Tag: Thriller

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While We Were Burning

Sara Koffi (Photo: CPearce Photography)

Sara Koffi began her novel in the summer of 2020. It wasn’t a pandemic project, born out of boredom, but rather seeded from the racial reckoning that stemmed from the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

“It was a concern about if these people and their families will actually achieve justice. A stress that these cases weren’t going to have a resolution that matched the justice needed,” she says. “And I kind of took the seed of that paranoia and put it toward the book essentially — that was like the seed of the beginning of While We Were Burning.”

The novel, Koffi says, is “first and foremost fun — fun is not the right word — but it is a fun, fast-paced, twisty read. And then secondly it’s exploring important themes.”

For her debut novel, Koffi puts two women’s stories into counterpoint: Elizabeth, a woman on a downward spiral as she questions the mysterious circumstances surrounding her friend’s death, and Briana, who is hired as Elizabeth’s personal assistant to help her pick up the pieces.

But Briana has questions of her own. The Memphis police have killed her son, and now she’s on the search for who called the cops on her child on that fateful day that took him away.

Together the women rush towards finding their answers as their relationship blurs the line between employer and friend, predator and prey.

“The thriller genre is very good about exploring justice outside of the usual justice system,” Koffi says. “So I thought for a story like this, it’d be fitting.”

The story begins in Elizabeth’s first-person perspective, which switches with Briana’s third-person narrative throughout the novel. “I often joke that Elizabeth thinks she’s the main character. She’s like, ‘This is my story.’ And then Briana, who arguably is actually the main character, does not center herself the same way.”

Even so, the prologue depicts Elizabeth lamenting her crumbling marriage. “She doesn’t know what book she’s in,” Koffi says. “She cannot conceive of Briana entering into her life. You know, this woman’s very concerned, kind of a borderline obsessed with her husband, like a domestic thriller trope. And then you keep reading. You’re like, ‘Oh, I think that’s a different book. That’s not what’s actually going to happen.’

“That was the first thing I wrote,” Koffi adds of the prologue, “and it has not changed from editing, drafting, to now. That has remained the same, untouched. … Once I got a good grasp of [Elizabeth], it’s like the story started to unfold.”

And, always, Koffi knew, this story was going to unfold in Memphis, the city where she grew up. “I also know about the city’s history, its involvement in the NAACP and Civil Rights Movement as well. And I thought it was interesting because the city also has a history of seeking justice on its own, so that was an interesting parallel to what’s happening in the story.

“For me personally,” Koffi says, “to have a book set in Memphis be the first book I put out, it feels like a major responsibility. But it’s a good one because I’m gonna have a lot of readers who have not been to the city and this book is gonna be their gateway to what the city is like without actually having visited there. I’m hoping — outside of the thriller background — that I capture the city. This is a good city. [Elizabeth and Briana are] having some drama, but the city itself is fine.”

But Koffi doesn’t just want to promote Memphis. She wants to create “a thoughtful moment for the reader as well. For me, I want that moment to kind of be a reflection on, like, are there are other things that I’m doing without thinking about it? That might be affecting other people? Do I have my own blinders on when it comes to certain things in my life, and may that be affecting other things?”

Sara Koffi celebrates the launch of While We Were Burning at Novel on Tuesday, April 16, 6 p.m., in conversation with Kristen R. Lee.

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Film Features Film/TV

Film Review: Bridge Of Spies

I’m not sure I’m qualified to critique a Steven Spielberg film. Large parts of my definition of how to make a good film come from Spielberg, who, in turn, distilled the ideas of old masters such as Hitchcock, Kubrick, Harryhausen, and Capra into wildly popular entertainments. Of all of the extremely talented directors to come out of the 1970s — Lucas, Coppola, De Palma, etc. — Spielberg is the most prolific and populist. Only Martin Scorsese rivals his artistic batting average. Sure, Spielberg can be cheesy, but Scorsese never really tried to make a big-tent spectacle picture, while Spielberg has occasionally elevated simple monster movies to the realm of high art. Since Spielberg’s been copied six ways to Sunday, it’s easy to take him for granted. That is, until he drops an atomic bomb of greatness like Bridge of Spies.

Like Saving Private Ryan, Bridge of Spies opens with a huge, bravado sequence that sets the realm of the film’s conflict. But it’s 1957, and the Cold War is in full effect, so instead of storming the beaches at Normandy, we’re treated to an interlocking series of tracking shots of FBI agents stalking Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) through Brooklyn.

There are no dinosaurs or sharks or aliens in Bridge of Spies, but there is a giant monster looming just off-screen: nuclear war. I think it’s hard for people who didn’t spend their childhood in abstract fear of Soviet missiles raining atomic death to understand people’s motivations in spy movies of the period. Directors didn’t have to explain the stakes, because everybody knew that a tiny slipup could lead to the destruction of civilization. But Spielberg, ever the effective communicator, conveys the mood of the times perfectly with a single scene where his everyman hero James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) comforts his young son Roger (Noah Schnapp) who has been traumatized by a “duck and cover” instructional film.

Donovan is a lawyer who distinguished himself at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals, but is now living a comfortable life practicing insurance law. Because of his experience and integrity, he is chosen by the New York State Bar Association to be Abel’s attorney. His job, he is told, is to demonstrate the superiority of the American legal system by mounting a defense of the accused spy. He earns the ire of the press and his colleagues when he saves Abel from the electric chair. After an American U-2 spy plane is shot down over Russia and its pilot Francis Gary Powers is captured, Donovan is called on to defuse the potentially explosive situation by negotiating a prisoner swap in East Berlin.

Working from an excellent screenplay by Matt Charman that was rewritten by Joel and Ethan Coen, both Hanks and Spielberg are at the top of their game. Hanks is unmannered and charming, able to summon a laugh or a gasp with a raised eyebrow or tense gulp. Spielberg can convey in one perfect composition what it takes most contemporary directors three or four quick cuts to get across. Even his scene transitions are things of beauty.

The most important thing about Bridge of Spies is its vision of America. Early on, Donovan sums up his philosophy by saying “It can’t look like our justice system tosses people on the ash heap.” To fearful 21st-century America, Bridge of Spies is a rebuke that reverberates from Ferguson to Guantanamo Bay. Too many contemporary stories, from 24 to San Andreas, put sociopathic jerks in the protagonist role and all but order you to accept them as heroes. But Hanks and Spielberg understand that heroes need to behave heroically. Here, they’re putting forth a real-life lawyer devoted to upholding America’s highest ideals, even for its enemies, as a hero to be emulated. As Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. said, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Donovan might like Scotch in his Nescafé, but he represents an America that at least pretends to be good.

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The Gift

Like all right-thinking Americans, I am a Turner Classic Movies (TCM) junkie. It’s the default channel I turn to when the cable box is on. By sheer coincidence, the night I returned from a screening of The Gift, I turned on TCM just in time to catch the beginning of Shadow of a Doubt, the 1943 film that Alfred Hitchcock considered his finest work.

Writer/director/producer/actor Joel Edgerton has clearly studied Hitchcock, and his new film The Gift carries much of Shadow of a Doubt in its DNA. It begins with a young couple Simon (Jason Bateman) and Robyn (Rebecca Hall) buying a Southern California, midcentury modern home. They’re relocating from Chicago because Simon has a prestigious, high-paying new job in “corporate security.”

You just know they’ll soon come to regret those huge windows that blur the lines between outdoors and indoors. They’re shopping at Ikea, when someone recognizes Simon: Gordon “Gordo” Mosley, played by our director Edgerton. Simon grew up in the area before leaving for college and career, and Gordo was a high school friend. Or maybe “friend” is an overstatement. Simon seems pretty reluctant to talk to him, and reveals to Robyn that the kids used to call him “Gordo the Weirdo.”

Writer/director Joel Edgerton stars in The Gift

Edgerton’s portrayal of Gordo is one of the best things about The Gift. He’s an Iraq War veteran, plain-spoken, and down-to-earth, but somehow unsettling. He’s just a little too stare-y, and his simple statements like “Good people deserve good things” seem to carry sinister subtexts. He gives off a weird stalker vibe even before the first unsolicited gift arrives at Simon and Robyn’s house.

But then again, nearly everyone in the film is giving off bad vibes. Robyn’s got major problems. She had a miscarraige back in Chicago and is the only person in the film who doesn’t drink copious amounts of wine, because she’s in recovery for unspecified substance abuse. Employees at Simon’s new company are clearly a bunch of status-obsessed creeps. And Simon is the worst of all. Bateman’s finest work has been as Michael Bluth on Arrested Development. Much of the show’s comedy comes from the fact that the Bluth family is hopelessly entitled and clueless to their own foolishness. Michael is the most sympathetic of the lot, but that’s only by comparison with the other characters. Imagine how annoying Michael Bluth would be if you knew him in real life, and you’ve got a sense of how Bateman’s performance plays out in The Gift.

Gordo makes references to “letting bygones be bygones,” and as his presence in their lives grows more insistent and sinister, Robyn wants to know what kind of history he and Simon have. In Shadow of a Doubt‘s, opening scene, Hitch makes sure the audience knows that Joseph Cotten is not the good-hearted Uncle Charlie his family thinks he is. The simple tension created by the informational asymmetry between the audience and the characters imbues every one of Uncle Charlie’s innocuous actions with a sinister undertone. Edgerton attempts the opposite. He wants you to wonder who is the real bad guy, Gordo The Weirdo, Simon, California start-up culture, or maybe even us, the audience.

The Gift is a tricky film to review, because I think Edgerton has his heart in the right place. He clearly wants to do some classical suspense filmmaking, and his influences are pointing him in the right directions. And yet, this film comes off as less a Hitchcockian thriller than as a low-rent Gone Girl. As with last year’s David Fincher hit, the real fear the film is tapping into is the failing middle class’ economic anxiety. Simon seems to shun Gordo because he’s a reminder of Simon’s working-class past, and Gordo goes to great lengths to fake affluence. But The Gift lacks either Fincher’s talent for dense plotting or Hitchcock’s elegance. Long passages in the middle seem repetitive, as Edgerton leans on jump-scares over and over. And the less said about the ending, the better.

If you’re a fan of suspense, and want to support original material, give The Gift a whirl. Edgerton’s a gifted actor, and shows promise behind the camera. Here’s hoping the pieces come together better in his next outing.

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Gone Girl

Gone Girl is based on a bestselling crime novel by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay. With its byzantine plot, morally ambiguous characters, and obsession with peeling back layers of “reality,” it is the perfect material for director David Fincher. It is the stylistic and thematic cousin of Fincher’s masterpiece Zodiac, and may surpass the 2007 film in reputation. One of the few useful notes I took before surrendering to Fincher’s dark spell was: “Perfect frame after perfect frame.”

Gone Girl is currently teaching me how much of my weekly word count is taken up with summaries. The expertly executed whiplash plot has earned word of mouth that is the envy of Hollywood, and yet recounting it here would be useless. If you’ve read the book, you already know what happens. If you haven’t, you don’t want to know. Here’s the setup: On their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) comes home to find his wife Amy (former Bond girl Rosamund Pike) missing, apparently the victim of a kidnapping. In less than 48 hours, the case becomes a full-blown media circus. Then things get weird.

Gone Girl is about the media. It’s probably the best filmic critique of our industry’s effect on society since Natural Born Killers predicted the metastization of the 24-hour news cycle 20 years ago. It’s marketed as a mystery, but it’s closer to Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole or Sidney Lumet’s Network than a classic mystery like The Big Sleep. Once observed by the media’s electron microscope, the characters behave like a quantum particle forced into choosing a definite state. Is Nick a hero, villain, or victim? Like Schrodinger’s cat suspended between life and death, he exists as all three at once. In a memorable exchange near the end of the film, he confronts his greatest tormentor, talk-show shouter Ellen Abbot (Memphian Missi Pyle), with all of the lies and distortions she has spread about him. “I go where the story is,” she says, even if that means inventing details to support the most lucrative narrative.

Ben Affleck in Gone Girl

Gone Girl is not misogynistic. Nor is it misandristic. It is misanthropic. Its worldview is so cynical it makes Double Indemnity look like It’s a Wonderful Life. Everyone in the film stoops to their basest level, confirming their sexes’ worst stereotypes. Nick’s glibly charming exterior hides a lazy, emotionally distant philanderer. Amy’s perfect woman exterior hides untold depths of emotional manipulation and cold-blooded lies. As she says, “We’re so cute, I want to punch us.” If, as has been suggested, Fincher’s adaptation tips the moral scales toward the male, it’s because Affleck’s job description as a movie star is: “Be sympathetic on camera.” And Affleck is very good at his job.

Gone Girl is exquisitely well acted. Pike shows complete control over her instrument, shifting into whichever version of Amy the director needs her to be as the points of view change. Kim Dickens shines as Detective Rhonda Boney, the Marge Gunderson-like investigator who proves impotent in the face of overwhelming evil. Neil Patrick Harris manages to take his character Desi Collings from creepy to nice and back again with very limited screen time. But the best of the bunch may be Tyler Perry as the Johnnie Cochran-like defense attorney who cheerfully plots the character assassination of a missing woman who, for all he knows, could be rotting at the bottom of a lake.

Gone Girl is about class. It’s one of the most insightful movies made about the Great Recession, exposing films like Up in the Air as classist dreck. The fear of losing economic status permeates everything. The story’s real inciting incident isn’t Amy’s 2012 disappearance; it’s 2009, when the couple lose their media jobs and are forced to move from New York City to a Missouri McMansion, propped up by debt and illusion. In one telling moment, when one of the movie’s many middle-class Machiavellians finds themselves confronted with actual, desperate lower-class criminals, they are summarily beaten at their own game.

Gone Girl is circular. It’s an appropriate structure for a story where everyone is trapped, either by their sex, their class, their perceptions, or by a whole sick society whose death throes make missing white girls into a growth sector for cable conglomerates.

Gone Girl is a very good movie. You should go see it.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Equalizer

I have a theory about The Equalizer.

If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to be cornered by me at a cocktail party, you know I am a man of many theories. But this theory is about why, in 2014, Hollywood would sink $50 million into an adaptation of a third-rate TV show from the 1980s about Bob McCall, an ex-CIA agent who goes all Dirty Harry on New York City as a way to atone for his past sins committed in the service of The Company.

What’s that, you say? You didn’t know this Denzel Washington vehicle was a TV reboot? Isn’t the whole idea of rebooting popular entertainment franchises from the past to capitalize on the brand recognition built up over the years, so as to save marketing money and cut through the audience’s mental clutter in today’s go-go internet world? So why bother rebooting a boring TV show no one remembers as a generic action thriller? Vigilante violence movies are a dime a dozen. Just pick a new title, give Washington a gun, and let the bad-guy blood flow.

Chloë Grace Moretz and Denzel Washington in The Equalizer.

That’s where the theory comes in.

The Equalizer movie exists because the real audience for this kind of project is not the audience, as in the public. It’s a pitch designed to attract studio investment by appealing to the decision makers, who, at this point in time are rich white guys in their 40s and older. To that very small but very powerful audience, The Equalizer is gold. They’re the ones who fondly remember the series, which starred Edward Woodward, an English actor who was 55 when the show premiered in 1985. My theoretical execs were teenagers back then, and things were so much simpler: the Russians were the bad guys, women knew their place, and an old man with a full head of white hair named Ronald Reagan took care of everything. But today’s audiences, whom the execs must court, are so confusing and scary. “So, yeah,” they say. “Let’s make that Equalizer movie! Everybody loves The Equalizer!”

Seen through the lens of this theory, so many inexplicable Hollywood phenomena, such as the fiasco of the Battleship movie, make more sense. It certainly explains The Equalizer, which was supposed to star noted aging Australian actor Russell Crowe, who could at least sound like Woodward, but ended up starring a tired looking Washington rocking dad jeans like it was his job.

The movie opens with McCall working in a Home Mart, presumably because the Home Depot product placement deal fell through at the last minute. He’s a stand-up guy whom everyone likes, but he is sad, because he is a widower with a dark past. So on nights when he can’t sleep, he frequents a coffee shop where he befriends trashily dressed Russian prostitute Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz). But when he sees Teri get a life-threatening beat down at the hands of her pimp, he decides to get involved and use his CIA superpowers, which manifest themselves onscreen as CSI montages of Washington’s bored eyes looking at stuff, to help her out. But just helping a much younger woman dress more modestly while proving the superior virility of older men isn’t enough to build a movie around, so it turns out that the guys pimping this particular street hooker are big time Russian gangsters who call in the anti-Equalizer in the form of Marton Csokas, an ex-Spetznaz agent who calls himself Teddy. Hijinx, in the form of comfort violence for the go-to-bed-early set, ensue.

Teri, the woman who all of this trouble is supposedly for, completely disappears from the movie for an hour until returning, more modestly dressed, after the climactic set piece inside the Home Mart where McCall gets to do all of those ultra violent things with tools you fantasize about while you’re in Home Depot. Or at least, I fantasize about them, which just goes to show that, as a guy who grew up in the ’80s, I am in the target audience for this film. I only wish, like my theoretical Hollywood execs, I had the means to stop it from happening.