BOOK: Murder at Graverly Manor by Daniel Edward Craig (2009)

I picked this mystery up off the shelves of my local public library a few weeks ago on a total whim.  I’d never heard of the author, but I was looking for something short and frivolous, and the description on the book jacket made it sound like just the thing: a spooky little “cozy” set in a bed and breakfast.

Though not particularly well-written (it’s not badly written either, mind you — just not a stand-out language-wise), I really enjoyed both the story and the main character, Trevor Lambert, a hotelier who, it turns out, is the star of a series of mysteries by author Daniel Edward Craig (the “Edward” stands for “Not THAT Daniel Craig“).  Always nice to stumble into a new batch of books, especially ones you can trust to be entertaining throw-aways when you want to take a brain break between two heavier novels, a purpose previously served well for me by Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, RIP.

This story begins with Trevor feeling literally burned out from his last job, a gig managing a huge luxury hotel recently destroyed in a fire. (Ha! Get it? Literally burned out?)  Depressed and unemployed, Trevor moves back to his hometown, Vancouver, BC, to look for another position.

Just as he’s about to take a crappy job at a crappy hotel, a twist of fate strikes:  a big, classy, old bed and breakfast, Graverly Manor, goes on the market, and at a ridiculously low price to boot.  Immediately, Trevor wants it; he’d already been thinking he was tired of all the hustle and bustle of managing huge hotels, and a B&B seems like the perfect, quiet change he needs.

It’s not long before he figures out why Graverly Manor’s on the market for peanuts, though — it turns out its octogenarian proprietress, Lady Elinor Graverly, has to sell it fast in order to move to the UK, where she must establish residency or risk losing the family home there as well.  But Elinor isn’t in so much of a hurry she’s willing to sell the manor to just anyone.  After talking to Trevor a few times, she agrees to let him buy it, but only if he’ll work alongside her for a month so she can make sure he’s TRULY qualified.

Trevor’s not thrilled by this plan — Lady Graverly is unlikely to let him make any of the changes he’s eager to get started on before reopening under new management — but he desperately wants the place, so he agrees.  After moving in, however, he realizes he’s in for quite a ride.  Elinor is a complete mystery to him, for one thing.  On the one hand, she has very specific rules about things (mostly cocktail hour) and woe to the person who attempts to bend or break them.  On the other, she’s hardly ever around, procedures are bafflingly lax, and the place is utterly filthy.  Plus, she immediately forbids Daniel access her apartment in the manor, not even to take a peek before he signs the paperwork.  When it turns out she has an adult son with developmental disabilities living with her, this rule makes a little more sense — perhaps she doesn’t want him to get upset by the presence of strangers.  But even that is somewhat mysterious — who is this son of hers, and what happened to make him the way he is?

The manor seems to have an eccentric personality all its own, as well.  Rumors abound that it’s haunted by Lord Graverly’s ghost, for example — he disappeared several decades back, and though Lady Graverly insists he isn’t dead (but instead ran off with the maid), suspicious events lead Trevor to suspect she might not be telling the whole truth.  The house is also full of strange sounds, terrible odors that seem to come and go, a truly evil cat, an odd elderly butler who’s been with the Graverly family forever, and a housekeeping staff of one (who also happens to be sleeping with the elderly butler — try not to think about it).

Something weird’s going on at Graverly Manor, that’s for sure, and Trevor quickly finds himself smack-dab in the middle of it.  When he begins to poke around looking for answers, he sets off a series of events (starting with the sudden disappearance of the housekeeper) that roller-coaster us to an incredible twist at the end — a twist that caught me completely by surprise (in part because I wasn’t paying all that much attention, but still), a quality I always find extremely pleasurable in a story, even when it’s a bit on the silly side, as it is here.

In short, this is a thoroughly entertaining novel, and fans of spooky stories and murder mysteries will probably enjoy it quite a bit.  I’m looking forward to reading another installment myself the next time I need a break from something weighty, so watch for more reviews coming soon!  (It may be just what I need as soon as I finish my current book, Karl Marlante’s brilliant Vietnam War novel Matterhorn, which I’m finding as heavy emotionally as it is physically (600 pages-plus!).)

Recommended!

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MOVIE: The Caller (2011)

I was poking around on Amazon Instant Video this weekend, looking for a bad horror movie to rent, when I came across this one.  The premise sounded overly familiar –  young woman receives increasingly scary phone calls — but it had an intriguing, potentially ludicrous (yay!) twist that caught my eye.  The young woman?  Answering the phone in 2009.  The phone calls?  Coming from 1979.

Well, now, just how am I supposed to resist THAT?  Time travel AND cheesy horror?  It’s like someone crafted this movie just for me (though, obviously, if that were truly the case, it would’ve co-starred Richard Dean Anderson, not Stephen Moyer, but never mind. . .).

The young woman is Mary (Rachelle Lefevre, from ABC’s Off the Map), and she’s in the middle of a hellish divorce, having only recently gotten up the gumption to leave her abusive husband.  Finally on her own, she moves into an old apartment building — cheap, convenient, and though not in the best of neighborhoods, certainly good enough for the time being.  She even makes a friend right away:  her neighbor George (Luis Guzmán, a fave of mine), who turns out to be the building’s gardener, as well as its longest resident (he grew up there).  The only thing that seems sort of strange is that the apartment comes with its own phone already installed — an old rotary-style phone.  But hey, that just saves her from having to deal with the hassle of installing a land line, right?

Her first night, though, she realizes the problem with inheriting a phone number from a previous resident when she gets a phone call from an older woman (age 50 or so) asking for someone named “Bobby.”  Mary explains the situation — she just moved in, there’s no Bobby there anymore — and the woman hangs up.

The next night, she calls again, and this time becomes furious when Mary repeats she has just moved into the apartment and hasn’t met anyone named Bobby.  The caller insists she just saw him inside the  apartment, at the window, and accuses Mary of lying to cover up an affair.  Distraught by the woman’s anger and more than a little freaked out, Mary hangs up.

But the calls continue.  Finally, the woman explains what’s going on — her boyfriend Bobby, who, sure, is abusive but totally loves her you know, hasn’t been returning her calls.  Yet she knows he adores her — he proposed to her once, even, right before he left for the Vietnam War.

Whoa, ho, ho, hold up.  The what now?  Mary assumes the woman is just crazy, but the woman, who introduces herself as “Rose,” figures out what’s happening right away — their lines are crossed.  IN TIME.

(Well, OBVIOUSLY.)

To prove it to Mary, Rose says, “I’m going to go draw something in the pantry, and when you go look, it’ll be there!”  But Mary opens the pantry door and sees nothing.  She yells at Rose to leave her alone, and heads to bed.  Something bugs her all night long, though, and she finally gets up to look again.  Sure enough, it’s been wall-papered over.  She scrapes the paper off to find a drawing of a rose right there on the wall, just like Rose said it would be.

When Rose calls again, she begs Mary to talk to her for a little while.  She’s lonely.  Just five minutes.  So they begin to chat, Mary still believing she’s a nut job and that the rose in the pantry was a coincidence.  They end up comparing notes about their abusive partners, and Mary says, after describing the way her ex-husband is making the divorce proceedings drag on forever, “Sometimes I wish I had just gotten RID of him, instead of walking out.”

The next night, Rose calls again, this time giddy because she “took Mary’s advice.”  When Mary figures out Rose means she killed Bobby, she panics and hangs up the phone.  Then she goes to the pantry, opens the door. . . and finds it’s been bricked up!  BOBBY’S IN THERE!

Mary stops answering the phone (yeah, took her long enough to come up with that idea, right?), until one evening she picks it up thinking it’s her mother and finds an angry Rose on the other end of the line.  This time, Rose makes it clear if Mary doesn’t do what she wants, she will track her and her mother down in 1979 and kill them.  Or kill someone important to Mary — a friend, a boyfriend, someone.  They were all alive back then, after all, though children, and Rose has all the control in 1979 — there’s absolutely nothing Mary can do to stop her.

From there, enter a series of brutal murders, with people simply disappearing in the present after they’ve been taken out in the past.  Though there’s an attempt at one point to explain why Mary can remember events from both timelines (that is, she remembers the pantry before it was bricked up, even though, having been changed in 1979, she shouldn’t have ever seen it NOT bricked up), it doesn’t really make much sense, I confess.  The theory, posited by Mary’s new boyfriend (Stephen Moyer), who accepts this whole time travel theory with curious calm, I must say, is that Mary can remember things from both timelines because she’s been directly involved in the alterations.  Well, but, hmm.  Huh?  She hasn’t really been any more involved in the alterations than HE has; after all, he’s seen things before and after too, never remembering the “befores,” and he’s also talked to Rose.  The thing is, however unclear a theory that might be, I always appreciate it when there’s at least an attempt to explain these sorts of things in a movie.  Just TRY, people.  Give it a shot.  For my sake, if not your own.  (Hear that, Connie Willis?  Yeah, you heard it.)

The end of the film, which involves death-matches in both timelines happening simultaneously, was FOR SERIOUS fun.  And though the acting from Lefevre was pretty ho-hum, everybody else did a fine job, and the story was original and entertaining.

Though it was made in 2009 and then shelved, this film’s been lately making the rounds of various film festivals, undoubtedly because Stephen Moyer is famous now (from HBO’s True Blood).  My guess is that it’ll go straight to DVD without a theatrical release, which is too bad because I would’ve enjoyed this in the theater and it’s certainly no worse than other theatrical horror flicks I’ve seen recently (The Ward, e.g.).  Sure, the plot is a bit gooferoo.  But it’s also an interesting concept.  At least it’s a unique one, anyway — that counts for a lot in my book.  (My book is very small.)

Definitely recommended to fans of this kind of stuff, and well worth the $6.99 rental fee at Amazon (I would’ve gladly paid full theater ticket price for it, after all, and this way, I got to watch it in my PJs — aces!).

[Prequeue at Neflix | Available for streaming at Amazon.com | View trailer]

Genre: Horror
Cast: Rachelle Lefevre, Stephen Moyer, Luis Guzmán, Ed Quinn

MOVIE: The Conspirator (2010)

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting from this film, but I guess it was, at the very least, something a lot more “Hollywood” — take the trial of Mary Surratt, charged with aiding and abetting in the murder of President Abraham Lincoln, and turn it into, you know, a John Grisham flick.  Something mindless and fun.

And so, I was surprised to find myself incredibly bored about 30 minutes in.  Until I realized what was actually going on with this film.  Then things got a little more interesting, and a lot more thought-provoking.

My theory here, and director and ex-Boyfriend of the Week Robert Redford should feel free to debate this in the comments if he feels so moved (hi, Bob!), is that this movie was made — and made now — because the court case of Mary Surratt so plainly speaks to our post-9/11 political-legal world.

Mary Surratt, the mother of one of John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators, 21 year-old John Surratt, ran a boarding house where many of the conspirators both lived and held “secret meetings” in the months leading up to the president’s assassination.  Though there was no evidence to support she knew what those meetings were about, let alone that she was actively participating in them, she was scooped up and tried with seven others not long after Lincoln’s death.

Assigned to defend her was young Capt. Aiken (James McAvoy, who bored me as much in this film as he does in most of his films — sorry, fans), a survivor and hero of the Civil War, who returned to his legal practice as soon as the war was over, despite job offers from the U.S. War Department Secretary, Edward Stanton (Kevin Kline).  A strong patriot, though a battle-weary one, he is initially furious about his assignment to defend Mary, believing her to be guilty.  Nevertheless, as the trial proceeds, he becomes increasingly more convinced of her innocence, and equally-increasingly more horrified by the way the proceedings are being handled by the government.

Mary, played here with pale-faced, sunken-eyed resignation by Robin Wright, is certain she will be found guilty, and for good reason.  The retribution-hungry government has decided to try each of the co-conspirators in a military tribunal, despite the fact they are civilians.  The  tribunal denies her the right to a jury of her peers, the ability to testify on her own behalf, and even the right of her defense council to demand full discovery of the evidence the prosecution has gathered against her.  An outraged, grieving country instead tries her based on unreliable testimony from unreliable “witnesses,” all clearly more interested in seeking revenge against this “enemy of the state” than in seeking justice.

Hmm, sound familiar?

In any case, though the story itself is fairly familiar (young lawyer’s naïve belief system challenged by complicated case) and also a bit on the slow-moving side , it’s a relevant, thoughtful one.  If you’re at all interested in the history, I think you’ll get a lot out of this film.  It doesn’t have the entertainment value that the usual Hollywood courtroom drama has — it’s got more of an “educational film” feel to it at times.  But once I realized what it was up to and let go of my expectations for mindless fun, I was even more entertained than I would’ve been otherwise, I think.  Such a surprise to go into a film thinking it’ll be kind of a throw-away and find instead a much more intriguing examination of the ways in which times don’t really seem to change.

Recommended!

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Genre:  Drama
Cast: James McAvoy, Robin Wright, Evan Rachel Wood, Alexis Bledel, Justin Long, Danny Huston, Norman Reedus, Kevin Kline, Tom Wilkinson

BOOK: All Clear by Connie Willis

I’ve been kind of torn as to how best present this book review, since All Clear is essentially just the continuation of a really, really long book by Connie Willis.  A really, really long book she’d originally intended to keep at single-volume length, but then found herself needing to split in half so as not to overwhelm (the first half was Blackout, by the way, which I reviewed a couple of months ago).  I thought about just revising the Blackout review to make it reflect the two-part series as a whole.  But the problem is, my opinion of this series changed radically after reading part 2, and I think that’s probably somewhat useful information.

You see, I was MAD CRAZY about Blackout after I finished it.  I loved it!  Sure, there were a few story-related elements I was concerned about, but I figured all would be fixed and explained by the end of the second book.  As it turned out, though, this was only half-true.  Things were explained, sure, but they were definitely not fixed.  In fact, they just got more and more broken until I  finally got to the information I’d been dying for the entire time — the explanation for why/how time travel trapped a group of historians from the future in London during the Blitz of WWII — and that information ended up totally blowing my mind.  WITH ITS ABSOLUTE LAME-ITY LAMENESS.

That said, even if the time travel thing had been resolved in a way I could get behind, I would still have been super-duper disappointed by All Clear.  Listen up — I enjoyed this story a LOT and I’m VERY glad I read it and I want to make that perfectly clear (before you guys go off on me for hating Connie Willis, whose previous novels I have adored), but this was a sloppy piece of writing and it’s made me wonder what the heck Willis was thinking.  Why didn’t she just write the novel she so clearly wanted to write?  The general-fiction WWII novel?  Why throw in this half-assed, totally unnecessary sci-fi element?  Just because she was expected to, as a genre writer?  Well, that ain’t good enough, Ms. Willis!  Not by a long shot!

I can’t say much about the ending of this book (the why/how part) without ruining the whole thing for everyone who hasn’t read it (but we can talk about it in the comments if you want — NOTE: SPOILERS MAY END UP IN THE COMMENTS!), but I can complain about a few specific problems I had with the series overall pretty safely, I think.

My number one rant is that this series was absolutely, without a doubt, too damn long.  The second installment in particular featured repetitive after repetitive after repetitive everythings — the characters had the same conversations over and over (was that the retrieval team? have you seen the retrieval team? was that the retrieval team? hey, did you see the retrieval team yet?), they did the same things over and over (another subway play, another night in the bomb shelter, some more shenanigans from the kids), etc.  Everything was just the same stuff over and over and over, and while I suppose you could argue that’s sort of how the Blitz itself was, that kind of repetition didn’t do this crazy-long story any favors, and it also started to kind of blur the edges of the characters for me (especially the two women, who began to seem to me like they were the same person talking constantly to herself). The characters I had found so intriguing in the first novel were boring the absolute bejesus out of me by the end of the second.

It would’ve been incredibly easy for Willis to have kept this novel the length of a single book — the second book’s important features could easily have been edited down to about 100-200 pages, making for a super-long single book, but certainly not the longest I’ve ever read.  More importantly, as I said earlier, she could have simply made this a novel about the Blitz, leaving out all the science-fiction time travel stuff to begin with.  I liked very much the idea that, in the future, historians will travel back in time to observe important events personally.  But that didn’t actually make any sense.  Nor was there any attempt to explain what they were doing with this new information that made the work so tremendously important.  I mean, first of all, why would that kind of technology go to HISTORIANS?  Out of all the kinds of people in the world?  Clearly, in the story, historians were the only ones allowed to use the technology, but how did they manage to keep other people, especially people in other countries, from doing it too?   Only the British get to travel in time?  Not bloody likely.

Besides, surely the technology required would’ve cost a fortune — you’re trying to tell me that in 50 years, history departments are going to be the ones rolling in the bucks?  I was willing to suspend my disbelief on that element for the sake of the intriguing idea.  But when that idea flopped so disastrously at the end, all the little things that had been niggling at me throughout came out whompin’ instead.

Am I glad I read Blackout and All Clear?  Yes!  Definitely!  While I was obviously disappointed overall, I still enjoyed VERY, VERY MUCH the parts of the novel that focused on the Blitz itself.  I’ve read and heard from readers here that some of the little details Willis included in the narrative were inaccurate — using the wrong terminology for money or phone booths, putting skunk cabbage in England where it doesn’t belong, minor stuff like that — but the historical information about the Blitz itself seemed fairly reliable, and she certainly quite clearly and profoundly conveyed the fear, courage, determination, and ritual the British people sank into during what must have seemed to them a never-ending onslaught of death.  Those were some amazing people, those Brits.  And I’m really glad I got to spend so much time with them, getting to look inside their lives and witness the incredible ways in which they were able to cope with such horrors with such aplomb.

If only the novel(s) had been about THOSE GUYS instead of the three idiots from the future, this would’ve been an absolutely mesmerizing series.  (I call them “idiots,” by the way, because of another little quibble I had — these three were supposed to be HISTORIANS, yet they seemed to have an astonishing lack of knowledge about history, at least beyond whatever details had been “installed” on a computer chip in their brains before their travels). Instead, it’s distracted, overly long, and not nearly as thought-provoking scientifically as Willis’s other novels about time travel have consistently been.

Glad I read it.  But I won’t be reading it again.  If you’re interested in WWII novels, you might find this series enjoyable for that aspect alone.  But sci-fi lovers probably need not apply.

[SCIENCE FICTION]

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BOOK: Black Hills by Dan Simmons (2010)

I’ve been a big fan of author Dan Simmons ever since reading his terrifying novel Song of Kali about 9 years ago.  In the last few years, he’s shifted from his more standard horror or sci-fi works to an interesting combination of horror and history instead.  The first of these new horror-historicals, The Terror, was about the Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage and the man-eating monster the men encountered on the way, and I found it enthralling, as well as incredibly detailed with amazing research on the era, the setting, and the original expedition itself.

The second, Drood, a fictional take on Charles Dickens, I found kind of a slog, in large part because I’m not much of a Dickens fan, so the elements of his life and creative process were less inherently interesting to me.   I think I’d like it if I stuck with it, though, and I do plan to go back to it at some point and try again.  If and when the mood strikes.

But his third, this novel, had me excited as soon as I read the description on the back of the paperback.  A story combining Native American spirituality, the Battle of Little Big Horn, and the crafting of Mount Rushmore?  Sign me right the heckwild up.  I’ve always been fascinated with Native American history and culture, thanks in large part to my grandfather, who was extremely knowledgeable on the subject, and I didn’t know much about Mount Rushmore (been there once but was too young at the time for it to have made any significant impression on me) and was curious to learn more.  All in all, sounded like the perfect summer tome.

The novel opens by introducing us to its main character, a Native American man in his 70s named Paha Sapa (“Black Hills”) who is the chief explosions expert working under architect Gutzon Borglum at Mount Rushmore.  This job seems odd to anybody who knows the history of the monument — that it’s essentially a big “frak you” to the Native Americans of the region, a monument to white power over red, carved meticulously into one of the most sacred mountains of the Sioux people.  But it’s not long before we realize what Paha Sapa is actually doing there.  He plans to help build the thing, and then he plans to blow it right up.  It’s his destiny, he believes, a destiny he saw in a vision as a boy, many, many years ago.

Cut from there back to 1876, Custer’s Last Stand at Little Big Horn, just after the Sioux have whomped the white man’s ass.  There, a ten-year old Paha Sapa is moving around among the dead, when he comes across a soldier who is still alive, though clearly not for long.  He reaches down to touch the man and is suddenly infused with his soul or ghost (however you prefer to think about it), just as the man dies under his hand.  It’s not until he recounts the experience to his Elders later that night that he realizes the man was Custer himself.

As it turns out, Paha Sapa has a unique ability to touch people and see into their lives, both their pasts and their futures.  And now, having touched someone at the moment of their death, he also carries within him the spirit of the most infamous archenemy of his people, Gen. George Custer, who spends the next half-a-century-plus babbling constantly (mostly in x-rated detail about sex with his wife, oddly enough) inside Paha’s head.

As the story of Paha’s life unfolds — the various things that ultimately brought him to Mount Rushmore to fulfill his destiny there — he experiences just about every historically important event of the era.  He knows Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse personally (and fears them equally), he works for a time in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, he travels to see the new Brooklyn Bridge and gives us an intricately detailed account of how it was built (amazing), and he falls in love with his beautiful, doomed wife at the Chicago World Fair.

Throughout it all, Paha Sapa finds himself in a constant struggle between wanting to retain and reassert his heritage, and knowing it’s too late; that his only option now — his only real option — is to come to terms with the “Wasicun” (white) world he inhabits and somehow manage to craft a Self that fits into both his past and his future.

I was absolutely riveted by this novel from start to finish, no doubt about it.  As far as I could tell, based on a combination of my own knowledge and occasional Internet searches to learn more about some element or another (I’ve done a LOT of reading about Mount Rushmore of late, for example), most of the details of the story’s various historical punctuations are incredibly well-researched and accurate, despite being fictionalized to include Paha Sapa’s participation or observation.  The more philosophical elements of the story — the search for one’s identity, the pain of grappling with the loss of your people, the Cassandra-like agony of knowing the future and being unable to prevent it,  the development of Paha’s “relationship” with Gen. Custer, and Paha’s ultimate, exceedingly calm decision to destroy one of the most famous monuments in our country right in front of one of its most famous presidents (he plans to blow it just as FDR shows up to see its opening ceremonies) — are enthralling overall as well.

THAT SAID, there is no point in trying to argue that this is a “good book.”  It is, in fact, pretty much a disaster.  Some of the very same things I liked about it were among its strongest literary flaws — one character experiencing so personally so MUCH of history’s most famous events and people?  That’s just one example of what I felt like was Dan Simmons’s fascination with the era getting in his own way.  The book is also enormous, and overly rich with historical details that just don’t matter (I could see he was telling us about the Brooklyn Bridge, for example, because it was such a unique example of white technological marvel, standing out in contrast, like Mount Rushmore, against the novel’s broader back-drop of Native American “magic,” but while it was definitely an amazing segment, it didn’t belong in this novel and neither did several other tangents into history along the way).

In this regard, I couldn’t help but be reminded of what ultimately drove me bananas when it came to Connie Willis’s series Blackout/All Clear (my review of All Clear is coming next, incidentally) — both authors clearly had agendas, and those agendas were to share a love of some historical era with the reader, but the authors also had to deal with the reader’s genre expectations for them, and therefore had to shove into what were otherwise plain historical novels (or even plain historical textbooks, frankly) elements of science fiction (Willis) and the supernatural (Simmons) that conflicted with the narrative, and ended up resulting in a discombobulating mess that went on far too long and lacked clear focus.

Despite its enormous flaws, however, I very much enjoyed this novel and would recommend it to anybody who has read The Terror and/or Drood and liked them — you already know what Simmons’s horror-historicals are like, so you may be as able to overlook his tendency toward distracted tangle easier than the average reader.  I also think this novel would appeal to anybody interested in Native Americans in general and the history of that time and region, as well; I learned SO MANY THINGS about the Sioux and the Black Hills area, for example, and I thoroughly enjoyed learning them!

But despite that enjoyment, I’m fully willing to admit this book was a mess, desperately in need of a good, firm editing hand.  It was a mess I was more than happy to put up with, but a mess nonetheless.

Recommended with caveats!

Genre: FICTION
ISBN: 0316006998

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MOVIE: Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

A few months ago, two friends and I decided to form a little bad movie lovers gang (you know, like the Crips, only far too lazy for violent crime).  The plan was to get together periodically and go see something in the theater that looked delightfully awful.  The first flick we picked was Sanctum, an entertaining stinker that fit that description quite excellently.  We spent most of that movie guffawing inappropriately and had a grand old time.

This round, our selection was Cowboys & Aliens, which, after reading half a dozen reviews that panned the poo out of it, we were sure was going to be as bad or possibly even worse than Sanctum.  Popcorns and Diet Cokes in hand, we settled in for what was certain to be another two hours of snickering.  Ye-heh-HES!

Imagine our surprise, then, when we all three ended up enjoying this film quite a bit. What the . . . WHAT?  Sure, it makes little sense (but since when do alien movies make much sense?), but it’s actually pretty entertaining, and not just because the costume designer so beautifully tailored the seat of Daniel Craig’s pants, making them cling perfectly to his butt cheeks’ every slope and curve.   They’re truly a marvel of sartorial art, those pants.  Add to them  a pair of chaps, and what you have is sheer rear perfection.

(After the movie, one of my friends remarked that chaps are kind of like push-up bras for asses — you’ll see what she means if you check this film out.  Humina humina.  WOW.  Ahem.  Whew!  And I’m still laughing at the fact we all three noticed this phenomenon and couldn’t wait to remark on it to each other as soon as the credits rolled.  This is a truly grand gang we’ve got going, I must say.)

Okay, so, the plot:  The story opens with a classic Western set-up — dashingly gruff cowboy finds himself in a new town where he immediately encounters trouble.  In this case, it’s Jake Lonergren (Craig and his butt), who wakes up in the desert with total amnesia, a strange-looking metal cuff on one wrist, and an equally strange-looking wound in his abdomen (just above and around to the side from his butt).  He makes it to the nearest town only to collapse on its outskirts, where he’s discovered by the town’s pastor/doctor/sage (Clancy Brown), who treats his wound and introduces him to the town’s Big Jerk (every Western’s got one) right outside the church’s front doors, rustling up a fight.  He’s Percy Dolarhyde (Paul Dano), the arrogant, drunk, insecure, screw-up son of a local wealthy cattle rancher, cantankerous ex-Civil War colonel, Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford).

When Percy accidentally shoots a deputy, Jake flattens him (not with his butt) and Percy ends up in jail.  The problem is, the town’s sheriff has a wanted poster hanging in that same jail with a picture of Jake’s face on it.  And pretty soon, Jake finds himself (and his butt) in Percy’s adjoining cell.

When the colonel rides into town to demand his son back, the two prisoners are being transferred to a coach to take them into the nearby “big city” where they can be tried for their crimes.  Before the coach can get moving, though, strange lights appear in the sky and suddenly a bunch of ships start zooming by, firing lasers, exploding buildings, and scooping up several of the townsfolk.

Jake manages to get (his butt) free and the strange metal bracelet on his arm suddenly activates himself.  When he pulls its trigger, it fires, bringing down one of the ships, just as Percy is nabbed by another.  And now it’s, you know, cowboys and aliens, as Jake and the colonel form an uneasy truce and, along with several of the town’s other residents, including a strange woman named Ella (the truly awful Olivia Wilde), band together to try to destroy the aliens and rescue their people.

The concept sounds silly, I know, but if you think about it, it’s really no sillier than any other aliens vs. Earthlings movie I’ve ever seen.  The aliens themselves don’t make a lot of sense in terms of their design (for one thing, they have an extra set of arms with extremely dextrous fingers and better capability for forward motion, yet in order to USE those arms, they have to expose their vital organs.  Hmm.  Might want to try to evolve out of THAT, I’m thinking), but at least they don’t look exactly like human beings save for big heads (man, I hate that).  Granted, they look so radically different from humans it’s hard to believe they’re so readily able to breathe our atmosphere and find stuff to eat.  But whatever.  No one ever seems to get this exactly right, and how could they when there’s so much we don’t know about outer space?

The first half of this film is pretty damn great, if you ask me.  As a stand-alone Western, without the alien elements, it’s well made, and the costumes and set design were great (though ’tis true I’m a total sucker for Westerns).  When the group finds themselves teaming up with the local Apache tribe to invade the aliens’ home base, on the other hand, things get pretty silly pretty fast.  And yet, even then, I was completely entertained, only rolled my eyes a few times, and, as I said, greatly enjoyed checking out Craig’s mesmerizing backside (the filmmakers provide an absolutely ridiculous number of shots of said backside, by the way, but it’s hard to fault them too much for it).

I also liked that both the bad-asses in the film — Jake as the traditional “Man With No Name”-type character and Ford’s Col. Dolarhyde — weren’t your usual one-dimensional Western bad-asses.  They both had relatively complicated personalities, and the colonel in particular was a truly interesting character, in my opinion.  His obviously horrific experiences in the war left him hardened and bitter, willing to fight but hating to fight, and he frequently takes that dissatisfaction out on his son Percy, whom he considers to be an absolute coward.  At his side more often than not is a young Native American man the colonel had taken in as a boy, Nat (Adam Beach — and yes, this movie’s a veritable ex-Boyfriend of the Week smorgasbord for sure!), who respects and loves the hell out of Col. Dolarhyde, even though the colonel mostly treats him with disdain.  As they fight side-by-side to get Percy back, however,  Col. D. comes to realize how solid Nat’s character is and their relationship finally begins to bloom in a very masculine, yet also very touching kind of way.

My two friends seemed to consider the colonel an irredeemable jerk, and there’s good enough reason for that.  But he actually reminded me a lot of my own father, a Marine who also fought in a brutal war — tough on the outside, with a big, big heart on the inside he hasn’t always been confident enough to reveal.  It was refreshing to see both this character in general, and Harrison Ford playing this character in specific.  The last few Ford movies I’ve seen had me worried his time as an actor was done — he mostly just grunted and scowled his way through Morning Glory, for example.  But he was spot-on perfection in this role and I hope he manages to land more parts like this one soon.

In retrospect, I can’t help but think the movie reviewers who hated this film went into it thinking all the wrong things.  I think their expectations were probably too high, and I will grant them that a movie entitled Cowboys & Aliens sure sounds like it ought to be a comedy, which this film most certainly, at times laughably, is not (it IS a truly bad title — I would’ve gone with REALLY Bad Day at Black Rock, myself).

Go into it expecting it to be good-bad, though — somewhat badly thought-out, fairly goodly acted — and you will be rewarded with two hours of definite fun.  And also, did I mention Daniel Craig’s ass?  Because DANIEL CRAIG’S ASS.  <– Mentioned.

Recommended!

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Sci-fi, Western
Cast:  Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Paul Dano, Noah Ringer, Keith Carradine, Adam Beach, Clancy Brown

MOVIE: Hereafter (2010)

I remember thinking this film looked unbearably cheesy when I first saw the trailer for it a year or so ago.  When Matt Damon‘s character said the line, “It’s not a gift . . . it’s a curse,” I confess I laughed out loud in the theater, which I’m sure was incredibly annoying to everyone else there with me (sorry, but COME ON).  I had absolutely no intention of ever seeing this movie — none ‘tall — until the other day when my sister recommended it to me.  Not only had she enjoyed it, she said, but it involved a set of twins that had made her think of us (we’re fraternal, but close enough).  We don’t tend to seek out the same kinds of movies, but when we do hit on the same ones, we usually either both like them or both dislike them.  So her recommendation had some weight to it, and I decided to suck it up and give Hereafter a shot.

First things first, it IS ridiculously cheesy at times, especially at the end, when it is also ridiculously hokey.  And, what’s worse, Damon’s character, a psychic who recently retired because talking to dead people was seriously bumming him out, says that “It’s a curse” line not once but TWICE.  TWICE!  TWICE with the world’s most trite and annoying movie line of all time!  Whoever the screenwriter was, I’d like to take him out back and pop him one in the chin.

That said, I was surprisingly entertained by this film, and it made me think some too — not a lot, but some, for sure.  It’s got some interesting ideas about responsibility, the afterlife, perseverance in the face of adversity, the way people latch on to beliefs that don’t make any sense in order to get through difficult ordeals (my two cents), etc.  And it’s well acted, despite the fact it’s not very well-written (not just the dialogue, but it also lacks a clear mission and the end is absolutely unforgivably dumb).

The story comprises three separate tales which converge ham-handedly (but whatever) at the end.  The first is about a guy named George (Damon) who had brain surgery as a child that somehow left him with the ability to talk to dead people.  By touching your hands briefly, he can connect with someone you’ve lost and convey messages back and forth.  But after a successful career doing just that, George burned out and quit.  The constant grief wore on him, and the fact people treated him like a freak didn’t help much either.

So, he threw in the towel and took a new job, this time in construction, and though his brother (Jay Mohr) constantly pressures him to get back into the psychic biz, saying it’s his responsibility as someone with such a unique ability to help people, George is happier living his new “normal” life and wants no part of his old gig.

As his tale unfolds, the film introduces a second story, this time focusing on a young French woman named Marie, a news reporter who nearly dies when a tsunami hits the small island she is vacationing on in the beginning of the movie.  Obsessed with the peaceful visions she had as she was drowning, she begins exploring research on the “hereafter,” ultimately publishing a book on the very controversial and oft-disdained subject.

Meanwhile, the third tale weaves on in, this one about a little boy named Marcus, maybe 7 or 8 years old, whose identical twin brother is hit by a truck and killed one afternoon.  The boy’s mother is sent to rehab and he’s placed into temporary foster care, where he slowly begins to fall apart, lost and untethered without his “big” brother there to guide him (I can see why my sister could relate to this, as she’s always been my tether and guide as well).  When he comes across some web sites about psychics and the afterlife, he immediately robs his foster parents of their rainy-day fund and begins paying a series of kooks to talk to his brother in Heaven for him.  Though he knows each one is a phony, rarely getting any information correctly, he persists, desperate to get both his brother and his previous life back.

The three characters end up meeting at the end of the film (when, where, and how I’ll leave for you to discover, but I hope you believe in tremendously unbelievable coincidences. . .).  We knew it was bound to happen, of course, this being the way movies with parallel story lines typically go.   But even though the plot is predictable, the dialogue is cheesy, and almost all of Matt Damon’s storyline was completely expendable, I really enjoyed the other two plots and their characters, and the actors in those roles (Cécile De France as Marie and Frankie and George McLaren as the twins) did a wonderful job with their complexly emotional parts.

Overall, I’d say this one is well worth a rental if you’re interested in this kind of stuff.  (And, while I’m at it, allow me to also recommend the terrific sci-fi novel Passages by Connie Willis, which is also about the science and theory of the afterlife and is both better written and a lot more engaging than this movie.)

Incidentally, it turns out I’ll never be able to look at Matt Damon again without thinking of this (NSFW):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSfoF6MhgLA&feature=related.  Hee.  Hee hee.  Hee hee hee hee hee.  Oy.

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre:  Drama
Cast:   Matt Damon, Cécile De France, Frankie & George McLaren (the twins), Bryce Dallas Howard, Jay Mohr