writing

Last night, I watched Chronicle, which I generally enjoyed, even if one of its defining features — the “found footage” format — is also one of its weakest. Aesthetically, I think it works; as Scott Tobias notes, it often “seem[s] less like a movie than like the fantastical abruptly, artlessly colliding with the real world.” But on a practical level — who’s filming? why are they filming? still? — it’s a weak link in an otherwise quite entertaining, realistic take on superpowers. I’m a little tired of the shaky-cam, found-footage thing in general, which I think works better in horror anyway, but the other stuff makes Chronicle worthwhile.

Meanwhile, more fun household repair projects found me today: helping with the kitchen sink before I’d even had breakfast, then spending a couple of hours trying (and failing) to fix the garage door after dinner.

In between, I watched The Sting off and on — it’s long been a favorite, and I got the Blu-Ray for Christmas — and wrote this with my weekly group:

The Wizard was an engineering marvel. It was designed for interstellar travel before interstellar travel was cool. Even today, nobody’s quite sure how the Millenium Corporation did it, how they raised all the capital needed to build the damn thing, which even today, a decade later, would be the envy of almost any fleet out among the stars. If it hadn’t been destroyed along with the Earth, just a year after launch, I don’t doubt it would be flying still.

But you didn’t come here for a history lesson. You came here to hire our services, put us on your payroll. I have to promise you, though, what we do here, it doesn’t come cheap. And if we do it right, even you won’t remember hiring us to do it.

It’s called “temporal erasure,” or “history smudging.” You might also have heard it called “time squelching,” if you really have been doing your homework, like you say. But frankly, those folks are amateurs. It’s like using a hacksaw instead of a scalpel to cut out a cancer; the end result is the same, more or less, but there’s a whole lot more collateral damage with the hacksaw.

Chopping up the past too messily is the surest way to bring the time cops down on your ass. If you’ll pardon my French.

We use a scalpel here, with laser precision, and we get results. Results so good, nobody’s the wiser, not even the client.

For instance, you started off by asking me what I knew about the Wizard, one of the first ships launched from Old Earth. A great hulking beast of a ship — ugly too — but you don’t need to be sleek to be fast out in space, I guess; you don’t have to be aero to be dynamic. Massive, and massively expensive. And still under investigation. The circumstances of its destruction, the explosion in the core that took out the ship and the planet below it were suspicious enough that the System’s never quite closed the book.

In fact, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think they were just about to report on some kind of new evidence? An ten-year investigation, arrests possible, iminent…

Of course, they aren’t going to find any. Aren’t going to have found any…? Tenses can get complicated around here, as you might imagine. But not to worry, your Corporation is safe. I could ask you WHY you wanted to destroy your own ship — it really was an engineering marvel, nothing quite like it since — but that isn’t what you paid us for.

Tomorrow, I return my attention to this other short story.

I wrote something today, with my weekly free-writing group:

“If there’s one thing I don’t believe,” she said, “it’s ghosts.”

He knew that she was lying but said nothing, turned back instead to face the window where the writing had appeared. Out of habit, he pulled the pencil stub and notebook from his pocket. The letters were messy streaks of dark red paint, or maybe blood, and if any of the phones in this damn house had been working, he’d have already called in forensics. The red was smudged on the glass like a kid’s finger-paint, and there had to be at least a half dozen prints in there that they could match. That was sloppy, he thought, as he transcribed the message into his notebook. These ghosts, or whoever it was, were just banking on his not being able to call this in to the department anytime soon, or to do to him and Sarah what they’d reportedly done to everyone else who’d been dumb enough to spend the night.

“YOU’RE BOTH GOING TO DIE,” the letters on the dining room window pane said.

“I know I can’t explain it,” Sarah said, “but that doesn’t mean it’s the Joyce family. It’s not a haunting. There’s someone here, and they’re dangerous, but vengeful spirits they’re definitely not.”

He grunted a reply, still wishing absently for crime scene tape, blood kits and dusting powder, his badge and his gun. He didn’t believe in ghosts, wasn’t talking just trying to convince himself like he knew Sarah was. He believed in cold, observable facts. The house had a reputation, and had earned at least some of it — three people had disappeared here or nearby in the past year alone — but he didn’t believe half of what they said about it. He’d done the research just like Sarah, maybe even dug a little deeper because he didn’t have to pretend he didn’t believe in ghosts. He wasn’t even convinced there had been a Joyce family, not like they were depicted in the neighborhood stories, anyway. Inbred mutants at the turn of the century, their suburban house a bloody killing ground. It was all just a little silly, like something out of a bad movie, and there wasn’t anything so clear-cut in any of the newspaper clippings that he’d read.

And yet, someone was here, someone other than the two of them. And everything that had happened tonight — not just the writing, but everything else — proved if nothing else that someone was very hostile.

I am operating under the idea that forty minutes of bad writing — and even if this isn’t awful, it isn’t great — is better than forty minutes of not writing.

After the writing, we went to see Django Unchained. I’ll say this much for it: it isn’t boring. Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz are both quite good in it, as is the scenery-devouring Leonardo DiCaprio. I think Nathan Rabin’s review is probably the closest to my feelings about the film:

In the films of Tarantino’s revenge collection, a noble desire to cinematically right (or re-write) historical wrongs mingles with and mutates more problematic impulses toward exhibitionism, sensationalism, voyeurism, fetishism, and exploitation. In film after film, Tarantino combines aggressively combustible elements—racism, sexism, profanity, hard drugs, violence against women, rape, Nazi brutality, slavery—with the deranged delight of a mad scientist, then cackles with glee as he lights a flame and watches the magnificent destruction that ensues. Tarantino remains an entertainer above all else, so his lurid provocations are generally in service of the intense emotions he forcefully, confidently orchestrates. Part of his genius in manipulating audiences lies in creating immersive cinematic experiences so overpowering that they distract from the thorny questions about race, sex, violence, and representation his films pose without answering. For better or worse, Tarantino aspires to an experience more emotional than intellectual, more in line with the giddy, transgressive thrill he experienced devouring B-movies as a young cinephile than the more cerebral, less immediate charms of the arthouse. He straddles the line separating art and trash, but his allegiance clearly lies with trash.

I’m not sure I’d be quite as generous in grading as Rabin, but I agree with him about pretty much everything here, including the fact that Tarantino’s own return to acting in the film was, at best, ill-advised. It’s an interesting film, with some really great — or at least incredible to watch — moments, but I think it might be my least favorite Tarantino movie. That said, I’m generally a fan and liked Django Unchained, so…

Anyway, that was Sunday.