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A month or so ago I was browsing through the audiobook collection at the Greenville Library, which I find surprisingly extensive, when a kindly elderly woman approached me.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?” she asked.

She looked like a librarian. “Oh, just browsing,” I said.

“Have you ever read any of the Mrs. Pollifax novels?” She smiled like someone about to divulge a well-kept secret, pulled an audiobook off the shelf, and held it up for me to see.

The cover featured an old woman wearing a silly hat and looked like the kind of book this elderly woman would read and I wouldn’t. “No,” I said. “I haven’t.”

She looked delighted. “Well, they’re fabulous. You’ll love it.”

And before I could object she placed it in my hands. The decision was made. I was checking out The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax. She was just too sweet and too pleasant to say no to. We talked briefly after that, and I learned that she was not, in fact, a librarian but an audiobook lover like me. I also came to the conclusion that she was a very lonely person and that a random conversation with a stranger in the library — even if that stranger happened to be someone as boring as uninteresting as myself — would be the highlight of her day.

I thanked her profusely for the recommendation, and we eventually went our separate ways. I didn’t get around to Mrs. Pollifax until recently. This polite willingness to accept the woman’s recommendation and listen to her book waned almost immediately after leaving the library; as soon as I got home, I put the book at the back of my audiobook queue and forgot about it. (I rip the audiobook off the CDs, put the MP3 files on my iPod, then erase the files when I’m done. That way I can listen to the book at my leisure and not worry about only listening to it in the car and missing library due dates).

Well I’ve now listened to The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax and I owe that sweet old lady a warm embrace. The book was as delightful as she had promised. I’ve already checked out the second one.

The story concerns one Emily Pollifax, an aged widow not altogether pleased with her life. She finds her meetings with the Garden Club and her time as a volunteer at the hospital rather dull. Then one morning she reads in the newspaper of a woman similar to her age who was just discovered on Broadway, and Mrs. Pollifax realizes that it’s never too late to pursue one’s dreams. What makes the story unique is that Mrs. Pollifax’s dream has always been to become a spy. And rather compulsively, on a whim, she decides to pursue this end with vigor. She contacts her local Congressman to get a meeting with the C.I.A. and then waltzes into the C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia to offer up her services. She isn’t taken seriously of course, but by a happy accident of mistaken identity, Mrs. Pollifax is enlisted to be a simple C.I.A. courier on a special assignment to Mexico City. When that assignment goes sour, Mrs. Pollifax finds herself kidnapped by villainous enemies of the state and holed up in an Albanian prison.

What follows is an unexpectedly wonderful novel. Mrs. Pollifax is no super heroin. She knows no marshal arts and only has basic knowledge of handing a pistol. Her greatest weapon is her age. She’s just an honestly nice old woman, much like the woman who suggested this book to be.

The narration by Barbara Rosenblat is wonderful. She brings Mrs. Pollifax to life with an endearing sweetness, capturing that gentle, innocent timbre so often heard in the voice of the elderly. She can also pull of a nice Chinese, Russian, and Albanian accent, giving life to an assorted cast of spies, prison guards, and Albanian goat herders.

I’ve since learned that there are 14 Mrs. Pollifax novels, and while I may not get to them all, I’m certainly excited to follow Mrs. Pollifax on another charming adventure.

In my last post I commented that Lauren and I hardly ever get to go to the theater. Well, that very night we went to the theater. It wasn’t planned, but Lauren’s mom was kind enough to babysit the boys, so Lauren and I went out to eat and then to catch a movie.

Stranger Than Fiction was Lauren’s idea. I was pushing for the new James Bond movie Casino Royale, but I’m glad we went with her vote. STF was fabulous, an easy-paced comedy starring Will Farrell as Harold Crick, an IRS auditor living a rather bland existence. Harold counts his toothbrush strokes every morning, counts his steps to the bus stop every morning, and shuffles around his cublicled office like a zombie on autopilot. Harold is a very boring man.

All that changes one morning when Harold begins to hear his life narrated by a voice in his head. That voice belongs to Emma Thompson, a reknowned author battling writer’s block and a nasty nicotine habit. As it turns out, Thompson unknowingly is writing (or perhaps controlling) Harold Crick’s life. She believes she invented the character, but Harold Crick is a real human being, very much alive.

Well, according to Thompson’s narration, Harold won’t be alive much longer; she reveals early on in the narration that the story concludes with Harold Crick’s imminent death. Harold hears this and is thrown into a panic. He first seeks the help of a psychiatrist and then ends up in the office of a literary professor, played masterfully by Dustin Hoffman. The scenes with Hoffman as he attempts to define the type of story Harold is hearing are hilarious. (I think I found them funnier than other people did, because a few times I was the only one laughing.)

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a young baker being audited by Harold. She, like, Thompson, turns Harold’s life around as he discovers for the first time what love is.

The entire cast is fantastic. Queen Latifah does her duty as Thompson’s assistant, not overplaying the role. Thompson is electric and deserves a nomination. Hoffman, like I said, is hilarious and the perfect example of an actor DOING business as he acts. He makes coffee, shuffles papers, eats yogurt — and never in a way that suggests he’s an actor being busy but rather as a literary professor who spends twelve hours of his day in this small office and knows every inch of it by heart.

And Will Farrell is wonderful as well. EW gave him some flack in their review because he wasn’t “Will Farrell” enough. They wanted to see my slapstick, I suppose. Dumb. I tell you, when it comes to movie reviews, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Had Will Farrell done his “Will Farrell” clown act in this movie, it not only would have resulted in a hammy silliness untrue to the character and story, but it also would have resulted in Will Farrell being criticized for being Will Farrell. “Can’t he play anyone else?” the reviewers would have said. “Can’t this guy be serious for one second?”

The answer to the latter is yes. Will Farrell can actually act when he wants to. I didn’t see Talledega Nights and probably never will. That Will Farrell doesn’t interest me. But THIS Will Farrell, the Harold Crick Will Farrell. For him I’ll hire another babysitter and pay big bucks to go to the theater.

The person most deserving of praise is Zach Helm, the unknown screenwriter who wrote the script. I’ll be surprised if Helm isn’t nominated also. The script was poetic and honest and even though it had a character who was a writer (without fail the most boring characters in film), the story, dialogue, and building suspense were all first rate.

And I can’t forget Marc Forster as well, whose direction made it all possible. Forster directed Finding Neverland, which was wonderful in its own right and probably why Dustin Hoffman was in this one (Hoffman was in Neverland also.) Kudos to you, Mr. Forster. We’ll all be keeping our eyes on you to see what you come up with next.

We rarely get to the theaters these days, what with the two little bumpkins and what not. A trip to the movies would cost us a small fortune. But we almost ponied up the money to see Cars when it hit theaters earlier this year, which is to say we really wanted to see it.

Thrift overcame desire, however, and we decided to wait for the DVD. My mom and dad were kind enough to buy it for Luke and Jake, which thrilled Lauren and me since we wanted to see it just as much, if not more than, the boys did.

Well, we’ve seen it, and it’s as wonderful as we had hoped. Pixar has never let me down, and they didn’t start with Cars. I never thought I’d see a buddy comedy with Owen Wilson and Larry the Cable Guy, but alas here it is. And perhaps it’s not completely accurate to call this a buddy comedy; it’s Owen Wilson’s movie. And as usual, there’s a great supportingig cast of eclecticic characters — from the hippie VW van Fillmore to the military jeep Sarge, who, naturally, runs the local Army Navy Surplus store.

The animation is amazing. Some of the shots looked almost real, like one of a closeup of a fluorescent light with flies buzzing around it. I’m constantly amazed at how Pixar uses light, particularly in places like the huge speedway. To think that each one of those twinkling flashing lights is an intentional stroke of the animator’s brushes makes every frame of Cars a work of art. I laughed out loud. And although I didn’t tear up at the end, I got pretty close. This is a wonderful family film for kids and adults alike. Bless you, Pixar, for giving it to us.

My only disappointment was that there were too few special features on the DVD. The two animated shorts were a nice addition, but the abundance of special features on The Incredibles DVDs made Cars‘s special features feel a little empty. I wanted more “making of” documentaries. And I always love seeing the cast recording their voice overs. There was none of that here. But other than that, this is a worthy addition to any DVD collection.

As noted in a previous post, I only recently saw the second Godfather movie. What prompted my seeing it was the audiobook of the novel The Goodfather by Mario Puzo, which I had been listening to and only just finished. The audiobook was a full cast reading. Most audiobooks are read by a single narrator, but a few rare gems use a full cast of actors to play the role of every character in the novel. The effect is like listening to a movie, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s easy to follow the dialogue because you grow accustomed to the actors’ voices. And since each of them insert their own unique performance into their respective roles, you get more emotion and delivery than is often heard from a single voice.

The Godfather deserves to be the great classic it has become, but in my opinion, this is one instance in which the movie (or movies, plural, since the second Godfather movie also came from the book) is better than the novel. Puzo takes too many tangents, following minor characters and their respective plights rather than sticking closely with the Corleone family wherein lies the heart of the story. The most frequent tangents follow Johnny Fontaine, the crooner/movie star who is supposedly based on Frank Sinatra. I kept wanting to speed-listen through these parts and get back to the real story.

But Puzo is a master of narrative drive. He kept me going with the anticipation of something about to happen. Video games use the same principal: put the gamer through a scenario that will take him nearly to the limit of his tolerance, than introduce a new obstacle. It keeps players going for hours. And Puzo can establish an impending action with a single sentence at the end of the chapter. He won’t let you stop reading . . . or in my case, stop listening.

The Godfather will always remain a masterwork of storytelling. It’s a great saga. Few authors can make such sinister people so endearing and so worth following. And the tension is palpable. When Michael Corleone kills Sollozzo and the police captain in the Italian restaurant, I was on the edge of my seat. The audiobook scene was just as riveting as the scene in the film.

The biggest negative of the novel, however, is that Puzo spends far too much time on sex. Everybody has sex. And it’s not enough to simply insinuate that they do or even say that they do. Puzo has to describe the sex act with vivid and graphic detail. He’s not content simply telling us they had sex. He has to tell us what TYPE of sex they had. I found myself rolling my eyes and reaching for the fast forward button more times than I cared for. It gave me the sense that Puzo was a perverted old man, which probably isn’t true. Puzo was just a product of his time; The Godfather was written at the height of the sexual revolution, after all. Not that books didn’t depict sex before then, but I doubt they did to the same degree. Anyway, despite the abundance of the nasty, The Godfather is quiate possibly the greatest crime novel of all time. And if you’re going to take a stab at, I suggest the audiobook cast recording.

Lauren and I started reading this aloud to each other last year and for a reason I can’t remember we stopped reading it halfway through. It had nothing to do with the content of the book. It’s a young adult novel, so it’s clean. And we certainly didn’t put it aside because it was boring. It was anything but. In any event, something came up, and we set it aside and forgot about it.

When I saw the sequel, Peter and the Shadow Thieves at the bookstore, I remembered that Lauren and I had never finished the original, and we took the original off the shelf and jumped right back in. So much time had passed since we had last read it, that we had to go back and review. But soon the story came back to us, and we were back in the middle of the action. And there’s plenty of action.

Peter and the Starcatchers is the story of how Peter Pan became Peter Pan. How Captain Hook became Captain Hook. How Tinkerbell and mermaids came to exist. How the lost boys came to be and why they can’t fly like Peter can. As you can see, it’s the story of Neverland, the prequel to the early twentieth century play Peter Pan.

I don’t want to give away any of the story. You should have the pleasure of discovering all the backstory yourself. To even hint at some of the events would lessen the surprise.

Suffice it to say that Peter and the Starcatchers is a wonderfully magical, thrilling, touching, altogether wonderful read. How Lauren and I were ever able to set it aside unfinished is a mystery. The last 100 pages are a thrill ride. You can’t put this thing down. Everything about — with the exception of the number of typos it has — is perfect. I felt like a kid again.

Mission Impossible III (aka M:i:III, or as I like to say it: Capital M, colon, lowercase i, colon, roman numeral three) starts off pretty gruesomely. Tom Cruise is handcuffed to a chair, being interrogated by a very menacing villain (the versatile Philip Seymour Hoffman) who is holding a gun to Tom Cruise’s wife. Then, while Tom Cruise watches in horror, Hoffman shoots the wife in the leg and then in the head, killing her. Then the opening credits roll. Now isn’t that nice?

Maybe I’m getting too wimpy in my old age, but scenes like this really freak me out. I hate them. They’re too painful to watch. I cringe when I’m forced to watch a man desperately trying to save his wife’s life, begging, pleading, working any and every angle to keep her from being killed. And then boom! All for not.

You’ll be happy to know, however, that once the initial scene is over, the gruesomeness eases up a bit. This isn’t Saw or any of its sequels, films that I believe are perpetuated by the devil himself. It’s an action movie. And a dang good one at that.

OK, I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I don’t think Tom Cruise is crazy. I think he gets far more bad press than he deserves and is probably a rather decent person. One doesn’t get to the position of power he holds by being an idiot. Yes, Paramount dumped him. But someone else scooped him up lickety split, possibly giving him even more power than he held before.

And I don’t care what anyone says, Tom Cruise is a fine actor. He’s handsome, charming, a movie star, pure and simple.

So he believes in Scientology. So what? So he has a reputation of being an egomaniac. So what? The man entertains me when he’s on screen, and that’s all that matters. Top Gun? Priceless. Rain Man? I cried. Days of Thunder? Well, let’s skip Days of Thunder.

He’s a fine actor. And Mission Impossible III is no exception. He’s a thrill to watch.

As was Hoffman. The man can disappear into any role. He can be hilarious one minute, like in Along Came Polly, and then exude pure evil in roles like this. Here, his villain was so ruthless, so unabashedly evil, that he scared me silly. When he made threats, he did so so matter-of-factly, so brazenly, that I believed every word of them: He was going to kill Tom Cruise.

Kudos also goes to first-time feature film director J.J. Abrams, creator of my favorite TV shows Alias and LOST. And in truth, Mission Impossible III felt like a bigger, louder, more-things-blow-up episode of Alias. The similarities are almost uncanny: there’s a secret government agency, one that prohibits its members from divulging their involvement to their spouses. There’s lots of fancy gadgets and people in disguises. There’s trips around the globe to exotic locations. There’s repelling, shooting, many conversations via walkie talkie and lots of near-death experiences. There was even a Marshal character (the computer genius geek on Alias) coming to Tom Cruise’s rescue via a phone line — which happened on nearly episode of Alias.

But I didn’t mind. I love Alias. I love the whole covert, black-ops story line. I’m a sucker for that stuff. So I enjoyed this film immensely. The stunts were amazing — and to think that Tom Cruise performed some of them made them even more amazing. A must watch if you can stomach intense action sequences.