Movie review by Greg Carlson

In the opening scene of Ulrich Seidl’s “Paradise: Love,” the Austrian filmmaker presents a series of vehicle-mounted shots focused on the faces of people with developmental disabilities as they careen around in bumper cars. Smashing into one another, their expressions run the gamut of highly intensified human emotion as Seidl makes note of the fine line between pleasure and pain. The sequence suggests an entire universe or the makings of another movie, but it ends quickly and without additional comment. Among the group is teacher Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel), who subsequently packs for a Kenyan vacation that will serve as the movie’s central concern.

The topic of international sex tourism, especially from the vantage point of the middle class female consumer, is rare in mainstream narrative cinema, and the curiosity factor accompanying Teresa’s quest to locate a partner will invite contemplation from many viewers. Seidl sets the stage with economy, revealing that certain European women spend their holiday as “sugar mamas” who pursue young “beach boys” willing to provide companionship in exchange for varying degrees of compensation. Some of the transactional mechanics are filled in by the racially insensitive Inge (Inge Maux), but more memorable is the long take of sunbathing vacationers lounging on the beach while local candidates stand patient and silent behind a rope, waiting to be chosen.

The closest Seidl comes to constructing any degree of viewer sympathy for Teresa occurs when her initial partner Gabriel (Gabriel Nguma Mwarua) moves too quickly, resulting in Teresa’s sobs over the lack of emotional connection. We all know that money can’t buy love, and Seidl drives home the point as Teresa settles on Munga (Peter Kuzungu), a seemingly more sensitive lover who nonetheless expects that Teresa will open her wallet to all kinds of pressing financial matters, from medical bills to school supplies. “Paradise: Love” is at its best during these scenes, principally due to Seidl’s fogging of user and used.

One of the movie’s most provocative and dispiriting exchanges involves an aborted bacchanal in Teresa’s hotel room with a trio of friends and a hired “stripper.” Seidl escalates the humiliation, as the hapless prey is presented to Teresa as a birthday gift. What follows is a nightmarish display of soulless exploitation, as the women initiate a contest to see who can coax an erection from the young man. By this point, Seidl has made clear the irony of both words in the film’s title, reiterating that the gloomy realities of prostitution reside far from the sun-drenched and farfetched fantasies of happiness and fulfillment.

A number of critics have taken Seidl to task for withholding any degree of commiseration or understanding that might come with an exploration of the inner lives of either Teresa or the men with whom she interacts. The filmmaker deliberately distances himself and the viewer, drawing on his work as a documentarian to indicate the ways in which the exchange of money for sexual gratification parallels the socioeconomics of the global travel industry. While many would quickly describe the system in which Teresa and Munga operate as miserable, deplorable, or even morally repugnant, Seidl details the minutiae of their polluted dance. Hakuna matata.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Things move so quickly in the digital age that documentaries on contemporary Internet politics are risky business for diligent filmmakers committed to quality research. Alex Gibney, whose “Taxi to the Dark Side” earned the 2007 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, is as good as any non-fiction storyteller working today, and “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks” joins “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,” “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer,” “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” and a number of other features as a moment-in-time snapshot of a lightning rod topic. What has surprised some critics on the left is the possibility that Gibney has ideologically sided with an establishment committed to silencing those who would leak privileged information, but one should see the film before labeling Gibney pro- or anti-transparency.

Tracing the intense media scrutiny of the “hacktivist” organization fronted by Australian radical Julian Assange, “We Steal Secrets” follows one of Gibney’s common templates: the unraveling of a powerful, seemingly principled person or group whose off-camera behavior contradicts the on-camera perception. Gibney is particularly adroit in the arrangement of his information surrounding Assange, framing the WikiLeaks founder first as a truth-telling provocateur committed to “crushing bastards” and later as a paranoid egomaniac whose once far-reaching influence already appears to have run its course.

One of the central questions of Gibney’s narrative asks us to consider the role of the whistleblower. On this count, “We Steal Secrets” presents the case of United States Army PFC Bradley Manning, the intelligence analyst and computer specialist whose release of one of the single largest collections of classified documents in U.S. history resulted in Manning’s July 2013 conviction. Gibney’s film was completed and released several months prior to the conclusion of Manning’s trial, but the movie does attempt to address the complex gender identity issues that played a central psychological role in the media’s effort to understand Manning’s motivations. The onscreen text display of Manning’s confessional instant message conversations with eventual betrayer Adrian Lamo contributes to the film’s arresting visual design.

In the latter part of “We Steal Secrets,” Gibney returns to the question of Assange’s actions during August of 2010, while the WikiLeaks leader was in Sweden. In what has become a muddy and confusing report of sexual misconduct fraught with conspiratorial charges and countercharges, the Swedish government investigated the complaints of two women who accused Assange of coercive or non-consensual sexual activity. Gibney includes clips of several pundits and talking heads quick to label the allegations as a “honey trap” meant to smear and discredit Assange, but the filmmaker’s curiosity leads to an unexpected turnabout that will surprise many Assange sympathizers.

Some of the most interesting commentary on “We Steal Secrets” has played out in back-and-forth disagreements between Gibney and his critics – including Assange. Robert Manne published a response from Gibney in his column in Australia’s “The Monthly,” along with Manne’s rebuttals, and their beef rests in part with the seriousness of the U.S. grand jury investigation of Assange and the possibility of his extradition to America to face charges. In his original review, Manne also argues that the presence in the film of two former Assange associates, Daniel Domscheit-Berg and James Ball, skew away from objectivity. In Gibney’s defense, Assange refused to participate in the film without compensation. Like any good documentary, “We Steal Secrets” will leave most viewers with a desire to learn more about its subject.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Following its Palme d’Or win at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the discourse around Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue Is the Warmest Color” has addressed the off-screen drama between the filmmaker and stars Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux as much or more than the onscreen story of a doomed love affair in Lille, France. Claims of Kechiche’s bullying, abusive on-set behavior led the moviemaker to respond with thinly-veiled legal threats. Additionally, author Julie Maroh, whose 2010 graphic novel is the basis for the film, expressed her own disappointments with the adaptation, writing that the filmmaker’s vision “turned into porn and [made] me feel very ill at ease.”

Subsequently, a number of writers have taken positions on the movie’s sexual and emotional politics. Michelle Juergen’s “PolicyMic” essay “’Blue Is the Warmest Color’ Gets Lesbian Sex Wrong” was reposted on “Salon” and frames an attack on Kechiche’s dominant male gaze. Juergen argues that the director failed to uphold the “responsibility that comes with representing both another gender and sexual preference.” Writing for “Jezebel” and taking the opposite side, Ashton Cooper notes, “I have never seen a portrayal of a lesbian relationship on screen that captures the experience as truthfully as this film has.” Somewhere in between is the valuable October 25 “New York Times” critique by Manohla Dargis, perhaps the best thing about the film written so far.

The movie’s three hour running time suggests an epic of sorts, and Kechiche makes a convincing argument on behalf of the protracted character study. The erotically charged bildungsroman is so close to the heart of Gallic moviemaking that Molly Haskell, in an essay on Maurice Pialat’s “A nos amours” wrote that the “teenage girl on the cusp of sexual awakening is a beloved icon of French cinema.” Haskell went on to say, “Painful, beautiful, and discomfiting, ‘A nos amours’ remains… startling in its honesty, its unique mix of savagery and delicacy,” a description that could just as easily be applied to “Blue Is the Warmest Color.”

The relationship between Exarchopoulos’s Adele and Seydoux’s Emma provides the platform for the movie’s explorations of domestic and interpersonal conflict, but without question, the fullness of the story belongs to Adele and Adele alone (the French title of the film is the less colorful but more appropriate “La Vie d’Adele – Chapitres 1 & 2). Assisted by cinematographer Sofian El Fani, Kechiche stays in close, framing Exarchopoulos in tight shots that regard the range of emotions on Adele’s face. Kechiche’s relentlessness forms a perfect illustration of the phenomenon of the “polyphonic play of features” described by Bela Balasz in his groundbreaking “Theory of Film” in 1948.

“Blue Is the Warmest Color” is filled with richly detailed moments, many of which could stop a clock: a commentative assist from Louise Brooks in “Pandora’s Box” during a backyard celebration party; the volcanic and physical post-confession brawl that leaves Adele a sobbing mess; the way Adele labors to keep it together at a preschool dance program; Adele and Emma’s brief, wrenching reunion at a café. “Blue Is the Warmest Color” is not perfect, but the collaboration between Kechiche, Exarchopoulos, and Seydoux demands attention. The expression of Adele’s neediness, desperation, and anguish at love lost should move anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of a brutal breakup.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

For any number of reasons, including the ones framed by Richard Brody in his New Yorker essay “Should a Film Try to Depict Slavery?,” fictional and fictionalized movies about the topic are relatively few in number. David Denby’s claim that Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” is “easily the greatest feature film made about American slavery” maybe suggests as much about the smallish category and our collective attitude and appetite for slavery movies as it does about the director’s achievement. While this is not to say that McQueen comes up short in any significant way, “12 Years a Slave” should be considered a thread in an ongoing conversation and not the final word.

Based on Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir “Twelve Years a Slave,” McQueen’s version was preceded by the Gordon Parks adaptation “Solomon Northup’s Odyssey,” which debuted on PBS in 1984. Northup, a free black man from Saratoga Springs, New York, was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. in 1841 and then sold to a series of slaveholders. Working from John Ridley’s episodic screenplay, McQueen does not intend Northup to morph into a synecdochic representative of all slaves, but there are instances in which the character, in relation to all victims of American slavery, becomes, to use Kenneth Burke’s conceptualization, “part of the whole, whole for the part, container for the contained, sign for the thing signified, material for the thing made.”

The new version of Northup’s story, anchored by Chiwetel Ejiofor’s tremendous performance, also features recognizable faces like Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Paul Giamatti, Alfre Woodard, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Paul Dano in parts of various size. Aside from Ejiofor, the largely unknown Kenyan filmmaker and performer Lupita Nyong’o leaves the deepest impression as the tragic, victimized slave Patsey. Unencumbered by the reflexive associations that accompany the better-known actors, Nyong’o’s relative anonymity establishes Patsey as a tabula rasa, adding many surprises to the young woman whose superhuman abilities in the fields cannot protect her from rape and the lash.

With “12 Years a Slave,” McQueen continues a gradual move away from the lower-budget austerity of feature debut “Hunger” and follow-up “Shame” to arrive at a recognizably traditional “Hollywood” filmmaking style marked by polished production and sound design, smooth camera glides, and Hans Zimmer’s score. Both Melissa Anderson and Ed Gonzalez recognize McQueen’s continued interest in the physical and psychological contours of the human body, and while neither Anderson nor Gonzalez ultimately share the positivity of the critical majority, the carefully considered pieces they wrote provide much food for thought.

Aside from the score, on multiple occasions the use of music in the movie furnishes the most evocative complement to the gallery of visual horrors visited by McQueen. Ann Powers identifies the way in which two particular songs, the grisly “Run…” and the spiritual “Roll Jordan Roll,” work in tandem to illuminate the film with period detail and comment potently on two facets of antebellum music culture. The scenes featuring these songs are memorable, and the one in which Northup adds his voice – first tentatively and then in full throat – to a funeral chorus is a stirring moment almost stupefying in its intermixture of hope, resignation, acceptance, and despair.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

On his 21^st birthday, slightly awkward wallflower Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) receives the unlikely news that he has the ability to travel backward in time. Dad (Bill Nighy) explains the miraculous capability to his son, noting that the trait is enjoyed exclusively by the male offspring in the family line. Like most time jumping narratives, “About Time” exercises the science-fiction device to coincide with some kind of moral affirmation, even if filmmaker Richard Curtis normally makes his bones with material decidedly less bleak than Star Trek’s “The City on the Edge of Forever,” Richard Kelly’s “Donnie Darko,” or Rian Johnson’s “Looper.”

Arguably the most common theme explored in time travel fiction is the idea that going back to “fix” – or, such as Ray Bradbury’s legendary 1952 story “A Sound of Thunder,” even just observe – something in the past will establish an alternate history/future. “About Time” is not at all interested in or concerned with the Butterfly Effect, and Tim opts to use his power to woo the woman of his dreams, the charming Mary (Rachel McAdams) – even if he has to repeat situations until he gets them just right. “About Time” does not invest in its premise with the kind of care taken by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis in the exceptional “Groundhog Day,” still the summit of time-fracturing romantic comedies.

The rules of the temporal paradox are conveniently obliterated to suit the heartwarming, completely predictable outcomes for which Curtis is known, and the writer-director busies himself with familiar tasks, especially in a plot trajectory where Tim labors to undo the misery of his sister Kit Kat’s (Lydia Wilson) bad luck and poor choices. Another thread involving grouchy playwright Harry (Tom Hollander) provides the initial complication to Tim’s conquest of Mary, leading to the movie’s most sustained consideration of time travel’s amorous benefits via the potentially endless variations of Tim and Mary getting it on for the “first” time.

A.O. Scott, Andrew O’Hehir, and Gabe Toro are just three of the critics who recognized the problematic male fantasy creep factor in Tim’s seduction of Mary. Unfortunately, Mary remains duped by Tim’s time manipulations for the film’s duration, and Curtis misses what might have been an important opportunity to engage with ideas surrounding the ethics of Tim’s superhuman ability. McAdams does the very best she can, but her character is never Tim’s equal, and their partnership is founded at least in part on a deception, no matter how much Curtis insists that time travel cannot guarantee love.

The irritating voiceover narration seems engineered to make certain the audience knows that the power to travel in time means nothing next to an appreciation of a life well-lived. Dad admits that he used his time-travel powers to read every book that caught his interest, Dickens twice (the pursuit of riches is quickly dismissed as an option by both Dad and Curtis). As “About Time” wears on, Tim’s relationship with Dad supersedes the comfortable, content existence Tim shares with his wife, and the father-son spotlight contains strong echoes of the classic Twilight Zone episode “Walking Distance,” which featured a powerful expression of paternal love and a more poignant argument that in the end, we really only get one chance.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Like fellow Detroiter Sixto Rodriguez, Bobby, Dannis, and David Hackney’s trio Death recorded stunning music embraced and appreciated by its largest audience decades following the original production. A little Motor City magic connects “Searching for Sugar Man” to “A Band Called Death,” another compelling movie version of an almost too-weird-to-be-true tale of unrecognized brilliance and second chances. Made by first-time feature documentarians Jeff Howlett and Mark Christopher Covino, “A Band Called Death” is a great underdog story backed by giddy bursts of rock and roll firepower. It’s also a moving portrait of looking back, moving forward, and family love.

Hard-liners will say it’s a stretch to claim that Death was, as the New York Times headline of Mike Rubin’s profile claimed, “punk before punk was punk,” but only the worst kind of snobs would dismiss the strange beauty and punchy immediacy of garage tracks like “Politicians in My Eyes,” “Freakin Out,” and “Keep on Knocking.” Rubin appears in the film, and his terrific 2009 feature article established the blueprint used by the filmmakers: a tapestry of blood brothers, crate-diggers, and resurrections, the latter partially embodied by Bobby’s children in Rough Francis, a group formed in tribute to Death.

When the movie gets to the details of the 1975 United Sound Systems studio recording session and the subsequent major label flirtation, Howlett and Covino really find their stride, collecting interviews from Groovesville director of publishing Brian Spears – who recognized immediately that Death was something special – and producer/mogul/Groovesville CEO Don Davis, who initially thought his colleague had lost his mind. Following multiple rejections by label after label, Death catches the ear of Clive Davis, who offers a deal contingent on a name change.

Then, in a pure expression of the “corporate rock sucks” mentality championed by punk heroes large and small, David more or less tells Davis to go to hell and the brothers walk away, managing to take the master recordings of their work with them. Pressing 500 45s independently on their own Tryangle imprint, Death further embodies the fierce DIY credo of self-sufficiency, but neither the single nor its B-side get enough airplay to make a difference. The tapes would collect dust in an attic for years, until the inclusion of Death tracks on rarities compilations and interest from record collectors like Robert Manis, Ben Blackwell, and Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra eventually closed a circuit through Bobby’s son Julian.

The movie constantly reminds us that David Hackney was the soul of the group. Some delightful prank phone calls hint at David’s frequency on an unexpected wavelength, and the movie makes clear that the young musician took inspiration from sources like the Who and Alice Cooper. In part because David died of lung cancer in 2000, the visionary bandleader’s absence weighs mightily on the emotional scales of the movie. David, whose conceptual acumen guided the entirety of the Death endeavor, assumes a kind of mythical prominence as an ahead-of-his-time prophet. Howlett and Covino surely play up this status, but both Bobby and Dannis take seriously the spirit of their brother forecasting that eventually, the rest of the world would catch up to Death.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

If one believes the assessment of Scott Foundas in his apologetic “Variety” essay, Ridley Scott’s “The Counselor” is a slept-on and misunderstood near-masterpiece on par with “Blade Runner” and not the ridiculous, cringe-worthy embarrassment described by many other critics. For those keeping track, Metacritic’s page for “The Counselor” averages fifteen positive reviews, thirteen mixed reviews, and twelve negative reviews to come up with a score of 49 on a hundred point scale. Foundas discloses his role as the organizer of the “first complete North American retrospective of Scott’s films,” and the critic’s feelings extend to the eyebrow-raising claim that “The Counselor” is “bold and thrilling in ways that mainstream American movies rarely are, and its rejection suggests what little appetite there is for real daring at the multiplex nowadays.”

Familiar generalizations about the public’s lack of taste and intelligence aside, the first part of that claim is dubious. Directed by Scott from novelist Cormac McCarthy’s first script produced originally for the screen, “The Counselor” is a cryptic neo-noir crammed with the most familiar tropes and expectations of the style. Contrary to Foundas’ opinion, the movie ventures nothing and gains even less, unfolding with a solemn pomposity that will delight only those viewers who believe they are in on the joke as opposed to being the butt of it.

Take, for example, the spectacle of Cameron Diaz’s cheetah-stroking femme fatale replicant Malkina grinding and squeaking her mons pubis on the windshield of Reiner’s (Javier Bardem) Ferrari. Apart from the scene’s flirtations with outright misogyny, amplified by Reiner coarsely likening Malkina’s vagina to a “catfish thing” and a “bottom feeder,” McCarthy appears to reveal a disappointingly regressive embrace of masculine fears regarding “repulsive” female sexuality. Whether or not one finds the scene liberating or debasing (see Tracy Moore’s “Jezebel” column for a more detailed discussion), the moment typifies the film’s anything goes desperation to rise above the forgettable banality of its plot.

While “The Counselor” is not exactly a bore, Scott’s phony gravitas and McCarthy’s drug trade philosophy-lite conspire against the efforts of the game stars. Along with Bardem and Diaz, the principal cast includes Brad Pitt, Penelope Cruz, and, in the title role, Michael Fassbender. A few arresting visuals, including the high-speed clothesline decapitation of a motorcyclist, must compete with secretive conversations too dutiful in their elisions. Further, the pace of the film oozes like the fecal sludge that hides the narrative’s MacGuffin-esque drug shipment in a disguised septic truck bound for Chicago.

Along the way, Scott indulges plenty of McCarthy’s signature bloodletting, including the sight of the nightmarish “bolito,” a kind of motorized piano wire garrote/noose that cuts through the neck of any victim unlucky enough to have it slipped over his head. Death comes for the guilty and the innocent alike, but aside from brief glimpses of Cruz’s naïve and underdeveloped Laura, Scott and McCarthy have no interest in exploring a point of view alternative to the twisted lawbreakers whose moral failures lead to unspeakable outcomes. Only time will tell if Foundas made the right call on “The Counselor,” but unless the movie gets embraced as camp, it is unlikely to ever attain the status of Scott’s better films.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A disappointing and unnecessary remake of Stephen King’s first major success, Kimberly Peirce’s take on “Carrie” almost slavishly follows the rhythm and pace of Brian De Palma’s 1976 classic. The rehashed script, credited to Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and original screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen, fails to turn up anything new and significant from the source material despite filmmaker claims to the contrary. Indiewire’s Drew Taylor has suggested that the late addition of Cohen’s name to the official credit list is a legal development born of Aguirre-Sacasa’s sometimes word-for-word and scene-for-scene reliance on Cohen’s adaptation.

King’s conceptual tour de force continues to hold a magnetic appeal for audiences of many ages. Drawing on the primal fears that accompany the physical and emotional changes of adolescence and placing them in close quarters with the tension between religious fanaticism and the strong pull of normalcy and conformity, King tapped into the insecurities that go hand in hand with rites of passage. The greatest fright of “Carrie” arises from the inversion of the Cinderella story: an unthinkable scenario in which a mother seeks to murder her own flesh and blood. Peirce boldly affixes a messy, opening flashback to Carrie’s birth that flirts with infanticide by scissors, but the prologue detracts somewhat from the punch of De Palma’s charged shower room spectacle and its mix of eroticism and revulsion associated with Carrie’s menstruation.

Like some of the self-referential elements of the 2002 TV movie version of “Carrie,” the new edition slips in a few convenient updates, including an underdeveloped cyberbullying thread surrounding a YouTube upload of Carrie’s humiliation. Less competently, a throwaway reference to Tim Tebow will date faster than William Katt’s ruffled, powder blue tuxedo shirt. Surprisingly, very little attention is paid to the discovery of Carrie’s telekinetic super-powers, a thematic component ripe for reconsideration in the context of titles like “X-Men: First Class.” Aguirre-Sacasa’s experience as a Marvel Comics writer makes the missed opportunity especially vexing.

Peirce, whose blistering “Boys Don’t Cry” explored a world filled with inexplicable horror, seems like a strong choice to tackle “Carrie,” but the raw verisimilitude of her 1999 feature debut is conspicuously absent in the new movie. The director struggles with tone, especially when it comes to the handling of the high schoolers who make Carrie’s life hell. Peirce does clarify Sue Snell’s (Gabriella Wilde) sense of regret and guilt, restoring both the character’s pregnancy and her “psychic connection” to Carrie that manifests most directly in the climactic house destruction scene. The rest of the tormentors, especially Portia Doubleday’s exceedingly cruel, one-note Chris Hargensen, dart toward parody and cartoon.

While there is nothing wrong with the casting of talented performers like Chloe Grace Moretz (in her first leading role) and Julianne Moore, Peirce provides few opportunities for the principal actors to distance and distinguish themselves from Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie. Spacek and Laurie both earned Oscar nominations for their portrayals in the De Palma film, and that feat most certainly will not be repeated by Moretz and Moore. Peirce works hard on the development and clarification of the twisted, abusive, and operatic mother-daughter dynamics, but Moretz never quite accesses the fragile vulnerability of Carrie with the same degree of credibility demonstrated by the unforgettable Spacek.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Probably the weirdest and most disappointing thing about Shane Salerno’s documentary “Salinger” is the lack of interest shown in the words and ideas of the popular author’s literary output. Sure, the movie follows a familiar script that makes connections between “real life” sources and inspirations for well-loved characters and events, but the desperate autobiographical sleuthing does its enigmatic subject no favors, focusing on the “mystery” of J.D. Salinger instead of anything resembling a thoughtful consideration of the man’s talents. The movie is enough to send disciples back to their dog-eared paperbacks. I daresay “old Jesus probably would’ve puked if He could see it.”

If the superficial treatment of Salinger’s oeuvre fizzles, so too does Salerno’s ill-advised decision to stage reenactments of Salinger pounding away at a typewriter, often in front of a huge movie screen filled with images that speculate on everything from post-traumatic stress disorder to the failure of Salinger’s marriage to Claire Douglas. The effect is cheap, disheartening, and, if you’ll pardon the easy swipe, phony as hell. The use of a mute actor impersonating Salinger distances us from the charm, warmth, and humor of the fiction, stirring up instead the uglier tendencies toward the writer’s irritability, paranoia, and seclusion.

While some of the talking heads are people who knew and interacted with Salinger, too many of the interview subjects belong in the desperate stalker or eager opportunist categories. Salerno gives Joyce Maynard way more screen time than necessary to articulate her points about Salinger’s pattern of fixating on very young women and girls. A grim section highlighting the ghastly crimes of Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley Jr., and Robert Bardo would be more at home on an episode of some lurid true crime cable series. In contrast, a too-brief discussion about William Shawn’s decision to overrule the “New Yorker” fiction editors who rejected “Zooey” hints at a more insightful and discerning narrative.

Salinger fanatics and completists will discover a handful of titillating material, including a very short, previously private motion picture film clip of the author made during his World War 2 service, several rarely-seen photographs including the only known image of Salinger at work on “The Catcher in the Rye,” and a final revelatory coda outlining the possibility of forthcoming publications. Claiming that “information was provided, documented, and verified by two independent and separate sources” (whatever that means), Salerno describes a novella informed by Salinger’s work as a counter-intelligence agent, a love story based on Salinger’s relationship with his first wife, a treatise on the Vedanta religion, and a full account of the Caulfields, including a retooled version of “The Last and Best of the Peter Pans.”

Most tantalizing of all: five new Glass stories, purportedly focused on Seymour, and a “detailed genealogy” of the family. Salerno claims the first of the tales sees Seymour and Buddy “recruited at a party in 1926 for the children’s quiz show ‘It’s a Wise Child’.” Less hopeful is the note that these stories are “saturated in the teachings of the Vedanta religion,” a deep fear long held by Salinger followers disillusioned by the author’s later tendency toward theological didacticism at the expense of rich and involving storytelling. Salinger biographer Paul Alexander summarizes this shift, saying of “Hapworth 16, 1924,” “It’s long on tone and absolutely devoid of plot.” Salerno’s movie doesn’t have much of either, so here’s hoping that we might get to read some new Salinger in the near future.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A hair-raising survivor thriller, Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity” imagines the deadly consequences of the Kessler effect on a shuttle mission spacewalk endangered by projectile debris. At the risk of drawing fire from the enthusiastic moviegoers who made “Gravity” the most successful October film opening to date, the movie does not surpass the intellectual and emotional engagement of Cuaron’s brilliant, blistering “Children of Men,” although for many, the fierce determination and will to live expressed by stranded astronaut Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) will sets heart to pounding. “Gravity” is still better than good. Along with Emmanuel Lubezki’s phenomenal work as director of photography, the visual design certainly heralds another milestone in the development of photorealistic CGI.

“Gravity” is so direct, so focused on the life-sustaining importance of critical tasks performed step by detailed step, one wonders whether or how philosopher and Cuaron fan Slavoj Zizek will apply the “paradox of anamorphosis” to the new film. Zizek’s fascination with the idea that meaning in “Children of Men” can be derived only from examining the background and the margins – as opposed to the principal elements of plot that dominate the foreground and the action – invites a kind of discourse that must be altered for discussions of “Gravity.” Of course, it is entirely possible that Zizek could surprise us all with a claim that the chasm of space functions in a manner parallel to Cuaron’s previous efforts, but I for one see the filmmaker’s latest as a canny, calculating blend of technological experimentation and classic Hollywood formalism, the latter most disappointingly embodied by Steven Price’s often-standard issue score.

As one of the biggest movie stories of 2013, “Gravity” has already generated a metanarrative constructed by people interested in the intricacies of the production process as much as the drama of Dr. Stone’s predicament (the last time this happened on a similar scale may have been “Avatar”). Celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson posted a series of comments on Twitter popping a few holes in the movie’s logic balloon. The items called out ranged from minor, possibly aesthetic issues (why Bullock’s hair didn’t float in zero-G) to questions of positioning (Hubble, the International Space Station and a Chinese rig are “all in sight lines of one another”) to several other matters of plausibility. From a storytelling standpoint, one can chalk the entire lot of Tyson’s observations up to the most basic rights of artistic license. The popular scientist also made sure to note that he enjoyed the film “very much.”

No potentially groundbreaking movie dealing with space exploration can escape the inevitable comparison to “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and “Gravity” reviewers have lined up to pay their respects to Stanley Kubrick’s landmark. Kubrick’s film, no less meticulous in its own approach to orbital verisimilitude, was sui generis in a way that “Gravity” cannot claim. Andrew O’Hehir even suggests that “Gravity” is like a “secular equivalent to the spiritual or supernatural dimension found in Kubrick’s and Tarkovsky’s great space movies.” Both “Gravity” and “2001” have a way of defining the terrifying immediacy of an astronaut’s fragile tightrope walk between life and death, but Cuaron – with one notable exception – chooses not to float toward the metaphysical phantasmagoria so indelibly conjured by Kubrick.