Critiques

Greg Zachary’s new short stories, collected in  Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain, are some of the most memorable stories that I’ve read in a long time.  They reveal the inner world of people forming relationships across international boundaries and cultures and describe an emerging globalization of human consciousness.

On a lark, I watched this movie, “Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman”, thinking it might be weird and campy – but it turned out painfully stupid and boring.  You’ll get most of it by fast forwarding to the 58:00 minute mark and catching the “50 Ft. Woman”  in the last five minutes of the film.

John Barth’s first novel, The Floating Opera may seem like a warm-up to the author’s later “post-modernist meta-fictions,” On re-reading, I see a model of what a novel can be – a new vision of everyday life, imbued with love and delight at all the world’s absurdities and pleasures.

A thin sci-fi plot that is really a platform for vulgar, soulless sex among the unmarried and unattached in their 20s and 30s at some time in the future. An afterlife that resembles this life is the ultimate vision of despair.

The story of a whimsical but charming nihilist seeking revenge.  Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) works as a “consultant” for the FBI, but is perfectly candid that his real mission is to find and kill  the serial killer who murdered his family, legal procedures be damned.

Well-written, deliberately nuanced perspective on male sexual exploitation of vulnerable, ambitious women in a high-pressure news corporation modeled on NBC. Identifies with the victims – at last! – but how about the the poor and powerless around the world, victims of American policies left out of  the “news”?

The plot is simplistic and predictable, but Clint Eastwood flavors a drug running story of “The Mule” with humor and occasional flashes of his tough edgy acting – at 88 years old.