Monday Miscellania 11/9/09

Travel Reading: The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper. Unlike most books about the gruesome murders in Whitechapel in 1888, The Mammoth Book doesn't push forward a single candidate and scream "HE DID IT!" Instead, the editors lay out the indisputable facts (while simultaneously noting that, among "Ripperologists," there may be no such thing as an "indisputable fact"), flags suspect evidence and turns loose a whole slew of experts offering a wide range of opinions as to who may or may not have done it. It's a great place for a beginner to get an overview of history's greatest unsolved crime. It's definitely better than just about any of the movie versions. (!988's Jack the Ripper, recently issued on DVD for the first time by the WB Archive, is the most historically accurate, though it fudges enough details throughout to place it more appropriately in the "speculative fiction" category. 1999's From Hell is allegedly based on the exhaustively researched graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, but bears little resemblance to the graphic novel, much less reality.)

The last movie I saw: The Men Who Stare at Goats. "Military intelligence" has long been accepted as an oxymoron, and nothing in this movie, an adaptation of Jon Ronson's nonfiction book, contradicts that view. However, director Grant Heslov, screenwriter Peter Straughan and most of the actors (Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey among them) put so much emphasis on the wacky aspects of the story of a U.S. military unit that tries to employ psychic abilities in defense of our country that I fully expected Fozzy Bear to come on screen and yell 'WOCKA WOCKA WOCKA!" at me to punctuate the jokes. (As it is, the awful music score by Rolfe Kent pretty much does that anyway.) Only George Clooney, who plays psychic "super soldier" LynCassady, seems to know that with material this potentially outrageous, the smartest approach is to play it with a straight face. Consequently, not only are Clooney's scenes funnier, but his character is far more sympathetic; it's a lot easier to care about the fate of someone who genuinely believes something crazy and is crushed to discover it isn't true than it is to sympathize with someone who constantly winks at you as if to say, "Just kiddin', folks."