The Lookout stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Chris, a young guy trying to put his life back together after a terrible automobile accident (his fault) in which two people are killed and a third is severely injured. Chris receives a serious head injury that leaves him very unlike the person he once was. Instead of a high-school hockey hero, he's a janitor at a bank. He attends a class that's supposed to help him learn to "sequence," to live an orderly life. His roommate is a blind man (Jeff Daniels, almost unrecognizable behind a bushy beard) who tries to help him, too.
What Chris wants most of all is the one thing he can't have: his old life back. Along comes Gary Spargo, who says he can help Chris get it. Spargo's everything Chris no longer is. He's got a way with women, he's in control, he's sure of himself. And he wants to rob the bank where Chris works.
This isn't really a caper movie, though it has the trappings of one. You know what happens in capers, right? Something always goes wrong.
I thought this had the makings of a nice little noir movie, but it's not noir, not by my definition, anyway, and I can't tell you why without spoiling the whole thing. So, as usual, I'm keeping mum.
What you think of this movie might come down to what you think of Chris. Obviously the filmmakers want you to sympathize with him. I can see why someone might not. Still, this was a worthwhile movie. Different from what you might expect and full of good performances. Check it out.
I believe I said that reading Hunt at World's End was like "reading" a Republic serial, so to use a similar analogy, I'll say that reading this latest entry in the series was like "reading" a good '50s B-movie, one of those about finding a civilization under the ice at the South Pole. It's not exactly an ancient civilization, though, and I'm not going to say any more about it. After you read the book, you can come back here and click this link if you think the idea's too far-fetched.
The Lookout stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Chris, a young guy trying to put his life back together after a terrible automobile accident (his fault) in which two people are killed and a third is severely injured. Chris receives a serious head injury that leaves him very unlike the person he once was. Instead of a high-school hockey hero, he's a janitor at a bank. He attends a class that's supposed to help him learn to "sequence," to live an orderly life. His roommate is a blind man (Jeff Daniels, almost unrecognizable behind a bushy beard) who tries to help him, too. 
A group of companions wanders across a blighted land in search of mysterious, perhaps not entirely human, man known as Mr. Shivers. You think you've heard this one before? Maybe not, considering that the blighted land is the U. S. of A. in the 1930s, blighted by the Dust Bowl years and the Depression, a setting vividly rendered in this book. Each of the companions has a good reason for finding Mr. Shivers, and in the end the reasons are all the same: revenge.
I was surprised when I read this book to discover that I'd seen quite a few of the movies that Maltin discusses. But that still left plenty that I hadn't seen, not to mention a few that I hadn't even heard of.
Okay, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, this is a new book. How can it be forgotten? Crider's finally lost it. You're probably right, as much as I hate to admit it. But here's my thinking.
A long time ago, this book might have been titled Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Law but were Afraid to Ask. It's very thorough, it's conveniently arranged, and it's written in language that non-lawyers will find easy to understand. When I started going through it, I realized that it has uses I hadn't anticipated. Crime writers might want to consider it for their libraries. There's a quite useful and readable section on "Criminal Procedures," for example. 
As you all know by now, Barbara Allan is the writing team of Barbara and Max Allan Collins. Their series about Brandy Borne and her "mom," Vivian, is one of the funniest going. In this one, Vivian talks a Russian heiress named Nastasya Petrova into donating a valuable Faberge egg to a church auction, where things go wrong. Really wrong. Nastasya winds up dead, and so does one of the bidders. Many of the other bidders are poisoned, though they don't die.
