In Books

Rarely is it possible for fiction this night-haunted and tortured to have such ease and flow. But flow is what the writing of Richard Yates does, even though it may start off in social embarrassment and run through painful miscommunication and foolhardy self-delusion before ending in nearly catatonic despair. There is a pounding life and movement in his gloomy pages that helps stave off a reader’s sinking notion that things are going to turn out quite poorly indeed for all the sad suckers whose lives Yates is maneuvering with autobiographical clarity. It catches you up before smashing you down. (Don’t say you weren’t warned.)

The Everyman’s Library Richard Yates is available wherever finely wrought but grim as hell literature is sold. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Comics

In its basic conception, the Swamp Thing is a not unfamiliar variant on that old comic and fantasy staple: the misunderstood monster. Frequently the monster in question is a gentle giant, saving the little boy who believed in him but was about to get run over by a speeding car, just before the monster itself is gunned down by a paranoid detachment of National Guardsmen. Although the Swamp Thing does indeed get pursued by squads of soldiers, weapons bristling and teeth clenched against the dark unknown, and has been known to save the innocent from time to time, nobody would ever really refer to him as a gentle giant—particularly after Alan Moore got done with him…

Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book One is available in finer comic book stores everywhere. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Theaters

You think you’ve seen this movie. Irascible old codger (white, of course), who doesn’t need or care about any other human being on the planet, gets his ice-cold heart thawed by a fireball of empathy (maybe a child, or a colorful minority) who comes bounding into his life. There are indeed elements of that movie floating to the surface from time to time in Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo, but fortunately they tend to get slapped to the side by the vision (yes, we can call it that) of a filmmaker with better things on his mind…

Goodbye Solo opens today, and if things go right it could end up one of the most fondly-remembered American films of the year. Read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters

It says something about a film when the greatest character in it is not human or animal, but in fact a farm. True to its title, Czech writer-director Bohdan Sláma’s The Country Teacher is, indeed, about a teacher in the country. But although there is ripe material here for some moving drama, the only element that truly comes to life is the farm where much of the film’s action takes place, with its heaping mounds of hay, gorgeously sprawling acres of fields, lake and forest, and dilapidated main building that looks as though it could easily give room to a family of 15. Somewhere within the beautiful confines of this farm, and its evocatively rendered rural community, Sláma locates the necessary elements for a story, but never ties them together in any appreciable manner…

The Country Teacher opens this week in limited release. You can read the full review at Film Journal International.

In Theaters

A polarizing family secrets drama whose moment of revelation is continually diverted in favor of enticing new fragments of the truth, Must Read After My Death is a documentary that does its best to get at the truth, no matter how frustratingly far away that truth insists on receding. Watching it is like receiving a spooky postcard from the shiny-on-the-outside postwar American suburbs, whose text reveals the fever-pitch dreams, disappointment, and madness roiling underneath….

Must Read After My Death is still playing in limited release, or can also be viewed online for a mere $2.99 at the website here. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Books

Those who read Thomas Rick’s lacerating 2006 take on the first phase of the Iraq War debacle, Fiasco (given what he uncovered, the title was shockingly not hyperbole), might be surprised by his thought-provoking follow-up and what it reveals about the war’s second act. The weighted phrase that seemed to choke the nation’s news outlets a couple years back, “the surge,” takes on an entirely new meaning once you have taken in Rick’s dramatic, Bob Woodward-esque, behind-the-scenes narrative of how it was actually thought up and then implemented on the ground. The story of how that all came about is, like just about everything else associated with the Iraq War and the Bush White House, a bloody comedy of errors and incompetence. But what makes the tale of this phase of the war different is the fact that, despite all the odds, the long-shot gamble taken by a desperate president who’d gotten in over his head by relying on the wrong people to fight his half-thought-out crusade, may have actually worked…

Thomas Ricks’ The Gamble is in stores now and well worth your time, one of the first important books of the year. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Theaters

It doesn’t take much to make the life of a spy look great. The travel, expense account, sense of danger, all that role-playing — it’s catnip for most people, whose greatest investment in daily skullduggery tends to be making their boss believe they’re actually working. In Duplicity, however, writer/director Tony Gilroy ups the ante by reveling in all of the above while throwing in a keen sense of fun and maybe even a dash of honest-to-god romance. It’s a dashing and bright entertainment that aims to please without scraping the floor for your approval. In other words, about as different a world from Gilroy’s Michael Clayton as could be imagined…

Duplicity opens wide today. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters

A mob film that’s as far from the genre’s standard operating procedure as could be imagined, Gomorrah paints a bleak and impressionistic picture of a society not just riddled with gangsters, but crippled by them. Not only are the gangsters shown here resolutely unglamorous, they’re disloyal, cowardly, and frequently downright stupid; if there were any cops around in this world, these guys wouldn’t last a day. But the Neapolitan towns the film sets itself in seem hardly the kind of place capable of mustering a vigorous law enforcement response to the random brutality and open-air drug markets. Instead, the society appears little more than a host body for the Camorra (the particularly thuggish Neapolitan version of the Mafia), existing only to provide more euros for the weekly take and bodies for the slaughter…

Gomorrah has been playing in limited release for a few weeks in larger cities, should hopefully be expanding throughout the country over the spring. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Books

In his new paradigm-shifter of a book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (Penguin, January), P.W. Singer musters an arsenal of evidence—ranging from overseas battlegrounds to factories busily filling lucrative Pentagon contracts to the most bleeding-edge research workshops—to make one searing point: that human society is hurtling toward one of those great hinges of history, and we are wholly unprepared for its implications…

Wired for War is in stores now. Read it soon. You can read the full article on the book in the current issue of In These Times.

In Theaters

The good news about the films nominated for best live action shorts this year is that it’s a thoroughly worthwhile series, whether you’re making a night at the theater of it, or just wanted to get the lot of them from iTunes. Unlike most like-minded compilations, the Oscar Nominated Short Films 2009 program is a uniformly solid one, with only one entry of generally mediocre effect, and at least a couple that qualify as truly excellent. Unlike self-impressed Oscar-bait features like The Reader or even the wildly uneven Curious Case of Benjamin Button, this one is pretty much a risk-free venture.

The Live Action (and animated!) Oscar Nominated Short Films 2009 is showing (hopefully) at your local arthouse. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Theaters

Definitions in cinema have gotten pretty limited when you watch a film as over-the-moon romantic as James Gray’s Two Lovers and realize that by modern standards, it barely qualifies as a “romance”. Somewhere along the way, the very word became co-opted by the purveyors of music-montages and slapstick embarrassments that always ended up at the altar (and adding “comedy” to the description makes the icky girl stuff go down better, it seems). Modern love stories about the young seem mostly about the wedding; it has more to do with scheduling and the frantic rush toward or away from commitment than love.

Two Lovers is in theaters now. You can read the full review at this week’s “The Screener” column at PopMatters.

In Theaters

You can tell a lot about a man by watching how he shops for appliances. In the case of Bryan Mills—the ex-secret-operative-whatever whom Liam Neeson plays with dour glee in the speedy and semi-repulsive kidnap thriller that is Taken—audiences get a measure of the kind of man he is by watching him buy just the right karaoke machine for his daughter’s 17th birthday. He’s a careful man, with a penchant for over-planning, but he doesn’t dilly-dally, isn’t afraid to make decisions. So viewers will feel secure knowing that when said daughter gets kidnapped in Paris by Albanian human traffickers, Mills is the guy to go after them and start snapping fingers like so many dry twigs…

For our sins, Taken is playing pretty much everywhere. You can read the full review at this week’s “The Screener” column at PopMatters.

In Movies

When confronted with the sort of ejaculatory, hand-waving theorizing that flows through Sophie Fiennes’ proudly abstruse The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, it’s hard to not to feel a disconnect. It seems hardly the kind of thing one should be watching on a cinema screen or (more likely, given the film’s peekaboo release schedule) television. A more proper setting for this freeflowing dissertation would be a bright-walled university lecture hall at nine in the morning, where the bearded professor is desperately trying to wake the students who are dozing through his intro to film studies class…

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema is playing occasionally, here and there, and should be available soon on DVD. You can read the full review in this week’s “The Screener” column at PopMatters.

New on DVD

One of William S. Burroughs’ more famous quotes concerns the meaning of the title for Naked Lunch. No matter that he was probably just winding up the interviewer, Burroughs still captured a shiver of dread when he explained it as being “the frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” The line may not be appropriate for the entire opus, particularly when one is talking about Mugwumps, but it’s nevertheless a feeling that everyone is familiar with. It’s that second in time when the scales fall off and you see the world—or, more often, a particular corner of it—in a completely new way, as though for the first time.

Nicholas Geyrhalter’s film Our Daily Bread is a 21st century naked lunch in the true sense of what Burroughs meant, not a scattershot impressionistic sensory assault, but an eye-opener that can actually change the way one views the world. At least part of it.

Our Daily Bread is now finally available on DVD. You can read the full review at this week’s “The Screener” column at PopMatters.

New on DVD

It’s not really Billy Crystal’s fault. Maybe it is, but he’s allowed benefit of the doubt. After all, his name’s not listed in the writing credits for the six-hour PBS miniseries history of American comedy, Make ‘Em Laugh. So, it’s certainly possible that the blame for his thuddingly unfunny opening host segments for each episode could go to the actual filmmakers behind this cheap pratfall of a series. After all, these are the guys who managed to rope in everyone from Groucho Marx to Mort Sahlt and Bill Cosby and get maybe a dozen solid hard laughs out of it…

Make ‘Em Laugh is now available on DVD. You can read the full review at PopMatters.