24. What’s So Funny? by Donald E. Westlake

Westlake’s lastes Dortmunder comic crime novels finds the world’s best, unluckiest burglar in pursuit of a gold and jewel-encrusted chess set worth millions. It an impossible crime; the set is locked in a bank vault beyond even the reach of Dortmunder and his crew, and to make matters worse, Dortmunder has an ex-cop who knows a little too much about his activities breathing down his neck.

Dortmunder being Dortmunder, he finds a way to get the cop off his back, to capitalize on his one chance to get the set, and to deal with last minute changes to his plan. Does he succeed? Of course; it wouldn’t be a Dortmunder story if Dortmunder didn’t pull off yet another impossible heist. Is his success lasting? Again, these are stories that fit a certain pattern, and a reversal or two along the way would just be par for the course.

Inside Man (2006)

Spike Lee does the heist movie, and does it well. He understands the form, and plays off it nicely. In the end, though, the film failed to satisfy.

Clive Owen plays the robber. Denzel Washington plays the cop. The dynamic between them is solid, but there’s just not enough of it. The movie presents a tense situation, but there isn’t much of a feeling of tension to the movie, if that makes sense. It’s more of a technical exercise than an exercise in supsense. From the first line of dialogue, it’s clear that this is a movie with some serious slight of hand going on; nothing is as it seems, and all that. As a result, I spent so much time watching for the trick, that all the stuff going on around the fringes faded into the background.

Part of the problem, for me, may have been that I watched the movie in two chunks. I started to fall asleep about halfway through, just about the time Clive Owen started talking about Nazis. Figure once you bring that into a “simple” bank heist, you really need to pay more attention than I was capable of paying. It’s possible that some of the tension of the movie was released as a result of splitting it in half, but I’m not sure how much of a difference that would have made.

23. Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert, by Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert is one of my favorite critics. I don’t always agree with him — and how much less rich a world it would be if we all agreed all the time — but I usually respect his point of view.

Indeed, I’m usually less interested in reading Ebert’s thoughts on a new release I might want to see than I am in going back to one of his reviews after I’ve seen a movie, and had a chance to form my own opinion. This makes Awake in the Dark (like Ebert’s Great Movies series) a perfect reference work, especially in the areas of 1970s film, foreign films, and documentaries.

22. Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, Health-Inspected Cartoons by Roz Chast 1978-2006, by Roz Chast (Haiku Review)

Big book of cartoons
Not as good as The Far Side
New Yorker absurd

21. Boomsday, by Christopher Buckley

This would be a funnier book if it weren’t so plausible, but it’s still a damn funny book. This would be a more satirical book if Christopher Buckley weren’t such an unblinkingly astute observer of human, political, and social nature, but it’s still a damnably brilliant satire. This would be a more enjoyable book to read if the world Buckley depicts weren’t so terrifyingly close to reality, but it’s a damned enjoyable book for all that it isn’t a different, gentler, safer book.

The media. Public relations. Corporate America. Religious America. War. Economic instability. Generational conflict. Family conflict. Social Security. Social insecurity. Ambitious politicians, craven politicians, incompetent politicians, career politicians, political aspirants, and corrupt political staffers. All of these elements bubble in Buckley’s crucible until the introduction of a catalyst — in the form of a modest proposal to solve the Social Security funding crisis by encouraging (i.e., offering tax incentives to) the Baby Boomer generation to commit voluntary suicide at age 70 — moves them toward transformation.

Such transformation as occurs in the book is individual rather than systemic. People change. Some for the better. Some for the worse. Some stay the same, but are called upon to bear the consequences of their actions. But Buckley is smart enough to recognize that systems are slower to change, and political systems among the slowest of all. While the book ends with a pebble in a place where it might someday become an avalanche, the story is rooted firmly enough in the real world not to acknowledge the probability that the pebble will run up against a larger stone, and simply stop.

We live in a world where studying a problem passes for leadership, where recommendations are conflated with action, and where perception — and its creation, management, and manipulation, trumps reality at every turn. It’s depressing, because there are no end of real problems in the world that require ledership, action, and a swift dose of reality to solve. Buckley renders a depressingly accurate vision of why we’re instead stuck with study, and recommendation, and manufactured perception, but depicts that vision in a way that enables us to laugh such that we may not weep.

20. A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

When I finished reading A Canticle for Leibowitz, I contacted several friends who know about such things to inquire as to why the @#$% they hadn’t either recommended the book to me sooner, or in the case of one friend who has made vague pronouncements about the book ober the years, why they hadn’t been more forceful in their recommendations.

Now, I’m a sucker for science fiction that interweaves Catholicism into the futuristic — or in this case, post-apocalyptic — mix. Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. Dan Simmons’s Hyperion books. Religion is as open to extrapolation as technology, or military strategy, or politics, or people with ray guns and laser swords saving alien princesses.

In the case of A Canticle for Leibowitz, the church is portayed — quite generously; this is not a church of inquisition and relentless authority, but rather one that is patient and stingy with its gifts of knowledge — as the keeper of the flame of knowledge and enlightenment in a world that has abandoned both in the wake of a nuclear catastrophe. Spanning centuries, the book shows fact becoming legend, legend become mythology, and mythology becoming canon, as the world moves from collapse to barbarism to Renaissance to modernity and back around to collapse again.

It’s a depressing book, because it assumes — as so much science fiction of the 1950s did — that the human race lacked the will and the wisdom to avoid destroying itself. It’s a hopeful book, because it believes that given enough time, we can muster the will and the wisdom to rebuild, to learn from our mistakes, and to plan appropriately for the next mistake.

Written in 1959, A Canticle for Leibowitz assumes that the human death wish will be realized in atomic fire. Reading it in 2007, that fear seems almost quaint. Replace the radiological reaper with any other horseman of a potential apocalypse — be it global warming or pandemic or some future horror yet undreamt — and the hopeful message applies.

Spider-Man 3 (2007)

It’s no Superman III. It’s no Batman Forever. The closest third film in a successful series analogue to Spider-Man 3 is probably Return of the Jedi.

In both cases, these are films that struggle under the weight of their predecessors, and both Spider-Man 2 and The Empire Strikes Back shatter the conventional wisdom of sequels by being better than the original installment. Each third outing is burdened by expectations of exceeding what came before, and in both cases, this is a nearly impossible task.

Neither film is terrible. Indeed, Return of the Jedi represents a quantum leap in effects work from either of the earlier Star Wars films. Each film was almost destined to fall short of the gold standard they inherited, but each features elements that lowered them from noble failure to speeding train run off the rails.

Need anything more be said, at this late date, about the sins of Return of the Jedi? I thought not.

It’s worth noting, however, that Spider-Man 3 recapitulates one of the cardinal failings of Jedi: unnecessary and poorly-timed comic relief. As a character, Spider-Man is funny, even campy at times. He cracks jokes. He resorts to the occasional pun. He uses humor to stick a pin in people’s inflated self-image, from street crooks to supervillains to, most entertainingly, J. Jonah Jameson. As viewers, we accept, even expect that.

Unfortunately, Spider-Man 3 frequently avoids the well-timed one-liner and the precisely placed zinger in favor of pure slapstick. Instead of serving as Spider-Man’s comic foil, J.K. Simmons — still perfectly cast as JJJ — is left to play straight man to his secretary. Is the scene funny? Absolutely. Is it either necessary or true to the essence of the character? Absolutely not. A later scene in which Jameson plays the patsy to a young child in the midst of a climactic battle not only continues Raimi’s newly-developed tone deafness about what makes the Jameson character entertaining, but also interferes with the pacing of an action sequence that is already too busy by half.

Even worse than the Jameson bits is the tragic ways in which Spider-Man film stalwarts Bruce Campbell and Stan Lee fare.

I yield to no sentient life form in my appreciation of Campbell. He’s utterly misused in this movie. His plays his role with his customary aplomb, but he also plays it as though he wandered in from an altogether different movie. Like Simmons, Campbell’s work borders on the slapstick, something he and Raimi know well from their Evil Dead collaborations. The broad comedy, to say nothing of the outrageous accent, set entirely the wrong tone. Again, the sequence in which Campbell appears — the largest amount of Spider-Man screen time he has enjoyed to day — already has too much going on.

Stan Lee’s cameo in Spider-Man 3 is also his longest. He and Toby Maguire share a moment which, if it doesn’t break the fourth wall entirely at least reminds viewers that there is a fourth wall to break. It’s a nice homage, it allows Stan Lee to remind us what Spider-Man means, but it borders on the self-indulgent.

Problem is, Peter Parker/Spider-Man is already entirely too self-indulgent. Once again, the central conflict in the film is not the one between Spider-Man and the villain du jour, but rather the one in which Parker forgets and has to relearn the lesson With great power comes great responsibility. The key challenge he must overcome is the challenge of complacency. That is the tragic flaw from which all the other action in the film flows.

In essence, being Spider-Man has become too easy, and Parker isn’t ready when it becomes difficult again. He also isn’t able to look past his own self-satisfaction to understand the problems that his girlfriend, Mary Jane Watson is having with her career. Like many two-career couples, one party’s success generates friction and (justifiable) resentment on the part of the less successful partner. That one of the partners in this case is a superhero is largely incidental.

Unfortunately, the interpersonal conflict in this case feels like it exists not to provide honest character moments, or to show the development of a normal relationship under unusual circumstances, but rather to give poor, game Kirsten Dunst something to do with her screen time until it is time for her to once again be taken hostage, to once again give Parker/Spider-Man something important to fight for.

The lack of chemistry between Dunst and Maguire drags down their already contrived interactions. Though they are meant to be playing a couple standing on opposite sides of a growing rift, there are few scenes where it feels like either character is especially invested in bridging that divide.

Where Maguire fails to find much meat on the bones of his interactions with Dunst, he does manage in the early going to use the turbulent emotions stirred up by that relationship — as well as the turmoil churned up by learning his uncle’s killer remains at larger — to fuel his embrace of the alien symbiote that makes up the black costume he wears for part of the film. While Raimi and Company (thankfully) simplify the origin of the black costume — one that originated in the Spider-Man comics — quite a bit, they capture the essence of the concept. I will note, however, that in the comics, wearing the black costume didn’t force Peter Parker to sport such a jackass hairstyle. The alien-symbiote-inspired, Id-driven Parker is, unfortunately, another source of unnecessary and discordant slapstick.

The symbiote/costume feeds on negative emotions, and a tormented hero has no shortage of those bubbling just below the surface. So, while Spider-Man battles the array of villains aligned against him, Peter Parker fights a battle with his own demons.

All this conflict makes for a crowded screen at times. On top of the troubled romance and the inner conflict Raimi juggles plotlines involving Parker friend, Green Goblin son, and villain in search of revenge and redemption Harry “New Goblin” Osborn; villain and Uncle Ben killer Flint “Sandman” Marko; and black costume inheritor and Parker antagonist Eddie “Venom” Brock.

The Osborn story is slightly less threadbare than the Peter Parker-Mary Jane plotline. Its resolution rests on the contrivance of a character stepping out of the background to convey a crucial piece of information at an appointed time, even though they have been in possession of this information, and in a position to communicate it, since the end of the first film. Once that information is passed on, this story resolves in the only way it can.

The Venom plot is the least interesting of the three villain stories, but the inclusion of the character in the franchise was inevitable. Venom, largely on the strength of the visual presence of the character, is a wildly popular Spider-Man villain. His introduction happens in a way that gives the character a motivation to hate Spider-Man, and his actions in trying to destroy the character make sense, in the context of people in silly costumes punching hell out of each other.

Thomas Haden Church fares best as Sandman. His origin is ludicrously coincidental, but ludicrous in an “it could only happen in a comic book” sort of way, which is convenient, this being a comic book movie and all. His motivation is simple, and the character is almost sympathetic in his actions. He isn’t evil, but is rather a man who made a series of bad choices in response to a desperate circumstance. In a role without much dialogue, and one that relies heavily on CGI, Church manages to convey a range of emotions, largely through facial expression.

The interplay of these character, and their various interactions with, and battles against, Spider-Man, form the foundation of the real strength of the film: solid action sequences. The stunts are complex, and are impressive to look at. While Raimi struggled with the emotional content of this film, Spider-Man 3 represents the current pinnacle of his evolution as an action film director.

19. Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris

Where Max Barry’s Company was a disappointment, Then We Came to the End is a revelation. Barry and Ferris till the same field — the working world, with all its quirks, drama, and dysfunction — but Ferris’s effort yields a more bountiful crop.

The novel concerns the activities of an advertising agency staff in the days after the bubble burst. With no new work coming in, and serial layoffs picking off colleagues one by one, the copywriters and art directors spend their time interfering in one another’s lives, gossiping, and finding other ways of keeping busy.

While it sounds like the stuff of a sitcom — and Ferris’s dialogue often suffers from too much resemblance to Aaron Sorkin’s cadence of statement, repetition, digression, repetition, ironic aside, recapitulation — Then We Came to the End is a surprisingly human book. There is tragedy and suffering that balances out the absurdity of the situation, and the energy and attention the various characters invest in the minutia that surrounds them ten, twelve, or more hours a day.