Praise of Folly

We're on a Road to Nowhere, Come On Inside

Erasmus finished Donald E. Westlake's latest opus in the ongoing chronicles of John Archibald Dortmunder and his cohort, The Road to Ruin. The core regulars are back: Andrew Octavian Kelp, Stan Murch, Tiny Bulcher. And Andy's squeeze, Anne-Marie, takes on a slightly more prominent role.

The Road to Ruin is a thoroughly enjoyable read, as Erasmus has come to expect from Westlake, a true professional, craftsman, and artist. It revolves around a slow-developing scheme of Dortmunder, et alii, to heist some classic cars from the isolated estate of a disgraced, pariah CEO. Complications develop, as they always do. Erasmus has two criticisms and hereby warns potential readers to stop reading after the first if they don't care to have a sigificant element of the plot given away.

Erasmus was saddened by the Mysterious Press's or Westlake's failure to simply pick up a copy of his wonderful Don't Ask and check the spelling of Tiny Bulcher's family's homeland. It is, of course, Votskojek, which, alas, is consistently misspelled Vostkojek throughout The Road to Ruin.

The second criticism revolves around some plot developments of which a potential reader should likely remain ignorant. For you all, don't worry, pick it up. Overall, placet. Now go away.

Really. Shoo. Hie thee to Strong Badia.

Ok, if you're still with Erasmus, be warned that the odd thing about The Road to Ruin is that it's a caper novel without a caper. The complications which ensue completely wreck Dortmunder's plan, and there's no back-up plan or consolation prize either. A good plan fails for no reason but crazy circumstance. While realistic, readers' expectations may be let down. On a similar note, Dortmunder, sounding a little bit like his dark shadow, Parker, forcefully swears revenge on some people at the end of a chapter... and it never comes up again. Bad guys get their comeuppances but at the hand of fate, rather than a Dortmunderian nemesis. Once again, with such loose ends dangling, one isn't as satisfied as one could be.

The Rundown (which is worth renting for Walken and more...)

Ok, Erasmus apologizes for the tumbleweeds blowing across the old Encomium Moriae here. He's been up to his earlobes in verb forms as he wades through a massive translation project. Some things briefly noted in the interim.

• 50 First Dates was substantially better than its ads appeared. While the premise is dingy—Drew Barrymore is a fetching Hawaiian lass who's developed a case of amnesia Mementoensis and hasn't developed Guy Pearce's self-tattooing skills yet—the movie takes the premise seriously and sticks to it reasonably well. Adam Sandler is fine. Erasmus is no fan of his (and was one of the few who came away from Punch-Drunk Love unimpressed, it seems) but has enjoyed a few of his movies. Rob Schneider's stoner shark-bait kanaka maoli is funny but his accent seemed Puerto Rican or Mexican half the time. Nevertheless, overall, placet. And the walrus trainer gets an ave.

• The Dead Zone and Monk are back and welcomed. Neither's in quite top form yet, although the former's eerie "Collision" had a couple of the creepier moments of episodic TV I've seen since the X-Files' heyday, with Johnny's flashbacks, the girl lurking around, and burn traumas. The latter seems to be relying a little too much on Adrian Monk's neuroses at the expense of the clever plotting which is their hallmark. But still:Placet placetque. (And nice to see Ajay "Samir Nagheenanajar" Naidu on Monk.)

• Dodgeball is pretty much what you'd expect from the ads. Which is, in Erasmus's case, good enough. Erasmus would have given the script another polish and cleaned up the ending a little bit, but it was still a very solid second-tier farce along the lines of Stiller's Zoolander, Vaughn's Old School, or Sandler's Happy Gilmore. Erasmus always enjoys Rip Torn, Stephen Root, and Christine Taylor. And the cameos are pretty funny. Special recognition to the send-up of ESPN's obscure-sports broadcasts. Gary Cole and Jason Bateman are pretty much spot-on, though Bateman could have been even more over the top and still dead-on satirically. Made Erasmus want to go watch Toby Huss & Orlando Jones's extended basketball-game call scene on the Bedazzled DVD. Placet.

• The Confusion by Neal Stephenson is a big, fun read like his Cryptonomicon or its predecessor in the Baroque Cycle trilogy, Quicksilver. For anyone who enjoys historical trivia and the history of science (including a fair amount of the dismal science), Stephenson's your guy. He's weaker on character and personality than ideas and window-dressing, so Erasmus doubts people will be reading him as a classic belletrist 100 years from now. But for big, fun, erudite page-turning fun—Tom Clancy for people with graduate degrees—you can't do much better. Ave.
  

With thanks for your patience and in hope that the Follies will play again soon, Erasmus remains,

Yr. obdt. srvt.

Empty. Not so big.

Erasmus caught The Big Empty on DVD last night. He wasn't particularly impressed. While Erasmus is often fond of independent movies with oddball scripts, this one left him rather perplexed. The writer-director Steve Anderson is clearly a fairly talented guy, but those talents seem to weigh more heavily on the directorial side of the hyphen. The movie clearly wants to play like a neo-noir that rambles into X-Files. In addition, it seems to have some existentialist pretentions. (Is the lead character dead, and Baker, California, his Huis Clos? Erasmus doesn't think so, but it's suggested.)

Unfortunately, the script doesn't bear the weight of all these factors. It seems like the kind of movie which wants to let the viewer put together what's really going on amid the confused trappings, but some clues were either too subtle or too ethereal for Erasmus if that's the case. Erasmus's reasonable hypothesis was neither confirmed nor refuted by the ending which, indeed, muddled it somewhat.

As some of the IMDb's comments make clear, it's possible that some of the deleted scenes might have provided hints to a different, more macabre ending, but having reviewed them, Erasmus is not entirely convinced. Moreover, judging by his comments on the commentary track, Anderson seems to believe that the movie is successful. Alas, Erasmus didn't enjoy it enough to re-watch it in hopes of making some sense out of it.

Non placet.

The cast, it should be mentioned, is good. Daryl Hannah, in particularly, is not only physically unrecognizable, but a much better actress than Erasmus remembers her being. (Though, to be fair, when one says "Daryl Hannah" to Erasmus he thinks of mermaids and replicants. Erasmus is old.) Rachel Leigh Cook has some nice moments, but doesn't strike Erasmus as the most obvious casting for a foundling redneck delinquent. Sean Bean steals his couple scenes with the only real star power on display (no pun intended). Jon Favreau is ok, good in some scenes, and pretty ordinary in others. Kelsey Grammer does a decent little turn against type as an F.B.I. agent. The two Canadian Indian actors provide some real life to their scenes, Adam Beach as the local sociopath, and the always-entertaining Gary Farmer as Indian Bob. Joey Lauren Adams is not entirely convincing as the love interest, being outshone to some degree by both Daryl Hannah and Melora Walters, who does a sprightly turn as a truck-stop scorta. (Favreau's character ends up in bed with Cook's, which is discomfiting, given that he knows she's half his age. Though, in theory, until the end of the movie, he doesn't know she's jailbait...)

Bubba Ho-Tep

Erasmus finally got to see this cult film, which had been making the rounds at small festivals and conventions for something like two years. MGM is to be credited for putting together a very nice DVD release for it, given that it's the format in which it's most likely to be seen.

How was it? Not bad. Bruce Campbell's performance as "Sebastian Haff" (né Elvis Aron Presley) is fantastic, and Ossie Davis is a very nice foil as "Jack." Otherwise, the movie (based on a Joe R. Lansdale story) feels a little like Bilbo Baggins describes himself in The Fellowship of the Ring, "thin... sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread." The movie would have benefited either from cutting it down from its current length of 92 minutes down to about 75, or alternatively, bolstering the original story, perhaps by adding to the rôle of The Nurse (Ella Joyce, who, trivia fans, played Catherine Duke in the pilot of NewsRadio) or adding some more developed characters among the residents of the Mud Creek Shady Rest Nursing Home.

Still, if you think you'll like a loose homage to The Singing Detective that pits two possibly delusional elderly men who identify themselves as Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy against a revivified, soul-sucking Egyptian mummy with a penchant for bathroom graffiti on the battlefield of a dilapidated East Texas rest home, then Erasmus feels confident is thinking you will enjoy Bubba Ho-Tep. (Universal monster-movie fans will grin when tana leaves are mentioned.)

Placet.

Erasmus must add a major caveat to Egyptology fans like himself: the Egyptian in the movie is dreadfully inauthentic, though the somewhat mis-subtitled German Schätze der Pharaonen newsreel was a lovely surprise.

Hard to Fathom, Revolution

Erasmus just finished George P. Pelecanos's Hard Revolution, Pelecanos's take on the riots which leveled sections of Washington, D.C., in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968. It's a good book, Pelecanos doing his thing, with young men, mostly, working out their often tragic destinies, singly or in groups, surrounded by a meticulously detailed soundtrack and automotive showroom. Pelecanos is one of Erasmus's favorite living mystery writers, not least because Erasmus is also a native Washingtonian. Pelecanos is a writer of abundant gifts, not least his obvious, intelligent sympathy with black characters and an impeccable ear for black accents. Pelecanos made a very shrewd move by shifting his series' protagonists from the Greek-American Nick Stefanos to the less autobiographical but perhaps more typically Washingtonian Derek Strange, a black private eye of working-class roots. (If one can make a socio-economic criticism of Pelecanos's Washington, a visitor to the actual city familiar with his works would likely be surprised that the city is not, in fact, primarily populated by sympathetic, working-class blacks and Greeks and minorities of unpleasant but powerful less-ethnic whites and unpleasant black criminals.)

In Hard Revolution Derek Strange's youth and career as a policeman are drawn, with rich portraits of his parents and his ill-starred brother. The book builds to the riots (with a heavy sense of foreboding, at least for the Washingtonian reader) which then prove slightly anticlimatic (indeed, literarily, not nearly as apocalyptic as the horrific rooftop violence which concludes King Suckerman, Pelecanos's novel of the bicentennial). Pelecanos is a deeply moral writer, as the great detective and noir writers are. Occasionally he slides into mere moralism, as in Soul Circus, much of which reads as a sermon on Guns Are Bad. But for the most part, Pelecanos is humane, clear-eyed, and tough. If Hard Revolution has a failing, it's that Pelecanos seems not quite to have decided what he feels about the riots. On the one hand, his morals and pragmatism portray it as the genuine tragedy it was, whose cost fell primarily upon Washington's black citizenry. On the other, he has some of the book's wiser characters imply that the riots were somehow inevitable and even a type of catharsis. Erasmus finds the latter view unfortunate, even if it's clearly Pelecanos's deep sympathy for the plight of black America during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century that likely lead him to feel that way.

Hard Revolution is a welcome read from one of America's best living novelists, whose work deserves recognition outside the precincts of the mystery genre.

Ave, though Erasmus recommends some of his earlier works even more highly.

Mean Girls

Over the weekend, Erasmus caught Mean Girls at the Googolplex and enjoyed it for the most part. Tina Fey's screenplay is frequently excellent at pointing out some of the atrocious trends and instances in contemporary popular culture for which her ideological opposite number Robert Bork coined the phrase "slouching towards Gomorrah." She's less good at pointing to real solutions, as the main villain has to be shocked out of her complacent, arrogant malice by being hit by a bus. Literally. And that's presumably not an option for most high-schoolers.

Fey herself gives a good, straight performance in the movie, as does fellow SNLer Tim Meadows, though he still has that "is he kidding or serious?" vibe he often emanates in his sketches. Amy Poehler is on-target, though not entirely convincing, as the arguable fons et origo of evil, the villain-girl's mother who refuses to be maternal, engendering the rage that her daughter Regina (the "queen bee," get it?) sublimates into dominating, manipulating, and abusing her classmates.

The young cast is quite good, and Lindsay Lohan is excellent. Erasmus has a paternal crush on Miss Lohan, dating back to her performance in Freaky Friday which he thought quite matched (and exceeded in difficulty) Jamie Lee Curtis's rightly celebrated turn. Miss Lohan's performance in this movie is pitch-perfect throughout, from her turn as healthy, trusted and trustworthy home-schooled girl with her parents, to wary, nervous first-day-of-school girl, through her transformation, first ironic, then all but involuntary, into an Mean alpha Girl, and then back into a chastened version of her older self. One certainly hopes that the young actress will not be (or, sad though it is to think of, already has been) similarly brutalized by the movie industry.

The movie's not without it's occasional flaw or odd touch (why name one character after Janis Ian?), but overall, it's a straightforward, contemporary comedy of morals and manners.

Placet.