TV Review: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window (2022), Netflix, and The Flight Attendant, Seasons 1-2, HBO Max.

The TV mini-series The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, starring Kristen Bell, is remarkably similar in genre and concept to HBO’s TV series The Flight Attendant starring Kaley Cuoco, which just arrived on HBO Max for a second season.  

 

In both series, the plot centers on an attractive young woman protagonist, each with her own serious emotional problems and excessive drinking habits, stumbling into a murder mystery which in The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window may or may not have even happened, and in both cases may or may not have been done by the intoxicated leading lady herself, who then has to try desperately to clear herself and solve the mystery by playing amateur detective. 

 

Both Bell and Cuoco are gifted comedic actors, and both pull off their respective roles convincingly and amusingly.  This is no mean feat in either case, since they need somehow to convey their characters’ tortured souls, their drunken irreverence and silly but self-destructive misbehavior in absurd situations, and yet also cleverly manage to figure out “who dun it” from a baffling list of likely suspects and clues that would challenge a sober person, all at the same time.   

 

The amateur detective work and smart-alecky response to mysteries, violence and dire personal straits is familiar territory for Bell, whose acting stint as the girl sleuth Veronica Mars earlier in her career contained much of the same appeal as this new show.  I saw all the Veronica Mars TV seasons and the follow-on movie a few years ago, and thought it was an outstanding and entertaining series, with a very gutsy and appealing young heroine. 

 

For Cuoco, her long acting run as Penny, the sweet but clueless party girl next door in The Big Bang Theory, who had to constantly improvise, make up stories, tell little lies and use her sexy good looks and flirtation to get herself out of embarrassing situations with the socially inept but brilliant tech nerds across the hall, was similarly good preparation for her role here, as a different sweet but clueless party girl (and flight attendant) who finds herself in far more dangerous situations than Penny ever faced.

 

For some viewers, trying to combine comedy, murder, intrigue, psychological thriller and satire into one show might be all too much.  However, I think both these series are worth seeing just for the enjoyment of watching these two remarkably talented actors working their onscreen magic to get their characters out of impossible situations.  Recommended.

Book Review: Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice (2015). Bill Browder.

Red Notice is an autobiographical account by Browder, the grandson of a famous U.S. Communist and the son of a Harvard legal scholar, of his efforts to make his own mark in the world by becoming a hedge fund manager in the newly "free" economies of Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s.  

He succeeded in that, and quickly became very wealthy in the new "Wild West" of the post-Soviet economy.  But in the process, by expecting Russian business to be governed by the rules of fairness and transparency that are generally honored in the West, he ran afoul of Putin and the new generation of Russian oligarchs, and discovered the reality of "Russian rules", including all the sorts of dirty operations, corruption, murder and mayhem with which we have lately become so familiar.  

When one of his lawyers was imprisoned for defending him and his hedge fund, and ultimately was killed by the Russian state, it led him to fight back, leading to U.S. Congressional passage of the Magnitzky Rule, which placed personal sanctions on key Russian business and government figures, and triggered our ongoing national crisis over Putin, Trump and the Russian attacks on our political processes.  The Magnitzky Rule is prelude to the sanctions now being imposed on Russian oligarchs around the world in response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Red Notice is a gripping personal story, and a foundational background piece in the complicated history of our current political moment, and our complicated relationship to the post-Soviet world of Russian politics and finance in the Putin era.  Recommended.

Movie Review: On the Rocks (2020). Apple TV+.

This entertaining film stars Rashida Jones and Bill Murray, and was directed by Sofia Coppola.  It’s an amusing comedy about a young New York mother (Jones) who develops suspicions that her otherwise seemingly wonderful husband might be cheating on her.  

Into this bout of post-natal insecurity comes her serial philandering playboy father (Murray), who is immediately sure she is right, and sets out to drag her into his wild ideas and outrageous plots for investigating the husband.  Recommended. 

Book Review: Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (2019). Ronan Farrow.

An extremely well-written, fast-paced true-life autobiographical thriller, in which the multi-talented NBC reporter and New Yorker writer describes what it took to break through the wall of lies and defensive mechanisms that had protected Harvey Weinstein and other wealthy and powerful sexual predators for decades. 

It was Farrow, along with a couple of women journalists at the New York Times, who investigated, wrote, fact-checked and finally published the story of Weinstein's predatory sexual behaviors toward women in Hollywood.  His stories played a critical role in bringing Weinstein to justice, and also helped trigger the #METOO movement that brought other powerful sexual predators in media to light.  

In his book, Farrow details how he was strung along for over a year by his supervisors and higher-level executives at NBC who were bent on undermining and burying his story.  He only gradually learned as the investigation developed of the extent of  Weinstein's ongoing active measures to protect himself, including a well-financed private media and intelligence campaign to track Farrow's progress, and prevent the story from being told. 

Along the way, Farrow also uncovered The National Enquirer's "catch and kill" tactics for protecting rich celebrities (including Donald Trump), and was himself surveilled and subjected to negative media attacks to try to derail and discourage his investigation. 

An inspirational and exciting tale of journalistic heroism, integrity and dogged persistence in tracking down and exposing the crimes of the corrupt rich and powerful men who control many of our media and entertainment businesses.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (2010). Leslie Kean.

The author of this book is the award-winning New York Times journalist who later co-wrote the explosive 2017 story on the U.S. government’s admissions that a major naval carrier task force had experienced repeated encounters with UFOs, and that the government had in fact been actively studying the phenomenon for decades while denying its existence.

In this book, the author includes summaries of major reported UFO sightings from around the world since the 1940s, followed in each case by the detailed written statements of some of the many highly qualified observers, such as government leaders, military and commercial pilots, police and astronauts who witnessed them. 

After reading this compilation of so many extremely specific and detailed eye-witness reports, it is much harder to believe that UFOs (or UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, as they're now sometimes called) aren't a real, physical occurrence. 

Kean makes the case that UFO encounters and sightings are almost certainly far under-reported due to the social and institutional disincentives to event reporting.  She also highlights how the U.S. government’s policy of constantly debunking and ridiculing them (at that time), while almost certainly maintaining a deniable, highly-classified program to continue collecting data, is at odds with the more open approach of many other countries, and does a disservice to the world's ability to study and investigate UFOs/UAPs scientifically. 

Many other countries in the world (including England, France and many NATO countries) do in fact encourage UFO/UAP reporting, and have open programs for sharing information between countries.  Kean's approach to her material, which is dispassionate, seemingly skeptical and does not assume any particular explanation for UFOs/UAPs, is convincing in making the case for more open scientific investigation of these mysterious phenomena.

This book is probably the best place to start in delving into the current state of knowledge about UFOs, and what our government has been doing (and not doing) for most of the past century to collect and study the phenomenon.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Rewiring America Handbook (2020). Saul Griffith.

This valuable work is only available (to my knowledge) as an e-book, in .pdf format.  Despite that minor accessibility limitation, the contents are very useful, well-presented and thought-provoking.  This is also the first major publication (it's really the introductory manifesto) of an organization (Rewiring America, at https://www.rewiringamerica.org ) which in the past several years has become an important advocacy group in the United States for finding practical solutions to the climate crisis.

The author is an Australian-American MIT-trained engineer, who (with a group of collaborators) has done detailed studies on what it will take to try to keep the world (and the United States) at a low-enough carbon level to avoid the worst effects of climate change.  His proposals are based on science- and engineering-based analyses of current conditions and problems.  He and his team of researchers are also well-versed in many of the economic issues and challenges related to climate and environmental policy, another crucial part of the story which he weaves into his prescriptions for averting the worst of the climate crisis.

There are a few key arguments made, mixed in with many sub-topics, graphs and studies:  first, meeting climate objectives will require a World-War II-scale industrial program, to build and deploy the technical infrastructure for power generation and the new grid;  second, we can all contribute significantly as individuals, without lowering our standards of living, by simply replacing or adding any personal infrastructure (cars, furnaces, stoves, solar panels) with new-tech all-electric versions;  third, an all-electric economy is cheaper in the long run, but requires heavy up-front investment, requiring inexpensive financing, which should be made widely available to consumers;  and fourth, building the all-electric economy will create on the order of 25 million good new jobs throughout all of American's zip codes, urban and rural.  

It is a very exciting and uplifting vision, with an abundance of supportive technical and financial detail included -- now all we have to do is figure out how to do it politically.  The .pdf of the book can be downloaded from Rewiring America’s site on the web, where you can now find other more specific and detailed reports and white papers on climate issues.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Following Fifi (2017). John Crocker, MD.

A very nice first book and memoir by (full disclosure here) my long-time primary care physician, Dr. John Crocker, who as a young man was one of the student researchers working with Jane Goodall in Gombe, Tanzania, studying chimpanzees.

It’s a very personal and thoughtful reflection on how what he experienced and learned there shaped his life, and made him a better doctor and father.  Highly recommended.

Movie Review: The War Bride (2002). Amazon Prime.

An energetic young London girl marries a Canadian soldier in 1941 in the midst of the Nazi bombing campaign, and quickly gets pregnant.  As the wife of a Canadian combatant, she is shipped off to his home in poor, rural Alberta in 1943 with their young daughter, but without her husband, who is off fighting the war. 

 

When she arrives at the primitive family home on the plains, she has to learn how to get along with a dour mother-in-law, a crippled sister-in-law, and other unwelcoming and unsophisticated locals she doesn't know. 

 

This is a well-executed "fish out of water" tale, that highlights the plight of World War II British war brides sent off during the war to the "safety" of their new husbands' distant homes and families.  Recommended.