Everybody knows that economics is about measurement and money and things numerical; that’s why most of us find it so damned dull.

But as approached by offbeat economist and Freakonomics co-author Steven D. Levitt, economics is also “the study of incentives”: what it takes to get us to do a certain thing—or to not do it, as the case may be. Which makes it human, and therefore fascinating.

This is what I love about this delightful new book by Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner: that it comes at things sideways or upside-down or head-on, but never the usual way. I’m still not sold on some of the more radical hypotheses Leavitt coaxes from the data (the link between abortion and falling crime rates being the most widely reviled and quoted), but I’m 100% there on the importance of throwing the numbers against conventional wisdom to see what sticks. The numbers may not always tell the exact truth, but neither do they lie, making them extraordinarily useful in the exploding of myths.

Levitt and Dubner tell fascinating stories about how to combat crappy teaching, bring  down the Ku Klux Klan and what happens when you call your kids “Winner” and “Loser” (answer: not necessarily what you’d think on any count). But really, they’ve written a book celebrating the heart of truth: asking questions, and hacks to stay open to the real answers.

As an interesting side note, the prospect of reading something that seemed like it would rock my world long and hard was too enticing to wait for a library copy to become available, but not enticing enough to get me to part with $26 of my hard-earned money. My break point? A 25¢/day rental from the Beverly Hills Public Library, and pushing the rest of my reading to the bottom of the pile. Some might call that cheap, but I’m betting Levitt would come at it sideways and say that I was already giving up time I’d committed to other reading to explore this book, and therefore it was of great value to me.

And you know what? He’d be right.

xxx
c

TAGS: reviews, Freakonomics, Steven+D+Levitt, Stephen+J+Dubner, economics

TOPICS: reviews, reviews/books.

I am a fan of the old Steve Martin. The SNL/L.A. Story/“The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!” Steve Martin. I don’t get the New Yorker pieces, and the thicket of hype was too thick around Lapin Agile to entice me into seeing or even reading it.

I picked up my copy of Shopgirl, the book, years after it was first published; this particular softcover had an inside cover price of one dollar when I picked it up at a Salvation Army store on the West L.A. And I walked around with it for a bit before I committed even to that.

It was its heft that was the deciding factor. Shopgirl is a slip of a novel—a novella, as the cover proclaims—slight and ever-so-slightly precious, like most self-proclaimed novellas. It feels good in the hand, though, much like I imagine the gloves that introduce its two main characters must feel.

It is undeniably elegant on the inside as well, both in its faintly-stilted prose and the strange, spare atmosphere it conjures up. Shopgirl evokes a Los Angeles more like the one depicted in 1950s L.A. Confidential than the post-millenial version I tool through daily. The archetypes are modern, but they feel quaint, like girdled Suzy Parkers instead of juicy Carmen Electras.

It’s not so much that the characters are unreal as it is they are remote—real seen through glass, real seen from one cool remove. What the novel(la) did more than anything was make me want to see the movie; I want to see actors inhabit these characters and bring them to life because I could not connect with them on the page: this Seattle millionaire, this alt.rockboy, this Silver Lake artist/shopgirl. Everything is a clean, sleek surface, with no grubby human bits to grab onto.

Steve Martin has the dark side down, like most funny people. He sketches out a sad, beautiful, believable story of two people running up hard against their limitations. But like Capote, a film I reviewed here recently, it’s curiously unaffecting given what the characters are going through. I suspect Martin is a fan of order, and imposes it where he can, thinking the discipline serves the storytelling.

But it’s the mess that makes a good story interesting. A writer can clean it up; a writer and director and editor can’t.

Which is why I enjoyed reading Shopgirl. But I can’t wait to see it.

xxx
c

Buy Shopgirl, the book, on Amazon.
Buy Shopgirl, the DVD, on Amazon.

UPDATE: Marilyn & Neil brought up the whole book-vs-movie thing in the comments, which reminded me that this rare movie-being-better-than-book thing has happened to me before, with Sideways, a delightful film which turned out to be much more tedious and blathery and self-indulgent in book form:

• My review of the film Sideways.
• My review of the book Sideways.

TAGS: Shopgirl, books, novellas, reviews, Steve Martin

TOPICS: reviews, reviews/books.

From the time I decided to become an L.A. actor, my life has been one telecommunications nightmare after another, a hellish mix of pagers, cell phones, forwarded voice mail, forwarded home phone, dedicated fax lines. (And a P.O. Box, because yes, even Gap™-casual fake moms have stalkers.)

This year, my descent into the Hades that is the Los Angeles telecom megalopoly accelaterated sharply when I started spending copious time at The BF’s pad, a.k.a. my country house, a.k.a. that place dead-smack in the middle of The Silver Lake Cone of Silence.

Apparently, the wealthy folk whose million-dollar homes ring the Silver Lake Reservoir do not like tatty cell towers cluttering their views or mutating their DNA. Which is fine for them but sucks for me, since it takes my brilliant telecom workaround—forwarding my land line to the cell—and metaphorically drops it on its head from a 15-story window.

And even if I wanted to forward my phone to The BF’s land line (which I most decidedly do not—a girl has her limits), I couldn’t, since the BF, self-employed in the VFX world of film & TV, is doing the same forwarding between cell-and-home dance I am. Nothing like having your best corporate client ring your boyfriend’s pants while they’re on a bell.

Anyway, about a month ago, in utter frustration over shitty cell reception when there was some, missed calls when there weren’t and a few really scary races to auditions, I gave up my main land line (the other is for the fax/DSL) and ordered Vonage.

Holy-fucking-crap! My number rings at home! My number rings at my country house! And it really is my number—my one and only number—because Vonage lets you port your old landline number to your new Vonage account!

There are a few small kinks I need to work out. Hauling the Vonage router around with me is gonna get old, I can see right now; I’m looking into the possibility of a second router or at least an additional power supply (the heaviest part of the gear). There’s a little dropout now and then, thanks to less-than-perfect DSL.

But for anyone splitting their time between two places—especially two places with crummy cell reception—or fearsome of losing their actual, memorized phone number in a cross-town move or another area code split, Vonage might be just the ticket.

xxx
c

TOPICS: communicatrix, reviews, VoIP, Vonage.

Lesser noir is fun. Like all noir, it’s generally filled with Famous Character Actors of the Golden Age: faces that started looking 35 when they were barely 20 and never looked too pretty to begin with—your Harry Morgans and Thelma Ritters as opposed to your Alan Ladds and Veronica Lakes. But with lesser noir—whatever didn’t make it to the top of the pile along with The Maltese Falcon or Double Indemnity—you get to figure out what about it didn’t work.

Somewhere in the Night is chockablock with Famous Character Actors—Harry Morgan is so far down the list, he’s not even credited—and sports direction by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and story adaptation by Lee Strasberg (er…come to think of it, that could be the problem right there).

But if you ask me, what doesn’t quite work about it is that its stars are…um…shall we say, ‘less than luminary’? John Hodiak has a reasonably long IMDb, but he also sports this fakakta moustache that says “dashing-but-dangerous leading man” less than it does “Rodolfo ‘Chance is the fool’s name for fate’ Tonetti“. And Nancy Guild (“Rhymes with ‘wild!’”), while unquestionably hot, is…well, when you’ve done almost as many films as you have husbands, it’s no wonder you’re not a household name 50 years later.

The story—an amnesia plot with a pretty predictable twist—is good-ish noir, and whoever lit and styled the thing did a damned fine job, but the really absorbing, fun element of the film is (are?) the performances.

Not as much fun as the new Wallace & Gromit DVD release, of course (run! don’t walk!), but not a bad way to pass a late-Friday night.

Bourbon optional. Well, in some households, anyway.

xxx
c

OTHER FILM NOIR REVIEWED HERE: Out of the Past, with Robert Mitchum

Image via the loathsome Amazon.com whose so-called customer support makes the USPS look like Neiman-Marcus.

TOPICS: film noir, reviews, reviews/film, Somewhere in the Night.

1. Proves once and for all that an actual script is not necessary to secure major financing.
2. Replaces ho-hum filmic “tricks” like plot and character development with highly illustrative musical montages.
3. If you don’t like the ending, you can wait around five minutes and there will be another one. Twice.
4. Will rid your boyfriend of that pesky crush he’s had on Kirsten Dunst.
5. Will rid you of that pesky crush you’ve had on Legolas.
6. Not enough quirky romantic comedies invoke the memory of Martin Luther King in the name of cheap emotional credibility.
7. Will ensure that no one accidentally spends tourist dollars in hillbilly flyover states for years to come.
8. Provides much-needed outlet for Susan Sarandon to show off her famed facility with broad physical comedy.
9. Overproduced website provided much needed salary and health benefits for at least two code monkeys and a web designer.
10. Provides the communicatrix with a much-needed outlet to vent her considerable spleen.

xxx
c

TOPICS: Cameron Crowe, communicatrix, Elizabethtown, Kirsten Dunst, List-o-rama!, Orlando Bloom, reviews, reviews/film.