As long as it sticks to situation comedy, Max Barry's Coupland-lite corporate satire succeeds as a reasonably unchallenging in-flight diversion. Unfortunately, laughable-in-the-wrong-way sex scenes, lazy character arcs and preachy apparatchik posturing eventually sink what might have been a breezy, disposable trade paperback. Most embarrassingly, Barry's tendency to overuse stock descriptive phrases, carried over from his earlier works, is distracting and suggestive of slack editorial oversight.
At least judging from this somewhat lazily, if entertainingly, written production diary of the 1996 Pfeiffer-Redford sudser "Up Close & Personal," the late John Gregory Dunne had less in common with his wife, Joan Didion, than with his tediously self-promoting brother Dominick. Catty score-settling, name-dropping and inexcusable factual lapses (movie titles incorrectly recalled, productions attributed to the wrong studio) aside, and the lamentable absence of Didion's brand of stately dry-ice observation notwithstanding, Monster is a quick, acerbic industry survey. Readers seeking more substantive dream-factory insight would do well to read The Devil's Candy by Julie Salomon.
Artist: Smog. Album: Wild Love.
Artist: Autamata. Album: My Sanctuary.
Rumors of Woody Allen's Hitchcockian triumph have been somewhat exaggerated—almost as exaggerated as ScoJo's grating, mommy's-high-heels sexpot routine—but with its ingratiatingly shtick-free observations about class and a genuine corker of a twist ending, Match Point is easily the most entertaining Woody Allen movie in years. Grade: B
Gibson's familiar idées fixes—passing references to Cornell boxes, nodal points, lateral thinking and the like—survive his inaugural foray into the present tense intact. The added currency also allows him to wax hypertextually on topics as varied as terrorism, Russian oil, globalization and viral marketing. If Gibson's tendency to let his characters exposit lengthily loses some of its energy in the absence of a novel future setting, his peerless ability to channel corporate intrigue, consumerism, semiotics and Japanese culture into gleaming prose and brutal, beautiful set pieces is as vital as ever.