Latest reviews - 3 Movies and 2 books

Clerks, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, plus Top Producer and The Mile High Club

Yes, I am absolutely taking advantage of my sabbatical time to get in some serious reading time and movie watching.  This is an interesting collection.  Let's do the easy ones first:

Bourne Identity and Bourne Supremacy - I read the original novel and enjoyed it.  The first two movies in the series are classic action adventure flicks.  The action is non-stop and high quality.  I was actually pretty impressed by both of these and I'm looking forward to the third in the series.  They have a great look and feel.  Add in the basics of a great concept from the novel and you get a pretty good package.  I try not to expect too much from this genre and these actually deliver a bit more than I expected.

Clerks - Award winning and the movie that made director Kevin Smith.  Let's see, overall the acting is first year drama class, the script is a long string of obscenities intermixed with some gratuitously inflated verbiage, the direction is workmanlike (allowing for the fact that it appears to have been shot with a single camera so you don't get a lot of shot diversity) but doesn't strike me as be too much above good quality film school.  The humor is basically late middle school/early high school.  So color me puzzled by the raves this movie generally engenders.  Is this the slacker generation's great identity movie?  Could be.  It won two awards at Cannes and another at Sundance.  It strikes me as unnecessarily long and self indulgent.  Honestly I'm not convinced.

Books:

Top Producer by Herb Vonnegut.  Have to admit the author's last name jumped out at me (no relation to Kurt apparently).  Looked like a pretty good mystery thriller.  The story of a beloved investment guru who promised massive returns to everyone and seemed to deliver.  If you've watched the news lately you've seen exactly what happens to those investments.  As a thriller it exhibits one of my least favorite tendencies.  The book builds and builds and builds and wraps everything up in about 10 pages.  It always feels artificial and rushed to me.  The story itself was fairly lame.  The big "reveal" was pretty obvious by halfway through the book.  Not bad but not particularly good either.


The Mile High Club by Kinky Friedman If you get the Kinstah you'll enjoy the book.  The stories about a mythical New York private detective named Kinky Friedman and his merry band of "Village Irregulars" - Ratso, Rambam and McGovern.  Kinky meets a beautiful woman (as usual) who might be a terrorist and ends up with passports hidden in his cat's litter pan while the State Department and the "terrorists" chase them all.  This isn't particularly deep or profound stuff but it's fun and comes with a solid dose of  the patented Friedman attitude.  Like I said if you get Kinky, you'll enjoy the book.  I've read about half a dozen of them.

Time to start working on the next batch.