Rocky Balboa (2006)

I’m sure that some professional critic somewhere wrote this at the time of this film’s theatrical release, but like its title character, there is something endearing about Rocky Balboa. Note please that “endearing” does not imply “good.” This is a deeply flawed movie. It’s an exercise in pure ego, but it’s a humble egotism (if such a thing is possible) or at least one leavened with desperate neediness.

Rocky Balboa opens with the retired champ having made an accommodation with his past. He is obviously not at peace, but he is able to get up in the morning with enough of a sense of purpose that he can get through the day. This carries him over the hole left by the death of his wife, Adrian, the gulf between him and his son, and the distance between who he was, and who he has chosen to be.

When a computer-modeled simulation suggests that Rocky in his prime would have matched up favorably against the current heavyweight champion, the ludicrously named Mason “The Line” Dixon, Rocky allows himself to ask the question “What if…?” and to stoke a long-dormant fire in his belly. Meanwhile, Dixon, who has never faced an opponent worthy of his talent, finds his popularity — and his marketability — waning. His handlers propose an exhibition bout between the current and former champions to capitalize on the attention garnered by the computerized exhibition. Feeling they have something to prove, each fighter agrees.

For Rocky, this means getting back in fighting form. This of course means…

Training Montage!

Let’s be clear about something here: there is still no training montage like a Rocky training montage. Indeed, the training montage in Rocky IV is not only the greatest of the Rocky training montages, is not merely the greatest training montage of all time, it may be the single finest montage of any type ever committed to film.

While the montage in Rocky Balboa hits all the right notes — the contrasting training styles of Rocky and his opponent, Rocky’s commitment, energy, and perseverence at overcoming all obstacles and limitations, the Philadelphia City Hall steps (replaced in Rocky IV by the steppes of Russia — oh, hey, I just got that one!) — but it hits them in a labored, predictable, over the top fashion. When Rocky struggles repeatedly to lift a weight, there is no doubt that he will eventually get the bar over his head. There’s no drama, no dramatic tension, merely an obvious, “third time’s the charm” inevitability to the whole thing.

The montage gives way to the main event, a 10-round exhibition billed as a battle of Will vs. Skill. Punches are thrown. Blood is spilled. Director Stallone shows that he learned the lessons Robert Rodriguez (who directed him in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over) taught in Sin City about the lyrical power to be found in the contrast between black and white images and bright red blood. Respect is earned and given on both sides. People fall down. People get back up again. Flashbacks are experienced. Odds are defied.

How does it end? The only way it could possibly end while still keeping the audience on Rocky Balboa’s side without straining credibility or sacrificing goodwill by robbing the character of his everyman, indomitable, underdog charm. It ends appropriately. It ends fittingly. It ends.

Haiku Review: Showcase Presents Metamorpho Volume 1

Chimeric hipster
Changes form and saves the day
Jealous caveman schemes

15. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie

So there’s this fellow name of Roger Ackroyd. Very wealthy, but very parsimonious. This character trait is a vexation to his various relations, servants, and friends, many of whom have a need or a desire for money. He is found murdered in his study, in a house full of people with motive and thin or deceptive alibis. Fortunately, an amusing Belgian chap name of Poirot recently retired to the village where the murder took place. Having some small expertise in such matters, he agrees to investigate, and to find the truth of the matter.

I came to this book knowing the ending. Although I did not know whydunnit, I knew whodunnit before I began the story. This was both an advantage and a disadvantage. As an advantage, it game me an appreciation for the craft with which Christie structures her work. Her stories are always a treat, and knowing the story is running down a blind alley makes the reader appreciate Christie’s powers of circumnavigation. On the other hand, Christie’s mysteries contain so many red herrings she may as well have gotten into the discount sushi racket. Well-crafted or not, the frustration of a Christie mystery lies in knowing that the ball isn’t under any of the shells, that no matter which card one chooses, they will never find the lady. in the case of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, it was just a matter of knowing the outcome, and trying to spot the connection between Poirot’s seemingly unconnected statements and conclusions to validate that Christie was, indeed, playing fair with her readers.

14. Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem

Murder, mayhem, dames, betrayal, Buddhists, sandwiches, and inescapable compulsions. These are the elements that move Lionel Essrog through Motherless Brooklyn. The compulsions are a function of Essrog’s Tourette’s Syndrome, the rest comes to him through his association with Frank Minna, the jack of all grey market trades and self-styled detective who employs Essrog and his compatriots. Minna’s death sets Essrog on the path to work out whodunnit, and why.

Well-written and engaging.

Haiku Review: RENT (2005)

Roger is a jerk
Cast’s a bit long in the tooth
Songs are quite good, though

Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

Toward the end of this film, novelist Karen Eiffel rhetorically asks about the value to the world of a man who knowingly chooses to accept his own death in the service of a greater, and more narratively fulfilling, good. A less confident, less intelligent movie than Stranger Than Fiction would not only have explicitly referenced Jesus Christ at this juncture, but it would have given protagonist Harold Crick the initials JC just to drive home the metaphorical point for the audience. Fortunately for that audience, among the many virtues of Stranger Than Fiction are its confidence and intelligence.

Eiffel (played by Emma Thompson with a world-weariness that makes it seem at times as though she is channeling Alan Rickman) is fighting writer’s block by writing a novel about a doomed IRS agent named Harold Crick. There’s just one catch: Harold Crick is a real person. He starts hearing Eiffel’s third-person narration in his head, recounting everything he thinks or says or does, and ultimately informing him of his impending demise. Not surprisingly, this shocks Crick. It also shocks him into action, both in an attempt to avoid his fate, and in an attempt to break out of the shell of routine that has grown around his life.

Sound like something from the mind of Charlie Kaufman? It’s a fair comparison, although Stranger Than Fiction is less metaphysically smart, and more authentically charming, than Kaufman’s fantasies. Like a Kaufman story, Stranger Than Fiction defies conventional wisdom across the board.

It’s a mainstream Hollywood comedy that is actually funny, with most of the laughs genuinely earned. As Crick, Will Ferrell, as it seems every comedic actor must at some point, has his Michael Keaton meltdown moments of over the top emoting, but for the most part, he avoids playing the role too big. As a result, most of the humor in the film comes from the dialogue — especially during Crick’s interactions with a literature professor played by Dustin Hoffman — and from authentically funny situations.

It’s a story about unlikely people meeting cute and falling in love. While it suffers from the common cinematic malady of developing relationships on ridiculously compressed timeframes to satisfy the demands of a 113-minute run time, Stranger Than Fiction steers clear of needless complications, avoidable misunderstandings, and other idiot plot devices to focus on the relationship between two plausibly real people who — surprise, surprise — have an actual chemistry between them.

The result is a story about why life matters, why the best fiction is never half as strange or wonderful as the most mundane reality, and why finding your voice requires accepting the responsibility inherent in using that gift.

Running with Scissors (2006)

Based on Augusten Burroughs’s 2002 memoir, Running With Scissors exemplifies the pitfalls inherent in translating the rich strangeness and poignant contradictions of real life onto the screen. This adaptation is too linear, too respectful of characters who don’t deserve it, and fundamentally too structured to capture the chaos of Burroughs’s reconstructed childhood and adolescence.

The book recounts Burroughs’s experiences living with the family of his chemically unbalanced, chemically dependent mother’s psychiatrist during the 1970s. The movie covers the same territory, but plays it straight. That isn’t to say writer-director Ryan Murphy doesn’t try to find the humor in his source material. He clearly sees the potential for laughter in the quirky eccentricity of his cast of characters. Unfortunately, by offering the audience a chance to share a laugh over humorous excreta or gags about adding deceased petflesh to the evening meal, Running With Scissors sidesteps the darker implications of its source material.

This leaves the cast largely adrift. Brian Cox does his best with the role of Dr. Finch, the psychiatriast, but the script never decides what it wants Finch to be. Is he a healer of a con man? A pill pusher or a savior? Fundamentally, does Finch himself believe anything he says to others, or is he merely drifitng through his life on presumed authority and neglected responsibility? Murphy doesn’t seem to know, so Cox can’t ever create a wholly realized character.

Meanwhile, Jill Clayburgh is given too much to work with, too much weight to carry. She’s a capable enough actress to shoulder the load, but Running With Scissors requires her to be the long-suffering wife, the romantic rival, the middle-aged eccentric, and the sainted surrogate mother, all at the same time.

By far the strongest performances in the film come from Annette Bening and Alec Baldwin in the role of Augusten’s parents. Bening, in particular, takes a role that could easily have gone over the top and makes it a masterpiece of restraint. Her descent into delusion, mental illness, and drug dependence is layered, complex, and sympathetic. With far less screen time, Baldwin turns in a phenomenally nuanced performance. He does the majority of his acting through subtle changes in facial expression, registering a range of emotion not fully captured in the dialogue.

But this is Augusten Burroughs’s story, and it rises and falls on his experience, and his perspective. From an acting point of view, the greatest problem with Running With Scissors is Joseph Cross, the actor playing Augusten. In the book, Burroughs unique voice carries his strange story along. He is largely reactive to his experiences, but engagingly so. In contrast, Cross spends most of the film in a haze of self-pity, looking as though he might burst into tears at any second, which is not terribly far from the truth. The character is unsympathetic, and barely likeable.

The character needs to be likeable to support the weight of the story. For all the humor that comes through in Burroughs’s writing, Running with Scissors is a dark book. By striking a lighter, safer tone, Ryan Murphy overlooks some of the darkness. He forgives the story and the characters for their sins, and by rendering them absolution he tames demons which should not be tamed. Absent the frankness of Burroughs’s narrative, the predatory nature of his adolescent relationship with a man 20 years his senior does not come through. It becomes just another part of the relativistic and non-judgmental tapestry of life among the Finches that defined Burroughs’s adolescent environment.

The film takes this loose, open ethos at face value, and in doing so, it robs the relationship of any moral or ethical context, or of its horrific contradictions. This is not to suggest that Running With Scissors should have been played as a story of victimization — for such would cut against Burroughs’s own interpretation — but Murhpy needed to acknowledge the unhealthy, even criminal, dynamic of this relationship. Ultimately, Running With Scissors is a coming of age story; even absent the perspective offered by the book, this film tells a selectively incomplete, and therefore dishonest, story.

Marrakesh Palace Restaurant, Washington, DC

I had occasion to visit Washington, DC, on business recently. While in the city, a colleague and I had dinner with a friend of mine from high school. It was great to catch up, and to meet her husband, and to hear about her work, which overlaps with ours sufficiently that the evening offered opportunities for both shop talk and socializing in relatively equal measure.

My friend recommended Marrakesh Palace, a Moroccan restaurant in the Dupont Circle section of the city as the venue for our reunion slash business meeting. It was an ideal choice all around: wonderful food, a nicely appointed, comfortable atmosphere, attentive but unobtrusive service.

I began my meal with Kefta Cigars, spiced ground beef wrapped in filo dough. The beef was delicately flavored, and had a dense, almost sausage-like texture. That is to say it wasn’t a loose, taco-like ground beef, but something far more solid, something that held together within the fragile filo shell.

I followed the appetizer with the Chicken Mkali, a tagine of chicken with preserved lemon and Moroccan olives. As with Indian food, the meat in a Moroccan tagine is almost beside the point — almost. It is a delivery system for the rich and complex blend of flavors within the dish: the lemon, the olives, the spices. The chicken absorbed the flavor of the sauce, and the result was tender and delicious.

I chose a Finca Antigua Tempranillo to accompany my meal, largely on the strenght of the Finca Altos de Luzon I once enjoyed at the Dali tapas restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While the Antigua didn’t hold up to my memory of the other Finca, it proved a fine match to the meal. At first, I thought it was a bit thin; it didn’t hold up to the starter terribly well. As the meal developed, I found the wine offered a pleasant compliment and contrast with the acidity of the preserved lemon and salt of olives.

While I enjoyed my meal immensely, I’ll confess to turning a covetous, even a predatory, eye on the Merguez across the table, and to my friend’s lamb Couscous Tfaya. It’s always a good sign when dining at a new restaurant when you look around the table at what your dinner companions are having and think “Yes, I would have been very happy had I ordered that. Perhaps next time.” That’s why professional restaurant critics customarily make multiple visits to an establishment as part of the reviewing process. They need a chance to try many things to get a full scale of what a restaurant has to offer. Based on one brief visit, I will simply say I recommend Marrakesh Palace without reservation, and leave it to the reader to render their own judgment on the fine details.

Marrakesh Palace
2147 P St. NW
Washington, DC 20037
(202) 775-1882
http://www.marrakeshpalace.com

13. Fangland, by John Marks

John Marks brings the vampire story into the 21st century in this novel that pits a nightmare from the deepest pits of the human imagination against the intrepid staff and crew of America’s most popular television news magazine. His monster is far less dashing and far more primal than the Dracula of Bram Stoker’s archetypal vampire novel, but Marks’s creation retains the power to command, compel, destroy and horrify.

As a retelling of a classic horror story filtered through — I hate to say this, I really do, but there’s nothing for it, alas — a post 9-11 sensibility, Fangland is an insubstantial, but diverting, read. Marks is quite effective at juggling multiple voices, points of view, and prose styles, and creating something dynamic from these disparate elements. As a comedy of manners about the television news magazine business, the book does not measure up. As a former 60 Minutes producer, Marks has an insider’s perspective on the industry. unfortunately, it’s possible he’s too much an insider, too close to the source material to provide the necessary perspective, the masterfully — and playfully — wicked pastiche of people and situations. He seems to be aiming for Broadcast News, but hitting WKRP in Cincinnati. The story needs to be more satirical, more — if you’ll excuse the obvious, but apt, pun — biting.

Also, the book suffers from the inevitable problem of rendering ultimate evil. It’s too big. Too all-encompassing. Any attempt to place limits or meaning, boundaries or interpretations, on something so fundamental to the human condition is doomed to be self-defeating. Once you tell a reader the most horrible thing you can ever possibly imagine looks like this, or talks like that, or creates such and such a response in the minds and hearts of its victims, it’s no longer the ultimate evil. It’s mundane, garden variety evil. It’s powerful, but bounded, and therefore controllable and surmountable, if only with great effort and at terrible cost. In the end, Marks acknowledges, even embraces, this narrative trap.

12. Finn, by Jon Clinch

Jon Clinch explores the background of one of American literature’s most famous minor villains, Pap Finn. From the drunken, violent, racist kernel of a man depicted in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Clinch spins out a story of drink, violence, racism, and contradiction.

Contradiction, of course, is a central component of Huck Finn’s character. At a basic level, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a story about nature versus nurture. It’s also about the tension between the natural, primitive state that Pap Finn embodies versus the civilizing influence Widow Douglas exerts on Huck. It’s about slavery versus freedom, both in terms of the institutional and institutionalized slavery of Jim’s world, and in terms of Huck’s journey of liberation from all external influences. It’s about right versus wrong, and the role character, stripped of all extraneous baggage, plays in determining the right path.

Unfortunately, Jon Clinch doesn’t follow any of these threads with Finn. The man is a contradiction because Clinch needs him to be, but he is a lazy contradiction. Clinch lays out the inconsistencies of Finn’s character, but never adequately explores the source of those contradictions. Finn is a black sheep, a throwback, a man with Father Issues(tm) who simultaneously internalizes, rejects, and depends on his father’s attentions. Clinch presents a picture with all the dots connected, but fails to show how each line was drawn, what made Finn the man he became.

One of the stylistic problems with the book is that Jon Clinch, the narrator, is smarter than Finn, the protagonist. This results in explanations of Finn’s thought processes and motivations that are entirely too sophisticated for the character, as when Clinch writes, “He [Huck] listens wide-eyed, and his father listens too, although he feings some other occupation all the while, either repairing lines or drinking whiskey, thinking as he listens that from this mingled trove of the primitive and the poetic he might likewise acquire some knowledge worth possessing.” A well-turned sentence, and no doubt about that, but one entirely at odds with Finn’s understanding of the world as Clinch generally presents it.

This is not to say Finn is stupid, merely unlearned in any formal sense. He is a character with an obvious and deep understanding of the world, but it is an understanding without much room for nuance. Twain sidestepped this problem in Huck Finn through the device of a first-person narrative. Even when acting as Sam Clemens’s surrogate, Huck’s point of view is uniquely, authentically, Huck’s. Finn, in contrast, is entirely a creature of Jon Clinch’s narrative whims. Clinch’s story wouldn’t necessarily hold up to a first-person narrative, but the device would have compensated for some of Clinch’s excesses by tying him to a single point of view, and by presenting Finn’s world in a form more accessible to Finn’s understanding.

Another problem with the character lies in his alcoholism. Finn is a drunk, and has clearly been a drunk for some years preceding the earliest point in the novel. Like so many other details in the story, Clinch asks readers to take Finn’s relationship to whiskey on faith, without ever truly exploring the hold it has on him. This is not to suggest Clinch should have written an addiction memoir, merely that given the central role of the whiskey jug in the character’s existence, the relationship is too important to be written off so blithely.

After a year spent in prison, Finn’s return to the jug is too easy, too obvious. Indeed, what happened to the character during that year, when he was deprived of his daily indulgence? What would happen to a character who seemingly spends nearly every page of the book either acquiring, conspiring to acquire, or drinking whiskey, and sometimes all three over the course of the same page, who sees snakes and spiders in the shadows as a result of the cheap, low-quality whiskey he drinks, when deprived of that comfort, that necessity? It’s strange that a writer who takes as his inspiration a paragon of narrative realism shies away from confronting such an obvious, and potentially powerful, reality.

The novel recounts the story of Finn’s life in the years leading up to the Huck Finn narrative, and parallels Twain’s novel, appropriating certain scenes and spinning them from a slightly different point of view. The book runs out of steam during its final third, shifting focus as the timeline catches up with Twain. As Finn’s life spirals towards it inevitable conclusion, and the character is, essentially, marking time before his final appearance in Huck’s story, Clinch explores Huck’s early life, offering details and interpretations that don’t necessarily contradict Twain’s story, but are in no way implicit in the source text.

The result is, essentially, the Secret Origin of Huckleberry Finn. In this light, Finn embodies not the great spirit of American letters, but rather the overly-enthusiastic fringes of the genre world. In the realm of comics, and science fiction, and televison, there exists a vibrant, and arguably parasitic, fan culture that draws life, energy, and inspiration from other people’s intellectual property. Fan fiction, the resulting phenomenon, reflects the efforts of people so passionate about their favorite fictional worlds that they arrogate to themselves a role in shaping the soft clay around the fringes of existing stories, reinterpreting details, appropriating meaning, and putting creative energy and talent — that might otherwise be used to craft original works — toward playing in someone else’s sandbox. The fact his chosen sandbox exists in the public domain makes Jon Clinch’s claim cleaner than those that result in derivative Superman stories. In the end, however, the spirit is similar, and the result is a work by an author who is still using training wheels.

Brick o’ Harryhausen: Jason and the Argonauts

As Sinbad, and the Arabian Nights milieu recedes in the background, and eventually disappears over the horizon, we turn our attention to Greek mythology, Harryhausen style.

In an effort to advance his claim to the throne usurped from his father by Aeertes, Jason sets out on a voyage to the end of the world, there to claim the legendary mystical maguffin known as the Golden Fleece. Fortunately, Jason has the gods on his side, or, more to the point, one very powerful goddess. Turns out Aeertes got a bit over-enthusiastically stabby when he took over the kindgom, killing a princess who was under Hera’s protection. Hera therefore pledges to aid Jason — within limits laid out by Zeus — in reclaiming his hereditary throne.

Jason gathers a group of heroes to aid him in his quest, loads them aboard the good ship Argo, and sets off to find the Golden Fleece. Among Jason’s intrepid band is Hercules, played here as supremely arrogant, tragically overconfident, and immeasurably powerful. That is to say, just like the Hercules of legend. His arrogance and overconfidence cost him dearly, causing Hercules to serve as one of several object lessons in the film about what happens when mortals defy the will of the gods. Again, this is standard Greek mythology fare.

Like the stories from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights that gave rise to the Sinbad films, Greek mythology is tailor-made to Ray Harryhausen’s effects style. Jason and his crew encounter giant bronze warriors, gods, harpies, a seven-headed hydra, and a troop of skeletal warriors over the course of their quest, each fantastically rendered. Sure, these creations look a little worn around the edges from the perspective of modern effects sensibilities, but they’re still remarkable when considered as products of their times.

As with all Harryhausen films, of course, the more you think about the stories, the more little details stick out, stray fibers that, if pulled, threaten to unravel the entire narrative cardigan. In Jason and the Argonauts, one such detail arrives near the end of the film, when Jason faces the skeletal warriors known as “The Children of the Hydra’s Teeth.” As the name suggests, these creatures spring from the teeth of the defeated Hydra, and are presented as even more fearsome and deadly than the creature that gave them rise. That’s all well and good, but it seems a bit like the old joke about how if the black box on an airplane is indestructible, why not make the whole plane out of the black box material. If the Hydra is such a fearsome creature that it is the last line of defense guarding the Golden Fleece, then where is the sense in having an allegedly more powerful reserve force? But, again, such worrisome thoughts defeat the purpose of watching a good swords and sandals epic.

Finally, since you can’t properly tell a Greek myth without cherchez-ing la femme, Jason meets up, and wins the heart of, Medea. Fortunately, their relationship comes to a more salutary end than it does in the classic myth, but this is more a function of the film coming to a somewhat abrupt end in the middle of the story than any lack of narrative fidelity on the part of the filmmakers. Indeed, one almost expects the film to end with a Bond-style teaser setting up a sequel: “Jason will return in The Man With the Golden Fleece…”

Brick o’ Harryhausen: The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

Concluding the reverse-order Sinbad viewing cycle is 1958’s 7th Voyage. Kerwin Mathews originated the role of Sinbad, in which capacity he is less effective than John Phillip Law in Golden Voyage and infinitely better than Patrick Wayne in Eye of the Tiger. Like Wayne, Mathews makes no pretext of being part of the Arabian Nights world, but is instead purely a creature of the soundstage. He cuts a fairly ridiculous figure as Sinbad, but he cuts that figure gamely.

The title of the film raises the question, “What of the previous six voyages?” a question it makes no attempt to answer. Sinbad is obviously a fabled hero, one who has done great deeds, and won acclaim and reputation, but the film cares little for this backstory. Instead, it’s a loosely-conceived collection of set pieces. The connection between these set pieces owes little, if any, debt to logic, but merely serve as excuses to get Sinbad and company from point A to point B in time to face the latest Harryhausen fabricated menace.

I don’t say that as a bad thing. But this was not a film destined to be renowned for its screenplay.

The Harryhausen menaces in this film are fantastic, from cloven-hoofed cyclopses, to dragons, to rocs and snake-women, and genies…Oh my! These early efforts have a freshness and energy to them that the later Sinbad outings, made with later-generation technology, never fully equal. Indeed, the dragon-cyclops battle in 7th Voyage presages the later minotaur-griffin throwdown in Golden Voyage. Of the two, the earlier effort is stronger, not because Harryhausen didn’t get better as he got older, but because 7th Voyage has the passion and energy of the new, of something that has never been seen before.

11. Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers, by Michael Connelly

I’m a fan of Connelly’s fiction, so I was predisposed to appreciate this collection of his journalistic work from the 1980s and 1990s. Reading his crime beat reports of murders and robberies, cops and robbers, it’s not hard to imagine that Connelly had no shortage of people telling him, “Gee, Michael, with all the stuff you’ve seen, and all the characters and situations you’ve covered, you really ought to write a book.” Thankfully, Connelly listened to this (imagined) encouragement.

His writing is simultaneously terse and detailed. He never lets dramatic embellishment get in the way of the facts, but he still manages to tell a hell of a story. The obvious difference between news and fiction is that in the latter case, you can’t make things up. Fortunately, real life provided Connelly with facts and details that — somewhat depressingly — prove the maxim that truth is stranger (and more brutal, and more tragic, and more fundamentally infuriating) than fiction.

The best pieces in the collection are a profile of an organized crime task force in Florida, and of a crack-addicted burglar in California.

Crime Beat is one of those books that flies on by. Despite the breakneck pace of the writing, I wish I’d spent more time with the book. This was especially true in the case of crimes and trials about which Connelly filed multiple reports. Spread out over days and weeks in multiple editions of various newspapers, these stories would have been more compelling than they were in anthologized form. Read sequentially, these reports demonstrate how much of journalism is based on repetition, rehashing the same facts day after day to provide a broad and accessible context. It gets somewhat tedious, but less so in Connelly’s hands than it would have been filtered through the perspective of a lesser writer.