→ September 9, 2011
→ By

The Score.

Littlefield leaned closer to him. “You’re a young man, you can still learn. Pay attention to this. You can steal in this country, you can rape and murder, you can bribe public officials, you can pollute the morals of the young, you can burn your place of business down for the insurance money, you can do almost anything you want, and if you act with just a little caution and common sense you’ll never even be indicted. But if you don’t pay your income tax, Grofield, you will go to jail.”

Donald Westlake, writing under the pseudonym Richard Stark, produced a series of hard-boiled crime novels starring the thief known as Parker, a series that began with the book The Hunter (later adapted for the screen as Point Blank and Payback). The University of Chicago Press has reprinted the first twenty Parker novels (out of 24), including The Score, which is currently available as a free eBook through amazon and is also free on BN.com, with the promotion running through the end of September.

The crime at the heart of The Score is certainly ambitious – Parker finds himself drafted to join a group that intends to knock over an entire town in North Dakota, led by the unreliable Edgars, who devised the plan because he knows the town’s layout and when they could maximize their payout. Stark spends about two thirds of the novel on the setup, with Parker leading the effort to assemble the ideal team and handling some of the logistics, including an interesting scene where he goes to purchase weapons from a blind arms dealer who stores the goods in boxes for children’s toys. The bickering starts from the moment Parker, who has little to no tolerance for bullshit, meets Edgars, and while it never explodes into a complete meltdown, the undercurrent is always there and threatens to undermine the solidarity of the team in an effort where one screw-up will sink the entire operation.

The real appeal of the novel is in the interplay between the characters, mostly between Parker and the others. Parker’s experience and limited tolerance for frivolity makes him the ideal field general for the operation, but he’s also forced to delegate as the group takes over the town almost building by building. Three group members eventually deviate from the plan in one way or another, forcing Parker to adapt on the fly, and his reaction to one of those three was one of the few big surprises in the book. But Westlake’s knack for clipped, quick dialogue keeps everything moving even through that first two-thirds of the novel where nothing actually happens beyond the planning; even the masters in the hard-boiled field, Hammett and Chandler, would typically drop a body or two and have their protagonist get a blackjack to the dome before the halfway point, although both had the brighter, more literary prose that they could have dispensed with those plot devices and still kept me riveted.

I am enough of a fan of heist stories that I knocked out The Score inside of forty-eight hours, and appreciated reading one that’s the antithesis of the overly stylized heist motif popularized by Ocean’s Eleven. I could have done with a little more explanation of the big twist from the mouth of the character responsible, although Stark does provide the basic back story, and Parker’s sudden decision to go soft on one of his partners in the heist, although not terribly consequential, felt oddly out of character. Parker’s simple, direct, no-nonsense approach is the real appeal of the novel for me, even with those quirks, a rare example of a likeable protagonist who’s actually the bad guy.

Next up: Michael Ruhlman’s The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection. Ruhlman’s Ratio remains an essential, often-used item on my cookbook shelf. (Shelves, really. Three so far.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 9, 2011
→ By

Ticket to Ride app.

Ticket to Ride, reviewed here, is one of our favorite games to break out with friends who haven’t played many of the German-style boardgames we like because a new player can learn how to play in a few minutes and the game is long enough for a new player to start to catch on to strategy before it’s through. The publisher, Days of Wonder, has operated a very successful online site for several of their games for several years, and their Ticket to Ride app for iOS (or for Android devices) is fully integrated with the online site, so you get a robust community of experienced players right out of the chute.

The app is close to perfect if you’re playing online. The graphics are exactly those of the physical game and are very easy to navigate on the iPad’s screen. Route cards go in the lower left; you can cycle through them by clicking once, and completed routes get a solid-colored outline and a punch mark on the left side, with a count of total routes and incomplete routes next to it.

Your train cards display in the bottom center, and when you have enough to complete a track between two cities, you click on the relevant cards and drag them to the track, waiting until the right track is highlighted (both city circles start to glow as well) before releasing. That’s a little trickier than it sounds, and my wife and I have each once incorrectly placed trains; a setting allowing players to insert a confirmation option would be helpful, but right now the only confirm/cancel option appears when you select new route cards.

Opposing player icons sit at the top with number of trains remaining, number of train cards in hand, number of route cards in hand, and number of points all clearly visible. You can see an online opponent’s ELO rating (at least, I assume that’s an ELO system) and “karma” by clicking on the player’s icon.

The app itself runs very quickly with only a few unnecessary animations that didn’t unduly hinder play. Online play may lag due to slow connections or slow players, of course, and you can turn some of the animations and the entirely harmless music off.

Online play is the game’s strength. Players can log in via GameCenter or via the Days of Wonder site, and can create games or join existing ones in the “restaurant” accessible two clicks from the main screen. Open games are identified by different icons that indicate whether you are eligible to join the game and which board and cards are in use – the 1910 expansion, the Europe board, and the Swiss board are all available as in-app purchases. Players also tend to describe games as fast games or no-blocking games where applicable, although that’s on the honor system. So far, I’ve only played on the US board with the 1910 expansion and have found online opponents tend to go hard after the long, cross-country routes (sensible) and are obsessed with getting the longest route (potentially counterproductive). Then again, I think I’m at two wins in five or six games, so perhaps my opinions on strategy hold as much water as a plastic sieve.

The app has two flaws that put it below the standard-bearer in the space, Carcassonne. One is the aforementioned potential for a misplay that would be solved by a confirmation dialog. The other is that the Ticket to Ride AI players are horrible – they play linearly and won’t present any kind of challenge to even a novice player. It’s also less than ideal for pass and play because you can see other players’ routes too easily unless you’re sitting rather far apart. I did have one unexplained crash that hasn’t recurred.

However, if you like playing online opponents, it’s very strong and I’ve found the half-dozen or so games I’ve played to move very quickly. And if you’ve never played any of the boardgames I’m always yammering about here, on Twitter, or in chats, this is one of the best places to dip your toe in the water of smarter, better games that also play well for socializing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ September 7, 2011
→ By

Pulp.

I waited until that night, drove over, parked outside. Nice neighborhood. Definition of a nice neighborhood: a place you couldn’t afford to live in.

Charles Bukowski wrote his final novel, Pulp, as he was dying of leukemia, and passed away before the book was published. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise then that the overarching theme of the book is death – facing it, fleeing from it, and wondering what there is to life other than speeding towards it.

The protagonist of Pulp, Nick Belane, is a private detective who is simultaneously lucky (his cases have a habit of solving themselves) and down on his luck (he’s somewhat broke and usually heading to the bottom of a bottle) when he receives a visit from a new client, who calls herself Lady Death, and most likely is the Grim Reaper in more attractive form than we’re using to seeing. She wants Belane (which I presume rhymes with “Spillane”) to track down a man she believes to be the French author Celine, who should be dead by about thirty years but is apparently running around Los Angeles. Nick picks up a few more clients, including a man who believes his controlling new girlfriend is a space alien, another man who believes his wife is cheating on him, and a friend who hires him to find the elusive Red Sparrow but doesn’t actually know what it is. (The Red Sparrow is most likely a reference to Black Sparrow Press, a small publisher whose financial support allowed Bukowski to become a full-time writer at age 45.)

On its surface, Pulp is a hard-boiled detective novel reminiscent of the clipped tones of Hammett and tight yet rich prose of Chandler, although Belane’s toughness is more superficial than that of the Continental Op or Philip Marlowe. Belane bemoans his inability to catch a break in between catching breaks, dropping into deep depressions that last until the next barstool, where he typically orders a few drinks, starts a fight, and leaves more or less victorious. Clients find him, as do clues, yet he still manages to encounter no end of trouble, much of it because of his own bad decisions.

In between drinks and fights, Belane muses on the nature of life and often doesn’t like what he sees, looking at the indignities of this mortal coil from bodily functions to the need for money to questioning his own sanity. One of the book’s most memorable scenes puts Belane in the waiting room for a psychiatrist he wants to question; the waiting room is full of apparently crazy people, but when Belane’s name is called and he’s ushered in, the apparent psychiatrist claims he’s just a lawyer and Belane is yet another crazy person who’s entered the wrong office. Is Belane crazy? Did he black out? Did reality change on him, as it has a habit of doing to him throughout the book?

As much as Belane looks at life and cringes at what he sees, he’s not running headlong into death, even though Lady Death tells him a few times that he’ll be seeing her again soon. But it’s his inner monologue that really makes Pulp memorable and often very funny in a wry sort of way; it’s an accumulation of decades of wisdom, much of it not all that useful, wrapped up in a fast-paced detective story where the ultimate case is solving the mystery of life. I won’t spoil the ending, although you can probably figure out where the book is heading, and even so the plot is hardly the thing there. Bukowski managed to pay homage to my favorite genre through a black-comic look at the end of life. It’s quite an achievement.

Next up: Richard Stark’s heist novel The Score, available as a free eBook for the Kindle (or Kindle iPad app) through that link. Stark was one of Donald Westlake’s pen names, and I reviewed the first novel in this series two years ago.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 7, 2011
→ By

Job opening in the baseball industry.

An industry contact of mine is looking to fill an entry-level analyst position and asked me to post this here for my readers. It’s a good opportunity for someone who fits their requirements. Just to be clear, this job is not connected to ESPN or to me personally, and I can’t answer any questions about the position. Good luck.

—

We have a position available for recent college graduates with a passion for baseball. We are a well-known sports entity, and we are hiring an analyst in our MLB research group. This position is in Southern California (relocation not provided).

Ideally, we are seeking a recent graduate (entry level or 1-2 years of experience). A bachelor’s degree (or better) from a prestigious university is preferred, but sufficient relevant experience will be considered. Experience in the team-sports environment is heavily preferred.

If interested, please reply to the following address by September 9: baseballresume@gmail.com

In the subject line of the email, please put “Research Job.”

The body of your email should first contain your resume, appropriately formatted. In addition to the traditional resume information, please be sure to include any details about athletic experience.

Below your resume, please put 1) your full contact information, 2) how you obtained this listing, and 3) your minimum annual salary requirement. The salary requirement needs to be a specific dollar figure. Applications without that information will not be considered.

No cover letters or attachments. Responses with attachments will be discarded.

Candidates must be able to get themselves to Southern California for an interview. Thank you for your interest!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:
→ September 6, 2011
→ By

Empires of Food.

My 2700-word column on the rehab process from Tommy John surgery, with comments from a TJ surgeon, a rehab specialist, and three pitches who had the operation, is now up for Insiders.

—

The point of Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, by Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas, is a good one: Civilizations, like ours today, have risen during times of plenty, periods where favorable weather and trading booms have led to rapid growth of populations and cities, but that they tend to fall, often catastrophically, when the food supply is interrupted. We are nearing the end, they argue, of an unusually good era for agriculture, but a cataclysm approaches as climate change, irresponsible farming techniques, water waste, and profiteering all catch up to us and put our future food security at risk. These are all issues that we as consumers should consider when deciding what to eat and where to get it, but a book that’s full of histrionic statements like “cancerous is exactly the state of our twenty-first-century global food empire,” factual errors, and serious omissions isn’t the way to argue the point.

The point of Empires of Food is to show readers the history of the food supply and how civilizations rose and fell with their sources of food, and in that regard Fraser and Rimas largely succeed in their efforts. They use the story of Francesco Carletti (link in Italian; Carletti’s memoir, My voyage around the world, is available used on amazon), a Florentine merchant whose disastrous eight-year trip around the world brought him into contact with many trading societies of the late 1500s and early 1600s, as the narrative hook to connect the various chapters, each describing a key variable in the construction of “food empires.” Those variables are fundamental to agriculture, husbandry, and food commerce – water, soil, distribution channels, refrigeration – with the final additions of “blood” (not just war, but subjugation and oppression in prime growing areas of the world) and money before their one chapter with an iota of hope, describing movements toward organic farming, slow food, and fair trade. The framework is here for a powerful wakeup call to anyone willing to step back and examine his larder and his table.

Unfortunately, when it comes to connecting problems to prescriptions, the authors fall back on hysteria and run light on facts. You can’t do an entire chapter on the declining quality of soil, including descriptions of the effects that heavy tilling and overfarming have on soil erosion rates, without even a single mention of no-till farming as a potential solution, even a partial one, to the very real problem at hand. Similarly, you can’t talk about nitrogen loss through waste and erosion without discussing the same problem of phosphorus, an absolute gating factor on the amount of life that this planet can sustain. (Untreated sewage dumped into the ocean sends loads of phosphorus to to the bottom of the sea, where it’s of little use to life on land.)

The authors’ sins aren’t limited to science or agriculture. They openly praise Marxism with nary a mention of the food shortages that have plagued every society that implemented (always via political repression) Marxist economic policies, including famines in North Korea and milk rationing for Cubans over the age of eight. Meanwhile, they excoriate capitalism and misstate Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” by accusing him of advocating cost-plus pricing. Rather than point out how government subsidies can distort market decisions, or argue for taxes that reflect the externalities they (correctly) point out are not reflected in free-market prices, they want to throw capitalism overboard and send us back to the Middle Ages. They’re similarly dismissive of comparative advantage without considering its wealth-generating capabilities – if you want to argue that localism trumps comparative advantage, acknowledge the latter’s benefits and explain why the former is in our best collective interests.

There are even the sort of tiny errors that don’t necessarily affect the larger point of the book but serve to undermine the credibility of the text because checking these facts is so easy yet wasn’t done. The authors repeat the dubious story of Roman commanders salting the earth around Carthage (per Wikipedia, which has a solid source for this, “ no ancient sources exist documenting this. The Carthage story is a later invention, probably modelled on the story of Shechem.”) They also mention the million-plus city of “San Jose, Texas,” which is probably news to the residents of the San Jose in California or to the residents of San Antonio, Texas.

The intent of Empires of Food is a good one, I think – raising awareness of the fragility of our current infrastructure for feeding the world. It’s certainly relevant to me out here in Arizona, where we depend on dwindling water resources and import much of our food because the local environment isn’t ideal for agriculture (and a lot of local farms out here are selling out to developers). But it’s relevant to anyone in the U.S. because, even though we’re not necessarily the world’s greatest offenders (China is the real villain of the book, although the authors seem too skittish to say so explicitly), we are in the best position to do something about it. The problem with the book is that it gets sloppy and devolves too often into a polemic rather than sticking to well-argued advocacy.

Next up: Nearly done with Charles Bukowski’s bizarre twist on the detective novel, Pulp.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 2, 2011
→ By

Tikal boardgame & app.

Winner of the 1999 Spiel des Jahres (Boardgame of the Year) award, Tikal has two to four players exploring a Mayan jungle, uncovering temples and discovering treasures for points, but with the added twist that you can steal control of temples or forcibly trade treasures with your opponents to maximize your point scores.

On a turn, a player draws the top hex tile from the stack and places it wherever s/he wants on the board as long as it is accessible from a hex that’s already placed. The tiles include temple tiles, treasure tiles, and empty tiles. A temple tile is worth points to the player who has the most worker tokens on it at each scoring round, and temple tiles can increase in value as players “uncover” higher levels, ultimately worth one point per temple level each time it’s scored. The treasures on temple tiles are “discovered” by workers and come in six types, with points per treasure increasing as you add more examples of each type – one point if you only have one treasure of that type, three points if you have a pair, and six if you collect all three. The empty tiles are useful primarily for a player’s ability to place one of two new base camps on one (or on a treasure tile from which all treasures have been collected), allowing the player to place new workers closer to unclaimed temples and treasures.

Once a player has placed a tile, he has ten action points to use on his turn. Actions include placing a new worker or his one leader token for one point; moving a worker to another tile for one point per “step” between tiles; uncovering a temple level for two points; collecting a treasure for three points; trading treasures with an opponent (in which s/he has no choice) for three points; placing a base camp for five points; or guarding a temple, thus protecting it for the player for the remainder of the game, for five points. Uncovering temple levels, gathering treasures, guarding temples, and scoring points for temples all require the use of workers, so placing and deploying them constitutes the critical decision in the game.

In those scoring rounds, players score for treasures as described above and for controlling temples. When multiple players have workers on a temple tile, the points go to the player who has the most workers on that tile, counting any leader tokens as three workers. But each player takes a turn in the scoring round before counting up his points, so before you score, you get to move workers around to control as many temples (or dig up as many treasures) as possible. And since the three scoring rounds before the final one are somewhat randomly timed, each player has to keep one eye on his positioning for the next scoring round – both how well he’s defended temples he’s controlled and how quickly he can move workers and/or his leader around to grab control of another temple. Guarding temples does help, but a player can only guard two temples per game, and when guarding a temple the player loses control of all workers on that tile for the rest of the game.

One other constraint covers new temple levels: Uncovering a level requires placing a small square game piece with the next level number on top of the highest current level. If all game pieces with the next level number have been used, that temple can’t get any higher.

Because there are multiple scoring rounds and the types of tiles revealed vary as the game goes on, Tikal almost plays like a game with two halves, similar but far from identical. In the first half, players are primarily uncovering temple levels and guarding their highest ones, but as the game moves on to the second half, the inability to uncover new levels means players use more action points on stealing control of temples and/or swapping treasures. Of course, the first half can set up the second half, such as controlling temples that are remote from the rest of the action, thus guaranteeing the player a few points without having to spend action points or workers to shore up his defense.

The main flaw in the boardgame is the length of time between a player’s turns. With each player given 10 action points and an ever-widening number of options on the board, a single turn can take several minutes as the player maps out a plan to use up all 10 points in the most efficient and effective way possible while also setting himself up for the next turn. The compensation for this is that the tension created by the knowledge that the other players are likely to screw you out of some points, so while nothing good is going to happen while it’s not your turn, you will want to watch to see just how badly you get screwed. I’ve also seen the suggestion on boardgamegeek that players use a timer to limit just how long each turn takes, which isn’t the worst idea for a four-player game.

Tikal players two to four players, but the board size doesn’t change, so with two players there’s somewhat less interaction or need to steal from other players. With four players, you’re fighting for smaller pieces of the same pie, and there’s more movement and intrigue involved.

One final positive on the game is the box, which is well-designed for easy cleanup given how many different tokens and tiles there are in the game.

Several other commenters at BGG compare Tikal to El Grande, saying the latter game uses a similar mechanic with a better implementation. I’ve never played El Grande, but I’m sure many of you have and am curious whether that should be an upcoming purchase and whether it plays reasonably well with just 2-3 players.

–

The Tikal app for iOS received some pretty tough reviews when it was first released because it was a buggy mess, very crash prone, hard to decipher on screen, with really weak AI players; I bought it early and had all of those problems, but heard about a forthcoming update and decided to sit on a review until that update arrived. The update has made the app much more stable, cleaned up the UI significantly so it’s easier to follow what’s going on, and I think the AI players are a little better – but not a lot, making it more of a training app if you’re not going multiplayer through GameCenter (which I haven’t tried). At $4.99, it’s definitely worth the trial run if you have an iPad and want to try Tikal before you purchase the physical game. One comment I’d offer is that the game graphics are different from the boardgame, including trucks instead of workers, and the screen is a little dense on an iPod or iPhone. On the plus side, however, the AI moves pretty quickly, so you can run through a solo game without dragging, and the animations make it clear what the AI players are doing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 1, 2011
→ By

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.

Alan Bradley walked away from a career in broadcast engineering to become a writer but didn’t produce his first novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, until he turned 70, likely unaware at the time that he was about to embark on a new career at a point when most people are satisfied with retirement. The book, the first in a planned series of five (book four comes out in November), is a murder mystery of sorts, but succeeds because of the appeal of its protagonist, the precocious eleven-year-old amateur chemist (and sleuth) Flavia de Luce.

Flavia is intelligent and quick-witted, and takes no interest in the trappings of young girlhood like dolls, dresses, or makeup (all favorites of my five-year-old), instead comforting herself with her sophisticated home chemistry lab, where she pores over classic texts in the field (such as Henderson’s An Elementary Study of Chemistry) and replicates the experiments of chemistry giants such as Lavoisier … and his wife, who, along with Madame Curie, is one of Flavia’s idols. That comfort is necessary because her family is – although it would be early for the word, as the book is set in 1950 – dysfunctional; her widowed father has completely detached himself from his family, her two older sisters have no use for her and are each wrapped up in their own worlds, and only the gardener, Dogger, seems to care for Flavia in a familial way.

When Flavia discovers a dying man in the cucumber path on her family estate in Buckshaw, a death for which her father will eventually be arrested, she begins working to unlock the mystery in stages: Who was he? Why was he arguing with her father shortly before his death? And did he steal the missing piece of Mrs. Mullet’s custard pie? The case, of course, revolves around poison (Flavia’s particular obsession within chemistry), but also requires a lot of legwork, a lengthy exposition by her father (more interesting for the way he delivers it than for its content), and the inevitable face-to-face confrontation with her prime suspect, putting her in danger that she has to think her way out of.

The resolution of the murder mystery is rather perfunctory – while perhaps realistic given the setting, it’s pretty obvious who killed the stranger and what the motive for the murder was – but Flavia steals the show. Bradley notes in the afterword that she was a secondary character in another novel he was trying to write, and took over the pages to the point where he realized he had to start over and write a book starring her. The Sweetness is written in the first person, and the combination of her adult-like powers of deduction and her childlike energy, with a degree of innocence somewhere in between the two, is infectious, especially when an adult character – often Inspector Hewitt, charged with solving the murder – puts her on the spot and she has to dissemble. Her desire to solve the crime is matched only by her immediate bent toward revenge on anyone who wrongs her, usually one of her sisters, which hatches a minor subplot that lasts for about two-thirds of the book. The one downside to Flavia’s personality is that she is extremely observant, and as the narrator she shares all of these observations with us, often to the detriment of the story at hand.

I rarely recommend reading a book just for a character, but The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie would be an exception. It’s a very quick read; my wife gave me the book as a gift for Christmas – which shows you how far behind I am in my book queue – but I believe she’ll like it more than I did, as she’s a fan of what I’d call the “light murder” genre. It will not satisfy anyone looking to solve a difficult puzzle, but if you can step back and just enjoy Flavia’s effervescent character, you’ll find it worth the time.

Next up: Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novel Some Buried Caesar. Also, the DVD for Black Swan just arrived in the mail today.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ August 31, 2011
→ By

The Social Network.

The Social Network, a stylized, maybe not all that accurate rendition of Facebook’s origin story, won wide acclaim in last year’s awards season before running into The King’s Speech at the Oscars. Featuring a ferociously quick, smart screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher (apparently a favorite director of many of my readers), it takes what might otherwise be dry source material and draws you into a technical and legal morass by means of a truly well-told story, one full of flawed characters, interpersonal drama, and plenty of incredibly funny lines.

Although nearly all of the central characters in The Social Network are real, as are the major plot points, much of what fills in the rest of the plot was either exaggerated or just made up to make for a more compelling script. (Since it’s not pitched as a documentary, I don’t have a huge issue with this.) In the film, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg is shown as a brilliant programmer, business visionary, and interpersonal doofus who is set on the path to start Facebook after he’s dumped (with cause) by a girlfriend after an insane conversation that more or less concludes when he tells her she doesn’t really have to study because “you go to BU.” After that point, the film uses two parallel lawsuits against Zuckerberg to structure the narrative through long flashbacks that follow the history of Facebook from its predecessor, facemash (a hot-or-not type of site featuring only coeds at Harvard), through his interaction with the Winklevoss twins (who may or may not have given him the idea for Facebook), to the startup phase of Facebook and eventually to the move to Silicon Valley and venture capital investments that led to a schism between Zuckerberg and his best friend, CFO, and seed-money source Eduardo Saverin.

The pace and intelligence of the dialogue in The Social Network are frenetic, reliant on actors who can deliver the lines credibly and time everything properly. It reminded me not of any drama or anything recent, but of one of my favorite classic films, the screwball comedy His Girl Friday, a Cary Grant vehicle known for so much dialogue that its script had three times the pages per minute of a typical script of the era. The Social Network isn’t quite that frenzied – characters aren’t talking over each other as Grant and costar Rosalind Russell did – but just about every character speaks quickly, and there’s no mercy with the dialogue, not in vocabulary, in subject matter, or in pauses between scenes. This isn’t merely a movie about really smart people – it’s a really smart movie about really smart people, and it expects you to follow along.

Eisenberg earned plaudits and award nominations for his performance as Mark Zuckerberg, affecting disdain for most of the people around him and perhaps for social connections in toto, yet switching to fanboy mode when Internet rock star/bad boy Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) shows up and talks his way into the company. Timberlake was just as good as Eisenberg in less screen time, playing Parker as more pretense than substance, untrustworthy but never grating. And Andrew Garfield, who’s about to become a huge star as Peter Parker in the next unnecessary Spiderman reboot, was incredibly affecting as Eduardo Saverin, who, in the movie at least, is squeezed out by Zuckerberg and Parker in the latter’s power play. (Saverin was the primary inside source for Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, which was in turn the source for Aaron Sorkin’s script for The Social Network. I haven’t tackled that book, but one of Mezrich’s earlier books, Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, was a great read.)

I did enjoy the Harvard scenery and even some campus vernacular. The final clubs’ role in campus life may have been overstated; my sense at the time I was there was that they were very much on the fringes of the social scene, although to be fair I was never “punched” and so I don’t have first person experience to back that impression up. I did notice that Zuckerberg’s dorm room was a good bit larger than any room I ever had at Harvard, and less industrial-looking.

I’ve read some criticism of The Social Network for its portrayal of “nerds” as socially awkward or simply awful people, but I didn’t see that in the film at all. No one comes off worse than the Winklevoss twins, who appear as entitled upper class twits and are, in the script, probably the least intelligent of the central characters. Zuckerberg may be socially inept, but he also ends up getting stinking rich because of his intelligence and work ethic, and I think the portrayal of him as able to outsmart would-be competitors and to work wonders with a modest amount of coding both paint him in a better light than otherwise reported. He’s not depicted as a great guy, but the film’s central debate on his character – it’s bookended by women telling him he’s an asshole (beginning) or that he’s just trying to be one (end) – only covers half of what makes him compelling as the protagonist.

In a rather scathing review of the film’s underlying message, Harvard Law professor Laurence Lessig argued that the script ignores the fact that the Winklevoss’ suit, one of two central plot points, was basically frivolous. The film never mentions an NDA or non-compete agreement, and Zuckerberg says explicitly that he took no code from the Winklevoss’ efforts. So what exactly were the grounds for their suit? You can’t copyright an idea, and you aren’t supposed to be able to patent one (although there are these bogus “business method” patents, the film never mentions that either). Zuckerberg isn’t accused of stealing a trade secret. He settled simply to make the nuisance suit go away. Lessig argues that this is a pox on our economy, and I tend to agree. He also argues that the film omitted the power of the Internet to destroy barriers to entry into new or existing market spaces, which is undoubtedly true but tangential to the human story (real, fabricated, or somewhere in between) at the heart of The Social Network.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ August 30, 2011
→ By

Behold, Here’s Poison.

Author Georgette Heyer is best known – or so I’m told by Wikipedia, which is never wrong – as the creator of the literary subgenre known as the “Regency romance,” historical novels set among the English upper class in the early 19th century (that is, the time of Jane Austen’s books) but written in the 20th century. I had no idea who Heyer was when my wife gave me one of her non-romance novels, the mystery Behold, Here’s Poison, for Christmas last year. I can see the connection to those Regency romances, which Wikipedia describes as featuring “intelligent, fast-paced dialog between the protagonists,” as this book was fast and witty, but I’d be hard-pressed to call it a detective novel and it fell a little short as a mystery. It’s more of a fun thriller built around a country-house murder.

Gregory Matthews is the head of household at the Poplars and holds all the keys, literal and metaphorical, to the lives of the family members around him. When he’s found poisoned (by nicotine) in his bed one morning, everyone in the house is revealed to have a motive – his sister, sisters-in-law, niece, two nephews, the family doctor, and so on – while no one has a clear alibi except the one man, the intelligent, sardonic Randall Matthews, who had the most to gain directly from Matthews’ death: nearly his entire liquid fortune. Superintendent Hannasyde and Inspector Hemingway, who appear together in three other Heyer novels, arrive on the scene to piece together the mystery of Matthews’ death, a story complicated by the eventual death of one of the many other suspects.

Randall is by far the most interesting character in the book, as he’s a few levels above everyone else in brainpower and isn’t afraid to show it, tweaking his relations (especially his nosy aunts) for his own enjoyment. His arrival after the elder Matthews’ murder leaves no doubt about his role in the rest of the book – he’s there for dry wit, as when he first appears, entering a room filled with his relations after they’ve all learned of Gregory’s death:

“And which of you,” he inquired, looking amiably round, “is responsible for dear uncle’s death? Or don’t you know?”
This airy question produced a feeling of tension, which was possibly Randall’s object. Mrs. Lupton said: “that is not amusing nor is this a time for jokes in bad taste.”
Randall opened his eyes at her. “Dear aunt, did you think I was joking?”

Just about every family member has some humorous aspect to his or her character, and putting them all in a room brings the worst out in them, making the family scenes – and there are many – the real highlight of the novel.

While I enjoyed the book for the dry humor and quick prose, I can’t call it a proper detective story – more of an old-fashioned thriller. A true detective story stars the detective; he can be any sort of detective, a police inspector or a PI, a sharp investigator or a drunken hack, but his personality drives the story and he becomes the hero (or antihero, as the case may be) through which the reader experiences the investigation and solution of the crime. Hannasyde’s character is bland – I wouldn’t even call him “vanilla,” which is rather an unfortunate synonym for “bland” since real vanilla flavor is anything but – with no distinguishing characteristics other than the natural suspicion you’d expect to see in any detective character, and the conversations between Hannasyde and Hemingway are merely explanations of where they stand in the investigation. Hannasyde’s best role is as a foil for Randall, who admires the detective’s intelligence but also plays him for his own benefit.

I’m also reluctant to categorize Behold, Here’s Poison as a true mystery because of how few clues there were to the killer’s identity. I rarely figure out who the killer is in better mysteries, but can always see how I should have figured it out once I reach the conclusion. In this case, however, Heyer’s explanation fit the story to date but was based on awfully scant evidence, some of which wasn’t even clear to me as I read it because Hannasyde didn’t discover it – in fact, he only solves the crime when another character fills in the missing blanks in the final chapter.

Those two complaints do undersell the book a little; it’s a good read because it’s full of witty dialogue and most of the Matthews clan are humorously drawn caricatures – a group of slightly batty would-be members of the gentry whose dialogue will elicit more smirks than laughs, but still plenty to run you through the book towards the conclusion of the murder. I would just urge you not to look at this as a detective story or as a mystery, but more along the lines of what might happen if P.G. Wodehouse decided to try to satirize those genres.

Next up: Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, a cute mystery that made Bradley a first-time novelist at age 70.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ August 29, 2011
→ By

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (film).

I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo two years ago and didn’t care for it, between the awkward prose, stilted characters, and violent revenge fantasy that fueled the story, so I gave up on the trilogy rather than plowing through the two subsequent, longer books that followed. The film adaptation of the book garnered very positive reviews, however, as Larsson’s plot, too thin and angry for a 600-page novel, worked well in a 150-minute film that was ultimately powered by Noomi Rapace’s star-making turn as Lisbeth Salander.

If you haven’t read the book, the basic plot is that Mikael Blomkvist is an investigative journalist in temporary disgrace who is hired by an aging industrialist to solve the 40-year-old disappearance of the industrialist’s niece Harriet. The industrialist used a research firm to investigate Blomkvist first, and the reclusive, tortured hacker Lisbeth Salander, who did the actual research, ends up teaming up with Blomkvist to try to solve the mystery of Harriet’s disappearance and find the previously undetected serial killer whose identity Harriet seems to have deduced right before she vanished.

Salander’s character is all hard edges, from her eidetic memory to her flawless cracking skills to her extremely insular personality to her refusal to talk about the traumas of her past. Her portrayal ends up critical to the film, not just because she is the Girl of the title but because Blomkvist’s character is about as dull as an old butter knife. Rapace, a Swedish actress whose English-language debut will come in the next installment of the Sherlock Holmes reboot (which, as a fan of the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories, I have to say looks like a circus freakshow’s take on the character), inhabits the character with a brooding intensity and a barely concealed rage that keeps threatening to explode through the surface. But even when she is violently raped – more on that scene in a moment – by her legal guardian (long backstory there), she channels that rage into a violent, controlled revenge that gives her what she wants by reversing the balance of power. Conveying all of this through Larsson’s clipped, unrealistic dialogue is not simple; it puts more responsibility on the actress involved to convey it through body language, tone, and facial expressions, and Rapace does so from start to finish. It was no small shock to see her out of character in one of the DVD extras and discover she’s kind of cute. There is no cute to her portrayal of Lisbeth.

That rape scene, though … I’ll confess that my wife and I both voted to fast-forward through it. We’d both read the book and knew exactly what was coming, but the thought of watching that attack on Lisbeth in real time was repulsive, and the film does not shy away from just how violent the attack was, or just how much of a violation it was. That scene in the book is all about power and powerlessness, and there’s no question that those aspects come through in the film version. Even at double the normal speed, it went on too long to stomach, and watching Lisbeth get her revenge doesn’t erase it for the viewer any more than it would erase it for her character.

The last half of the movie is all about Blomkvist and Harriet looking for clues in old newspapers and business records for the identities of the serial killer’s victims and, eventually, his identity as well. There’s tension as they visit the sites where various bodies were recovered, but no real drama until Blomkvist blunders into the killer’s grasp and has to be rescued by Lisbeth in a scene of fake-tension – you know Blomkvist isn’t going to die with two more films in the series, but the book and film both push him to the brink of death before it happens. In other words, don’t watch this just for the plot, which is mildly interesting but also extremely sick (reflected in the book’s original Swedish title, which translates to Men Who Hate Women). Watch it for Rapace’s performance as Lisbeth, and for the tremendous prep work that had to go into creating all of the documentary evidence that she and Blomkvist eventually use to find the killer.

–

I commented on Twitter that I was unlikely to go see the English-language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, due out in theaters this winter, because these remakes tend to fall short of their originals. This isn’t strictly a language issue for me, but a cultural one. For one thing, large American studios that remake foreign films tend to Hollywoodize the films to increase their commercial appeal, often changing plot elements, dumbing down smarter dialogue, softening harsher elements that might scare away viewers or hike the film’s MPAA rating, or employing more marketable actors who might bring their own audiences. They have every right to try to make more money, of course, but these are not factors that typically increase the quality of a film. For another thing, there is a pretty clear insinuation in these remakes that the studios believe that Americans will not – or can not – tolerate a film with subtitles. I’m not exactly Mr. Art Film Snob, but I’ve seen at least 20 films with subtitles in at least eight foreign languages and have never once felt that my opinion of a movie suffered because it was subtitled. You get used to them in a matter of seconds, and then you don’t notice them for the rest of the film. Did Inglourious Basterds fare worse at the box office for its heavy use of subtitles? No. So why do we need an English-only version of a film that was made very well by native actors in their own country?

Several readers argued that the director of the English version, David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network), makes it worth watching on its own. I understand that the director of a film can have significant influence on its ultimate quality, but in this case, I’m not concerned about the directing but of the script itself, and as far as I can tell, Fincher wasn’t involved in the screenplay, which was adapted from the book (not the Swedish film) by Steven Zaillian, whose filmography since Schindler’s List skews towards big-budget and commercial efforts, including Mission: Impossible, Hannibal, and, of interest to most of us, Moneyball. I’d also consider it a negative that the filmmakers were reportedly offering too little money for the role of Lisbeth, not because I think money buys you a better actress but because it sends a signal that the studio and/or Fincher don’t see Lisbeth’s role as the crucial one. I might eventually see the English version, but the early indicators on the film’s quality are not all that favorable in my eyes.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,