Sundance ’06: Cinnamon

January 29, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
*½/****starring John Bowles, Erin Stewart, Ashley Bowles, Larry Bowleswritten and directed by Kevin Jerome Everson by Alex Jackson Taking my cue from the official description in the Sundance Film Festival Film Guide, I've been referring to Cinnamon as "the black race-car driver movie." Depiction of race in the movies is a real dilemma: being black is either meaningful or meaningless. If it's meaningful, that means that the black identity is distinguished from non-blacks and is more or less alien and incomprehensible to non-blacks. If being black is meaningless, well, then why make a racing movie with an all-black cast? You…

Sundance ’06: Jewboy

January 27, 2006Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
***½/****starring Ewen Leslie, Naomi Wilson, Saskia Burmeister, Leah Vandenburgwritten and directed by Tony Krawitz by Alex Jackson Following his father's death, Orthodox Jew Yuri quits his rabbinical training and applies for a job as a taxi driver. He's mad at God, mad at his Jewish faith, and eager to experience a world that has been denied him all his life. Jewboy is perhaps the best Martin Scorsese film Martin Scorsese never made--and by that I mean, of course, the Scorsese of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and The Last Temptation of Christ rather than the more imitated (and imitable) Scorsese of…

Sundance ’06: The Proposition

January 27, 2006Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance, UK, Western
*/****starring Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, John Hurtscreenplay by Nick Cavedirected by John Hillcoat by Alex Jackson In his review of Rene Cardona's exploitation quickie about the Jonestown Massacre Guyana: Cult of the Damned, Roger Ebert describes how Cardona ends the film with photos of the real-life victims while the audience is solemnly reminded "that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it," prompting Ebert to crack, "So remember, don't drink cyanide." I only wish that John Hillcoat's The Proposition were that lucid in delivering its Important Lesson. This is a movie at least as gory and…

Jerry Lewis: The “Legendary Jerry” Collection – DVD

January 27, 2006Posted in1950s, 1960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Music, Romance, Sci-Fi

Jerryondvdtitleby Travis Mackenzie Hoover If you're savvy enough to read film criticism, you probably know it's supposed to be funny that the French love Jerry Lewis. We all have a big, self-satisfied laugh when we first hear that, as if anyone could take Jerry Lewis seriously. (We certainly didn't.) But the thing is, there aren't a lot of people who will admit to actually seeing one of his movies–the Lewis hate-on has become so intense that the only thing remaining of him is the joke; he's the scapegoat of anti-French resentment and anti-intellectual hostility, as if only frogs and eggheads could possibly find anything redemptive in his work. Thus a generation has shunned his films, never to know if there really is a centre to the onion, something more than mugging to the Lewis mystique.

We at FILM FREAK CENTRAL have decided to put a stop to this. Over the next ten weeks, we will be interrogating the Lewis canon (as it relates to Paramount's recently released DVD box set "Jerry Lewis: The 'Legendary Jerry' Collection") for traces of artistic merit–assuming there are some to be found. We may come up with revelations; we may come up with suggestive patterns; or we may come up with nothing whatsoever. By the end, though, we hope to have definitively answered the question of whether the French are onto something–and if we can really point fingers in a culture that conversely embraces Betty Blue. And Luc Besson. And Amélie. Originally published: November 11, 2005.

Thumbsucker (2005) + The Chumscrubber (2005) – DVDs

January 26, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Satire, Teen

THUMBSUCKER
**/**** DVD – Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Lou Pucci, Tilda Swinton, Vincent D'Onofrio, Keanu Reeves
screenplay by Mike Mills, based on the novel by Walter Kirn
directed by Mike Mills

Thumbsuckercapby Walter Chaw With the brief reprieve offered the Sundance imprint by Junebug now smelling a lot more like "fluke" than "trend," find Mike Mills's underwhelming Thumbsucker, another Sundance sensation so familiar in its affected suburban quirk that its peculiarities seem like formula and its attacks on middle-class perversity and malaise seem all too comfortable. There simply isn't much heart left in this pursuit, this punching of holes into the façade of planned communities and their plastic citizenry–this central conceit of broken people leaning on psychic crutches as the apocalypse of the day-to-day cascades in on them in blue, stylized waves.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

January 25, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, France, Mexico, Mystery, Theatrical, Western

*½/****
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cesar Cedillo, Dwight Yoakam
screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga
directed by Tommy Lee Jones

Threeburialsby Walter Chaw Crash by way of Cormac McCarthy, Tommy Lee Jones's "fuck you" of a mouthful The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is another fairytale salvo from the race divide, fired from that good place that results in cultural artifacts so unbearably cheesy and proselytizing that any potential heat is lost long before the second reel has finished unspooling. It's about serendipity, this elegy for the American West, hence no transgression is left unredeemed in its long, rambling, "it's good for you, so swallow it" narrative, with blame going in equal portion to Jones–whose smug, smarter-than-you are attitude has shoehorned him into prestigious position as the resident asshole of Man of the House, Men in Black II, and The Missing–and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams, Amores Perros), who paints every Mexican in the film in the same shade of saintly. (All the gringos, on the other hand, have a lot to learn about the grand mystery of being human.) It's tedious, unsurprising stuff, this picture–the kind of thing that gets the Right in a bunch about how Hollywood is a tool of the subversive Lefties while making smart folks on both sides of the Culture War cringe before its condescension.

The Alan Clarke Collection – DVD

January 24, 2006Posted in1970s, 1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, Crime, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Prison, Television, UK
SCUM (BBC VERSION) (1977) ***½/**** starring Ray Winstone, Phil Daniels, David Threfall screenplay by Roy Minton directed by Alan Clarke SCUM (THEATRICAL VERSION) (1979) ***½/**** starring Ray Winstone, Phil Daniels, Mick Ford screenplay by Roy Minton directed by Alan Clarke MADE IN BRITAIN (1982) ***½/**** starring Tim Roth, Eric Richard, Terry Richards screenplay by David Leland directed by Alan Clarke THE FIRM (1989) ***/**** starring Gary Oldman, Lesley Manville, Phillip Davis screenplay by Al Hunter directed by Alan Clarke ELEPHANT (1989) ***½/**** screenplay by Bernard MacLaverty directed by Alan Clarke DIRECTOR: ALAN CLARKE (1991) **/**** directed by Corin Campbell-Hill by…

Flightplan (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 23, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B+
starring Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Erika Christensen, Sean Bean
screenplay by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray
directed by Robert Schwentke

by Walter Chaw The bad guys have a plan and to pull it off they need only total omniscience and omnipotence, putting Robert Schwentke's Flightplan in the company of hysterical caper flicks like Arlington Road–though it's also the kind of hysterical estrogen melodrama à la Mildred Pierce in which Jodie Foster specializes these days. Between this and Panic Room, it almost seems as if Foster is taking tough maternal roles to protect the over-exposed, maybe-exploited child actress she used to be, to the point where the quality of the project itself comes second.

The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes (2006); Mutual Appreciation (2006); Unknown (2006)

January 19, 2006Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Family, Fantasy, France, Germany, Music, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE PIANOTUNER OF EARTHQUAKES
*½/****
starring Amira Casar, Gottfried John, Assumpta Serna, César Saracho
screenplay by Alan Passes and The Quay Brothers
directed by The Quay Brothers

MUTUAL APPRECIATION
***½/****
starring Justin Rice, Rachel Clift, Andrew Bujalski, Seung-Min Lee
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

UNKNOWN
½*/****
starring Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear, Bridget Moynahan, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Matthew Waynee
directed by Simon Brand

by Walter Chaw The Quay Brothers, Stephen and Timothy, are marvellous animators, having shepherded stop-motion and a disquieting biomechanical ethic into a series of notably discomfiting shorts, more than one of which pays tribute to their hero/mentor Jan Svankmajer. I met their 1995 transition to live-action features (Institute Benjamenta) with equal parts excitement, curiosity, and trepidation–I believed they'd be a little like either fellow animator-turned-director Tim Burton or those masters of a form who overreach by switching to a different medium, à la Michael Jordan. The truth is somewhere in-between, as the Quays have retained a bit of their glacial patience and a marked affection for created environments but have miscalculated the extent to which our fascination with animate clockworks translates into a commensurate fascination with people sitting around, staring at a wall. The former inspires existential thoughts on the nature of sentience; the latter generally inspires boredom. No question in my mind that something's lurking in the Quays' underneath, but it's important to mark that fine line distinguishing fascination from obtuseness for the sake of itself. Exploring the waking/dreamlife divide is interesting–but it's neither original nor terribly useful when the main tactic seems to be to conjure up pomposity-inspired sleepiness.

Two for the Money (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 19, 2006Posted in2000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Sports

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Al Pacino, Matthew McConaughey, Rene Russo, Armand Assante
screenplay by Dan Gilroy
directed by D.J. Caruso

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Finally, a movie as loud and incoherent as Al Pacino himself. He's the resident corruptor of Two for the Money, and the film gives him massive monologues of dubious insight just so the Duke of Hambone can do his thing. Sadly, he's not the one running the show–that honour belongs to the perpetually-ripped Matthew McConaughey, whose role requires him to look mesmerized as Pacino talks of things that "pucker your asshole to the size of a decimal point." Two for the Money sure has that effect: the experience is assaultive in so many ways that you're likely to be riveted even as you wish it would all go away.

Transamerica (2005) + Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005)

January 18, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Music, Road Movie, Theatrical, UK, War

TRANSAMERICA
**/****
starring Felicity Huffman, Kevin Zegers, Fionnula Flanagan, Graham Greene
written and directed by Duncan Tucker

MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS
*½/****
starring Judi Dench, Bob Hoskins, Will Young, Christopher Guest
screenplay by Martin Sherman
directed by Stephen Frears

by Walter Chaw Duncan Tucker makes his hyphenate debut with Transamerica, one of the first pictures distributed by the Weinsteins under their new aegis. Predictably, all the earmarks of the earnest indie genre Miramax blazed are cemented into place: it's over-written when it's not overreliant on a soundtrack of ethnically-cued melodies (the wood flute marks the appearance of an Indian, for instance) and folksy ballads (I challenge you not to 'pit up when a tune about a rose blooming accompanies our hero swapping his "outie" for an "innie"); narratively creaky; and hangs its hopes on its star, Felicity Huffman, to impose nuance where there is none. Huffman's performance being the sort of stunt in a minor independent film that plays fast and loose with smug liberal paternalism should guarantee her an Oscar nomination–and it can't hurt that another Leonardo DiCaprio doppelgänger arrives post-Michael Pitt in the form of Kevin Zegers, trailing a little pathos and a little inappropriate titillation on his thin shoulders.

A Dry White Season (1989) – DVD

January 16, 2006Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Thriller

***/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Donald Sutherland, Janet Suzman, Jürgen Prochnow, Marlon Brando
screenplay by Colin Welland and Euzhan Palcy, based on the novel by Andre Brink
directed by Euzhan Palcy

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Belonging to the white-centred apartheid genre, '80s division, A Dry White Season is by far the best of a bad lot. At the time of its release, the film was widely–and rightly–criticized for being, like Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom, more concerned with its Caucasian lead than with the more central but less bankable blacks who suffer by his side. But unlike Cry Freedom (or last year's dismal In My Country), A Dry White Season isn't about a heroic fait accomplis so much as an evolving conscience shedding its skin. Donald Sutherland's Ben du Toit actually comes off like a naïve dingbat in early scenes, convinced that the caning of his gardener's son was justified and that the various disappearances subsequent to the incident must have some logical, moral justification. The film's project is to show him that to fight the power, he has to give up everything–a message sure to strike fear in the hearts of armchair liberals everywhere.

Match Point (2005)

January 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Luxembourg, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode
written and directed by Woody Allen

Matchpointby Walter Chaw Match Point is a quasi-Patricia Highsmith flick about a rudderless Ripley cruising like a shark amongst England's polite society, and the extent to which it works has to do with the degree to which its philosophy of chance and living with ghosts attaches itself to the zeitgeist. The picture opens with a shot of a tennis ball lobbed low and in slow-motion into the top of a net, an image that has as its echo a key moment where a wedding ring tossed towards a river rebounds against a fence into the street. The voiceover talks about the common fear that our lives are governed by happenstance and entropy, transforming the ball going forward into a metaphor for winning–and back into one for losing. Using this as gospel, it's interesting to wonder what it means that, when push comes to shove, our hero's victory is defined by his defeat. Match Point is Woody Allen's best film in some time, which is a left-handed compliment at best; better to say that it's another decent millennial fable about class, the vicissitudes of fate, the reptilian hunger of infiltrating the social strata, and living with ghosts.

Tristan + Isolde (2006)

January 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Drama, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK, War

*/****
starring James Franco, Sophia Myles, Rufus Sewell, David O'Hara
screenplay by Dean Georgaris
directed by Kevin Reynolds

Tristanisoldeby Walter Chaw After bravely transforming the Robin Hood legend into a case of thirtysomething love jones with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Kevin Costner's well-known ex-best friend Kevin Reynolds turns the Tristan + Isolde legend into a WB/TIGER BEAT-friendly, mouth-breathing bodice-ripper indicated by lots of backlighting, orgasmic slow-mo, and dialogue purple enough to blind a Bronte sister. It's shot like a perfume commercial and written like a florid creative-writing exercise, one packed with such AM Gold, Luther Ingram treasures as: "Why does loving you feel so wrong?" Well, it might have something to do with said love being the basis for the Guinevere/Lancelot adultery story in which a woman comes between a king and his most trusted knight, leading to the ideological and literal collapse of a kingdom. Or it might have something to do with the fact that the actors playing the lovers in question never for a moment manage to spark the soggy tinder packed beneath the story. This allows a great deal of time for the sentient beings left in the audience after the ten-minute-mark exodus to suss out why this thing was delayed, then dumped in the middle of the January dead zone. It also, incidentally, caused me to fantasize about somehow harnessing the ability of films like this to make 125 minutes feel like six days for youth-giving effects and racing box scores.

Glory Road (2006) + Last Holiday (2006)

January 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Sports, Theatrical

GLORY ROAD
½*/****
starring Josh Lucas, Derek Luke, Emily Deschanel, Jon Voight
screenplay by Christopher Cleveland & Bettina Gilois and Gregory Allen Howard
directed by James Gartner

LAST HOLIDAY
*/****
starring Queen Latifah, LL Cool J, Timothy Hutton, Gérard Depardieu
screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter S. Seaman, based on the screenplay by J.B. Priestley
directed by Wayne Wang

by Walter Chaw There are two big laughs in Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer's African-American Hoosiers, Glory Road. The first comes when some white guy says derisively, "Can you imagine what basketball dominated by Negroes would look like?", while the sight of defeated Kentucky coaching legend Adolph Rupp (Jon Voight), vilified by history perhaps unfairly (though there's no question that he's vilified unfairly by this film), mourning the loss of the National Championship Game to an upstart team prompts the second. Both moments speak to the biggest problems in a film riddled with little ones: the former because it makes the audience complicit in–and comfortable with–the picture's callousness and casual blanket racism, and the latter because everything that happens in the film is already a foregone conclusion. The only appeal left is rooted in seeing the black players put on exactly the kind of degrading sideshow the picture suggests they're too human for. Glory Road is smug, offensive, and ignorant in the way that films with no self-awareness are ignorant–wrapped in a story designed specifically to make people cheer and believe that this one game in 1966 changed peoples' attitudes towards African-Americans in sports instead of simply bolstering the idea that the black athlete was advantageous and alien rather than just merely alien.

Dark Water (2005) [Unrated Widescreen Edition] – DVD

January 12, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jennifer Connelly, John C. Reilly, Tim Roth, Dougray Scott
screenplay by Rafael Yglesias, based on the novel by Koji Suzuki
directed by Walter Salles

by Walter Chaw Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) is having a nightmare. Dark water is flooding into the ramshackle apartment she’s been forced to rent with young daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade) now that husband Kyle (Dougray Scott) has left her for another woman, where she encounters the visage of her spiteful alcoholic mother. Connelly’s performance throughout, but especially within these few seconds, is so complex, so almost physically wrenching, that the knowledge that Dark Water was badly marketed, critically savaged, and largely ignored stings all the more. Specifically, the moment in question underscores how far from the usual supernatural thriller this picture aspires to be: a ghost story in which the hauntings are golems of the soul instead of ectoplasm, cold spots, and rattling chains. In many ways, Dark Water works as an update of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, another story of a single woman in a strange place, beset by children and other reptiles of the spirit. And in return, that image of corrupt water invading a woman’s place of sanctuary with her daughter, already laden with archetype, gets a bracing shot of genre smarts.

Lady Sings the Blues (1972) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

January 10, 2006Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Diana Ross, Billy Dee Williams, Richard Pryor, James T. Callahan
screenplay by Terence McCloy and Chris Clark and Suzanne De Passe
directed by Sidney J. Furie

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Billie Holliday never really surfaces in her ostensible biopic, Lady Sings the Blues. There's somebody using her name, of course, somebody who pouts and shrieks and cries copious tears–but no matter how much Diana Ross knocks herself out "emoting," she doesn't do justice to her predecessor. Nor, for that matter, does the movie she's in. The supremely jaundiced Sidney J. Furie has seen fit to jettison any real mention of either Holliday's music or her convictions, replacing them with a blackface Valley of the Dolls–the story of not one of jazz's premier vocalists, but a sad little girl hooked on heroin. Ross is a solid junkie, all right, yet she and everybody else connected with the production are wrong to impose this on someone who should be remembered for a few things beyond sordid melodrama.

The Jazz Singer (1980) [25th Anniversary] – DVD

December 22, 2005Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Music, Romance

*½/**** Image B Sound A- (DD)/B+ (DTS) Extras D
starring Neil Diamond, Laurence Olivier, Lucie Arnaz, Catlin Adams
screenplay by Herbert Baker, adaptation by Stephen H. Foreman, based on the play by Samson Raphaelson
directed by Richard Fleischer

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Having always had a knack for turning schlock into symptomatic gold, J. Hoberman once worked his magic on the remake of The Jazz Singer by comparing the original’s vision of Jewish cultural schizophrenia against the 1980 version’s post-Israel reversal. I recommend the essay (from his collection Vulgar Modernism) not merely for its brilliance, but also to discharge you from seeing the movie–because the only thing Hoberman gets wrong is that it’s “a mediocre film but a resonant one.” Mediocre it may be, but resonant it ain’t, entirely too careful as it is to soft-pedal some traumatic material so as not to upset star Neil Diamond’s MOR constituency. The Jazz Singer has all of the singer’s sentimental weaknesses without the attendant cheesy bombast that makes him entertaining. It’s a singularly bland film that doesn’t quite hurt but that feels like a chore as it trickles towards the end.

The Family Stone (2005); Loggerheads (2005); The Dying Gaul (2005)

December 16, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

THE FAMILY STONE
*/****
starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Claire Danes, Diane Keaton, Rachel McAdams
written and directed by Thomas Bezucha

LOGGERHEADS
*½/****
starring Tess Harper, Bonnie Hunt, Michael Kelly, Michael Learned
written and directed by Tim Kirkman

THE DYING GAUL
**/****
starring Patricia Clarkson, Campbell Scott, Peter Sarsgaard, Ryan Miller
written and directed by Craig Lucas

by Walter Chaw An absolute freakin' nightmare: Imagine spending the holidays with Diane Keaton in full-smirk, full-chuffing, shit-eating laughter mode, then magnify that with a screenplay by hyphenate and former fashion executive Thomas Bezucha that never misses an opportunity to excrete a little dollop of quirk where silence would have spoken volumes. The Family Stone is an intensely middlebrow bath, dipped in warm sentiments and institutionalized ugliness–one half slapstick fish-out-of-water, one half chestnut-lit holiday perennial-hopeful. (The marriage works about as well as it does in other pieces of Yuletide garbage like Christmas with the Kranks and Home Alone.) Therein, eldest Stone boy Everett (professional piece of wood Dermot Mulroney) is home for the holidays (it's not as good, obviously, as Jodie Foster's film of the same name but it's cut from the same cloth) to introduce his girlfriend Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) to his quirky tribe. Chief antagonist for the first hour is mousy (yeah, right) Amy (Rachel McAdams), who has an NPR duffel bag in a brief introductory shot, thus establishing her character as much as it's ever going to be established. She doesn't like Meredith because I don't know why but proceeds to brand her a racist and a boor when it seems that, mostly, Meredith is intensely uncomfortable and self-conscious. Maybe she has social anxiety disorder, or the more common stick-up-her-ass-ism. That's how appropriately-named evil mother Sybil (Diane Keaton) diagnoses her, except she calls Meredith a monkey and replaces the ass-stick with a silver spoon.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004) – DVD

December 15, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Robert De Niro, Romance, Spain, UK

½*/**** Image A Sound A
starring F. Murray Abraham, Gabriel Byrne, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert De Niro
screenplay by Mary McGuckian, based on the novel by Thornton Wilder
directed by Mary McGuckian

by Walter Chaw Given its cast as well as its presumption to chart the hazy intersection between predestination and circumstance, Mary McGuckian's excruciatingly dull The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the third adaptation of Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, might be the biggest miscalculation of the year. Start with Robert De Niro as the corrupt Archbishop of Lima, presiding over the inquisition of Brother Juniper (Gabriel Byrne). Six years previous Juniper witnessed the unceremonious snapping of the titular bridge, which sent five random people to their howling doom. Had they known how boring our good brown-robed pilgrim would make them out to be, I wouldn't wonder why they didn't try to float. No, Brother Juniper has decided that he's going to write the world's dullest book about this quintet of unfortunates so as to perhaps accidentally ken the mysterious workings of the Almighty in the small lives of small people.