Film: The Hunger Games

March 27, 2012

I went into The Hunger Games (2012) with an open mind…or so I thought, at first.  I’m naturally skeptical of pop culture phenomenons this bloody popular, maybe even a little snobbish.  But after fending off a subconscious urge to dislike the film for the first half hour or so, it eventually won me over, thanks [...]

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Film: Young Adult

March 27, 2012

The latest collaboration between director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody, Young Adult (2011) is a sure-handed dark comedy, anchored by a hilariously unsympathetic lead performance from Charlize Theron.  She plays Mavis Gary, a highly successful young adult writer who’s stirred from her hollow, upscale urban existence in Minneapolis by an email from an old [...]

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Lost Weeks

March 26, 2012

The last several weeks have flown by in a blur of day job, stress, and appointments appointments appointments.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have made my “get out of the house more often” resolution on top of a renewed commitment to routine health maintenance.  Two cavities, one crown, several X-rays, an MRI, and a colonoscopy later, and [...]

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Novel: Mariposa by Greg Bear

March 19, 2012

Greg Bear’s Mariposa (2009) re-gathers the cast of Quantico, pushes them deeper into the future, and entangles them in a skein of desperate operations to save the United States from the brink of total collapse. While structurally and conceptually more ambitious than its predecessor, I found it a somewhat tougher read. But after a rather [...]

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Film: First Squad

March 17, 2012

First Squad (2009) is an interesting, if not entirely satisfying, Russian-produced anime film layering an occult secret history over World War II.  The story involves Nadya, a young girl with precognitive powers who emerges from a traumatic, amnesia-causing shelling to learn that she’s actually an important field agent for Russian military intelligence, a group called [...]

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Film: Happy Happy

March 17, 2012

One of the things I love about Netflix is finding quirky, weird little foreign films that I might not otherwise discover.  That was the mindset that brought me to Happy Happy (2010), a low key, small-scale dramedy I didn’t quite find quirky or weird enough.  Pitched as a black comedy, it’s actually a fairly run-of-the-mill [...]

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Non-Fiction: The Books of Michael J. Totten

March 4, 2012

It’s closing in on twenty years since I met Michael J. Totten, at a life-changing writer’s workshop in Michigan.  Not long after, he contributed to another life-changing move for me, letting me crash in his spare bedroom for a while when I relocated to Iowa City.  Since then, Mike’s gone on to become a highly [...]

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Film: Farewell

March 4, 2012

Farewell (2009) is not on the Spy 100 list, but it could be — though I would probably relegate it to the lower ranks.  While classily made and historically interesting, it’s rather a slow, distancing thing.  Loosely based on real events, the story takes place in 1980s Moscow and involves a high-ranking KGB analyst named [...]

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Spy 100, #33: The Looking Glass War

March 3, 2012

In the introduction to John leCarré’s The Looking Glass War, the author recounts how it was written in the shadow of the success of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, a novel wildly praised as a scathing deglamorization of the spy business.  LeCarré himself disagrees with that assessment, however, feeling that his breakout [...]

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Spy 100, #31: Spies

February 26, 2012

The oldest film on the list, Fritz Lang’s Spies (1928) is a silent film, which adds to the challenge of following its plot contortions.  Clearly on the list for historical interest, I found it pretty difficult to enjoy.  The story involves a banker named Haghi (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) who secretly runs a spy organization.  Haghi wants [...]

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