Month: November 2013

We got movie sign

Last night, I watched How to Steal a Million, which, while enjoyably pleasant, was maybe less than you’d expect from a romantic heist movie set in Paris starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole.

This afternoon, I re-watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I haven’t seen in several years. It’s still quite stunning, and a hugely important work, but it’s a movie I probably admire more than I enjoy. (I’m sort of tempted to seek out the sequel, which I remember having something of the opposite problem.)

After that, I went for a walk, then came back and watched Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. I do think I like his earlier movies, like The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo better, but there’s no denying this is much more epic and beautifully shot. Seriously, I could watch the castle attack — which this clip shows but doesn’t really do justice to — almost all day.

After that — I took a short break to go to the local diner with my parents for dinner — I watched John Carpenter’s The Ward, which I was just kind of waiting to be over. It’s really not very good, boring more than anything else, with a twist ending that almost seemed clever the first hundred times I’ve seen it in other movies. A couple of months ago, I watched Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, which is at least interesting in its flaws. Weirdly, unshakably interesting. The Ward, on the other hand, isn’t even representative of Carpenter at his absolute, crazy worst (like the terrible In the Mouth of Madness). There’s nothing distinctive about it at all. It’s not even risibly bad; it just kind of is.

Which isn’t a great way to end the evening or a day spent mostly in movies. But there you have it.

It’s hard to believe the long weekend is almost over. There’s still tomorrow, and I don’t go back to the office on Monday, but it’ll be back to work for me soon. Of course, that’s only for a couple of weeks. When the heck did it become December already?

Random 10 11-29-13

Last week. This week:

  1. “Destroyer” by the Kinks, guessed by random passer-by
    Feelin’ guilty, feelin’ scared, hidden cameras everywhere
  2. “Let it Bleed” by Johnny Winter (orig. the Rolling Stones), guessed by random passer-by
    And there will always be a space in my parking lot
  3. “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us” by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
    I hear the music up above my head
  4. “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield, guessed by tammy
    You know I feel so dirty when they start talking cute
  5. “Troubleman” by Electric Guest
    Girl of the bohemian kind
  6. “Have a Good Time” by Paul Simon
    God bless our standard of living
  7. “Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well” by Mike Doughty
    I sought to lose that cloud that’s blacking out the sun
  8. “Where Is Bobbie Gentry?” by Jill Sobule
    Then ten years later, disappeared and broke everybody’s heart
  9. “Love of the Loveless” by Eels
    Always been my own man, pretty much alone
  10. “Rock and Roll All Nite” by KISS, guessed by Occupant
    You’re lookin’ fancy and I like your style

Here’s a hint: they’re the lyrics to songs.

Good luck!

Wednesday

It rained and rained and rained all night, and although it let up quite a bit by morning, it rained and rained and rained again all day.

I was just as glad not to be at work. Our office closed early for tomorrow’s holiday, but I’d taken the day off altogether, in the same plan that’s had me burning up left-over vacation days with three-day weekends lately. This will be a five-day weekend, thanks to Thanksgiving and the Friday after, and I won’t go back to the office until next Tuesday. Just last week, we were talking to our UK boss about Thanksgiving, and he was saying, “That must be nice. And I suppose lots of people take the Friday off as well?” He was actually shocked when we told him the office was closed, that both Thursday and Friday are paid days off, and that a four-day weekend for Thanksgiving is a pretty typical American custom.

I went and got a haircut this morning, to at least try and pretend like I had some kind of schedule. But mostly I just sat around, watched an episode of Sleepy Hollow, tried to explain iTunes to my mother, and avoided going back out in the rain. I only replied to a single work e-mail. Not exactly an eventful day off, but I’m not complaining.

Last night, I watched Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, which I seem to remember having watched in theaters, even if the movie itself wasn’t perfectly familiar. It wasn’t bad — not as good as Wrath of Khan or as much fun as The Voyage Home, perhaps, but I think history has been kind to the movie, and there’s a certain hokey nostalgia that hangs over it. A lot of the practical effects are dated, and there’s a fair amount of scenery chewing — Christopher Lloyd’s no Ricardo Montalban, but his Klingon and Shatner’s Kirk trade a good bit of yelling — but it’s entertaining.

Wake in Fright, on the other hand, which I watched this evening…well, it was interesting. It’s set in the Australian outback in the early 1970s and starts to feel like a horrible fever-dream after a while. I think the moral of the movie is “don’t drink so much that butchering kangaroos in the dead of night seems like a good time.” Seriously, the kangaroo hunt is bloody and graphic and awful to watch. Though maybe the disclaimer about this at the end is strangely preferable to the “No animals were harmed during the making of this picture” we often see — and which it turns out might not be worth a damn. Still, that doesn’t make the scenes any easier to sit through.

Anyway, that’s been my Wednesday. Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving, and then I have three more days of weekend to get through. I wonder how I’ll manage.

Sunday

It’s been a couple of days.

I took Friday off again, mostly just trying to make it feel like a Friday instead of a Saturday — mostly because that makes Saturday feel like a Sunday, and I don’t need two Sundays in my weekend. (I like Sundays, but I don’t need two of them.)

That evening, I watched Before Midnight, which I really liked a whole lot. While I think it can be enjoyed without having seen Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, it’s absolutely a companion piece to those two films, and it’s a delight to dip back into these characters’ lives — even when those lives themselves aren’t always delightful. (Watching them fight is like watching good friends, or your parents, fight and almost as uncomfortable.) I’m surprised to discover I was hoping they wouldn’t make the movie a couple of years ago. This, too, seems like a fitting end to the story…and yet I could see coming back to them again in another ten years. This film is sometimes less fun than the first two — it’s less about falling in love than struggling to maintain in — but it’s still terrific.

Yesterday, I thought about watching a movie, but ended up just watching a bunch of television. Scandal, Agents of SHIELD, the new Doctor Who. Mostly that’s because I went to dinner with my parents and aunt and uncle to celebrate a birthday and got a home a little later than I expected. (A short but furious snow squall that made driving almost impossible for a good stretch of road didn’t help any.) And today’s it’s mostly more TV, trying to avoid the ridiculous cold and wind outside.

My writing group got canceled, thanks to a friend’s car troubles, but I decided to make use of the writing prompts he posts every Saturday and do some free-writing on my own. I really do need to get back into writing more regularly, above and beyond the forty minutes of it I do most Sundays.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote:

She was staying at the cabin, the one her father bought before he died, when she saw the thing that might have been a wolf.

There wasn’t any heat or running water at the place, and only candlelight or a beat-up lantern by which to see. But she was only staying the one night, packing up the last of the old man’s books and papers because nobody else in the family wanted to. There were ten months of notes and ratty journals squirreled away up here, maybe more; and although she and her sisters were just as likely to burn it all, Karen had agreed to travel the three hours north to box and tag everything she could find. She wasn’t sure if anyone outside the family even remembered her father’s novels, and whatever he’d been working on here, it sure as hell hadn’t been another book. But maybe there were still some collectors out there, die-hard fans who would pay good money for a glimpse of his later writing.

God knew the old man hadn’t left them much of anything else. It was only chance that Karen had even found out that he was dying.

He’d come back to Chicago for some reason. She didn’t think it was to die — she couldn’t even say for sure if he’d known he was sick — but that’s how it had played out. Almost a year without contact, not even a word, and then one morning Deb called her from the hospital and said, “Um, Kar? I think they just wheeled Dad into the emergency room downstairs.”

Karen was tempted to think of it as destiny, or maybe karma. Those were the kinds of words that Deb had used at the funeral, and like always Maggie had echoed her, but maybe there was some kind of truth to it. All Karen knew was that the man was dead, and there was a strange satisfaction in knowing that he’d breathed his last in a city that he’d always hated.

Not that the cabin revealed anything more about her father. She’d glanced at the writings she was bundling for the drive back home, but it seemed like there was more of his madness than answers in there, and the building itself anonymous and ramshackle. He’d apparently been there since last October, paid in full, but it was a lonely shack in the woods more than anything else.

Not quite sure where it’s going, but it’s something that wasn’t there before I started, so that’s something.