The Edge

From downtown…from Mitch & Murray, Mr. Steak Knives himself, Alec Baldwin, stars alongside with Sir Fava Beans, Anthony Hopkins in The Edge — in this, another David Mamet-penned joint (as talky, though not as memorable as Glengarry Glen Ross).

Hopkins plays a polymath billionaire, an almost Victorian era-styled adventurer named Charles, who is accompanying his age-inappropriate wife on a photo-shoot in Alaskan back-country (actually, western Alberta, Canada).

Charles, along with his wife’s dashing photographer (Baldwin), and their pal Stephen (Oz/Sons of Anarchy mainstay, Harold Perrineau) find out just how dangerous nature can be right off the bat when a bird strike downs their small plane, after some foreshadowing.

Stuck in the remote bush, the trio has to fend for themselves and make it to safety while a mammoth Kodiak bear is in hot pursuit.   

What good is a survivalist tale without a healthy dose of bickering? With Mamet in charge, this takes the form of pretty welcome, wry stuff like:

“You can season meat with gunpowder. Did you know that?
…Wish we had some gunpowder.”

With a love triangle as text, not subtext, we know that it’ll take everything these people have to get out of there alive without tearing out each others’ throats before ursa does.

When it comes to genre films, 1997 was a pretty great year: LA Confidential, The Fifth Element, Starship Troopers, Donnie Brasco, Jackie Brown, etc. Yet The Edge remains decidedly under the radar, despite a top-drawer cast that also includes Peckinpah regular L.Q. Jones and leggy Down Under model, Elle Macpherson.

The Edge asks the question, what personality style prevails in the bush? Is it Charles’ placid hubris, Bob’s impulsive hotheadedness, Stephen’s clarion calls? (the latter even spins a Voltarian variant of “the best is the enemy of the good” with, “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”)

A genre film with smarts, The Edge loses its namesake with some coda-sagging. Still, a pretty fun nature-run-amok flick, and a great bear to boot.

*** (out of 5)

Alice Through the Multiverse

When we gaze into space, we can see the afterglow of the Big Bang, some 14 billion years back in time to the creation of the known universe. In the theory of “eternal inflation,” though, some parts of the universe didn’t end, creating alternate, or multiple universes (multiverses), infinite in number and perhaps even obeying different laws of physics from the ones we’re familiar with.

In Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Alice Through the Multiverse, protagonist Alice, born in Tudor England, finds herself “in a strange place, interrupted by fragments of a life she had known. And with each waking, a contradiction.”

This place? A psychiatric hospital, present day…where “she had not died, or at least, she had no memory of death…[yet] here she was in another world. Certainly not Heaven, nor did this seem the molten pits of Hell.”

Faithful readers of our site will recognize the name, Brian Trenchard-Smith. He’s the English-Australian film/TV director, producer, writer (and now novelist) who directed the thoroughly mesmerizing Stunt Rock, and the crack action flicks, Day of the Panther and Strike of the Panther, the dystopian/survivalist, Turkey Shoot, and two installments of the Leprechaun series. The beginning of Alice came to him in a dream in 2003:

All I could remember next morning were a few images. A riot overwhelms a medieval execution… A young girl flees through the forest in a blinding thunderstorm… The girl faints… She wakes up in a 21st Century psychiatric institution…

From a narrative standpoint, infinite universes provide novelists with infinite narratives (the fractal on the book’s cover is no accident. These are infinitely complex abstract objects that simulate naturally occurring phenomena). Here, Trenchard-Smith focuses on two: an attending physician who kidnaps the girl, and secret agents who then pursue the duo.

Writers of historical fiction need to get every period detail correct. Even more challenging? Switching between time and place, as the author deftly does here, from posh West London to 16th century Tower Hill.

Alice Through the Multiverse mirrors Brian Trenchard-Smith’s multivariate film career, with elements of espionage, adventure, and international intrigue.

The book is available on Amazon / Kindle and interested readers can take a look at this short trailer.