Movie Review: Iron Man 2

Iron Man 2 starring Robert Downey, Jr.

Iron Man 2 is a sequel that works. Robert Downey returns as Tony Stark, now publicly know as Iron Man. The first film had Tony inventing Iron Man to save his life and allow his escape from terrorists who wanted to use his genius for evil, and made Tony realize that he himself had been using his genius for evil. In this film, Tony has redeemed himself by bringing peace to the world through his Iron Man persona. But there has been a cost. The same technology  that saved his life in the first film is now killing him by poisoning his body. Without a substitute, Tony will die. In the meantime, the Military Industrial Complex, personified by Sam Rockwell's character, is none too happy with what peace is doing to their business, and some elements of the government are uncomfortable not being in control of the peace keeping force. Add in Mickey Roarke as a brilliant but jealous and vengeance seeking bad guy, and the stage is set for lots of special effects laden battle scenes that look great and successfully wow the audience.

Robert Downey, Jr is great as Stark. He plays smart well, and snarky even better. Mickey Roarke looks better than he did in The Wrestler (I thought he looked like he'd had major plastic surgery in that one; now he looks much more natural) and even though here he is laden with a thick sometimes incomprehensible accent, he does most of his great acting with his expressive face and body. Gweneth Paltrow is strong enough as Pepper Potts playing a foil straight man character to Downey. Scarlett Johannson looks great but doesn't get much to do until some late martial arts scenes that look fabulous as comic book battles.

Book Review: The Killing Floor

The Killing Floor, by Lee Child.

The Killing Floor is the first book in the Jack Reacher series. Reacher is a former military policeman who now chooses the life of a hobo, randomly roaming the country in search of interesting things. He carries almost nothing with him, buys new clothes occasionally instead of washing (he disposes of the old clothes), and never plans to settle down. What he finds mostly in his search are troubles. In The Killing Floor, he is arrested in a small town in Georgia for murder. Because he has a strong alibi, he is soon helping the police to solve the murder, which in a coincidence only acceptable in popular entertainment turns out to be of his brother.

Killing Floor is a fast paced, sometimes gruesomely bloody action tale. Sometimes the details stretch the bounds of the possible, and I don't for a second believe that the bad guy's scheme would have worked in real life, but the character of Reacher is unique and interesting, and I will continue to read other books in the series.

The Jack Reacher Series:

1. Killing Floor
2. Die Trying
3. Tripwire
4. Running Blind
5. Echo Burning
6. Without Fail
7. Persuader
8. The Enemy
9. One Shot
10. The Hard Way
11. Bad Luck and Trouble
12. Nothing to Lose
13. Gone Tomorrow
14. 61 Hours

Book Review: Simple Genius

Simple Genius, by David Baldacci

Simple Genius is the third Baldacci book featuring the characters of Sean King and Michelle Maxwell.  In this one, Sean and Michelle investigate a death at a research facility located near a highly secure CIA location in Virginia.

The book begins with Michelle instigating a bar fight and getting tossed into a mental institution as a result. Michelle has some serious mental issues that are discussed at length, but unfortunately don't seem very relevant to the main plot. Much of the early part of the novel dealing with Michelle's stay in the mental facility play like a different story altogether, and could easily have been removed without much impact to the main story.

That main story begins with Sean taking a job in order to get money to pay for Michelle's hospital stay.  Sean is asked to determine if the death at the research facility is a murder or a suicide. This leads to more murders, attempted murders, kidnapping, and gunfights galore.

Michele's stay in the mental hospital not withstanding, the characters, plot and action are all interesting and absorbing until the end. In the end, though, Baldacci has one character behaving completely unbelievably and another character explain everything that was really going on. I found this very much a let down, and wish Baldacci could have shown more, and told less.

The books in the Sean King/Michelle Maxwell series are:

1. Split Second
2. Hour Game
3. Simple Genious
4. First Family

Movie Review: The Princess and the Frog

The Princess and the Frog

The Princess and the Frog is a Disney's latest animation feature, and marks a return to classic hand drawn animation that Disney had supposedly forsworn in favor of 3D computer animation. The story is a more modern variation of the Prince and the Frog fairy tale, and references the classic tale directly as the character's read it early on. The time setting is not clearly stated, but appears to be New Orleans in the 1950's. The heroine, Tiana, is a waitress but wants to start a restaurant. The hero, Prince Naveen, is a wastrel who wants to party. Naveen is turned into a frog by a Dark Voodoo master in a scheme to get money by replacing him with an impostor and having the impostor marry the richest girl in town, who also happens to be Tiana's best friend. You would think  a magician who could accomplish this could find safer ways to make money. Tiana is turned into a frog because she tries to reverse the magic by kissing the frog prince. The logic in this is never explained. It is of course necessary or there would be no movie.

From the point that the frog prince arrives on the scene, The Princess and the Frog is as good as just about any Disney animation. The story from that point is lively and humorous. The main characters are far more entertaining as frogs than they were as humans. The supporting animal characters, Louis the horn playing alligator and Ray the love-sick lightning bug, are humorously written and entertainingly voiced. There are some genuinely creepy voodoo shadow monsters. There was a happy ending for nearly everyone. One character dies, which surprised me and I thought was well handled.

Unfortunately, the beginning section and to a lesser extent the ending drag the whole movie down from classic status. The animation in the beginning made me think Disney would regret reviving hand-drawn. The characters especially looked no better than the flat, rushed looking things you see on Saturday morning cartoons. There is one segment that is animated to look like Tiana's dream drawing of her ideal restaurant. It's a great idea, but unfortunately the execution just emphasized the whole flat look of the overall animation. The characters were depressing and/or annoying. The best friend character was especially annoying, and seemed more like Cinderella's step-sisters than someone you might care about. The music  in this section is particularly dull and unmemorable. The music overall in no way compares to the great Disney musical scores of the past. This is likely due not to a lack of talent in Randy Newman, who I like, but to using strongly jazz-inflected tunes throughout (appropriate to the New Orleans setting) rather than the more typical Broadway show-tune style.

Book Review: Fade Away

Fade Away, by Harlan Coben

Fade Away is about a missing pro basketball star. Myron Bolitar, a former college basketball superstar waylaid by injury and now a sports agent, is asked to look for him. You wouldn't think you could easily build a mystery series around a sports agent, but Harlan Coben finds a way.

I'm reading Harlan Coben's Myron Bolitar books in order. Fade Away is the third. This is the most personal of the Bolitar books so far, from Myron's perspective. We spend a lot of time learning about Myron's history as a basketball star. His history is vitally important to the story, both in understanding the events and in understanding the character of Myron Bolitar. Maybe because of this, it is told in third person instead of first person. Still, we mostly follow along with Myron, to the extent that when the narrative viewpoint switches to Esperanza or Win it is quite jarring.

I liked Fade Away. The story is interesting. The reader is given a lot of clues to process. The suspects and hangers-on are interesting. The back story and development of Myron makes one glad this is an ongoing series. This is good, because Myron is the only character really developed in any depth. The supporting cast (Win, Esperanza, Jessica) are superficially portrayed, but provide good moments of comic relief, including a new character of Big Cindy who creates quite the vivid impression.

The books in the Bolitar series are:

1. Deal Breaker
2. Drop Shot (Myron Bolitar) 
3. Fade Away
4. Back Spin: A Myron Bolitar Novel (Myron Bolitar Mysteries)
5. One False Move: A Myron Bolitar Novel (Myron Bolitar Mysteries)
6. The Final Detail: A Myron Bolitar Novel (Myron Bolitar Mysteries)
7. Darkest Fear (Myron Bolitar)
8. Promise Me (Myron Bolitar, No. 8)
9. Long Lost

Book Review: The Killer Inside Me

The Killer Inside Me - by Jim Thompson

Lou Ford is a bad man. He doesn't care for anyone, even those he says he likes. He is a complete phony. Everything he says and does is purely for effect, solely to convince people that he is a normal, boring, not very funny fellow. Because he is really a brutal killer. He also happens to be the narrator of the story.

The Killer Inside Me is about Lou Ford when he loses control, kills, and then has to try and cover the killing up. He does this by lying, which he has done all of his life, pretty much every minute of the day, and killing more, which he has wanted to do all of his life and which he does with no second thoughts.

Lou is not reliable narrator, though. The story is sometimes hard to follow because what we are being told doesn't seem to match what people are doing or saying. The main character is evidently not telling us everything, because others suspect him for reasons that seem minor. It seems hard to justify the gusto with which they react, the suspicions they clearly have of Lou, who by his own account is well liked and seems normal to everybody else. The ending begs the question: how does Lou manage to write/narrate his story anyway?

The dialog seems awkward, This may be because of the time frame (the 1950's), the setting (West Texas), or the narrative perspective.

Overall, this was an interesting novel. It is also short, so even with its flaws, it makes for a brief, thought provoking diversion.

Book Review: The Lost Symbol

The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown

You can tell this is a fantasy, because the Redskins are in the playoffs.

I've read all of Dan Brown's books so far, and if you liked his others, you will probably like The Lost Symbol. I don't think it is as good as the earlier books, for several reasons, but it still is entertaining and pulls the reader along on its rapid roller coaster of action and puzzle solving.

The Lost Symbol takes place over only eight hours or so, though there are numerous flashbacks giving some of the characters' background to set the story. All of Brown's books take place over a short time, with the main characters rushing from one crisis to another, usually with something important on the line should they fail to solve the current puzzle presented by Brown's antagonist. I think the Lost Symbol takes place over the shortest time yet. The puzzles are interesting enough, and are presented along with an interesting take on the history and relationship of Washington, DC and the Freemasons.

Brown claims that everything he presents here, historically and scientifically, is true. I think he classifies something as true if he can find any reference on the internet to someone who once claimed it as true. There is a touch of hyperbole. I know computer stuff pretty well (it's my day job) and Brown is laughably ignorant on most computer issues. This is hardly a fault restricted to Dan Brown, as most books and especially movies get computer stuff wrong. Actually, I understand why. Real life computer are boring! And there doesn't seem to be any Lost Symbol.

The biggest problem with this book, though, is that it fails to convince us that the crisis his characters are involved in is in fact a crisis. We are repeatedly told that some information, hidden from the reader, is a matter of national security. One character, shown a screen image of this information, immediately changes his entire motivation. Yet when we are shown the basis for the national security crisis, it seems boring and mundane. The villain has a secret video of prominent politicians and celebrities participating in secret mason rituals! Oooh! That is to say, so what! Politicians and celebrities are seemingly daily shown to be doing much worse.

Interestingly, my audiobook version had an added feature: a sneak preview of Dan Brown's next blockbuster, The Mother of God! Here is what I can remember.


The Mother of God, by Dan Brown.

"Listen!" said the eerily close, disembodied voice. Robert Langdon recognized the voice as that of the tall, tattooed, muscular, hairless albino who had earlier chased him through the tunnels beneath old New York.

"Like a Virgin. Touched for the very first time!" played from some unfathomable source.

"I don't understand! It's a Madonna song," cried Langdon.

"Exactly," whispered the whispery voice. "Pay closer attention, Mr. Langdon."

"Robert, I know you can figure this out!" Margarita Villaneuva said to Langdon with fatigued lovingness. "You are the most brilliant symbologist I have ever met!" Margarita admired Langdon's muscular swimmers body, smelled his seldom washed tweed jacket. In all of her twenty four years, she had never met a man like Robert Langdon, not even while getting her doctorate in mystical string theory from MIT.

Langdon tried to focus. He had hurt his shoulder hanging from the Empire State Building, and twisted his ankle when the hang glider landed from the Statue of Liberty. The last thirty seven minutes had been pure hell! Still, he knew the answer was just beyond his grasp.

"Madonna," Langdon thought aloud. "Most people associate the word Madonna with the Virgin Mary, but it literally means 'My lady.' But there is another, older meaning. Mad Onna means Mad Japanese woman."

"Robert, maybe he's not referring to the singer! Maybe he wants us to examine the lyrics!"

"Margarita, you're even more brilliant than you are beautiful! 'Like a virgin' must be referring to extra virgin olive oil! And it's not 'touched', it's touche-d, from the old French word tuchier. And the root of tuchier is..."

"Tuch!. Robert, do you mean..."

"Yes, it's so obvious now!"

Movie Review: Me and You and Everyone We Know

Me and You and Everyone We Know is an unpleasant movie. The characters are uniformly weird, damaged, strange or offensive. There is no character development. There is no story arc. There are no traditional dramatic structures. The lack of these does not necessarily mean a film is bad, but this one is.

 I would tell you what this movie is about, but it is not really about anything. It is a loose collection of characters who don't act in the way normal people act. They do nothing of significance, and they do it often. We care nothing for these people. When the credits finally rolled, I wondered how anyone could like or recommend this movie (it won several awards and was well reviewed when it was released) or even how anyone could think it was a movie worth making. 

I would guess that professional reviewers view movies like this through a strange lens that tells them the film makers must have intended something deeper than what is seen. They don't understand it, so it must be good. Well, I don't think this movie was good, not in the least little bit.

Movie Review: The Pink Panther

The Pink Panther, starring Steve Martin

The Pink Panther is an uneven but ultimately adequate comedy starring Steve Martin in the role of Inspector Clouseau originated by Peter Sellers. There are some very funny scenes, plus a whole lot of scenes that just don't work. The original movies were also pretty hit and miss, more so as the series went along, and the films completed after Seller's death were all miss and no hit. Like in the originals, the humor is mostly of the slapstick variety, so if that is not what you like be warned! There are also a lot of jokes based on Clouseau's bizarre accent.

Martin initially seemed to me to be a poor fit to take over for Sellers, but he brings an earnestness and likability to the role that modestly won me over. Ultimately, this is the key to Martin's version of Clouseau. He means well at all times, but unknown to himself is an accidental wrecking ball toward the rest of the world.

Jean Reno is stolid as the sidekick. The writers decided to reverse the Kato surprise attack dynamic from the original series and have Clouseau attempt to attack Reno's character. There is at least one direct homage involving the attacker clinging to the ceiling in preparation for an attack. The original series got this right. The new one does not.

I don't think Kevin Kline is a good fit for the Dreyfuss role. This may be due to the script. The original Dreyfuss was initially a good man and loyal police officer who is gradually driven insane by Clouseau's ineptitude and bizarrely fortunate success. The Dreyfuss in this version has no backstory. He comes to us as a supercilious, unqualified and mean-spirited glory hound.

As an actress, Beyonce is a fine singer and a beautiful woman.

Movie Review: Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, directed by Chris Columbus

The Greek gods are big. And they look good. And they have awesome deep British accents.

Yes, Percy Jackson is about the Greek gods existing for real in modern times. Actually, it's more about their children with mortals, who are called demi-gods. Percy Jackson is a demi-god, the son of Poseidon and a mortal woman. He's never met his father, and apparently has few if any questions about who his father was or why he's never been around. According to my children, there is a lot more information in the books, so perhaps this is covered there.

Percy Jackson the movie looks good, has a good amount of action, and is marginally worth seeing. The acting is fine, and there are some big-name actor cameos strewn about here and there. The direction and story are mostly good. The story is very episodic and somewhat uneven. The mini-episodes (Medusa, the Hydra, and the Poppy Eaters) could be easily replaced with any other mythological tale. They feel a lot like filler. At the same time events seem rushed, like there was far too much to cram into the allotted movie time. I found myself wondering how Chris Columbus could take a long book like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and make a movie that felt right, but with this much shorter book make it feel oddly paced and disconnected.

So if the child of a mortal and a god is a demi-god, what is the child of two demi-gods? A semi-god? A demi-demi-god? Demi More-or-less?

Movie Review: The Wolfman

The Wolfman, starring Benecio Del Toro, directed by Joe Johnston.

The Wolfman has a few good things going for it, but not enough to balance off the bad things, which include the acting, the directing and the writing.

Benecio Del Toro is not a handsome man. I haven't seen him in anything else*. Does he play leading men? He is also a Puerto Rican playing an Englishman who has been living in America since he was a child, but he sounds like a Puerto Rican who has been in America and maybe seen a few American TV shows. He has trouble with the accent.  Oddly enough, Emily Blount is English and plays an English woman, but still seemed to have trouble with the accent. Maybe she's been playing too many Americans.

Joe Johnston, the director, evidently believes (wrongly) that you can never have too much of a good thing. There are some nice atmospheric shots of the fog in the forest early on. There is also a very nice time-lapse shot of the moon. Then there a few more time-lapse shots of the moon. And some time-lapse shots of other stuff. You become a little bored of time-lapse shots. Johnston also uses that staple of the modern horror/thriller, the forced jump scene. That's when something or someone shows up or is revealed suddenly behind the character in a scene, at the same time as some boo-yah effect in the music soundtrack. Johnston uses this over and over again. I hate this method. Yes, it makes you jump. It's a natural reaction. But my next reaction is anger. This is a cheap shortcut in a fear movie. The director is unable to earn a real fear reaction, so he resorts to tricks that fake the real thing.


As far as the story goes, I hated the father character. Which is not to say that I hated the character itself, which would be a desirable reaction to the screenplay, but rather that I don't think the character worked in the movie and I would have preferred it's absence.There was no real mystery about the father being the other wolfman. There was a ton of animal imagery surrounding the father, in case we missed all of the other not so subtle clues to his secret identity. The father was purposely portrayed as a creep. He was too nasty, I thought. His character didn't work. How did his other son, who was killed in the beginning, not know that he was a wolfman, having lived with him all of his life? Why was he determined to become the wolf and kill when apparently wolfmen cannot remember anything they do when they are wolves? Why did his faithful manservant allow him to run free after keeping him safe for many years? Did he kill the man servant when he was a man or a wolf? These questions are not answered or explored in any way. I think they added him so they could have a big wolfman duke out to climax the film, but even that didn't really work for me.

I will say that the wolfman itself  looked great in close-up , howling and thrashing about, but looked awful when it was running, especially when running on all fours.

 I have one general problem with werewolf movies: there is no cure, there is always a tragic ending. This is actually discussed in the movie by Emily Blount's character, who states that if magic caused the condition, then surely magic can cure the condition. I agree with this, and wish it were pursued more fully. I find it unseemly that a good man can be cursed like in these movies, and doomed.

For a great werewolf movie, even though it too is a tragedy, I still recommend American Werewolf in London.

*Okay, I looked him up on IMDB, and I have seen him in The Usual Suspects and Sin City. I just find him unmemorable, I guess.

Book Review: Fearless: The Lost Fleet Book 2

Fearless: The Lost Fleet Book 2

The Lost Fleet is set in a far future and concerns the battle between the Alliance and the Syndics, deep in space. Ostensibly the Syndics want to conquer and the Alliance wants to be free. They've now been at war for over a hundred years. The soldiers fighting on both sides have known nothing but war in their lifetimes, and this colors their actions in battle. Thrown into this is John Geary, an officer when the war began who through suitable Buck Rogers mechanisms has been frozen and reawakened at the time of the story. Complicating matters is the fact that John Geary is now known as the legendary hero Black Jack Geary to the modern fleet, and he is thrown into command of the fleet just as it faces a devestating attack from the Syndics.

The first book in the series, Dauntless, layed out this premise and its consequences. John Geary is out of touch with modern tactics, but the tactics from his time are much better suited to survival and long term victory.

This second book does not advance the overall story arc very much. The main action has to do with several large space battles that occur as the fleet tries to advance toward home without facing overwhelming resistance from the Syndics. This is a cat and mouse game that was established in the first book. As in the first book, the battles are interesting in how tactics and communications are affected by ships moving at speeds significantly impacted by speed of light effects, but really nothing new is added there beyond the first book. The main new elements involve some character development for John Geary in the way of personal relationships, and the discovery that some party outside of the Alliance and the Syndics may be influencing the events of the war, possibly for nefarious reasons.

The writing is good except for the dialog, which doesn't ring true, especially in the audiobook version. The book is interesting enough as a step in a series, and I will continue reading the series, though I hope things pick up. This entry is kind of like episodes 5-10 of a long running TV show: not much meat but a few interesting tidbits thrown in to maintain interest. Here's hoping it turns out to be more Lost than Twin Peaks.

The books in the Lost Fleet Series:

1. Dauntless
2. Fearless
3. Courageous
4. Valiant
5. Relentless
6. Victorious

Book Review: Proven Guilty - A Harry Dresden Novel

Proven Guilty (Harry Dresden Book 8)

Proven Guilty is a solid entry in the Harry Dresden series. Harry is his usual sarcastic, hard-headed, sleepless self, and a large number of regular characters make appearances somewhere along the way. People Harry cares about are put in danger, and Harry beats up monsters, the bad guys, and himself until he finally triumphs in the end.

Harry Dresden books are not the deepest, most serious you can find, but they are fun quick reads with a good sense of humor and driving plots that seldom flag.

This one has a little more going for it in the end than many of the others in the series, in fact. We find out that many loose threads in the previous books, plus a huge loose thread in this book, are tied together in some overarching bad guy plot that we can only assume will be tied up in future installments.

The loose thread in this one is so large, in fact, that for a while I kept saying to myself, "What did I miss?!?" Thankfully, Butcher comes back in the end and discusses the very question I was having, saving me from having to look for my missing brain cells, or go back and review the audio-book for the section I missed (more on that later). In fact, the only problem I had with Proven Guilty was I thought it was over, since the action had bee resolved, but it just kept going on. This was done in order to bring in the overall story arc, but I still felt a little bit like I was left hanging for a while.

As a service to readers of the series, or those who might be interested in starting, here are the books of the Dresden Files series, in order:

1. Storm Front
2. Fool Moon
3. Grave Peril
4. Summer Knight
5. Death Masks
6. Blood Rites
7. Dead Beat
8. Proven Guilty
9. White Knight
10. Small Favor
11. Turn Coat
12. Changes

I mentioned in passing that I listened to this on audio-book. I love me some audio-books. I subscribe to Audible, and I get two audio-books of any kind for an extremely reasonable price.  As I drive 90 minutes each day to and from work, I consider this a life saver. Before audio-books, I was wasting my time on boring and repetitive music radio, or sports talk that had become so crude and not about sports that I couldn't even let my children listen to it anymore.

There can be problems with audio-books, though. You get some bad readers. The reader of Proven Guilty is James Marsters (Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer!) and he is very good. Some books are not well structured to be audio-books. They have footnotes, diagrams or other quirks that require the printed word to come across correctly. You tend to miss things occasionally because you get distracted by, say, that annoying driving thing. This is a problem because it is very difficult to leaf through an audio-book looking for that section you kind of missed to find out who Petunia is and why she is trying to kill the hero.

Finally, I want to mention Jim Butcher's excellent web site. He has a lot of interesting information, not the least of which is how he structures and writes his books. Worht looking at if you are interested in writing, or even if you're just interested in how books get written!