Reinventing Hell

[Hyun Orth]

Permanent and creative business model reinvention is imperative to a successful business. This book is unique because it presents a fully integrated process on business reinvention, from analysis to action. Cost cutting and customer value creation are fully reconciled. Without question, it is a must-read roadmap to apply in every sector and in every business!" - Professor JC Larreche, INSEAD, Author of The Momentum Effect

"In our more than changing times, the process of reinventing a business model is complex to figure out and even more so difficult to implement. This book stands out as it brings an enlightened view on the end-to-end approach for doing so. Dussart presents innovative and practical recommendations to create and capture cost-benefits value, across all sectors of activity. It is a fantastic contribution and, as such, a must-read to face adversity and reverse the tide of commoditization!" - Philippe Mauchard, Professor, Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management

Obviously, historian Mark Lee Gardner has never believed in the line delivered by a newspaper editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the classic 1962 movie about the troubling power of mythology in America. In To Hell on a Fast Horse, a dual biography of two of the biggest legends on the southwestern frontier--outlaw Billy the Kid and his slayer, Pat Garrett--Gardner, a tenacious researcher, tears into the story, debunking many legends, correcting several long-held "facts," and offering new insight into a story that remains popular almost 130 years after the Kid was killed in a darkened bedroom in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, and more than 100 years after Garrett was shot dead in the desert east of Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Interest in Billy has never waned. Michael Wallis--no stranger to reinventing the conceptions we have of famous historical figures--tackled Billy in Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride (2007), the same year famed Lincoln County War historian Frederick Nolan published The Billy the Kid Reader. In 2009, Harold Dellinger's Billy the Kid: The Best Writings on the Infamous Outlaw hit bookstores. John Vernon took him on in a 2008 novel, Lucky Billy. Billy has captured the imagination of historians ranging from Robert M. Utley (Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life [1989]) and Bob Boze Bell (The Illustrated Life of Billy the Kid [1992]) to Walter Noble Burns (The Saga of Billy the Kid [1926]).

Garrett is less popular, although Leon C. Metz's magnificent 1974 biography, Pat Garrett: The Story of a Western Lawman, remains the standard account of Garrett's fascinating, but troubled, life. "I sometimes wish that I had missed fire [and] that the Kid had got in his work on me," Garrett said (p. 176).

Several of Gardner's theories might bring about heated debates from Billy the Kid scholars and Billy buffs. Gardner, for example, argues that Billy the Kid overpowered James Bell and shot him with the deputy's revolver during his famous escape from the Lincoln County Courthouse in 1881. Other accounts say the Kid was slipped a pistol in an outhouse. Gardner also theorizes that the Kid was armed with a revolver when Garrett shot him dead in Fort Sumner in 1881. Some accounts, in contrast, have argued that the Kid had just a butcher's knife at the time he was killed. Debunking that theory, Gardner writes that "it is ludicrous to think that the Kid would have gone anywhere without a firearm" (p. 289).

Gardner also blames a rather surprising figure for Garrett's murder. Claiming self-defense, Wayne Brazel was acquitted in the 1909 trial, a year after Garrett's murder, yet Gardner writes, "many of Brazel's acquaintances and friends doubted he did it" (p. 243). So have several historians, who have laid blame on a wide variety of suspects, including hired killer Jim Miller. I will not give away Gardner's "killer"--others have theorized him as a possible suspect--but Gardner claims: "I am the first to present significant evidence identifying him as the killer" (p. 299).

Gardner is an established historian--and a talented musician--who has written on a number of western legends, including Geronimo, the Little Bighorn, and the Santa Fe Trail, and is currently researching a history of the James-Younger Gang's disastrous 1876 bank robbery in Northfield, Minnesota. He definitely can spin a yarn, and backs up his claims with significant evidence. There are too many holes in the Billy the Kid saga (we cannot say for sure where he was born) for there ever to be a definitive biography on him, and Gardner's take on Garrett is not as in-depth as Metz's, but To Hell on a Fast Horse is an enjoyable and fascinating ride that takes readers closer to the truth behind the legend of these two great western figures.

What Robert Altman appears to have done with The Company (12A) is employed all of his tried-and-tested techniques - the multiple plots, the over-lapping dialogue, the satirical lunges - and then edited most of them out. The film takes us behind the scenes of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, across a year of rehearsals and performances. Altman has mixed a few actors in with the real Joffrey dancers, namely Neve Campbell as an overworked ingnue, and Malcolm McDowell as the company's curiously English-sounding Italian-American director, but none of them has anything approaching a storyline or even a rounded character (even though Campbell herself shares a "Story By" credit). Altman seems to have been seduced by the spectacle of the ballet - and, fair enough, he films it beautifully - so we got lots of world-class dancing, and only the merest fragments of anything else. It's like catching five or 10 minutes every week of a fly-on-the-wall TV series. On pointes, but with no point.

Fictional as it claimed to be, Boogie Nights adhered so closely to the life of John Holmes - the porn world's biggest star in more senses than one - that a biopic of Holmes would be redundant. The makers of Wonderland (18), then, have concentrated on one episode in his life, after his towering success had detumesced, and he had slid to cocaine-addicted hell. It was then, in 1981, that Holmes (Val Kilmer) advised a gang of associates to burgle another of his friends, an LA nightclub magnate called Eddie Nash (Eric Bogosian). Shortly afterwards, Holmes revealed to Nash who it was who committed the burglary. And shortly after that the robbers' house was raided, and four people were beaten to death.

The film shows us these crimes three times, as remembered by three unreliable witnesses. But this Rashomon-inspired mode of storytelling-and-retelling is effective only if each version pulls us in a revelatory new direction, and in Wonderland that doesn't happen. Each account just presents us with almost the same sordid, drug-induced squabble between despicable human dregs. One viewing of that would be enough.

Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore do their best Tracy and Hepburn impressions in Laws of Attraction (12A), an old-fashioned screwball romance directed by Peter Howitt. Brosnan and Moore play New York's fiercest divorce lawyers. When they oppose each other in court, the gloves are off, but when they meet after work - you guessed it - the rest of their clothes are soon off, too. The leads' mature sparring is entertaining, but the five credited screenwriters can't seem to agree on what the story is, and when the film decamps to rural Ireland, it doesn't know where to go next.

Olivier Assayas's Demonlover (nc) is a murky French thriller that stars Connie Nielson as a double-dealing executive involved in distributing Japanese anim-porn on the internet. The unsettling, atmospheric cinematography and music fight a losing battle against a script that's freighted with tediously rambling nonsense.

Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (PG) stars Lindsay (Freaky Friday) Lohan as a young prima donna who moves house from Manhattan to New Jersey. Once she's there, the theory is that she's picked on by a bitchy bully. But Lohman immediately humiliates her rival and then gets herself a doting dreamboat of a boyfriend, so I'd assume that the director of this shambles hasn't grasped the concept of the underdog.

Billed, not very impressively, as "The Highest Grossing Spanish Documentary Of All Time", Julio Medem's The Basque Ball (15) is an endless parade of talking heads, recommended only to viewers who want to hear in microscopic detail about every contrasting viewpoint relating to Basque independence.

Reinventing Eddie (15) is based on a play about a dad wrongly suspected of abusing his children. It would have worked better as an hour-long ITV drama. Also adapted from a play, Married/ Unmarried (18) is a breathtakingly awful British four-hander whose virulent misanthropy is matched only by its undergraduate pretentiousness. Anazapta (15) is a medieval horror fantasy that's both too long and too bonkers to bother with.

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