Short Takes
July 22, 2015
A ghost speaks… softly
When Bill Novak writes a book with a major celebrity, you know about it — he’s the king of ghosts. Sometimes, though, he writes books you never hear about. Private books. In the Times, he tells all.
July 18, 2015
Lake Street Dive: “Nobody knows what I’m doing here (and I ain’t got a clue)”
written and sung by Rachael Price.
July 15, 2015
The first gift of Christmas: “Joy”
I am such a sucker for films like this. Of which there are so few.
July 8, 2015
“Magic Mike XXL” — Go for the fun, walk out thinking about your place in the dance
If you skipped “Magic Mike” because you thought it was about men who thrill women by humping the air in thongs, you missed a seriously good movie. Its real subject was late-stage capitalism: Mike (Channing Tatum) wants to design furniture, but the economy only wants him to strut his stuff for sexually unfulfilled women. “Magic Mike XXL,” just out, deals with that economy three years later. Mike and his dancer friends are struggling — Mike makes furniture, but he can’t afford to pay for his assistant’s health plan — so they see a stripper convention in South Carolina as their “last ride,” a final burst of creative dancing before they surrender to reality. The movie is light-hearted and generous — these men are uncommonly attentive to plus-sized women — and there’s so much dancing you could think it’s a romp. That’s the surface. But name another movie about “adult” entertainers in which one of them (Matt Bomer) says he’s a “Level Three Reiki healer” and then credibly passes his hands over an injured friend because he is, in fact, a Reiki practitioner. Then there’s the message of the film, which is that dreams have a sell-by date and our lives are much tougher than we anticipated. And then there’s the final close-up of Tatum, who understands that his moment of triumph is evanescent and bittersweet — a portrait of where we find ourselves in this summer of 2015.
June 16, 2015
A nail-biting, true story of a French family in World War II
Heroes tend not to talk about their exploits, so no one told young Charles Kaiser what his French cousins did in World War II. It was a lot: André Boulloche coordinated the Resistance movements in the nine northern regions of France, and when he was captured, his sisters did all they could. The price was high: As the war was ending, their parents and brothers were taken to Germany and killed. Now, a lifetime later, Kaiser excavates their story. More: in a mere 230 pages, he also offers a capsule history of the war, with telling anecdotes that were new to me. Like: Hitler slept through D-Day. The French police weren’t asked to arrest children, but in 1942 they sent 4,051 to Germany, where they were immediately gassed. Bicycles cost as much as cars. Men pedaled to charge generators to keep the lights on. Heat? A memory. “The Cost of Courage” is well named. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]