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Michael Lewis

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Review of The Premonition

Review of The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis Rating ***

I’m a Michael Lewis fan. Premonition, however, fell short for me. The book lacked a narrative focus. Instead, it read more like a series of loosely connected anecdotes. I would have preferred more insight into how the Trump administration dropped the ball.

Trump’s initial reaction to the pending pandemic was to kill the messenger. Career civil servants tried to raise alarm bells, but Trump and his Republican allies did their best to silence those who didn’t fall in line with their nothing to see here approach. Take, for example, Trump’s solution to rising covid numbers, which was to reduce testing. Yeah, this guy was President.

When Trump saw the positive press that Governor Cumo received from his daily press conferences, Trump decided that he would be the new front person. That’s when we started getting nonsense like Trump’s suggestion to inject disinfectant.

The people who knew what steps the administration should have taken must have felt enormous frustration with the total lack of planning and foresight. But, unfortunately, I didn’t get that sense of frustration from the characters with whom Michael Lewis chose to focus.

Some give Trump credit for the rapid development of vaccines. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that Trump was more concerned about getting the pandemic behind him because of the upcoming election.

I believe Micahel Lewis missed the bigger picture. I wanted to know what Fauchi thought as Trump mucked things up. I wanted to know more about the CDC’s mishandling of covid tests, the mixed messages over masks. I would have liked more on the economic impact of completely shutting down the economy for nearly a year. That history has yet to be written.

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Review of The Fifth Risk

Review of The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis
Rating ****

I’ll admit that I am not a Trump fan. Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, described him as a con man, a liar, and a cheat. That says it all. I also knew that equally incompetent people surrounded him at every level. Michael Lewis’s book delves deeper into that incompetence by examining the early days of the Trump transition.

The book examines three government agencies and what happened after Trump won: Commerce, Energy, and Agriculture. I’ll give Trump a pass for being ignorant. He doesn’t read. He didn’t think he would win. And he has the leadership skills of an uneducated dictator. So it isn’t that unimaginable that he was unprepared for the task. But couldn’t he have at least had the common sense to keep some of the career government people who understood the responsibilities of their respective agencies?

The only requirement Trump had for appointing someone to a position was that he or she, mostly old white he’s, was a vocal supporter. It also helped if you had donated generously to his campaign. If you were also a climate change denier and despised a particular government agency, you were a lock. Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, hated any regulation that hampered oil production. We’ll put him in charge of the Department of Energy. It was only after the fact that Rick Perry and the Trump team learned that the Department of Energy had little to do with energy production.

The same incompetence metastasized throughout the government. Wilbur Ross was a successful businessman (according to Wilbur Ross), we’ll put him in charge of Commerce. Wait. The Commerce Department doesn’t have anything to do with Commerce or trade?

Michael Lewis could have picked any government agency and could have told the same story. I wish he would have looked at the EPA and how Scott Pruitt and his successor have taken us back fifty years to a time before there were regulations in place to protect our land, water, and air.

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Moneyball: Book vs Film

Moneyball by Michael Lewis  – Rating **** 1/2
Moneyball the film directed by Bennett Miller and written by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Zorkin
Rating ****

I always enjoy having the option to read a book and then seeing that book come to life in film. This blog is full of examples of this. One that comes to mind is the book The Bounty and the film starring Mel Gibson, though the two are not connected. My preference is to first read the book and then see the film. As a writer I’m always interested in the choices other writers make in trying to tell the same story.

In this instance, I saw the film first. I totally enjoyed the film; so much so that I decided to listen to the audio version of Michael Lewis’s book on a recent cross country drive. Good nonfiction stories are hard to come by. Michael Lewis knows a good story when he sees one. In this case, he saw a story where no one else did. Good for him.

I vaguely remember watching the Oakland Athletics during their record breaking win streak. I vaguely remember hearing commentators talking about how they were able to accomplish so much with so little. But I definitely didn’t see a best selling book and movie while it was happening. But Michael Lewis sure did. And this is the same guy who came across the story that led to the book and Movie The Blind Side.

Since I saw the movie first, I’ll start with that. I thought it was one of the best movies I saw this year.  Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill were great. I was fully engaged from start to finish. I don’t think it’s a Best Picture candidate, but as a whole it was entertaining. My only problem with the film was how the writers decided to give Jonah Hill’s character full credit for the idea of using statistics as a better gauge of choosing players over more traditional methods. Since I hadn’t read the book, I assumed that’s how it played out in the book. It wasn’t until after I listened to the audio version that I learned that Jonah Hill’s character, Peter Brand, was more of an amalgamation than a real person and that the real Billy Beane was a lot more involved in the whole statistics angle than what the film depicted.

Other than that one shift away from the book, the screenwriters, Steven Zaillian and Aaron Zorkin, did a good job of adapting the book. The climax in the film, the winning streak, was almost a side note in the book.

Had I read or listened to the book first, I’m not sure I would have saw the potential for a movie. The book is entertaining and full of interesting anecdotes, but it isn’t exactly a story with a beginning, middle, and an end. The Oakland A’s didn’t win a World Series. But everyone likes an underdog story. And the story of how a small market team with a small budget was able to compete against teams with three and four times the budget makes for a compelling story.

It usually takes me a couple of weeks to read a book. I listened to the audio version over three days of driving. Since I had seen the movie only a few days before, it made the audio version even more interesting.

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Review of The Blindside

Review of The Blindside written and directed by John Lee Hancock
Rating ****

The Blind Side

This is one of the better sports films I've seen in a while. The last football related film I saw was Invinciblewith Mark Wahlberg. That story was also based on a true story, but the true story aspect was lame. The main character's main claim to fame was that he played a couple of games on special teams. The climax of the film was when the main character scores a touchdown on a fumble recovery after a kickoff. The filmmakers glossed over the fact that the resulting touchdown was nullified because he had stepped out of bounds.

This film has the same underlying theme of all sports films where an underdog overcomes obstacles to achieve success. The difference here is that the main character, Michael Oher, not only rises above poverty to become an NFL football player, but that he's currently starting and playing for the Baltimore Ravens.

The film is based on the best selling book The Blind Sideby Michael Lewis. Besides being a compelling story, this film shows what can happen when someone is given opportunity. In this case, the opportunity comes from an unlikely source, an attractive white woman and her close-knit family. Sandra Bullock's portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy is every bit as good as Julia Roberts's performance in Erin Brockovich. The supporting characters do a fine job. I give a lot of credit to Tim McGraw for playing a role that is so far removed from his music career and past film roles that he is unrecognizable as the person we've seen in the past. Quinton Aaron, who portrays Michael Oher, is not asked to do much beyond play the role of gentle giant. But he does it well.

The film earns credence by not shying away from a controversy that I'm sure was covered in the book. The controversy concerns the possibility that the family's altruism had more to do with their efforts to have Michael Oher play for their Alma mater Old Miss. I won't give away how this was worked out in the film, but it was handled with honesty and sincerity.

There is plenty of humor. I especially liked the trash talking player who opposed Michael Oher in one of his early football games.

My only fault with the film, and it's minor, is that they made Michael Oher out to be a saint. I'm sure he's a great person, but we all have our flaws. I would also have liked to have learned more about what has happened with Michael's brother and mother since his success.

Lastly, the filmmakers closed the film with images of the real Michael Oher and the family that helped him. Look for more from this film come awards time.