Bookpusher

Last year I was lucky enough to go to “Watch the Pilots with Aaron” hosted by Aaron Barnhart, a nationally-known TV critic for the Kansas City Star, where he showed clips from the best new television shows for the fall season at a local movie theater. It was a lot of fun, and this year I managed to nab tickets to the 2007 version held last week. The focus last time around was on drama: shows like Daybreak, Studio 60, and Heroes stood out. This year the featured shows were more comedy-based and less formulaic. Here’s the list of what we saw with my review, and whether or not the show is going on my TiVo list. As always – and just like last year – at least one of my favorite shows will be tragically canceled by a hasty network; we’ll see if we can spot which one as we go along.

Aliens in America: This CW sitcom about a Muslim foreign exchange student from Pakistan coming to live with a sheltered and fearful suburban family was more offensive than funny, but after a few scenes I was able to better understand it. Everyone is a jerk except for the Pakistani character, who is a caring, spiritual person and who looks at the Western world with an innocent perspective, even though the show never spares an opportunity for a terrorist joke. Aliens has a lovingly twisted sense of humor, solidly in the Fark/It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia camp of comedy. It’s absolutely worth checking out, though, as the show has a surprising amount of heart to it.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Inspired by the Terminator franchise, this drama begins right where T2 left off – apparently the network is going to pretend the film Terminator 3 never happened. Sarah is on the run from bad guys sent from the future, trying to keep the teen-aged John Connor safe so he can someday be humanity’s savior. Lena Headey from this summer’s 300 plays Sarah, who brings a measure of intensity to the role, however the show seems like stuff we’ve all seen before. It had an amateur feel to it – not SciFi Original Movie level bad, but just film-school graduate bad, with a lot of people running in slow motion, mouth open in an unheard “NNNNOOOOOOO” with a heavy percussion soundtrack in the background. Unless they triple the special effects budget and bring in Arnie for some serious stunt casting, skip it.

Women’s Murder Club: Taken from a series of the same name from James Patterson and set in San Francisco, four girlfriends team up to solve crimes. One is a homicide detective, one a medical examiner, one is an assistant district attorney, and one is a reporter. The setup isn’t nearly as cheesy as it sounds, and it does a decent job of balancing the serious murder stuff with of more lighthearted just-friends-hanging-out parts as well. It comes across as Law & Order crossed with Gilmore Girls, if you can imagine it. Angie Harmon does some good work here, but ultimately it’s Not My Thing. My mom, though? She’ll love it.

Dirty Sexy Money: Peter Krause from SportsNight and Six Feet Under stars in this show from ABC. Krause’s character is a do-gooder who gets an ungodly amount of money to become a lawyer, public relations point man, and problem-solver to a rich, spoiled, drug-addled, dysfunctional New York family; hilarity ensues. Krause shines as he attempts to be an island of sanity while the Darling clan envelops him in problem after problem. After he bails a Paris Hilton-like socialite daughter out of jail, he negotiates the handover of a multi-million dollar yacht – complete with a non-English speaking crew – won in a late night poker game by the younger brother. Looks good, and I’ll certainly give it a chance.

Chuck: Now we’re talking. Relentlessly promoted by NBC to the point I’m nearly sick of the show already, Chuck is a comedy version of Alias, all tech-friendly super-spy action thriller with the funneh dial turned to 11. Here’s the deal: all the secrets of a CIA superspy is downloaded into the brain of a underachiever who works at the tech support at a big box retailer. The underachiever teams up the the superspy’s sexy partner to save the world on a weekly basis. All you need to know is that this thing is surprisingly well-written and belongs at the top of your TiVo list. Trust me on this one.

Kid Nation: This will either be the greatest reality show of all time or end Western civilization as we know it. This television show has spawned more controversy than the Alien Autopsy and the Janet Jackson Nipple Flash combined, and it hasn’t even premiered yet. We only got to watch an extended trailer, but it looks like the kids are separated into teams, set loose in an abandoned town, and compete in challenges for status – there’s an upper class that gets most of the food and money and don’t have to work, while the lower class scrubs the pots and cooks the meals. The remaining two classes are merchants and the working class, and everyone trades money for food and goods. It really just looks like a televised version of Exchange City in a Wild West backdrop, but lawsuits are already flying, so who knows how it’s going to go. I’ll certainly be tuning in.

Pushing Daisies: A new show produced by Barry Sonnenfeld about a guy who can bring the dead back to life with a touch, but if he touches them again, they go back to being dead. Yes, it’s as silly as it sounds. Tries way to hard to be cutesy and whimsical. If you’re feeling charitable, give it a few episodes to find its tone – all I know is that it hasn’t found it yet.

Reaper: The best show of the night and, by far, the most difficult to explain. A dark comedy about a loser who works at a Home Depot with his even more loser best friend finds out on his 21st birthday that before he was born, his mother sold his son’s soul to the devil in exchange for a longer life. He now has supernatural powers and is tasked by the devil to track down escapees from an overly-crowded hell. God bless the creators of this show – if I was a television producer, I would have thrown them out on the curb after hearing that pitch. This thing is like Buffy the Vampire Slayer on steroids and played for laughs, but has an amazing about of wit and freshness to it. As a matter of fact, it was the most pleasurable and original thing I saw that entire evening. Of course, it’s on the CW with little promotion and even less attention, so it’ll get filed away under reruns of 7th Heaven and Everwood, so watch it while you have the chance and pray that the FX Channel or MTV has the guts to pick this thing up.

More recent proof, as if I needed it, came last night while watching Entertainment Tonight. Apparently, teen heartthrob Zac Efron recently signed a movie deal to star in Seventeen, a movie about a burned-out 36-year old guy who suddenly wakes up in the body of a seventeen-year-old boy.

Putting aside the obvious rip-off of movies like Big and Freaky Friday for a moment, let’s look at that sentence again. According to Hollywood, 36 is a decrepit, horrifying age where your life is pretty much over and the only way to get any joy is to fantasize about being a teenager again.

I turned 35 just last month. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I’m skipping opening weekend. And may Zac Efron be forever disfigured in a horrifying self-tanning accident.

Every so often I get in the mood for an old-school sci-fi book. I usually come away disappointed, as for all my librarian skills, I often have trouble coming up with one. I’ll find a good nugget here or there – Robert J. Sawyer’s Mindscan, for example, or Dan Simmons’ Illium – but for the most part, I have to let the mood pass and go on to other things. This time around, I stumbled across Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, which is set in a Blade Runner-type dystopian future. A nice mixture of sci-fi, cyberpunk, and hardboiled noir; one of the features of the future is that people have chips on their brain stem that records all brain activity, and functions as a storage unit for the soul; souls can be transferred into other people’s bodies, called “sleeves”. The rich can clone their bodies and transfer their soul into the new one once they die, which makes the rich effectively immortal and hopelessly corrupt. Excellent book.

Also in the reading list: a friend tipped me to “Mainspring” by Jay Lake. The elevator pitch goes something like this: the universe is actually a giant brass clockwork machine, and one day the archangel Gabriel appears to a clockmaker’s apprentice and tells him that world is winding down – dying – and he needs to find the key to restart it, which is just about the coolest description for a book I’ve ever come across. I’ll let you all know how it goes.

The wife and I saw Stardust last weekend, which is loads of fun and is well worth your time. However it is lighter that I expected – I enjoyed the flick but couldn’t remember much about it ten minutes after I walked out of the theater. This might be because I’ve already read the book, but your mileage may vary. I will also say that at some point we need to have a national conversation on Claire Danes, who keeps getting these romantic ingenue roles but always manages to underwhelm me. Again, YMMV.

I found a really good one for you, gang.

A stylish, smart, moody noir thriller set in the 1950s, “Queenpin” is as hardboiled a novel as they come, dealing with the subjects that noir does best: sex, lies, betrayal, and stolen money. The book is narrated by an unnamed young woman who studies accounting by day and does the books for a seedy bar in a seedier part of town at night. She becomes entranced by the glamorous older dame who comes once a week to pick up the bar’s tribute money; Gloria is as stunning as she is business-savvy, surrounded by the whispers of mob legend. Gloria takes a liking to the young narrator and decides to take her under her wing. She learns quickly, eager to shed her working-class upbringing; soon she’s living the good life, eating at the finest restaurants and wearing the most expensive furs as the mob money rolls in. All is well until she falls for Vic Riordan, a charming small-time gambler who is known for his losing streaks. She falls under his spell, and soon she’s creeping behind Gloria’s back, talking herself into believing Vic’s grand schemes. The two women face off as cross turns into double-cross, and the story turns on the young woman’s ability to out-fox her mentor, who has made a lifetime of keeping tricks up her diamond-studded sleeve.

Both literary and deliciously trashy, Megan Abbott does everything right in “Queenpin,” adhering to the classic noir forms while carving out her own territory. She has written a book in a clear and strong female voice that belongs right alongside works from the genre like Jim Thompson, James Ellroy, and Raymond Chandler. Abbott also does an excellent job in letting our imaginations to the heavy lifting for us: for example, for a novel with a lot of blood, she never gets too lurid. For a novel that has a lot of sex, she never gets too salacious. Her prose is fast, sharp, and sparse, and is a joy to read. Abbott is a major talent on the scene, and I can’t wait to see what she comes out with next.

I’m really digging BookDivas.com after running into it randomly last week. Geared towards teen and college-age readers, it’s a community website that focuses on books, book reviews, a blog, and author visits (next up: Melissa Marr on September 10th. In December they’re interviewing Anna Godberson from her upcoming novel “The Luxe“, which I’ve heard nothing but wonderful things about.)

Great stuff all around, and I’m glad they’re doing what they’re doing.

Daniel Silva is a writer of spy thrillers, most featuring the character of Gabriel Allon, a retired assassin for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. Depending on where you are in the series, Allon works undercover as one of the world’s greatest art restorers, specializing in the Renaissance masters. The character is conflicted, like all good heroes are, as he divides his time between being the healer of priceless works of art and the avenging angel of death who gunned down most of the members of Black September, the Palestinian terrorist group who took Israeli athletes hostage during the 1972 Olympics. (If you’ve seen the Spielberg film Munich, Allon essentially is the Eric Bana character.)

Silva’s popularity as an author has grown rapidly and his books flirt with the top of the bestseller charts. The Allon series are wonderful thrillers as Gabriel gets talked out of retirement for one last mission, and he and his hastily-assembled crew race against the ticking clock to save the blah blah whatever from the bad guys. Amidst the blah blah whatever, Silva’s novels always have an important historical point to them: “A Death in Vienna” is about the European theft of Jewish-owned art during the Holocaust; “Prince of Fire” is about the bloody, conflicted history of Palestinian statehood. That being said, Silva’s novels never feel like a history lesson. A fast and clever plot is always front and center, with the emotionally-wrecked Allon (his wife and child were victims of a car bomb) and his manipulative boss, Shamron, swoop in and save the day, often behind the scenes, and without credit or glory. Which is as it should be – real spies don’t ever get medals.

“The Secret Servant”, Silva’s latest, is another along these lines. However, the series is losing a bit of steam, as Gabriel can play the reluctant hero only for so long before it gets to be tired. Also I’m sensing a cynicism creep from author Silva, who is losing his touch in keeping his terrorists at least somewhat sympathetic.

Check out Silva’s earlier Allon novels (“The Kill Artist“, “A Death in Vienna“, and especially “The Confessor“) for some fun brooding spy thriller action. Also Silva’s gone Hollywood, so expect Gabriel Allon on the big screen sometime soon.

(I’ve always pictured another Gabriel – Byrne – as Allon. Watch as someone like Tom Hanks gets the role, just to torture me.)

It’s been so long, I’ve almost forgotten I have a blog. Summer semester’s over and all papers and projects have been turned in. Good semester, but a tough one; I feel like I’ve been away for a long time in an unpleasant place doing tedious things. Kind of like the opposite of a vacation, really.

We now officially have a crib. The in-laws are in town this week, and they offered to buy us one, so on a brutally hot Sunday afternoon we drove to Nebraska Furniture Mart and picked one out. It’s what my wife calls a ‘transformer’ – it’s a largish crib that converts to a transitional bed and then into a day bed, so we can keep on using it as the kiddo grows up. It’s quite beautiful to look at, however the directions were completely nonsensical and my father-in-law and I had to put it together by a series of educated guesses mixed with repeated looks at the picture on the box with brows furrowed. Now it stands the in the room that was previously our office, a very physical representative of what’s coming our way in early December. Yeah, the anxiety level kicked up a notch.

Also, it was my birfday a few weeks ago, which I suffered under the effects of a flu/virus/bacterial apocalypse. My wife got me a wireless router, which is a glorious thing; not only can I now surf the internet on the laptop while on the potty, but I’ve networked the TiVo box into it, so now I can download content from the net and watch it on my television. You have no idea how cool this is – it’s something like three bucks a movie if I want to watch something off our regular cable pay-per-view. I can now order a movie off Amazon.com for a similar price, with older movies running just under two bucks, and some weekly specials for as cheap as ninety-nine cents. Granted, the selection is limited, but the concept of media outlets competing for my attention on my television is freakishly cool. Plus I can get videos from the Onion or Rocketboom and about two dozen other sites for free.

Books and movie reviews forthcoming. I’ve got a bunch for you.