Avoiding prison

Dale, Wendy. (2003). Avoiding prison and other noble vacation goals: adventures in love and danger.New York: Three Rivers Press.

Started reading it yesterday. After Disclaimers, Claimers, and Acknowledgments she has an Introduction: Travel Plans. It begins with a quote from Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters:

Anything you can do is boring and old an perfectly okay. You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive it. You can't imagine any way to escape. There's no way to get out.

As is my wont, I went looking for information on Palahniuk; I knew nothing about him, had never heard of him. There are numerous entries for him in the OPAC. But I wanted more detailed information, so I went to the NY Times website to look for book reviews. And I found quite an interesting essay.


June 8, 2008 - Love the Ones You’re With
By LUCY ELLMANN

SNUFF
By Chuck Palahniuk.
197 pp. Doubleday. $24.95.

What the hell is going on? The country that produced Melville, Twain and James now venerates King, Crichton, Grisham, Sebold and Palahniuk. Their subjects? Porn, crime, pop culture and an endless parade of out-of-body experiences. Their methods? Cliché, caricature and proto-Christian morality. Props? Corn chips, corpses, crucifixes. The agenda? Deceit: a dishonest throwing of the reader to the wolves. And the result? Readymade Hollywood scripts.

Wow.

So not only has America tried to ruin the rest of the world with its wars, its financial meltdown and its stupid stupid food, it has allowed its own literary culture to implode. Jazz and patchwork quilts are still doing O.K., but books have descended into kitsch. I blame capitalism, Puritanism, philistinism, television and the computer.


Chuck Palahniuk has his uses as a shock jock: 73 people (according to him) have fainted during public readings of his short story “Guts.” A riotous account of some disastrous underwater onanism involving a swimming-pool drain, that story excellently delineates the shallowness of American life. But his latest novel, “Snuff,” the dry-as-dust tale of people making a documentary about a woman who wants to break (as the promotional copy delicately puts it) “the world record for serial fornication,” is not so much shallow as bitter. Whatever point Palahniuk meant to make seems to have been lost in a self-induced miasma of meaninglessness — onanism of a more dispiriting sort.


Told primarily from the perspective of three participants, Mr. 72, Mr. 137 and Mr. 600, most of the action takes place in a vast hall where hundreds of men in their underpants plow through junk food and Viagra. All 600 of them have volunteered to spend the day sharing one woman and one toilet. It sounds like an athlete’s foot bonanza! But that’s show business.


On the plus side, the men have been certified free of venereal disease. Nothing to worry about then — except that this is the bottom of the barrel Palahniuk has chosen to scrape. He even dares to make a Melville-related joke (inevitably, I guess) based on the name of the whale. Not wise: Palahniuk’s banality makes the Pequod smell pretty sweet.


This novel reeks not of lust but of the lamp, with many a discharge of nerdy info on everything from cyanide poisoning, Claudius’ wife Messalina, vibrators, defibrillators, gangsta tattoos and Hitler’s inflatable Aryan sex doll to fluffers and intercourse-induced embolisms: stuff most 10-year-olds know — or could Google.


There is a running gag (to which the reader’s response may be to gag and run) about porn film titles, only a few of which — “Gropes of Wrath,” “Beat Me in St. Louis,” “Lady Windermere’s Fanny” — can be mentioned here. Some don’t even attempt to be clever. “Inside Miss Jean Brody” sounds like a title suggested by a newly arrived Martian.


Is this what passes for invention these days? Do Palahniuk’s readers chortle at such things? Have they no pride? There’s a glaring absence of finesse. A paragraph-long description of difficulty with excretory hygiene is offered by one “dude” as an analogy for a bad day, then repeated almost word for word at the end of the book. It’s not that great an analogy.


The telegraphing of the denouement is also out of control, with one allusion after another to genetic links between the star and the people servicing her: a baby was given up for adoption many years before. One possible “son,” the confused Mr. 72, has been perving for years all over a pocket-size rubber edition of her vulva.


Revulsion is expressed indiscriminately: Palahniuk is contemptuous of everything and everybody! Including, I suspect, us. The people in this novel don’t merely speak in clichés, their every action is clichéd. It’s as if, like some grumpy groundhog, Palahniuk has come out of his burrow only to tell us he has nothing to say — unless it’s that porn has ruined sex. But we knew that already.


The floppy plot seeks refuge in cosmetic tips and movie trivia, with a pretty obscene focus on actors who came to grief, if not death, while filming some picture or other. If this catalog of corporeal catastrophe is supposed to justify snuff movies, it fails. The trouble with snuff movies is that the wrong people die.


The risk in objecting to all this is that you look like a fuddy-duddy. But the problem is not the moral turpitude that Palahniuk pretends to promote or tolerate; the problem is his lack of artistry. He has allowed the failings of the culture he criticizes to infect his own work. The feeble irony employed here isn’t up to the job of processing all the detritus he hurls at us. Who will de-trite us now?


Instead of any real creative effort, Palahniuk chucks at us every bit of porno-talk he can muster. But not in a good way. This is no celebration of a field in which America excels — the hatching of new vocabulary — but an exercise in deadening the English language. Johnny One-Note, this book is shooting blanks. Alienation is soooooo 20th century.

Lucy Ellmann’s most recent novel is “Doctors & Nurses.”

Sin nombre

Sin Nombre, sometimes also known by its international English language title Without Name is an award-winning Spanish language film written and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga , from Focus Features and produced by Amy Kaufman.

Parallel story lines of gang members and Honduran migrants riding the rails to the US border. The violence of the gang is demonstrated in the initiation of a young boy into the gang, in the gang leader's attempted rape of a woman who happens to be a gang member's secret girlfriend, and the robbery of migrants riding on top of a train going north. The film is very well made, and the story is enrapturing. I kept wondering if those who oppose migration into the US would be affected in seeing the determination, courage and grit of those hoping to get into the US to seek a better life.

Enchanted April

Two English wives search for an escape from the dreariness of unhappy marriages, and go to a castle on the Italian coast for the month of April. Based on a book by Elizabeth von Arnim.

Lottie Wilkins (played by Josie Lawrence - whom, at first, I did not recognize, byt soon realized I remembered from the English , and original, version of Whose line is it anyway?) sees a newspaper advert for an Italian castle being let for April, with servants, and decides she wants to go. In her ladies club she speaks with Rose Arbuthnot (played by Miranda Richardson), and convinces her that the month's respite would do them good. Soon Mrs. Arbuthnot is in charge of the details, and rents the castle from George Briggs (played by Michael Kitchen, of Foyle's War). To offset the cost of the month's rent, they advertise for women to share their month's idyll, and receive, to their utter surprise, only two answers. One is crusty Mrs. Fisher (played by Joan Plowright), a widow whose husband had been part of English intellectual circles in which personages such as Tennyson existed, and who retains a rather elevated sense of herself. The second respondent is Lady Caroline Dester (played by Polly Walker), a society beauty who longs to be away from all the attention of men clawing at her, all the parties she attends, and simply do nothing.

It was a kick to see Joan Plowright, the reason I searched out the film (being on a Plowright binge, having seen Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont and Tea with Mussolini recently). An added fun detail was the presence of an Arbuthnot, as there had been a charactert with the same name in Claremont. She plays the character marvelously, and some of her quirks and mannerisms, and vocal inflections, are there.

The Italian countryside is a marvelous added detail. The men in the film, Alfred Molina playing Mellersh Wilkins, Michael Kitchen as George Briggs, and Jim Broadbent as Frederick Arbuthnot, are quite hapless.

A gem.

Off the map

I'd give it a 75% mark, out of a hundred. Quirky story of a famiuly living off the grid in New Mexico. They get by on less than $5,000 a year, from the man's veterans benefits and their selling of stuff. They get some things and services they need through barter. They home-school their daughter.

As the movie opens young Bo is exploring her world as her mother, Arlene, struggles to hold the family together amidst her husband Charley's deep depression. Their friend George visits, hangs out silentlym eats, and takes Bo out fishing. Into this life enters an IRS agent. Finding Arlene naked gardening, he is enraptured, and then stung by a bee, falling into a deep fevered illness.

There is a lot of melodrama, Charley's depression and Arlene's quirkiness not so much explored as exposed; William's psyche is troubled by a memory he begins to believe is not real, but it is not altogether clear why; only Bo's role works well. The movie promises to be more than it becomes, and falls flat.

5 best: Pete Dexter on fiction about families

1. The Complete Stories. Flannery O'Connor. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971. SS O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor died of lupus at age 39, leaving behind two novels, the material for two books of nonfiction and 32 short stories—perhaps half the stories close to perfect. A prime example is "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," about a family heading from Atlanta to Florida on vacation. The husband and wife ("a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage"), their three children, a grandmother and her cat are not far into the trip before an accident (startled cat, clawed driver) sends the car into a ditch. Another car comes along, but the would-be rescuers turn out to be three escaped convicts. Then comes one of fiction's great revelatory scenes, when the grandmother, even as the other members of the family are being led off into the woods and executed, bargains for her life with the convict called The Misfit. The grandmother, too, will soon be dispatched—but not before her pleading turns into a religious discussion. "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit says, once she is dead, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.'' As this mesmerizing short-story collection shows, O'Connor's tales—many of them about families and distant relations— seem to have come to her built-in with such scenes and lines and characters.

2. Edisto. Padgett Powell. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984. FIC Powell

Here's why—I imagine—J.D. Salinger has never come out of hiding. From the moment "Catcher In the Rye" was published in 1951, every novel written about a precocious kid found some critic erroneously calling it the best book about precocious youth since "Catcher in the Rye." Then one day in 1984 Salinger—again, I'm imagining—had the bad luck to pick up "Edisto," by a young man called Padgett Powell, who had never written a novel before, and the next day the old recluse woke up feeling like Floyd Patterson the morning after his first fight with Sonny Liston. What Salinger would have seen when he opened "Edisto" was what Patterson saw when he looked across the ring into Liston's baleful eyes: the real thing. It's not just anybody, after all, who can write a believable novel about youthful brilliance. "Edisto" is the story of a 12-year-old named Simons Everson Manigault, whose sophisticated-beyond-his-years tone can't disguise how unfathomable he finds the adult world. The mysteries begin with his mother—or "the Doctor," as he thinks of this haughty college teacher—and his father, or "the Progenitor," who is no longer with the family. A mysterious stranger soon becomes the boy's surrogate father, teaching him about life using "one ounce of suggestion and pounds of patience." Padgett Powell is a writer of strange and original gifts. I just can't get over how little attention he receives from the thumb-suckers who sit around bemoaning the state of the arts in America.

3. Straight Man. Richard Russo. Random House, 1997. FIC Russo

The story of William Henry Devereaux, Richard Russo's middle-age university professor, begins with a remembrance of how, as a boy, he had begged his parents for a dog for years and then he finally got one. Devereaux's father, a well-known literary critic not interested in dogs or kids or, in the end, his wife, shows up one afternoon with an ancient Irish setter, who limps into the kitchen five minutes after arriving and dies. As his father buries the dog, Devereaux suggests naming it Red. His father looks at him in disbelief—name a dead dog? "It's not an easy time for any parent," muses Devereaux, "this moment when the realization dawns that you've given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living legacy, that it bears your name." Russo's access to the pulse of family attachments can make it all too easy to overlook the power of his great comic novels, like the hugely entertaining "Straight Man."

That is overrating it.

4. A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories. Norman Maclean. U. Chicago, 1976. FIC Maclean

The writing just drops on you out of a tree. Norman Maclean (1902-90), a revered Shakespeare professor at the University of Chicago, published only two books, one an account of the 1949 smoke-jumping tragedy in Montana's Mann Gulch and the other this one, a 104-page novella about two brothers, their father and the mysteries of family love. For the entire length of "A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories," Maclean sustains a voice so precise and beautiful that it becomes part of the story itself—as fundamental and natural to what is here as the characters and the trout-fishing rivers where matters of love and attachment settle out into time. Here's the narrator, one of the brothers, on the devastating moment when a big fish gets away: "The fish has gone and you are extinct, except for four and half ounces of stick to which is tied some line and a semitransparent thread of catgut to which is tied a little curved piece of Swedish steel to which is tied a part of a feather from a chicken's neck." In the end, it's the voice that stays with you, long after the particulars of the story have mingled with other stories and faded away—a reminder of the consequential things that measured, dead-accurate sentences can be.

5. Rhine Maidens. Carolyn See. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981. FIC See

This explosive, driven little novel—which makes you feel, almost as soon as you begin, that it's slipping through your fingers too fast—could well be the most explicit, reasonable description of the craziness of women ever written. I'm not referring to the specific craziness of specific women— which is here, too, and beautifully done—but to a general condition: that wild, random windsock blowing somewhere out there. Carolyn See's novel is built around two women. The mother is in late middle age and bitter, so thoroughly disabused of all happiness and hope that even the idea of them makes her physically sick. The daughter, 20 years younger, has two unremarkable and unlikable children and a similarly unremarkable and unlikable television screenwriter for a husband. The daughter can see for herself who she married but is nevertheless scared to death of losing him. Many writers experience a period of bereavement after they finish a novel—not as bad as your dog dying but bad enough. Finishing "Rhine Maidens" did that to me, just as a reader.

—Mr. Dexter, whose novel "Paris Trout" (1988) won the National Book Award, is the author, most recently, of "Spooner."

Elizabethtown

Amazing how mediocre films continue to get made; not as amazing as that they are popular. I don't know how this turkey did, nor do I know why it was made, but I do know I didn't like it. Ebert, who can be savage with those films he doesn't like, unexplainably liked it.

Ladies in Lavender

Maggie Smith and Judi Dench play two sisters living in splendid isolation in Cornwall. One day they find a body washed up on the beach, who turns out to be Andrea, a Polish musician who washed up on shore (it is never fully explained how or why that happened). The sisters become fond of Andrea: Janet (Smith) becomes a somewhat remote mother figure, who speaks enough German to communicate with the young man; Ursula (Dench) becomes infatuated with him, the love she has never had for anyone now directed to Andrea. The local doctor at first treats the youngster, then becomes resentful of his presence, and finally jealous of him. A young Russian woman, Olga, is in town, painting, and rebuffs the doctor's romantic advances. It is then that the doctor tells the local police that he suspects the foreigners in their midst. Olga tells Andrea that he is a very talented violinist, and wishes him to meet her brother, a concert violinist and conductor.

Dench and Smith do their usual great work.

Books on Finance During Trouble

1. The House of Morgan Ron Chernow. Atlantic Monthly, 1990. 332.12 C


Can a bank actually be heroic? Ron Chernow suggests as much in his exhaustive history of J.P. Morgan and its instrumental role in the development of the industrial Western economy from the late 19th century to the end of the 20th. But the clear-eyed Chernow does not ignore the less-than-heroic in this National Book Award-winning title, which is as much a social and political history as it is the story of the Morgan dynasty. Of the fallout from the Crash of 1873, Chernow writes: "Not for the last time, America turned against Wall Street with puritanical outrage and a sense of offended innocence." When World War I erupted: "Wall Street, which prided itself on its prescience, was once again caught napping by a historic event." Both tendencies remain in place today. What we do not have is a Wall Street king like John Pierpont Morgan, the man who built the banking dynasty and who had the power to intervene personally in the Panic of 1893 and save the U.S. Treasury by launching a syndicate to replenish the nation's gold supply.


[Emphasis added. Seems some things never change.]



2. The Go-Go Years.  John Brooks. Weybright & Talley, 1973. 332.645 B

Just as the stock market moves in cycles, even though each new generation seems to think each new high and low is happening for the first time, so, too, do market players often imagine that they're breaking new ground when most are not. Today's high-flyers are pretty much the same as those depicted by John Brooks in "The Go-Go Years," his account of how the stock market changed during the 1960s. At the very moment when stocks were truly going mainstream in America, Brooks produced one of the most enjoyable and insightful books ever written about the tribes and tactics of the stock market. Chronicling the escapades of almost-forgotten swashbucklers such as Gerald Tsai and Saul Steinberg, he produced incomparable observations about Wall Street's merry-go-round of triumph and tragedy. He describes 1968 as the year "Wall Street had become a mindless glutton methodically eating itself to paralysis and death," something that happened again in the period 2004-07. And what of our capacity to learn from our mistakes? "Reform is a frail flower that languishes in the hot glare of prosperity," he observes. Given that prosperity still looks a while off at this point in 2010, maybe reform will actually bloom.

3. The Bubble Economy. Christopher Wood. Atlantic Monthly, 1992. 332.6322 W

"What everybody knows is seldom worth knowing," begins "The Bubble Economy," an incisive, readable assessment of the Japanese real-estate boom and bust of the 1980s. Christopher Wood, the former Tokyo bureau chief for the Economist, writes with such flair that it's a shame he gave up journalism, becoming a financial analyst and the publisher of the newsletter Greed & Fear. His book has aged well; swap out names and institutions and it might have been written last year. "Isaac Newton actually arrived in Japan in 1990," Wood writes. "His presence did not prove a pretty sight in a country where too many people had concluded that the laws of gravity, when applied to their own financial markets, had somehow been suspended." Like a faded rock star, the 367-year-old Newton is back for another world tour.

4. When Genius Failed. Roger Lowenstein.  Random House, 2000. 332.6 L


A raft of books have been written—and are still being written—trying to explain the complex financial products, such as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, behind the near collapse of Wall Street about 16 months ago. The last time something this complicated took the system to the brink, it was the crash in 1998 of the gigantic hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, when its "relative value" trades went bad. Luckily Roger Lowenstein was on the case—there is no better writer for explaining the intricacies of finance in eminently understandable terms. His description of how Wall Street reached its precarious state in 1998, necessitating a rush to bail out LTCM, captures the birth of the "too big to fail" doctrine: "Almost imperceptibly, the Street had bought into a massive faith game, in which each bank had become knitted to its neighbor through a web of contractual obligations requiring little or no down payment." A decade later, we'd done it again. If more people had read "When Genius Failed," today's miseries might have been avoided.

5. Point of No Return. John P. Marquand. Little, Brown, 1949.  FIC Marquand

While Wall Street hardly has trouble generating stories that seem straight out of a novel, there are a handful of sublime works of fiction that capture the spirit of its strivers in ways that nonfiction cannot. These novels, like Tom Wolfe's excellent "Bonfire of the Vanities," show us what the traders were thinking as well as what they were doing. Nearly four decades before "Bonfire," John P. Marquand wrote "Point of No Return," a lost masterpiece that shines a bright light on the mind-set of that species of Banker Americanus that helped to build the modern financial-services edifice and that colonized suburbia. Marquand's protagonist, Charles Gray, managed not just to survive but to thrive in the 1929 stock market crash, the Depression and its aftermath, and he has collected an enviable set of trophies: the new house in Westchester County, the wife, the two kids and the country-club membership. But "Point of No Return" is hardly a cheerful success story. Instead, it's a gripping portrayal of a man obsessed with roads not taken and of the insecurities that lie just beneath a veneer of seeming achievement. "The more you get, the more afraid you get," says Gray. "Maybe fear is what makes the world go round."

— Mr. Duff McDonald is the author of "Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase" (Simon & Schuster, 2009). He is a contributing editor at New York magazine.

Mountains Beyond Mountains

Mentioned in an article about Haiti that appeared in today's Journal.


Much about modern Haiti is explained by the rough 35-mile journey from Port-au-Prince to Zanmi Lasante, Creole for "Partners in Health." This oasis-like hospital, made famous by the 2003 bestseller "Mountains Beyond Mountains," sits on a dirt road in Haiti's central plateau, one of the poorest regions of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere.


Credit: Mark L. Tompkins for The Wall Street Journal - Patients receive treatment Monday at rural Zanmi Lasante, operated by a Boston-based organization.

Brief Encounter

Watched film in two parts: started it last Thursday evening, finished it last evening (before watching Mrs. Palfrey yet again).
Rather slow. Melodramatic. Yet I managed to enjoy it. Rachmaninoff's

Piano Concerto No. 2  played by Eileen Joyce, runs through the film.

Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson

The man who never was

Quite good. 1955. It worked quite well. Of course, there is a website for the operation itself.

Clifton Webb plays the role of Ewen Montagu, the British operative that masterminds the deception of the Germans, an operation to make them think that Sicily will not be the main objective of the Allied invasion of Europe in 1943. A body is sent as an emissary, his pockets filled with the every-day objects that any man would have; an attached briefcase contains documents that make it seem that Greece will be the main objective of the Allied invasion.

I became aware of the story in reading David Ignatius's Body of Lies. I have the book, written by Ewen Montagu, who was portrayed by Clifton Webb in the film.

Webb was born in Indiana, yet his English accent was quite good. His career was rather interesting: he did not make many films, yet had a handful of very good roles, including this one, Laura and Razor's Edge (nominated for awards for the latter two).

Gloria Grahame plays the role of a woman looking for romance, an American who every so often has something approaching an accent I judged to have been English. She shares a flat with Pam, who is secretary to Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu. When the plan is underway, implementing it requires credible details and items. One is judged to be a love letter from the dead man's sweetheart. Lucy (who refers to herself early in the film as a librarian) is falling in love with a pilot. Pam is assigned the task of writing a love letter, but has trouble with it (being somewhat sexless herself, she remarks to Lucy, after warning her not to fall in love with a pilot, that if she were to fall in love, she would allow it to happen during the war, to avoid pain and to save her full effort and strength for the war effort). Pining for her pilot lover, Lucy dictates a letter full of longing, pathos, unfulfilled love, fear, and passion.

The body is released from a submarine, wearing a Mae West (also called so in the book), his briefcase attached to a chain that wraps around his waist and down and out of his sleeve. It is found by Spanish in Huelva. That is described  in the book: Huelva is far enough away from Gibraltar that it is trusted the body will not be delivered to the British there. It is also known by the British that there is a German operative in the Huelva region who is likely to get documents from the washed-up British man.

The Germans (called Jerry by the British officers) are impressed, but need confirmation that the dead man (Michael Martin) was really whom he seemed to be. An operative is dispatched to ascertain the truth; he is played by Stephen Boyd. He lets a room in a boarding house, using an Irish brogue to charm the landlady. Once inside, he sets up his telegraph machine, communicates with his people, and sets out to find proof.

He goes to a tailor shop and inquires about his "friend" having bought shirts there. That is inconclusive. He winds up in the flat of the two women, and waits. Pam comes home, and he speaks with her, not knowing her role or job. Eventually Lucy shows up, after having received a phone call from her Joe's pilot mate, telling her of his demise.

In the flat Patrick O'Reilly asks questions, including some about Michael Martin. In her grief Lucy speaks of the pain of romance and of loss, and O'Reilly is convinced that Michael martin was a real man. Before leaving he gives the women his address. He goes back to his flat and telegraphs his contacts including saying that if they do not hear back from him in an hour then they can assume that Michael Martin wasn't real.

The Brits go after O'Reilly, but before actually arresting him Montagu calls the commander and reasons with him: O'Reilly wants to be arrested, so let us not do so. When they do not arrest him, O'Reilly telegraphs his contacts that martin was real.

Feature films as history

Selected papers from a conference sponsored by Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung, University of Bielefeld held in 1979.

Cover of book shows "Jacket illustration of Battleship Potemkin poster from the National Film Archive, London" of a sailor with the ship's name on the headband of his cap.

The book contains papers on:
1. Introduction: Feature films as history
2. Battleship Potemkin
3. Germany and France in 1920s
4. Jean Renoir
5. British films, 1935-1947
6. Film censorship in Liberal England
7. Casablanca, Tennessee Johnson and The Negro Soldier
8. Hollywood fights anti-Semitism

Local Color

Interesting story about a 17 year old budding artist who gets to meet a Russian painting master he idolizes, who, in turn, is a vodka-swilling, bitter recluse. The film works well, but the cursing is incessant, and overdone. Nonetheless, the film was a good one.

Body of lies

Film based on novel by David Ignatius. Glad I  had it; had started to watch Is Anybody There? with Michael Caine, which I turned off.

This one was an action-packed political thriller: a CIA man on the ground in Iraq is chasing bad guys, makes an important find, and is rescued from terrible death by black helicopters who thwack two SUVs filled with bad guys weilding rocket-propelled grenade launchers (one is launched, but hits the CIA-man's vehicle, which rolls over and pins him and his aide-de-camp; he, Roger Ferris, is rescued by US helicopter crew who jump out of the chopper and throw him into the bird, which flies away and takes him to a hospital). In turn, he is being tracked by satellites controlled from back in the US, and the choppers are given orders by those same remote sources.

If the technology is indeed that good, it is a wonder the US in not doing better. Then again, the movie makes the point, through the person of Roger Ferris, that the bad guys communicate person-to-person and in code, and that high technology is the wrong weapon to wield in combating them.

Leonardo DiCaprio does an excellent job. He is a fine actor. Russell Crowe does a good job playing a stomach-bulging, ethics-free, CIA desk man. A good supporting cast.


Jordan's spies come off looking pretty good. That made me think about Jordan; it seems clear, now, that Jordan must have very good spies and secret forces, surviving wedged in between Syria (to its north), Iraq (east), Saudi Arabia (southeast), and Israel (west). Its only outlet to water is to the Gulf of Aqaba.



In the book, after the dedication and author's note, there is a quote from The man who never was. With a foreword by Lord Ismay about deceiving one's enemy. Fascinating. Inside the book Operation Mincemeat is dicussed by Ferris and Hoffman.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

Found this one on the shelf, purely by chance, as I grabbed some films to have for the long weekend upstate. Didn't watch it in Chichester; brought it back with everything else when I returned yesterday. As I had left Chichester early, to avoid complications from snow (a small storm had beset us in Saturday night into Sunday, with very powerful winds, some gusts forceful enough to snap a pine tree in our yard) and traffic. Watched it yesterday afternoon, at 3.30 (I'd left Chichester a bit after 11, and after stops both in Phoenicia and in Kingston to check the air in Subaru's tires, made excellent time in my ride). Was awed, moved, pleased. Very nice acting. A character-driven plot that works. Very nice, indeed.

Inside of the film reference is made to the film Brief Encounter; Mrs. Palfrey tells Luda of having seen it with her husband back may years ago.

Began watching the director's/producer's commentary version. One interesting piece of trivia is that on eof the actresses, who plays the character Mrs. Arbuthnot is Anna Massey, daughter of Raymond Massey.

Another is that the Claremont Hotel is a real hotel, though not named the Claremont, but the Averard Hotel.