Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (2009)

From 1976 until 2002 Joseph Frank published the five (large) volumes of his biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky. As he explains in the preface to this (large) single-volume abridged version, he looked to Leon Edel’s similarly massive biography of Henry James (four large volumes), which was whittled down to a single book (large, of course). Frank thought that was a pretty good idea and brought in editor Mary Petrusewicz for the condensing work. It would take them seven more years, but I found the single volume particularly useful and worthwhile, given I had only limited interest in plowing through the original five. It connects a lot of dots that might be missed simply reading through Dostoevsky’s beyond-impressive work as a whole. Perhaps most crucially it covers the 10 years from 1849 to 1859, when Dostoevsky was charged and convicted of treasonous activity, imprisoned, forced to endure a mock execution, and exiled to Siberia. He was imprisoned there for four years, after which it took him another six years to make it back to Russia, Petersburg, and Moscow. Understanding what happened in that period is almost staggering to contemplate—he lost 10 years of writing in his late 20s and 30s, the best years for many writers. It is crucial to understanding his work, both before and especially after, when he produced most of his masterpieces. Frank also provides excellent literary context and analysis for all Dostoevsky’s work. My takes were not always the same as his, but he’s the expert here, not me, and his analyses were always illuminating. Even this abridged version is still quite a honker—nearly 1,000 pages in print and closer to 1,500 in the kindle pagination (however that is calculated). But this biography was essential as I made my way through Dostoevsky’s work, lucid and informative. Even with its imposing length I would recommend it to anyone with more than a passing interest in the great Russian novelist. Dostoevsky wrote great tales, but in many ways his life story rivals them.

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

A Prophet (2009)

Un prophete, France / Italy, 155 minutes

Director: Jacques Audiard

Writers: Thomas Bidegain, Jacques Audiard, Abdel Raouf Dafri, Nicolas Peufaillit

Photography: Stephane Fontaine

Music: Alexandre Desplat

Editor: Juliette Welfling

Cast: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Hichem Yacoubi, Reda Kateb, Slimane Dazi, Jean-Philippe Ricci, Gilles Cohen, Leïla Bekhti, Jean-Emmanuel Pagni, Frédéric Graziani, Alaa Oumouzoune

I must admit I originally took the title of this epic prison movie a little too literally. I knew it involved an Arab in a European prison and I worried it was about some bearded chin-stroking holy man enlightening other inmates (or failing to), heading down some solemn religious line. The running time was the final detail that put me off it. But it turns out A Prophet is one of those long movies I’m happy to see, immersive, intense and kinetic, sending us to places where time does not exist. The camera is restless, roving, often handheld in these tight claustrophobic prison spaces. Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebena serves up a performance that is masterful and unforgettable, inhabiting a majority of these scenes and virtually carrying the picture by himself, though he is amply supported, notably by Niels Arestrup as Cesar Luciano, the Corsican center of power in the suffocating French prison setting.

A Prophet also counts as both a coming-of-age and an immigrant picture, as the Muslim El Djebena is 19 when he is convicted of unspecified crimes and sentenced to six years in an adult prison, after spending what sounds like much of his adolescence in juvenile facilities. El Djebena, arriving at prison, has obviously been beaten recently. One wound on his face is recent and ultimately leaves a scar. He is self-possessed and wary, stalking through his days as a loner. Prison life is hard. Early on he is a victim when he is pushed around for his shoes, which are taken off his feet. When the prisoner Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi) attempts to pick him up, offering hash for oral sex, the outline of El Djebena’s new life starts to come into focus.

A Serious Man (2009)

UK / France / USA, 106 minutes

Directors / writers / editors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

Photography: Roger Deakins

Music: Carter Burwell, Jefferson Airplane, Band of Gypsys

Cast: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolff, Jessica McManus, George Wyner, Amy Landecker, Adam Arkin, Peter Breitmayer

I wanted to make a point about A Serious Man being underrated, but every time I go looking for ranked lists of Coen brothers movies it’s chaos. I keep running into opinions I can’t believe anyone really has. A Rotten Tomatoes list that is aware of Ethan Coen’s solo Drive-Away Dolls from last year, for example, has True Grit #1 and Blood Simple #2 before getting to Fargo, No Country for Old Men, and Miller’s Crossing. The Big Lebowski is down at #14 in that list of 20 while A Serious Man sits comfortably in the middle at #11. That’s not exactly underrated but this list and many of the others strike me as weirdly perverse in any number of significant ways each.

Maybe Coen brothers movies appeal on a range of inscrutable, deeply personal points that may be difficult to discern. I know that’s at least partly the case for me with A Serious Man, which features, though not by name, the western Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park, the growing up home of the Coen brothers. St. Louis Park was the next school district over from mine (Hopkins) and it was where my Dad taught 9th-grade physics and reported he’d had one of the Coens in a class one year. Many of the exteriors in A Serious Man were actually shot in Bloomington, a southern suburb. But I know St. Louis Park in the ‘60s when I see it. They are dead-on, these flat treeless squared-off suburban developments. The trees are all grown up now but this is what it looked like there 60 years ago.

Wire’s Pink Flag (2009)

About half of this treatment for the 33-1/3 series by Wilson Neate of Wire’s classic debut is devoted to going through the album track by track, a daunting task in a way for an album with 21 tracks clocking in under 36 minutes. I’ve always been in the minority on Wire, more of a partisan for their third album, 154, but Neate has rounded up a lot of notables stumping for Pink Flag, including Steve Albini (Big Black, Rapeman, and notorious producer at large, R.I.P.), Graham Coxon (Blur), Robert Pollard (Guided by Voices), and others. Neate spends the first half mainly on positioning Wire within the rock and punk-rock welter as it existed in 1977. He makes a good argument that Wire was set apart from punk-rock—and from rock—by the band’s clinical aesthetics, which developed further as they went. There’s also a good deal of interesting information here about how the album was recorded and the various essential contributions of producer Mike Thorne. I know Pink Flag reasonably well and had a gratifying session studying the track-by-track here closely, playing each song, reading Neate’s text, and often playing the song again. Among other things it helped me identify definitively my own specific favorites, such as “Three Girl Rhumba” (1:23) and especially “Lowdown” (2:26). More than anything it convinced me of what I’ve always sensed intuitively, which is that Pink Flag is perhaps thought of best as a single cohesive whole (or two, given vinyl albums) rather than 21 disparate parts. I tend to lose track of this album at the molecular level of individual songs. Neate also focuses closely on the mostly illegible lyrics, reading closely into them, as Pink Flag was that unusual punk-rock album which included a lyric sheet. Even knowing the lyrics and reading along with Neate and an online lyric sheet I had a hard time making them out. But I’m more of the school that most rock lyrics are a tantalizing distraction at best, with some exceptions such as slogans, chants, and many Bob Dylan songs. Most times, when I actually look into it, the specific words and their meaning are more beside the point. But Neate would be one to disagree, and his exegeses are detailed, multileveled, complex, and sometimes interesting. It was a treat to hear Pink Flag again and I appreciated the wide scope of interview subjects assembled here. It makes complete sense, for example, that Robert Pollard is a big fan of Pink Flag. Much of his own career has been in pursuit of the kinds of song fragments found on it. This 33-1/3 is solid for all fans of the band and album.

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

Disappeared (2009-2022)

I happened to remember this old Discovery true-crime show about missing person cases which I used to watch a lot. I found it online complete except for most of the first season and that was all she wrote for a week or 10 days. I didn’t get to all of it, but I sampled all the seasons and saw a couple of them complete. The initial run lasted six seasons, starting in 2009. Then there was a break and three more seasons, then another break and season 10 ran just last year. It turns out I hadn’t seen all the old episodes by a long shot. The comforting voice of Christopher Crutchfield Walker provides the voiceover in all seasons except 7 (nonetheless a pretty good season). The show is built out of interviews with various principals—not always all of them—accompanied by reenactments, which can be confusing or distracting but also helpful. It’s fair to say the shows are often padded out to fit a one-hour TV time slot. Compare the much more highly efficient Forensic Files, which can practically pack in three intriguing cases in the time Disappeared spends on one. But in many ways I appreciate the slower pace of Disappeared, which offers time to let the complexities settle in. They are essentially different shows despite all the police procedure: Forensic Files explicitly knows whereas Disappeared explicitly does not know. In general, I think the early seasons are better. The cases seem to be chosen more for their inherent interest, while the later seasons, especially 10, are focused more on urgent public service in the mold of America’s Most Wanted and To Catch a Predator, offering a platform to help solve cases. Since Gabby Petito there have been increasing cries for the media to focus on BIPOC missing person cases rather than solely on young white women, which is fair and reasonable. We hear more about gross police incompetence in these later seasons, and in turn police don’t always cooperate with interviews, which is unheard of in the early years. It’s easy to come away with a sense of outrage and urgency in the later seasons and it’s not out of place for these cases.

I found a Wikipedia article that traces ongoing results of the cases, another reason I favor the older episodes. Those cases simply have a better chance of being resolved by now. I ran into plenty of “still missing” notices there, but sometimes there are developments and sometimes they are as surprising as any twists and turns captured in the show. To be clear, these resolutions can also be something like learning how a stage magician’s tricks work. At first, curiosity is satisfied but then it starts to feel stupid that you ever wanted to know. For what it’s worth, my interest in these cases is apparently more about the mystery of them, how strange they can seem, rather than the horrors and sadness of human brutality and trafficking. Many of these vanished are victims of various crimes, or suicides, or even people trying to start over—and many times it’s fairly obvious what has happened to them. Once in a while they are found alive. Often their bodies are never found, or haven’t been yet. Among other things I am amazed how hard it can be to find a body—sometimes the follow-up casually mentions it was finally found in an area that was supposedly searched carefully. Once or twice the body has clearly been moved there later. The ones who likely died from exposure are often lost in unimaginably vast and harsh terrains. It’s actually disconcerting how many missing person cases there seem to be. The show is also useful that way, reminding us of it. What happens to these people? I feel for the families and those left behind, of course—their grief is often the hardest part to watch. See enough of these episodes and they start to fit patterns. Near the end of many someone is often seen saying, “Well, someone knows what happened here and I just wish they would come forward with what they know.” Check the Wikipedia page—sometimes they did.

Brian Eno's Another Green World (2009)

I enjoyed Geeta Dayal’s meditation on Brian Eno’s great album, which is pitched well to the mood of the album and indeed to much of his work in the mid-‘70s and beyond. It appears in writing this 33-1/3 book that Dayal even used the Oblique Strategies card deck created by Eno in collaboration with multimedia artist Peter Schmidt. Eno famously used it while working on Another Green World and many others to follow. There’s a chapter where Dayal runs down the album tracks in order, like most of these books from the 33-1/3 series, but otherwise she is floating around Eno’s work and poking at it gently, trying to figure out how it works from the constituent pieces, and it’s somehow a perfect pleasure to read. She has taken great advantage of the many interviews given by Eno and others involved with the album, pulling amazingly on-point quotes from decades of them. She also received email from Robert Fripp, whose voice here is unusually pungent with love and respect. I always forget things like Phil Collins is on the album, or how odd it is that Fripp, late of King Crimson, and Collins, still in Genesis, would sign up at all for an album like this. Part of that is likely due to Eno’s strange charisma, so potent that Bryan Ferry reportedly kicked him out of Roxy Music for drawing too much attention away from him. Not even exiling him to the soundboard in performance could diminish his appeal. I jumped on the Eno bandwagon a little later, with the Bowie/Berlin collaboration, and was in thrall to his projects well into the ‘80s (with some return to strength in the early ‘90s with the Walkabouts track). Another Green World could well be the summit of his otherworldly powers—more like just one peak in a mountain range. But listen to me go on. Dayal has a similar devotion. One thing I like here is that she doesn’t land squarely on Another Green World. She also likes and discusses Discreet Music, released earlier in 1975. And she likes the two Fripp collaborations—(No Pussyfooting) from 1973 and Evening Star from 1975—as well as Eno’s first two solo albums. That’s a pretty good cluster, and she also delves into his influences, such as notably Steve Reich. For once one of these 33-1/3 books seems way, way too short. I wanted more of Dayal’s reflections and quotes from old interviews. There’s a little sentimental charge here too in the way it reminds me of listening to Another Green World and Eno in the ‘70s. The album is made to be listened to in quiet rooms, and it goes crazy places, from pop songs about tying your shoes to vivid jungle and forest scenes. It’s so odd and so perfect in its way it almost feels like a novelty, a precious intricate toy or gift. Honestly, I thought this book had some of that magic too.

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

Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (2009)

Carol Sklenicka's biography of poet and short story writer Raymond Carver is very good, packed with research and interviews and inevitably nearly as heartbreaking as some of Carver's stories. It was good to get to the bottom, more or less, of Carver's relationship with Gordon Lish, which is surprising in many ways. It's fair to say Lish is almost wholly responsible for the "minimalist" tag Carver was stuck with by Lish's alarmingly aggressive editing of the What We Talk About When We Talk About Love collection. Carver was generous and deft in circumventing the subsequent problems, but I believe he is still taken as a literary minimalist by many. In typical fashion, he was happy to accept the glory and evolve his writing from there in the limited time he had left. Inevitably, also, as biographies will, Sklenicka reveals the clay portions of Carver's feet. Some of this is painful to learn, such as the way he treated his family and first wife. He always meant well, at least you can say that about him. By the time he and his first wife were deep into their alcoholism there were incidents of domestic violence. Those things are less fun to learn. Still, Carver produced some great work in his 50 years on the planet. Calling him the American Chekhov is a reasonable proposition, although we should also remember Chekhov was a doctor, died six years younger than Carver, and produced about five times as much work. I don't know Carver's poetry very well (or anyone's), but I see his stories putting him in the company of Sherwood Anderson, early Ernest Hemingway, and John Cheever, which is no shabby lineage. I look forward to reading all his stories and reading them again. At the same time, there's a slightly sour taste from some aspects of his life, particularly the way his first wife was treated in the aftermath of his death. Sklenicka appears to have no dog in any of these fights in Carver's life, but I did come away with somewhat dimmed views of both Lish and Carver's second wife, Tess Gallagher. "Money changes everything" as a rock band from Atlanta called the Brains once noted—an eternal truth and no less so here. But Carver was a great writer and always will be. This biography does a solid job of telling the story.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Troubled Man (2009)

Most of the Kurt Wallander novels by Henning Mankell (the originals in Swedish) came out like clockwork in the '90s, but the last two straggled in at five-year intervals. The one before this is short (An Event in Autumn, technically a Linda Wallander novel), and the one before that, The Pyramid, was a collection of stories. Perhaps the last handful feel like Mankell might have been just slightly (or more) bored with the project. There's some of that here, perhaps inevitably, and there's some series tidying-up that feels mechanical. But it's a fairly big novel with a fairly big case, once again charged with international and historical issues, perhaps most notably with reverberations of the Cold War. By their size, complexity, and pace, the majority of Mankell's novels feel more like political thrillers than detective stories or police procedurals. There's really not much genre innovation to them, except using genre as scaffolding for larger political and social ideas. In that way, Mankell does an admirable wrap on the whole series with The Troubled Man. The case is mysterious enough to offer gratification in the resolution. It's hard to miss that Wallander and Mankell are saying a lot of goodbyes here. Wallander's ex-wife Mona (Linda's mother) shows up for the first time since Faceless Killers, I believe, the first novel in the series. Wallander's one-time girlfriend after the divorce, the Latvian Baiba Liepa, has a dramatic sequence too. Rydberg, who died in Faceless Killers, still haunts Wallander's thoughts as his mentor. Other threads from the series are dropped entirely, such as coworkers who seemed to have a future in it and some other storylines. Mankell's writing actually ranged widely beyond detective fiction, including plays, screenplays, and YA literature. He was certainly much more than a narrow genre writer. You always sense that, and his decisions are easy to trust. Sometimes he feels almost protective of Wallander's privacy, the main reason, given more than once, for withholding information. Other things here, some of the resolutions and problems that plague Wallander, feel mechanical. Here, for example, he is 60, still diabetic and battling his weight, but now he also has onset Alzheimer's. It scares me silly in a way, of course, but also feels like it's emerging unconsciously from Mankell's own anxieties and one-more-thing worries. Still, all around, it's a generous finish to a worthwhile series, the whole thing a classic of Nordic noir.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Novo Rock (2009)

The nagging mysteries of 69 and Novo Rock started for me with "Rock'n Latex," which showed up one day in my Top 40 playlist on Napster (me there squinting in the bright new world of streaming music). I stock the playlist from a number of different sources, plundering blogs, Billboard lists, and social media, usually in a binging kind of way so I often forget what source gave me which songs as I digest them over the weeks and even months by shuffle, an hour or two every day. I thought "Rock'n Latex," which is credited on Napster to Carl Craig with a release date of 2017, came from one of those places. But very occasionally, I go into the wilds of Napster personal playlists, and I think now that's where "Rock'n Latex" must have come from. I loved it right away and kept loving it. The band is called 69, and even though Detroit techno key figure Carl Craig does have a side project called 69, this is not it. This 69 is French and somewhere I got the impression it is just two people—maybe the album cover? The Vimeo video? Information on the internet is scant. The release date appears to be 2009 or 2010, not 2017. Yet though it is incredibly obscure in this day and age (or perhaps because, though I hate to think it) I am sold all the way. It reminds me of when Alan Vega of Suicide took on rockabilly on his first solo album, in 1981, and it also reminds me of another kooky rock 'n' roll novelty project in Music for Parties by the Silicon Teens, and in still other ways it's like Ultravox circa Ha!-Ha!-Ha! You can see from song titles such as "Flexy Body," "Dominatrix," or indeed "Rock'n Latex" that there are kinky sexy-naughty preoccupations harking to sectors of glam such as Lou Reed's Transformer (also note there is an ostentatious letter X in every damn one of their song titles). But the attack of guitar and keyboard is bouncy-brite at the same time, dare I say bubblegum. Inevitably, perhaps because they are French, they sound like Plastic Bertrand and "Ca Plane Pour Moi" to me too, in terms of the primitive rock 'n' roll aesthetic. "Rock'n Latex" remains my favorite, perhaps for sentimental reasons. The guitar chords are clanging muted, the yelpy vocal recorded suffocatingly tight with the highs shaved off, the keyboard bottom insistent, and the whole thing propulsive to the max. There's cowbell and even a guitar solo, light and melodic as it is robotic, before it all goes whirling off into a brief psychedelic episode. Poppers, I'm sure. The basic idea is that the people are dressed in latex. All that in 3:05. The intended hit was more likely the title song, which opens the album and actually has videos on YouTube and elsewhere. This song has more of a stomping Glimmer Twins vibe, prowling and tiptoeing all faux honky-tonk with a geeky staccato approach, until the thing opens up big to the tune of "Chinese Rock"—2:33. How did this ever miss?

Leonard Cohen: Live in London (2009)

USA, 157 minutes, documentary
Director: Edward Sanders

Concert films are a breed of documentary unto themselves and the fact is I just don't look at that many. Maybe I've seen enough live shows that I know a movie of one is always a completely different experience. Or maybe I've seen enough bad shows that I forget (again) the magic of the good ones, which concert films can sometimes capture (rationally you would already assume it's a good show if it's getting the film treatment). The concert movies I like—Stop Making Sense, say—are often structured and filmic and not very much like seeing a concert. If they're rambling like a concert can be—The Last Waltz, say (understanding I'm likely in a minority in my indifference to that movie)—they're often even duller than concerts can be. At least in the movies we're spared the tedium of teardowns and setups. But paradoxically teardowns and setups count among the most common elements of the concert experience. Which only underlines how something essential about the actual physical presence is always missing from movie versions.

In any event, Leonard Cohen: Live in London is not cinematic, at all—the director is no one particularly in the movie business, and while the credits emphasize Roscoe Beck's role as musical director there is not a cinematographer credit on IMDb.com. Repeat: No cinematographer credit. Instead, "camera" is folded in with "electrical department." This product is also, while I'm on the caveats, associated with a CD release. It had no theatrical release of its own. So technically it's not a movie, it's a video, which only makes sense on ridiculous marketing levels. I would love to see it on a big screen. What's most remarkable about this Leonard Cohen performance from the summer of 2008 in London is how generous and satisfying it is. Cohen is the logical place to put the credit.

Yes (2009)

For maybe 20 years now I've been in a kind of limbo with the Pet Shop Boys. I suspect most people still think of them as an '80s act, if not a one-hit wonder ("West End Girls," in spite of five more hits that followed in the US and many more internationally). I traveled deep into their catalog until approximately the 1996 album Bilingual, lingering very long and very hard on the Very Relentless package. I've always had a listen since then, even following the singles and B-sides and such (even that Battleship Potemkin thing), but little has ever insinuated itself again the way the work did of a golden period from 1987 to 1994. The closest I came was probably "The Night I Fell in Love," a brilliant shot across the bow to Eminem on the 2002 album Request, which I otherwise lost track of a week or two later. This pattern applied to Yes. When it came out I said Maybe and then the whole thing slipped my mind. So this is a story of one of those happy returns, a phenomenon I think I've seen with novels more than music. I try to read it, I try to read it, I try to read it—multiple attempts across years or even decades. Then one day I pick it up again and it's the best thing I've ever read. Yes is the best Pet Shop Boys album I've heard in a long time and just now I'm thinking the best of the 21st century.

This occurred to me a couple years ago, so the judgment has also turned out to be resilient. Is it really the upbeat positive note of the title? The music certainly pursues such avenues, albeit with their usual wryly detached irony. The opener, "Love etc." sets the tone, insisting you need love. The football chants on the chorus are relentless: "you need more you need more you need more you need more." I think they would find a way to make it say "sex" if that's what they meant. "All Over the World" follows on with a gorgeous takeoff that floats above the planet and marches into dignity accompanied by alien space gun sounds. It's beautiful and full of love etc.: "Exciting and new to say I want you." "Beautiful People," next, is not about the externality, though incapable of laying it on the "inner beauty" line. Still, that's what I hear in the chorus: "I want to live like beautiful people, give like beautiful people, with like beautiful people around." That sounds clannish and like Utopia at once. "Did You See Me Coming?" works because the arrogance of the title and play of the lyrics is belied by the ripening chest swoon of the melody, which somehow grows into a terribly sweet monster of sincerity. "Vulnerable" runs in place with the theme and may sound too much like a type of Pet Shop Boy song, i.e., product. Yet, for all that, the singer (as played, as usual, by Neil Tennant) is "so vulnerable," pleading his case. "More Than a Dream" might be long, but hits sweet spots of its own within the vibe. Even at their worst, the Pet Shop Boys are always at least as good as the pop Al Stewart, a firm floor for their entire career. "Building a Wall" is another song that may feel like reworking, but the twist on Brian Wilson's "In My Room" is fine: "not so much to keep you out, more to keep me in." Then "King of Rome" is more familiar territory ("My October Symphony," "To Speak Is a Sin," "The Samurai in Autumn"), but it's very beautiful territory. I could put down roots here—maybe I have. "Pandemonium" is a rave-up, standard issue, working to stoke the mood. If I'm really into it this is usually good for a minute or two of irresistible dancing with any cat handy.

The weakest songs follow, as if Pet Shop Boys Chris Lowe and Tennant were exhausted with the good times and/or already looking ahead. "The Way It Used to Be" and "Legacy" are the only songs here that pull some shades of self-pity around themselves, prefiguring Elysium. I still try to pay track sequencing some respects. At least there's the convenience that they're easily cut off when listening straight through. Otherwise, Yes tracks 1 to 9 are just the best thing going.

A Moveable Feast (1964/2009)

In 1975, I might have liked A Moveable Feast best of all the books by Ernest Hemingway I read. But among people I knew who disliked him it was singled out for additional revilement for its various self-aggrandizing qualities. So I wasn't sure what to expect many years later, and after disappointments with revisits to two of his more highly regarded novels. As it turns out, my interest in memoir trumped my growing suspicions that Ernest Hemingway is a charlatan, and I enjoyed it as much I had the first time. It's Hemingway's usual wooden-block alternations between description and dialogue, and his usual stoic nonsense, but it's also gossipy and fun, sometimes malicious (notably his acid treatment of Ford Madox Ford, which is cruel). On that score, Hemingway's description alone of a conversation he overheard between Gertrude Stein and, presumably, Alice B. Toklas, makes the book. His memories of F. Scott Fitzgerald are good too, providing views new for me into Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Hemingway's admiration for The Great Gatsby is so sincere and unqualified—he also praises Tender Is the Night, but I have the impression he was almost in awe of Gatsby. I like how Hemingway judges Fitzgerald as a writer, which in turn makes him willing to put himself through the agonies he describes, trying to be Fitzgerald's friend (and remembering always that the first presumption with Hemingway should probably include acknowledging the usual, and obvious, self-aggrandizement, which is real). I also like everything about Ezra Pound here, starting with his very appearance at all. Mostly he comes across as a kind of well-dressed, well-mannered beatnik, which is interesting. Even more interesting, Hemingway omits any discussion at all of Pound's World War II adventures on the side of the Italian Fascists and the consequences suffered.

On the other hand, noting the multiple dates of publication (and also that Ernest Hemingway died in 1961), I think it has to be said that A Moveable Feast is now officially a mess. Hemingway never felt he had it done before he died, and the first edition was the result of his fourth wife Mary's compositing among the fragments. The latest version from 2009, "The Restored Edition," was composited by Sean Hemingway, Ernest's grandson by his second wife, Pauline; among other things, Sean and his father (another of Ernest's sons) felt Pauline was not treated fairly in the first edition. In fact, the memoir mostly features Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, though there is some discussion (briefer and more elliptical in "The Restored Edition") of their breakup and of Pauline. I'm not about to get into the middle of such internecine conflict. Both editions are essentially the same book, and they are both very good. There might be more material in the latter edition, and I particularly liked the Fragments section appended at the end, where you get a nice feel for how Hemingway worked, like watching multiple takes of the same scene from a movie one after the other. The best way to read A Moveable Feast now just might be to read them both (though note: the earlier one appears to be a little harder to acquire, which is probably only going to get worse).

In case it's not at the library.

I Love You, Man (2009)

USA, 105 minutes
Director: John Hamburg
Writers: John Hamburg, Larry Levin
Photography: Lawrence Sher
Music: Theodore Shapiro
Editor: William Kerr
Cast: Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Rashida Jones, Jaime Pressly, Sarah Burns, Jane Curtin, Andy Samberg, J.K. Simmons, Jon Favreau, Rob Huebel, Aziz Ansari, Nick Kroll, Mather Zickel, Thomas Lennon, Lou Ferrigno, Rush

As much as I enjoy laughter, I'm not particularly versed in latter-day American film comedy. I think this one may fall loosely under the "Apatow" label. Director / screenwriter John Hamburg is more closely associated with the Ben Stiller industrial complex, with writing credits on all three Fockers travesties, Zoolander, and Along Came Polly (the last of which he also directed, and the only one I've seen that I liked even approximately). Stiller himself goes way back with Apatow, but more than anything I think it's the familiar faces of Paul Rudd and Jason Segel that is giving me the impression. They are in many of these things, along with the omnipresence of that congenial try-anything gross-out aesthetic that permeates this.

I liked this movie when it came out and then I forgot about it, but seeing it again recently I was surprised by now much closer to classic romantic comedy it is than the usual straight-up broad bids for bigg laffs. Indeed, it is actually quite faithful to the formula, except the formula has been turned cockeyed. The couple that marries at the end, Peter Klaven and Zooey Rice (Rudd and Rashida Jones), are basically OK all through. It's finding Peter a best friend so he can have a best man at the wedding that's more the problem, and therein lie all the familiar "meet / break up / make up" dynamics of the rom-com.

Don't Cry (2009)

I spent a good deal of time believing Mary Gaitskill was a better story writer than novelist, chiefly because there were two books of (very good) stories to one flawed novel that I loved in spite of its flaws—even because of some of its flaws. Veronica changed that calculation, though I'm not entirely sure it isn't flawed too in its ways. But it's such an impressive leap of imagination and memory that it's at least the equal of either collection, let alone any one story. Now Don't Cry seems to take that tilt another step in. Gaitskill is growing older and more ponderous like the rest of us—that's a big part of what made Veronica great—but it also means her crystalline prose can become tangled as it attempts to pin down endless nuance. The arduous quantum mechanics of precision writing will have its toll, and many patches in these stories feel a good bit fussed over. It's reminiscent of the arc of Henry James's progression, perhaps, which I suppose means I should give them another chance. Some I found a chore to plow through—"Folk Song," "Mirror Ball," "The Arms and Legs of the Lake." Others, such as "Today I'm Yours" and "The Little Boy," work reasonably well. "College Town, 1980" was more disappointing because it started so well. "The Agonized Face" is possessed of interesting ideas, and thus a bit arid and intellectualized. I like the last two stories best, I think, "Description" and "Don't Cry." They are linked, but in an odd way, unfolding as two very different—and very differently approached and told—episodes from the life of a creative writing instructor. In the first she has a fairly minor, offstage role. In the second she is present as a supporting player, albeit a key one, and one whose own biography intrudes on and affects, sometimes directly, the development of events. Gaitskill works best for me when she is dealing with the negative space between human cruelty, emotional distance, and the longing for connection. Almost entirely gone here are the references to sadomasochism—as lifestyle, as orientation, as underpinning philosophy—and I find that I miss them. Maybe this represents a kind of maturity for her, but I still miss them.

In case it's not at the library.

The White Ribbon (2009)

Das weiße Band: Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte, Germany/Austria/France/Italy, 144 minutes
Director/writer: Michael Haneke
Photography: Christian Berger
Editor: Monika Willi
Cast: Christian Friedel, Ernst Jacobi, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur, Ursina Lardi, Fion Mutert, Burghart Klaußner, Steffi Kühnert, Maria-Victoria, Leonard Proxauf, Josef Bierbichler, Gabriela Maria Schmeide, Janina Fautz, Enno Trebs, Theo Trebs, Rainer Bock, Roxane Duran, Susanne Lothar

It's not so surprising that veteran director and writer Michael Haneke has erected a scene and setting for The White Ribbon that is rich with allusion and evocative suggestion. That's pretty much business as usual for him, hefting oversize significance out of the quotidian with a surprising and deceptive lack of effort, as seen in such earlier pictures as Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, or especially Cache. What's surprising is where he appears inclined to take it here, spinning a story that is equal parts Village of the Damned and the whole of Ingmar Bergman's oeuvre, a stark, spooky, demon-seed tale, never settling into anything certain, forcing us instead to take the pieces and attempt to put them together ourselves into anything larger.

In a small farming village in Germany shortly before World War I something is terribly wrong. The doctor suffers an accident when the horse he is riding takes a fall as the result of tripping on a wire strung between two posts of a gate. A worker's wife dies in accident; her death leads to her family's ruin. The baron's son is kidnapped and brutally caned and left hanging upside down with his pants at his ankles. A barn burns to the ground. These events are oppressively sinister, individually and taken together. They seem slightly more than accidents, but no one happens to know any such monsters so no one has any idea who to blame. The fragile emotional ecosystem of the villagers, among their various classes and interrelations, begins to rot under the suspicion.

White Material (2009)

France/Cameroon, 106 minutes
Director: Claire Denis
Writers: Claire Denis, Marie N'Diaye, Lucie Borleteau
Photography: Yves Cape
Music: Tindersticks
Editor: Guy Lecorne
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Christopher Lambert, Nicolas Duvauchelle, William Nadylam, Michel Subor, Isaach De Bankole, Adele Ado, Ali Barkai

The premise for White Material risks easy political cliché-mongering but director/writer Claire Denis uses her concrete, allusive filmmaking to abstract and refine it until finally it begins to transmute into something very like a horror film. Its first image is jackals running across a dirt road at night, lit by the headlights of a moving vehicle, and soon after the scene is a dark bedroom in a great house, still at night, where a mysterious corpse is found, "the Boxer" according to the soldiers who discover him, caught in the probing stab of a flashlight beam. The soldiers are silent, ranged against the walls. The bedroom is filled with them.

It's the end days of the last vestiges of colonial control in an unnamed African nation. A civil war is underway and approaching its flash point, with mountain-based revolutionaries and nationalized armed forces pitted against one another and the wealthy landowners of French extraction caught between. For all intents and purposes the action in White Material takes place in the psychic span after Captain Willard's encounter with the French-Vietnamese plantation owners of Apocalypse Now Redux. The situation has grown beyond dire. The clashes have become grimly purposeful. Corpses line the roads and trails, arranged in rows with their faces to the ground. It is not a good time to have blue eyes in that country, one character tells another.

Precious (2009)

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, USA, 109 minutes
Director: Lee Daniels
Writers: Geoffrey Fletcher, Sapphire
Photography: Andrew Dunn
Music: Mario Grigorov
Editor: Joe Klotz
Cast: Gabourey Sidibe, Mo'Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Sherri Shepherd, Lenny Kravitz, Stephanie Andujar, Chyna Layne, Amina Robinson, Xosha Roquemore, Angelic Zambrana, Bill Sage, Sapphire

For all the abuse that it may deserve for the obnoxious official release title—which, on balance, may or may not have done the African-American novelist and poet Sapphire very much good—and for the abuse that it doesn't deserve because of its association with Oprah Winfrey (and, OK, Tyler Perry too), who has been known to get a few things right, I think in the end that Precious has to be counted as a good one. It draws its contrasts starkly, and many of its horrors seem calculated to shock—the obesity, the abuse, the family and other circumstances. But they never feel made up or particularly gratuitous, and in the end it comes across to me as a refreshing and interesting parable of "the system" actually working. I'm not sure there's that much wrong with wanting to stand and cheer for someone who can face down and survive the kinds of things that are going on here and, oh yeah, out there too.

Much has rightly been made of Gabourey Sidibe's brave performance. She owns this top to bottom. It's not just her physical presence, though certainly that's the first thing you notice—implacable, stolid, enduring as the earth itself even as she lumbers across it. But she's also nearly pitch-perfect emotionally, in the way she starts as so fully collapsed within herself, surviving at the most fundamental levels, and gradually begins to crawl out of all that, almost like a slow-motion second birth. Late in the movie, as she tentatively engages with the world, it becomes obvious how smart she is and also devastatingly funny. The transformation is really done well, in the screenplay and direction as well as in Sidibe's performance. But it's ultimately her performance that puts it over most effectively and makes Precious such a pleasure to watch in spite of everything.

Best American Crime Reporting 2009

The 2009 edition was edited by Jeffrey Toobin, who I recall as a cable-news fixture in the '90s most notably on the O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky cases, on both of which he wrote serviceable, journeyman-like books. For all I know he's still a regular on cable news—my blood pressure doesn't allow me to look in on that circus very often any longer. Backstopped as always by Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook, it's likely that even a monkey from a Cary Grant movie could probably put together a creditable collection. Well, that's not entirely fair to Toobin; this is a good collection, and that's what counts. One case recounted here, in "Body Snatchers" by Dan P. Lee, involves a corrupt physician plying an illegal trade in harvested body parts on a surprising scale. It has since turned up more than once on Investigation Discovery channel shows (watch that channel long enough, I'm sorry to say I have discovered, and you start to see some of the same cases appearing with slightly different treatments on different shows). "Non-Lethal Force" by Alec Wilkinson is a nice examination of the ins and outs of law enforcement policy for controlling people without killing or unnecessarily harming them. There's an interesting piece on the JFK assassination too. And I was particularly struck by "Tribal Wars" by Matt McAllester, which recounts gang warfare troubles between Somalian refugees in my home town of Minneapolis, Minnesota—it's a situation that has developed since I left in the '80s and one I have been utterly oblivious to on return visits in recent years. Because it's on this personal level, it's hard to grasp, but there it all is, finely detailed. The usual spectrum of mayhem is present all through this collection, captured neatly in the list on the cover that someone evidently had a lot of fun putting together: "Suburban Murders," "Cage Fighter Cash Heists," "Lone Gunmen," "Credit Card Chaos," "Dead Presidents," "Mutilation in Mexico" (that's another Bowden article), "Migrating Miscreants," so on and so forth. The piece that has stuck with me most is called "American Murder Mystery" by Hanna Rosin. It looks at patterns of crime and housing in Memphis, Tennessee—which, as you may or may not know, has become one of the highest-crime cities in the U.S. in the past 15 years, along with Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; and other unlikely metro areas. It uncovers the disquieting, and discouraging, possibility of a connection with one strain of public housing policy. As usual these pieces are brisk and readable, and go by way too fast. Another worthy entry in this worthy series.

In case it's not at the library.

Avatar (2009)

USA/UK, 162 minutes
Director/writer: James Cameron
Photography: Mauro Fiore
Visual effects: hundreds (scroll down)
Editors: James Cameron, John Refoua, Stephen E. Rivkin
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Wes Studi, Laz Alonso

From the earliest days of its release, before it was clear yet what a monster runaway hit it would turn out to be, before I had even seen it for myself, I have been mystified by the levels of critical revulsion aimed at James Cameron's decade-plus-in-the-making science fiction extravaganza. I know it's a bit of a mug's game to attempt to assign motivations or other psychological overlays to people's reactions to movies, especially those who write about them professionally or as a passionate hobby, but it has been very difficult to read them as anything but churlish backlash of some kind.

Look, I don't know that Avatar is one of those giant generational movies that comes along and (for better or worse) changes everything, the way that movies are looked at and/or made, a Citizen Kane or a Star Wars (make that Jaws) or a 2001 or whatever. But I also don't know that it isn't. And, having seen it a second time now at home, I know I like it a lot more than most of the writers I read and trust on these things—a lot more.

Black Dynamite (2009)

(This is my review of the LAMB April Movie of the Month.)

USA, 84 minutes
Director: Scott Sanders
Writers: Michael Jai White, Byron Minns, Scott Sanders
Photography: Shawn Maurer
Music: Adrian Younge
Editor: Adrian Younge
Cast: Michael Jai White, Obba Babatunde, Kevin Chapman, Tommy Davidson, Richard Edson, Arsenio Hall, Byron Minns, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Nicole Sullivan, James McManus

Black Dynamite is an amiable send-up of '70s-era blaxploitation fare that generally hits most of the right notes, and provides a few laughs along the way. I never have been a huge fan of B-movies of this era or very many others, so caveats, but it looks and moves like ones I know, for example with the grainy umber palette suffused all through, reproducing digitally the slightly washed-out, slightly muddy feel to a certain kind of film stock. It features a corny horn-based funk band on the score accompanying the action—at times it seems like that music, which I recall hearing at least as often on TV of the time, punctuates every last plot development no matter how small. Characters are prone to erupt with "baaad" exclamations such as, "Sister Betty made some hog maws and, man, she put her ankle in it." Some of the best laughs, for me, came at the expense of the clumsy writing from those movies of yore, as when an early flashback scene embeds exposition in the dialogue: "Jimmy, I am 18-year-old Black Dynamite and you're my 16-year-old kid brother." Or, in another scene, when characters start reading stage directions along with their lines, e.g., "The militants turn, startled." (Did that really happen in some of those movies?) A lot of clever and amusing animation accompanies the action, such as a panorama of zodiac symbols that serves as montage during a sex scene. The plot revolves around a nefarious government plot (personally overseen by Dick Nixon) involving malt liquor, the mysterious death of Black Dynamite's kid brother, orphans on smack, and various other matters. Michael Jai White plays Black Dynamite; I've only seen him previously in 1997's Spawn, a movie I don't recall well. He's fine as the big swaggering dick and Vietnam veteran out to avenge his brother's death and otherwise get to the bottom of things. He's also a terrific fighter, particularly when he lets fly with kicks, and he has a tidy way of setting his face into a mask of self-seriousness that serves many purposes—evincing his imposing macho presence, resetting after laugh lines, and generally making clear to all around him that he is someone to be taken seriously when they are all clowns. Wait a minute, isn't he the biggest clown here? And speaking of, one of my favorite sight gags comes in a formal meeting of pimps, when one Captain Kangaroo Pimp is asked for his input—and there he is, an almost perfect Robert Keeshan lookalike in a red jacket, a kindly looking white fellow with gray mustache, bad haircut, and all. It doesn't make a lick of sense. Oh, but did you think it would? This must be one to get your ankle into.