movies

Saturday

I got word yesterday of some fraud on my debit card — no, I wasn’t at a Charleston service station, thank you very much — so I had to go into my bank this morning to pick up a replacement.

The rest of the day was even less exciting than that. I re-watched Clue for some reason — it’s on Netflix, so, y’know, there — and the latest episode of Hannibal. I read some Kaleidotrope submissions, and I finished reading What Is the What by Dave Eggers, a novel based on the life of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng.

I liked the book, particularly Deng’s voice that comes through as a character, and the way the story is structured, but I’m not sure it’s brilliant or illuminating of the human condition. If it weren’t a true story, for instance, I don’t think I’d have liked it half as much. But still, it wasn’t bad.

I am glad to be finished, though: I’ve actually been reading the book since late February, and it will be nice to move on to something else. According to my Goodreads challenge, I’ve only read 12 of 1 book for the year.

This evening, I watched Akira, which was…strange. On the one hand, it’s a very straightforward post-apocalyptic psychic powers kind of story. But it’s also…strange. I’m tempted to look into the original manga, which apparently goes into a lot more detail.

Anyway, that was pretty much my Saturday. I didn’t do any writing today, though I have been writing every other day this week. It’s not been great — I’ve filled several pages in my notebook but wouldn’t necessarily want a lot of it in the final story — but it’s keeping the story alive for me and moving me in the direction I need to go with it. So there’s that.

Saturday

Let’s pretend this past week was just so exciting that I couldn’t even bring myself to write about it, and that’s why I haven’t posted much of anything here in a week. That seems better than just admitting that it was a boring one-day-pretty-much-like-the-last kind of week.

Even today, there wasn’t much to report. The weather turned nice again — windy, but not the slap in the face of winter’s return we had on Thursday and Friday. There was snow in the forecast for Monday, last I heard, but I think most of what hobbled us in February has finally melted.

I bought my plane tickets for my trip in September to Canada and the Banff Centre. Still, it’ll be another half a year before I use them.

This evening, I watched a couple of movies. I started with Grave of the Fireflies, a late-’80s anime set near the end of World War II. It’s a beautiful film, although very sad, and after it I needed something of a pick-me-up. So naturally I turned to the downbeat folk music story Inside Llewyn Davis. (The original thought had been 12 Years a Slave, but maybe not this week.) I liked the movie a lot — it’s not really a downer — but I didn’t quite love every bit of it. I’d be tempted to call it “lesser Coen Brothers,” if even their “lesser” movies didn’t have such style and skill. (See The Ladykillers or Intolerable Cruelty, for instance.)

All in all, a pair of very good movies.

And all in all, while not a super exciting day — I did a little editing, went for a walk, listened to a podcast — a pretty good day.

The weekend

Yesterday, I got a haircut and finished reading the last of January’s submissions for Kaleidotrope. That maybe doesn’t sound like a full day — and heaven knows submissions have kept coming in all through February and into March — but if you think my Saturday was in any way wasted, I have just two very simple words for you:

Arctic Blast.

I watched this cinematic — or is tele-visual? Wikipedia suggests the movie premiered on screen, but I think it aired primarily on the Syfy Channel — classic over Twitter with friends. On any objective level, it’s a terrible movie, with bad effects and some questionable acting. Michael Shanks gives it his all, or at least whatever percentage of his all he decided the movie was worth, but it’s ridiculous disaster movie. Heather’s already posted a good rundown of the night’s film, including several of the funnier comments. (Keep in mind, of course, that this is a woman who calls Sharknado “a metaphor for modern life, in which chainsaws solve all our problems.”)

I’ve been watching my fair share of bad movies lately, but watching them with friends — even when those friends are separated by several time zones — is a whole lot better.

Today, I wrote a little with my weekly group:

“Do not call me Master,” the doppleganger said. “Call me…Phil.”

He didn’t look like a Phil, but Alison knew it wouldn’t do her any good to tell him that, not with that weird crooked staff, still crackling with energy, held over his head. It had taken only a single blast of that energy to get rid of Nate — which was no big loss, as far as Alison was concerned, but she also wasn’t in any hurry to join him in an atomized spray of used-to-be-people particles. She’d called this weirdo Master out of some instinct — it was what the long crimson robe and dangerous magic seemed to demand — but if Phil was what he wanted, then Phil was what he’d get. She wasn’t going to risk making him angry like Nate had, at least not until she managed to wrestle that magic stick away from him.

It was funny, though, Alison thought. He didn’t look a Phil so much as he looked like…well, Nate. She hadn’t really noticed that before, but the resemblance was a little uncanny. Was that why her now very ex-boyfriend had called the man the doppleganger before they’d awoken him? Then he’d just looked like some old dude propped up on a big rock inside a cave — “entombed upon the altar of Circe’s midnight slumber,” Nate had said, which she was sure was something he was remembering wrong from out of some book. The man had looked kind of peaceful, actually, serene, and she hadn’t seen Nate look like that even once in all the time they had been dating.

True, they’d been hunting magic and legends since their second date — or was the Bigfoot trap officially their third? It had seemed fun at the time. Nate had seemed fun at the time. But that was long before they’d stumbled across this Merlin-wannabe who’d zapped Nate into a cloud of nothingness and then taken his face. Alison had been planning to break the relationship off after this excursion, just waiting for the right moment between the caves and the flight back home to the States. Should she tell him before they cleared customs, or after? Now Nate was gone and she’d escaped having to go through all that, thank god, but she hadn’t escaped this deadly wizard who could zap her too if he wanted, and even worse who looked like her ex.

You know, sometimes I just go wherever the prompt leads me.

Sunday

I wrote this today:

Time travel can be like this: it fractures cause and effect, confuses the linear patterns that seem to govern our lives, and makes a patchwork of our memories, ripped and torn at unexpected seams. You remember things that never happened; you get a life you never lived. Take Abraham, for instance.

“I’m going to write a story about a time machine,” Abraham says. “It’s a mechanical device for traveling to the past that will become its own blueprint when future generations read it.”

“You’ll have to get it published first,” Laura says. She likes Abraham but doesn’t know when or where this talk of writing and time machines started. He still hasn’t even graduated high school. “Hand me that mop,” she says. “Somebody broke a jar of pickles in aisle six.”

“That isn’t a problem,” Abraham says, meaning the story of the time machine, of course. Laura has to reach past him to grab the mop. “I just have to write the right story and the time machine will exist. It will always have existed. And they’ll send it back to meet me.”

Laura likes Abraham. When he first started working here at the start of summer, she thought he was kind of cute. But he has some pretty weird notions, and this time travel business is just the latest.

“Is that important to you?” she asks. She heads back out to the front of the store, toting the bucket and mop, and Abraham follows. “A visit from the future?”

“I want to know how the story ends,” he tells her.

“Black holes are basically time machines,” she says. It’s something she read, maybe for class, maybe not, she doesn’t remember. She knows she probably shouldn’t be humoring him, adding fuel to this fire, but the night shifts are long, and dull except for broken jars of pickles, so she says it. “Maybe your time machine should be built out of a black hole.”

I’m not exactly pleased with it, but sometimes that’s the nature of the beast: you struggle through forty minutes of free-writing only to have nothing much at all to show for it. I’m not saying there isn’t the start of some kind of story buried in this somewhere, just that, if there is, it’s well buried indeed. But in writing, even the wrong words are better than no words.

I’m not watching the Oscars this evening, though I can’t claim to have made a better choice by watching A Good Day to Die Hard. It’s easily the worst movie in the series, rarely even rising to the level of interesting, and I can only imagine how ridiculous any sixth movie in the Die Hard franchise would have to be.

I probably should have spent the evening writing. Even more bad words would have been better than this.

Saturday

On Thursday I was on campus, talking with instructors. I still need to type up and distribute my notes, but I’m done with campus calling until the fall, which makes me happy.

Yesterday, we had a team outing to Astoria, where we had a very nice lunch, followed by a visit to the Museum of the Moving Image, and then a drink before heading home. (My mixed drink was called a Suffering Bastard, which was much more pleasant than it sounds.) This was the outing we’d planned for a month ago when I got sick, so it was nice to finally get a chance to do it. It was a really fun day out with my co-workers.

Today, I gave blood. They had some trouble with the vein on my right arm, leaving me with a nasty-looking bruise, but it was smooth sailing once we switched to the left. Thanks to the switch, though, it took a little longer than I’d expected, and after I decided to head home for lunch rather than try to go get a (much-needed, admittedly) haircut.

Tonight, I watched Dreamcatcher. It’s not one of Stephen King’s best, but I remember liking the book well enough — even if a quick glance at Goodreads shows I only gave it two stars — but the movie is just ridiculously bad. On occasion, the ridiculous trumps the bad, making it almost enjoyable in its lousy craziness, but it’s often not even fun in a “so bad it’s good” way.

Anyway, that’s been my past few days.