Book and Movie Reports by Ed

Art report: Watercolors by John Singer Sargent Last night, I saw the John Singer Sargent watercolors exhibit at the MFA. Wow. Painting with watercolors is something like trying to sign a check with a wet mop. It’s amazing if it can be done at all, never mind done superbly, as he does. I knew Sargent mostly from his portraits, of course. Some beautiful painting there, but what always impressed me was seeing a real human being looking back at me out of the canvas. (One of my favorites: "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit", http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/The_Daughters_of_Edward_Darley_Boit,_John_Singer_Sargent,_1882_(unfree_frame_crop).jpg ) But I had no idea the guy could paint like this. When I entered the first gallery – scenes of the canals of Venice – my jaw literally dropped. “These are *watercolors*?” I asked myself, thinking maybe they were actually oil paintings tossed in to soften us up. Then I read the description card: watercolor. I lean

Movie report: John Carter (2012) I watched the science fiction movie “John Carter” last night. Don’t ask me why. It got terrible reviews. I guess I wanted to keep my geek credentials current. This movie reminded me of the Green Lantern movie. Not in its content, but because it had such a massive budget for special effects, yet is laid low by very simple problems that make it difficult to follow. They spent a quarter of a billion dollars making this movie. Billion, with a B. So, let’s get right to the problems, shall we? Scene 1… The first scene is of the planet Mars, with a voice telling us that this is the planet Mars, and how the evil warlike Zodanga city is pretty close to conquering the nice city of Helium, and then the entire planet. Next, we see an aerial battle between blue flying things and red flying things, where a handsome, ripped young man is desperately giving orders and his plucky crew is striving to carry them out. Yay! We want him to win! Oh, wait. He’

Book report: Inferno, by Dan Brown I just finished reading Dan Brown’s latest novel, “Inferno.” Having previously read “The DaVinci Code,” “Angels and Demons,” and “The Lost Symbol,” I’m now prepared to formulate my Special and General Theory of Dan Brown Novels. Every Dan Brown novel since “Digital Fortress” contains the following elements: • Robert Langdon, the tall, handsome professor of art history and symbology at Harvard University. You definitely want Langdon on your team when you play Trivial Pursuit, because he knows everything about everything, which can be really handy. Whenever he speaks, it is with a smile of some kind. He is also a powerful swimmer, yet, although he’s near major bodies of water at least four times in this book, he never dives in. Also, he has probably taken a vow of celibacy, because he never ends up with the – • Beautiful, brilliant, and plucky woman who helps Langdon unravel the mystery. In “Inferno,” Brown has outdone himself in creating the e

Movie report: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) There’s a scene in this movie where Sherlock Holmes finally meets face-to-face with his archenemy, Professor Moriarty. By this point, Moriarty has already masterminded a series of bombings across Europe that have killed hundreds and pushed the continent to the brink of a world war, as well as killing the only woman Holmes has ever cared about, and threatening Holmes’s only friend. I’m thinking it’s time for Holmes to whip out his revolver and off the scum. But no. They banter threateningly back and forth, and Holmes leaves. Huh? I mean, is he Batman or something? Has he taken a vow never to kill? Or do the moviemakers just have no clue about what an audience can and can’t reasonably swallow? I’m going with the latter, because this movie just keeps throwing things at me that I don’t want. All of the fight scenes go on for far too long, for example, as do all of the chase scenes. And there’s one inexplicable scene of Stephen

Book report: The Hydrogen Sonata, by Iain M. Banks Literature is people, so they say, but Iain M. Banks isn’t aware of this. Most of the characters in The Hydrogen Sonata are NOT people, but Ships, which is Banks’s shorthand for the massively smart and capable artificial intelligence units of spaceships belonging to the Culture. The Culture, in turn, is a collective of advanced (to us) civilizations that range throughout our galaxy. The civs in the Culture are post-scarcity societies, which is nice. Everybody has enough food, a place to live, and so forth. Machines do most of the work, so people are free to do pretty much whatever they want. Sounds pretty cushy, right? But even with people who have everything, there are still problems. Take the Gzilt, for example. They are an advanced civilization, on the same level as the Culture, but not a member of the Culture. They’ve all been there and done that, and now they are taking the Next Big Step: they are going to Sublime, which

Book report: The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown I started reading Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code”, and really liked it, up until I found out that the big secret behind all the machinations was that Jesus was a dad (“Dad, show Jimmy that you can too walk on water!”), and his descendants (the Christs?) were still among us. I couldn’t take it seriously after that. It was as if the big secret was that the moon really was made of green cheese, and an immense conspiracy was underway by Kraft to harvest all that cheese. Sorry, I cannot suspend disbelief that much, and I’m usually a really good belief-suspender. His “Angels and Demons” was terrific, though. He actually wrote this before DaVinci Code, but when DVC became such a monster hit, A&D was rediscovered. It’s about a plot to blow up the Vatican with an anti-matter bomb, all orchestrated by a madman who also feels the need to kidnap and maim several archbishops – who are in the midst of electing a new Pope – at certain historically si

Movie report: Man of Steel “Man of Steel” is phenomenal. The story is told non-chronologically, which took some getting used to. In fact, at one point, I thought the theater had forgotten to show an entire reel of the movie, until I figured out what was going on. They’re trying to show what it would be like for someone to have these amazing powers – and hide them desperately – and how difficult that would be. He’s trying to make sense of it all, and that means sometimes remembering what happened in the past, the good and the bad lessons growing up. Superman’s super powers have never been shown like this before. This is what it would be like to fly: the roar and buffet of the wind, the shakiness and uncertainty, the exhilaration and freedom. This is what it would be like to be invulnerable and super strong – fighting desperately against enemies who are also invulnerable and super strong – and not fighting enemies who aren’t. His heat vision is the scariest power imaginable

Book report: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris Sigh. This is yet another of those books about how great the world would be if only most of the people in it – in this case, the 5 billion or so who believe in God – didn’t exist. Let me save you a little time (and 348 pages) by summarizing his main points: 1. All religious faith is nonsense. 2. Some of it is dangerous nonsense, because it encourages people to hurt or kill people (Spanish Inquisition, suicide bombers). 3. Especially Muslims, because martyrdom and jihad are prominent parts of Islam. Luckily, he has some simple solutions to these problems: 1. Establish a world government to which all nations surrender their power. 2. Induce Muslims to reform Islam from within to remove all the violent elements. 3. Convert our societies to the use of alternative energies so that oil has no value and Muslim countries become impoverished. No, I’m not kidding. Those are his solutions. He doe

Book report: Who’s Your Caddy? Looping for the Great, Near Great, and Reprobates of Golf, by Rick Reilly A lot of sports fans don’t care for Rick Reilly as a sports writer. He is routinely trashed by the sports talk station I listen to. But I think he is really and inventively funny. That’s what drew me to this book, even though I don’t play golf or know much about it. Reilly’s concept for this is that in no other sport can an ordinary person be so close to a star athlete while they’re actually competing as in golf, where the caddy is right near the player for the entire round. So, to see what it’s like being so up close and personal, Reilly asked many golfers if he could caddy for them for a round. Many said no, but a few said yes. This book is based on Reilly’s experiences caddying for golfers including John Daly, David Duval, Tom Lehman, Jack Nicklaus, Deepak Chopra, Donald Trump, professional gambler Dewey Tomko, Bob Newhart, Casey Martin (whose rare leg ailment allowed

Book report: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond  Having read Diamond’s phenomenal “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” I was looking forward to reading “Collapse.” GG&S was a brilliant analysis of why European and Asian societies came to dominate the rest of the world. This success was ultimately deduced from the effects of geography, with all of the logic and inevitability of the proof of a theorem in geometry. I expected the same kind of sharp analysis in Collapse, but I was very disappointed. This book is a rambling, anecdote-laden presentation of certain cherry-picked historical societies like Norse Greenland, Easter Island, the Mayans, the Anasazi, and modern Montana, where Diamond regularly vacations. His main point seems to be that societies that don’t take care of their natural resources – especially their trees – collapse, sometimes very suddenly.  Okay, certainly a good point, but one that could have been presented far more succinctly t

Book report: Twilight of the elites: America after meritocracy by Christopher Hayes There’s a prestigious public high school in New York City. To gain admission, it doesn’t matter who you know, who your family knows, or how rich you are. All you have to do is score well on their entrance exam and you’re in. Sounds like the perfect meritocracy, right? The smart kids –regardless of race or ethnicity or religion or anything else – will get an excellent free education and a boost into the best colleges, jobs, and lives. So, what’s the result? The student body is almost all white and Asian, from the best neighborhoods of NYC. Not what was intended at all. So, what went wrong? Well, as with anything, there are ways to game the system. There are preparation classes kids can take specifically to help them do well on the entrance exam. Of course, these classes cost a lot of money, and only the kids whose families can afford it can go. Plus, kids from better neighborhoods go to better

Book report: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker This book makes the unbelievable claim that violence has declined in the world and that we are, in fact, living in the least violent time in human history. What?! Is he crazy? Come on, pal! Watch the news for an hour – with school shootings and terrorists and serial killers and abusive boyfriends – and then tell me what you think! And that’s actually one of the issues he talks about. What we see on the news is the unusual, the uncommon, the unlikely. If you look at the statistics – and believe me, he looks at the statistics – by practically every measure of violence, there is a steady downward trend in time. A couple hundred years ago, you were 30 times as likely to be murdered – yeah, murdered – as you are today. One of the very interesting things he does is to talk about some of the kinds of violence that used to be very common, but that we almost never see any more. Flogging. Pub