Tag: review

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25 books reading

25 Books, Book 5 – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Book 5 - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Book 5 - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Imagine someone wrote two books. The first book was a crime thriller. One filled with twists and turns, long-held secrets uncovered, lots of characters with complicated interconnecting back stories, gruesome crimes and clever detective work leading the heroes (let’s say it’s a kind of buddy cop thing) to solve the case.

Now imagine the second book, which has the same pair of lead characters, is about financial intrigue. It’s also a thriller but it’s more cerebral, it’s about fraud and misdealing, it’s about politics and journalism and perception. It’s about manouvering information and people into the right postion to either commit, or solve, white-collar crime. It has elements of a spy novel, heist story or computer hacking cyber-punk.

Now take the two books and…  Oh I know you think you know what I’m going to say but no don’t intertwine them, simply jam them together. Chop the second book in half and stick the pieces either side of the first.

Now you’ve got something a bit like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It’s not a bad book. I definitely enjoyed it – but this structural oddity is responsible for all the things I didn’t really enjoy. Like the way it’s slow to get started. Or the fact that there’s long complicated sections of exposition very early on about the financial stuff. Or the fact that when you think you’ve just come to what must surely be the end of the crime thriller you’ve still got 100 pages to go and it switches back to the other story with corresponding drop in pace.

I think I preferred the central crime story because even though it’s not the kind of thing I usually read – too much gruesome detail – it was at least page-turningly gripping. Also it had some clever detective work. How the case is solved with the help of various old photographs and the conclusions drawn from them was genuinely fascinating and ingenious. The other story felt slow, unnecessarily complex and outstayed its welcome.

If this was a stand-alone book I’d probably avoid any more by the same author. However it’s part of a trilogy and clearly there’s an ongoing element to the two main characters relationship with stuff still to tell. I’ll be honest and say that I’m intrigued enough to want to follow that.

Because in the end the most interesting thing about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the girl with the dragon tattoo.

7/10 – enjoyable in a what’s-going-to-happen way for the central 2/3rds of the book.

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reviews

Romeo and Juliet, at The Globe

Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet

On Thursday I finally did something I’ve wanted to do since I moved down here – go see a play at The Globe in London. For those that don’t know it’s a re-construction of the 16th century theatre where Shakespeare actually wrote and acted.

I’m not sure that Romeo and Juliet would be my first choice of play to see but someone was organising a trip and I decided to join in. Besides it’s Shakespeare and I like Shakespeare.

I guess that there are two things to review here – the theatre ‘experience’ and the performance itself.

We went for the cheap tickets in the yard which was open to the elements but were lucky with the weather – I had prepared for rain so was pleasantly surprised we didn’t get any. I had braced myself for inclement weather and for standing for 3 hours, what I hadn’t prepared myself for was that for the first hour there was a plane going overhead every few minutes. It meant 10-15 seconds of struggling to hear the actors, who are not relying on their lungs and voices. I also was unfortunate to stand behind two of the tallest people there, so I was constantly shifting position as they did. The Globe website says that there’s no seat that doesn’t have a partially obscured view of at least part of the stage, but at least pillars don’t move. I think that, rather than comfort would make me want to pay for a seat next time.

The performance itself was excellent I thought. It was a very ‘straight’ version with the period costume and staging – which I’m told, despite the theatre, isn’t always the case. The leads were great, especially Adetomiwa Edun’s Romeo. Phillip Cumbus as Mercutio was good too, bringing out a side of that character I wasn’t aware of. I guess I’ve been influenced by the Baz Lurhmann film to think of Mercutio as quite a cool dude. Cumbus’ Mercutio was more comic, a bit of a windbag – but just a likeable and entertaining. Along with Fergal McElherron’s Peter he was responsible for bringing out the bawdy humour of the play. The later was also very good.

I had wondered whether the nature of the venue – both being outdoor and very close up – would lead to a problem with the audience being too noisy but that wasn’t the case. There were a few who ignored the no cameras rule and I heard at least one mobile phone on a very loud vibrate setting but generally the audience was more respectful that I’ve seen say in the cinema recently. There was a good-natured feeling of wanting to laugh that made the humour work better than it perhaps deserved at times, but when Juliet ‘died’ there was a hush in the place I hadn’t expected.

Overall it was a very enjoyable performance. It made me want to go see more Shakespeare – though perhaps indoors next time.

8/10 for the play.

6/10 for the ‘experience’

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movie reviews

The Boat That Rocked

The Boat that Rocked
The Boat that Rocked

I saw this movie with M. on my birthday so I figure I owe you a review on it. However I’m not sure how much I have to say.

OK it’s a Richard Curtis movie that’s not a romantic comedy (well not really). It’s a (very) fictionalised version of pirate radio in the 60s. It takes place on a boat in the north sea which houses a radio station. There’s a colourful collection of characters – some obviously based on real life DJs – and a plot about the authorities trying to shut it down.

It’s good fun, it rattles along pretty well and there’s plenty to laugh at. It does suffer from some of Curtis’ particular ‘sins’ i.e. a tendency to over-sentimentality, plus an entirely unrealistic moment where the guy is completely inept but the girl goes for him anyway. It also has an ending that’s both illogical and too drawn out.

But… I dunno, it’s hard not to like. Thanks to all-round good performances the  characters are so amiable, and it’s all so breezy and light that you don’t really care about that stuff. At least I didn’t.

8/10 – a fun, even if completely unmemorable, way to spend a couple of hours.

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25 books reading

25 Books, Book 4 – The Ascent of Rum Doodle

The Ascent of Rum Doodle
The Ascent of Rum Doodle

This book was given to me by my “Secret Santa” on a writing site I’m on. It’s taken me a while to get to reading it (as you can tell it being months since Christmas now). It got added to the list because it’s quite short and I felt I needed to catch-up on my target a bit. Anyhow…

The Ascent of Rum Doodle is the account of an expedition to climb the fictional Rum Doodle mountain which is slightly higher than Everest (40,000 1/2ft). It’s told by the leader of the expedition who is often blissfully unaware of what’s really going on around him.

It’s like a “Three Men and a Boat” for mountaineering. Or so believe since I haven’t read that book either.

The real test for a book like this is is it funny? It is but for me it was a bit of a one-joke idea – that the narrator has no idea just how incompetent his team really are. I read it more with a wry smile than I did actually laughing – though there was at least one laugh out loud moment toward the end.

6/10 It was a fun read but not “one of the funniest books” I’ve read. Sorry Bill.

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25 books book reading reviews

25 Books, book 3, Skellig

So having Set Aside The Crow Road what did I pick to read next? Well I was in Waterstones as I said and saw a display of books recommended by Nick Hornby. I picked up Skellig by David Almond largely because it was short. It turns out it’s another book aimed largely at kids – that makes three I’ve read since Christmas. If I had done so deliberately I’d start to worry that I’m ‘dumbing down’ my reading choices, however in each case I’ve genuinely not realised until I actually had the book that it wasn’t aimed at adults.

Anyway it’s an enjoyable and easy read – as you’d perhaps expect from something aimed at children.

The book is a fairly simple and straightforward story – there are no real surprises in the plot itself – of a boy who meets a strange and mysterious person in the crumbling garage of his new home, the eponymous ‘Skellig’. Who or more importantly what Skellig is is one of the major questions of the book.

It’s written with a child’s voice but also has a particular tone to the writing which will either strike you as lyrical or overly stylised depending on how well you’re enjoying it. I was mostly in the first camp with a few forays into the second.

I’d definitely recommend it to any adult looking for a light charming read or any child with a love of the unusual.

7/10 – a delightful little fable.

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movie reviews

Ghost Town

Ghost Town Poster
Ghost Town Poster

They seem to love Ricky Gervais in the US. Something I can’t quite understand – for the simple, arrogant reason that I personally think he’s just ok. I can’t see why many other fine British actors or comedians never get the reception he gets.

Anyway they obviously like him enough that someone thought he could star in a romantic comedy. And you know what maybe they’re right because it oh-so-nearly works. And as you may know if you’ve read this blog for a while that’s quite an acheivement for a rom-com in my opinion. The nearly-great ones are rare enough never mind the tuly great.

Gervais plays a mildy misanthropic dentist, Bertram Pincus, who dies briefly on the operating table and acquires the ability to see ghosts. This is not much fun as they all want something from him – all that unfinished business with the living – “tell my daughter I love her”, “the will’s hidden behind the…” and so on.

Chief amongst these is Greg Kinnear who is the dead husband of Téa Leoni and it’s his attempts to frustrate Leoni’s new relationship via Gervais that occupy most of the film. Naturally Gervais falls for her and thus we have a story, albeit a fairly predictable one.

Which is not to say this movie is without its charms – it looks great, it manages to find some shots of New York we’ve not seen a million times before – but let’s get to the key question: does Gervais pull it off as a romantic lead?

Well yes and no.

First the no. At the end of the day he doesn’t look like a leading man. It’s not actual looks per se it’s the way he holds himself I think. He’s too used to being the figure of fun. Also whilst I think he’s likeable and has some chemistry with Leoni, when Greg Kinnear comes on screen you realise what a great comic actor he is and what’s lacking a little with Gervais.

Also, and this is not Gervais’ fault really, there’s this thing that happens in some comedies with a forceful comic personality at the centre where the comedian steps outside of the plot and basically does his schtick – his well-known sitcom character, or even his stand-up routine – and the characters around him/her carry on as if this is nothing unusual. You see it in everything from Woody Allen to Groucho Marx and it makes for a certain kind of comedy, but I don’t think it works in a rom-com because it distances you slightly from the emotional reality of the characters.

What works is that Gervais does sadness well. Cleverly David Koepp co-writer and director, has fashioned a story in which Ricky’s character is more sad than bad. He doesn’t really hate the world he’s hiding from it because he’s been hurt. This is where Gervais’ training as a comic loser comes in, because such characters as David Brent are really tragic figures. So Gervais knows how to make us feel sorry for his dentist Pincus. It’s a short step from there to empathy and to imagine why Leoni feels something for him.

Overall it’s a brave attempt and I did enjoy it. As a movie per se it’s no better than quite good, but if you have to choose a rom-com from the last 5 years you could do an awful lot worse.

lots of ghosts
lots of ghosts

7/10 – Mildly enjoyable

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reviews TV

Dollhouse 1.01 – ‘Ghost’

Dollhouse Dollhouse is the new TV show from Joss Whedon, starring Eliza Dushku. You may not have heard much about it, you certainly haven’t from this blog because I’ve been keeping a low profile. I’ve been deliberately ignoring hype and information for two reasons:

  1. I think I’ll enjoy it more with less pre-conceptions
  2. I think I’ll be less invested in it if it gets cancelled.

However it’s Joss Whedon and it’s the first new TV from him in a long time, virtually the first new anything. So I’d lying if I said I hadn’t been looking forward to it.

Unfortunately it’s not great. I mean it’s not great, not insanely fun and re-defining what you can do with the genre, it’s merely OK. At least that’s true of episode 1 – Ghost. I hope and pray (almost truthfully) that it will get better. All three of Joss’ previous TV series had merely ok eps, Angel and Buffy at least had some not good at all ones. So I’ve been trying to convince myself that it’s ok, that it can have a mediocre start and get better. I’m having a little trouble though because all his previous shows were better than this from ep 1. Even Firefly‘s “The Train Job” which was a re-tooled, and significantly less-good, pilot from the original two-hour Serenity – even that was better.

By now you’re probably thinking I hated it. I didn’t but let me put it this way. If you’d shown me this and I didn’t know it was from Joss I would never have thought he’d been involved. It had none of his humour or flair for dialogue. It pretty much just played it straight all the way through.

Unlike some other fans/reviewers I don’t see the concept – agents or ‘actives’ are programmed with personalities/skills, hired out and then have their minds wiped on return – as inherently a problem. I can see that it could mean there’s no chance for character development, that we’re watching Eliza play a different role each week and so it’s hard to care – but someone as smart as Joss will have thought of that.

I’m more worried that take away the Joss humour and edge and what you’re left with, on the evidence of Ghost, could be a ep of pretty much any lawyer/cop procedural – albeit with a scifi twist.

I’m writing this now, over a week after I watched it because I’m about to watch ep 2, “The Target“. I’ll report back soon as to whether it got any better.

Eliza wakes up

Almost forgot the most important part – 5/10

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book reviews

Slam – Nick Hornby

So, I bet you’re thinking this is the first of my “25 Books” right? Well you’d be wrong. I read this over the Christmas period whilst at my parents. I have since finished my first 25-er (that’s sounds naff but I need some sort of shorthand) but I felt like I owe this one a review first.

Slam is about a 16-year-old skater (skate-boarder) called Sam. Sam loves skating and has read the autobiography of his hero Tony Hawk hundreds of times. So much so that when he needs to confide in someone or ask for advice he talks to a poster of Tony who “talks” back in quotations from the book. Sam’s life is turned upside down when he meets Alicia, a short-lived girlfriend who becomes the subject of a (hopefully) lifelong relationship. She becomes the mother of his child.

I liked this book. Mostly. For a start it was very readable. I find Hornby so anyway but here, where he’s trying to emulate the voice of a 16-year-old, it was even more so. No surprise then that I finished it in only a few hours over a couple of days. Although that may have had something to do with trying to escape watching soaps and gameshows with my parents.

If there was anything I didn’t like about the book it wasn’t the fault of the writing per se, it was the subject matter. As a mumble-something-year-old man who’s still single, probably would like not to be but who’s always ben iffy about having kids, it pushes lots of buttons for me. It caught me off guard as the back cover doesn’t mention pregnancy and I hadn’t read any reviews – I bought it because it was the latest Hornby. Anyway this is a book review not a discussion of my issues.

Had I read any reviews (which I did immediately after) I’d have seen that it’s viewed as a book for “young adults” simply because the main character is that age and it’s told from his pov. I’m not sure how I feel about this. Isn’t the point of reading (and perhaps writing) to see the world through another pair of eyes? In any case I’d recommend it to anyone who likes Hornby’s brand of gentle observational comedy. I say gentle because it’s nowhere near as sharp as “High Fidelity” was, but then that’s my favourite of his and I don’t think anything since has been as good.

What lets the book down slightly for me is that it tries to sort of have its cake and eat. It wants to have something approaching gritty realism but it wants to wrap it in a softer, gentler and above all optimistic view of human nature. So it shows us that teenage pregnancy is a life-altering, if not life-wrecking event (a “slam” in skating is when you fall and hit the ground hard) and that it makes things tough at an age when you’re not necessarily equipped to deal. However it pulls out an ending, which while it doesn’t negate any of that, allows the reader some relief from thinking, “this is just going to be hard grind of juggling school, work and baby-care”. To do this Hornby uses a device on top of the Tony Hawks device, something which up until that point I could have happily lost. When the ending occurred I could suddenly see why he’d done it. It felt a little like a cheat, slightly unearned. However it was a genuine relief to have some sense of ongoing happiness for these characters.

Apologies for being a little vague. For once I don’t want to give away the ending.

7/10 – for the humour, the readability and the main character.

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book reviews

Chesil Beach (far away in time)

On Chesil Beach is the latest book by Ian McEwan and I read it recently. Now I know what you’re thinking, why on earth do you trust him after Atonement? Why spend your hardly-earned cash on one of his books. Well in my defence it was a 3-for-2 deal, plus I had heard good things about it. Anyway bought it I did and read it too. And you know what? it’s good.

But it’s not completely – how shall we say? – unproblematic. It has at its centre an idea, a pivot to the story, not quite a plot twist but certainly a, erm, plot kink, that is inherently frustrating. I don’t want to give too much away but it has a somewhat downbeat ending. The structure of the book also lends itself to a certain disappointing dilemma. The heart of the book is about sex. The central event in the book is the wedding night of a couple in the 1960s. We meet them first on this night as they enjoy their dinner together and look forward (or not – he’s eager, she’s fearful) to the consummation of their relationship. Then, in various flashbacks we get the story of their lives and their meeting, everything leading up to this point in fact.

Now as I said about Atonement McEwan writes about sex well. It feels real and therefore carries a certain erotic charge. Plus the building anticipation of how that key moment will play out creates a drive to know what will happen. So unfortunately, the rather well written passages about their earlier lives, which are actually most of the book, feel at times like a distraction from what I really want to know.

Maybe I’m just shallow.

Still, even with this and the not-so-happy ending, I still prefer On Chesil Beach to Atonement. It’s well written and evocative. I think it should be required reading for anyone who thinks sex education is a bad idea.

8/10

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reviews

The Mentalist

Imagine Derrin Brown as a detective.

If, like me, you’re enough of a pedant to sigh whenever someone uses “beg the question” when they really mean “prompt the question”, then you may get a slight measure of satisfaction when a word is used properly. So the first thing I noticed about The Mentalist that it’s not about someone with a learning disability. OK, of course if that were really the subject of this show they’d never call it that, but they could have called it “Cop-Psychic”[1] or simply “Jane”, so  I take it as a small indication of the producers sensibility that they got this part right.

The Mentalist is about a John Edward style TV psychic who after a personal tragedy gives it up to become a police officer. As a medium he was a fake, using cold reading techniques to gather enough information to give a convincing performance. He now uses the same techniques to solve crimes. A simple and yet interesting concept.

Being the Smartest Guy in the House

The show reminded me a lot of House, and let’s face it medical shows are just cop shows where the criminal is a disease, the cop is the doctor and the symptoms are the evidence. (In fact I’m pretty sure House used that metaphor explicitly in dialogue early on.) They both feature arrogant central figures who are impossibly brilliant at what they do and know it. At one point Patrick Jane, our psychic-turned-cop, says that he doesn’t like seeing doctors because “they always want to feel like they’re the smartest guy in the room, when obviously that’s me.” They even both share a disdain for belief. When one of his colleagues states she has a cousin who is a real psychic, Jane says “he’s either deluded or dishonest or both.”

I think that where they differ is that Gregory House is a startlingly misanthropic figure where Patrick Jane is merely annoying. Also, it’s really unfair on the evidence of one show but I think Hugh Laurie beats Simon Baker in both acting ability and screen presence generally.

Suspect Device

Anyway, what separates this show from a thousand other cop/medic/lawyer shows is its gimmick, its device, so how well does it use it? Quite well I think. One potential problem is that whilst it’s enough for a TV psychic to get a few details in the right ballpark to let the person feel like they’re having a real contact with the “other side”, the police ultimately have to prove what they think they know. However they tackle this head-on and within the first five minutes one character has shot another on the basis of Jane’s, let’s face it, educated guesses. Later in the episode he uses his techniques to get the murderer to incriminate himself, a pattern I suspect we’ll see again.

It’s also interesting that after the initial scene where we’re shown what little pieces of information he uses to construct his guesses, that after that we only hear his (always correct) insights. And of course they use his talents for comic relief, allowing him to embarrass his colleagues.

I do foresee a trap here, that the writers might just get lazy and have him know things he couldn’t possibly know, simply by establishing a pattern of credibility with the audience. However I hope they don’t do that, or not straight away. The fresh thing this show has to offer is its device and so they should keep it to the fore. Like Derrin Brown, show us the trick and then, at least some of the time, show us how it’s done. The formula works because it includes us the audience in on the “clever” side of the transaction, and so we’re flattered and will love you for it.

A good example is near the end when the criminal says,

“I knew it might be a trick but I had to be sure.”

“Yes. That’s how the trick works.”

And The Trick Worked

I definitely enjoyed The Mentalist and if you enjoy police procedurals then this looks like it will be a good one. I haven’t spoken much about the fact that this is a pilot and therefore needs to set up the concept, establish the characters and introduce an on-going story element. I haven’t done that because it does all that well enough for it not to be distracting.

I have too much TV where I need to keep up week to week so that I’m not sure if I’ll become a regular Mentalist viewer, but it’s enough of a new twist on the genre, with enough intelligence in the writing to be highly enjoyable when I do catch the odd episode.  8/10

[1]Yeah ok, that’s a terrible title but you get my point.