10. Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams, by M.J. Simpson

There is a passage in Douglas Adams’s So Long, And Thanks For All the Fish that provides perspective on Simpson’s biography:

Those who are regular followers of the doings of Arthur Dent may have received an impression of his character and habits, which, while it includes the truth and, of course, nothing but the truth, falls somewhat short, in its composition, of the whole truth in all its glorious aspects.

And the reasons for this are obvious: editing, selection, the need to balance that which is interesting with that which is relevant and cut out all the tedious happenstance.

[from the opening of Chapter 25 of So Long, And Thanks For All the Fish, page 137 in the Pocket Books paperback edition.]

Hitchhiker is a book almost wholly lacking in such balance. It’s interesting, and comprehensive, but Simpson pads out the story with quite a bit of tedious happenstance.

Completists and obsessives will appreciate the dedication to detail, the recounting of every Footlights sketch Adams wrote, the ins and outs of the journey of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy through seven levels of Hollywood development hell, the long, strange journey of Starship Titanic, and the various versions of just how much of Adams’s money his accountant stole from him. It’s all part of Adams’s life, but much of it is overkill.

I’m a fan of Adams as a writer, a humorist, and a humanist (as, I believe, is M.J. Simpson). I don’t find my appreciation of him either diminished or enhanced by Hitchhiker. Indeed, fascinating as he was, I’m not sure any life would retain its fascination when held up to such exhaustive scrutiny.

But for the aforementioned completists and obsessives, Hitchhiker is grist for their obsessive mill. They are the ideal audience for such a book. This is, perhaps, one of Adams’s best jokes. The fannish audience likely to embrace Hitchhiker as holy writ, is, according to Simpson, an audience Adams never wholly embraced or understood.

Haiku Review: Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., Volume 1

Bad guys get punched hard
The good guys bicker a lot
Many things explode

(H.G.) Wells of Lost Souls II: War of the Worlds (2005)

Sure, the alien war machines in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds devastate the entire planet. Sure, they use humans as grist for their roving chum factories. Sure, the very notion of entire divisions of hundred-foot high mobile killing engines lying hidden beneath the earth — including in, you know, major metropolitan areas — strains the disbelief of even the most willing suspender of that quality.

In the end, none of this matters. Spielberg gets a pass from me for introducing the greatest innovation in the history of cinematic science fiction: The Pants Preserving Ray.

[Quick note of clarification: Tom Cruise plays a character named Ray in War of the Worlds. Tom Cruise’s Ray takes no firm position in support of or in opposition to pants during the course of the film. The ray in question is one of the standard sci-fi laser blaster variety.]

During Tom Cruise’s first encounter with the aliens, a tripod emerges from underneath the ground in outer borough New York. With a convenient crowd of gawkers and rubbeneckers standing helpfully close to hand (less because people would believably stand around watching while a hundred foot high machine came up from the ground like this happened [although some certainly would] than because Spielberg, who does not lack for these in the movie, wanted one more big crowd scene that could devolve into wholesale slaughter), the tripod opens fire on the assembly.

Once this starts, people start running for their lives, to little avail. Every person struck by the alien ray immediately disintegrates. Their pants survive.

Their pants survive! I swear, it’s the most mind-boggling scene in science fiction since poor Charlton Heston found the Statue of Liberty buried on the beach. What possible need could three-legged aliens have for the 501s and chinos, sweats and hiphuggers, capris and ass chaps of billions of two-legged humans? It’s madness. Madness, I tell you!

So there’s Tom Cruise fleeing for his life surrounded by explosions and falling pants. How @#$%ing cool is that? And then later in the film, he and his daughter wander through a forest as a gentle rain of pants settles to the ground around them. It’s almost lyrical in its lunacy.

Almost cool enough to make you forgive the film its other lapses. Almost.

This is a spectacularly self-involved film. The world is literally coming apart at the seams, and all we see of that comes through Ray’s perspective. It provides focus to the film, but it does so at the expense of context. Spielberg is obviously confident that his audience will fill in the blanks, but “I know you know” takes the concept of “show, don’t tell” one step too far.

Perhaps this would matter less were Ray a more interesting character, but he’s not. Some of the fault lies with Cruise. Not so much because the publicity cycle for War of the Worlds coincided with The Tom Cruise Bat%$#@ Insanity Tour 2005 but more because he’s reached the point in his career where the things that made him a megastar are starting to show some wear around the seams. Making Ray a cargo loader was a perfectly valid casting choice, but expecting Tom Cruise to play the blue-collar everyman is like expecting Julia Roberts to play the all-American everywoman; it becomes difficult to separate the wattage of the bulb from the design of the lamp. Also, Cruise is reaching the point Harrison Ford hit in the late 1990s; he’s still solid and bankable and can open a movie, but he’s not what he once was. Like Ford, who has been derided for his somewhat limited range (surly-laconic, enraged-finger pointy, momentarily defeated-resurgent), Cruise’s stock responses (frustrated-sarcastic, emotional-blocked, resolute-martyred) no longer have the sparkle they once had. Ray suffers by association.

By the same token, Cruise suffers from the two-dimensionality of the skin he’s asked to inhabit. So Ray is a Bad Father? Spielberg establishes that at the start of the film, through the standard signifiers — the empty refrigerator, the tension filled “game o’ catch” with this son, the simmering (albeit subtle) alpha male jockeying between Ray and his ex-wife’s boyfriend/new husband. Unfortunately, having established it, he keeps hammering home the point.

I’m not suggesting that the simply fact of an alien invasion forgives the character all his paternal sins, but Spielberg’s insistence on reminding the audience of this fact over and over and over again was not effective. And the points he chooses don’t work terribly well. There are plenty of ways to communicate lack of parental engagement. Not knowing your ten-year old daughter has a nut allergy? Not one of them. I know it’s a minor point and all, but it rings false. Even if Ray is such a bad father, if his tendency for being late, and forgetting to shop for groceries, and living like a slob is a hallmark of his character, I refuse to accept that he wouldn’t know that. I refuse to accept that his ex-wife wouldn’t make a point of reminding him every time she dropped off the kids to stay with him. “Your son has an essay to write for school, and don’t forget, your daughter is allergic to nuts. So no peanut butter. In fact, it’s probably best not to keep the stuff in the house, just to be on the safe side.” Hell, if Ray is so inept — and as viewers, we’re certainly supposed to bear witness to his journey from ineptness to, if not competence, then at least a primal, instinctual parental sensibility over the course of War of the Worlds — how does he even get custody of his kids, aside from the fact that the movie needs the kids to chronicle the character’s reformation in response to tragedy.

Ray isn’t the only problem with War of the Worlds, of course. The story lets down the side as well. The movie also holds certain necessary character moments in abeyance until they suit the needs of the plot, rather than where they would fall in reality. As Ray and his kids flee New York, which was just attacked by aliens, in one of the few vehicles not affected by the aliens’ initial EMP attack, they pass pedestrians ambling along the highway. Not one of these people makes any attempt to hitch a ride, or ask for help, or otherwise interfere with Ray’s journey. Later, they lose their minivan to mob violence. The scene is scary, and believable, but the fact that it didn’t happen in the first instance makes not a damn lick of sense. The only reason the first group didn’t attack the car is not because such an attack wouldn’t have been realistic, but because the filmmakers needed the scary scene later.

Similarly, after finding a safe haven after the initial alien attack, Ray doesn’t bother to turn on the TV to find out what’s going on. He bore firsthand witness to the attack, he fled with his family, and he doesn’t check out CNN to find out what the hell is going on? Codswallop. As I write this, the media is in week two of nonstop, breathless, breaking news coverage about the death of someone who was famous for, basically, nothing. If the public has enough interest to sustain this level of media attention, shouldn’t the end of the world merit some good wall-to-wall coverage, complete with killer graphics, and somber, yet stirring theme song? I understand this was not the story Spielberg chose to tell, but it’s a story that should have intersected with his characters more than it did.

Steven Spielberg loves him some aliens. This is, after all, the man who gave us E.T. It shows. Even after depicting them engaging in the wholesale slaughter of humanity, even after showing them blighting the planet, Spielberg just can’t stay mad at the little guys. He wants it both ways. He wants his aliens to be scary, but he also wants them to be engaging. Witness the scene where a group of aliens explore the basement of the house where Ray, his daughter, and Stock Crazy Man Character #17 (twitchily played by Tim Robbins) are hiding out. After presenting the aliens as unstoppable killing machines for an hour and change, Spielberg shows the aliens as curious, almost childlike in their motions.

Now, there is a way this makes sense. Without a recognizable face, the aliens’ eventual defeat lacks impact. You can argue that we need to see the face of the enemy to appreciate the death of the enemy. On the other hand, Spielberg’s approach skates awfully close to the line of fetishizing the aliens, of making it possible to empathize with them. Had the scene lasted any longer, he would have crossed that line.

But of course, in the end, the aliens are overcome. The hero completes both his physical and spiritual journeys, and the film ends, leaving open far more questions than it answers. How will the human race rebuild? Will Ray, like Moses, have led his people to the Promised Land, only to be denied its embrace himself? Are we really supposed to believe that his ex-wife just hung out with her family in Boston, somehow managed avoid disintegration (all except, you know, her pants) or chummification, and waited for her ex-husband — who for all she knew was either dead or still as incompetent as ever — to guide her daughter home?

(H.G.) Wells of Lost Souls I: The Time Machine (2002)

I don’t know about you, but I find that the serviceable life of electronic devices leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. My cell phone doesn’t hold a charge nearly as long as I would expect. I’ve never had a laptop with a battery sufficient to provide for true portability. The Lovely Wife’s iPod always seems to be running its last few drops of juice whenever I want to borrow it. A friend who owns a Nintendo Wii just mentioned that he made the move to rechargeable batteries for his wireless controllers to save money on all the disposables he burned through since he bought the console.

So the fact that two key pieces of technology in The Time Machine — the steampunk marvel that carries Guy Pearce’s Alex Hartdegen into the past and the future, and a mid-twenty-first century personal digital assistant/database — carry enough charge in their respective Energizers to keep going and going and going through thousands of centuries comes as something of a surprise, and stretches credulity just a bit.

All right, geeks and fanboyz, let’s get this over with: Yes, I will grant that from a relativistic perspective, you can argue that the time machine itself uses very little power. For all the time that passes around it, the machine stays in the same place. But the machine certainly has a lot of moving parts and bright lights tied up in its operation, and it looks like it’s using a lot of power. Besides, staying still relative to, well, everything? That’s a feat that probably takes a bit of power to accomplish.

This is one of those considerations I’ll bet even money I’ve spent more time thinking about in the 48 hours since I watched The Time Machine than the screenwriter, producers, director, and cast combined spent while making the movie. And really? They don’t need to worry about it all that much, because there are obsessive schmux like me out there to do their worrying for them.

At one point, Guy Pearce’s Alex Hartdegen discusses time travel with another character. The other character is well enough informed to know about both the H.G. Wells story and the George Pal movie based on Wells’s work. This presents a fundamental problem. While it is nice for the movie to acknowledge its antecedents, the fact that Pearce’s character ends up in a close approximation of Wells’s story goes entirely unremarked. “Morlocks? Weren’t those the creatures from the book that other character mentioned all those thousands of years ago?”…is a line of dialogue that doesn’t appear in the movie.

Regardless of the dissonance of imaginary life imitating art, Hartdegen does, indeed, set out on a journey through time. Why? Why do most things happen in movies (even, annoyingly, those movies that exist as vehicles for spectacular explosions and gratuitous violence)? He does it for love. To get back the one who got away. To right that which went wrong. Somewhat surprisingly, he accepts the lesson that one cannot change the past fairly quickly, and goes looking for answers in the future. After two brief stops in the 21st century — one in an idyllic technoparadise, the other in a pre-post-apocalyptic apocalypse — he winds up 800,000 years in the future. Miraculously, the humans he encounters there are effectively no different from the ones he left at the turn of the 20th century. Some of them even speak English.

Eight thousand years in the future, through centuries of global upheavals — deserts and ice ages and temperate zones unfolding in their turn — and the English language survives intact?

Come the @#$% on! Think of how far English has evolved since Chaucer’s time, since Shakespeare’s even. Drop of speaker of Middle English into NYC today, as see how well they fare. And that’s without the benefit of the moon being ripped from its orbit, or genetic drift, or millennia of evolution. The very notion that any extant sources of the language would survive in an accessible form when the continents themselves have been reshaped is ludicrous. The notion of English as a sacred human inheritance down through hundreds of thousands of years would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic.

This wouldn’t matter if the film wasn’t pretending to be a piece of science fiction. Good science fiction thinks about these things. It extrapolates logically. Above all, it does the hard work. If my character speaks English, and your character speaks a language that evolved from English down through the years, then we’re damn well gonna take the time to learn to communicate without relying on some half-assed contrivance to cut corners. It may take five — even as many as seven — extra minutes of screen time to get the point across, screen time that would allow for character development, but it’s five to seven important minutes. It’s five to seven honest minutes. It’s five to seven minutes that respects the audience’s intelligence.

I know; I ask too much. Next I’ll be looking for some manner of believable transition (more than, you know, a costume change in which he sheds his frock coat and cravat in favor of an open-collared shirt and vest) between Alex Hartdegen, the bright but scattered late nineteenth century scientist — played as a steampunk amalgam of Barry Allen and Reed Richards — and Alex Hartdegen, the competent action badass.

Regardless of how it happens, a badass he becomes. He takes on the bad guys — led scenery-chewingly by Jeremy Irons — and saves the day, as he of course must.

In the end, the only meaningful time travel related to the movie involves the 96 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

9. Nature Girl, by Carl Hiassen

Nature Girl is quintessential Hiassen. It’s a story about a collection of geeks, freaks, defectives, and essentially well-intentioned people doomed by an inability to get the hell out of their own damned way.

The book starts with an ill-timed heart attack, and an equally ill-timed telemarketing call that goes awry. The consequences of both of these incidents carry the story along, as a mismatched collection of individuals converge with and diverge from one another across the face of a small island in the Florida wilderness.

In this regard, the story of Nature Girl plays like an episode of Lost scripted by Hunter S. Thompson and scored to The Benny Hill Show theme. The characters variously meet up, split off, kidnap, escape from, hide from, rescue, and otherwise encounter or avoid each other. Some of them remain wholly unself aware through the whole experience, and are no better leaving the island than they were when they got there. Some of them learn from the experience. They leave the island as potentially better people, although Hiassen never goes straight for the happy ending. At best, these characters have equal chances of redemption (or at least second chances) and backsliding.

There are a few creative missteps in the book, including a football helmet that fails in its duty as a sight gag, and a small religious sect that shows up about two-thirds of the way through the book to little effect. Otherwise, this is a light, fun book that does what it does well.

Simple joys

I’m paraphrasing, but there’s a bit in My Dinner with Andre where Wallace Shawn talks about the appreciation he finds in life’s simple things. In particular, he talks — more or less — about waking up in the morning and knowing there is a cold cup of coffee from the day before waiting for him in the kitchen, and about how much he looks forward to that cold cup of coffee.

I know how he feels. Indeed, I have taken to making extra coffee in the morning, so that there will be leftover coffee the next day. I don’t have Wally Shawn’s fortitude; the thought of cold coffee first thing in the morning, especially a chilly winter’s morning, is more than I can bear. But a good cup of reheated leftover coffee, dropped into a saucepan and brought up to a boil and drunk strong, hot, bitter and black? There are few things better. Sometimes I finish it, and make a fresh pot for The Lovely Wife. Other times, I share it out, so we both have something to drink, but I don’t have to bother with the mechanics making coffee. Some days, such simple tasks elude my early morning capacity to accomplish basic tasks.

This came powerfully to mind this morning when I dragged myself out of bed at 5:00 a.m. to attend to the first of what I assume will be three or four rounds of shoveling related to DoomStorm 2007. The storm didn’t drop as much snow as anticipated overnight, but I always like to get a head start on it, so that if work and school are on, I don’t have to rush the rest of my morning. As I finished the shoveling, that leftover coffee was powefully on my mind; when I came in, I made a beeline straight for the saucepan.

Looking at the snow blowing outside my window as I write this, and thinking ahead to the next time I go out to shovel, I’m glad I made a fresh pot this morning, so I’ll have something waiting for me when I come in from the cold.

8. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

In this book, the brothers Heath explore the question of what makes for effective communication. Not surprisingly, their exploration leads them to the idea that simple, engaging communication increases attention, retention, action, and acceptance of ideas. They boil this down to a list of principles that they organize under the rubric of SUCCESs (Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories). They maintain that ideas that reflect these principles are more effective than those that do not.

They make a good case for their model, and garnish their story with plenty of solid examples. At the same time, the whole thing is pretty darned obvious. Absent the catchy acronym, there’s not a lot of substance to their program.

This book reminds me of a novel written expressly to justify a movie deal: the book feels more like the prerequisite the brothers Heath need to build credibility in order to get themselves on Good Morning America and to book a lucrative series of lectures and conference presentations. I have no problem with that; we’re not talking about selling snake oil. Their work is benign, and I’m all for anything that improves the quality and effectiveness of communication — not so much in the area of selling widgets, but across the entire spectrum of ideas. At the same time, their book skirts awfully close to telling people what they already know. Nice work if you can get it.

Thai-ing one on

For Christmas this past year, my not-quite-on-account-of-she-and-my-brother-have-yet-to-make-it-official-
but-they’ve-been-together-so-long-that-it’s-pretty-much-a-conclusion-
so-foregone-as-to-be-a-meaningless-distinction-so-let’s-just-go-ahead-
and-say-it’s-a-duck-and-call-her-my-sister-in-law gave me a copy of The Ultimate Soup Bible (Anne Sheasby, Consultant Editor; published by Barnes and Noble Books; ISBN 0760774498, if you care about such things).

As so often seems to happen with really good cookbooks, my intention to sample a broad range of recipes has been thwarted to date by the fact that I found such a damn fine recipe first time out of the gate. It’s a recipe for a Thai chicken soup that is simply out out this world. It’s a chicken soup that features coconut, lime, peanut butter, and noodles in supporting roles. The recipe also calls for cilantro come garnish time, but I can’t abide the stuff. I didn’t feel the soup was any the weaker (and to my taste buds, it was a damn sight stronger) for the omission.

I’ve made it twice so far, and it took a little bit of trial and error to get it right. The recipe calls for coconut cream or coconut milk. Not being able to find coconut cream in my neck of the woods, I used coconut milk the first time. It was good, but it didn’t have sufficient richness, body, or sweetness to carry the coconut flavor forward. The second time, I used cream of coconut, the sweetened stuff used in umbrella drinks. It made for a much stronger, and much more flavorful soup.

It was one of those recipes that resembles something you might find in a Thai restaurant, without being like anything specific I’ve ever found in any Thai restaurant I’ve been too. It falls somewhere between a soup and a curry, too complex for a simple soup, but not quite thick enough to qualify as a restaurant-type curry. In that respect, it shifts away from restaurant fare into something more like home cookery.

With hundreds more recipes representing a host of global cuisines, I can’t wait to continue my world tour of soup. Wherever else my soupmaking roams, I know I’ll come back to this one again and again.

Robin and Marian

The details of Robin Hood’s end are well known. The final battle for Sherwood, the mortal wound, the arrow fired through the abbey window to mark the place where Robin’s body should be laid to rest. They are part of a story that has captured countless imaginations over scores of years. So the plot of Robin and Marian is a foregone conclusion.

The interesting questions raised by the film concern not what happened during Robin Hood’s last days, but why they happened. What drove Robin to return to renew his outlaw ways upon leaving the king’s service? Why was gathering a new band, challenging the Sheriff of Nottingham, and trying to relive his glory days more important to him than Marian, whose heart he recaptured, despite her religious vows?

The reason, it seems (although the movie never makes this point explicitly) is that it’s all he really knows. Sean Connery’s Robin is a warrior, a leader, and at heart a brawler. His authentic self is the one with a bow or sword at hand, and a clear understanding of where to swing the blade or launch the arrow. He’s also a rebel at heart; it’s not enough to fight. There needs to be a cause for which to fight. Following King Richard to the Crusades and beyond, he lost that clarity. Instead of fighting the good fight, he participated in the slaughter of innocents. Instead of standing up for the oppressed, he was among the oppressors.

So when his time with the king ended, and he found himself with only one meaningful skill set, he reverted to form. He set himself up in opposition to King John, rescued Marian (who initially showed little interest in being rescued, thank you very much) and tried his level best to renew his antagonism with the Sheriff of Nottingham.

There’s only one problem with Robin’s genius plan: the Sheriff won’t play. Robert Shaw plays the Sheriff as a direct counterpoint to Robin. He is patient where Robin is impulsive. He represents the establishment where Robin stands for the outsiders. Where Robin came away from the Crusades committed to Fighting the Good Fight, the Sheriff appears to have learned the virtue of not fighting unnecessarily. Robin is a leader of men, the Sheriff supervises a band of incompetents.

Indeed, it would make a fascinating character study to recount the experience of Robin Hood and the Sheriff fighting side by side in King Richard’s service. Despite their inevitable antagonism, Connery and Shaw play their parts as men who have a blonde. It doesn’t change the roles they play, but they both acknowledge the connection.

Above all, where Robin is still up to his same old tricks, the Sheriff has learned. When Robin sneaks into Nottingham — the way he did countless times in the past — the Sheriff marks his progress. When Robin and Little John scale the castle walls to make their escape, the Sheriff watches their progress, noting how slowly the go, how much of their prowess has been lost to time and age. His pursuit of Robin speaks of inevitability and pity rather than the anger and energy of their past conflicts.

And in the end, when the King’s man, Sir Ranulf (a proxy for the Sheriff in his younger days) brings a force of men to attack Sherwood, the Sheriff assumes command, and orders the men to hold their attack, and wait Robin out. He knows that given time, Robin will come to him, setting the stage for the final battle between two old men the world has passed by.

From there, things play out according to the legend. As they must.

The Triplets of Belleville

This movie features everything I love about animation: gorgeous design, clear communication of ideas and story, and a dose of the kind of believable unreality you can only get from a cartoon. Unfortunately, The Triplets of Belleville also features the things I really don’t care for: simplisitc plot, undeveloped characters, and a lack of understanding about where to draw the line between charming and pretentious.

The movie opens with a performance by the titular Triplets, an Andrews-sisters type act that is part of a raucous nightclub scene in some imagined past. Their show is a combination of vaudeville and cabaret, and the animators render the sequence in a style that is equal parts Fleisher and Bakshi. It’s an obvious and effective homage to an early style of animation, rendered in black and white, which conveys simply, and engagingly that we’re watching something that happened in the past.

From there, the story follows an orphaned boy named (according to the blurb on the Netflix envelope) Champion, who lives with his grandmother on the outskirts of Paris. The grandmother demonstrates her compassion for her young charge by trying various methods of engaging his interest. One such attempt results in the acquistion of a dog that, like Animal Companions(tm) across the animated landscape, theatens to drag down the movie under the weight of its largely failed attempts at comic relief. Eventually, she discovers his passion for cycling, an interest she encourages with the gift of a tricycle.

When next we see Champion, he is a grown man, training to comete in the Tour de France. The adult Champion is a wonderful character design, encapsulating the essence of the cyclist’s physique: long and lean, all sharp angles and sunken cheeks, with the exception of his cannonball calf muscles. At one point, the camera pans across a wall of photographs, and we see, in a few, brief transitional images, the evolution of the small, round child into the tall, angular man. It takes less than five seconds, but in those few moments, you understand the passage of time, and the amount of work and will it took to Champion to reach the point at which he stands, ready to chase his dream.

He doesn’t get very close to his dream before he is kidnapped and brought to Belleville, for reasons that don’t make a hell of a lot of sense. Not that they need to, as the point of the kidnapping is to set up a rescue story (much more visually interesting, and easier to render with minimal to nonexistent dialogue) rather than a cat and mouse game between captor and captive. Suffice to say the Belleville mob is involved, which shadowy underworld organization apparently prefers Darwinian cycling competitions to cockfighting and other blood sports. It falls to the grandmother, aided and abetted by the Triplets, to attempt a rescue.

Like Champion, the Belleville mob henchgoons are masterfully designed. They embody the phrase “built like a brick wall.” Their bodies are flat and retangular. Like brick walls, the various henchgoons are indistinguishable from one another.

Arrayed against the henchgoons are the grandmother, the Triplets, and, all but uselessly, the dog. Like the mob soldiers, the Triplets have few distinguishing features. One has a penchant for high explosives, but otherwise the characters never develop much in the way of distinct personalities, a charge with which I am certain the character designer, animators, and director would strenuously disagree. If such was their intent, they failed.

Belleville is a wonderful construct, all sweeping spires, and busy streets, and dark alleys, hills and straightaways, bridges, and waterfronts, and frog ponds. It’s industrial and cosmopolitan, modern and retro. It’s arguably the strongest character in the movie, largely because it never overpowers the action. It’s a city I would have liked to see more of, but instead we’re treated to a series of dream sequences told from the dog’s point of view. As dream sequences go, it’s certainly less tedious than, say, the extended dancing dream in Oklahoma!, but it still takes away from the more interesting story and characters, and the various possibilities inherent in the side streets and hidden corners of Belleville.

A History of Violence

There’s a scene toward the end of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence where a bloodied Viggo Mortensen stands on the shore of a lake with a gun in his hand. He hesitates for a moment, and in that moment, it’s unclear whether he intends to discard the gun, or turn it on himself.

I won’t ruin the resolution. As the movie draws to a close, Mortensen’s Tom Stall is a man lost to himself, and to everyone who matters to him in life. It’s a small moment, and neither Mortenson’s performance nor Cronenberg’s direction makes too much of it. There are no close up shots of conflict playing out over Tom’s face; he’s not wrestling with angels, merely standing alone, in the garden, before stepping into the abyss. The question is, does he undertake the hard work of rebuilding himself and his life, or does he accept that everything he was and everything he hoped to be was betrayed and destroyed in a split second, and there is no going back?

Not surprisingly, given its title, A History of Violence is a shockingly violent movie. Mortenson plays Tom Stall as a man who (re)discovers how naturally violence comes to him. He is neither tortured by this fact, nor wholly believable when he denies his capacity. At best, Tom is resigned to the inevitability of it all. It falls to his family to depict the emotion and horror of realizing that the husband and father whose character they took for granted masked something darker, something both attractive and repulsive. In the end, Tom’s struggle between absolution and damnation turns on the question of what will exact the least cost from his loved ones.