The Friday Article Roundup
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Thanks to the true north of the FAR, C.D. Ploughman, for submitting! Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
At his blog, Dan Sinker writes about the power of The Westing Game:
The Westing Game was the first book I read that didn’t lie to me…. There were no hidden clues in The Westing Game. From the very first sentence on, if you looked close enough, the answer to its central mystery was right there to discover. But the book didn’t lie about bigger things either: That parents were flawed, that adults were hiding secrets, that the world worked in ways that were both unclear and unfair. It was clear-eyed in the many ways that people fail themselves and each other, and it offered no straightforward solutions to any of it.
Kiana Fitzgerald dives deep into Vince Staples’ new album at Consequence of Sound:
A Vince Staples album is nothing without a dedicated dance track, and โCottonโ serves that purpose here; even so, it feels just a hair out of place. It sounds more aligned with Donna Summer or Gloria Gaynor than the brash, guitar-led majority of the album, but thematically, Staples ties the song back to religion: โWhen Jesus died up on that cross/ He left us lost singing the same old song.โ Even Staplesโ dance records are complicated and not what they seem. โMusic make you feel just like cotton/ Pick me up when I feel like falling down,โ he raps during the chorus, invoking images of African American ancestors struggling through exhaustion as they pick cotton in the fields. Itโs an intentional depiction; Vince Staples is never far away from thinking about the echoes of slavery in this country.
Jason Bailey surveys the films at Tribeca, including the latest from Bob and David as they climb Machu Picchu:
Itโs odd to contemplate an outsider like Cross having anything as normie as a bucket list, but the documentary does a great deal to humanize these two comedy icons, and to capture the dynamics of their lengthy relationship. Theyโre just naturally funny together, after decades of making each other laugh, busting each otherโs balls, topping each other, and doing bit on demand (the best running gag finds Odenkirk โpulling a Durstโ whenever he goes to the bathroom with his hot mic on, mumbling Jinx-style murder confessions and other grievances). The sly kidding of conventions of documentary filmmaking and voice-over narration will please fans, but those of us who are aging alongside these guys will appreciate the existential realizations that are the ultimate outcome of their four-day journey.
In advance of a retrospective of his movies, John Sayles talks with Dan Mecca about filmmaking and dealing with problems at The Film Stage:
[In Eight Men Out] we see, I think, itโs maybe Arnold Rothstein leaving for Europe so he canโt be called as a witness or whatever. We literally shot it in the parking lot. So I said, โAll we need is people waving from a boat,โ so we made a little boat set on the side of the motel that weโre staying in. And we got a swimming poolโone of those plastic swimming poolsโand you put a lot of broken mirror in it and you blast a light down onto it and it makes that kind of water thing on the people. And then you throw confetti on them and you keep it [a few seconds] long. You really have to be realistic about: โDo I need a wide shot here? Whatโs the scale of this movie? Whatโs important at this moment?โ
And The Reveal’s Scott Tobias interviews directors Alex Thomas and Rhys Buonos on the work behind recreating famous nonfiction for the parody series Documentary Now!:
Thomas: The detective work simplifies things, too. A lot of documentaries are made in fairly simple ways so thereโs not a huge film crew and not multiple cameras. Oftentimes I feel like you can get lost in the muck and this approach just helps ground everything else.
Buono: A really good example of that is the Agnรฉs Varda one we did called โTrouver Frisson.โ If you look at something like Vardaโs The Gleaners and I, thereโs all these weird, funky digital effects that speak of the era in which the film was made. You could easily walk into that, and go, โOh, man, boy, there were so many weird things they were doing in the early mini-DV era. Where do you begin? Where do you end?โ But in this case, we were like, โWell, what camera was she using?โ And she was using this dinky little handi-cam, this little mini-DV camera, and we only know that because we saw pictures of her holding it. So we went on eBay and just bought two of them. The camera itself has these built-in digital effects, and you kind of realize, โOh my God, you guys, thatโs all she did. She just pushed this button on the camera. That was the effect.โ
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The Friday Article Roundup
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Double Features
Family heirlooms loom large in Father Mother Sister Brother and Vulcanizadora.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Four, Episode Twenty-One, โRising Starโ
โYou cannot make history, you can only survive it.โ
This is after the end of the war, essentially, and it picks up significantly; it occurs to me that Iโm so trained on drama at this point that itโs the consequences that really end up being interesting to me. President Clark taking his own life absolutely owns as a storytelling move, selling that the war is over and making it so we never have to see (or cast) the major character that has always been offscreen. One of the criticisms I heard of this show is that itโs sucking itself off talking up its own protagonists to the point of, at times, ludicrousness; thereโs that to an extent here as Sheridan neatly avoids any consequences for anything heโs done, although the basic move of accepting resignation in favour of a better job is cool (and admittedly having his feet up on a desk when heโs caught is pretty funny).
The basic resolution to the whole situation is interesting; explicitly economic and cultural connection as opposed to military domination. This is one of those things that would actually have been more interesting than the constant warfare as an overall premise, to watch where the consequences go. Unfortunately, I hear the next season sucks donkey balls. Gonna have fun with that after the season finale next week; I have this suspicion that bad scifi is actually better for me (as a baby scifi writer) than average-to-good.
Sheridan avoids certain consequences but as you note, the coup of icing the president off-stage not only saves money in actors but allows for a balance in consequence — it’s been a minute but I don’t think there’s a full rooting out of everyone involved here, there is a general interest in economic/cultural connection and moving on as quickly as possible. Which feels true to previous experiences! Anyway, very interested for your take on the season finale, which is a ride.
Tales From The Crypt, “Fitting Punishment” – A standout episode in part because of the (unusual for the show) focus on Black respectability politics and hypocrisy, as well as stage legend Moses Gunn’s* hilarious, loathsome performance as a cheapskate funeral director, Thortenberry, who reluctantly takes in his teenage nephew. Gunn obviously relishes every scene playing this asshole though his comeuppance doesn’t feel as well-staged as it could be. Maybe they ran out of money.
*Speaking of Homicide: Life On The Street, Gunn’s performance in “Three Men and Adena” is unforgettable.
The Racket – At its core, this is about a cop (Robert Mitchum) and a gangster (Robert Ryan), and how the former has sworn to take down the latter in a corruption-filled city. But there are a lot of moving parts here and they weight things down and turn a simple story into a complicated melodrama with too many characters. Plus Mitchum and his fellow “good” cops are as apt to use violence as Ryan. We’re told that Ryan is now working for a national syndicate that wants to move away from violence, so if the crooks are trying to avoid violence, why aren’t the heroes? Still, there are some well directed scenes (most by John Cromwell, though some are by other directors because Howard Hughes was not happy with the movie and added more), and the cast, especially Ryan, is good.
Elementary, “The Man with the Twisted Lip” – This is a title of a Conan Doyle story, and there is no connection to it otherwise and I didn’t see a man with a twisted lip. The main mystery involved the search for a missing woman who might have fallen off the wagon, and while it does seem she has, that has nothing to do with her murder. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time when a drone was sent to kill a potential whistleblower out to reveal a drone manufacturer’s screw up in Afghanistan. The more interesting part of the mystery is that the drone company is using tiny drones to poison people, which seems to be the one thing real world drones aren’t doing. But the real plot is the return of Mycroft, seemingly to woo Joan, which puts a huge strain between the two of them, and leaves Holmes so discombobulated that he saves the phone number of the missing woman’s heroin dealers. And on top of all that, Corsican mobsters seem to be doing business at Mycroft’s restaurant, Joan investigates, and Joan gets kidnapped. To be continued as we now have the arc that will end the season. Messy but engaging,
Mad Max Fury Road – treated myself to a birthday rewatch. It’s still perfect… in every way.
Time Out of Mind – a classic “this box set says Film Noir but the curators don’t seem to really understand what that is” selection, this is a romantic melodrama about a talented pianist born into a shipping family, and the women who love him. I enjoyed it quite a bit though, I love a Piano Movie and the rest of the family betraying their stern father to help the pianist brother escape to Paris to fulfil his dreams had some powerful emotional moments. The music is really good too, and sells him as a talent.
Singapore – next film in the same box set fits the bill a little better. It’s a Casablanca-derived wartime romance with Fred MacMurray and Ava Gardner that has a bit more of its own personality than some of the Casablanca knockoffs I’ve seen, and a good pulpy feel to it – it’s under 80 minutes and Gardner has (dramatic musical sting) AMNESIA!! Also it costars Thomas Gomez, who I just ran into in The Twilight Zone, nice coincidence.
Oh, hey, nice timing on the Thomas Gomez spotting! I want to see both of these last two, noir or not, and of course a rewatch of Fury Road always sounds good.
Neither of the “noirs” have much of a reputation and there are some fun dismissive quotes from the director and stars of Time Out of Mind on Wikipedia*. But it’s been a while since I’ve done much classic Hollywood stuff and I thought they both had some good sweeping romance and 40s star power.
*Robert Siodmak: “a preposterous film… the story was absurd (who can sympathise with a main character who doesn’t believe steam will ever supplant the sailing ship?)”
Depending how you count, Iโm about halfway through my Woody Allen retrospective. Huh.
Bullets Over Broadway โ Less dramatically ambitious than the last one but an unqualified success. A period piece in which John Cusack is a young Jazz-Age playwright who compromises his principles when a mob boss agrees to produce his play if he finds a role for his moll, the abrasive and demanding Olive (Jennifer Tilly). Dianne Wiest is the fading star who takes the lead role, and โ90โs It Guy Chazz Palminteri is Oliveโs bodyguard who, it turns out, has a better ear for story and dialogue than the writer.
This was publicized as the movie where the gangster takes over as playwright, but in fact that really develops only halfway through the film. The first half is mostly gags, in particular with Cusack caught between the demanding Tilly and the larger than life Wiest. Wiest, who won her second Oscar for this picture, is a riot every second sheโs on screen. Iโve noted that I found her mewling hard to take in Hannah (her first Oscar), but sheโs so big here every second that it comes around the other side and is just funny. Meanwhile Tilly does some of her best work as the hateful Olive, abandoning the seductive purring she puts on in most roles for a voice like sandpaper and an attitude to match. (But she has a few moments where you see just how insecure she is โ Olive knows god didnโt give her talent, so she has to use what he did give her instead.)
But even as this is Allenโs purest comedy in 20 years, it doesnโt completely abandon a dramatic sense. While the mob hits arenโt gory, they donโt shy away from the violence, either, with innocent bystanders and even, by the end, some characters we know and have come to care about getting it in a way that is sometimes shocking given the rest of the workโs light tone. And when the violence ultimately encroaches on the play, Cusackโs corrupted idealist draws a line and will go no further. (Cusack is never going to be my favorite actor, but heโs much better here, conflicted and flailing, than as the cocky student of Shadows and Fog.)
They canโt all be Husbands and Wives, but this is a heck of a good time. (And Allen will stay in this primarily comic mode for another couple works.)
It’s such a fun movie. Cusack in over his head is the best Cusack.
Taskmaster, โDomestic bumfluff.โ
โAnd thatโs what you get for wanting limelight. The lime is bitter but the light is bright. โฆ Safe.โ
โThat is the first time this series that my testicles have gone fully inside my body.โ
โIโve never met a man, until actually sitting opposite you, Greg, that emanates such raw sexuality as Tom Jones.โ
โOh, twelve people love it.โ
โCould you type a little faster? โฆ Speak faster.โ
โI find it fascinating that Alex told you that hair wasnโt lint and then you just carried on pulling your hair out. Like a character from One Flew Over the Cuckooโs Nest.โ
โI donโt know that Iโm fucked. Iโm certainly surprised by your wolf noise.โ
โIs it inappropriate to ask for your belly buttons?โ
โLint. Thatโs โฆ whatโs lint? Itโs not a mint. Itโs fluff, isnโt it? Itโs not mint. Itโs not a drink. Thatโs Lilt. Iโve suddenly now just lost the ability to work out language.โ
โIโm the arsehole brother-in-law whoโs doing coke in the toilet.โ
โOkay, well, it is the โco-hostโ of Taskmaster here telling youโโ
โYes, I did notice that, and I was irritated. Heโs my assistant. Carry on.โ
โRight, Iโm on my way to a recorder conference. The only rule isโtwo rulesโbring a recorder and donโt have any paint on you.โ
โSpeaking plainly, you have been consistently awful in this show. But that, my friend, was a goddamn work of art.โ
โTurns out narrative is fucking stupid.โ
โItโs a near miss in that it nearly missed my penis.โ
โIt was Hollywood, Hollywood, Hollywood, oh, heโs taken a balloon in the dick.โ
โMe and Joel kept going, โAhhh, weโre gonna be in a film with Kumail! Letโs put this on our CV!โโโจโYeah, I wouldnโt.โ
โIf youโre giving us all five points, youโve done nothing. You might as well give us zero points.โ
โIโm giving everyone five points apart from Kumail, who Iโm giving zero points.โ
โOkay, can you give us five points again so I can have a more TV-friendly reaction?โ
โWeโre all Joel Dommett!โ
And victory to Joanna, complete with one final heroic pose!
Pinky and the Brain — introduced to the nephews, who seemed good with it although not overwhelmed. I did have to explain Raymond Burr in the Godzilla episode, so much for my prior argument about taking things as they come, although to be fair it was an honest question for them to ask. The minor Hunt For Red October parody in another episode folded into the plot more completely, I hope it’s one of those moments of recognition for them down the road.
Mystery Train — a movie about transition that is also a movie to live in. In what is currently the Decision Of The Year, we escaped the third-floor walkup with no air conditioning for the safety of the arthouse theater, which was screening this on 35mm, all the better to see the absolute GOAT Robby Muller capturing cracked sidewalks and walls, harsh sun fading into twilight, dim bars with fluorescent and neon, the night over a railroad bridge. Jarmusch constructs everything so well here, the opening segment is slower than the subsequent ones and sets a rhythm of expectation to be tweaked later on, I forgot how fantastic Nicoletta Braschi is in the second segment, rolling with things when she can but not being passive (Tom Noonan is used perfectly as opposition in this regard) even as she experiences something she can’t understand. The final segment is one of the great “dudes rock” bad nights in cinema because these dudes do not rock, yet they are out here fucking around and fucking up and absolutely owning a dude in a way that anticipates Dead Man, Jarmusch’s deadpan violence had me guffawing like Robert DeNiro in Cape Fear. There are connections made and missed, Masatoshi Nagase and Youki Kudoh share a lot but still have moments apart, and that is OK. Everyone here is an outside of some kind, they come to Memphis and leave (if only to a bootleg doctor in Arkansas in the case of our boys). They check in and they check out, as Pere Ubu’s David Thomas would say. The train rolls on and Memphis — with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Cinque Lee, a wonderful team behind the hotel desk — is still there.
Barton Fink – The most literary of movies dealing with writerโs block and packed with references to fictional works and real-life writers. I am no writer and may not be a well-read man but I picked up many of the Chandler references, the Faulkner analog, I know what โKafkaesqueโ means, Ask The Dust sits on a shelf, unread. So, this is cerebral and full of โthe life of the mindโ. But what I latch on to when I watch this, more than the plot of trying to write a wrestling picture, is the atmosphere – stifling, dream-like, anxiety filled and full of symbolism. When the Overlook is booked the ghosts go to The Hotel Earle.
The Book Graveyard had a great interview with Paul Giamatti. Heโs a total genre nerd, well read in pulpy trash, sf, horror, mystery and crime fiction.
The Coens love genre but have largely stayed away from two of the biggest ones, sci-fi and horror. Sci-fi will make appearances elsewhere but Fink is really their one full-on stab at a horror movie, like all Coen flicks it is in conversation with its counterparts — in particular fellow showbiz tales Inside Llewyn Davis and Hail Caesar! — but that atmosphere you describe is unique.
I have been slooowly working my way through the Chinese animated adaptation of Mรณdร o Zวshฤซ/Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation/MDZS/Founder of Diabolism (there are a lot of translations). Because I am too cheap for Crunchyroll and too lazy to torrent, this involves watching sketchy translations on YouTube.
All this is to say that I in general would not recommend watching this particular translation and am still on the fence with the series, but there are some things you just can do better in animation than anywhere else. The live-action adaptation wasn’t able to let the zombies in this be zombies for censorship reasons, but even then this sequence would just never look as good, IMO:
https://youtu.be/5atlnoySMuo?si=KrSpe8s99jD58NO9&t=1219
(it’s cued up, the whole thing is less than three minutes long. brief context: there’s a war on, the guy in purple and the guy in blue and white about to be killed are allies in a war against the people in red and white. readers of the book will know what’s going on with the flute player but no one onscreen has any idea what’s going on)
What did we read?
8 Bit Theater, Strips 1140-1170, Brian Clevinger
โItโs not a plan anyone will like.โ
โNothing you have said or done has ever been anything anyone will like.โ
โI knew that would happen, but Iโm mad about it anyway.โ
โIt will require teamwork.โ
โWe can do that. In theory.โ
โWeโve seen teamwork, anyway.โ
โWell, Iโve heard of it. Not sure I understand the appeal.โ
โWe need to use your heart.โ
โSo do I! It moves my blood around.โ
โNot if we kill you!โ
โThatโs distressingly logical.โ
โAnd now that Iโve described the plan in full, nothing could possibly go wrong.โ
โI am of an open mind and am willing to listen to criticism. Also, thatโs stupid and youโre stupid.โ
โSo, you want us to build a thing thatโs the size of everything using nothing.โ
โYes.โ
โTwice.โ
โYes.โ
Thereโs a part where the Dark Warriors have the Orbs and Sarda has them cornered. When he asks if they even know how to use the orbs, Bikke hocks his at Sarda, catching him offguard and leading to this line: โYouโre a quick thinker and spiteful. I can respect that. You wonโt be killed, Bikke.โ This also leads to Sarda recognising how out of their depth the Dark Warriors are, taking pity on them, and letting them run away.
โFine. If youโre gonna be a bunch of team-killing babies about it, Iโll stick to the plan.โ
โWhy do we even have physics?โ
โI suddenly favour the first, much more stupid interpretation.โ
AS noted last time, I found a surprisingly obscure late Westlake novel, The Scared Stiff. Even as I had started reading Le Carre’s The Tailor of Panama, The former is a lightweight crime novel set in a fictional South American nation. The latter is not lightweight (though inspired by Graham Greene’s “entertainment” Our Man in Havana) and obviously in a real place. And while Westlake did not set out to write a searing analysis of American and British interference in the Third World, his fictional nation really looks cartoonish and maybe a bit racist. Not something I like saying about a favorite author, and I don’t think he was racist, but I can’t say he was particularly great with depicting the Other, and his works set in Latin America tend towards exoticization more that I am comfortable with.
Anyway, The Scared Stiff is fun to a degree, and has some interesting twists as our protagonist tries to make his plan succeed, but it’s a quick and fairly forgettable read. Apparently Westlake chose to publish it in the US under a pseudonym, and I would not be surprised if 2003 Westlake, coming off The Ax and The Hook, wasn’t sure this book would please fans of those darker works. I can’t entirely recommend it, but I figure most hardcore Westlake fans are completists, and hey, at least it’s not Memory.
Not far into The Tailor of Panama yet. It’s good so far but not compelling.
Aw, Memory may be messy but it’s messy within Westlake’s wheelhouse of identity struggle and midcentury American life — the first section in particular where our guy gets trapped in low-wage work is harrowing stuff. Westlake’s Latin America stuff definitely feels like he’s skating the surface, this isn’t that big a deal in the Grofields because those are Bond-ish surface pleasures anyway (although it is part of what limits them too) but I can see it being a bigger problem with more emphasis and less Kahawa focus/research.
Deep into the second of the Art Keller/Adan Barrera novels, The Cartel, which just got to a dramatic second act twist of utter, vicious ownage I would not dream of spoiling. Winslow is smart to stick with third person perspective, keeping you inside every character’s perspective, whether a DEA agent or a literal child soldier. There are obvious flaws in his writing, especially the odd tendency towards sentiment, and nevertheless I am compelled to read on. (That and he opens every chapter with a quote either from a song, usually with the title in the quote, or the most pretentious source possible – Paradise Lost, the Bible, Homer, etc. Don’t imply what you’re doing is up there, Don!)
Tried to get through this newer horror novel Edenville and goddamn do I think centering horror on a squabbling couple in a toxic relationship is uninteresting. Same thing with Midsommar. Ended up not finishing it; I think there’s something to how a toxic relationship without escalating stakes is more petty and annoying than inherently dramatic. You aren’t waiting to see what happens next – you want them to break up, the simplest move, and you’re waiting for THAT instead, which means you’re wasting your time.
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin – the Guardian recently did a big “best novels ever” list based on top ten polls from various writers, and looking through it I realised I’d only read four or five. Figured I’d use it as a push to catch up on some classics, and this seemed a good way in because I already owned a copy and thoroughly enjoyed the other three LeGuin novels I’d previously read. Not sure why this one lingered on the shelf for so long, really. Anyway, it’s excellent – this kind of “learn a whole new world and language” sci-fi generally doesn’t appeal to me as much as the “here’s our familiar world, but with a few new twists” variety but LeGuin does it so well, and the characters really hooked me in. This chilly world would drive me away in days though, when I sign up for this job please send me somewhere warm.
Gonna see how much more of the list I can catch up on entirely from cheap second-hand copies, because I like a fun search. Also this copy had been annotated by a previous owner and I love that.
I should probably get around to this one sooner or later. I’ve read just one LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven, and it’s very good.
I’d put this one and The Dispossessed on a similar “very good” level to Lathe of Heaven. I didn’t like The Word for World is Forest quite as much although it’s still pretty fascinating. Maybe I’ll try one of her fantasy novels at some point.
I’m long overdue for a reread of this — chilly is right, the world and the style are colder than Le Guin usually is but that is by design. The Earthsea novels are very much worth your time, excellent fantasy (and the first three are fairly short without being remotely shallow); I will always plug her later novel Lavina, the Aeneid told from the perspective of the woman whose land is conquered. It is not so much revisionist as exploratory, “here’s a familiar story but with a few new twists” done with a total immersion into a lost perspective and beautiful language.
Untouchable, by Mulk Raj Anand
I recently got a weird crash course in Hindutva, a nationalist and fascistic Indian movement, and since it is, among other things, very supportive of the traditional caste system, this seemed like a good time to finally pick up this 1935 novel.
Itโs the day in the life of a young outcaste street sweeper and toilet cleaner, Bakha, whose cheerful attitude is thoroughly tested by the routine indignities, humiliations, and disregards of his day. (His pretty sister has it even worse, for reasons you can probably imagine.) This is a political novel, and itโs fairly successful on both fronts: Bakha is a distinct literary character with his own quirks and sense of humor, but heโs also representative enough for this to work as an indignant rallying call to action (Gandhi turns up at the end to give a speech, even if what Bakha takes from it is specific to his own situationโand almost science fictional in terms of its hopeful anticipation of how coming technology could change things). Anand balances the misfortunes of the familyโs day well, too, making sure they feel routineโinevitable, even, in any system this unjustโrather than exceptional. He even notes that exceptions exist: Bakha encounters upper-caste people who are casually kind to him. Their offhanded decency doesnโt change the system theyโre all in, though.
Thereโs a lot I didnโt know about the caste system before this, especially in this era: for example, the sweepers here canโt draw their own water from the well because itโs believed theyโll contaminate it, so they have to wait, sometimes for hours, for an upper-caste person to 1) arrive, 2) have time to draw and pour for them, and 3) be kind enough to do that. As Anand notes, you donโt always get all three factors.
Backflash, by Richard Stark
Heโs on a boat, motherfucker!
This rules, from the central heistโthe detailed, fully realized knocking-over of a riverboat casinoโto the background color like marijuana grown in bags of peat moss suspended over the water to the characterization to the complications. The introduction I have says that Parker seems softer in this last set of volumes, but heโs still steely enough to open the novel considering killing a wounded partner who could potentially talk to the police. He ultimately doesnโt, but he explicitly regrets it by the end of the bookโand when someone heโs with offers an even riskier kind of mercy to a fallen partner/foe, Parker doubles back and cancels it out, so to speak. Thereโs still plenty of grit here.
My favorite supporting character here is the returning Noelle, who gets a more active part and independent to play in the proceedings this time around. (Sheโs split up with Tommy, and though Iโm bummed to hear heโs out of the game, itโs cool to see her working solo.) Her performance as a fragile, disabled debutante is such an excellent grace noteโI love them using the wheelchair to smuggle the money off the boatโand the way her presence provides both an unexpected solution (the reporter talks to Carlow, her โassistant,โ about his heist-ruining realization because heโs been infatuated enough with her to view them as potential allies) and a little wrinkle of a complication (her dehydration is a really clever problem to throw in).
The finger also has a clever and unusual role here, as he has delusions of grandeur in setting up the heistโand informing on itโto prove his moral point about casinos. This is not the kind of thing itโs easy for Parker to wrap his mind around, and itโs cool to watch him turn this guy over in his head for the whole novel until he finally gets closure on his exact motivations. Claire even does research to provide additional insight!
โWe live and we learn, Ray.โ
โThe Pram,โ by Joe Hill
After suffering a miscarriage, a still-grieving couple move to rural Maine. Never do this, and if you do, donโt let a friendly local shop owner convince you that you should cart your groceries home in an ancient, rotting pram.
This is a strong, atmospheric horror story with both a realistic emotional core and a nice commitment to alternating eeriness (a โfunnelโ of trees with an unsettling history) with visceral and bloody scares. Its only fault is going on three pages too long: it reaches both a dramatic, character-based resolution and one hell of a punchline, but then it goes on for one more section with some exposition I donโt need and a weaker punchline. Still, Hillโs short fiction tends to kick ass, and this is no exception.
“The introduction I have says that Parker seems softer in this last set of volumes, but heโs still steely enough to open the novel considering killing a wounded partner who could potentially talk to the police. He ultimately doesnโt, but he explicitly regrets it by the end of the bookโand when someone heโs with offers an even riskier kind of mercy to a fallen partner/foe, Parker doubles back and cancels it out, so to speak. Thereโs still plenty of grit here.”
Fuck yes. Parker coming back to finish off that later problem after making that error (which really does not seem to be one in the early going — barring the specific person coming along I think the decision is a rational one, but that doesn’t matter now does it?) is brutal shit. But it’s what needs to be done. The main softening here is Stark throwing all of these poor Plunder Squad guys a bone, it’s nice that Noelle and co. get a good score after the frustrations of that book and in general it’s a lot of fun to see them again — Noelle herself rules, her disgust with the reporter is great, and Lou Sternberg skirts Westlake territory but is magnificent in his role. This is the strongest argument for the book as 80s-set, I think you can barely get away with that kind of impersonation back then but not in the 90s with more images in play.
Exactly! The opening decision is rational enough that I think heโd still make it if it were someone he knew better, but he has to take a little bit on (relative) faith here, and he clearly decides to not risk extending that again.
Iโm convinced by the โ80s argument. The impersonation angle is fun, but even a few years later, the casino would be checking up on all this much more thoroughly and have a lot more pictures to look at, as you said. Here, they can still, with a helpful โpost office errorโ cutting down their time, be swayed by generalities and a letter that sounds a hell of a lot like this guyโs speeches, but that windowโs already closing. (Reading Flashfire today, and cool alter egos are being taken down by routine credit checks! The world has lost all romance.)
I can never remember which book it’s in, but there is a clear reference to the concept of “blood simple” in Parker’s observation that when killing becomes your general solution to problems, it soon becomes the only solution to them. Not to say never kill someone to solve a problem, let’s be real here, but it shouldn’t be the go-to. Letting the guy at the beginning live is a solid solution! Firebreak will have more on the whole “how do you handle some of the crew being caught and some not,” and I think there is a grimly funny undercurrent in the series of Parker not quite consciously calculating how many times he’s the only person left alive at the end of a score — after a while, that becomes a pretty damn suspicious trait in a potential co-worker.
Backflash was my first Parker, when I learned that Westlake has that pen name and before the earlier works were finally reprinted. I liked it enough to keep going, but only remember the anti-gambling crusader (who I think I would be more sympathetic with in the age of legal gambling everywhere).
Backflash rules, the trophy husband having an affair is a nice little snapshot of a whole life that Stark is very good at.
Maigret and the Wine Merchant – First Maigret Iโve read. The violent death of a wealthy merchant reveals a background of pettiness, oppression, and decadence. The plot is really a vehicle for Simenon to poke a hole in bourgeois normality – Seemingly respectable characters leading double lives without the slightest recognition of their own dubious and immoral behavior. Simenonโs spare and economical prose without much description sucked me in almost reading this in one sitting. No wonder he pumped near a hundred of these out and no wonder it seems like everyone has read them all. Despite this Simenon manages to deliver masterfully crafted characters; extremely human, full of weaknesses, passions, flaws, and vices. Maigret reads the characters himself working more on empathy and psychology rather than deduction of clues to solve the crime.
Thinking about this and I never read The Westing Game, but Holes felt like a book that didn’t lie to me. Adults are often foolish and greedy, the past weighs on you, punishment does not make you an inherently better person (most movies and books about prison are not so blunt about the stupidity and futility of incarceration), and you sometimes reap what you sow (“Now you tell me, who did God really punish?”)
Both Holes and The Westing Game were favorites of mine as a kid, and yeah, this is a huge part of the appeal of the former. I donโt know that I specifically thought about The Westing Gameโs honesty at the time, but it has a lot more nuance (sympathetically and unhappily) to its characterization than most books I was running into at the time while also still having some of the Holes-like satisfaction of seeing a complex, detailed picture come together into a different kind of image. Both A+ Magic Eye books in that way.
The Westing Game does a great job adding nuance to everyone throughout and being honest about their disappointments, and after the extremely rousing mystery resolution there are two epilogues where we see how the characters have moved on. Everyone is in a better place than they were before but that does not “heal” things — people stay divorced, some relationships are broken off, some dreams are never realized. Solving the mystery doesn’t solve everything, Raskin says, and not everything is there to be solved.
This exactly. I still reread it from time to time, and it holds up just fine for exactly those reasons.
It’s a very mature-feeling book, despite being for kids, due to that, I think.
Raskin’s The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) was one of my favorites growing up, but somehow I only read The Westing Game as an adult.
Holes is a great call in that regard, I read that as an adult and really liked it both structurally and for that lack of bullshit.
I think you’d like The Westing Game a lot. It’s breezy but still takes things seriously.
Year of the Month update!
This June, you can write up any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1958.
Jun. 5th: Gillian Nelson: Paul Bunyan
Jun. 12th: Gillian Nelson: Grand Canyon
Jun. 14th: Tristan Nankervis: Vertigo
Jun. 19th: Gillian Nelson: Elfego Banca
Jun. 23rd: Bridgett Taylor: Basil of Baker Street
Jun. 25th: John Bruni: Mon Oncle
Jun. 26th: Gillian Nelson: Disneyland Gay Days
Jun. 28th: Tristan Nankervis: Touch of Evil
And in July, we’re opening up submissions for your writing on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1979.
Jul. 3rd: Bridgett Taylor: Apocalypse Now
Jul. 14th: Lauren James: Flowers in the Attic
Jul. 28th: John Bruni: All That Jazz
Jul. 29th: Lauren James: Ghost Story
I’ll do All That Jazz for July 28th