I read my first two Pynchon books this year. The Crying of Lot 49 knocked my socks off. Inherent Vice grabbed those socks and ate them. I am sockless and I am converted: Pynchon is my favorite fiction author.
The premise: In 1970, Doc Sportello is a chronically stoned private investigator living in Gordita Beach near Los Angeles. Doc's ex, Shasta, tips him off to a plot to seize the fortune of her boyfriend, Wolfmann, a major real estate developer. Soon after, Shasta and Wolfmann disappear. As Doc investigates, he keeps encountering the Golden Fang, a mysterious group which has its tentacles in everything: real estate, a dentists' guild, a smuggling ring, and more. Doc is never exactly targeted by the Golden Fang, but everywhere he looks, he finds another tentacle, and he can never be sure who's in league with it.
This is a phenomenal movie, full of first-rate intrigue, false identities and double-crossing. Cary Grant gives a excellent performance; we are never sure until the very end where his loyalties lie, or even who his character really is. An Audrey Hepburn gives a perfect portrayal of an uncertain yet brave woman who is not just a 21st-century "strong female character."
A poignantly creepy thriller that leaves me wanting to discuss and debate. For instance, the men of Stepford are obviously crueler than men of today who get sucked in by AI girlfriend chat apps -- but are the Stepford husbands weaker than today's men? A Stepford wife at least offers the illusion of life, and is designed, however chauvinistically, to be part of a household, a family. An AI girlfriend is a method for a man to completely detach from love and romance; it offers a way to safely reject life outside one's self.
For the love of all that is good in this world, do not watch the 2000s remake.
A solid spy thriller by a master of the genre. This is the second book I've read by Le Carre, the other being his famous The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Naturally, he knows his spy tradecraft, the details of which are used to great effect in portraying a competent protagonist drawn into events larger than himself, by no fault of his own.
Le Carre also deftly makes reveals that kept me turning pages til the end. As with Came in from the Cold, the ending happens suddenly and all at once. As in that other great spy thriller, The Day of the Jackal, the full strength of the protagonist's plan is kept secret from the reader till the very end, yet (also as in Jackal) it's all very logical: Le Carre doesn't cheat the reader by pulling things out of his rear end.
As strong as the famous train-and-car chase is, for my money it's too hectic to be this movie's best scene. I prefer the foot chase where Detective "Popeye" Doyle tries and fails to catch Charnier, the stately criminal mastermind. The cinematography and the actors' movements make it; the steadily increasing tension of the score clinches it.
Nothing could possibly be drier than a movie about Japanese salarymen who work in banking, right?
Not so.
Shylock's Children is an intricate tale of fraud and counter-fraud, with a new level of deception appearing every time when you think the movie can't get any more complex. There's a lot packed into these two hours, and it's well worth your time.
The characters in this movie about con men are hard to like, all of them, especially the main character's stupid, narcissistic wife. Certainly that means the director and the screenwriter did their jobs well! But even so, I was almost ready to give up on the film two-thirds of the way through. However, I'm glad I persevered. The payoff, in which yet another con is revealed, made the whole thing worth it.
I was initially interested because it had Robert Redford and Paul Newman co-starring; having just watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the first time, I was eager for more from that pair. I didn't feel so strongly about Butch Cassidy that I wanted to follow its director to this film, but then my decision was clinched when I saw on Wikipedia that The Sting's plot took inspiration from David Maurer's book The Big Con, which I read just a few months ago.
By far inferior to that early hallmark of film noir, The Maltese Falcon. Marlowe is too much of a hero in this one, and the plot is needlessly tangled with insufficient payoff.
I watched this as part of my "curriculum" for movies featuring intrigue. Although I've given this a star rating, as with previous entries this is less a review and more an analysis of character interactions to improve my D&D Dungeon Mastering skills.
The idea of watching movies to study intrigue was inspired by this Tao of D&D post, and subsequent discussion on Alexis Smolensk's Patreon. As always, if you care about the cutting edge of roleplaying games, you need to read Alexis's blog. Once you see how much you can learn from the millions of words he's given away for free, you'll understand why I send him some cold hard cash each month to get just a little extra.
