The reviews are in...

We watched this DVD last night:
The short review of this film is it's a very sweet movie.

It's not laugh out loud funny, but there are some laughs in it. It's not overly serious, but it has it's serious moments. It's more a character study than anything else and that's not a bad thing.

The film tells the story of a young man, Colin Hanks, who quits law school to go to work and the work he finds is being the road manager for a washed up mentalist, John Malkovich. The two bond, bicker, and banter as they ride the ups and downs of Buck Howard's career. It's based in part on the time that the writer/director was the road manager for The Amazing Kreskin.

Colin Hanks is mostly a blank slate in this film. He's got just a few expressions and he uses them all up within minutes so it's up to his co-stars to carry the film. Thankfully Malkovich does his job and he walks away with the movie. The movie crackles when he's in the scene but when he's not it drags. Hanks and his erstwhile female co-star Emily Blunt are, to put it kindly, meh, okay. To me they were the bland leading the bland. Malkovich and Steve Zahn stood out, as does Tom Arnold in his cameo.

Hanks and Blunt notwithstanding, this is a sweet little slice of life film and it was nice to watch once.


I just finished two books and here's what I thought of them:
Everything you know about Chinese food in America is debunked in Jennifer Lee's fine book. She lays bare the fact that most everything you eat in American (and Canadian too) Chinese restaurants is not really Chinese. Fortune cookies were invented by the Japanese. General Tso's chicken is unheard of in China. Sweet and Sour chicken/pork/beef, does not exist in China. Chop suey was invented in America.

Ms. Lee, the American born daughter of Chinese immigrants, speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese, and she tracked down all the stories behind the most famous dishes served in Chinese restaurants. She went to China, Taiwan, and to many other places to get the story behind the dishes, the restaurants, and the people behind the cuisine many Americans (and Canadians) know and love. Her book is highly entertaining and highly engaging as well. It's a fast fun read and you'll never think of Chinese food in the same way after you read her book.

I highly recommend this book.


I'm a huge fan of the history of early Australia, I loved Robert Hughes book The Fatal Shore, so I was eager to read this book when I first saw it. And after finishing it last night I can tell you it's a very good read.

This book tells the story of Mary Bryant a Cornish lass who was sentenced to death for a petty robbery she committed in England in the late 18th century. She had her sentence commuted to transportation to Australia, she was in the first shipment of female convicts to that country. What makes Mary's story extraordinary is that she survived the trip to Australia while pregnant, started a family with another convict, made a successful escape from Australia in an open boat that sailed to the country we now know as modern day Indonesia, was caught, sent back to England to face trial for her escape, became a folk hero for having done all that, and finally in the end got a pardon from the king through the help of James Boswell, the man who wrote the famous biography of Samuel Johnson.

Ms. Erickson tells Mary's story very successfully. She's brief, to the point, and keeps the narrative moving. You really get a sense of the hardships convicts like Mary went through in going to Australia, starting a new colony there, escaping from there, navigating the treacherous ocean, and having to stand trial again when she got back to England. It's a hell of a tale and this is a heck of a book. I highly recommend it.