From "The Death of the Middlebrow Legal Thriller" by Joe Reid (The Vulture), written on the crushingly boring occasion of the 25th anniversary of the movie "The Client."
I saw part of that movie. I was on a plane and I watched enough to decide this is a type of movie I hate and will never watch again: a plot based on putting a child in danger with many shots of the
[T]he real gem at the heart of this movie is Susan Sarandon, who milks her star turn for all its worth. Her scenes opposite Tommy Lee Jones as they face off over the fate of this young boy are the kind of crackling movie-star showdowns that rarely appear outside the action drama....Could they please go crackle somewhere else and not inside the aluminum tube I'm trapped in? For me, that was most certainly not — to use Reid's phrase — "deeply enjoyable." I'm irritated by the notion that we're expected to enjoy children put in danger. In real life, it would be horrible, but having our emotions artificially leveraged because of our primal love of children, that's pleasure.
ADDED: I've corrected this post. Originally, I'd written "The Firm" for "The Client." The one I saw and the one marking its 25th anniversary is "The Client." "The Firm," also discussed in the linked article, came a year earlier. ALSO: I don't think Sarandon was the mother, just the lawyer and a woman (and therefore, conventionally, experiencing maternal pangs).
पोस्ट्स
११५ टिप्पण्या:
The nice thing about travel in the modern tube, which you sensibly avoid, is the multiplicity of channels, or, as I prefer, to turn the thing off and read a book. But yeah, you got that type of movie right.
Ann, I absolutely guarantee that you will deeply enjoy “Frankenstein in Love.” No harm to children. A feminist angle.
Theme: Man must have his mate.
Tagline. Frankenstein is not the monster. Her husband is. A love story.
I just need to sell it.
The film with Susan Sarandon was The Client. The Firm stars Tom Cruise, and no children are involved.
You need children in danger so that women watch it.
p.s. Gene Siskel famously loathed movies that he described as "children in danger" pictures.
You need children in danger so that women watch it.
Bet his agent told him that.
"The film with Susan Sarandon was The Client. The Firm stars Tom Cruise, and no children are involved."
Thanks. I figured that out on reread, but I appreciate the prompt.
Such boring titles, especially for someone who is working in the legal field!
Spring Tide (2016) (Springfloden) was good. TV series so there are episode-based developments. Swedish or one of those languages with subtitles. High production values. Distraught mother and kid are one of the elements.
I'm irritated by the notion that we're expected to enjoy children put in danger. In real life, it would be horrible...
Oddly, in real life, my father did precisely that... I mean putting a child in danger. Me.
He didn't do it to enjoy it.
I worked at dangerous jobs on farms from the time I was old enough to pick something up and move it from one place to another. By the time I was a teenager, I was working on and around farm equipment that would tear your arm off if you weren't constantly aware.
Dad thought this was good for me. Taught me self-reliance and a good work ethic. He was right, too.
My grandkids won't have to work, mostly likely, until they finish their schooling. I don't know how to counteract this world of softness and ultra-mommy concern they are growing up in.
The absence of this ethic means they'll have a lot of time to focus on worthless shit like feminism and their sexual identity.
Every author needs "firm support" from the reading public. That's why the Puzo went to the mattresses in The Godfather.
The Firm is about a Harvard law grad who unknowingly takes a job in a law firm that represents the Mob
Sorry for multiple posts, but does anyone else find the sentence, "As a bookish indoor kid who hadn’t figured out his sexuality, I was a firm supporter of the middlebrow legal thriller," very bizarre? What the hell does the first half have to do with the second?
I watched both The Firm and The Client and don't remember either of them.
Tom Cruise is capable of some stinkers though.
SPOILERS SPOILERS. I had a discussion once with Linda Fairstein about how predictable it was that in each of her books there comes a point where the heroine (a prosecutor) is kidnapped or held at gunpoint by the bad guys and is in extreme danger. She said, in effect, that I was right, but, "it sells," and that's what her publisher wanted. To me, same sort of thing.
"You need children in danger so that women watch it."
Not this woman. I've avoided such movies since "The Client" made me realized I didn't want my emotions cheaply appropriated like that.
I really enjoyed The Firm. But I might just be a sucker for Wilford Brimley in a villainous role. The performances in The Client were pretty stellar, but I didn't enjoy the movie that much myself. For me, the most overrated of all the "middle-brow legal thrillers" was A Few Good Men.
"Gene Siskel famously loathed movies that he described as "children in danger" pictures."
I'd forgotten that. Good for him! It's such a cheap way to grab people.
Just for shits and giggles, I looked up Siskel's review of The Client. Sure enough, he hated it.
"I worked at dangerous jobs on farms from the time I was old enough to pick something up and move it from one place to another. By the time I was a teenager, I was working on and around farm equipment that would tear your arm off if you weren't constantly aware."
You should read the memoir "Educated."
Erin Brockovitch (2000) was good but I couldn't figure out the relation with her boyfriend at the end. A major plot line that suddenly and deliberately ended in favor of legal plot.
I'd forgotten that. Good for him! It's such a cheap way to grab people.
To grab women. Political move also. 19th amendment stuff.
The softness and dullness of contemporary office life compels people to imagine or seek out artificial danger.
The triumph of Althouse's sexual identity and feminist obsessions created a world of pasty nothingness.
Real adventure and drama are virtually absent.
All we have is backstabbing and gossip.
Henry Miller wrote about the sensory deprivation and intellectual starvation this creates in "The Air Conditioned Nightmare."
"A few days later Dad came home with the most frightening machine I’ve ever seen. He called it the Shear. At first glance it appeared to be a three-ton pair of scissors, and this turned out to be exactly what it was. The blades were made of dense iron, twelve inches thick and five feet across. They cut not by sharpness but by force and mass. They bit down, their great jaws propelled by a heavy piston attached to a large iron wheel. The wheel was animated by a belt and motor, which meant that if something got caught in the machine, it would take anywhere from thirty seconds to a minute to stop the wheel and halt the blades. Up and down they roared, louder than a passing train as they chewed through iron as thick as a man’s arm. The iron wasn’t being cut so much as snapped. Sometimes it would buck, propelling whoever was holding it toward the dull, chomping blades. Dad had dreamed up many dangerous schemes over the years, but this was the first that really shocked me. Perhaps it was the obvious lethality of it, the certainty that a wrong move would cost a limb. Or maybe that it was utterly unnecessary. It was indulgent. Like a toy, if a toy could take your head off..."
Westover, Tara. Educated: A Memoir (p. 138). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Why am I recommending a book where a child is put in terrible danger? Because it's a memoir, written by that (former) child, and it's beautifully written from the child's point of view as the child figures things out for herself. It's real-life danger, not something some plot-writer dreamed up.
i miss Gene Siskel, he had that movie review show where he would review movies; and then, for comparison's sake, they'd have the same movie reviewed by a complete idiot, that would evaluate the movie through warped liberal eyes.
It was great!
If Siskel liked the movie, i probably would too
If Siskel hated the movie and ebert liked it i definitely would hate it too
If you're going to have huge machine-driven scissors, you's going to need a virgin.
My requirements for a movie is that it not be stupidly written. The writers' plot point checkoff list shouldn't be obvious as each element is introduced.
Guy with drinking problem is my chief bail-out point. Just stop fucking drinking.
"What the hell does the first half have to do with the second?"
Read the whole thing.
I'm interested in the way different genres fill different emotional needs for different people.
I'd rephrase your question as a general discussion: What kind of a kid were you and did any particular type of movie work for you as a place of refuge? What was going on there and where are you now and how did your taste in movie genres progress? This relates to my "imaginary movie project." It's not an effort to objectively evaluate movies, but an examination of your own psychology. And really, that has a lot to do with what movies get made, because the moviemakers are trying to reach us where we are and entrance and enmesh us. Why and where are we vulnerable? This is WAY more important than whether the movies are objectively good (if there is such a thing).
"Educated" pairs well with "The Mosquito Coast" (2 books I read around the same time). "Mosquito Coast" is fiction, but both have a bigger-than-life charismatic father with grandiose and horribly dangerous ideas. I love the brilliant-but-dangerous father stories and hate the mother-is-scared stories.
Thanks for your clarification between real experience and the movies, Althouse.
I witnessed several horrifying accidents that permanently disfigured the victims during my years working on farms.
Why and where are we vulnerable?
In my opinion, the role of mass media over the past century has been to take over the job of parenting from parents, to become the moral teacher of children in the absence of religious indoctrination.
We are vulnerable because this relieves parents of a huge share of the burden of teaching and caring for their own children.
You know, I've never read a legal thriller and never seen any of those movies except "The Client" (which was forced on me on a plane).
"In my opinion, the role of mass media over the past century has been to take over the job of parenting from parents, to become the moral teacher of children in the absence of religious indoctrination."
First example that sprang to mind: "The Cosby Show."
No the Cosby show was an outlier from the first episode to fare like different strokes, where the kids were the wise ones.
I love the brilliant-but-dangerous father stories and hate the mother-is-scared stories.
I hate both. Father or mother needs to man up, and do so at the beginning of the story so we can all go home.
The kid in The Client died of heroin @25yo
You want bad legal movie? Try Paul Newman in The Verdict.
Shoot yourself in the head before watching, it will save you 90 minutes.
It's simple to raise kids and grandkids right... Kill your TV. Quit blaming the librul Media secular elite.
A "bookish indoor kid who hadn’t figured out his sexuality" is a pretty succinct description of my early adolescence, but I don't recall gravitating towards any genres specifically. But I was certainly attracted to movies generally. My father is a movie nut and would constantly show me all of his favorite 80s comedy films (e.g. Caddyshack, The Blues Brothers, Fletch, Trading Places, etc. My father paid almost no attention to movie ratings. I saw Coming to America, the R-rated Eddie Murphy comedy, in the theaters; I was six. I remember it being a point of contention between my parents, and my mother rarely went to the movies. For her, the idea of sitting in a dark room for two hours without being to talk or get up and move around was hell. So it sort of became my father and I's "thing." We're the kind of people who constantly throw lines from movies back and forth at each other to the utter annoyance of everyone around us.
@gilbar:
If Siskel liked the movie, i probably would too
If Siskel hated the movie and ebert liked it i definitely would hate it too
I was just the opposite. My tastes tended to be more in line with Ebert's than Siskel's. But there was of course the occasion where it would be switched. The most fun aspect of the show was when they vehemently disagreed about a movie and would refuse to given an inch. On only a single occasion did Siskel change his mind after hearing Ebert's review and change his thumb's up to a thumb's down for Broken Arrow. And even then, Siskel took the opportunity to razz Ebert about his liking the godawful Burt Reynolds' comedy Cop and a Half.
Shouting Thomas,
Your comment about the dangers of farm life reminded me of Harry Crews' autobiography "a childhood"
He grew up in rural Georgia in the 30's "where everyone was missing a body part, even if just a finger"
Very approximate quote.
I was a big fan of Crews. Perhaps the strangest writer I ever read.
John Henry
Did the same thing with my kids, J. Kubrick, Scorsese, Coppola, Herzog. Got in trouble taking them to see Cape Fear.
Professor,
You’re a lawyer; I would presume you dislike lawyer movies. I, as a physician, generally dislike medical TV shows and movies. However, I have learned to appreciate them as window into how the public views physicians. At one point in time I even co-taught a course to 4th year Med students on “Doctors in the Movies”. A fun and well received elective course.
What does “The Client” say about the way the public views lawyers?
I read older mysteries and thrillers. Contemporary ones are mostly about a child in danger, usually from a neo Nazi serial killer 🙄
Want a good thriller? Some Eric Ambler from the 30s through the 60s.
Siskel was good, Ebert unreliable.
Or actually, Ebert was 100% reliable: he'd praise the worst shit if it seemed in line with his politics.
I thinking that Sarandon “milking it” indicates a bad performance, not a good one.
John Cage had a great line. He didn’t like a piece of music. “Don’t you like being moved?” He was asked. “I like being moved” he replied, “but I dislike being pushed.”
I like it when the endangered children have asthma and/or diabetes and will die unless they take drugs, which are somewhere else. You can never tell exactly how long it will be until the children are perfectly OK, so it's ever so suspenseful.
Sarandon was epic in "The Hunger"
You need children in danger so that women watch it.
Rhhardin may have a “theme” running through his comments, but on this topic, he nails it. That story was overwhelmingly women aimed.
@Ken B:
Or actually, Ebert was 100% reliable: he'd praise the worst shit if it seemed in line with his politics.
Do you have an example of this?
Another suspenseful plot device is where a white child is standing around minding his own business and some crazy black guys and a sleazy Amerindian guy come up and cause a stressful scene with him right in the middle of it and a bunch of big-time trashy fake news outlets write click-bait lies about incident and about him and get away with it.
Too unrealistic?
“The Three Stooges meet Hercules, 1962.” My cousin and I were Eleven years old. Told our moms we were going to the matinee didn’t mention we were riding our bikes. It was our first trip to town on our own and by the time we got there we were too old for the Stooges. We left when the popcorn ran out, pedaled around town like rock stars and would have got away with it If I hadn’t kept the ticket stub.
I only saw the Firm. That's only Grisham type film i ever saw. I thought it was absurd. Hot shot lawyer goes to MEMPHIS (haha) and joins a STRANGE firm that full of WHITE MEN and WASPy wives. You know its evil because there are no Jews and no black lawyers.
Hal Hollbrooke Hackman, and Quaker Oats Brimly are the villains.
At the end Cruise and his wife return to Boston where all "Good think" Whites live.
My liberal professors, back in the late 60s, were agog over Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Message. Required reading in rhetoric and English classes.
McLuhan argued that we live within an artificial environment created by media.
Decades later I met one of the leading McLuhan scholars in the U.S. at a Latin Mass in Jersey City. (McLuhan was Canadian.)
I learned for the first time that McLuhan was a devout Catholic. He attended Mass every day. He literally believed that this media environment was the work of Satan.
My liberal professors never told me that.
Do you have an example of this?
Missing, and Driving Miss Daisy. Anything by Michael Moore. The color purple. That's off the top of my head.
The John Landis comedy Trading Places is suffused with anti-WASP sentiment. It's still a funny movie.
Ebert always had his thumb up. Siskel was more selective.
Eddie Murphy was funny but badly used. Trading Places was one of his better ones.
@rcocean:
Ebert always had his thumb up. Siskel was more selective.
Now that's a bit of a different critique and one that was often made of Ebert. That is, that he tended to "like everything." But when they tallied his starred reviews, the average was 2.5, which is thumbs down.
But honestly, I don't get what that list of movies is supposed to convey. Ebert liked them because they were in line with his politics? How can we know that? He didn't like them but pretended to do because of his politics? The Michael Moore pictures are probably the best example. I believe he gave thumbs up to all of them, but I'm not sure about The Big One, which was actually my favorite of his. But that brings up another question. I don't share Michael Moore's politics but believe he is a talented filmmaker.
I'll also say that Ebert most certainly had a blindspot to black movies or movies that featured a black person prominently. He used to get heckled about this on Howard Stern all the time. Stern always seemed mesmerized by the notion that Ebert was married to a black woman. Stern always attributed Ebert's like of Spike Lee (who Stern hated) to the fact that he was (then) dating a black woman.
Well they were the front for an Italian mob the moroltos, Greg iles has taken up the southern suspense mantle from him, with the natchez series
I remember as a kid being so bored by this alleged Golden Age of legal thrillers. Maybe I should check them out now.
"Ebert liked them because they were in line with his politics? How can we know that? He didn't like them but pretended to do because of his politics?"
Ebert was quite explicit about being a liberal/Leftist and NOT liking movies he thought were too anticommunist/conservative** and LIKING movies that pushed the liberal narrative. Sorry, you don't agree. But if you read his reviews and its all there.
** = the few ones that got made.
Here he is praising Commie propaganda:
The Battleship Potemkin' has been so famous for so long that it is almost impossible to come to it with a fresh eye. It is one of the fundamental landmarks of cinema...If today it seems more like a technically brilliant but simplistic... that may be because it has worn out its element of surprise--that, like the 23rd Psalm or Beethoven's Fifth, it has become so familiar we cannot perceive it for what it is"
The villain in the pelican brief is a cajun oil baron powerful enough to underwrite the assasination of two supreme court justices, and naturally stubborn at the agencies and the president.
Greg iles charact et starts off with a lynching of two and then segues into the Kennedy assassination,
Here is Ebert's witless comment on Geronimo:
"Within a few days of each other, I saw "Schindler's List" and "Geronimo," and it occurred to me that both films are about Holocausts, about entire populations murdered because of their race"
Of course Geronimo wasn't 'Murdered'. He lived to 70 and died a well-to-do farmer in Oklahoma.
If we had a press worth a farthing
https://nypost.com/2019/07/24/fbi-agent-brother-to-cop-accused-of-murder-for-hire-plot-dead-by-suicide-sources/
Shouting Thomas
As far as I know there is no mccluhan book called the medium is the message.
He used it as a catch phrase but the book you linked is the medium is the massage.
It is mainly a book of photos with some commentary/captions.
Perhaps you were thinking of his book Understanding Media?
John Henry
Ebert also hated "Zoolander" solely because the target of an assassination plot was the prime minister of Malaysia. Never mind anything else about the movie.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/zoolander-2001
@rcocean:
Sorry, you don't agree. But if you read his reviews and its all there.
I've read a good portion of his reviews, a number of his books, and watched him on television for 20 years. And no I don't recall him ever being explicit about not liking a movie because it was too anticommunist or being explicit about liking a movie because it pushed a liberal narrative. Do people tend to go easier on their side and harder against the other side? Absolutely. It's a perennial human foible. Are you not doing the same thing? Taking issue with movies you don't like because they do not align to your political point of view.
@Bill Peschel:
Ebert also hated "Zoolander" solely because the target of an assassination plot was the prime minister of Malaysia. Never mind anything else about the movie.
That's a good example. Although, to be a little fair to an unfair review, that was two weeks after 9/11. A lot of wacky opinionating was going on at the time.
@John Henry
This is one that trips me up.
I think that Understanding Media has long been repurposed as The Media is the Message, and yes, I agree, the actual word is "massage."
They are so rare:
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-lost-city-2006
@narciso:
They are so rare:
What is the "they" in that sentence?
It's such a cheap way to grab people.
The problem isn't that they do it (though it may ruin the movie for you if you're cynical about it) but that women fall for it.
For me, kids in danger is neutral. They will have put in something else for men to enjoy while the women are emoting. Car chase or something.
Airplane movies are awful for me. Do they have nobody who knows how airplanes work.
The answer has to be that they put in what audiences like best, not closest to how things work.
Recently I've experienced a spate of movies where the airliner crashes, mowing down a half mile of trees, and stops mostly intact and the hero steps out. Instead of the more realistic thousands of pieces more or less where it hit. But what plot can you make from that.
Oh and Gravity (2013) getting everything about orbital mechanics, forces and momentum wrong. Made the whole film one long painful trudge. Had a child flashback though.
"I think that Understanding Media has long been repurposed as The Media is the Message, and yes, I agree, the actual word is "massage.""
"The medium is the message" was McLuhan's phrase in "Understanding Media." "The Medium Is the Massage" is a graphic presentation of McLuhan's ideas by Quentin Fiore (with both authors credited):
"The title ['The Medium Is the Massage'] is a play on McLuhan's oft-quoted saying "The medium is the message". The book was initiated by Quentin Fiore. McLuhan adopted the term "massage" to denote the effect of each medium on the human sensorium, taking inventory of the "effects" of numerous media in terms of how they "massage" the sensorium. According to McLuhan biographer W. Terrence Gordon, "by the time it appeared in 1967, McLuhan recognized his saying ['The medium is the message'] was a cliché, and welcomed the opportunity to throw it back on the compost heap of language to recycle and revitalize it. But the new title is more than McLuhan indulging his insatiable taste for puns, more than a clever fusion of self-mockery and self-rescue — the subtitle is 'An Inventory of Effects,' underscoring the lesson compressed into the original saying.' However, the FAQ section on the website maintained by McLuhan's estate says this interpretation is incomplete and makes its leap of logic for McLuhan to leave it as-is: 'Why is the title of the book The Medium is the Massage and not The Medium is the Message? The title is a mistake. After the book came back from the typesetter's, it had on the cover 'Massage'. The title was supposed to read The Medium is the Message, but the typesetter made an error. After McLuhan saw the typo, he exclaimed, 'Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!' Thus, there are four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: Message and Mess Age, Massage and Mass Age.'"
@rhhardin:
Airplane movies are awful for me. Do they have nobody who knows how airplanes work.
You should check out a 1997 movie starring Ray Liotta and Holly Hunter called Turbulence. Oh my god was it awful, and I'm sure a smidgen of airplane knowledge would make it even more cringeworthy.
I have a similar reactions when I see a lot of movies where psychiatrics or psychotherapy are employed. I pretty much had a permanent eye roll watching K-Pax. Especially when the psychiatrist played by Jeff Bridges (who normally can do no wrong in my eyes) bring his patient home to interact with his family as a therapeutic tool. Oy.
"Airplane movies are awful for me. Do they have nobody who knows how airplanes work."
Have you seen "Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines"? That's kind of the "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" of airplanes.
Top Gun is a fun airplane movie
As a bookish indoor kid who hadn’t figured out his sexuality
I don't recall having to figure out my sexuality, but I am thankful that the check-out clerk at the Safeway has a button explaining their preferred pronouns.
John Grisham can't write a good ending to a book so the movies made from them all have terrible endings, too. He should write 80% of a book and then hand it off to someone else to finish.
“Massage the Media” Jeffery Epstein
Grisham wrote what he knew, which is Memphis and the Midsouth. Nothing wrong with that, and I enjoyed seeing the place on the big screen. Lots of history and culture here.
I thought The Firm was pretty well done; not a Cruise fan but he was OK and the rest of the cast excellent.
Iles is a better writer and attempts more ambitious and wider-ranging plots than Grisham (not that I am expert on either--just a reader a goodly number of their books).
As to the genre of kid-in-danger, count me out; not much on the whole legal genre actually, so haven't seen/read many of the items mentioned by others. No opinion on Siskel and Ebert . . . I can barely remember the name of any film critic, though I used to think their opinions had some value. (Kael, Kauffman (sp?) at TNR years ago, geez my memory is going.)
The late Philip Kerr's "The Shot" is a clever JFK-assassination riff. (Kerr had been a lawyer before his enormous burst of fiction writing.)
Narr
Hollywood NEVER does librarians right
Re airplane movies, I wish someone would make a movie of "Nanette: Her Pilot's Love Story," Edwards Park's very cinamatically written World War II combat memoir of flying P-39 Airacobras in the Southwest Pacific theater in 1943. It's one of only two books I know of about the P-39, a plane that fascinates me. Park is a terrific author and his memoir would make for a terrific movie.
Anyway ...
Roughcoat, do you know the work of Ernest K. Gann?
Narr
I'll look for the P-39 book
Ebert gave very positive (and insightful) reviews to some anticommunist films, such as The Killing Fields and The Lives of Others.
I think the selling point of thrillers are the plot twists. Some are truly ingenious. "Gone Girl", the first two Hannibal movies, "The Firm" were cleverly plotted. Whatever their shortcomings in other areas, the intricacy and sudden plot turns of the plot kept me engaged. In the same way, a comedy with a lot of funny jokes can overcome deficits in other areas.....Shakespeare's plots aren't all that credible and many of his jokes aren't that funny, but the poetry makes up for these shortcomings. Also, he not only puts kids in danger, but he actually kills them. That's probably why you never hear of women wanting to play Richard III.
Have you seen "Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines"?
Nothing but uppity white men going downy down down.
"A German officer can do ANY THING with an instruction book!"
I thought the books were enjoyable enough, although I was relatively young when he started cranking them out. I believe I listened to a couple of them on the radio (do radio stations still do this?).
But I HATED the movies. Rather, I watched The Client, hated it, and didn't bother with most of the others. It was way too on-the-nose due to how much of the plot had to be chopped for time. I think I may have watched Pelican Brief also; I remember thinking it was better but kind of forgettable.
"The Firm" isn't really a legal thriller. It's a legal hook on a story about selling out.
He's a poor kid who struggles to make good. Then just as he's on the brink of what he's worked for, he gets an offer that was too good to be true. Later, he discovers why it was too good to be true, and tries to redeem himself.
You could write a story with the exact same beats about someone joining a factory that's illegally dumping chemicals into the local river.
I haven't read the books in decades, but I recall the quality taking a real nosedive.
The Firm and A Time to Kill are enjoyable pulp and melodrama, respectively. The legal angle is more of a hook to introduce the main story. I think you could remake either one into an enjoyable movie today.
The Pelican Brief was distinctly lower quality. It was a standard '70s "shadowy people plot against the President" plot with the venue shifted to the Supreme Court. The legal hook is flimsy. There's no real reason for the main protagonist to be a lawyer. In fact, it would probably be better paced if she were a journalist uncovering the story than a lawyer driving the story.
I think I read The Client, but don't have any firm memories of it.
By paperback standards, the first two are enjoyable reads, the third is serviceable, the fourth is dreck, and I never bothered with the rest.
I liked The Firm. I read it, I think, just after the movie was made. Then I read the other novels he had published up to that point-A Time to Kill, The Pelican Brief, and The Client- they were much less impressive, and I never read another one of his novels. I have seen the movie The Runaway Jury, and hated it.
I much preferred the novels of Scott Turow.
Yes, none of Grisham's novels I have read strike me as novels about the profession of law- more like pulp action novels. On this level, The Firm was well done and an enjoyable read. The others were just not good, or didn't make a lot of sense to me.
Time to kill was his first the firm made it possible for him to publish it.
Matthew quick recycled the firm set in a DC lobbying firm in the 500
I get that lawyers don't like thrillers about law, doctors don't thrillers about medicine and so on. I tend not to like thrillers where they are in my area of expertise because the writers always get so much wrong. At least when I watch The Verdict, which I reqatched last year and rather liked, I have no idea what they got right and wrong and can enjoy it.
I don't like thrillers about packaging but, as KC (case-y) Boxbottom I have published over 60 of them. Go figure.
John Henry
I watched part of The Firm (I think) when it was on HBO years ad years ago. The only thing I remember was Tom Cruise and an infinity pool on top of a NYC skyscraper.
I could not get through the whole movie.
The idea of John Grisham as an author never appealed to me so I never read any of his books. Then, in 1999, I was in New Orleans looking for something to read at the airport and a John Grisham book looked like the least bad thing. I forget which one it was but I read a bunch on the plane then stayed up all night finishing it. Then I went to Borders and bought 2-3 more to binge on. Over the next couple months I read everthing he had written to that point.
But I never read any of them twice. Never had any desire to.
Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake, Tom Clancy, Nevil Shute, John D McDonald and some others I read over and over and over again. Some a dozen times or more. I want something to read and these are always old comfortable standbys.
So why did I get so hooked on John Grisham but only read any of them once? I have no idea.
Why does anyone watch airplane movies anyway? Get a tablet, Amazon has a Kindle Fire for $50 and download movies from youtube, Amazon, Netflix or other sources. Download them so you don't need a connection.
I always have a couple dozen movies, mini-series, tv shows on my tablet. Also I always have about 20-30 episodes of Hee-Haw downloaded from Youtube. When nothing else appeals, Hee-Haw will absorb me for 45 minutes.
John Henry
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"Have you seen "Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines"? That's kind of the "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" of airplanes."
Its a movie that's much better on the big screen. Those are real airplanes and real stuntmen and real crashes. No CGI. IT probably could lose 30 minutes and be none the worse. Best Line:
Robert Morley : The trouble with these international affairs is they always attract foreigners.
Blogger J. Farmer said...
Sorry for multiple posts, but does anyone else find the sentence, "As a bookish indoor kid who hadn’t figured out his sexuality, I was a firm supporter of the middlebrow legal thriller," very bizarre? What the hell does the first half have to do with the second?
Yeah, I must agree. It's a non sequitur. Just bad writing.
Hee-Haw will absorb me for 45 minutes.
I'm pleasantly surprised how well Hee-Haw has held up over the years. Gems...
Blogger mikee said...
You want bad legal movie? Try Paul Newman in The Verdict.
Shoot yourself in the head before watching, it will save you 90 minutes.
7/27/19, 8:14 AM
DAFUQ? Seriously? That was a great movie. Excellent cast.
EMPTY ARMS HOTEL!!!
It varies from the novel however.
Gloom, despair, and agony on me
Deep, dark depression, excessive misery
If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all
Gloom, despair, and agony on me
We figured she was rich, loaded to the hilt
And we figured she had class like the Vanderbilts
'Cause we had heard for years how she was so well reared
How was we to know they meant the way she was built
Gloom, despair, and agony on me
Deep, dark depression, excessive misery
If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all
Gloom, despair, and agony on me
Sorry for multiple posts, but does anyone else find the sentence, "As a bookish indoor kid who hadn’t figured out his sexuality, I was a firm supporter of the middlebrow legal thriller," very bizarre? What the hell does the first half have to do with the second?
It's a journalistic style, to cram multiple facts into one sentence. It has a name that I don't remember.
J. Farmer @7:39 AM: "...but does anyone else find the sentence, "As a bookish indoor kid who hadn’t figured out his sexuality, I was a firm supporter of the middlebrow legal thriller," very bizarre?"
Well I do, FWIW. I guess it's supposed to intrigue us and draw us in to read the rest of it. Didn't work for me.
In my early years, I was bookish (my choice) and "indoor" (not my choice), but I was never in doubt about my sexuality. And I never read a middlebrow legal thriller (whatever that is) in my life. I consider Raymond Chandler and John O'Hara literature of a fairly high order, for instance.
Takes all kinds, I guess.
The child is in danger for what he witnessed.
In today's parlance his family background is deplorable flyover country.
Northern Urban creatures find them alien indeed.
_____
For me John Grisham shined light on legal proceedings and maneuver.
Not legal analysis but the unsavory chaos and valiant fighters for making sense of it.
The Firm is a 1991 legal thriller by American writer John Grisham.
Mob ownership of law firm uncovered by New hire.
I checked on publication date so as to claim ...
Probably provided model for Democrats' legal-criminal-business-model post Clinton.
Hee Haw holds up so well because it has nothing topical.
You could take it back to the 40s and it would still work.
I watched half an ep of laugh-in a little while ago and had no idea what they were talking about.
I'ma picking
And I'ma grinning.
John Henry
You found another and pfffft you were gone
Right backatcha rejahm.
John Henry
curious story, many moons ago, when I was real estate, I found this very high end sales establishment in south florida, there was something that was off about them, months later I realized it was a money laundering outfit, ala the firm in the book, it would have been awkward had I gone to work with them,
When I look at you I get melancholy
You make me feel like a bump on a log
You’re not for real, I mean it by golly
A head like a melon and a face like a dog.
Where, oh where, are you tonight?
Why did you leave me here all alone?
I searched the world over, and thought I'd found true love,
You met another and THPPTH! you were gone.
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