Quick recommendation

The Intern, which we saw this past weekend, was an enjoyable, understated movie.  There were some light laughs and some light drama, and the movie didn't overstay its welcome.

It wasn't one of those broad comedies with all kinds of craziness or outlandish stuff going on (not that those can't be fun, too).  Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway are pros and set the right tone for this pleasant, gentle story about a senior citizen intern working at a hip and trendy online retail operation.  

Yes, the young people learn a lot from the older, wiser De Niro, and De Niro gets a new lease on life because of all the young energy and new ideas around him, but it's all done with a light touch and the movie even manages to work in a few surprises.

It's funny, though.  Knowing that they has De Niro on the film's payroll, the producers couldn't resist one over-the-top element: they actually worked in a heist sequence, with De Niro driving the getaway car!

Anyway, before you get all caught up in James Bond and Star Wars, you might want to give this graceful little American comedy a try.  I found it to be a nice appetizer for all the upcoming holiday blockbuster stuff, and you may, too. 

Quite something

Jodi Taylor's The Nothing Girl isn't my usual type of book, but a discount offer caught my eye just when I was ready to start something new. Very quickly, I was glad I took a chance on it. The Nothing Girl is a fresh, fun story about a group of eccentrics thrown together in a small estate in the English countryside, with the quiet, insecure Jenny the centerpiece of the group. As the story progresses, Jenny soon learns that she isn't as quiet and insecure as she and the people around her had thought.

Jenny gains her gradual, new self awareness amid many entertaining episodes, including animal rescues, an arranged (and later, genuine?) romance, frequent intrigues involving Jenny's relatives, and even, in the later going, a genuine mystery. Oh, also on hand is Jenny's imaginary friend, Thomas the Horse, but this element is done with a light touch and doesn't overwhelm the proceedings with whimsy. In fact, for a golden, talking horse, Thomas lent a good bit of grit and sense to the story when he showed up.

I actually listened to the audiobook version of The Nothing Girl, which is beautifully read by Lucy Price-Lewis, but I'm sure the book would be equally enjoyable in print or on one's Kindle. Ms. Taylor wrote a great little story here, and I'm going to keep an eye out for more of her stuff.

"The Nothing Girl" is easily available in any of the formats mentioned above.

To boldly go... once again?

I've been enjoying Blunt Talk, the new comedy series starring Patrick Stewart, now showing on the Starz network.  An occasional guest star on the series has been Brent Spiner, Mr. Stewart's old cohort on Star Trek: The Next Generation way back when.  Though playing totally different characters now (Mr. Stewart an effective television journalist with a train wreck of a personal life and Mr. Spiner a sympathetic piano player working in the bar Mr. Stewart's character often visits), it's been a lot of fun seeing the easy repartee these two actors still have with each other.

Seeing them also makes me want a new Star Trek series.  C'mon, how hard would that be?  Just get a new series going, assemble a nice cast, and set the whole thing in the 24th century, a couple of decades after the time frame of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  That last point would allow characters from that series, as well as from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, to come and go as occasional guest stars, complementing the new series' regular cast.  It would be a lot of fun.  Watching Mr. Stewart and Mr. Spiner on Blunt Talk just reminds everyone that time is being wasted and these actors won't have an indefinite window to again play their classic Star Trek characters.

And as far as a premise for a new Trek show?  I say keep it simple.  Star Trek is best when embracing its classic structure: a ship traveling the galaxy having adventures, encountering strangeness, and addresssing challenges and moral dilemmas.  You don't need to complicate the premise with too much originality and cleverness.  Leave those things for the individual episodes' stories, and for the new characters created to populate the series.

Any, end of rant.  But if there's anyone at Paramount Pictures who reads this blog, could you please get on this issue at your convenience?  Time, as they say, is a wastin'.  Thanks.

Strangers in a bar

Peter Swanson's The Kind Worth Killing is a slick and trashy thriller without a lot of subtlety and nuance, but at the same time I have to admit it's undeniably an entertaining page-turner. A woman meets a stranger at an airport bar, and after hearing his tail of woe about his cheating wife, offers to help him get his revenge on her. As in killing her.

If you check credibility at the door and allow yourself to accept that a woman can talk a stranger- fairly quickly, too- into offing his wife, the story is pretty enjoyable. What's especially enjoyable, and clever, is that the cheating wife, quite coincidentally, just may have psychopathic tendencies of her own. Oh, there's also another guy in the story, one who is particularly dumb and let's himself be manipulated and used by the much smarter women. It was fun to see the poor guy caught in the middle as each woman tries to use him to best the other.

The Kind Worth Killing isn't one of those autumnal, thoughtful thrillers that make us think about our own issues and problems as the various characters confront theirs. But then does every crime story have to be that? Sometimes a sharp, fast-moving story about beautiful people with dark souls, all spinning through an over-the-top plot laced with violence and sex, can deliver decent entertainment, too. This story certainly did.

Bond investment report

For fans of James Bond, the latter going of 2015 offers a couple of nice treats.  Obviously, the big one is the premiere of the new Bond film, SPECTRE, which debuts in the UK in October and in the US in November.  From the trailers, it looks elegant, action-packed and intriguing.  After all, we haven't seen the international crime cartel, SPECTRE, as a Bond antagonist since the 1971 film, Diamonds Are Forever, and SPECTRE head Ernst Stavro Blofeld since the pre-credits sequence of 1981's For Your Eyes Only. What do the producers have in mind for the re-launched, re-booted crime organization in the new film?  We'll soon see.

But you may not realize that we're also getting a new Bond novel, and in only a few days: the second week of September will see the release of Trigger Mortis by Anthony Horowitz.  Set in Ian Fleming's original 1950's timeline, the book sounds pretty great.  Here's a description that paraphrases from the press materials: Recovering from his recent victory over Auric Goldfinger, Bond is relaxing with his latest ally and conquest from that adventure, Pussy Galore, when he's soon called upon to thwart an effort by the Russians to sabotage a famous international auto race in West Germany.  But is there more to the plan than simply embarrassing the West by messing up a celebrated race car event?  Bond intends to find out.  Again, sounds pretty good, huh?

Stay tuned for more discussion of our favorite fictional spy, as I'll undoubtedly have more to say about both the high-profile film and smaller-profile novel in the near future.  For now, it's great to know we're getting some new Bond on both the big screen and printed page beginning almost immediately.

Brief Asides #5

It's been a while since I've done one of these "Brief Asides" posts, so here's a new one for you, finally.  There may be longer reviews of some of these items shortly, but for now here are some quick thoughts on a few things I've been reading and seeing lately.

Irrational Man, still in a few theaters, was an okay Woody Allen movie, but ultimately felt like warmed-over leftovers. The themes covered here- mostly involving morality and justice- were handled with more urgency and drama in earlier Woody films like Crimes and Misdemeaners and Matchpoint.  Also, the pace was a little sluggish. Still it's a watchable, somewhat entertaining movie for Woody fans.

Fantastic Four is pretty much the big disappointment everyone says it is, though it's more needlessly mediocre than a travesty.  It's just amazing to me that the rich Stan Lee/Jack Kirby source material has yet to yield a truly decent movie after several tries.  Probably Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer a few years back came closest.  There was at least some pretty good adventure and somewhat grand science-fiction wonderment in that one.

Zombeavers, recently seen via Netflix streaming, is actually a lot more grim and scary, and straight-up horror oriented than the title of the movie suggests.  The filmmakers, however, certainly didn't miss the double-entendre opportunities the title offers, and the puppet-like beavers often look a little silly. Still, this one may genuinely unnerve you a little, especially if you're just tuning in for goofy fun.

Speaking of goofy fun, you'll get a lot of that in both the movie and series versions of Wet Hot American Summer, both also now on Netflix.  The 2015 series (8 episodes, just released) is actually a prequel to the 2001 movie, which apparently has a cult following. Both series and movie offer a nice mix of so-bad-it's-good humor, as well as genuinely inspired funny bits.  Check 'em out.

I'm still working my way through Isaac Asimov's Foundation series (a 2015 project of mine) and just finished Foundation's Edge. This one was an important entry in the series, not only because it was the first new installment in the series in several decades when it originally came out in 1982, but also because it connected the Foundation novels into the continuities of other Isaac Asimov series and stories, in essence creating a grand Asimov universe.  And it did all that while telling a decent story, too.

That's it for now. I hope everyone is making the most of these final days of summer.

Meet a more troubled Jesse Stone

I didn't rush to read Robert B. Parker's Blind Spot, Reed Farrel Coleman's initial Jesse Stone novel, because of the high number of moderately negative to outright hostile reviews on Amazon, but figured I'd eventually get to it. I was surprised, then, that I really enjoyed the book when I finally read it. It's always a tricky thing when a new writer continues another writer's series, but this novel did a nice job with the balancing act such an arrangement requires: it honors and respects the characters and situations created by the original author, but introduces plotlines, themes, and ideas that engage the imagination of the new writer.

On that last point, maybe it's just me, but I enjoy novels where the characters have complicated interior lives and struggle with weaknesses and various psychological issues. Here Jesse Stone is struggling a little more with his drinking and a mobster / hired killer is all of a sudden struggling with guilt in the wake of his killing a young woman. Elements like this added a kind of burnished richness to the proceedings.

I also liked how Mr. Coleman subtly undid some of the changes Michael Brandman, the first writer to take over this series from Mr. Parker, made to the series to put it more in line with the Jesse Stone TV movies. Mr. Brandman, for example, moved Jesse into a waterfront house with a footbridge leading to the front door, just like the house in the TV movies. He also avoided describing Molly Crane as an Irish woman with a bunch of kids and a very specific way of bantering with Jesse, so it wouldn't contradict the Molly in the TV movies, a black woman who acted more formally around Jesse. Here, Molly is very clearly once again the Irish woman Robert Parker created, and she has her old history and personality back. And, while less obvious, Coleman seems to indicate that Jesse has moved again and is again living in a condo-like residence like he was before.

And while the editor in me actually kind of liked the clear, easily understandable "point A connects to point B" plotting of the Brandman novels, I found myself enjoying the sort of messy, organic plotting of this new book. One crook / scammer, for example, plans to use Jesse as a way to extricate himself from his mob ties, which are getting out of hand. But then he sort of forgets about that as new things attract his attention, and start interacting with Jesse in a whole different way. And Jesse himself sorts of blunders around most of the book trying to figure out what's going on, knowing that he's committed to solving the murder of the young woman that gets the plot rolling, but not much else for the longest time.

And while I don't want to overstate the idea, the book and its characters are sort of marinated in melancholy, adult concerns and regrets, and an overall tiredness at the demands of life, giving the book a more serious, literary quality we haven't seen before in either the Parker or Brandman entries. Hey, it's still a Jesse Stone detective thriller, but a more seasoned and thematically complicated one. Maybe those things will make Robert B. Parker's Blind Spot more of a slog for some people, but it wasn't for me. I enjoyed the richness.

One thing's for sure: I'm not going to wait long to read Mr. Coleman's next entry in the series, Robert B. Parker's The Devil Wins, which is out in September. I'm pretty much thinking that Jesse Stone is in good hands for the moment.