Category: Pop

Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich

(MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 281 pages)

Some books take a while to grow on you; some endear themselves right from the start. The latter was my experience with Nathaniel Rich’s Cloudthief, a witty and smart crime novel with a deceivingly dull cover that does it no favors.

The protagonist is Tim, a freelance climate journalist in New York City, struggling to make ends meet by writing articles for magazines that pay by the word. He is “pathologically nonthreatening: not too tall, not too strong, not too quick, not too surprising, and not at all noticeable. Strangers were deeply unintimidated by me.”

After student-loan payments, health insurance and rent, he clears about $20,000, “enough for a weekly burrito, a monthly bender, a quarterly taxi.” When things are especially tough, as they are when we meet him, he rents out his tiny apartment for the night while he crashes on a friend’s couch.

But the night Tim is about to bunk with his friend Ces, Ces has other ideas. A brilliant eccentric whose main job is designing web pages, he’s hatched a plan to break into mini-storage units in Manhattan and steal anything of value in order to sell it. Tim is dubious but Ces has rented one of the storage units, so it’s not technically breaking and entering to enter the facility. So Tim follows along, guiltily aware that he is now, “according to the letter of the New York City Administrative Code, a misdemeanant.”

But things will get worse. And, as Tim muses, “The guilt, as with any sin, felt most acute at first occurrence. Each subsequent commission, no matter how severe, did not intensify the original guilt. Each crime alleviated it.”

Tim and Ces will part ways when they encounter a woman living in one of the storage units. Virginia has arranged her unit to lock from the inside, and she only goes outside for a few hours each night, when no one will notice her odd comings and goings.

Tim, still more journalist than thief, is intrigued and convinces Virginia to let him come in and interview her about her life, why she chose it and how she pulls it off, telling her (and himself) that it would be a great magazine story. But they become more than interviewer and subject, and together hatch a plan to pull off a much greater heist than breaking into mini-storage units. They decide to break into a data center near Tulsa, Oklahoma, and steal its most valuable data, an act they justify because of (a) the evil that technology companies perpetuate by collecting and selling our data and tracking us and (b) they are so desperate and broke.

Virginia is broke because she has chosen to take herself completely offline in order to escape from Big Tech’s all-knowing eye. She’s mastered the art of hiding not only from people but from Google, having realized that the best way to assure anonymity is to create lots of you’s. She also has acquired a lot of skills that will come in handy as she and Tim enact their plan.

Tim’s situation is more sympathetic. His financial struggles, aside from having low income in a high-cost city, are exacerbated by the fact that he is financially responsible for his sister, named Zoe, who has a genetic disease causing her to progressively lose her hearing and sight. Their parents are out of the picture, and Zoe is still able to live on her own, but both brother and sister know that at some point she is going to need full-time care.

All of this is happening in an America that is increasingly feeling the effects of a warming planet, which both Tim and Virginia refer to as “the Collapse.” Both are increasingly nihilistic, which enables them to easily make decisions that would have given others pause. They are also convinced that they can pull off the heist because of poor security in rural states. As Tim explains to Zoe, “This treasure trove is just sitting there. In giant empty warehouses surrounded by cornfields.”

Several perspective-shifting twists propel the story forward, as if a data-center heist isn’t enough to hold our attention. But the most compelling part about Cloudthief is how intelligent it is. Rich doesn’t assume that we know anything about data centers or how technology tracks us, but he explains everything in a way that is not insulting to readers. (One exception: how he uses initials to ostensibly disguise actual companies — as if we don’t know what G. and M. mean — although to be fair, the publisher’s legal team might have made that decision.) The dialogue between characters, even minor ones, is snappy and smart, and everything about the story seems thoughtful, from the contrast between mini-storage units and vast data centers, to the rich symbolism offered in a book that both Virginia and Tim treasure, a memoir by a French woman who spent 111 days in an underground cave.

And the data-center break-in, as it turns out, is but a prelude to another crime, which takes place in Boston and again, pivots the story in an unforeseen way.

Cloudthief is a story of descent, both societal and individual, and although it tries to leave us with a sense of hope, not everyone will experience it that way. Still, it’s the rare novel that will equally appeal to both women and men, and even rarer, teach you how to live in a storage unit, if that’s on your bucket list. B+

Featured Photo: Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich

Album Reviews 26/10/01

Satoko Fujii Orchestra Berlin, Second Attempt (Libra Records)

Jazz artist Fujii is known for her world-class improvisational piano work and finding the best collaborators available, talents that combine here in an oft-unsettling but undeniably musical form of ad hoc aural dada. On paper, a near-full horn section comprises the “orchestral” part of this experiment, but many other sounds come into play as well, including nontraditional ones (reflecting on all the turmoil that’s engulfed the world of late, one of the Lego-like sound-blocks inserted here has newspapers as its “instrument,” that is to say the musicians were tasked with extracting sounds out of them through tearing, crumpling or reading them. Other bizarre things are aboard, of course; in “Part 1” we hear Liz Kosak’s synth emulate humpback whale-song; “Part 2” features the drummer tandem of Michael Griener and Peter Orins futzing around with glitch sounds under a classic-sounding brutalist Japanese cinematic theme reminiscent of Akira Ifukube (of the earliest Godzilla films), all of which eventually starts spiraling into some noisy ad hoc jamming. “Part 3” reaches for a woozy, ethereal, unsettling vibe. As always, “good” improv is in the eye of the beholder; I had no problem dealing with the majority of this. A-

Desolat, People As Idiots & Idiots As Leaders (Reptilian Records/Exotic Fever Records)

To be honest, the things that got me interested enough in this Vienna, Austria “hardcore punk” band’s new LP to put this on the docket were (1) the album title, because come on, and (2) the fact that there are count ’em nine record labels helping to distribute the record worldwide, a factoid I wanted to bring to the attention of local bands who are putting out their own records. The band’s contracted with nine different labels to release this one, you see, including ones in France, Germany, Austria, U.K., Netherlands and two in the U.S., a pretty smart strategy that just wasn’t ever done in the past by DIY bands. Regarding the snarky quotation marks around “hardcore punk,” I wouldn’t say they’re that, more of a raw, stripped-down indie metal band similar to the ones Earache Records was hawking in the Aughts, the shorthand of which would go something like “Boris with no budget whatsoever,” a sound that actually works in our end-times. Put it this way: This was what I’d envisioned “punk metal” evolving into when the term first surfaced in the ’80s; it’s part Black Flag and part Black Sabbath, what one might call “awkward doom.” It’s quite cool. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• No brakes, baby, we’re suddenly into the first CD release Friday of October, on the 2nd! Now, in case you don’t know — and why would you? — Cancel Me (I’m Tired) is the second album by South London seven-piece electro-punk band Fat Dog, a group that could be considered England’s techie answer to The Hives, which means they act crazy and insane on stage, but since they’re from England and play expensive synthesizers that would fritz out if someone barfed on them, they’re more polite, as opposed to The Hives, who are Swedish and therefore don’t care about what Americans think of them, and besides, they have slightly better universal health care than Britain, so they’re just like “Neener America, come beat our heads in, at least we don’t have to sell our houses to pay for a poorly timed chipmunk bite.” So there’s that, and just to clue into what Fat Dog is about, not that it’d ever be on the test in any sane world, I watched one of their live videos, taken at the Pinkpop festival in the Netherlands earlier this year. The band’s two drummers are pretty lively, but the rest of the guys were even more tame than I’d expected, more like Daft Punk or LMFAO, like, you can’t get too wild when you’re plugged into all sorts of electronic gear, you know how it goes (let’s admit it, most soundsystem shows are about as exciting as watching someone try to correct a formula in an Excel spreadsheet). But whatever, the album’s title track is the first single; it’s fun and kind of funky and the vocals have a sort of Gravity Kills bullhorned effect on them, which I’ve never minded.

• That brings us to Walt Disco, a glam-rock/art-pop crew from Scotland that’s been making albums since 2022 and yet almost no one in the U.S. has ever heard of them, let’s change that now shall we, especially since they’re going for broke by making their third album self-titled. Well, will you listen to that, the newest single “Don’t Do This Alone” isn’t bad at all, kind of like a 2020s version of Bowie mixed with The Cure. There’s really nothing wrong with it at all; it definitely has a sleepy-chilly autumnal feel to it, and no, that doesn’t mean that I’ve suddenly stopped hating pumpkin spice, that’s something that’ll never happen, I assure you.

• Much to the disappointment of my first-ever editor from back in the days, I’ve never been big on The Smiths, mostly because I’ve wholeheartedly disliked every song of theirs I’ve ever heard, but that doesn’t mean there might not be something to like about this next one, The Age Of Everything, the fifth solo album from original Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, so I’ll try it. Morrissey isn’t on this record, which bodes well, Yup, the kickoff single, “It’s Time,” is appropriately ’80s and jangly and harmless in the vein of The Alarm or whatnot. It’s got a little energy to it, it’s not bad.

• Alt-country musician Greg Freeman is based in Burlington, Vermont, but is nevertheless on the rise, sort of. If you’re a confirmed hipster you may know him from his 2025 single “Curtain,” in which his voice sounds like a cross between David Byrne and the dude from Clinic, which I don’t mind at all. His new LP All Set The Bone includes the tune “Cahokia,” a high-energy jangle-pop joint that sounds a lot more put together than his previous stuff but his voice is still delightfully off-key here and there.

• And finally it’s Miranda Lambert, who placed third in 2003’s Nashville Star talent competition but probably should have won, not that I’d know. Crisco, her newest album, spotlights the title track, a syrupy Dolly Parton-flavored trifle that combines cowboy-hat slide guitar with ’70s disco just to annoy me.

Featured Photo: The Church, Lacuna & Ibibio Sound Machine, Chopping.

Strings and Superman

Five for Fighting orchestral comes to town

By Michael Witthaus

mwitthaus@hippopress.com

Fittingly given their moniker, when Five For Fighting’s 2000 single “Easy Tonight” stalled in the charts, its leader decided to be bold in choosing a radio follow-up from their album America Town. The result was the biggest hit of their career, a milestone that’s still reverberating today.

“I figured if I was going to go down, might as well go down swinging with a song I truly believe in,” John Ondrasik said in a recent Zoom call from his home in Southern California. The tune was “Superman (It’s Not Easy),” and it turned a then-obscure singer-songwriter with a hockey penalty for a band name into a star.

Piano ballads weren’t much of a thing at the time, but he was undeterred after their first try did just well enough to earn a second shot.

“The record company said, ‘Well, what song would you want to put out?’ and I said, Superman,” he recalled. “Because I had a sense that it could hit the heart.”

He was right, and when 9/11 happened the next year, the song became part of the national vocabulary.

On Friday, Sept. 25, Ondrasik, backed by four top-shelf string players pulled largely from Broadway pits, performs at BNH Stage in Concord. He plans a stripped-down evening of music drawing from a catalog that includes “100 Years,” “The Riddle,” “World” and of course the song that launched him.

It’s his second New England fall run in as many years, following a 2025 stretch the native Californian still marvels about.

“I haven’t had a lot of experience with the fall turn,” he said of New England’s foliage. “It was just stunning. So we said, let’s do another run, and instead of doing three weeks we’re doing five or six.”

How Ondrasik went from solo singer-songwriter to a name that gets him lots of free hockey tickets is a fun story.

When he signed a major label deal in the mid-’90s, a suit there told him Elton John and Billy Joel types didn’t fly in the era of boy bands, grunge and Lilith Fair. He needed something else on the marquee. Ondrasik had just watched Wayne Gretzky’s enforcer, Marty McSorley, rack up two five-minute fighting majors at an L.A. Kings game.

A bit miffed at the exec’s suggestion, he tossed off the phrase half-sarcastically, expecting it to be rejected, only to hear an enthusiastic reply. “I’m like, ‘you’re crazy,’” Ondrasik recalled. Those early years bore out his belief, as he was sometimes mistakenly booked as a metal act, and looked like a piano man lost in the mosh pit.

He’s come to like it over time. “There’s some silver linings to the name … it also keeps the focus on the music.”

The string-quartet format grew out of full-orchestra symphony dates Ondrasik couldn’t take to smaller markets, so 15 years ago he scaled the arrangements down to four players, and he still alternates between that in the fall and winter months, taking a full rock band on the road in summer.
It lets him dig into catalog deep cuts like “Devil in the Wishing Well” and “Two Lights,” and reframe hits like “100 Years” and “Chances” in a more intimate, storytelling setting. His favorite part of the night happens when he hands it over to the band. “I kind of just walk off stage and let them jam,” he said. “They always get a standing ovation.”

The current lineup includes Tony-winning violinist Katie Kresek, Melissa Tong, Chris Cardona and Peter Sachon. The band is drawn from a rotating pool of about eight or nine Broadway and session veterans Ondrasik met through longtime producer Greg Wattenberg and Dave Eggar, who’s both a master cellist and piano player.

“They love rock ’n’ roll, and, frankly, not playing the same piece of music eight days a week in a pit,” he said.

Opening the Concord show is Lace & Lee, a folk duo Ondrasik is happy to gush about, as it includes his daughter, Olivia. She joins him onstage most nights for a song of her own.

“Touring with [her] is pretty wonderful,” he said. “The whole quartet, everybody just enjoys them, and I think the audiences too are in for a treat.”

Five For Fighting with String Quartet
When: Friday, Sept. 25, at 7:30 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $67 and up at ccanh.com

Featured Photo: Courtesy photo.

Album Reviews 26/09/24

The Church, Lacuna (Cooking Vinyl Records)

U.S. rock fans will — or more likely won’t — know this Australian gloom-pop band from their million-selling tune “Under The Milky Way” from their 1988 album Starfish, their only full-length to go gold here. Bassist Steve Kilbey’s unremarkable but goth-sounding baritone matched up nicely with their then-competitors U2 and The Cure and it’s still in fine fettle as proved in this record’s opening song “Lumbini Grove,” at least once it gets going anyway; the band has tried to avoid being pigeonholed as a Cure/Echo & The Bunneymen wannabe for pretty much their entire history, and to accomplish that, they’ve largely eschewed common song structures, insisting on padding their stuff with melodic, atmospheric dada as found in the first couple of minutes of this new track (which only accomplishes delaying the inevitable bummer-pop vibe, which isn’t to say it’s a bad song at all; indeed, it’s strummy and catchy and important-sounding; I’m saying it would have benefitted from having no intro at all). All told, there’s not a lot to dislike here; some reviewers consider this record one of their best, and at the very least they’ve been consistently active, taking no more than eight years between albums over their 46-year oeuvre, which definitely counts for something. A —Eric W. Saeger

Ibibio Sound Machine, Chopping Mountain (Merge Records)

If you always wanted more than a little Afrobeat authenticity with your Moby/Massive Attack-related techno, this London, U.K.-based outfit is your ticket. Interspersing such sounds as West African highlife, post-punk, Afrobeat, soul and electronic music, this stuff is as frenetic and crazy-busy as it is unpredictable and interesting; the eight-piece collective is led by Nigerian singer Eno Williams, whose life’s mission is obviously to direct the world to a more positive place through infectious dance grooves. This is their sixth LP, produced this time at their own Vanguard Studios; it’s an all-in, team-collaborative record that follows the darker disco/club-focused Pull The Rope and, before that, Electricity, which was produced by renowned synthpop heroes Hot Chip. Despite the jam-out origins of the songs, there’s real precision to them, indicating that parts didn’t end up making the cut by slim vote margins; whether they’re on a dancehall tip, trying to evoke glitter-ball energy or ramming a loop into your head, it all works exquisitely. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• And here it is, the last CD release Friday of September, this one, Sept. 25! Of course, in current music news, the thing that’s been virally abuzz on social media lately (unless it’s not by the time you’re reading this) has been Ed Sheeran’s dropping Macklemore from his 2026 tour — including the Boston-area show at Gillette Stadium this very Friday — at the behest of promoters, owing to a political statement Macklemore made onstage, that is unless Sheeran has the good sense to cancel the tour, which would cost him between $60 million and $100 million (he’s worth around $400 million now, so I suppose his decision ultimately hinges on how many 100-foot yachts he’d ideally like to own). Naturally I’ll not weigh in on the sociopolitical nitroglycerine in this space, but that’s mostly because since the story broke I’ve continued to be more flummoxed about Sheeran’s mass appeal than anything else. It’s always puzzled me; as I expressed on “my socials” the other week, I consider him to be “the most overrated musician since Gogg the Neanderthal found himself worshipped tribe-wide for his ability to smack a mastodon skull with a log four times in a row,” which isn’t to say that he doesn’t write catchy-ish songs that are relevant to members of today’s young, criminally underserved generation; it simply echoes the complaint lodged by many others in my business, that, for starters, he can’t sing for beans. Now, would I cut him any slack if he could sing for beans? Possibly yes, a little, but if he were indeed some sort of momentously talented mega-diva I expect he would have told the promoters to go bake themselves in a pie and demanded that things be done according to the original plan way before he sensed he was about to get into any hot water from the Twitter masses, and besides, didn’t Sheeran ask for it in the first place, what with all the controversy Macklemore’s drummed up previously? But let’s leave that to stew in its own rancid juices and move on to other, far less radioactive things, starting with the new album from French techno-shoegaze band M83, titled I Wrote You A Letter! Let me mention first to all you smarty-pants whippersnappers that I was into these guys before most of you were, having added their 2008 sort-of-hit “Graveyard Girl” to a few of my personal mixtapes, but I certainly didn’t think “Kim & Jessie” was the greatest thing since sliced bread like Pitchfork did; quite the contrary. In fact their new single “Blister Sunrise” was my first exposure to them in many uninterested moons for good reason. The tune isn’t much of a game-changer, making like an overproduced Raveonettes-style shoegaze dirge, but sure, it’s fine.

• Speaking of politics and stuff but oh let’s not, Rage Against The Machine frontman Tom Morello checks in this week with a solo album, Everyone Gets Everything They Want! “Date Night,” the single, starts off with some bullhorned spoken word, then moving on to a Pennywise-punk verse, all without the banshee-screechy vocal gimmick he’s most known for. I’d recommend buying literally any Ministry album instead, but it’s your money.

• Neo-soul singer Leon Bridges keeps his steamy tradition going with Happiness Anytime, his fifth full-length. The title track is low-key sexy and sublime, irresistible stuff.

• We’ll end the week with Australian indie-folk singer Julia Jacklin and her fourth album, The Gem. The leadoff single, “Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon),” is Sheryl Crow-ish but much more worthwhile than that. She’ll be in Boston at the Royale on Nov. 20. —Eric W. Saeger

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: The Church, Lacuna & Ibibio Sound Machine, Chopping.

More of that

Alan Ritchson is always good for an Alan Ritchson type

Playing into that one character you always play might not be the way to blaze a path to an Oscar, but it does seem to be a good strategy for earning a regular paycheck.

Take, for example, Alan Ritchson, traveling butt-kicker Reacher in the Prime Video series Reacher. In addition to playing a large man who has a code and beats up bad guys in that series (which ends its fourth season this week; a fifth season is expected, according to Wikipedia), Ritchson plays a large man who has a code and beats up bad guys in Runner, released in theaters last week, less than two months after the release of Motor City, another movie where he plays a large man who has a code and beats up bad guys.

Hank (Ritchson), who has a “big guy” name, as Owen Wilson’s Ben says, is a courier, running things both legal and legal-status-unknown around Brisbane, Australia, where he lives and works on his sobriety. He is charged with picking up a medical package at the airport, which is where he meets Ben, who explains that he, Ben, is part of the medical package. The item is a secured cooler keeping a liver viable for a sad little girl who needs a new liver and Ben is the guy who knows how to keep it at the right temperature and knows the code to open it.

Things immediately start to go wrong with this assignment as Hank realizes that he and the aggressively chatty Ben are being followed by two SUVs full of bad guys. Soon the shooting and car chasing and occasionally some punching and kicking get underway as Hank and Ben try to race the organ to an out-of-town hospital before it loses viability while a cartel boss’s desperate, sweaty son (Rodrigo Santoro) attempts to hijack it for his mother’s own use.

Just to really hammer home that all of the violence Hank and Ben participate in is For A Good Cause, we see the sick kid and her mother regularly and we spend a little too much screentime on Hank’s sad backstory with his own sad sick daughter. And if that doesn’t do it for you, the movie really underlines the Extreme Danger and Extreme Heroism by scoring a lot of the action with music that feels like it was maybe left over from some Angel Studios’ biblical epic’s battlefield scenes. (Angel, which I know largely for its Christian and Christian-adjacent films, is this movie’s distributor and apparently has also started to release some less overtly faith-based movies. TBD on what all that means.)

Not unlike other movies I talk about here, Runner piles on a lot of unnecessary story elements for its characters — Santoro’s character has a difficult relationship with his mother! Hank is still sad about his failed marriage! These little extras aren’t needed because this movie’s core — overly talkative regular-guy Ben and strong silent type Hank — is very charming. They have good “guys who become buddies doing a task” chemistry, their respective skills help give energy and the right amount of humor to the action scenes. When the movie just gets out of their way, turns down the score and lets them do their things — Ritchson’s Reacher variant, Wilson’s Owen Wilson variant — we in the audience get the fun popcorn time the trailer promises.

In July theatrical release Motor City (available for rent or purchase), Ritchson, playing Vietnam vet and lunch-box-toting factory worker John Miller, is less crackling but still fun to watch. This action-revenge movie of few words lets 1970s production design, costuming and songs do most of the talking. Moments after Miller proposes to girlfriend Sophia (Shailene Woodley), cops are blasting smoke bombs into their home. Sophia and Miller end up under arrest, with police pulling bricks of cocaine out of his car, the car that hours earlier was briefly stolen from him. As we see in flashbacks, before she was with Miller, Sophia was the girlfriend of drug muckety muck Reynolds (Ben Foster) and now Reynolds, with the help of dirty cop Savick (Pablo Schreiber), is getting Miller out of the way. Miller goes to jail and Reynolds goes to Sophia, re-endearing himself to the woman who felt so betrayed by Miller. When she discovers Reynolds’ treachery and he gets violent, Miller’s friends (played by Lionel Boyce and Amar Chadha-Patel) break Miller out of prison to rescue Sophia.

Motor City is aggressive about its stylishness, from its slo-mo-enhanced action choreographed to Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” to every choice made with Woodley’s hair. It is very self-consciously Doing A Thing, which I found entertaining mostly and kind of endearing even when it felt like it tipped into A Little Much territory (which for me was when “Nights in White Satin” appeared on the soundtrack). For me, this movie boiled down to the appeal of Alan Ritchson and how he dances through his fight scenes with balletic precision, taking just enough punches so we don’t think he’s a robot.

Ritchson, of course, isn’t the only actor playing his standard character and serving up action in recent releases.

Ryan Reynolds plays that one Ryan Reynolds character who is here a fighter pilot during the Top Gun-era Cold War in Mayday, an Apple TV movie. Troy (Reynolds) is tasked with operating the camera on a spy mission over Soviet territory. When his plane is shot down, he winds up behind enemy lines and is found by Nikolai (Kenneth Branagh), an American-culture-loving former KGB agent who insists on Troy calling him “Nik” and is delighted to have real-life Maverick in his house. When Troy nixes Nik’s suggestion that they just wait out the end of the Cold War safely in Nik’s cabin, the two have to work together to get Troy to safety without Nik being arrested for being a traitor. Chasing them down is Volkov (Marcin Dorocinski), a glasnost-hating KGB agent hoping to use this situation to return the U.S.S.R. to its former hardline glory.

That all of these characters seem more naive than they should be for who they are is probably my biggest beef with this otherwise good-natured, goofy caper-like movie. There is some silliness to the “Russians are people, just like us!” elements of Troy’s journey. But Branagh’s heft helps to cut Reynolds’ patter-based glibness and the result is a highly watchable light bit of comedy.

Also playing his one character is Jason Statham in Mutiny, an August release that showed up last week on VOD for rent or purchase. Statham is Cole Reed, a former British military guy and also former British cop who is now the bodyguard for a shipping magnate Tibu (Ramon Tikaram), who treats Cole like family and buys him a fancy watch and is the stand-in for Cole’s cop father, who died during a police raid or something and Cole feels responsible and this is way too much backstory for a movie that was trying to sell itself by boasting it had the same director as Plane. Plane got right to the Plane of it all. Mutiny takes too long to get us in an actual ship on the actual water. The action kicks off on dry land when Tibu, who is about to sell his company, is ambushed. Cole nearly gets him to safety but Tibu is shot and has just enough time to say “take care of my crappy adult son” (not an exact quote) before dying. Cole then seeks the men who killed his beloved employer, which leads him to sneaking onto a cargo ship. Also on the ship is Angie (Annabelle Wallis), the third mate, who has her own irrelevant backstory. These are the good guys on the ship; everybody else (captain played by Roland Møller plus a bunch of henchmen I couldn’t keep straight) is a bad guy. What Cole and Angie, separately at first and then together, discover is that the ship is part of a human trafficking operation and some of the refugees aboard this particular ship are in dire need of medical attention. To get the help they need, Cole and Angie will need to kick, punch, shoot and stab their way through the bad guys.

There is one particularly fun scene of balletic hand-to-hand combat featuring Statham near the movie’s end. It stood out to me for how much more interesting it was than most of the action that preceded it. Statham does a lot of his Statham thing but the movie doesn’t have the fun this kind of action-focused affair should have. We are watching Mutiny for Mutiny, and all that implies in terms of sassy one-liners and creative violence, not a rumination on father-son relationships and not a study of the different ways human traffickers can be bad. A movie like this can put its characters in scary settings with bad people, and those characters should take it seriously, but the movie where a guy fights another guy with a giant hook shouldn’t take itself so seriously or weigh itself down.

I feel like recent Amazon Prime Video release The Runner also had action-entertainment potential, but it just doesn’t work, I think this is in part because the movie has no faith in itself or in lead Gal Gadot. In a movie that feels like smooshed together bits of other movies, Gadot plays Maia, a London prosecutor and single mom to diabetic kid Noah (Rory Wilmot). She drops her son off at school and then goes on a run before a big day in court where she’s meant to question the one witness who can put away the criminal on trial. Early in her run, she gets a call on Noah’s phone from a man (Damian Lewis) saying he has Noah and needs her to do exactly what he says if she wants to see her son alive again. Naturally, the task is killing the witness and she has about an hour to run a needlessly far distance to his hotel (no Uber in London?) and get the job done before Noah dies of the diabetic coma Damian Lewis (called simply “The Caller” on IMDb) has put him in.

Most of the action is Maia running through the city while talking to Damian. Along the way she tries to figure out how to tell someone what’s happening. This story feels like a copy of a copy of some similar movie that would have starred, for example, Jason Statham, but the movie never figures out a clear lane to stick to — is Damian Lewis a creepy sadist who gets his kicks from this or a professional just doing a task? Is Maia just a regular-lady mom trying to save her son or does she have some weird violent past? Or is Gal Gadot just so unsuited for this part, however well she might physically sell the action elements, that the movie doesn’t know how to compose her character? I vote for that option. One of the many signs of the movie’s total lack of faith in Gadot is the strange close-ups, shaky cams, slo-mos and other camera effects applied to Gadot, particularly in scenes where you might need an actor to convey an emotion. You get the sense that either Gadot couldn’t portray, like, panic or rage, or the moviemakers decided to add the character’s emotions in post. Either way, it highlights the overall limpness of her performance and adds to the “cheap story told cheaply” feel of the whole endeavor.

Featured photo: Motor City.

The Jellyfish Problem, by Tessa Yang

(Berkley, 373 pages)

You’d never know it from the title, but Tessa Yang’s The Jellyfish Problem is a good, old-fashioned ghost story, the kind to lose yourself in on chilly weekends in October when you’re not out pumpkin spicing or leaf peeping. It’s a bit fantastical, as ghost stories usually are, and asks us to care a bit too much about an invertebrate that lacks a brain and heart. But this is a mystery/thriller informed by marine science, and we will learn about jellyfish whether we want to or not. The author, Tessa Yang, clearly intends for us to appreciate jellyfish more after reading her debut novel, but that may not be the effect.

Dr. Jo Ness is a marine biologist who has been obsessed with jellyfish since childhood, when she came across one at the beach and admired “a raw gray thing slouched on the sand like an angel’s lung dropped from heaven.” All grown up now, she worked her way into a job at a struggling aquarium where she tends jellyfish in the first, tiny stages of life while working on a book about jellyfish with her best friend — a brash South American scientist named Aldo who has a remarkable resistance to animal venom.

Jo, who always said she liked jellyfish more than people, made an exception for Aldo, but he died in a scuba accident seven months ago, and Jo is still mourning. They were diving together but became separated in poor visibility, and Jo is wracked by the sense that she was responsible for Aldo’s death.

His loss was the second blow since she finished college: The first was becoming estranged from her college best friend, Nadia, a woman with whom she thought she had the makings of a romantic relationship. But Nadia went AWOL after commencement and they haven’t spoken in 11 years. She knows nothing about Jo’s current life other than that she had been obsessed with jellyfish. Then she unexpectedly calls and tells Jo she is living on an island off the coast of Maine and that they have a “jellyfish problem.”

Nadia doesn’t offer much more information and admits she hasn’t seen the creature herself. But Jo, listless and miserable since Aldo’s death, has plenty of accrued leave and books a cross-country flight, interested not only in the mysterious jellyfish but also in the possibility of rekindling her relationship with Nadia, or at least learning why it abruptly ended.

What she finds there, however, is nothing she expected. Nadia is happily married and nowhere to be found. The jellyfish is singular, not plural. It is said to be a massive, brightly colored, luminescent creature that appears for three days at the time of the full moon and has a strange effect on the locals who see it. They regard the jellyfish as not a fascinating object of study but a literal sea monster, the kind that Jo’s Japanese mother used to tell her stories about when she was a child.

Complicating matters is the geographic isolation of Shattering Point, “800 acres of spruce forest and granite shorelines and bracing, choppy waters that deter all but the gutsiest swimmers.” Twenty-two miles off the Maine coast, the island is reachable by ferry twice a week, but only during the summer season. Other times, to get on or off the island, you have to take an air taxi or catch a ride with the mail boat, which only goes out once a week.

Even though the island relies on tourists during the summer, Jo is not universally welcomed. Some of the islanders are hostile to her, and as she tries to find Nadia and unravel the mystery of the jellyfish, which the people of Shattering Point call Clementine, there is a bitter divide about what should be done about the jellyfish. The danger is not exaggerated or imagined: People are physically affected by even seeing Clementine, and one man has to be hospitalized.

That said, Clementine is not the ghost of this story, but an apparition that Jo begins seeing, which she understands to be a yōkai, a supernatural being that her mother used to tell her about.

The relationship Jo has with her mother is one of the many layers in the story: Her father, who used serve as an intermediary of sorts between mother and daughter, is dead, and their relationship is both distant and fraught, in part because the mother is resistant to her daughter’s sexual orientation and had been hoping that Jo would marry Aldo.

Each chapter of The Jellyfish Problem begins with an excerpt of the book that Jo and Aldo were writing, which serves not only to only impart jellyfish information but also to give us a glimpse of the closeness between the two. The conversation in the document’s editing notes grows poignant over time, and Jo begins to speak to her dead friend in editing mode, as if hoping he could see it. It’s a small but smart thing that Yang does to break up a novel that can feel overly long at times, especially when the suspension of disbelief is called for repeatedly.

When the explanation of everything arrives, it is — well, let’s just go with unusual: perhaps not wholly satisfying, but consistent with the novel’s intelligent foundation and supernatural overlay. The quirkiness of the story, however, is eclipsed by the gorgeous writing. Yang has the voice of a poet and hardly a page goes by without some elegant sentence construction that makes you take note of its grace. Give her bonus points, also, for assigning a cameo role to the University of New Hampshire. Wildcats beat jellyfish every time. A

Featured Photo: The Jellyfish Problem, by Tessa Yang

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