movies

The last three days

Friday was pretty uneventful, and even yesterday wasn’t terribly exciting by any real standard. It was warmer, certainly, to the point where you could wander outside in short sleeves and not feel uncomfortable — a far cry from the past few weeks we’ve had. There’s a chance of snow again in next week’s forecast, but hopefully it won’t impede my work trip to Stony Brook, which thanks to illness and weather I’ve already had to reschedule twice. And it also won’t impede my grumbling about how my parents managed to escape the worst of winter, leaving it all to me to enjoy.

Last night, I watched the 1977 horror movie The Sentinel, which is probably most notorious for casting genuinely deformed people as denizens of hell. That — spoiler warning — comes late in the film, and it’s just the one long scene, but however effective it might have been it’s also in very questionable taste. As for the rest of the movie…well, I call it a horror movie, since that seems like the obvious choice, but by the end of it I wasn’t entirely sure what it was I watching. There are parts that are ridiculously campy, some terrible acting — sadly, much of it from the film’s lead — and yet there are also parts that are really fairly creepy. Burgess Meredith is rather good in it, and Eli Wallach and Christopher Walken show up as a pair of detectives. But it’s such a weird movie, with such a strangely varied cast, even beyond Meredith, Wallach, and Walken. The trailer doesn’t really do it justice, and while I do think it was a terrible movie, I’m not entirely sure I didn’t enjoy it.

Then today I went to my writing group, and I penned/keyboarded this:

They found her outside the cabin, what was left of the old Wilson place out on the end of North Hadley Road, just half a mile from the edge of the woods and the county line. She had been left there overnight; the ME wouldn’t commit to a time of death, but preliminary tests suggested sometime between nine and ten the night before. That explained the rigor, Stock thought, and more importantly the dress. It had turned cold overnight, an unexpected frost that still hung in the morning air, but the girl was dressed for summer, her clothes a flimsy, gauzy white. Like an angel, Stock thought, and then quashed the thought down to the back of his mind. It wouldn’t help him any to start thinking like that again.

She had been strangled. Meyers thought they might get prints, but Stock wasn’t too hopeful. The body was too well staged, too precise, to expect that the perp had been that sloppy. The girl looked almost peaceful, if you ignored the bruises around her neck where the air had been cut off, ignored the too complete stillness of her body propped up against the oak tree. There was no sign of a struggle beyond all that, which suggested that she’d been killed somewhere else and moved, despite there being no other tracks but their own leading up this way. Meyers already had the sherrif’s men cordoning off a wider area, bagging anything that might look like evidence. Stock had just shrugged when the other man asked him if he’d had any theories.

The cabin was abandoned, half burned down in ’91, and nobody, least of all Red Wilson, had lived out here since then. Stock didn’t even know if Wilson still owned the property, which had stretched all the way to Potter County when he, Stock, had been a boy. But if he did, it wasn’t doing him much good these days, half-senile and bed-ridden like the man was reportedly supposed to be. Stock knew there were places that fall into disuse because nobody wants them, wants to be reminded of what happened there; there are places where darkness sets in, makes itself comfortable, sets up shop. The Wilson place had been well on its way to becoming one of those places even before the fire. The dead girl just made it clear the transformation was now complete.

“You recognize her?” Meyers asked, and Stock looked up.

“What?” he said. He tried keeping the surprise off his face. “Nah, why’d you ask that?”

“Dunno,” the other man said. “You just had one of your looks, is all.”

Can you tell I also watched a couple of True Detective episodes today as well?

That, more or less, was my weekend.

Sunday

[deleted]

There’s a lot I like about that, and where it took me, even if I don’t think all the things I like about it work successfully together.

This evening, I thought about sending out some rejection letters for Kaleidotrope, but I wound up watching Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters instead. I should have gone with my first instinct. The AV Club said the movie was “much like watching a shiny hammer hit a shiny nail over and over and over again. There’s something vaguely satisfying about the impact, and it throws up a few pretty sparks from time to time, but there’s nothing unexpected in the encounter between the two surfaces, and the repetition gets dull.”

I think that’s probably over-selling it, to be honest. I didn’t much enjoy the movie.

I am looking forward to having tomorrow off from work, even if I don’t plan to do anything more exciting with than send those rejection letters and maybe do some laundry.

Friday and Saturday

I worked from home yesterday, more in anticipation of a terrible commute than anything else. My boss texted all of us to say she didn’t mind if we all telecommuted, so who was I to argue with that?

The weather actually wasn’t so bad, quite sunny for a change and warm enough to actually melt some of the snow for the first time in what seemed like forever. It snowed again today, but yesterday was actually pretty nice once it actually got underway.

Still, I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to work from home. And, anyway, the LIRR was canceling trains when I first woke up, so it was probably for the best. Still, it’s a bit weird that the only day I was in the office last week was Monday, the one day a week I usually work from home.

Last night, I re-watched Before Sunrise, I suppose because it was Valentine’s Day. Never let it be said I don’t have a romantic bone in my body, even if I did watch it all by my lonesome.

Tonight, I watched the much less romantic The Counselor. The AV Club described it as “existential Elmore Leonard,” and it does sometimes feel more like an intellectual exercise than a movie, even if it’s the exercise of a decidedly gruesome intellect. It was good, but I don’t know that it was especially fun.

And that was the past couple of days. It’s a three-day weekend, which is really nice, and it’s not even supposed to snow…much.

Saturday and Sunday

Last night, I watched a couple of movies.

First there was Escape Plan with Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, which turned out to be surprisingly entertaining despite — or probably because — it was so ridiculous. I felt like Stallone was fighting the silliness a little bit, but Schwarzenegger was embracing it wholeheartedly, and as such was really good in the movie. I wouldn’t call it good, but it was a lot of fun.

After that, it was a real change of pace with Dallas Buyers Club. The movie wasn’t exactly remarkable, but it told its story well, and Matthew McConaughey was very good. So was Jared Leto, who I didn’t recognize until the movie was almost over, and both he and McConaughey deserve the Oscar nominations they got for the movie.

In between the films, I discovered a cat living in the garage. I’d been hearing noises off and on for the past couple of nights and discovered the blinds on a couple of the windows mussed up. But I chalked the former up to the wind, and the latter up to imagination…or more wind. (Well, the rational part of my brain did, anyway.) But I heard the noise again last night and although it was only for a second, I saw a cat creep into the far back corner. The garage is full of stuff, including furniture and boxes I moved back from Pennsylvania a decade ago with, so there are lots of places a small cat like that could hide. I gave up on trying to find it last night, partly because I didn’t want to chase it out into the cold, but I saw it again this evening. I tried leaving the garage door open, coaxing the cat out with soft words and tuna fish, scaring it out with loud noises, and the most I seemed to do was to chase it from one inaccessible corner to another.

It’s not so much that I mind there being a cat in the garage. I got a better glimpse at it tonight, and I think it’s a stray, so I want it to be warm. I just don’t want it to set up shop out there, think it’s a good place to go to the bathroom or have kittens, or get stuck in one of those inaccessible corners with no food to be had. I think I might have chased it out this evening — into what’s unfortunately become a snowy night — but I also thought I’d maybe done that last night.

So hopefully I chased it away and it will find a better place to hole up. Or if it’s still out there, I’ll be able to find and catch it, so that I can somehow take it to the vet. (I say somehow because we don’t own any cat carriers anymore.)

Anyway, that was most of my weekend. Today, after a prolonged absence, I joined my writing group again and wrote this:

“There are no ghosts here,” Jimmy said. I didn’t know which one of us he was trying to convince.

“Sure, there are stories,” Jimmy said. “The old house, the caretakers murdered.” He walked over to the shelf behind his desk and pulled down a book. “That was in 1908, three years after the house was first built. Then there was a fire in the barn, that family who rented the place and went missing in the ’70s.” He handed me the book, which was older than the paperback I knew he’d seen me tuck into my backpack, and was probably a first edition if I knew anything about Jimmy Bell.

“It’s all in Trevor Burnam’s novel,” he said, “if you can get past the lousy prose. And some of it’s corroborated by press clippings — of which,” he added, “there aren’t for that time and this area. But that’s a far cry from saying the house is haunted.”

“Then why aren’t you living there?” I asked. “Your family owns the house, you’ve been living in town for six months, and yet you’re still renting here, in this place.” It hadn’t escaped my attention that there had been a fold-away cot stored in the closet, or that Jimmy had shut the closet door when he noticed me snooping.

“You’ve done your homework,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased. Looking at him from across the desk, I thought maybe he couldn’t tell either.

“I just want to know what happened there,” I said. “Don’t you?”

“’They drank the milk and ate the butter,’” he said. “That’s the first line of Burnam’s book.” He nodded at it in my hands, and although I pretty much knew the thing by heart I flipped to the start of Chapter 1. “’Miss Abigail returned to the kitchen that cold October morning to discover the pantry door unlatched, the fire in the hearth gone out, and the little dead girl waiting for her at the top of the cellar stairs.’

“It’s not great writing,” Jimmy said, “but sure, I can see why people liked it at the time. After the Wilson family ran off in ’76 –”

“Disappeared,” I said. “There were five of them, and they weren’t ever found.” I handed him back the book. “There are press clippings about that.”

“And about Ken Wilson’s drinking problem, too,” Jimmy said. “Look, I like you, Clara, and we went to school together, which is the only reason I agreed to meet. But you’re seeing this from a distance and missing the details. And the details say there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“I just don’t think you believe that,” I said.

I took the writing prompts from this magazine cover. Imagine if I’d gone with the picture!

Tuesday

Today marked the first time since Thursday that I went outside, wore anything but pajamas, or did anything more strenuous than watch several episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show*. After four long days of illness and convalescence, of stomach bug and fever, I finally went back to work.

Sunday was pretty miserable, though, and it’s what convinced me I needed the extra day off. I’d planned to go to the doctor yesterday, but by that morning the fever was gone — and moreover, it seemed to stay gone without any outside assistance. I was still pretty beat, and so I lay about all day, but I was feeling a lot better long before the end of it. A lot better than the day before, definitely, when I’d had to take a long break between eating the two halves of a fairly small banana.

So I went back to work today. It was pretty uneventful, except for the yearly emergency preparedness training the building makes all of the floor’s fire safety team go to. And even that’s just sitting around learning about what to do in case of a biological attack, or gas leak, or zombie outbreak. I’ve still got lots of imminent deadlines and projects that I wish were more finished than they are, but it was nice to not come back to more of them.

And it was nice to get a chance to read again, something I couldn’t really do while I was sick. On Friday I couldn’t even concentrate on television. (Though later, putting Galaxy Quest and then Goonies on in the background while I tried to sleep was actually quite a comfort. Good movies, those.) Tonight, I finished reading Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred. It’s a simple but powerful book, a reminder of Butler’s talents, and though it’s a novel written about the antebellum South and slavery from the viewpoint of 1976, it doesn’t feel the slightest bit dated. I liked it a lot.

February promises to not be entirely normal, just looking at my schedule coming up, but it was nice to get back to a little bit of normal, today, anyway.

* Seriously, why have I never really watched this show before? It’s a little dated in places, but it holds up remarkably well. It’s endearing and funny.