movies

Sunday, once more with feeling

It’s cold and snowing outside right now. Not so much that I expect any real accumulation — it’s more like a wet dusting — but I’m nonetheless glad I’ll be working from home tomorrow.

It was an unexciting weekend. Yesterday afternoon, we set up the outdoor Christmas lights, making us one of the last people in the neighborhood to do so. Every year I get to feel more like a Scrooge because I don’t want Christmas lights and trees and songs until it’s actually Christmas. I’ll even be generous and say let’s have it all for the two weeks beforehand, and keep the lights up until New Year’s. And during that time, go for broke. I like Christmas a lot. But maybe we don’t need to adorn everything with holiday decorations months in advance. Maybe Christmas doesn’t have to start while we’re still eating Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe that, which was once just a joke or a come from retailers, doesn’t have to be the new rule. Maybe what makes holidays special is that they aren’t every day of the year.

Then again, just about an hour ago, I heard somebody setting off fireworks, which now seems to happen year-round in this neighborhood. So clearly I’m in the minority with this whole “celebrate everything all the time” thing.

It’s a shame, because I do like Christmas.

So anyway. Last night I watched Zero Dark Thirty, which is decidedly not a Christmas movie. It’s well crafted, if a little more pro-torture than I was expecting, but I can’t necessarily say that I enjoyed it. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why, but part of it’s the torture thing.

Today I did the crossword puzzle and went to my Sunday writing group. I was thinking I might continue working on the thing I wrote last week, but, as I think will become quickly evident, the writing prompts that were given to me kind of made that impossible:

The Panther leaped from the rooftop to the busy street below. He’s not even looking, Jodie thought. What a show-off. She’d be leaping tall buildings too if she had super-powers, if she’d been “infused with the mighty spirit of the jungle” instead of being tasked with finding them a parking spot nearby and feeding the meter. She didn’t like driving in the city on the weekends and the Panther knew it, but “evil doesn’t sleep in on Sundays, chum,” was all he’d said. She’d asked him to stop calling her “chum,” but apparently that’s what he called all his sidekicks, super-powered or not. No wonder every one of them had up and quit.

She didn’t need this. She could probably go back to MIT, get her old teaching job back. She still had friends in the computer science department, the same ones who’d been so happy to have a techie whiz kid like her on the faculty, then so shocked when only three years in she’d said she was going to turn her talents to crime-fighting instead. They’d bought her a cape as a going-away present, and the dean said, “come back anytime,” but it was obvious they didn’t approve.

Three years into this, Jodie couldn’t say she blamed them. She’d tried to make a go of it as a lone avenger — never with the cape, but only because she worried about dry-cleaning — but she had neither the mutant powers nor gymnastic skills it seemed like every bank robber, hostage-taker, and even petty thief in the city had nowadays. She’d bounced around for a while through different identities and costumes, tried to solder together some weaponry from old computer parts, but in the end the best she’d had to show for it was a couple of cracked ribs and a bruised pride.

Enter the Panther. His last sidekick had just left — turned to super-villainy was the rumor, but the man himself wouldn’t confirm or deny. Jodie’s tech skills didn’t seem like an obvious fit for a man raised from a boy by the jungle, who could scale twenty-story buildings like they were vine-covered trees, then back-flip through a hail of on-coming bullets. He was still using a dial-up when she met him. But he’d seemed nice enough — she’d liked that “chum” back then — and she couldn’t deny they’d had a shared enemy in common.

Dr. Werewolf.

God, it sounded stupid now even just saying his name, remembering a time when a nerdy rocket-scientist-turned-lycanthrope had been the closest thing she’d had to an arch-nemesis. The Panther and Werewolf had had their own run-ins, and somehow the evil doctor had managed to escape at the last minute each time. Maybe if Jodie and the Panther pooled their resources?

It hadn’t taken long after that to find the Werewolf’s lair…

And that was my weekend.

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?

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.

Some kind of weekend

So it’s been a couple of days. I wish I could say I did anything more productive than watch a couple of movies, fail to finish the Sunday crossword, read some comics, and go to my writing group, but that would probably be lying. Why is it that when I take off on Friday, I feel like I’m getting an extra Sunday, and not an extra Saturday? Believe me, I think I’d prefer the latter.

I did buy a new television, which was something. I don’t have cable, but the TV has an internet connection (for Netflix, YouTube, etc.), which I can combine with my Roku and Blu-Ray player and more than enough entertainment. I picked it up at the local Best Buy, which made me glad I hadn’t gone there to buy a PlayStation 4. They were answering phones with “Thanks for calling Best Buy. We’re all sold out of the PS4,” and lots of people with me in the long pick-up line were worried their own purchases wouldn’t be there.

If and when there’s a Portal 3, I’ll consider buying a gaming system — maybe for a new Bioshock — but I haven’t actually had one in years, the original Nintendo. I think I sold it at a garage sale, which is a shame. I never did figure out how to get that robot to work.

Anyway, the movies were Kiss the Girls and Jack Reacher. The former wasn’t great, and then was unbelievably bad in its last twenty minutes, while the latter was entertaining but very forgettable, with more talk about how amazing Tom Cruise’s character was — “Who the hell is Jack Reacher? Well…let me tell you…” — than action.

And then there was my writing group. I wrote this, from a few randomly chosen writing prompts:

In the past, I’ve tried to kill this woman. It was nothing personal, mostly politics; I was just a hired gun, doing a job, and most of the times our paths crossed her name could have easily been any of a hundred others. That doesn’t make it any easier, realizing in the heat of battle that you’re only there because some bureaucrat flagged her name a little higher on that week’s kill list — some Congressman wanted to make a point, or more likely just stumbled on her name at random — and I’m sure it wouldn’t have made her feel any better about the whole damn thing. My intentions were still the same. But it wasn’t built on anything specific, no personal feelings. If anything, I kept accepting the contracts because I respected her too much, respected her skills, wanted yet another chance to match them against mine. I could have walked, or let some other agent tangle with her for a change. Sometimes I wonder why nobody ever forced me to do that. A hundred times we must have met, squared off either face to face or across the divide of rifle scopes, and there we were, both of us still alive. There’s no honor among thieves, they say, but maybe there’s too much among assassins. Maybe you shouldn’t send one killer to kill another. Sometimes I wonder. They had super-soldiers and black ops programs that might have settled the account more quickly and completely than my own self-taught skills, but I guess no one in charge ever learned the power of no. Let’s just keep sending her out, these senators must have said — just as they must have been saying about her on the other side — and eventually it’ll sort itself out. Law of averages. That’s if they even thought about it that far. After all, these were the same men who’d built the Abomination Project — actually called it that, like that wasn’t just asking for trouble — then tried burying it and the evidence when it all went predictably south. I’d tied up a few of those messy loose ends for them myself. The pay was always good, and their checks cleared — you couldn’t always say that in this line of work — but thinking far ahead wasn’t exactly my employer’s strong suit. After all, they hadn’t told that this time me she would be…

And that was my weekend. I also spent some time on Friday coordinating a meeting for tomorrow morning at the office — is it good or bad that I can do work from my phone…on my day off…while on line? — which I’m not exactly looking forward to. But we’ll see.