Here are some of the books I’ve read (and a few movies, too). Feel free to quibble with the opinions, but please keep it clean.
- Micro-Review #162: Macbeth (2015)
directed by Justin Kurzel Of the more than 90 screen versions of Shakespeare’s second-most-famous tragedy, this one, from 2015 and featuring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, is among the most cinematic. Suffused with first-half scene jumping, stunning visuals and blood-soaked action, this is clearly a movie, not a play. Most of the Bard’s verbiage doesn’t make it onto the screen, but the lines that do are faithful to the original, showing us the Scottish king’s ambition and cruelty as well as guilt, paranoia, madness and roughly 100 other heavy themes.
There’s nothing subtle here. Everything is supercharged and severe, with no time to recalibrate and catch your breath. Watch this with the subtitles on or miss brilliant wordplay and provocative subtext. And enjoy the acting. Despite the lack of tone shifts and a fiercely grim last act, Fassbender et al give powerful performances.
- Micro-Review #161: My Friends
by Hisham Matar Here’s a heavy novel about exile, friendship and family. As a young Libyan student in England in the 1980s, Khaled has literary dreams. But history has other ideas. After a protest at the Libyan embassy, there’s no going home. Now he has to make his way in a foreign land while hopefully keeping Khaddafi’s regime from punishing the family back in Benghazi.
Khaled’s life is a case of not belonging here and not belonging there, of trying to embrace a new world that carries old-world sorrows and longings personified by the trials of fellow exiles. My Friends is sometimes dour and at all times humorless. It’s also intellectual when a touch of human emotion might be more apt, but it’s also hard to put down. For light escapism, go elsewhere. For a good look at what exile does to a person, I can’t think of a better novel.
- Micro-Review #160: Shakespeare
by Bill Bryson So what’s the real skinny on Billy WiggleArrow? Did he write his own plays or did someone else? Did he poach material from other playwrights? Was he a good husband? Did he look the way he looks on the cover of this book and others?
Because there’s scant documentary evidence about the Bard, it’s hard to answer these questions with certainty. But Bryson certainly tries, and the result is a slim biography that comes across as responsibly researched and clearly argued. It’s also brilliantly told, a sheer joy to read not only for insights into maybe the best writer in history, but also for its view of Victorian and Jacobean England. Dress codes for peasants? A cap on the number of courses allowed at each meal? The nuggets of historical elucidation are curious enlightenment for anyone who hasn’t studied the era closely. I give this book a nine out of 10, with one point deducted because I wanted another 100 pages once I finished reading.
- Micro-Review #159: 28 Years Later
Directed by Danny Boyle As a fan of zombie flicks, I looked forward to this movie. With Alex Garland writing and Danny Boyle directing, it promised to be a heavyweight entry in the genre. Instead, it’s a typical B movie dressed up as a tour de force—a very good-looking disappointment, give how high the bar was.
The story centers on a young boy (Rocco Haynes) crossing a zombie-ravaged coastal area of England in search of a doctor for his ailing mother (Jodie Comer). Minutely detailed cinematography and Boyle’s trademark shaky cameras and fast-cut action make for compelling pictures (everything looks and sounds convincing), but the quest is loud and earnest and full of nothing we haven’t seen before.
Instead of relatable characters, we get rehashed types (though the acting is good). Instead of tension, we get film-making—lots of it. You’re always aware that you’re watching an intricately made Danny Boyle story. There are attempts at philosophical depth in the form of Ralph Fiennes teaching our young hero the concept of Memento Mori, but it’s a level of contextualization that feels at best neither here nor there and at worst tautological. The film starts arbitrarily, then drags, then ends just because. Oh well. I can forgive Boyle because he gave us 28 Days Later. Maybe 28 Decades Later will rock us indubitably.
- Micro-Review #158: Dad’s Maybe Book
by Tim O’Brien Confession: When I saw that one of my top-five favorite writers in the whole wide world had written a memoir about fatherhood, I felt underwhelmed. O’Brien writes famously deep novels about war and morality and human frailty, not journals addressed to his kids.
I should have known better. This collection of gentle exhortations and not-so-idle musings is worth its weight in gilded-page-edge gold. As expected, it never strays far from O’Brien’s Vietnam calling card, but it’s also of the modern age, an honest, brilliantly conceived attempt by an old man to tell his very young boys everything they might want to know about him and the world once he’s passed on. These pages will appeal to anyone who likes moral philosophy and cultural critiques with their family dynamics. It’s an excellent book.
