SMART PEOPLE (2008) is a lightweight (probably lighter than it thinks) romantic comedy in which curmudgeonly professor Dennis Quaid stumbles into a romance with former student Sarah Jessica Parker, to the disorientation of Quaid’s brother Thomas Hayden Church and Promethean daughter Ellen Page. Pleasant, but it’s hard to imagine why Parker would be yearning so much for Quaid’s grouch (something that invariably annoys me). “You’re not ready——the sexual mores have changed.”
LA FEMME NIKITA (1990) stars Anne Parillaud as the junkie cop-killer given a new life as a French government assassin only to find the accumulating blood on her hands alongside her cover life increasingly burdensome (the only real weakness I find in this is that at the climax she falls apart surprisingly quickly). As the inspiration of two TV series and the films Point of No Return and Black Cat, this has had more pop-culture impact than I’m sure they ever anticipated; in comparison with the TV shows, this has none of Sector’s labyrinthine internal politics, and not even any explanation why the French government wants these people dead (which works, I should add). Good in its own right; Jeanne Moreau plays one of Nikita’s mentors. “Smile when you don’t know—it won’t make you smarter but it’s nice for others.”
RUDYARD KIPLING’S TALES OF HORROR AND FANTASY suffers the usual problems of (almost) Complete Collections of prolific authors: Some of the stories are simply dreadful (“Brushwood Boy,” with Kipling’s portrayal of a Perfect English Boy is just dreadful) and the tales narrated by the Irish rogue Muldoon always lose me due to the heavy phonetic spelling of his accent. That said, this has lots of good stuff, including one I’ve read before (SF in “As Easy as ABC” horror in “Mark of the Beast” and “The Finest Story in the World,” about Kipling trying to mine a friend’s past life memories for a story) and some that are new to me:“The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat” is a great comedy (even if it doesn’t actually fit this collection) that incidentally shows speed traps existed 100 years ago; “Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau” is a successful mix of ghost-story-within-a-story and a more humorous frame; and the celestial hierarchy coping with death in World War I in “On the Gate.” Overall, most satisfactory.
INDULGENCE IN DEATH by JD Robb is a very good entry in the “in Death” series, wherein Eve Dallas realizes a series of seemingly random killings are the work of a pair of wealthy murderers playing a Most Dangerous Game targeting The Best in various fields——which Eve realizes almost too late includes her. Well done, although the opening vacation in Ireland doesn’t quite fit: While it does show how well Eve works even without her usual support systems, I’d thought it would have more resonance with the main plot.
SHOWCASE PRESENTS THE FLASH VOLUME 2, fills in a number of gaps in my Silver Age Flash collection, including “Conquerors of Time,” which introduced Flash’s time-traveling cosmic treadmill and the first appearance of Iris West’s father and supporting character Dexter Myles (a flamboyant actor who eventually managed the Flash Museum). Flash remains one of my favorite books of the era.
