Evil Dead!

Well, it's a rainy Thursday in Statesboro, which is fine by us, since I don't have any great plans for today.   Just spending the morning in my wife's office, taking Gabriel out for ice cream, catching up on Justified, starting the nonfiction book Shadow Divers, and doing God-knows-what-else. 

Here are the new movies opening this weekend (besides the 3D original Jurassic Park):

Evil Dead    Director Sam Raimi and star Bruce Campbell approved (and produced) the remake of their cult 1981 original, one of the craftiest, funniest, most terrifying horror films ever made.   The new film is getting good reviews, critics saying that director Fede Alvarez honors the goofy spirit of the original - and serves up plenty of scares.  The story's the same, of course: five friends hole up in a remote cabin and stumble upon the Book of the Dead.  Beware.
(Yes)

Trance    A new Danny Boyle film is always an occasion, and this one is supposed to be twisty as all-get-out.  James McAvoy stars as a London art auctioneer who teams up with a gang of thieves to steal a Goya painting.  Things go wrong, of course, and McAvoy finds himself knocked out.  Upon awakening, he can't remember where he hid the painting.  Some critics find it too dizzying, too hallucinogenic, too much flash and style.  Rosario Dawson, Michael Fassbender, and Vincent Cassel co-star. 
(Yes)

The Company You Keep    A good week for movies continues with Robert Redford's all-star drama/thriller about a former Weather Underground militant (Redford) who has been successfully hiding out for three decades until a nosy reporter (Shia LaBeouf) discovers his true identity.  A cast of Oscar winners and nominees: Chris Cooper, Susan Sarandon, Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, Terrence Howard, Stanley Tucci, and Richard Jenkins. 
(Yes)

*

Jussi Adler Olsen's The Keeper of Lost Causes, which introduced Danish detective Carl Morck and his understaffed, overburdened Department Q, was my favorite thriller of 2012 and one of my favorite thrillers ever, really.  Relentlessly exciting and scary, original, tense as anything, leavened with offbeat humor, it was a knockout - Scandanavian crime lit at its best. 

The second Olsen book, the next in the Morck series, The Absent One (2012) is a major comedown, a truly preposterous book that is full of bad writing and translation.  Nevertheless, I still breezed through it, enjoying it despite myself. 

The story involves another cold case: The murder of two teens at a summer cottage in 1987.  It seems that the man serving a sentence for the murder was one of an elite group of wealthy boarding school students - the members of which, Olsen reminds us repeatedly, grew into the "jet set" of Danish society: wealthy, amoral, violent, soulless criminals. 

Morck and his assistant Assad are joined by a new partner, Rose, who seems to exist solely as lame comic relief, consistently annoying Carl; although I must say that Olsen's writing is so bad here that I wasn't sure what exactly Rose was doing to annoy Carl.  She seemed helpful and idiosyncratic. 

Anyway, as Carl narrows in on the "jet set" group, it appears that a lost member of the group - the group's lone female member, Kimmie, who has been hiding on the street for years, carrying around her aborted fetus (!!!!) - is also stalking her old comrades, for reasons to be discovered. 

Everything comes to a head at a hunting weekend on one of the criminal's lavish estate.  The ending was ludicrous but rousing.  There is a lot of animal cruelty in the book; the one-dimensional villains hunt endangered game for sport.  In fact, the villains are so over-the-top in their villainy that it almost defies belief: they watch A Clockwork Orange for kicks, get blowjobs from their illegally-employed workers, rape and beat on the weekends, kill without remorse.  Has Olsen a subtle bone in his body?  You wouldn't think so based on this book. 

So why did I like it?  I'm not sure.  I still Carl and Assad compelling enough characters (though we learn nothing more about them this time around) and Olsen's style is so your in-face and he can grip with you his plot machinations like a pro. 

It's a good Bad Book. 
But I hope the next one's better.