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I've done kajukenbo or kung fu for the last three years. And I love thrillers! Therefore, Haywire looked like it was right up my alley. It stars Gina Carano, a real MMA star.

Ha! All the best parts were in the trailer. (In fact, I think there were parts in the trailer that weren't in the movie). Let me count the problems with the movie:

- When the main character is on the run, she somehow manages to get her hair cut from past her shoulders to a stylish angled bob. Yeah, that would be top of mind for me when everyone wants me dead. The color doesn't change, so it's not like she's trying to throw her pursuers off track. Later, she shows up in cornrows. Cornrows I don't think she has enough hair for. And who braided it?

- Speaking of changing colors, when the the MC is being chased down city streets, running through restaurants and stores and vaulting over fences, she continues to wear a white hat. So much for being an expert. The first thing you should do when someone is tailing you is to change your appearance. Ditching the hat would have been a great first step.

- The character played by Tatum Channing is a bit of a rookie. He nearly screws things up and has ideas no one agrees with. Yet at the end of this section of the movie, the MC is kissing him and undoing his belt. Why? It seems beneath her to have sex with him. The reason is revealed near the end, when he dies. Gives her the opportunity for a flashback scene and a moment of sadness.

- The character played by Ewan Macgregor is shown putting a gun in the back of his pants. Then he fights the MC on the beach. A fight, it is clear, that won't end until one of them is dead. Yet he never pulls his gun. Isn't that guy familiar with Chekov? "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired."

- They re-dubbed the actress's voice, so it sounds different from take to take.

- If you don't trust someone, would you let them have full access to your stuff while you took a shower?

- There's a plot point involving a brooch being planted in a dead man's hand to cast the blame for the murder. It was like something out of Agatha Christie. A brooch! In his hand! With no signs of a struggle or threads caught in brooch to explain how he supposedly managed to yank it off his killer.

- The high-tech spies use - wait for it - Blackberries! How much did they pay for product placement?

This is definitely the last Steven Soderbergh movie I see. Contagion also sucked, but for different reasons.

I'm reading a book right now (one I have to read, for reasons that I won't go into) and one character is named Dayna So-and-So. And referred to by her first name. And another is named So-andSo Dayne. And referred to by last name.

For some reason, even though we know better, authors make this kind of mistake all the time. In Domestic Violets, which I loved, the wife is named Anna, the stepmother Ashley, and the daughter Allie. Which all kind of run together.

The less forgivable mistake in the book I'm reading now is that pigeons are seen feasting on a dead body. Pigeons? Crows I would believe, but pigeons is just laughable. And yet there they are on about page 200, tearing at some poor fictional guy's entrails.

My kid is watching CSI, and they keep doing crap like this. Like blowing up a photo until they can see fireworks reflected in a hubcap, or a face reflected in sunglasses.

As TV Tropes says, "the big blocky pixels you get when you zoom in too close on a picture are the only information that the picture actually contains, and attempting to extract more detail than this is fundamentally impossible."

Read more here.

On Saturday, I started reading a new thriller that has gotten tons of buzz and even a starred review. Like many a book before it, it’s being compared to Cormac McCarthy.

I ended up putting the book down before I was even 50 pages into it. One of the main characters, the deputy sheriff (whom the jacket flap copy tells me straight up is a good guy) finds a car parked on a logging road. On a hunch and on his day off, he hikes up into the area he thinks the car's owner might have gone. That night he is awakened by the sound of a plane and watches two men send up a flare and the plane drop a bundle attached to a parachute. It’s cocaine (which he doesn’t know but could guess).

Holding his rifle, he confronts two men when they are loading the bags onto their horses, identifies himself as an officer. At no time do the bad guy display weapons. One of the men flees on horseback. The deputy sheriff shoots at him and misses. The other man also flees, and the deputy sheriff shoots at him and misses. Then he hits the second man in the back of the head with the rifle butt and immediately knocks him out cold, and ties him up.

What’s the problem with this scenario?

If you work in law enforcement and you shoot someone when there is no threat to life, you yourself risk going to prison. It’s an inappropriate use of force. As is, quite likely, the rifle butt to the head.

And take that rifle butt to the head, which the deputy sheriff had no doubt would have the desired effect. It is not nearly as easy as you might think to knock someone out (despite what you saw on virtually every episode of 24). The more likely result is you just make someone really, really mad. And if you do succeed, any blow that is hard enough to knock someone out is also hard enough to possibly cause some permanent brain damage.

If the deputy sheriff had thought about how what he was doing wasn’t right, or how he got caught up in the moment, then I could have bought it. As it is, it just seemed like someone basing a book on what he’d seen on TV or in movies.

When I asked an online board full of current and retired law enforcement, they not only agreed it was wrong - they also started asking questions about the cocaine coming in 50 pound bags like flour (not in their experience) and the feasibility of using horses to carry any load much over 200 pounds (plus a passenger).

I think you owe it to readers to get it right.







 

When this demolition of an old smoke stack in Ohio went wrong and it fell the wrong way, cracking power lines like huge whips. Nobody was hurt.