The Z/Web Archive

Pretty good crime drama flick with odd coincidences and mistaken identity themes. Not quite as good as I was led to believe by reviews, but decent enough.

Today I head for Austin, for the annual REAL World conference. I go to San Jose first, to visit a client, and on Sunday I fly to Austin.

What's the point of this? It's not badly done, and even mildly interesting at times, but we've seen it all before dozens of times. The trailer gives away 99% of the plot and that's pretty much all this movies has. Disappointing.

This is a collection of three Nero Wolfe novellas. The first, "Poison a la Carte," is a tedious business about a poisoning at a dinner Wolfe attends. The suspects are a bewildering collection of female servers and the solution isn't particularly Wolfe-like (he basically figures out a way to trick the murderess to confess -- no brilliant deducting here). The next story, "Murder for Three" is better -- a woman returns to her vehicle to find there's a dead woman inside and hires Archie (Nero's partner) to help her -- but the ending is strange, as Wolfe unmasks the murderer (so he says) but can't prove anything. The third, "The Rodeo Murder," has a character so irritating I could hardly stand to read the story, and unfortunately the "solution" to this one turns out to be secret knowledge only Wolfe knows (cheating, in my book). Overall not great. This has tempered my enthusiasm of Wolfe novels for a while.