Nicholas Thurkettle

After so many years of faithful service, my laptop screen just flickered and died. After putting it to sleep and waking it up again, the screen was working intermittently, and it might be that I could force some more service from it; but with this added to the machine’s already-substantial list of eccentricities, it appears that it has finally reached the end of its service. Fortunately, the friends I am staying with have a desktop they never use in the guest room where I’m already sleeping; and once Lenovo gets over its bizarre troubles with processing my order, my new laptop will be headed for the Thurkettle homestead. It held out for as long as it needed to.

The typical response to your modern computer problem is on the spectrum between simple annoyance and pure berzerker rage, but I feel nothing like that. I’ve known this day was coming for a long time, and feel a strange fondness as I think on everything that laptop and I have shared. It knows as many of my secrets as my most intimate friends.

Bags are packed. Camera batteries charged. Stomach: cooperative enough to proceed. It’s time for Chicago, friends. Have a dazzling New Year.

The Informant!
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writers: Screenplay by Scott Z. Burns, based on the book by Kurt Eichenwald
Producers: Michael Jaffe, Howard Braunstein, Kurt Eichenwald, Jennifer Fox, Gregory Jacobs
Stars: Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale, Melanie Lynskey, Tom Papa, Rick Overton, Ann Cusack

When Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) describes FBI Special Agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) as “a good listener”; it is all but a declaration of love at first sight. Whitacre himself is not much of a listener, at least to others – his brain is racing full-time with shifting thoughts, trivial musings, and self-aggrandizement. He is speaking with Agent Shepard in order to become a corporate whistleblower, and will spend three years undercover at his own company, collecting evidence of a billion-dollar fraud. The Agent and his partner (Joel McHale) marvel at Whitacre’s ability to live two lives.

What they fail to understand it that this is not a torture to him, but a dream come true. The Informant! – based on the gripping book by former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald – is about a man who stopped living just one life a long time ago. In the life most people see he is a dweebish but highly-capable biochemist rising through the corporate ranks of ADM, one of the world’s largest food-products manufacturers. They can do things with an ear of corn that would startle you. But Whitacre has other lives – more fantastical, grandiose ones – as an orphan who made good out of some Dickensian turns of fortune, or as a guy with a swell idea for a TV show; and now, thanks to Agent Shepard, he gets to be the chipper, downstate version of Tom Cruise in The Firm.

Eichenwald’s book about the real-life price-fixing case built on the foundation of Whitacre’s testimony and wire recordings is an addictive read, because just as the intrigue about the case settles into procedure, the secret intrigue around Whitacre begins to unfurl itself. It earns its page-turning power because of how unbelievable is each successive act and revelation, how it makes you realize how little you can really know someone.

What filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has done is to seize on that essential truth, and bring all his prodigious tools to work mining it. The Informant! is not a follower on the path of Michael Mann’s The Insider, which another filmmaker might have made, but rather is an awesome cinematic joke, a pie in the face of America’s self-deluding hero complex, resting on a performance by Matt Damon free from all physical or psychological vanity.
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Originally published 7/15/2004

I, Robot
Director: Alex Proyas
Writers: Screen story by Jeff Vintar, screenplay by Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman, suggested by Isaac Asimov’s book
Producers: John Davis, Topher Dow, Wyck Godfrey, Laurence Mark
Stars: Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan, Alan Tudyk, James Cromwell, Bruce Greenwood

The Dr. Susan Calvin I knew never wore leather pants, or blasted away at hordes of attacking robots with a big futuristic gun, or took gratuitous showers. I never imagined her being as photogenic as Bridget Moynahan, either. But comparisons like that between this big expensive summer movie and Isaac Asimov’s I Robot, a thought-provoking compendium of short stories, are a deadly trap. Best to stay away.

What we get with this admittedly exciting, visually-rich, action-packed movie has almost nothing to do with any of the story material from that book – although a sequence in a robot maintenance facility with an unaccounted-for extra occupant is a clear nod to the story/chapter “Little Lost Robot”. What the filmmakers have done is plug a few character names, like Lanning and Robertson, and of course, Dr. Susan Calvin, into an explosion-filled scenario. But more importantly, they used the 3 Laws of Robotics, one of Asimov’s most enduring creations.
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Originally published 7/12/04

The Clearing
Director: Pieter Jan Brugge
Writers: Justin Haythe, from a story by Pieter Jan Brugge and Justin Haythe
Producers: Jonah Smith, Palmer West, Pieter Jan Brugge
Stars: Robert Redford, Helen Mirren, Willem Dafoe, Matt Craven, Alessandro Nivola, Melissa Sagemiller, Wendy Crewson

You can almost see it working on stage – an intense character piece where two people carry out a battle of willpower; while elsewhere, someone worries and wonders about the result. The attention paid to these three central personalities is certainly stage-like. But however effective that speculative version of this story might be, the truth is, it’s not working as a movie right now.

Once in awhile we are reminded that actors, even great actors, can only do so much for a movie. In The Clearing, we see three of the best actors working in cinema doing their damndest to render their characters three-dimensional and compelling. But in the end, it is not enough to overcome the indecisive, often plodding rhythms of a story that turns out to be much less than meets the eye.
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New Year’s Resolutions are like a karmic credit card binge. You make something around 5 pledges to yourself, any one of which would take a major investment of personal will. I mean that you would have to actually liquidate will from somewhere else in your life just to get there. Sure you MIGHT be able to lose 20 pounds OR get a raise OR find that special someone OR finish that addition to the house OR give up whatever particular tool it is you use to pummel your brain. But you’re not doing them all. Hell, even doing one is going to cost you.

I am getting fatter. That’s okay – I don’t think I’ve actually been skinny for ten years. I could exercise – I’ve seen myself build that routine more than once. Maybe I could even do it to the extent that a real change happens.

But I’m using that willpower already.

You might find this strange, Jimmy, but I feel like I am more serious about writing than I was even when I sold my screenplay. It’s not that I DO it more – as we’ve discussed, since I took this job I do it less. It’s just that I notice my interests and attentions narrowing severely. I have a girlfriend who is awesome, and it’s a hell of a year for football; but mostly, when I’m not punching the time clock, I’m working on the novel. Or thinking about the novel. Or distracting myself from the novel.

The only movie I have been to in almost two weeks was the Inglorious Basterds screening, and I had seen that movie already. For me to be spending this much time away from the big screen, in DECEMBER, is a scandal.

I’ve noticed that seriousness infecting everything to do with what I write. I find myself thinking more and more about how, if something in this life proves worthy of the brain I was given, it’s going to be something I wrote. I think less and less about my big studio screenplay ideas, and more about the wild and personal ideas that were supposed to wait until I was more solvent. I don’t think about settling down, making my own family. I just think about these stories I’m trying to tell, and how I will BE one of those people who finishes that novel, damn it. I am thinking less about HOW this is supposed to make me money, and betting more on the simple faith that it will.

The other night I got in bed, meaning to get a full night’s sleep, but mad with myself for only putting 300 new words into the book. So I told myself I didn’t need the sleep so badly (I did; I really did), got out of bed and wrote another 500.

By all rational measures, I am becoming more foolish as I become more fat. I think this is an encouraging development.