Jurassic Park hit theaters for the first time when I was nine years old. My mother had thought about asking our live-in nanny, Lori, to come with us but in the end decided to make the new dinosaur movie a mother-daughter adventure. About a week later Lori came back from the theater after having seen the movie by herself.

“Oh my God! It was so scary!” She announced. “Those dinosaurs! Oh my God!”

My mom and I suppressed smiles. I mean, sure, the dinosaurs were scary. And just because I was nine and she was a grown woman didn’t mean she couldn’t have gotten more scared than I had gotten.

“When they came into the kitchen I was so scared! I shouted out for those poor kids to hide!”

What? I still remember the kitchen scene. Three velociraptors were hunting the young kids and it was dark and terrifying. But shouting? Aloud? In a movie theater?

“I just screamed at them that the dinosaurs were coming. A man from the theater came and asked me to please be quiet, but I couldn’t! I just had to warn them!”

Did I mention she was a grown ass woman? She went on to tell us that she quieted down for a while but then another scary scene came on and she shouted for the characters on the screen to watch out again and had to be quieted by the theater staff again or she needed to leave. My mother and I thanked our lucky stars that we didn’t take her with us. She didn’t last as my nanny much longer after that.

This exchange came to mind after I finished Kate White’s The Sixes. Usually I don’t try to figure out whodunit while reading mysteries but this time I thought I’d give it a go. At one point the main character, Phoebe, starts a romantic relationship with a professor, Duncan Shaw, at the university where she currently teaches. Duncan reveals over dinner that his late wife, dying of cancer, drowned in the bathtub after she fell asleep reading there. The main mystery of the novel surrounded multiple drownings in the river that ran through campus. So of course I’m here, shouting in my head at Phoebe, that DUNCAN DID IT! Watch out lady, he’s a murderer!

I figured that he was impatient for his wife to die, he wanted her money, and was worried that her cancer would go into remission. See, Duncan and his wife were about to separate before she got sick. He was gallant and stayed with her, even moving back to her childhood home, while she lived out her last years. He told Phoebe that people who are severely sick often don’t have the same startle reflex that healthy people have. Normally the inability to breathe would wake someone and prevent their drowning in a bathtub. But his dear dead wife was so ill that her body failed to respond. He had even warned her of the danger of reading in the tub but she ignored him.

LIAR! I shouted! Watch out, Phoebe! He’s asking so many questions about the case because he wants to make sure you aren’t onto him! He killed his wife for her money, she was taking too long to die and then he developed a taste for it. He’s the one who has been drugging young college students and shoving them in the river, their healthy bodies useless, unable to startle them awake enough to swim to shore.

I pictured him watching from the darkened shore. Clearing the slackers and dullards from this small college campus. Someone needed to warn Phoebe. I tried, but like Lori shouting in the theater, it was useless, these characters’ lives were preordained.

Also I was wrong.

I don’t like being wrong. It’s embarrassing. Not as embarrassing as muttering to a character in a book that they need to use better judgment and stop sleeping with the killer, but close. Duncan didn’t do it. Someone else was shoving students in the river. Phoebe found out eventually, got into trouble, was hospitalized, but came out on top. Blah, blah, blah.

All the bad guys were taken care of. But I didn’t care. Duncan didn’t do it. My imagination had taken over while I was reading the book. In my opinion, it did a better job than the author’s. Duncan would have made a creepy, dark killer. His motives only a little comprehensible. His manner unassuming, sexy, persuasive. If he were the killer the book would have been better.

That’s why I don’t try to figure out how books end. I don’t keep track of clues and piece together the hints and evidence. If I’m right, why read the book? It had better be superbly written to keep me going once I know the bad guy. And if I’m wrong, I feel tricked. Kate White was pointing all the fingers in the world at Duncan. Looking back, it was too obvious. I should have known better. I might have even guessed the real killer if I hadn’t been too busy shouting about the wrong guy.

It made me mad at White for fooling me. She could have written the book without making Duncan look so guilty. It would have been better, in my opinion if either Duncan had done it or if he had a smaller role in the whole thing. Who likes feeling stupid? I understand not wanting to reveal the bad guy too soon, as an author you want readers to finish the book and then go buy your other books as well. But there is a fine line to walk and White overstepped. Maybe I was easier to fool because I was new to playing detective. But I still didn’t like how the ending unfolded. My bad guy was the better bad guy.

So I was wrong, tricked, and disappointed. Not a great way to end a book.

—

Kelly Hannon worked in an indie bookstore, is editing her first novel, and blogs about annoying people at www.letterstopeopleihate.com. Follow her on Twitter @KellyMHannon

Sometimes to even live is an act of courage.
— Seneca

The survival instinct is an interesting one. In the most extreme of circumstances — that is, in its purest form — it is without logic. It is animal. Survive to survive, and for no other reason. In Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, seven men are tested. Their circumstances are most certainly extreme, and along the way a few of these men opt out on their own terms. Most are not so lucky. One is not so resigned.

When we first see Ottway (played with a quiet intensity that can only describe as “Neeson-esque” by one, Mr. Liam Neeson) he has a gun in his mouth. The look in his eye implies that his mind and body are not operating within the same space. He is thinking of his wife. She tells him not to be afraid. Later, surrounded by the sounds of growling wolves, he tells one of his fellow plane crash survivors that they’d be a fool not to be afraid. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Ottway works at a remote oil outpost with a decent-sized group of men and women he describes as being “unfit” for society. His job is to protect these people by keeping the wolves surrounding the area at bay, perched atop a building with no company other than his sniper rifle. Left alone with his thoughts, he seems to suffer from the kind of internalized social bluntness that comes with that sort of job, an outcast amongst outcasts. None of that matters when the plane goes down.

Soon, the seven survivors find their scheduled leave promptly unscheduled as they awaken in a snow-covered haze. It is here in the wild, cold and hopeless, that Ottway springs into action. First, he guides a man towards death. He tells him “not to be afraid.” He tells him to “let it wash over him.” He describes the process as though he’s been there before. He then moves on to surveying their surroundings. It turns out that they’re full of hungry, aggressive wolves. As if matters needed to be made worse?

The men follow him because he seems to know what he’s doing, and he does, if only to a certain degree. He is familiar with wolf behavior, but mostly in theory. Besides, it is not his wolf expertise that makes him the de facto leader; it is his relentless desire to survive. And while the men cling to home and the things that they stand to lose, Ottway seems to want to survive only to prove to himself that he can.

The group is inevitably thinned. One by one they go, victims of the weather, the wolves and their own hopelessness. Along the way we learn just enough about them to feel sad about it, but not enough to linger for too long.

Then, there is the matter of the wolves.

Sometimes they look good, sometimes not so much. They are mostly, if not all, CG. An interesting choice, especially in context of the primary complaint that I’ve seen lodged against this film: The wolves do not behave like real wolves. Perhaps they are not supposed to? Maybe they are not meant to be “real” wolves? Maybe they are merely the cold, unrelenting representation of nature’s indifference? Maybe it was just cheaper to use CG wolves? Either way, they are most effective when growling just off-camera, their eyes glowing hungrily in the dark. And Carnahan is wise to frame many shots with just enough negative space to make us think that at any moment it could be occupied by one of the leaping, ravenous beasts. We have been trained by monster movies.

In the end it is Ottway, alone. No surprise. Early on in the film he insists that the men gather the wallets of the fallen for the families, like dog tags. Now, sitting on the forest floor he removes them from his backpack, one by one, and stacks them nearly on top of each other. He remembers his wife lying in a hospital bed. “Don’t be afraid.” He remembers a poem his father had framed in his childhood home:

 Once more into the fray, into the last fight I’ll ever know. Live or die on this day. Live or die on this day.

As he glances around him and sees the piles of antlers and various bones he realizes that he has wandered into the wolves’ den. The alpha wolf walks towards him. He gathers himself up, straps weapons to his hands, and lunges forward. Some will be frustrated by the black screen that follows that moment. Others will not. There is a short scene after the credits have finished rolling that may or may not provide satisfaction. For me, it’s completely unnecessary because one can only fight for so long, and the fight is the whole point.

—

Kevin Mattison is co-editor of The Idler, and a filmmaker and videographer. You can follow him on Twitter at @kmmattison.

The film begins with, and keeps returning to, the archetypal flood myth — Sam first sees Suzy when the latter is playing a raven in a summer production of Noye’s Flood. This mythic story not only drives the plot forward with its promise of a disastrous and world-changing flood/denouement, but it also introduces the themes of coupling, mating, and having sex which will develop into tropes of adulthood. The film is held together by relationships and perspectives — distances, intimacies, nearness and farness. Sex, though only hinted at cartoonishly by the Noah performance, is prevalent for the older set of characters (a dusty and wrung out crew including Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, and Bruce Willis). Hardly passionate or even sexy, sex for these grown ups is old and tired, a burdensome secret, an unuttered word separating twin beds.

For Sam and Suzy however, intimacy is king though they do inch closer to becoming sexual beings i.e. adults. Initially avoiding the immediacy of sex, their courtship occurs long distance as they pen letters back and forth to one another. Presented in a montage, we hear their voices speak of the very real and grown-up-sized pain of their otherwise childish lives. They feel cooped up, trapped, bored, lonely.  They don’t play well with others.  Suzy’s parents don’t understand her.  Sam’s parents are dead and he has to make his way through the foster system.  Their insights and advice to one another are at once touchingly appropriate and unintentionally silly.  They are there for one another in genuinely meaningful ways, but they are also very much still children despite the formality of their missives’ greetings and closings. Clearly, they know the patterns of adult relations, but they are still playing in these forms rather than living in them, and the structures remain a bit ill-fitting.

When they run away together, issues of intimacy and adult vs. child continue to unfurl.  Anderson’s camera eye constantly places our little lovers in shots that separate them in perfect symmetry.  Like middle schoolers across the dance floor they are attracted to each other, but scared, unsure — a mysterious gulf between them.  And both characters seem to be more comfortable with distance.  Suzy is shielded behind her power of quiet sight and her trusty binoculars.  Sam, a seer as well, is a talented painter of “mostly landscapes, some nudes.”  Together they enter a more adult context as a couple against the world that only further highlights how unprepared they are for that adventure.  Their beach blanket makeout scene, for example, is not all that sexy.  Suzy apologizes for the breasts that have not yet made themselves known. Sam spits with an almost too comical “ptooohey” sound after they kiss with tongues — he had some sand in his mouth.

Still with the adults’ ho-hum lives as a backdrop, the children’s brief escape builds perspective.  We imagine as children that growing up will be an answer that gives us voice and meaning and purpose, but the grown figures in Moonrise Kingdom are lost, searching just like the children, differing only in that they are closer to giving up. The children long to be adults. The adults calcifying in their present long to be youthful and effective. The film builds itself through this parallax comparing distance and perspective around that magical turning point of becoming/adult, loss of innocence, Summer’s end, loss of virginity.

Upon going through a commitment ceremony, if not lawful wedding with Sam, Suzy forgets her super power, loses her eyes, by leaving behind her binoculars. If we agree with Freud that there are no accidents, does this mistake show that upon entry into an adult institution Suzy immediately loses her fantasy and her special power? A dark reading at best. However, leaving the binoculars also hinders the couple’s escape, so perhaps the “forgetting” marks Suzy’s desire to linger in childhood a little longer.  Her pretend marriage helping her understand that realistically she needs more time.  The film seems to stay appropriately ambiguous on this point, pushing the boundaries of that in-between a little longer.  All I know is when I left the theater after watching Moonrise Kingdom that day, I (30 years old) fell in the parking lot and skinned my knee like I had done so often on elementary school blacktops. This too seemed Freudian, Anderson-esque, and an entirely appropriate epilogue to a movie about how we live through the practice of looking forward and looking back.

—

Ana Holguin writes PopHeart for The Idler.

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

— Charles Darwin

If I had a dime for every time I’ve watched Aliens (1986) I’d have, well, a lot of dimes. It remains a staple of my childhood, when I had an army of G.I. Joe action figures and Star Wars spaceships, which I used almost exclusively to play Aliens. Recently, I even sat through it on Syfy, commercial interruptions and curse word cover-ups be damned.

As I grew older I began to gravitate more towards the original film in the series, Alien (1979), which is a psycho-sexual horror film masquerading as science fiction. I responded more to the slow burn, the anguish of knowing that it was coming, but not when. Alien uses shadows similar to the way another great monster film (1975’s Jaws) uses water — to help disguise the fundamental flaws of the creature FX while simultaneously forcing the filmmaker to be more creative when deciding how and when to reveal the monster itself.

I remember the first time I saw the transport ship Nostromo touch down on a remote planet in response to an S.O.S. signal, only to find a giant humanoid alien with a hole in its chest. I remember wondering, “Who is that thing? Where did he come from? What’s he all about?” That was right before I was interrupted by the film’s actual, kick-ass story full of terror, fantastic sets, innovative creature design and rock-solid acting. So yeah, after the initial reveal, I didn’t give two shits about that giant humanoid alien. It appears as though I’m in the minority, though, as Prometheus (2012), Alien’s quasi-prequel, opened last weekend and purports to explain said alien’s origins as well as a whole slew of other things. (Like, the origins of man, for example. You know, nothing major.)

It shouldn’t surprise me that its connections to the Alien series are mostly superfluous. As previously stated, I couldn’t care less about the fan-named “space jockey” at the beginning of Alien. I had always assumed that it was just a remnant of whatever species had occupied that planet before being collectively chest-busted by our parasitic friends. It turns out that this “space jockey,” — now re-named “engineer” — may have been involved in the very creation of all that we know and all that we are. Oh, and they may have accidentally created the parasitic race of aliens I have grown up loving, as well. You wanna make an omelet? You know what that involves.

That isn’t the only connection between the films, though. There are smatterings of the original films’ production design everywhere and the company funding the expedition, Weyland-Yutani, is the same company Ripley later works for. . . twice. Here’s the thing: none of it really matters. Not in context of Prometheus, at least.

What we have in Prometheus is two films struggling against each other. One of those films — the one about a possible explanation for man’s existence via some sort of directed panspermia — is pretty fascinating and unique. The other is an alien monster film, which has already been executed with such expert precision as to have invented its own subgenre. While the first half of the film puts forth a series of interesting ideas, the later eschews them in favor of more traditional faire.

And that’s not even the biggest problem. While no one in their right mind would argue that any of the Alien films is a character study (Alien3 probably comes closest and people HATE that one. I’m not one of those people, for the record), those scripts at least allowed us to spend a decent enough amount of time with everyone to feel something for them. Once Prometheus gets rolling it hardly takes a breath. Remember all of those scientists who had all of those big questions? They can’t talk about them right now because their faces are melting. Or an alien is slithering out of their mouth. Or they’re mutating. Or self-performing a c-section! Yeah, that happens.

I don’t mean to make it seem as though Prometheus is completely without merit, so I suppose I should start mentioning something resembling a good quality? Well, everyone’s mentioned it already, but I’ll jump onto the bandwagon: Prometheus is a beautiful film. The intro, which involves one of the “engineers” ingesting some black, gooey genetic material, only to completely break down and disperse DNA identical to our own into an unnamed planet’s water supply, is visually stunning. And Michael Fassbender’s performance as “David,” the ship’s android, is fantastic and deeply unsettling.

I think that a solid argument could be made that Prometheus would have been better off having nothing to do with Alien in the first place. It will be interesting to see what happens in the inevitable sequel. The last surviving character is traveling in space in search of the “engineer’s” origin. (The old “who made the watchmaker” argument.) What we’re left with is a largely barren planet infested with parasitic aliens. How, exactly, did Prometheus have any real effect on what’s to come?

—

Kevin Mattison is co-editor of The Idler, and a filmmaker and videographer. You can follow him on Twitter at @kmmattison.

The novels revolve around Hilary and hir friends, three young barristers at 63 New Square, and a fourth character in a tax practice next door. Hilary is always just dropping in at Chambers to find someone to buy wine and dinner — always just in time to hear about a complicated tax or inheritance case that inevitably ends in mysterious deaths. “I am a historian,” says Hilary, “my profession largely consists in speaking ill of the dead.” The friends — Cantrip, Ragweed, Selena and Julia — all have personalities and backstories, but they’re vaguely sketched and tend to contribute to the stories mostly clever, allusive dialogue and bottles of wine. Hilary is also an enigma as to age, gender, and any interests besides being well-fed, insulting Cantabrigians, and ditching as often as possible an ongoing research project on the concept of causa in medieval common law. Hilary is a don, full stop.

The four novels, all named after classical references and with cover art by Edward Gorey, each take place in a different locale, evocatively sketched by Caudwell. In Thus Was Adonis Murdered (1981), Julia takes a vacation in Venice but a young man from her tour group is found dead — with Julia’s copy of the Finance Act beside the corpse. The Shortest Way to Hades (1984) involves a complicated Probate case and takes place on Corfu.

The Sirens Sang of Murder (1989) is my favorite. In the other novels, the characters are forver writing each other letters (theoretically to supplement their short phone conversations) but in this one Chambers has been equipped with a telex. Cantrip is attending a meeting of a trust in the Channel Islands when mysterious happenings ensue — I suspect this is the only epistolary novel ever told through telexes.

The last novel, The Sibyl in her Grave, published after Caudwell’s death in 2000, is an English village mystery. But the characters seem rather uncomfortable to be so far in the future, and one wishes she had just set the novel back in the 80s.

Caudwell, the pen name for Sarah Cockburn, seems to have been a character herself, a pipe smoking crossword puzzle enthusiast who worked as a tax lawyer before quitting to be a full-time novelist. The novels demonstrate a fond exasperation for English law as well as for the usual tropes of mystery novels. In The Sirens Sang of Murder, an engraved pen is found in a suspicious place, and Julia objects to its obviousness as a clue. “I do not doubt,” Hilary replies, “that in a crime novel having any pretensions to modernity, the pen would be quite inadmissible. As a mere historian, however, there is nothing I can do about it. Nature, as we know, does imitate Art, but I fear that she too often falls short of the highest standards.” I admit that I never thought that novels about tax law could be so entertaining.

—

Suzanne Fischer is a historian and writer who lives in Detroit. She cares about people, places, and things. Find her on Twitter as @publichistorian

Written by Juno writer Diablo Cody, Young Adult is just as clever but far less self aware. It doesn’t try so hard. Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) has. . . hang ups, we’ll call them, but they’re introduced with great simplicity and subtlety. For instance, when she receives an email announcing the birth of her former high school beau’s first child, she does not “freak out.” Not in the traditional sense, at least. Instead, she simply prints it out and spends large chunks of time staring at it (totally not freaking out)!

As I mentioned before, Mavis is clearly an alcoholic. But we don’t get the obligatory drunken stumbling, slurred speech and rows of liquor bottles. We do see Mavis wake up every morning face down on her bed, on top of the covers. She doesn’t appear to drink at home, but when she goes out she always seems to have just a few too many. Always. It’s the kind of drinking habit that might get your friends whispering behind your back, if you had any. It’s definitely the kind that sneaks up on you.

Eventually, Mavis comes to the conclusion that things have not shaken down for her the way they should have and that something absolutely must be done about it. Her job as a ghost writer for a popular young adult series isn’t quite as glamorous as being the actual author, and her lonely, one-bedroom apartment could be bigger. And why didn’t her marriage work out?! She’s awfully pretty, after all. Perhaps if she had married Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), her high school sweetheart, everything would have been different. There’s only one way to find out, and soon we find Mavis on a road trip back to her home town blaring a mix-tape Buddy had made for her on infinite loop. Mavis to the rescue.

It turns out that not much has changed ‘round these parts. She pretends to be disgusted by it, but everyone seems so happy. Are they just too stupid to know that they’re miserable? Too simple? At the local bar she bumps into Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), whom she doesn’t really remember — despite having had a locker right next to him in high school — until he mentions getting beaten near to death by a group of bullies who thought that he was gay. “You’re the hate crime guy!” You’d be hard pressed to find a guy as patient as Matt.

Mavis reveals her plan to him (after a few drinks, of course): Convince Buddy that he’s miserable and sweep him off to Minneapolis with her to start a new life together. Never mind that he’s already married and celebrating the birth of his first child. To Mavis, these things are mere stumbling blocks. Besides, babies are “boring.” Matt does not approve, but you get the impression that he’s not ungrateful for having been invited to the shenanigans, which I shall not spoil for you.

Charlize Theron’s performance is fantastic. It’s not as showy as her transformation in Monster (2003), but it is more nuanced. Patton Oswalt is proving himself to be a pretty interesting character actor (see Big Fan 2009 if you think his performance came out of left field), and Patrick Wilson is pitch-perfect as well. It’s such a shame that this film came and went without much notice. It was originally marketed as a comedy, which it is not. Most of the film’s laugh out loud lines are presented in the trailer. That’s not as to say that it isn’t funny, it’s just not broad comedy funny. It’s funny because it’s sad, because it’s true. Mavis may sound like a total nightmare and that’s because she is, but there’s an important scene towards the end of the film where she visits her parents and we get a glimpse of the reasons why. Her parents still have a picture of Mavis and her ex-husband on their wall. Her father remembers him as being a “nice guy.” Her mother concurs, adding that it is a “nice” memory. When Mavis announces that she thinks that she might be an alcoholic, they laugh it off. She’s just being dramatic. Isn’t that nice?

—

Kevin Mattison is co-editor of The Idler, and a filmmaker and videographer. You can follow him on Twitter at @kmmattison.

Tana French’s Faithful Place, the third book in the loosely related Dublin Murder Squad series, is a literary mystery. I haven’t read the first two books — this one sort of fell in my lap — but it didn’t matter. The main character, Frank Mackey, is introduced in book two, The Likeness, where he has a minor role. Or so the coworker who recommended Tana French tells me.

The first thing we learn about Frank is that he’s a divorced undercover agent and he tries very hard to be a good dad. The second thing you learn is that his high school sweetheart, Rosie, who he thought stood him up decades ago, was actually murdered. It goes downhill for Frank from there.

He travels back home to Faithful Place, which he’s avoided since he thought Rosie left without him. Frank has been heartbroken for twenty-two years and it shows in all of his personal relationships. His ex-wife saw it from the start and as the reader sees both how vividly he remembers every detail of Rosie and that he’s never really loved anyone else since.

I kind of read the book in dread. Once some workers find Rosie’s suitcase in an abandoned house, Frank knows she never left. And if she never left with her suitcase and the ferry tickets and no one ever saw her around the neighborhood again, she has to be dead. I had to wait with Frank, sitting on a stoop across from the house, for the police to find the body. I felt every minute of it, but the writing was beautiful. It’s not the kind of book you stop reading unless you have a very good reason.

As Frank works around the murder squad detectives, I almost felt like I was a step ahead of him. I didn’t necessarily know what each person he interviewed would say, but I saw where it would lead. I wanted him to stop. I wanted him to love Rosie just a little less, to think more about the good in life and less about events that no one could change. Through his searching you see his love for Rosie and his painful associations with his family. He’s kept in touch with his younger sister Jackie for years, but no one else even knows he has a daughter. His brother Kevin, four years his junior, always worshiped Frank. Even though everyone else in Faithful Place hates that he’s a cop, Kevin is still in awe of his big brother.

Shay and Carmel, the two oldest siblings, have lived a very different life than the younger three. With a mostly unemployed, always alcoholic father and a mother willing to blame the kids for the drinking, no one had a happy childhood. As you read along you see how hard Shay tried to protect his siblings from the abuse. He was the one who got hit, the one who quit school to bring in money, the one who stayed home so Carmel could get married and so someone would be around to watch the young ones.

Tana lets you feel Shay’s frustration at the discovery that nineteen-year-old Frank was running off to London with Rosie. Shay was finally supposed to be free. It was Frank’s turn to protect Kevin and Jackie like Shay had protected him. Finally the eldest was going to be able to have a life and it was slipping through his fingers.

You see, Shay never meant to kill Rosie. He thought he could convince her to make Frank stay. But his anger got the best of him. And while there’s never an excuse for murder, I felt for Shay in the end the same way I felt for Frank in the beginning. Tana takes such good care of her characters that the “bad guy” tugs at your heartstrings just as much as the “good guy.” She’s smart enough to know that in a fucked up family situation, no one comes out smelling like roses. The smell of Faithful Place never left Frank and now he’s stuck with far too much knowledge of what happened the night Rosie never showed.

There’s more that I won’t tell you. (Yes, there’s more! Go read it.) I wished the father had done it instead of the brother. He was the one flat character and I could have easily pinned everything on him. Even Frank’s mother had some sympathetic qualities, but his father was black-hearted all the way through. Tana gives him a backstory trying to explain some of the anger and bitterness but it fell short for me. He lost the girl he loved and settled for his wife. As far as the sympathy angle goes, it works more in the mother’s favor.

In the end the book was powerfully written if not a little too heart-breaking. I recommend it to anyone who likes their mystery books to have a little soul. My coworker promises that her other books aren’t as dark. Although what could match a brother killing his sibling’s girlfriend and hiding the body for twenty-two years? I think this is a set of books that I’ll need light-hearted fluff to read in between so I don’t get too disappointed with humanity. I’ll still love every word.

—

Kelly Hannon works in an indie bookstore, is editing her first novel, and blogs about annoying people at www.letterstopeopleihate.com. Follow her on Twitter @KellyMHannon

The Artist

Its story is a sort of mash-up of Singing in the rain (1952) and Sunset Boulevard (1950) — the first being a film about the inception of the “talkie” and a young starlet who makes it big because she has a better voice than the current big name (a less squeaky one, at least), and the latter being about a washed-up silent film star left behind by her former industry to go mad in solitude. Admittedly, The Artist functions much better when it’s closer to the former, but the winks help with the latter.

These “winks” that I keep mentioning mostly come in the form of melodrama, especially towards the end, which gets to be a bit. . . much. But there are also a few clever uses of sound here and there. Hearing Jean Dujardin’s thick, French accent at the film’s end is especially fun.

Speaking of Dujardin, the casting is phenomenal. None of the actors, even the highly recognizable ones (John Goodman, Penelope Ann Miller, James Cromwell), feel out of place. But man, does Dujardin look at home in black and white! Roger Ebert described him as a cross between Sean Connery and Gene Kelly, which is pretty apropos. Berenice Bejo as the plucky young Peppy Miller doesn’t do half bad herself, with her winning smile and perfectly placed (by Dujardin, in fact) beauty mark.

So the order for the day here seems to be charm. There isn’t a second of The Artist that isn’t charming in one way or another. But can a film win a Best Picture Oscar on charm alone?

The Artist is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Jean Dujardin), Best Supporting Actress (Berenice Bejo), Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Costume Design, Best Directing, Best Editing, Music (original score) & Best original Screenplay

—

Kevin Mattison is co-editor of The Idler, and a filmmaker and videographer. You can follow him on Twitter at @kmmattison.

“It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball”
— Billy Beane

Many great things have been said about the game of baseball (and a few silly things, too — Just Google Yogi Berra), but the above quote wraps it all up nicely and puts a bow on top. I would argue that you’d be hard-pressed to find a sport where even a regular season game, especially one early in the season, could hold as much drama as baseball. Bennett Miller’s Moneyball opens with a playoff loss and closes with one, but it focuses on a record-setting winning streak during the Oakland A’s 2002 regular season.

Beane, played by Brad Pitt, attributes the season’s winning ways to a team-building system devised by a night watchman at a pork and beans cannery named Bill James, now an advisor for the Boston Red Sox. James’ theory is that you choose players based on specific skill sets regardless of their perceived worth and overall talent. Beane is introduced to this system by a young Yale grad named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill).

Of course everyone thinks that Beane’s lost his. . . beans. But the wins begin to pile up, and you can’t argue with wins. Well, I suppose you can. Even Beane states that he won’t be truly satisfied until they’ve won it all. Even then he’d probably just want to do it again.

We spend a lot of time with Billy Beane off the field, which is easy because we’re told that superstition prevents him from watching the games on television, let alone live. He is a doting father and an honest, hard-working guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously. I was thoroughly impressed by how well Pitt was able to disappear into the character and contribute to Beane’s high level of likeability. If you had asked me beforehand whether or not I would expect a potential award-winning performance from him I would have said no, but there it is.

Moneyball is cleverly written (The Social Network writer Aaron Sorkin was involved, after all), well-directed and perfectly acted. The only real question is whether or not it is too quiet to stand out in the crowd. Well, if the montage of Oakland’s 20-win streak doesn’t get them, then I just don’t know what would have.

Moneyball is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Brad Pitt), Best Supporting Actor (Jonah Hill), Film editing, Sound Mixing & Best Adapted Screenplay

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Kevin Mattison is co-editor of The Idler, and a filmmaker and videographer. You can follow him on Twitter at @kmmattison.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast
— Ernest Hemingway

I have been lucky enough to have visited Paris twice in my life (so far) — once on a back-backing trip and once on my honeymoon. It is an easy city to be romantic in, but it’s even easier to be romantic about, and Woody Allen’s latest film, Midnight in Paris, is an hour-and-a-half love letter to the city, art, literature and creativity itself.

There is always a “Woody Allen character” in Woody Allen films, and this go-round his name is Gil and he’s played by Owen Wilson, displaying a kind of youthful exuberance I haven’t seen from Wilson since Bottle Rocket (1996). He’s travelled to Paris with his wife-to-be (Rachel McAdams) and future in-laws on a business trip, and this is not his first visit. No matter how hard he tries, he simply cannot get anyone to comprehend the beauty and amazement he sees all around him in the city of lights. They are more interested in stuffy dinners and shopping. His wife seems to be more interested in spending time with the laughably pretentious Paul (Michael Sheen), a family “friend.”

Gil often finds himself wandering the streets alone, which I’m sure he prefers. One night, unable to find his way back to his hotel, Gil is picked up by a mysterious cab full of revelers on their way to a party. Two of the revelers turn out to be F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda. It isn’t long before Gil, an aspiring novelist, is hanging with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso. Allen makes little effort to explain this flight of fancy, and the film is better for it. One evening, while chilling at Gertrude Stein’s home, Gil meets Adriana, a mistress of Pablo Picasso’s. They immediately hit it off and, in finding real romance, Gil begins to question himself and his life choices.

But enough about that.

This movie is really about Paris and the romance it inspires, and in that regard it is hugely successful. If this film doesn’t make you want to pack your bags then I’ve got nothing for you. Its literary and film references are clever (the gag where Gil suggests that Luis Bunuel make a film about a bunch of bourgeoisie people having dinner together and then finding that they can’t leave the room is a personal fav), but not so esoteric as to lose everybody, and the jazz soundtrack really seals the deal. A beautiful film set in a beautiful city. Will that be enough?

Midnight in Paris is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best original Screenplay & Best Art Direction

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Kevin Mattison is co-editor of The Idler, and a filmmaker and videographer. You can follow him on Twitter at @kmmattison.