Tomes: The Age Of Innocence

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A scathing attack on the hypocrisy and insularity of upper-crust New York Society in the late 19th Century and it's collective effort to thwart a romance between the married Newland Archer and disgraced Countess Ellen Olenska, The Age Of Innocence is not only one of the most entertaining reads you'd get out of a tome slapped with the twin labels of "Masterpiece" and "Pulitzer Prize Winner", it's a testimony to Wharton's consummate skill and narrative control as a novelist that she not only manages to have you race through the pages for a conclusion that's really quite foregone, but effortlessly tells this tale not through the eyes of a woman, as would have been naturally expected, but filters it convincingly through her troubled and introspective male protagonist.

Sped through this in less than 2 days. Sharp,witty, observant and of course, wonderfully romantic in the best tradition of Austen, The Age Of Innocence is a winner, for this reader at least.

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Flicks: Che

Steeped in authentic, gritty realism, Steven Soderbergh's biopic of revolutionary and guerrilla fighter Ernesto "Che" Guevara, filmed in 2 parts, is definitely NOT a lazy Sunday view.

Both Che Parts 1 & 2 demand your undivided attention, with it's docu-drama approach and sombre pacing.

Top marks for a commanding performance by Benicio Del Toro in the titular role, an authentic recreation of teeming jungle locales and shanty towns dotted around it's fringes and Soderbergh's largely unknown cast who bring the harsh drudgery, sickness prone and violence infested life of an impoverished resistance movement to splendid life.

Deduct those same marks for an almost hagiographical rendering of a T-Shirt adorning icon.

There's virtually nothing here for for those seeking events, experiences or even catalysts shaping and defining Che's transformation from ordinary man to extraordinary revolutionary in his zealous embracing of La Causa.

What drives this man, who after a victorious Cuban Revolution, that saw him fight alongside Fidel Castro to depose the ruling regime of Fulgencio Batista and chronicled in Part 1, to then chuck all vestiges of an ostensibly privileged existence in Havana to head south to Bolivia to relive another Hell-ish tour of Jungle Duty in resurrecting yet another Dictator Deposing Cause, depicted in Part 2?

As the movie is adapted from Che's own diaries, the glossing over of less savoury aspects of the man (presiding over numerous executions during his stint in Cuba. for one) is understandable. But this viewer still wanted a little more Man and a little less Icon.

You get Che the Firebrand castigating American Imperialism and it's supporters during a UN Assembly, Che the Leader dispensing discipline and justice, Che the Healer dispensing medication and Che the Writer and Thinker to his group of backwoods soldiers, but what you don't get, frustratingly so, is inside the man's head.

The pace, already leisurely in the first part, gets positively lugubrious in the second, with interminable scenes of the Communist guerrillas in the jungle talking, making camp, hiding and running wit the odd burst of excitement provided by the odd burst of gunfire during the rebels' numerous skirmishes with the ruling military forces.

Given the effectiveness of a cast of relative unknowns in 2 movies with dialogues almost entirely in Spanish, Soderbergh's choice of throwing the odd Famous Face or 2 is perplexing, to say the least. Oh look! There's Franka Potente, a Miss If You Blink Matt Damon (providing more fodder for trivia lovers to say that's 2 leads of The Bourne franchise re-united in this movie) and Lou "Where the hell's he been " Diamond Phillips.

When Che finally fulfills his destiny as a martyr to The Cause, you're left hardly knowing anything about a character you spent than 4 hours of screen time with.

Che the film is always intriguing, occasionally arresting but isn't consistently engaging enough to warrant this epic treatment

KayKay's recommendation: Only for die hard fans of the Argentine revolutionary (with lots of leisure time)

Tomes: American Tabloid

American Tabloid by James Ellroy


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I read American Tabloid years ago as a student in Australia. I re-read it recently, largely to re-familiarize myself with the sleazy, murky world of Ellroy's USA Underworld Trilogy, before I tackle his just published 3rd and final installment Blood's A Rover.

Long time readers of Ellroy's books will quickly find out that the USA Underworld books are merely the author painting his hellish world view on a wider canvas; American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand are basically the crime and grime of his magnificent LA Quartet(The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere,LA Confidential and White Jazz) extrapolated to Nation Wide scale.

As Ellroy states in his biting Foreward:"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets".

Tabloid sets out to prove Ellroy's maxim that President John F Kennedy "got whacked at the optimum moment assure his saintlihood" and seeks to "dislodge his urn and cast light on a few men who attended his ascent and facilitated his fall".

"They were rogue cops and shakedown artists. They were wire-tappers and soldiers of fortune and faggot lounge entertainers."

Tabloid is Ellroy's revision of American History, and like LA Confidential, predicated on a 3 Man character arc: Thuggish and violent Pete Bondurant, Handsome, opportunistic and money-loving Kemper Boyd and the conflicted, guilt-wracked Ward Littell.

To even try to encapsulate American Tabloid's labyrinthine plot within the confines of a review is foolhardy; storylines intersect, interests collide, combustible partnerships are formed and then brutally sundered.

Shakedown artist, pimp and strong arm man Bondurant supplies dope to an increasingly bizarre Howard Hughes while facilitating hits for Teamster Union boss Jimmy Hoffa, who is under investigation, along with the Mafia he's neck deep in collussion with by a crusading Robert Kennedy, whose McClellan Committee is infiltrated by Kemper Boyd on orders from a Machievellian J. Edgar Hoover convinced the committee's very existence is a slap in the face of the FBI.

Littell, worshipping Bobby Kennedy and his crusade, clandestinely hunts for the Mob's Achilles Heel: a set of Union Pension Fund books detailing illicit transactions of monies to finance numerous Mob-sanctioned enterprises with usurious interest rates charged to lenders, a fund liberally skimmed by Teamster Boss Hoffa for his own underhanded dealings.

Ellroy's clipped,staccato, rapid-fire, slang-coated and hugely profane prose and various epistolary devices (transcripts of phone conversations/memos/Newspaper articles)turbo charges a narrative that sees Bondurant and Boyd get co-opted then consumed by the CIA-Mob funded recruitment and training of a cadre of anti-Castro Cubans for the launch of the disastrous Bay Of Pigs invasion, chronicles the fall and then remarkable ascent of Littell as the Mob's and Howard Hughes' top lawyer even while it hurtles towards the inevitable downfall of Hoover's pet Agent and Kennedy Lover Kemper Boyd.

At the centre of this convoluted spider web of a narrative sits King Tarantula Hoover, the Underworld Trilogy's Primary Villain,as deliciously evil a creation as Ellroy's other Dastardly Wicked Character, rogue cop Dudley Smith in the LA Quartet along with the ubiquitous presence of the Mob/Outfit/La Cosa Nostra and it's Chief Heads Sam "Mo" "Momo" Giancana, Johnny Rosselli, Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante.

Tabloid isn't for those whose idea of a fun read isn't spending 500-odd pages with a uniformly unpleasant set of characters and aren't prepared for some of the most unflattering potrayals of certain historic personages in American History (Hoover-Cunningly Manipulative, Jack Kennedy-Sexually Voracious, Robert Kennedy-Obsessively Driven, Jimmy Hoffa-Foam At The Mouth Sociopathic, Howard Hughes-Reclusive and Germ-Phobic)not to mention oodles of blood-curdling violence, which in patented Ellroy style, is pornographic bordering on the surreal : "Sal burned a man to death with a blowtorch. The man's wife came home unexpectedly. Sal shoved a gasoline-soaked rag in her mouth and ignited it. He said she died shooting flames like a dragon."

My second read of Tabloid was as feverish as the first. Ellroy creates an American hell-hole of deception, violence, back-stabbing, political chicanery and racism that functions like a morphine shot to the veins. I was on a Sleaze high for a week and having turned the last page, am starting to experience withdrawal symptoms. Which is probably why I'm reaching for The Cold Six Thousand directly after writing this.

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The Punisher(s)

It's a colossal shame that 3 re-boots of The Punisher couldn't launch a sustainable franchise which effectively lumped it in the Failed Comic Book-To-Screen adaptations of Marvel superheroes. It rankles me no end that this means all 3 adaptations now join the mediocre Daredevil and the truly awful Elektra in the failed pantheon of Marvel characters who couldn't make the successful transition to the screen. More's the pity as each successive iteration of the skull-insignia sporting vigilante killer improved on it's predecessor with the 3rd movie finally striking the right balance between comic-book violence and showcasing the utter ruthlessness of one of Marvel's darkest anti-heroes.



Raiding my DVD archives to re-visit all 3 screen outings of the uber vigilante recently, I saw 3 occassionally cheesy, frequently dumb but constantly entertaining actioners that's perfect lazy Sunday viewing, if your idea of lazy Sunday viewing is bullet-riddled corpses, multiple stabbings and large scale destruction achieved through the expenditure of enough military arsenal to launch a foreign coup.



The Punisher (1989)



When cop Frank Castle's wife and children are killed by mobster Dino Morreti, he becomes a driven vigilante meting out righteous justice known as The Punisher. When Yakuza boss Lady Tanaka begins a gang war for control with the Italian mob by kidnapping the children of the Heads of Families, the cunning Gianni Franco enlists Castle's help in rescuing the kids, his son being one of them.

The fact that The Punisher's 1st screen avatar starred Dolph Lundgren (Sweden's premier wood export after Ikea) as the titular avenger doomed it to the DVD dungeons of C-Grade actioners from the get go. Director Mark Goldblatt (ace editor behind The Terminator, Terminator 2, Commando and Starship Troopers) working from a script by Boaz Yakin (the only shocker is that this is the same Boaz Yakin who would go on to helm the engrossing indie Urban drama Fresh), firmly anchors the film in it's B-Movie roots and taken as such, The Punisher is almost as much cheesy fun as Lundgren's other Yakuza-themed actioner, Showdown In Little Tokyo stopping just short of the latter's gleefully racist Asian caricatures, although Kim Miyori's scary Lady Tanaka skirts pretty close to the exotic Dragon lady archetype. Small points are scored by director Goldblatt for having the knife-wielding and butt-kicking female not be an Asian but blonde European Zoshka Mizak (wisely given no speaking lines) as is the casting of the reliable Jeroen Krabbe as the slimy Franco. What Lou Gossett Jr's doing here is anybody's guess (but the fact that he followed an Oscar winning turn in An Officer And A Gentleman with the Iron Eagle movies is a potent clue that canny role selection isn't one of his notable talents).

His Jake Berkowitz, Castle's former partner and pretty much the only one who believes he's alive after the car bomb that wiped out his family is supposed to provide some sort of moral anchor for Castle's revenge-fueled rampage, but anytime he and insipid blonde partner Nancy Everhard are on screen is dead space. It's the action you come for and Goldblatt stages them with enough efficiency to stifle yawns with Castle and Franco's climactic siege of Tanaka's stronghold providing some snappy martial arts ass-kickery (Lundgren's own Karate expertise comes in handy).

Lundgren has the height and bulk to inhabit the leather jacket-wearing, Harley driving and sewer dwelling Castle but lacks suitable menace to fully realise the punishment- meting vigilante. And the skull T-Shirt is conspicuously absent.

Exit Dolph Lundgren, enter Thomas Jane...

The Punisher (2004)

When ex-Special Forces, Ex-FBI agent Frank Castle's wife, son and pretty much his entire family is wiped out by vengeful mobster Howard Saint, he swears revenge on the Saint family and in the process becomes the one man vigilante The Punisher.

Director and co-scripter Jonathan Hensleigh valiantly tried uprooting The Punisher from it's previous B-movie roots by injecting some drama and emotion into Castle's metamorphosis from loving family man to vengeful enforcer of justice and hiring an actor like Thomas Jane as opposed to an action star to essay the role of the titular avenger. It's a hit and miss affair. The Origins approach fleshes out Castle's character arc but also waits until the climactic shootout to showcase The Punisher in full-on take no prisoners berserker mode.

Hensleigh takes as many right steps as he does misguided ones. The roping in of John Travolta as mob boss Howard Saint and Will Patton as his gay and ruthless enforcer Quentin Glass is inspired, but having Castle enact his revenge on the Saint crime family through a series of set-ups and deceptions is not. About the only planning we want to see The Punisher doing is deciding whether to pack both the Colt M4A1 carbine and M203 40mm grenade launcher or just sticking with the Glock 17 with a Strider JW knife for some close-up wet work.

Castle's encounters with some of Saint's bizarre assassins are inspired . Gunman Harry Heck who serenades Castle with a song before trying to kill him borders on the surreal while Castle's brutal apartment-busting brawl with The Russian (Pro-Wrestler Kevin Nash) set to an operatic aria is the the type of no-holds barred mayhem this movie could have used more of rather than wasting valuable time showing Castle's interaction with a trio of outcasts living in his apartment building. They may have been ported over from the comic books but blonde Joan, pierced Dave and fat Bumpo add nothing to the narrative except more fodder for trivia fans who can say 2 of the trio (Rebecca Romijn and Ben Foster) both played mutants in X-Men 3. And while serving to showcase Glass' sadism, the wince-inducing torture of Foster's Dave borders on the repulsive.

Hensleigh attempts to give The Punisher's character some heft (Frank is racked with grief, Frank drinks, Frank contemplates suicide) when what was needed was more firepower. It's a schizophrenic film, veering wildly between lethargic drama and explosive actioner. Rarely dull, The Punisher's second screen incarnation is nevertheless a failed experiment to kick start a franchise. At least Jane wears the skull T-Shirt.

Exit Thomas Jane, enter Ray Stevenson....

Punisher: War Zone (2008)

When ex-Special Forces vet Frank Castle's wife and children are killed by mobsters, he becomes the ruthless vigilante The Punisher. In the course of meting out his own special brand of justice to gangster Billy Rusotti, he accidentally kills an undercover FBI agent. When the horribly disfigured Rusotti, now named Jigsaw and his psychotic brother Loony Bin Jim target the Agent's wife and daughter, a remorseful Castle comes to their aid.

It took ex-Karate Champion and ex-Stunt woman Lexi Alexander directing from a script by Nick Santora, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway starring that Titus dude from the Rome miniseries to finally get it right. Ray Stevenson, the least prettiest of the 3 screen Punishers nails the character with deadly precision. Stevenson plays The Punisher the only way he should be played: as a relentless killing machine.

Alexander re-anchors the series in it's B-movie roots but dials the violence way, way over the top while staging the action scenes with stylish,efficient brutality (this movie would easily qualify for the Record of maximum head shots committed to celluloid).

Starting from The Punisher's assault on crippled crime lord Cesare's mansion, Punisher:War Zone is balls to wall action top-loaded with blood, guts and gore that would repulse anyone not familiar with another Lionsgate franchise featuring a psycho named Jigsaw. But Alexander wisely balances the non-stop assaultive violence by never letting you forget the scripts comic-book sensibilities (Castle fixes his broken nose with a pencil; a free runner is blown to smithereens doing a mid-air somersault). And Dominic West (playing another asshole after 300) and Doug Hutchison (also reprising an asshole after The Green Mile) playing Jigsaw and Loony Bin respectively, pitch their performances to the north of ultra-campiness, complete with exaggerated Noo York accents. The always watchable Wayne Knight is a welcome presence as Castle's arms supplier Microchip but the movie can't avoid some throw-aways; Julie Benz as the bereaved widow (as annoyingly weepy and whiny here as she was in Rambo 4) , Colin Salmon as the dead FBI agent's former partner (valiantly attempting an American accent) and Dash Mihok's Martin Soap, a cop on the trail of The Punisher who nevertheless supplies one of the better closing lines to a movie, "Great! Now I have brains splattered all over me!"

Frenetically paced and thrillingly violent, War Zone is The Punisher movie fans were probably waiting for (with Castle's skull insignia front and centre throughout) , so it's box-office failure is especially sad given that chances of any sequels have been torpedoed as well.

Well, another re-boot is probably a couple of years away. After all, good murderous vigilantes never die, they just get resurrected.

The Shadow Of The Wind

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It comes encumbered with the baggage of being compared to "One Hundred years of Solitude" and "The Name Of The Rose", but has neither the Magic Realism of a Marquez nor Eco's frequent digressions into semiotics-influenced discourses on Middle Age politics, philosophy and theology.

What Carlos Ruiz Zafon's gives you is pure escapism. Shadow Of The Wind is pure Gothic Melodrama replete with the heated passions and heady emotions without which the genre itself becomes pretty pointless.

Set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in a Barcelona under the Franco dictatorship, Shadow tells the tale of Daniel Sempere, initiated by his book seller father into the secret Cemetary of Forgotten Books, a huge library of old, forgotten tomes lovingly looked after by old caretaker Isaac Montfort. Tradition dictates that initiates to this forgotten library adopt one book and keep it safe for life.

When Daniel quickly becomes a fan of Julian Carax, author of his chosen book (the titular Shadow Of The Wind)and discovers that a horribly disfigured man who goes by the moniker of one of the book's characters Lain Courbert, is systematically hunting down and burning every copy of Carax's novels, he is plunged into a mystery to uncover Courbert's origins while evading the attentions of the ruthlessly sadistic Inspector Fumero and navigating a passionate but potentially doomed romance with the gorgeouus sister of his best friend.

Scratch beneath it's potboiler surface and some scenes of genuine pathos appear. Shadow is ultimately a novel of unfulfilled longing and unrequited love, with Julian's tragic life at it's epicentre, his downward spiral into sadness, despair, melancholy and ultimately rage at his failed romance with the rich and beautiful Penelope Aldaya fuelling the plot and rippling outwards to envelope and affect the lives of several characters in the book in dramatic and even horrible ways.

As chief protagonist and narrator, Daniel is blandness personified while Fumero never breaks out of the Evil Incarnate sketch he's boxed in. And Zafon proves himself the flip side of Isabel Allende in his inability to write convincingly about the opposite sex. See an echo of Allende's continued potrayal of all Latin men as macho, boorish rapists in Zafon's shading of his female characters as gorgeous femme fatales and nothing more.

So breathe a sigh of sharp relief for Fermin Romero de Torres, the best realised character of the book. Daniels' best friend, his father's assistant, an ex-spy and rakish lover, Fermin's magisterial lectures on women, romance and politics provide some much needed relief from the relentless melodrama.

Spiced with steamy sex, graphic violence, a crackling mystery and passionate romances, The Shadow Of The Wind is the perfect beach/flight/lazy morning/rainy night read. A crackling read as long as you're not looking for Marquez's Magic or Eco's Echo.

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