writing

The last few days

On Saturday night, I watched The Conjuring. It has its moments — if you’ve seen the original trailer, you’ve seen the best of them — but it also falls into a lot of the same traps as Insidious before it. That’s not surprising, in that it’s by the same director, but while James Wan gets a lot of things right, and he crafts some genuinely well-executed scares, the movie ultimately just grows a little tedious, and it’s bogged down in half-sketched mythology. Explaining a ghost almost always makes it less frightening. Like Insidious, this movie is both very smart and very dumb about what’s scary.

Part of the problem is that it’s framed somewhat as a biopic, of “paranormal investigators” Ed and Lorraine Warren. They’re well cast — I don’t think any movie with Vera Farmiga in it can be totally bad — but as characters they’re a distraction more than anything else. Just once, I want a horror movie that says up front, “The following is based on total bullshit,” rather than, unconvincingly, “based on a real story.*” Not least of all because any story with the Warrens at the center would be immediately suspect even if I believed in ghosts. There’s a throw-away joke at the very end of the movie where Lorraine says, “There’s a case out on Long Island he wants us to check out” — a knowing wink to their most famous case, the one on which they built their reputation, the Amityville Horror house. What the film doesn’t hint at, of course, is how thoroughly that case has been debunked (despite the books and bad movies), and the reputation along with it. If anything, the Warrens are depicted in The Conjuring as saintly and selfless, with evidence so incredibly compelling and freely shared it’s amazing that anyone could possibly not believe what they say is true.

My real problem, though, was it just wasn’t scary.

After that, I spent a few hours capping, probably the closest I’ll come this year to a Halloween party.

On Sunday, I wrote this:

The subject was bound to the chair, had been for the past hour, unmoving and unresponsive. Had it been anyone else, Markov would have assumed the subject was dead, had expired sometime during the last battery of tests, and that the slow arrythmic blip blip blip that monitored its breathing and heart-rate were nothing except echoes, either of his own faulty hearing or of faulty, misreporting machines. But he knew this subject too well, had been warned about its behavior too many times to think this was anything but playing possum. It could control its reflexes, but not perfectly, could slow its pulse and breathing, but not stop them entirely. Markov knew that, if anything, the subject was just biding its time, hoping that he, Markov, would make a mistake, get too close, assume the possum had passed on, and not for the first time he was grateful for the force field that circled the chair and the subject both.

“You can’t trust anything they say,” Andrew had said. “Some of them, they’ve learned our language, adaptive behaviors. They even look human.” This was only a month before one of them had escaped, briefly, from its cell, had taken Andrew and a fellow researcher hostage and, in the final shoot-out, skinned both of the two men alive. That, even more than Andrew’s words of warning, had convinced Markov that simply looking human didn’t make them human; they were beasts, angry and violent and dangerous. Lying still for half an hour certainly didn’t change that.

Sometimes he wondered if death wasn’t too good for these mutants.

But there was so much to learn from their behavior, their anatomy, the strange tricks that nature had played to enable them to live, unassisted, on this backwater planet. It was an impossible jungle out there, deadly in ways that Markov and his team had not even begun to count, and yet they lived, these mutants; they thrived. Once they had been human — even Andrew, even Markov, would have admitted to that. The evidence was too great, the branches of their shared family tree too well laid out, even if the history, the actual events that had split those branches in such different directions, remained elusive and unclear. But that made the work they were doing here more important; it did not make the mutants any less expendable.

The subject began to stir, perhaps accepting, finally, that Markov was not going to lower the force field, that the scientist would offer it no means of escape. Markov smiled and returned to his work.

Then on Monday, I worked, moved a dresser across the room, and wrote this. That’s about it, really.

* My favorite recent example of this is the trailer for Nothing Left to Fear, which claims to be “Inspired by the legend of Stull, Kansas.” As near as I can tell, the movie isn’t actually about any of those urban legends, so the trailer could just as easily have said, “We read about a spooky thing and wrote a movie that’s spooky too.” Actually, I think more movies — non horror movies — should come with disclaimers or title cards that announce their loose basis: “Based on the author’s vague memories of a TV show she used to watch.” “Inspired by a pleasant walk the director took with his dog.”

That said, a friend has tried to convince me that Nothing Left to Fear is actually pretty good. And it has Clancy Brown in it, who we all know can do no wrong.

Sunday

It’s been a relatively quiet weekend, although we did have some very bad news yesterday afternoon. One of my uncles, my mother’s oldest brother and my godfather, passed away after a protracted illness. We knew this was coming — my parents, along with the rest of my mother’s siblings, went to visit him a few weeks ago — and there’s some comfort in knowing he’s no longer in pain. But it’s still a shock, it always is, and my mother especially is still grieving. He and I weren’t necessarily close, but I always liked him, and it’s sad to think of the world without him. We’re still waiting to hear about the funeral arrangements.

Life does go on, though. Last night, I watched Elmer Gantry. It’s a complicated movie about religion and revivalism and faith, with an Oscar-winning performance by Burt Lancaster. (And one by Shirley Jones, too, I just discovered, although she’s also quite good in it.) I quite enjoyed the movie, although at two and a half hours it did occasionally feel a little long.

And then this afternoon I wrote this:

The trouble all started when they blew up the world.

It was just one planet of a dozen slated for demolition that year, uninhabited and, moreover, uninhabitable, at least by every estimate and simulation the Corportion’s budget had allowed them to run. “Not so much as a protozoa on the surface,” the chief engineer was fond of saying, with what he always hoped the colonial press would characterize as a hearty chuckle. “Not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse.”

Which was not to suggest that the discovery of indigenous life somewhere topside would have necesarily halted the project. A mouse was just a mouse. The Corporation had a mandate to catalog and preserve any extraterrestrial life they might happen to find, but in eighty-plus years of stellar expansion they had so far found exactly none. Just one long stretch of stars, and the dead hunks of worlds too fiery or gaseous or bitterly cold for human settlement. Most planets, they’d long since discovred, weren’t good for much of anything unless you broke them down into their constituent parts, brought in the demo team’s world-eater ships and vacuumed up the natural resources. You couldn’t settle on a big ball of methane or frozen nickel ore, but you could fill the ships a hundred times over. And then, when the giant rock was reduced to dust and rubble, and the orbits of everything else in the local system had been carefully adjusted, you could take those ships and power the Corporation’s real purpose for being: the singularity drive.

Each one had a black hole at the center, and each one of them was a picky eater.

James Way didn’t have any worries that the planet on his viewscreen, which was designated #579NI-17-5LQB5 in all of their log books, harbored any sort of life. He had faith in the chief engineer, if not the man’s strange sense of humor, and furthermore he trusted the simulations and surface telemetry that he’d checked at least a half dozen times himself. But it always paid to be sure. Way knew you couldn’t just turn the world-eaters off — “you don’t start it, you unleash it,” he’d been told his first week with the Corporation, when he’d first stood and watched a planet turned into its base elements and ash — and nothing that was down there had any chance of surviving.

The first blip on his screen took him totally by surprise.

One of the prompts that inspired it, the last quote at the end, was taken from a magazine ad for some car, so I’d probably have to rework that. (And I don’t know, can nickel ore even be frozen?) But I like it, mostly because it occurred to me near the end that I could introduce a character, and it could start to be a story, not just backstory. That might sound obvious, in part because stories often do start with character, but here it wasn’t until the appearance of James Way — somewhere near the end of our forty free-writing minutes — that this started to feel like something to me.

Anyway, that — plus failing at the Sunday crossword, and watching tonight’s incredible episode of Breaking Bad — was my weekend, both good and bad.

Sunday

A quiet weekend, and a quiet Sunday. I wrote this with my weekly writing group:

Robert found the box, but it was Edie who pried it open, which she said entitled her to at least half of whatever they found inside. Robert started to argue, he said Edie was always doing that, but when he saw it was nothing but a sheet of paper at the bottom of the box he lost interest and said, “Fine, you can keep it. Just…tell me what it is?”

He was worried Edie might say something like, “What, can’t you read?” And she might laugh, which she sometimes did, like everything he did or said was some kind of big joke. But she just kept looking at the paper, which was yellowed and curled at the edges with age, but also filled from top to bottom with the black scrawl of words. Robert couldn’t make any of them out — he could read, if not well — but Edie was clearly amazed by whatever the thing said.

“I think it’s some of contract,” she told him. “It’s pretty short, but it’s all kind of…I dunno, legalese.”

“Uh huh,” Robert said, “that’s…” But that was what? He started to wonder if he’d maybe made a mistake; maybe the paper (or even the box) had some kind of value after all. They could bring it to, he didn’t know, auction or something. Maybe it had historical significance. People were always paying good money for old things, and maybe it didn’t matter if this was just a single sheet of paper if it was the last will and testament of Paul Revere or something like that. “That’s interesting,” he said.

“Get a load of this,” said Edie. “It’s a contract for somebody’s soul.”

Robert sighed, but out of relief more than anything else. So, okay, interesting, but that’s all that it was. Somebody’s idea of a joke, but nothing they could make any money off of. Let Edie keep it. He didn’t have to feel cheated, because there was nothing to be cheated out of. He smiled.

“It’s a contract from somebody selling their soul to the devil in May of 1976,” Edie said. “Somebody named — ” she scanned the page — “David Falconer.”

Robert sighed, this time he hoped a little more loudly. There had to be something here at the dump they could turn a profit on.

“’The bearer of this document is hereby granted full and binding custody of my earthly and mortal soul’” Edie read. “It’s signed and dated and everything.”

“Is it, whadyacallit, notarized?” Robert asked.

“He was selling it to the devil, but here it is.”

It’s more an idea than a story, but I like the idea.

Last night, I watched Cloud Atlas…and didn’t much like it. There are a couple of good movies lurking within it — I’m not spoiling anything by saying there are six loosely interconnected stories across many different time periods — but there’s also a lot that doesn’t work, most everything doesn’t work well together, and there’s also an over-abundance of very bad makeup. Seriously, I don’t know which was less convincing, the six-foot Hugo Weaving as a female nurse or the Korean-born Doona Bae as a redheaded American abolitionist. (I’ll go with Nurse Noakes, if only because she’s part of what is easily the film’s worst sequences.)

David Mitchell’s original novel, which I read and quite enjoyed back in 2006, creates connections between the characters and settings mostly through tricks of narrative nesting. I’m not sure the film benefits from making those connections literal, by having the same actors portray many different characters (often aided by that aforementioned makeup). It gets silly quickly, and repeatedly, which does not seem like the film’s intent. And I’m not entirely convinced that the message of “our lives are all connected and everything we do recurs” was necessarily the book’s intent, much less that we needed nearly three hours of prosthetic noses to get that message across.

But that was pretty much the extend of my weekend.

Sunday

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.