A Hologram for the King (book and movie review)

From The Movie Snob.

A Hologram for the King (Book: B) (Movie: C).  I finished reading the novel (by Dave Eggers) yesterday, and today I saw the brand-new movie based on the book.  I thought the book was pretty good, and the movie was fair-to-middling.  It’s a story about Alan Clay (Tom Hanks, That Thing You Do!), a formerly successfully salesman who’s now in his mid-50s and not so successful.  We join Alan on his way to Saudi Arabia, where he’s going to try to sell a high-tech video-conferencing system to the King himself.  He’s pretty desperate; his debts are mounting, and his daughter will have to drop out of college if he doesn’t close the deal.  But the Desert Kingdom operates under a whole different set of rules, and Alan’s already fragile mental state is further threatened by a weird lump on his back that he thinks might be cancer.  I was curious to see if they’d get big stars to play the main supporting characters—the young Saudi guy who drives Alan around when he oversleeps, the Danish woman he accidentally befriends while he’s trying to figure out what’s going on at King Abdullah Economic City, the doctor who looks at Alan’s lump—but they didn’t.  (Tom Skerritt, Alien, does pop in as Alan’s dad.)  As I say, I thought the book was pretty good, but they definitely softened Alan up a little bit, as befits a character played by Tom Hanks, and they left out some of the book’s darker bits.

Whiteout

A DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Whiteout  (D).  This 2009 turkey stars the lovely Kate Beckinsale, who has been in more bad movies than I can easily shake a stick at.  (The Underworld movies, the recent remake of Total Recall, and Serendipity come readily to mind.)  Early in her career, when she was appearing in films like Much Ado About Nothing and The Last Days of Disco, I thought she was a talented actress, but I possibly could have been deceived by her good looks and British accent.  Anyway, this is another embarrassment to add to her collection, an amateurish murder mystery set in the exotic locale of Antarctica.  Nothing stands out in the memory except the entirely gratuitous scene near the beginning in which Ms. Beckinsale starts out in full Eskimo gear and strips down to her undies in order to take a shower.   Considering she must weigh about 80 pounds, it’s hard to take her too seriously as the U.S. Marshal tasked with solving the murder . . . before becoming a victim herself!  Director Dominic Cera also directed the lame action flick Swordfish, so I can’t say I was really surprised at how bad this one was.  Tom Skerritt (Alien) costars.