The Nino File

I really needed a laugh the other day, so I went to see The Men Who Stare at Goats. Seemed like a good choice, but it didn’t really work out. About a secret military unit with hippie underpinnings and a belief in the ability to use psychic power for military purposes–i.e., to avoid the need for guns–it just wasn’t that entertaining. I didn’t really laugh much, and I didn’t really get hooked into the story. And the continual references to “The Force” by characters who had played characters in Star Wars‘ films was dumb.

I’ve long thought that almost anything that Ricky Gervais says is funny. While still largely true, it wasn’t true for enough of the 100 minutes of his latest film The Invention of Lying. It is funny–loser Gervais lives in an alternate universe where no one lies, there isn’t even a word for it, until Gervais tells the first lie to good and bad results. But it wasn’t funny enough for me. So maybe I should have just watched Anchorman again.

I have the feeling that I’m expecting way too much out of movies right now, which is why they’ve largely left me cold as of late. To wit, I ended up watching the last James Bond flick, Quantum of Solace, twice. I thought I had missed the plot the first time since I was hooked up to a machine that didn’t really let me move, somewhat distracting, during my first viewing. Turns out, it’s just a movie where the plot is extremely secondary to the action scenes. I used to love Bond films, but this may be the end for me. It’s like reading a Dan Brown novel.

Last week, I went down to my parents’ place in the middle of nowhere Texas to try to rest and relax. It went pretty well, and I got to read quite a bit. First was Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I’ve owned this for quite some time, but I had it in my mind that this would be a terrible, sappy book. Boy was I wrong–at least as to whether I would like it; it is plenty sappy. It’s not exactly groundbreaking–looking at societal changes in just one generation–but it’s done well enough to be refreshing.

Set in a small village in Britain, Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague tells the story of one village’s attempt to deal with the Plague in 1665-66. The local reverend convinced the villagers to quarantine themselves from the outside world, both in the hope of preventing an outbreak in the village and, if an outbreak occurred, to prevent it from spreading beyond. When the outbreak seemed to pass, about 1 in 3 villagers were dead, leaving terrible emotional scars on the survivors.

Sebastian Junger, author of the tragic The Perfect Storm, puts together a more personal, yet more well known story in A Death in Belmont. In the fall of 1962 and spring of 1963, Junger lived in Belmont, a Boston suburb, as his family had a group of men doing work on their house. At the same time, Boston police were trying to solve a series of murders thought to be perpetrated by the Boston Strangler. When a murder happens in Belmont, somewhat out of the Boston Strangler pattern, a poor, black man with opportunity and a criminal record is convicted. Later, one of the workers at Junger’s home confesses to being the Boston Strangler. Junger compares the murders, looks at the black man’s trial, and questions whether an innocent man was convicted of murder. A quick, interesting read.

As with Coen brothers’ films, I do love me some Nick Hornby novels. His latest, Juliet, Naked, does not disappoint especially for an aging music fan like myself. Duncan, a Brit, loves the music of Tucker Crowe. In fact, Duncan is obsessed with Crowe. Thing is, Crowe disappeared from the music scene decades ago for unknown reasons. So Duncan is part of an online community that obsesses over everything about Crowe, include a pre-release unplugged version of Crowe’s last album. But Duncan’s longtime girlfriend isn’t so enamored with the mystique of Crowe anymore and their relationship is stressed because of it. I won’t spoil the rest of the plot, but I enjoyed it very much.

The latest book I received for free through LibraryThing.com’s Early Reviewers group is Angés Humbert’s Resistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France. Humbert was an art historian in Paris in 1940 when Paris fell to the Nazis, where she began to journal her part in the resistance movement. But soon enough he was arrested and spent the next 4 years in prisons in France and Germany facing interrogations, a show trial, isolation, food deprivation, and many other hardships. Through all that, she remained part of an order of prisoner resisters. And then her prison was liberated by U.S. forces in 1945 where she helped restore order and out Nazis. A wonderful story of courage and perseverance.  

Not sure how one follows up on the greatness that was The Godfather, but Fools Die is not it. Mario Puzo at least tried to put together a very different story, instead of changing the scenery and title (Dan Brown, are you listening?). Set in the 1960s, three guys meet in Vegas and do very well in just a short run. One can’t handle to success and meets his end. The other two go on to separate lives–one as a somewhat successful writer and small time scammer, the other as an increasingly powerful casino manager–but they remain close. I never got hooked by the story, and the lack of distinct voice in the story was odd and distracting.