Evening in Byzantium

Rating:
Summary: FILM FESTIVAL CARNIVOUS!
Review: Terorrists bother film-goers and critics at Cannes Film Festival. Best safe if you wear sunglasses (so to minimize your identity). '99 Oscars honoring Kazan has potential for "...life to imitate art...". Wouldn't that be cool? Let's GO!

Rating:
Summary: SHAW'S RICHLY DETAILED MOSAIC OF ONE MAN'S LIFE.
Review: This is a tremendously entertaining, panoramic view of one man's life that is engaging and sweeping in its (literally) cinematic scope. "Evening In Byzantium" is set at the Cannes film festival in France where famed producer of stage and screen Jesse Craig has come to sort out the personal and financial and creative tangles of his life while soaking up the beauty of the Mediterranean seaside. During the course of the two week festival the reader is introduced to a number of Craig's business acquaintances, friends, enemies, lovers, family members, and colleagues who are, at various instances, being plied with questions about his distinguished career by a young, freelance journalist named Gail McKinnon. Why Miss McKinnon has taken such an interest in Craig and how she seems to know so much about him is not readily understood until the final chapters of the book, but (like Orson Wells' "Citizen Kane") the device is an effective one for spinning out a series of flashbacks and revealing emotional confrontations over which Craig presides like a world-weary stoic. The lithe mosaic of his existence is brought to life by popular novelist Shaw who keeps the pace moving steadily while delineating a remarkably diverse cast of characters who parade in and out of the pages like guests at a cocktail party or (at times it seems) an orgy of decadence. As an added bonus you get a nice, behind-the-scenes glimpse of the ins-and-outs of movie deals, script rewrites, backstage bickering, petty jealousies, and the like. HARSH LANGUAGE: about 168 words, VIOLENCE: about 4 scenes, SEXUAL REFERENCES: about 20 scenes and/or instances.