Michael Lewis is one of our most compelling, original chroniclers. He combines instinctive storytelling and fascination with the hidden interstices of the human world. All his books are gorgeous reads but it’s when he explores and explains conceptual material that he soars. And in The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, he has a sublime notion to play with. The result astounds.
The GFC sprang upon the world as a huge shock, yet dozens of books since insist that the crash was quite predictable. Lewis tackles the question of cause from the most original angle of all, by focusing on those rare financial players who bet money – hefty licks of money – against the herd. A fascinating set of mavericks and misfits spent the years before the GFC seeking ways to make fortunes by gambling that the boom would turn to bust: a rebel with no social skills, a bunch of newbies with one good idea, a recluse with Aspergers, a glib salesman with brains. Lewis burrows deep into their lives, dovetailing their almost unbelievable stories as the storm approaches.
Throughout what reads like a Matthew Reilly thriller, Lewis gradually explains, evocatively and clearly, the intricacies of mortgages, derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, sub-prime, and the interlocked financial markets. In the process, his portrayal of the money world is staggeringly simple: yes, there was evil afoot, but most of the supposedly ‘perfect’ market were simply thick and driven insane by greed.
The Big Short is the one account of the global financial crisis you simply must read, and it’s my pick for best book, nonfiction or fiction, of 2010 so far. 4½ stars.
The end of the Shins felt premature, so when its pivotal member, James Mercer was announced to be working with producer/musician Danger Mouse, loud cheers could be heard. And the fruit of that collaboration, the self-titled release of Broken Bells, has been worth waiting for.
Mercer writes nifty, slightly askew alt-pop songs with Stipe-ish, involving lyrics. His clear, high singing has the expressive quality of the voice of Tim Booth (of James fame). The Broken Bells release is relatively short at ten tracks, but each one is polished, rhythmic, melodic and expressive. Much of it could have come from a Shins release, albeit with a keyboards orientation, but he does branch out into some more funky or dubby songs. In all senses of the word, this is a collaboration: the keyboards of Danger Mouse range from burbling synths to roaring organs to tinkling keys, he contributes all the drums, and he and Mercer share bass duties. Top track picks include ‘The High Road,’ which kicks off with bubbling synth percolation and settles into a lovely repeated coda; the delightful keyboard intro and high vocals of ‘October’; and ‘Sailing to Nowhere’, with its acoustic guitar and keys intro overlaid by falsetto, morphing into Mercer’s lovely chorus backed by organ, finalized by an extended musical finale. But the truth is, this album is very much a unified pleasure.
Buy anything James Mercer puts out! 3½ stars.
One approaches franchise books and films gingerly: ‘massively popular’ often indeed means ‘crap’. But instant franchise books can signal an artistic creation that has seized the public imagination because it is brilliant, at least in some aspects. Take Harry Potter – it succeeds because it deserves to. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series is another example. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo spread globally like a super virus, readers engulfed by its potent combination of intricate, raw plots and intensely individualistic characters observed in minute detail. (Here I’m indebted to perceptive analysis by Laura Miller.)
I read the second in the series, The Girl who Played with Fire for a book group, and enjoyed the experience without falling in love with the series. Too many endless details, I sniffed. But now I’ve seen the film of the first, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I wonder if I was mistaken. For the movie is a humdinger. Casting is a primary strength – Noomi Rapace is perfect as the emotionally fragile but unstoppable super hacker, Lisbeth Salander, and Michael Nyqvist steals every scene as the dogged investigator Mikael Blomkvist. By necessity the film version truncates the exhaustive plot of the book but under the direction of Niels Arden Oplev, it maintains a kinetic pace while constantly revealing the characters. The lovingly shot Swedish countryside and cities, plus the exotic (to my ears) Swedish language, convey Larsson’s fascinating Swedishness. Not peppered with violence like most modern thriller, the film nonetheless is graphically raw when it depicts one of Larsson’s major themes, that of male violence toward women. All of this intoxicating package unfurls at the best movies do – two and a half hours vanished from my life.
It is now clear to me that Larsson does indeed weave modern storytelling magic, and the film version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo captures that magic triumphantly. 4 stars.
Years ago, when I read Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s Dogs Never Lie About Love and When Elephants Weep, I recall being impressed by his wide-ranging, compassionate mind. So it seemed natural, after Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals (see my review) profoundly affected me, to read Masson’s new book The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food. Like Foer’s book, Masson’s effort is a plea for ethical treatment of animals, by refusing to harvest, kill and eat them, but it is also a paean to the joys of vegetarianism. The author has a magpie’s instinct for collecting interesting facts and stories, and here he weaves his knowledge into a plea for compassionate, healthy eating. Especially valuable for me was a chapter in which Masson chronicles his own diet and culinary habits. How rich he makes the vegetarian life sound!
The structure of The Face on Your Plate is discursive, sometimes almost random, and anyone seeking a coolly logical treatise on the moral advantages of vegetarianism would best go elsewhere. Yet it is the humane, highly personal exploration of these issues that gives the book its strong charm. Masson is an eloquent stylist, and that style is put to the service of an emotional message that hits its mark.
Powerful but never sanctimonious. 3 stars.
Two thirds of the way through The Concert, the exuberant romp by Romanian-born filmmaker Radu Mihaileanu set in Moscow and Paris, during a serious restaurant scene, I realized the film was just an exotic version of The Mighty Ducks. The Concert has the same ludicrous premise: a team of mismatched, completely ill-equipped ordinary folks aspires to win a championship against all odds, come within a whisker of the ignominy they deserve, and miraculously seize victory. My errant mind almost curdled my enjoyment but the sheer verve and creativity of Mihaileanu’s film swept aside all doubts.
A once-famous Russian conductor, fired as head of the Bolshoi orchestra thirty years ago during the height of Brezhnev-era suppression, now works as a janitor. One night he spies a fax requesting the Bolshoi orchestra for a concert in Paris. He seizes his chance and assembles his old team of musicians scattered in dead-end jobs, and off to France they go. Misadventure piles upon misadventure; a poignant subplot deals with the conductor’s insistence on having a young female French violinist as lead musician.
The fantastical plot of The Concert mostly brushes aside viewer doubts, the acting is solid to great (Dmitri Nazarov is especially strong as best friend Sasha), and there are enough laugh-out-loud scenes to make up for some characterization cliches. The broader observations on modern Russia and the Slavic character are painted lightly. The final, extended climactic scene is directed with amazing assurance.
An unusual near-pitch-perfect modern farce. 3 stars.
Nineties band James achieved stadium status in their British homelands but are not well-known elsewhere. They disbanded in 2001 and their key member, singer/lyricist Tim Booth put out a memorable solo release. They reformed in 2007 with the fine Hey Ma and have now adopted a calculated approach of releasing over 2010 two mini LPs.
The first of the two, The Night Before, is a revelation, seven familiar yet adventurous tracks of varied, upbeat, full-band rock, underpinned by Booth’s pristine, expressive vocals. The band has lost none of its imaginative arrangement skills, and each song ebbs and flows in classic James style, complete with full-on choruses. Standout tracks include ‘Porcupine’, with its slide guitar and ambience wonderfully reminiscent of the classic Laid album; the driving ‘Crazy’; and singalong ‘Dr Hellier’, with wonderfully obscure lyrics that seem to conflate Iraq and psychoanalysis.
A pity The Night Before is not a full-length album, but it’s not far off one and it’s a ripper. 4 stars
Of course one should read books by one’s heroes, both as homage and for inspiration. James Hansen is that rare scientist, brilliantly geeky yet driven by conscience to enter the fields of politics and persuasion. In spite of his own preference to stay in the lab, he was one of the first scientists to leap from the ivory tower to warn us about climate change, and he’s escalated his public activity to the point of a recent arrest amongst an anti-coal-plant protest. Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity is an unusual memoir, one restricted to exactly that period, the times of his public attempt to persuade policymakers to do something. The book begins in the late 1990s and ends with his recent letters to state leaders. While the world is clutching at greenwashing plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions to 550 or 450 parts per million, Hansen believes anything beyond 350 signals global calamity; he is mighty persuasive.
Unusually for a scientist, Hansen is a smooth, engaging writer, and the book seamlessly meshes a fascinating glimpse into backroom climate change politics and a gentle yet deep story about global warming. If you want one broad brush introduction to climate science and how it has rapidly evolved into near certainty and quasi despair, this is the book for you. I was held spellbound. Ranging over physics, paleontology and glaciology, rigorous yet emphatically personal, Storms of My Grandchildren should be required reading for all secondary students (it seems to me adults either know or reject the truth by now, and the youth of today will wrestle with the issue far better than we seem to be able to).
There can be no excuse for not reading this. Incendiary yet inspirational. 4 stars.
Is it the Scottish climate that produces so many driving, melodic examples of anthemic rock, perhaps as spiritual offset? As examples, consider Snow Patrol (though they have been rendered bland by success) and Idlewild. Now we have Frightened Rabbit, whose third album, The Winter of Mixed Drinks, is another emotional, feet-rousing example of chugging guitars, rousing choruses and impassioned singing.
The Winter of Mixed Drinks is an album to grow into, for the apparent directness revealed on first listen unfolds layers of complexity with repeated listening. Singer Scott Hutchison’s appealing, lilting voice rises, soars and moans in perfect synch with the lyrics, which alternate existential angst and hope. Highlights include the radio-friendly ‘Swim Until You Can’t See Land’, with its catch cry ‘are you a man or a bag of sand’; the stark ‘The Loneliness and the Scream’ with its hand clap beat; and ‘Not Miserable,’ Hutchison entreating over building keys and guitars that he’s ‘not miserable now’ in a wonderful Scottish brogue.
You’ll catch yourself humming snatches of Frightened Rabbit in the shower, it’s that good. 3 stars.
Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side thrilled me. All his books have. But the book is only partly a feel-good tale of a homeless black youth in Memphis being taken in by a Republican, rich white family and turned into a prospective American football star. Lewis also provides fascinating insights into the maths of football and its coaching, just as he did for baseball with Moneyball.
So when The Blind Side came out as a movie, one in particular starring Sandra Bullock, I groaned. Well, I can report that John Lee Hancock has written a decent script and directed a movie that engaged me and, dare I say it, moved me. Sandra Bullock’s performance, while hardly the stuff of an Academy Award, is creditable, and Quinton Aaron is splendid as the centrepiece youth. The real life story is interesting and wonderful enough to excuse the many Hollywood-style melodramatic devices. But without the other analytical side of Michael Lewis’s book, the film struck me as mawkish as soon I left the cinema.
Capable but ordinary. 2½ stars.
Something had to give and it’s my love of film; this month’s visual menu is slim:
- Food, Inc. finally hits Aussie screens
- Fresh from its Oscar, The Secret in Their Eyes
- A comedy set in modern Russia, The Concert
- The DVD of Where the Wild Things Are
- Although I’m sick of vigilante flicks, hopefully Michael Caine will lift Harry Brown out of the mire