic work, Kontakte, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Chinese zither music and songs by Australian Aborigines that are accompanied by the clicking of rhythm sticks.
The legions of admirers of Smith’s other novels, notably The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, will find a great deal to keep them happily reading Corduroy Mansions. The twist with this book, however, is that it is the print version of the author’s first online novel.
Beattie, like in so much of her earlier work, leaves a lot to the imagination. Between the dialogue and the action, certain assumptions, even leaps of faith, are sometimes necessary to get from one paragraph to the next. There are better ways to render suspense—less does not always mean more—but you get the sense from the very first sentence that something important is about to be revealed.
Lucy, half human, half bonobo monkey, was genetically engineered by her scientist father, so that “humans can be moved into a more favorable spot in the evolutionary matrix, a position in which we may enjoy some of the superior qualities of our bonobo cousins.” His mission was to create “a new race of people, more like the bonobo but with human intelligence and language—therefore better suited to living in harmony with nature.”
Tell-All follows the general plotline of the movie Sunset Boulevard, which pairs a down-and-out young writer with an aging actress seeking to reclaim her former glory. If you’re going to base a novel off of a movie, this 1950 noir classic is a terrific place to start.
Stephen King said that Olen Steinhauer’s spy book, The Tourist, is “the best spy novel I’ve ever read that wasn’t written by John le Carré.” Here’s the good news—The Nearest Exit, a continuation of that same story, is no letdown (though the background gained in reading that first book makes the first 100 pages of this one much more manageable).
The premise of Philip Pullman’s new book is brilliant. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ offers us a version of the gospel narratives in which not one, but two boys were born to Mary. Jesus grew up to be a millenarian preacher, who prophesied the coming of the Kingdom of God, whilst his brother Christ skulked around in the background, recording and (more often) distorting his brother’s words for posterity.
It’s no surprise that David has musical talent in his DNA. His father is a jazz trumpet player, his mother is a gifted singer, his grandmother sang in TV commercials and acted in a few movies (and was known in Utah as “the little lady with the big voice”) and his grandfather sang in a barbershop quartet. Talk about stacking the genetic deck!
The next two years of the war for Churchill were a harrowing march through what his wife, Clementine called the “valley of humiliation.” Defeats in Greece, in the Battle of Crete and in North Africa in 1941 were followed by the Japanese capture of Singapore in February 1942. That same month, the daring “Channel Dash” by German warships under siege in Cherbourg to their home naval bases stung British pride to its core. Great Britain, the nation of Marlborough, Churchill’s warrior ancestor, and Lord Nelson was losing the war on land and sea.
Justin Cronin has written an epic here. Like Stephen King’s The Stand and Robert McCammon’s Swan Song, this book is a character-driven apocalyptic road trip of a novel that takes us on a journey both physical and metaphysical. His writing transcends genre in every way, including a haunting description of death by nuclear fire.
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