About Fred

It’s a long weekend, which, thanks to the last week of summer hours, started early on Friday. I’ll miss those half days at the end of the week a little, I think, but I’ll be glad to go back to a normal work day starting on Tuesday. I can’t claim to have made any great use of those free hours on Friday all summer; most often, I’d come home and decided to read or watch something (a movie or TV) and find myself nodding off in my chair, falling asleep. I don’t know that an extra hour of work every other day is really worth it for a Friday afternoon nap.

This Friday I managed to stay awake, watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which I’d somehow managed to never see. (Maybe because I was five when it first came out.) It’s exceptionally dated, very much a movie of the very early ’80s, but in some real ways that works in the movie’s favor. In 1982, Roger Ebert called it “a scuz-pit of a movie,” but history has been much kinder. I don’t know if Ebert ever revised his opinion, but the movie is considerably less raunchy and scuzzy than a lot of comedies in the three decades since. Fast Times is funny a well observed, and it’s an interesting snapshot of the time.

I can’t the same, at all, about Elektra, which I watched on Friday night. With the recent announcement that Ben Affleck would be cast as Batman in the upcoming Man of Steel sequel, I’ve honestly been wondering if I should maybe revisit his earlier superhero movie, Daredevil. (Affleck also once played George Reeves, TV’s Superman, in Hollywoodland, but I don’t see that connection being made much in the discussion.) I don’t remember Daredevil being very good, but there’s that whole “history being kinder” thing to consider. Colin Farrell and Michael Clarke Duncan certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves… And honestly, my reservations (or in fact doubts) about a Man of Steel sequel, and Batman being in it, and a Superman vs. Batman movie, don’t really stem at all from the casting.

But Daredevil wasn’t available, and I’m not paying good money to sit through it again. (I’m also not convinced it’s worth sitting through again, just in the off chance some of it’s okay.) So I watched Elektra, which is a spin-off in that the character appears in the earlier movie, played again by Jennifer Garner, and they’re linked characters in the comics, but it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with Daredevil the movie. Which doesn’t make it any good either, unfortunately. Strangely, some of the acting is rather good, but the film falls down on almost every other level: script, direction, cinematography, musical score. Long stretches are just tedious, and the climactic fight scenes are just kind of dumb. (Will Yun Lee’s main bad guy basically just has the power to throw sheets up in the air. I wish I could say that was an exaggeration.)

So anyway, not a very good movie. I was going to watch a movie tonight, but then I remembered there’s a new episode of Breaking Bad.

Otherwise, it’s been a pretty average couple of day. I did some reading, I’m working on edits for the next issue of Kaleidotrope — next month! — and I wrote this:

“All that’s happening here has happened before,” said Fleet Commander Admiral Jeremiah Wells as he looked out into the ampitheater and its rows of graduating cadets. “And chances are good it will all happen again. But I hardly need remind you of that. You have months of training under your belts, each of you, and no doubt you’ve each seen your share of reports from the front. I can’t say I approve of that — there’s a place and a time for war reports, and I’m not convinced academy training is either. But better you too prepared than not at all. You know what you’re facing, and where the fleet will be headed, and I’m quite sure each one of you will do the temporal navy proud.”

It wasn’t much of a pep talk, well meant but uninspired, and delivered by a man who was clearly unaccustomed to public speaking. Which, on the face of it, was ridiculous. Wells had given this speech a thousand times, perhaps a hundred thousand. He has said so himself just now, when he said all of this had happened before. Josey wasn’t sure how often Wells had been hit by repeaters — even the fleet’s best scientists didn’t know how often the enemy had used their temporal weapons — but if it was true that basically everyone on board the flagship was a casualty of the Loop on some level, if even she could expect to feel its effects despite having ported from Earth less than one year (standard) ago, then she could only imagine how it must feel for Wells, how often the Admiral had lived through these very same moments, given this very same speech. He ought to seem a lot more practiced for all of that.

Yet obviously he had other things on his mind, and inducting the graduating class into the fleet for the hundreth-thousandth time could not have been a top priority.

There were reports, Josey knew, of rising sea levels on Base Europa, the ice starting to thin and crack; she’d be stationed there herself in a week — that was a week standard but also several more days of cryo — but maybe not for much longer if the frozen continents continued to shift, if the moon’s waters began to seep in and make operations there untenable. And if the fleet lost Europa, where was there left to draw back?

They’d managed to suture together a quarrantine zone for Earth in the first years of the war, and those lines of defense, though sometimes shaky, still stood. There’d never been a repeater blast topside on Earth in forty years and, god willing, there never would be. The fleet was here to protect Earth from that kind of temporal confusion, to prevent the Loop from circling further in — if they couldn’t find a way to counteract or cure its effect altogether and wage a war of offensive against the enemy.

A speech to several dozen frightened students hardly seemed to matter in the scheme of all that, however many times it had appeared to happen or would happen again. Josey knew all this, but still, it wouldn’t have hurt the Admiral to try just a little harder.