Come on over and see me at my “old” blog, Philip Booth’s Scribe Life, to which I’ve now returned. You’ll find content related to movies and books, as well as music.

The remake of Pelham is a surprisingly gripping cat-and-mouse thriller, with tight, taut direction by Tony Scott and compelling performances by Denzel Washington and John Travolta.

Read more here

Scribe Life

It turns out that I don’t have the time — d’0h! — to devote to TWO blogs, so for the time being I’ll be blogging at my original space, Scribe Life.

Please follow me over there.

thanks,

Philip

“At any given moment there are hundreds of men and women who, in the twilight of their careers, should be regarded as American national treasures. For example, the politician John Lewis, the musicians Willie Nelson and Ellis Marsalis and the novelist Larry McMurtry, to mention a few. To that list let us add 83-year-old Elmore Leonard, whose new book, “Road Dogs,” is yet another gem in a career that has endured for more than half a century and given us 42 novels.”

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I have to say that I was surprised by how much I was engaged and entertained by “Lost” creator J.J. Abrams’ new Star Trek movie. It’s both an origins story and a reboot of a franchise which, frankly, had been dying on the vine.

My surprise about all this is due to a couple of factors. First, I’m not and never have been a huge fan of “Star Trek” — the original ’60s television series or the many subsequent incarnations. I didn’t actively dislike it, and, of course, I saw many of the (original) television episodes over the years, as well as half or more of the big-screen outings. I just never warmed to what seemed like pseudo-intellectual posturing by characters spouting cheesy dialogue. I always felt like an outsider in that universe.

Secondly, too many TV-to-movie adaptations have been stinkbombs, to put it lightly, and dragging Trek out of mothballs kind of struck me as an act of pure commercial contrivance — you know, Hollywood so often avoids originality by digging up past successes, relying on familiar characters and stories to bring in the crowds. Fresh ideas, anyone?

But what was once cheesy is now nostalgic fun. For starters, the new Trek is full of lines that just won’t die, no matter how much you try to kill them: “Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor not a …” and “Live long and prosper” and “Set phasers to stun” and “Beam me up, Scotty” and “I’m givin’ her all she’s got, captain!” There’s also a reference to a very funny “SNL” parody, with the line, “You’re out of your Vulcan mind.”

The film’s screenwriters, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, and Abrams have done a great job connecting the dots between the characters we know and their younger selves, including a Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) who’s as brash and as womanizing and reckless (but street smart) as anyone figured he might have been as a teen/20something. Then there’s a Spock (Zachary Quinto) who’s sweeter and more emotional than the character was, as played by Leonard Nimoy. Yes, the latter turns in a terrific performance that’s much more than a cameo. And my favorite reborn character is Scotty, riotously played by Simon Pegg, so funny in Shaun of the Dead and everything else he’s done.

What else is there to like? How about impressive tech work, in terms of the look and feel of the Enterprise and the galactic chases and explosions; smartly choreographed fight sequences; multiple comic moments; a pair of frightening monsters on an icy planet; a warp in the time-space continuum; and, last but not least, a barely recognizable Winona Ryder as Spock’s mom. There’s a sexy green-skinned alien girl, too.

On the downside, Karl Urban, as “Bones” McCoy, mostly does a broad impression of the original, and Nero (Eric Bana), this film’s angry, face-tattooed, Romulan villain, is largely cookie-cutter. And I’d have to say that, aside from Nimoy, Pegg, Ryder and Bruce Greenwood as the Enterprise’s captain, the cast — pretty faces, hard bodies — was chosen in part to appeal to the teenybopper crowd.

I asked my 12-year-old son, who accompanied me to the screening, what he’d been hearing about the movie. He said the word around his middle school was that the new Star Trek “isn’t geeky, it’s actually good.”

The kids got it right, and so did Abrams: The $150 million production, in terms of sheer entertainment value, has set a standard against which this summer’s other popcorn flicks will be measured.

… isn’t just about beach books.

The economic crisis is still full on, and publishers complain about book-industry woes.

And yet, a flood of books, including a few notable ones will be released this summer, according to an easily navigable guide published today in conjunction with a story in USA Today.

John Updike’s final collection of short stories, new crime thrillers by Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke and Michael Connelly, two books about Woodstock (the 40th anniversary is nigh) and a pair of novels featuring fictionalized versions of Charles Dickens are among the releases slated for publication between now and August.

Resilience, Elizabeth Edwards’ account of life with her no-count husband, former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, kicks off the season tomorrow.

Also coming: New titles from  Richard Russo, Thomas Pynchon, Pat Conroy, Larry McMurtry, Donald E. Westlake, Alice Hoffman, Bob Greene, P.J. O’Rourke, Dean Koontz, George Pelecanos, Clive Cussler, Joyce Maynard, and Robin Cook; a novel from the point of view of the Frankenstein monster; and the usual pile of books written about or “by” celebrities (Patrick Swayze, Larry King, Bret Michaels) and politicians.

Click here to read the summer books piece, and here to access the release calendar.

Boos to the Weinstein Company for the way it treated Killshot, an adaptation of the great Elmore Leonard crime novel.

The film, finished in 2007, was directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) and has a first-rate cast: Mickey Rourke, Diane Lane, Thomas Jane, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. And yet the Weinstein Bros. essentially sent the film straight to DVD, after opening in a few theaters in Phoenix.

Charles Taylor, writing in the New York Times, calls the film “a tough, uncompromising picture that has much more in common with the no-hope noirs of the ’40s and ’50s than with the test-marketed pap no one is ashamed to release today.”

Read the rest of the review here, on Leonard’s web site. The DVD will be released May 26.

The Sound of Building Coffins, by New Orleans author Louis Maistros, is an intriguing tale of jazz and voodoo. I recently reviewed the novel for the St. Petersburg Times.

Click here to read the review, published Sunday. Maistros’ creative web site devoted to the book is here.

Read the full text (“director’s cut”) of my review, below:

The Sound of Building Coffins

By Louis Maistros

Toby Press, 358 pages, $24.95

New Orleans fiction has its comic juggernauts (John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces), literary reveries (Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer), gothic horror stories (by Anne Rice) and crime novels (by James Lee Burke).

Now comes The Sound of Building Coffins, by first-time novelist Louis Maistros. It’s a macabre and utterly hypnotic feat of literary imagination, an extended tale of voodoo and jazz in the Crescent City, circa the turn of the 20th Century. The novel is so fluently delivered that it sometimes feels as if it were being channeled via the same spirits — evil and good — that inhabit these richly drawn characters.

Maistros, a New Orleans record-store owner and former forklift operator with no formal training as a writer, has crafted a work, spiked with historical characters and events, so striking and original that it probably deserves a place on the shelf of great fiction from his adopted hometown.

The novel, written before Hurricane Katrina, closes with another mighty flood, as a fictitious version of real-life musical innovator Buddy Bolden — sometimes credited with inventing jazz — stands on the roof of a building that’s being dismantled by the storm. He raises his beloved cornet to his lips, and sends a song of salvation into the darkened skies. The same night, corpses, loosened from graves built in a city below sea level, rise by the dozens.

“As the city dies, so the city is reborn,” Maistros writes, wielding a sentiment of hope that’s been expressed frequently in New Orleans in recent years.

That’s just one of many engaging set pieces, if you will, that sustain a distinctively strange narrative centered in part on the vibrant life and tragic loss experienced by the Morningstar family, a clan led by a gospel preacher who chose to name all of his children for diseases.

“The Sound” opens with a singularly bizarre sequence, as nine-year-old Typhus Morningstar pulls a trio of aborted babies from a burlap sack, and places them in the waters of the Mississippi River. There, he performs an act of magical realism, his pure love and his singing of an old spiritual combining to provide the fetuses a “water birth” during which they are transformed into catfish.

The book’s extended cast of characters, including the Morningstars, whose home is located little more than a mile away from storied Congo Square, live in a world that’s often unkind and seldom gentle. The men, aside from Bolden, are mostly gamblers, drinkers, con men, abortionists, sailors on leave, prison guards, gravediggers, and Yankees looking to make a killing down south. The women, other than Gloria Morningstar, who died giving birth to Typhus, and voodoo queen Malvina Latour (another historical character), are hangers-on, mourning mothers, barmaids, and Storyville sex workers, some of whom claw their way up from claustrophobic street-front “cribs” to upscale houses of ill repute.

An historical event forms the backdrop for the story: In 1891, nearly a dozen Italian immigrants were lynched by a mob seeking revenge for the murder of Police Superintendent David Hennessey. The imagined sequel to the hate crimes has a group of seven including Noonday, Typhus and daughter Diptheria Morningstar, Bolden, and a newspaper reporter face down a demon possessing the soul of Dominick Carolla, the one-year-old son of one of the lynched Sicilian man.

The exorcism results in bloody murder, and the events of that day resonate throughout the novel, as Buddy’s playing grows in power and stature, Diptheria gains fame as a high-class lady of the evening, and Typhus runs headlong into a twisted love affair. And the Mississippi rushes on, playing witness to and sometimes participating in multiple acts of birth, death, and rebirth.

Maistros handily gets inside the heads of his characters, using vivid descriptions and apropos vernacular to bring to life a wildly conceived world, one informed by accounts of the actual place and time. He occasionally takes risks, gambling that readers will follow him through dark byways with no clear payoff. The results, more often than not, are transporting.

Tampa writer and musician Philip Booth blogs at www.flickersandlit.wordpress.com

I’m late in posting this, but here it is …

Monsters vs. Aliens

Voices of Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen, and Hugh Laurie. Directed by Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon.

Space invaders, a giant-sized woman, and characters inspired by the Blob, the Fly, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and Mothra all come to life in three dimensions — with the arrival of Monsters vs. Aliens, the Atomic Age is back, and just in time for the real-life meltdown of the global economy.

The animated feature, another in a series of major 3-D films unreeling this year (following the stunning Coraline and continuing this summer with Cannes Fest opener Up and four other films) is a kick to watch. It’s more than funny enough, if less than a stunner.

The 3-D effects are far more sophisticated and less cheesy than old-school 3-D, mostly unobtrusive, and well-integrated into the overall production design: It’s easy to sink one’s eyes into the multilayered textures of the movie, and forget that another type of animation ever existed.

The technique is particularly impressive during the outer-space sequences, a wild ride through the deserted streets of San Francisco and a battle on the Golden Gate Bridge during which concrete and steel are mangled as car drivers and pedestrians scramble to get out of the way.

But it’s the zippy story, in part a tale of female empowerment, that provides the greatest appeal for the movie, directed by Rob Letterman (director-writer of Shark Tale) and Conrad Vernon (director of Shrek 2).

Susan Murphy (Reese Witherspoon), as bright and sunny as her home state of California, is minutes away from being married to egotistical TV weatherman Derek (Paul Rudd) when a meteor strike transforms her into Ginormica, a 50-foot-tall freak of nature.

She’s rapidly shuttled away by a military team headed by General W.R. Monger (Kiefer Sutherland) and imprisoned in a secret government installation that’s home to a quartet of strange but friendly monsters. Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie) is a mad scientist with an insect head and a penchant for nutty inventions; B.O.B. (Seth Rogen), a pile of chemical ooze with a laidback attitude, eats everything in his path; the Missing Link (Will Arnett) is reptilian and racked with insecurity; and the larval critter Insectosaurus is a silent and usually gentle giant.

The monsters, at the request of a goofball president (Stephen Colbert), attack a dastardly four-eyed alien named Gallaxhar (Rainn Wilson) bent on destroying earth, with the help of legions of clones made in his own octopus-like image.

Many pop-culture references later — to Star Trek, E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the 1968 Japanese beastie throwdown Destroy All Monsters, not to mention Oprah and Al Gore — the five monster friends have worked hard in their efforts to save earth.

Susan has reconnected with Derek, although not in quite the way that either one initially expected. And did I mention that life lessons have been learned?

Fun and marked by a higher quotient of laughs than most films aimed at the younger set, “Monsters vs. Aliens” closes with a suggestion that Ginormica and her non-human pals may be back for a second installment, perhaps next time set in Europe.

Yes, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire racked up eight Oscars and has scored nearly $250 in box-office receipts worldwide.

But does that mean Hollywood can or will take advantage of the global interest in films reflecting Hindi culture and language, and get in on the Bollywood action?

Not necessarily.

“The studios are finding out that negotiating the distance between Burbank and Bollywood is trickier than expected,” Anupama Chopra writes in a report published today in the New York Times.

Sony, Warner Brothers, Disney and 20th Century Fox have all established Mumbai-based offices and production facilities over the last decade. But the Hindi-language movies they’ve produced or co-produced have all fallen short of commercial expectations.

Despite that failure, those studios have a couple of dozen or so Indian projects in the works.

The plan for the future: Pay attention to what works in Bollywood, revise accordingly, and have patience. The potential payoff – an opportunity to tap into the movie business in India, where more than three billion tickets are sold annually.

“There is professionalism, passion, work ethic and talent among the production houses in India, and in reality they don’t need us at all, Richard Fox, an international exec VP at Warners, told the Times. “We want to be there, and we will adjust our ways to be in line with theirs and not the other way around.”