That's Jimmy Hook (Rhys Ifans), a former man-about-town who has washed up in London's East End, from which he plots endlessly to claw his way back into society.

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Left out by him was the straight-to-video disaster Man About Town, the execrable Surviving Christmas, and then even when he re-teamed with a major talent in Kevin Smith, the end result was the painful to watch Jersey Girl.

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Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, as well as a neighbor of the mobster Frank Costello and a confidant of Roosevelt's inner circle, even a sometimes guest invited to the White House to amuse the president over a drink the in-the-know street fighter and hardboiled man about town whom his enemies feared and who was on our side.

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"Pendennis" follows "Pen" through his West Country upbringing to his debt-bilking sojourn at "Oxbridge University" (Thackeray himself spent five unproductive terms at Cambridge), his life as a literary man about town in the London of the early 1840s, his writing of a best-selling novel called "Walter Lorraine, " and his eventual marriage to his milksop cousin Laura.

WSJ: Book Review: Pendennis | New Grub Street | Keep the Aspidistra Flying | Books Do Furnish a Room | My Life Closed Twice