The Sentinel by Lee Child and Andrew Child

 "No. He didn't. Don't worry.  Before the ransomware attack he pressed the town to buy a backup systemfor all the computers.  The wouldn't come up with the cash so he tried to build one of his own out of spare parts.  It was supposed to overwrite whatever was on the server, but that didn't happen.  That's how he knew it had failed.  He was so mad about it he threw all the equipment in the trash."

Lee Child and Andrew Child, The Sentinel, Ransom House 2020

I've read all twenty-four of Lee Child's previous Jack Reacher novels and posted comments on six of them on this blog.  The co-authorship of this volume is not successful, mainly because the plot is too confusing and the usually reticent Reacher blabs too much.  The beginning is similar to the earlier books -- Reacher drops into a new town and immediately has to help someone who in this case is being kidnapped -- but then the plot, involving computer programs, becomes almost impossible to follow, as Reacher battles Nazis and Russians attempting to interfere in American elections. My guess is that possibly Child is tired of Reacher and wants to pass him on to younger brother Andrew (who writes novels under the name Andrew Grant; I have read none of his novels).  I also think it is likely Andrew became involved to help with the computer details, as Jack Reacher previously did not use computers or even cell phones.  Certainly co-authorship can work, as in the case of Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, whose brilliant Martin Beck novels I am currently rereading, and I have no problem with Jack Reacher evolving, but The Sentinel changes Jack too abruptly.

Turner Classic Movies May 2021

 May 2 Ernst Lubitsch's The Smilin g Lieutenant  1931 

May 4th Gerd Oswald's  A Kiss Before Dying 1956

May 5 Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder 1959 and Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt 1956

May 7 John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King 1975 

May 8 Samuel Fuller's Underworld USA 1961

May 9 Powell and Pressburger's I Know Where I'm Going 1945 and Lubitsch's So This Is Paris 1926

May 10 Godard's Breathless 1960

May 15 Fritz Lang's corrosive The Big Heat 1953

May 20 Blake Edwards's  The Party 1961

May 21 Samuel Fuller's The Crimson Kimono 1959

May 22 Frank Tashlin's  Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter 1957

May 23 Phil Karlson's film noir The Brothers Rico 1957 and Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running 1958

May 24 Chaplin's Modern Times 1936

May 27 Minnelli's The Band Wagon 1953

May 28 two by Mike Leigh, High Hopes 1988 and  Life is Sweet 1990 

Chloe Zhao's Nomadland (2020)

 Nomadland is very much in the tradition of films made about America directed by directors from elsewhere:  Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau, Charles Chaplin, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Douglas Sirk, Jean Renoir, Michelangleo Antonioni, Roman Polanski, etc.  Zhao's film (she is Chinese) is effectively low-key and austere, helped immensely by the minimalist expressiveness of actress Frances McDormand.  McDormand plays Fern, a woman whose husband and the town they lived in have died and she is on her own, driving from one state to another while living in her van and working temporary and seasonal jobs at Amazon and camps where she stays.  She has offers to stay with her sister and even a man she has met in her travels but doesn't seem to want to give up her independence, in spite of the hardships.  She makes friends along the way who share her sentiments and say things like "I didn't want my sailboat to be in my driveway when I died."

Much of this episodic film takes place at sunrises and sunsets, suggesting that this nomad way of life is both a beginning and an ending.  The landscapes of America are captured beautifully by Zhao and cinematographer Joshua James Richards -- who is also the production designer -- contrasting the beauty of the landscape in the deserts and rocks of America with the inequality and difficulties of some of its residents.

The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

 Most of the people who usually busied themselves with crime had been forced into inactivity during the last month.  So long as the police were on the alert, it was best to lie low.  There was not a thief, junkie, pusher, mugger, bootlegger or pimp in the whole of Stockholm who didn't hope the mass murderer would soon be seized so that the police could once more devote their time to Vietnam demonstrators and parking offenders and they themselves could get back to work.

--Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, The Laughing Policeman (Vintage Books, 1970, translated by Alan Blair)

This is the fourth in the Martin Beck series, as Beck and dozens of other policeman try to solve the massacre of nine people on a Stockholm bus.  The murder was carefully planned, leading Beck and the others to start investigating the lives of the victims, including a policeman, and if any of them could have been the targets.  For a long time they get nowhere, until they discover some photographs that lead Beck to think that the dead policeman, Ake Stenstrom, had been quietly working on a twenty-year-old cold case in order to move up in the ranks.  Once Beck goes back to the details of the old case some anomalies appear, including the possible misidentification of a motorcar and a strange note in the pocket of one of the victims on the bus who had been questioned in old case that involved a murdered woman. Beck and his team work long hours and interview many friends of the victims of the bus murder as well as those who had been questioned in the older case.  The last words of one of the bus victims, barely understood until they figured out the language he was speaking, also helped in finding the murderer.

Sjowall and Wahloo portray in detail the long hours and tedious interviews of homicide detectives and policemen in general, who often go days before they can spend any time with their families and even when they have a day off may be suddently summoned to a case because there are simply not enough police on the force. 

When We Fell, choreographed by Kyle Abraham and directed by Abraham and Ryan Marie Helfant

"When We Fell" was choreographed by Kyle Abraham in an isolated upstate studio over a three-week period and filmed on the promenade of the New York State Theatre as part of New York City Ballet's digital season.  The music is three piano pieces by Morton Feldman, Jason Moran and Nico Muhly.  The piece is filmed in black-and-white in grainy 16 mm. using NYC Ballet dancers of all levels, including principals, soloists, corps members and an apprentice:  Lauren Lovette, Taylor Stanley, Claire Kretzschmer, India Bradley, Christopher Grant, Jonathan Fahoury, Sebastian Villariini and KJ Takahashi.

The black-and-white film uses many shades of grey as well as a number of appropriately edited camera angles, conveying the isolation of the pandemic and how it has affected our way of looking at things that we once took for granted.  The choreography goes from adagio to allegro and back to adagio, again suggesting a pandemic uncertainty of changing behavior.  Abraham's choreography is influenced by Balanchine, especially in the varied groupings of the eight dancers, but also by Merce Cunningham, with its moments of stillness and contemplation and its dissonant music. The allegro part suggests the freeing of dancers from restrictions while the adagio parts suggest possible new ways to think about ballet and dancing.

Ray Enright's Dancing Sweeties (1930)

 Dancing Sweeties is a charming film from the very beginning of the talkie era: a drama, a comedy and a musical.  Bill Cleaver (Grant Withers) ditches his partner to dance with Needles Thompson's (Eddie Phillips) girl Molly O'Neil (Sue Carol) and they win the dance competition cup, dancing to and singing with "The Kiss Waltz" at Hoffman's Parisian Dance Palace.  While Bill and Molly are drinking their cokes the manager is forced to find another couple who want to get married in the dance palace, the original bride having bolted when she finds out the groom is an undertaker.  Bill and Molly agree to marry on the spot, mainly because they are stuck at home with tyrannical parents and the married couple will get their own furnished flat.

For a while things go okay, until Bill (who works at a soda fountain) wants to return to dancing and sneaks out to do so; they are headed for a divorce until they see each other with different partners at the dance palace and reconcile.  The last shot of the film is of Bill and Molly walking in the park with their babies, twins.  The film is full of dancing, jazz and slangy conversation ("he's got such a swelled head he has to put his hat on with a shoehorn") but symbolizes the end of the twenties, as Bill and Molly realize that leaving their parents means it is time to grow up and be responsible.  This sixty-two minute film is efficently directed by journeyman Ray Enright and shot by cinematographer Robert Kirrle, who both had long careers in mostly B films.

A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors by David Thomson

 Yet Bunuel's rating on the movie stock exchange is slipping.  No matter that so many of us seem always hurrying after a meal that does not materialize.  Despite the settled marriages in which the partners are somehow looking offscreen.  Still, his seasons or fetes are less often now.  Perhaps his insights are too unsettling for a community content with dreams and white lies.  I fear his status is passing out of reach -- and there are other directors for whom that shade has arrived:  Josef von Sternberg, King Vidor, Mizoguchi, and even Jean Renoir.

-- David Thomson. A History of Movie Directors (Knopf, 2021)

David Thomson, who wrote the indispensible The Biographical Dictionary of Film, here meanders a bit in a stream of consciousness about a number of different directors, from Fritz Lang to Quentin Tarantino, and his rambling thoughts about their roles in film history and whether they will be remembered or not.  As he says, "Who directed Ozark?" one might think this would lead to a discussion about the current auteurs of streaming TV shows, but it doesn't (there are a number of choices and reasons, from showrunners such Ronald D. Moore of the intelligent time travel series Outlander to writers such as David E. Kelley of Mr. Mercedes).  Whatever one's opinion of Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock may be Thomson has his own interesting and intelligent comments and analyses.  Certain things I agree with him about (the ultimate blandness of Spielberg and Tarantino) and others I completely disagree (Fritz Lang's American films never lived up to the quality of his German ones), but he always acknowledges the social factors at work.

In any case, Thomson's book has encouraged me to seek out again quite a number of movies (especially those of Stephen Frears, whose Philomena in 2013 I particulary liked) as well as books, with his recommendations of books on Renoir and Mizoguchi, though he shares my disappointment that the torrent of good books on film has been reduced to a trickle, though there a number of good ones in French that have not yet been translated.  He is also encouraging in his efforts to rethink and rewatch what one may have already formed an opinion about.