35 Shots of Rum (2008)

35 rhums, France / Germany, 100 minutes

Director: Claire Denis

Writers: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau

Photography: Agnes Godard

Music: Tindersticks

Editor: Guy Lecorne

Cast: Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogue, Gregoire Colin, Julieth Mars Toussaint, Adele Ado, Jean-Christophe Folly

I’ve seen a handful or so of pictures by director and cowriter Claire Denis and have to admit they often leave me mystified. That is notably the case with Beau Travail, a much-acclaimed picture I see turning up on all kinds of best-ever lists, though it left me cold. For all its allusive beauty it is ultimately a French Foreign Legion picture with most of the cliches intact, just more gritty and beautiful. Trouble Every Day was an oddly unpleasant vampire show that did not live up to advance billing. On the other hand, I love White Material and its examination of postcolonial Africa, playing it like tense horror. 35 Shots of Rum, by contrast to all the foregoing (she gets around), is set in suburban Paris and far more domestic and meditative, observing bonds of a fractured family and work group and apartment building community as things inevitably shift and change. Time, life, all that.

Lionel (Alex Descas) is a widower in his 50s who works the commuter trains, riding the complexities of the rail lines which we see in hypnotic shots from his view, tangling and disentangling. He lives with his grown daughter, Josephine (Mati Diop), who has an advanced degree in anthropology. It’s unclear when or how her mother, his wife, died but it feels like it’s many years in the past. They still feel her loss, as a road trip to visit her grave late in the picture shows. Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) is a neighbor who drives a cab for a living. She and Lionel have a history and she still has feelings for him, and motherly feelings for Josephine too. Tensions exist between them, but a good deal of sincere affection too. Rounding out the main four in 35 Shots is the brooding, somewhat standoffish and self-mysterious young man Noe (Gregoire Colin), who also lives in the building.

The Happening (2008)

Here’s a picture by director and writer M. Night Shyamalan I might have liked more if I’d caught up with it during the pandemic. It’s not necessarily a virus in this movie that is ravaging humanity along the US northeastern seaboard, but eventually they get to it as a theory (before gaily passing it by). The first theory is terrorism, which is soon discarded first for a virus and then, very strangely, in favor of an idea that plants and the wind have organized a strange attack. Who could have possibly anticipated?! What it looks like: people grow confused in public, stop moving and stand in place, and then commit suicide in various grotesque ways. Watch out for the guy who sets a riding mower to run over him. Usually it’s more like shots to the head, in one case with a shared gun. Much of it is tastefully left offscreen but the picture still got an R rating. A virus makes much more sense to me than the plants-and-wind thing, and it particularly would have in the context of the actual pandemic, which is why I should have caught up with it five years ago, right? I’m just working with what we’re given. The Happening is a tidy 90 minutes, a point in its favor. But people generally don’t seem to like it that much—224,000 on IMDb gave it an aggregate rating of 5.0 (note: on a 1-10 scale, not a 1-5). I guess I’m inclined to agree. Various points about the picture are effectively unnerving and even shocking, notably the suicides, but ultimately it hit me more as lame than anything. Mark Wahlberg is science teacher Elliot Moore and spends most of the picture walking around in an empty-headed brain fog, trying to keep people calm. Zooey Deschanel is his wife Alma, who may or may not be an intriguing character, but she’s drawn so poorly by Shyamalan’s script that she’s just exasperatingly out of focus. Something is off about her. That’s about all we get. Other elements, such as a mood ring that is represented as important, or semi-abandoned houses encountered on walking journeys fleeing across the countryside, are so nonsensical there’s a temptation to believe that Shyamalan is just playing us for reactions. Well, I mean, yeah, that’s what he’s usually doing. That’s what most filmmakers are usually doing. But usually he and they are doing it better. The Happening is eminently skippable.

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

USA, 124 minutes

Director/writer: Charlie Kaufman

Photography: Frederick Elmes

Music: Jon Brion, Deanna Storey

Editor: Robert Frazen

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, Hope Davis, Tom Noonan, Sadie Goldstein, Robin Weigert

Movies are collaborative work practically by definition but those like me continually tempted to assign credit to a single person, or “auteur,” generally focus on directors. The director and writer of this picture, however—Charlie Kaufman—is something of an exception. Synecdoche, New York is only his first picture as a director, but he was already known for three screenplays: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. All won high praise and awards. Spike Jonze directed the first two, Michel Gondry the latter. They are weird and original with ingenious high concept, open neurosis, and inspired narrative surprises. And they are known basically as “Charlie Kaufman movies” in the same way that we hear about Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, or David Lynch movies. Or that’s the career brand hoped for.

In 2008, appearing in a Charlie Kaufman movie had great attractions for ambitious actors. Think of Woody Allen, or Terence Malick with The Thin Red Line. The A-list players flocked to them, and Synecdoche looks much the same, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and no fewer than seven of the most in-demand women actors at the time. I only wonder how Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton missed out. Yet, unfortunately, it all adds up to less than even Adaptation., which, until this point, had been Kaufman’s weakest picture. I’m not even sure how to summarize this quivering mess except by analogy: it might be worth pairing with a more recent quivering mess, director and writer (“auteur”) Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid, for a long double feature journey into a night of head-spinning and bodies all over the street. Pie and coffee served with discussion until 4 a.m.

The Dark Knight (2008)

USA / UK, 152 minutes

Director: Christopher Nolan

Writers: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer, Bob Kane

Photography: Wally Pfister

Music: James Newton Howard, Hans Zimmer

Editor: Lee Smith

Cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Ritchie Coster, Chin Han, Nestor Carbonell, Eric Roberts, Anthony Michael Hall, Patrick Leahy

I have no problem calling The Dark Knight the best Batman movie ever made—by miles, even. I just think we might need to call on Scott McCloud for some analysis of why no Batman movie has ever worked as well as most Batman comics—is it the space between the panels? (If McCloud has done so already, someone please point me there.) In command of a princely budget, shot on location in Chicago, Hong Kong, and London, The Dark Knight is committed to being a high-tech thriller like director Michael Mann makes. Lots of gadgets, stunts, special effects, chase scenes (involving a Lamborghini, fat-wheeled motorcycles, and semitrucks marked “SLaughter Is the Best Medicine”), fistfights, gunplay, and tedious orchestral music from Hans Zimmer, with a giant swirling story about Gotham City and the chaos the Joker (Heath Ledger) unleashes there with bank robberies, hospital demolitions, assassinations, so on so forth. The Dark Knight is also rich with movie stars: Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, and the Democratic senator from Vermont, Patrick Leahy

I’m also happy to call Heath Ledger the best Joker of all and even to consider this performance possibly his greatest. But that’s more because his career was cut short in 2008, when he died at the age of 28. It’s hard to say where he would be now, still in his 40s. He rewrote the whole approach to the Joker but I’m pretty sure, given his willingness to take on a risky role and make it great like he did in Brokeback Mountain, that The Dark Knight and his Joker would be in competition with other performances by now. The big boffo attack of The Dark Knight continues to impress, but Ledger’s performance, embedded in it as the unsettling center of gravity, is one of a kind. The rest of the movie seemed kind of boring to me on my third time through. I’m still happy to call it one of the greatest superhero movies, but this might be a good place to wonder about the general utility of superhero movies.

The Headless Woman (2008)

La mujer sin cabeza, Argentina / France / Italy / Spain, 87 minutes

Director/writer: Lucrecia Martel

Photography: Barbara Alvarez

Music: Roberta Ainstein

Editor: Miguel Schverdfinger

Cast: Maria Onetto, Claudia Cantero, Ines Efron, Cesar Bordon, Daniel Genoud, Guillermo Arengo, Maria Vaner

According to internet sources such as Google Translate, the original Spanish title for this movie, La mujer sin cabeza, does indeed appear to translate directly to “the headless woman,” although results suspiciously include links to information about showings of this movie, which made me think the phrase may be specifically idiomatic in some way. My very first thought was that it might be some kind of pun on the part of the translator for “the heedless woman,” as that is an obvious quality of the woman in question at the center of this picture, Vero (Maria Onetto). She is bourgeois, a professional dentist, middle-aged, well-coiffed, married with children and a lover, and appears to have a busy, somewhat empty social life. She appears to be numb, in short.

Early in the movie, on her way home from an elegant afternoon gathering, Vero’s cell phone rings in the car, she is momentarily distracted, and she runs over something. She sits in her car gathering herself, obviously shaken by the incident. But she never gets out of the car to investigate, does not really look at anything, not even in her rearview mirror. She only composes herself, taking deep breaths, and then drives on, jaw clenched basically for the rest of the movie. As she leaves the scene, we see the corpse of a dog on the road. But she has not seen it. And now, for the rest of the movie, she quietly falls apart in a self-controlled way that makes it very difficult to see she is falling apart at all, except for a worsening case of disaffection, which could simply be the modern condition, yes? She seems to me to be more exactly heedless than someone who has lost her head, momentarily or otherwise, because of a crisis. In her deeply controlled panic she is still rational enough to act as if the rules don’t apply to her if she can get away with it

Black Sabbath's Master of Reality (2008)

Big YES to John Darnielle's treatment of Black Sabbath's third album in this 33-1/3 series title. It is one of the most creative from the series as it is technically fiction, which suggests a hundred ways to go wrong. But Darnielle, founder and sometimes sole member of the Mountain Goats, has since gone on to publish two novels, in the horror vein. But the novella or long story Black Sabbath's Master of Reality mixes up a resonant character voice with some very sharp yet plainspoken analysis of the music. The character is a teen institutionalized in a mental hospital. He is required to keep a journal, and thus our text, which often directly addresses his counselor or therapist, Gary. Our kid is furious because his walkman and tapes have been taken from him. Master of Reality is his favorite Black Sabbath album and Born Again (1983) is weirdly his second-favorite. He touches on the first two Black Sabbath albums and all the songs on Master of Reality. It turns out, by the way, that Master of Reality is another one of those things with weird versioning problems. Look it up sometime. The story here is divided into two parts, the first in 1985 when our kid is institutionalized and writing the journal, and the second in 1995, when he has decided to write a letter to Gary. Now he is 26 and works as a restaurant manager. He's still mad at Gary and defending Black Sabbath. My own story with Black Sabbath goes like this: I went for "Iron Man" in high school but the band scared me because of the burnouts they attracted, I ignored them until Born Again, which had a cover that scared me, and I was finally goaded into really listening to them after reading Joe Carducci's anti-pop screed in the '90s. Master of Reality was also Carducci's favorite, so that's the album I ended up with. It did not impress me very much either way, which was not helped by my bad attitude about Carducci. This book was helpful for finally seeing some light on the album. It's not as aggressive as the primal metal label (or "War Pigs") might lead one to believe (though my favorite song has a spooky title, "Children of the Grave"). This is another book in the 33-1/3 series that ranks with the best, although I'm not sure anyone else could ever try this fictional approach again. Or maybe they have! It's a big series now. I should also say the Mountain Goats have always been lost on me. My next move with Darnielle would probably be one of the novels. Don't miss this one if you're reading them.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

UK, 118 minutes

Director/writer: Mike Leigh

Photography: Dick Pope

Music: Gary Yershon

Editor: Jim Clark

Cast: Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan, Alexis Zegerman, Samuel Roukin, Karina Fernandez, Kate O'Flynn, Stanley Townsend

I was surprised to find this picture might have a higher profile than I thought or remembered. It got a bunch of awards and nominations and landed on a dozen or more year-end top-10 lists by a range of critics. Notable contrarian Armond White called it the best movie of that year (not necessarily an endorsement). And then, on director and screenwriter Mike Leigh's IMDb page, it shows up second in his "Known For" tally, just behind Secrets & Lies and ahead of Naked and Another Year. That latter was another surprise for me as I have also thought of Another Year as another overlooked gem. Also, yes, I would say Secrets & Lies is probably his best, but I haven't seen it in a while.

It's tempting to call Happy-Go-Lucky the self-conscious inverse of Naked. Where Naked is a portrait of a pathologically miserable human being, Happy-Go-Lucky is similarly a character study about a pathologically cheerful person. Perhaps needless to say, because this is a Mike Leigh picture, both feature amazing central performances. Sally Hawkins is perfect as the relentlessly upbeat Poppy, a single grade-school teacher in her early 30s who hangs out with her friends in London and cracks dad jokes like nobody's business. "Bear with me," says one character. "Is there?" Poppy says. "Where is it?"

The Afghan Whigs' Gentlemen (2008)

This entry by Bob Gendron in the 33-1/3 series struck me as competent nearly to a fault. Very well written, with lots of rock critic pizzazz and a familiar structure—about one-third on recording the album, one-third critical riffing track by track, and one-third general history, context, and other details. It even has some obligatory strange excesses, such as an unexpected rant about Linda Ronstadt. It was underwhelming, but so were the revisits to the album under consideration, at least at first. That surprised me a little, but eventually I found my connection to Gentlemen again, an honest, harrowing foray into the relationship wars, full of drama and thrumming anxiety. Despite recording for the Sub Pop label for a time (Gentlemen is the band's major label debut on Elektra), the Afghan Whigs never fit the grunge label well. It's true that it is rooted in loud electric guitars, but singer/songwriter/main dude Greg Dulli wrote songs that also drew on midcentury soul music for a lot of its power and polish, and his themes are complex and mature (even when describing someone who is immature). The Afghan Whigs were also a great live act I saw a few times in the early and mid-'90s. In some ways I think Gendron's competence here is evidence Gentlemen might have required something more unconventional. Or maybe it is more an album purely of its times. Or maybe I overrated the album once, or misperceived it. But no disrespect intended to Gendron just because he stayed within the lines and took a familiar route in the series for his book. I'm not even sure how to categorize the Afghan Whigs at this point, let alone evaluate. I see that Robert Christgau gave this album an A-, but didn't have very much illuminating to say beyond the obvious. Gendron does have approximately one suitcase full of good details here. More than half of Dulli's vocals were recorded in a single long night, for example, involving cocaine and a woman he met just that day. That sounds about right, both for Dulli's reputation and for his doomy charismatic stage presence. It's also interesting (after all these years) to find out how scattered some of these bands have become. One of the Whigs ended up in Minneapolis, and Dulli spent some time living in "Washington state," which I take to mean somewhere not Seattle. They were all from Cincinnati originally. One or more of them might still be there, maybe even Dulli. Album and book together are a worthy pair for fans.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Pontypool (2008)

Canada, 93 minutes

Director: Bruce McDonald

Writer: Tony Burgess

Photography: Miroslaw Baszak

Music: Claude Foisy

Editor: Jeremiah Munce

Cast: Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly, Rick Roberts, Hrant Alianak

In most of the zombie movies from the George Romero era (since Night of the Living Dead in 1968), foundational explanations have tended toward viruses, environmental toxins including radiation, and/or other pathogens. Pontypool—which I never think of as a zombie movie, even though I have to admit they're all over the place in the last third—runs instead with an exceedingly high-concept twist, claiming that the virus is carried by and communicable through language and meaning. It's trippy stuff, especially in our slightly more informed pandemic era, and it's not the only place this movie shows a willingness to go wide.

It's basically a one-set piece, virtually all of it taking place in the broadcasting studio of a radio station in the fictional small town of Pontypool in Ontario, Canada. Stephen McHattie is Grant Mazzy, a washed-up talk-radio shock jock who has landed in this outpost. It's Valentine's Day, when folks in the northlands are exhausted by winter and starting to show snappish cabin fever symptoms. We know it's a cold bleak exterior out there, but we never see much of it. From inside this church basement radio station, we learn that some kind of bizarre outbreak has begun in Pontypool, with incidents of random and extreme violence as yet unexplained. Mazzy and his producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) and crew work with the scanty updates coming in from the wires and other reports to try to make sense of what's going on for themselves and their listeners and us.

The Hurt Locker (2008)

USA, 131 minutes

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Writer: Mark Boal

Photography: Barry Ackroyd

Music: Marco Beltrami, Buck Sanders

Editors: Chris Innis, Bob Murawski

Cast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, David Morse, Guy Pearce, Christian Camargo, Ralph Fiennes, Evangeline Lilly

Technology has improved for making war films as well as for making war and The Hurt Locker is a picture that benefits from it. Though it has a lot of the usual predictable cliches, such as counting down days in-country before rotating out, the grinding physical tension as a mission plays out, and of course the ordnance going off as spectacularly as possible, this story of US soldiers waging war in Iraq circa 2004 is still remarkably good, easy to fall into at any point you join and thus ideal for catching repeatedly on cable-TV, at least as much as they show it. As it happens, The Hurt Locker was no box office smash—it won a Best Picture Oscar (and five others, including Best Director), but is the lowest-grossing winner ever.

It's all movement, flash, action but almost always lucid, focusing on the aspects of Iraq that make it unique: the desert setting, the dangerously ambiguous front lines of battle, and the extensive use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs—bombs) and the technicians used to disarm them. That's where Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) comes in. He has a knack not to say a gift for standing down these bombs. The Hurt Locker traffics in another cliché with him, this one perhaps borrowed from Vietnam movies: he's an adrenaline junkie. He's good at his job (disarming IEDs) but he's a cowboy often taking unnecessary chances, and he's not above endangering others or taking off on his own self-directed missions. He's a restless soul. War is the only place he can find peace.

Dead Set (2008)

Admissions made freely: I have never seen the Big Brother reality TV show (let alone the UK version) nor have I explored the zombie genre extensively. But I know how they work and this short British five-part miniseries, which clocks in under two and a half hours in total, has a lot of fun with both. I believe 2008 is still a little early for streaming, if not entirely for peak TV. Dead Set was broadcast on five consecutive nights in late October 2008. It almost feels chopped apart with an axe, with little in the way of credits before or after each commercial sitcom-sized episode (at least as they're available on Netflix) and only the most basic jagged stop and start points. It's made to binge even if it wasn't possible then. And these days does less than three hours even count as binging? As a zombie exercise, Dead Set aligns itself formally more with the 28 franchise style of fast zombies, and there's lots that we know here: the breakdowns of social norms, all human weakness related to the seven deadly sins vividly at work, the heartbreak and shock of seeing loved ones die and then turn, and don't forget you have to get these things in the head. As usual, it's not the coronavirus zombies, it's the humans who can't handle reality. And what better place to look for people who can't handle reality than on the set of a reality TV show? That's the genius of this one, along with its impossibly fast-cut tumbling stomping zombie attacks, a minute or two at a time. There's a reflexive love story for the usual sake of raising the stakes or whatever but mostly these characters are reality TV show types—starved for celebrity, seeing all things worthwhile in fame and attention, drawn like moths even in a pandemic zombie apocalypse. Dead Set is an early and workmanlike effort by Black Mirror writer Charlie Brooker. It fits well with the aesthetics of 2000s zombies, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, and Shaun of the Dead. It's harrowing, often gross, and funny in a kind of brutal way. Jaime Winstone's Kelly is the heroine, and a number of these reality TV contestants are memorable (notably Kathleen McDermott's Pippa, something of a straight man, a cheesecake in a slinky gown who can only helplessly squeak "I don't like it" as events unfold). The actual hero is porn-mustachioed Andy Nyman as the TV show producer and one of entertainment's great pigs—in a Brooker story, in a zombie picture, in cinema at large. He gleefully steals this show and takes it over the top like Krusty the Clown with bubonic plague. He's the worst monster here and you hate him until he becomes iconic in his death. You've heard of chewing the scenery? You've seen nothing. Definitely worth a look.

Change of Heart (2008)

I'm not sure how this ended up in my house, let alone why I felt such an obligation to read it. Later, looking up the conventional wisdom on Jodi Picoult, I learned the hefty novel is a bit of an also-ran in her ginormous catalog of over two dozen titles, often top 10 in rankings and polls but rarely top 5. In its details the story is as clanking as its title (someone here is going to need a heart transplant, you see, and others will need to reevaluate their opinions), but what bothered me more was the glib religiosity, for which I wasn't prepared. It sounds like Change of Heart is typical for Picoult in its topicality. I mean, check this out: A handyman, Shay Bourne, is convicted of the murders of the daughter and father in a household where he worked, and there is evidence the girl had been sexually assaulted. Bourne gets the death penalty, the first in New Hampshire in decades. While on death row, he learns that the younger sister of the murdered girl needs a healthy heart. Bourne wants to donate his, but there are complications because of the lethal injection he will get, which makes it impossible for him to be a donor. On top of all this, Bourne starts performing miracles. That's approximately where I got off the bus, and these miracles start early. Picoult is a skillful novelist—her book feels researched and believable in many important ways, and she juggles nicely the first-person reports of a few different characters. We only see Bourne from the outside but like many of these characters he's hard to believe as anything more than a device. At the same time, I have to give it up to Picoult for the book's other obvious function, which is the book reading group market. They are playing to it directly in my paperback edition, with a WSP Readers Club brand and, in the back, a Readers Club Guide, with suggested topics of discussion. And there is so much to discuss here, for people of goodwill: the death penalty, prison conditions, the justice system, organ donors and transplants, violence, death, loss, and of course that's good old Jesus coming along for the ride too, kinda sorta (still doesn't have any smokes). Change of Heart practically brings its own impetus for social interaction with it. And, yes, it might be fun to hang out with friends and loved ones and kick around some of the ideas, like dipping into Gregory Stock's Book of Questions on summer vacation or during Christmas week. The story in Change of Heart moves in swift, simple, and broad strokes to illustrate all its busy bullet points. You really should belong to a reading group to finish the experience. I'll give Picoult the benefit of the doubt that the simplifications are deliberate—to make it seem like a parable. But as a general rule for regular reading I don't like parables that much either.

In case it's not at the library.

WALL-E (2008)

USA, 98 minutes
Director: Andrew Stanton
Writers: Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Jim Reardon
Production design: Ralph Eggleston
Art direction: Bert Berry
Music: Thomas Newman
Editor: Stephen Schaffer
Cast: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Fred Willard, Jeff Garlin, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, Sigourney Weaver, Kim Kopf, Garrett Palmer

As I got ready to look at WALL-E again for the first time practically since it was new, I was overwhelmed by an unfamiliar feeling: nostalgia for the era of Barack Obama. Strictly speaking, of course, the Obama era is not over quite yet. And, for that matter, released on June 27, 2008, the movie isn't even technically of the Obama era anyway. But the spirit is there, the sense we can come together, acknowledge and address our common problems, and solve them, however illusory or delusional that may now appear to be. The sense that the problems we have brought on ourselves are ridiculous and should be resolved immediately because they can be.

The reason for my reaction is obvious. In fact, the Obama era is ending, and we appear to be embarking on a period that's going to make Bush/Cheney look like a Sunday ride to the hounds. WALL-E, an animated cartoon movie rated G ("nothing that would offend parents for viewing by children"), operates from the premise that our unsustainable lifestyle has finally caught up with us as a species. Earth is no longer habitable—plant life is extinct, only adorable cockroaches are left, and the surface is piled high with trash. Human beings have been hurled into space on a five-year luxury cruise (with corporate sponsorship from the ubiquitous BNL, or Buy 'n' Large) while robots are left behind to clean up the mess and monitor for signs of returning life. In other words, it's a neoliberal nightmare.

The Monster of Florence: A True Story (2008)

I was mostly disappointed by the report of this true-crime case, not so much because it hasn't been solved yet as because such an extraordinary level of seeming ineptitude has been associated with it. "The Monster of Florence" was a serial killer who operated in and around Florence, Italy, starting as early as 1961 or as late as 1974 (depending on various theories) and stopping in 1985. The killer preyed on couples in isolated lovers'-lane settings, killing quickly with the same gun, and then taking time for horrific mutilations of the women victims. There was never evidence of his own sexual gratification in any of the murders. It's something of Italy's Zodiac killer. Who he was, why he did it, and why he stopped—even whether it was a man—are largely unknown. For this book, American writer Douglas Preston, who has authored a good many fiction and nonfiction books, teamed with veteran Italian crime journalist Mario Spezi, one of Europe's foremost "Monstrologists," to get to the bottom of it, 15 years after the last murders. It's a case full of dead ends. More than that, it's a case full of good old-fashioned official corruption. And as soon as that becomes evident the whole story becomes at once more important to tell and considerably less interesting, just more bad-faith government actors. As events proceed, both Preston and Spezi, who have naturally enough been critical of the maze that the official investigation amounts to, come to find themselves subject to investigation, and jail. By the time we are at the second half of the book the original case is all but lost in the confusion. Italian authorities attempt to get away with more than one Baghdad Bob type of stunt. Preston, again naturally enough, loses interest in much of anything else after he has been indicted on various trumped-up charges, and Spezi is actually incarcerated. There was one interesting detail, but it has nothing to do with the Monster of Florence. One of the worst of the Italian officials in this case was also involved in bringing murder charges against Amanda Knox, which helped clarify my take on that case a little. Otherwise all you really learn here, sadly, is that official corruption exists, and it scares the hell out of writers with comfortable lives. Speaking strictly for myself, I already knew that much.

In case it's not at the library.

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

#38: Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008)

In my entire list, this may be the one title of which I am least confident, simply because it's the most recent. It's filmed self-consciously much like a documentary, heavy on the handheld camera and the strange jerks and sweeps of a restless pan-and-zoom—although the framing is often deliberate and surprising and perfect. It also has the feel of an Altman picture, with characters and overlapping dialogue cascading and swirling in and out of a lurching procession of scenes, until sometimes it seems the only way to cope is simply to give in to the sensory overload and let the threads pull you as they will.

Rachel Getting Married goes directly to the source of most modern dysfunctional family movies, 1980's Ordinary People, and liberally borrows basic elements: the upper-middle-class family, the Cold Mother (here done to a tee by Debra Winger), the death of a child/sibling in the past, and the general ineptitude of all in communicating openly with one another. Anne Hathaway's performance, which is functionally the center and point of the picture, occasionally feels studied but is indeed impressive. For the most part she simply disappears into the cringe-inducing Kym, the troubled self-centered sister who seems bent on spending her life in a revolving door between drugs, jail, and rehab. It's probably a little overwritten, but I think overall it's one of the most believable renditions of 12-step experience I've seen yet.

Dear Zachary (2008)

(This is also my contribution to the Movie Morality Blogathon, March 6-14, at Checking on My Sausages.)

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, USA, 95 minutes, documentary
Director/writer/photography/music/editor: Kurt Kuenne

Dear Zachary roots itself with ease and confidence inside the true-crime subgenre of documentary filmmaking, where all talk sooner or later focuses inevitably, and naturally enough, on "evil" and "justice." I say "naturally enough" because the impulse and point of view in these cases always seems to come from an emotional space still reeling from shock, virtually bludgeoned into a state of incomprehension, one that still seeks and indeed gropes and flails for ways to make sense of insensible events. Implicitly, by true-crime conventions, we are expected to trust the morality of victims ipso facto, when all that's left to them, practically, are the two aching desires: first, to understand (hence "evil" because such events are otherwise impossible to grasp), and second, in addressing the morality, the need to set things right again, back to the way they were, which is equally impossible but is nevertheless the driving impulse behind the continual talk of "justice" and "closure"—neither of which happens, as surviving crime victims say again and again, even when criminals are caught and punished.

Filmmaker Kurt Kuenne has to take his place here as a true-crime documentarian to reckon with, not because he has made such an intensely personal film, with his sad, grieving, outraged personality occupying every square millimeter of every frame. That would itself make sense when a person of some talent and skill directs, writes, shoots, scores, and edits the story of the murder of his childhood best friend, and everything proceeding from the crime. But when the story is full of the kinds of twists and turns no one can make up, with each development more dramatic and astonishing than the last, with copious examples of perverse human behavior operating at multiple levels—that's the domain of the true-crime documentary. It's also the reason I had better warn of spoilers ahead if you don't know this story, whose details are best understood via the picture.

Best American Crime Reporting 2008

This edition was edited by Jonathan Kellerman, a reasonably prolific crime novelist I may have read one book by somewhere along the line (I fell way behind on crime fiction a long time ago, though I still poke away at it now and then). Kellerman is a psychologist by profession and there's some reflection of that here in some of his final choices. There's an essay by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) from "The New Yorker," for example, "Dangerous Minds," which sets out to debunk the whole notion of criminal profiling. It's convincing enough, but then so are its defenders. My thoughts on this are plainly not clear yet. There's an interesting piece by Mark Bowden from "The Atlantic" that makes a strong case, based on a concrete example, that torture is simply not effective. That's always something I like to hear. Another piece from "The New Yorker," this one by Tad Friend, offers a fascinating profile of a death-row prison administrator. In general, this collection seems to have a bit more of these types of articles—there's also an examination of a super-maximum prison and a harrowing story of what happens to a witness to a crime who stands up to do the right thing—but the strange wonders of human mayhem make their appearances too, as they must. In one, a con man fools people into thinking he was formerly a player with the Pittsburgh Steelers, and he does so and gets away with it for awhile—in Pittsburgh. There's a kind of moral x-ray of a cold-case rape and murder finally solved when a serial killer is run to ground and happens to mention that he did that one too. It's sad, with issues of justice and victimology right at its heart. There's also the story of Eric Volz here, a popular figure on the true-crime TV shows. Volz, an American national living in Nicaragua in 2006, was arrested and imprisoned for the murder of his girlfriend, Doris Jiminez (there is some analogue in this case, perhaps only in terms of the terrors of overseas justice but I think a bit more than that, with the more recent Amanda Knox case in Italy); Volz was eventually released, as the story here and its coda details, when a Nicaraguan appeals court overturned the conviction. More fun treatments on the cover of the stories inside as well: "personal mythmaking," "vain terrorists," "criminal organ donors," "murder in the mountains," etc. Another good one.

In case it's not at the library.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008)

USA/UK, 99 minutes, documentary
Director: Marina Zenovich
Writers: Joe Bini, P.G. Morgan, Marina Zenovich
Photography: Tanja Koop
Editor: Joe Bini

This HBO documentary preceded by little more than a year the revival of interest in Roman Polanski's case following his arrest in Switzerland in 2009, when it appeared possible that he might be extradited to the U.S. I never even noticed it going by, but a friend included it on his list early in 2010 of the best films of the 2000s, so between that and all the furor I knew it was one I wanted to see. And it is indeed worth seeing—among other virtues, for me, it includes information I hadn't known about the legal and ethical improprieties of the presiding judge of the case in the '70s, Laurence Rittenband (who died in 1993). More generally, it seems to me eminently fair, not only about the crime itself, which it doesn't minimize, but also about all the events that swirled around it and the people involved. It doesn't excuse Polanski, but it provides a useful context.

This is one of those cases, of course, in which people tend to line up on opposite sides and take their pleasure throwing blunt objects at one another in the service of discourse (see also O.J. Simpson, Jonbenet Ramsey, Monica Lewinsky, second Iraq War, or, more recently, Casey Anthony). So I want to tread carefully. There's no question that Polanski committed a crime, no question that his defenders often say such silly things that they are, on balance, actively harmful to Polanski's cause, e.g., Whoopi Goldberg's assertion, "I know it wasn't rape-rape" (we all know she wasn't there). And certainly it's a useful thought experiment to ask what if it had been the filmmaker's daughter, or anyone's, who had been the victim in this case.

Because Her Beauty Is Raw and Wild (2008)

In some way that I cannot entirely explain, Jonathan Richman appears to be back in my life. It started with a show he happened to play in Olympia late in 2008 (promoting this, I guess, at least inasmuch as any of his shows are ever in support of product). "Please," I thought, indulging a nostalgic fantasy, "play 'That Summer Feeling,' play 'Pablo Picasso,' and for gods sake leave your shirt on." My wishes came true! And more—the show closed on an unexpected second encore, with me out of position and halfway to the door, standing there nervously shifting from foot to foot to see if this was going to be worth hanging around for, as he played, softly, so softly you could hear people rustling in the crowd, what turned out to be the most devastating song of the evening (in an evening full with more than its share), "As My Mother Lay Lying." At that moment my own father lay lying, three months away from his death, though I couldn't know that then any more than Richman as I stood there in the dark quiet and absorbed the words, the profound impact of them deepening by the moment. Now I'm starting to catch up with what Richman has been doing these past 25 years. All I happened to notice going by were the cameos in There's Something About Mary, which I was happy to see, but otherwise he's got a good couple handfuls or more of albums I barely know. Often accompanied, as in the movie, only by drummer Tommy Larkins, whose phlegmatic presence is a nice foil to Richman, many seem to include songs explicitly celebrating one artist or another—here it's "No One Was Like Vermeer"—a number of foreign language selections (here, "Es Como El Pan" and "Le Printemps des Amoreux est Venu"), and the usual silly but often endearing foofaraw (here, "The Lovers Are Here and They're Full of Sweat"). He takes a surprisingly hard line against antidepressants and the culture of eternal happiness in "When We Refuse to Suffer," which actually gets two treatments here, and indeed also opened both of the shows I have seen in the past couple of years. He appears to be very serious about this, and there are other songs in that vein as well (more for me to research, not sure if they're brand new or from albums I don't know well). He even includes a Modern Lovers cover on this, "Old World." I still like the Modern Lovers version better, and ditto with "Pablo Picasso" for that matter, whose language is unfortunately and ridiculously cleaned up in the latter-day version. But it's nice of him to take us Modern Lovers clingers-on into consideration that way. If you want Jonathan Richman back in your life, take it from me, this is as good a place to start as any, and worth your time too. I find myself thinking, once again, that he's maybe some kind of saint on earth.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (2008)

Kate Summerscale makes a detailed and authoritative (if implicit) argument here for the so-called Road Hill murder of 1860 as the first sensational media-saturated murder mystery of its kind, predating Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, Charles Manson, and O.J. Simpson by decades and more—detailed and authoritative not least because practically a quarter of her book is given over to notes and sourcings. But the sum is no rote rendering of dry details. In the first place, the case still retains both its mystery and sensation some 150 years later. On an early summer's night, a middle-class Victorian English family's three-year-old baby is plucked from the room where he slept with his 22-year-old nursemaid and his infant sister, across a short hallway from the room shared by his parents and five-year-old sister, on the second floor of the house (or "first," above the ground floor, in British and European usage). The baby Saville's body was not found until the evening of the following day, dumped in the pit of the outhouse used by the servants at a corner of the property, savagely stabbed to death. In the second place, the detective who led the investigation, Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, was one of the eight principals who established Scotland Yard and he also served as the inspiration for Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone and, in part, Charles Dickens's unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Summerscale also reasons that the case influenced Henry James as he wrote "The Turn of the Screw," and contends that Whicher represents one of the earliest and most enduring models for fictional detectives: logical, sharp-witted about physical evidence and forensics, canny in his understanding of human nature, and confidently following his hunches. Her book methodically takes the case from beginning to end, from the murder itself to the investigation that eventually stalled to the shocking confession that came years later, and even follows up the fates of the various principals, some of which turn out to be surprising and even confounding of expectations. Steeped as it is in the literature of both true crime and murder mystery fiction, particularly of the now mostly forgotten pre-Sherlock Holmes Victorian era, Summerscale the writer shows on practically every page how well she has absorbed the lessons of those gone before. It's a gripping, elegantly told tale that is exhaustive in nailing down every last detail, maintaining a well-won veracity on every page. It's also a perfect pleasure to read, endlessly fascinating and opening many new avenues to explore for crime aficionados.

In case it's not at the library.