movies

The Walking Zed

I wish I could say I’ve been exceptionally busy since last Sunday, and that’s why I haven’t written here much since then, except to post the occasional song and song lyric. But it’s really more that one day has been just like the last, and there hasn’t been a whole lot to write about. Lots of things happening at work, lots of projects underway, but nothing that necessarily bears mention.

Yesterday, I finished reading World War Z, which was surprisingly entertaining. Today, I went to see the movie version, which, maybe unsurprisingly, was not.

The movie has its moments, but far too few of them, and I was bored more than anything else by the end. (“More like World War Zzzzzzzzz,” I joked on Twitter, until some madwoman suggested it should be pronounced “Zed.” I know, right?) The book works a lot better than it ought to, given that there are no central characters or even, really, what you would call a plot. Brooks is great at introducing a lot of neat ideas, and surprisingly adept at wringing tension out of stories that we know, right up front, are going to end at least reasonably well. (It’s an oral history told by the survivors of the zombie war, after all.) He’s not quite as skilled at making the authors of each of those stories sound like a different person, but it’s a clever concept overall and engaging enough that I could forgive the book its occasional faults.

I’m less forgiving of the movie, which bears only a passing resemblance to the book. Not that I think the book is especially cinematic, or that I can’t understand all the changes that they made to it. It’s just that those changes don’t add up to an exciting summer spectacle, or a good time at the movies. There are hundreds, if not thousands of extras on screen — super-fast zombie swarms, one of many deviations from the text — but it’s remarkably bloodless for a zombie movie, with only a few genuine scares. (That’s what you get with a PG-13 rating, I guess.) It’s not an awful film, and I don’t think it quite unseats Survival of the Dead from its place in my heart as most disappointing zombie movie. But I honestly think I would have been better off going with my first impulse and seeing Fast & Furious 6.

Yes, that was my first impulse. What? Don’t judge me.

Last night, I watched another somewhat disappointing movie, The Awakening. As the AV Club review says, “the film does include a few effective chills, thanks to its elegantly creepy setting—an old manor house turned boarding school—and its use of period paranormal-detection equipment.” It takes a real turn near the end, however — one that’s impossible to discuss without spoiling the entire movie — and one that I’m not at all convinced really works. As the AV Club also points out, “the unraveling is a letdown, not just because it diffuses the frightening mystery, but because it treads on the wistful, doomed sense of longing the film built up.”

Today I also had my weekly writing group, where a set of pictures and words pulled from a magazine prompted this for some reason:

In theory, he was already dead. He could stay inside the capsule for another year, maybe longer if he managed to stretch what was left of the supplies, or he could swing open the hatch and let what would inevitably happen, happen now. There would be no rescue, even if Tabitha reconsidered, and he knew there was little chance of that. And even if she did, even if right this minute she was telling the others where to find him, and they were plotting a course, it would be the better part of a decade before they reached him, at best. He had only two options: face death now, the brutal cold of the planet’s surface, hypothermia or asphyxiation — he was not entirely sure which would claim him first; or delay the end, for a little while, push it off with few short months of solitude and exile and nothing but his own thoughts and corps rations for company. There was only one logical choice. And yet, it was logic that had found him in this place to begin with. He would be an even bigger fool not to realize that. There was only one choice, but that did not mean he had to make that choice today.

He was lucky the rest of the crew had died on impact or in the explosion before. It would save him from the tiresome chore of having to kill them.

There was still the on-board AI to contend with, only a vestige of what had been destroyed in the main ship, more child’s toy than super-computer, but it could still pose a threat if it was running the code that Tabitha had written into it. He had heard nothing from the AI since crashing; the capsule’s internal diagnostics suggested it was inactive, likely inoperable if not destroyed, but he did not know how far to trust that. The diagnostics had already been fooled once by his wife’s clever sabotage.

He didn’t think she had meant to kill McKenzie or Parish, who had escaped in the capsule with him, or any of the ship’s modest crew. The AI had disabled the fire suppression system during a routine refueling, then allowed a short-circuit in one of the hydroponic bays. If the bay had been empty at the time, if they had been using the refueling stop to also restock their supplies, they might have remained at the station long enough for everyone aboard to escape. Instead, he had…

It feels rushed near the end, not least of all because it literally trails off, and I don’t really have a handle on the character (much less the others he mentions). But what can you expect from forty minutes in a crowded Panera Bread?

Oh, and I started reading Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I’m about a third of the way into the novel and really quite enjoying it so far.

Until next Sunday, then?

Sunday

Last night, I watched Æon Flux, which was not very good. I mean, not awful, except perhaps in all the ways that it was awful, but not a successful movie by any stretch. It’s best when it rises to the level of interesting and colorful mess. I can’t really blame it for being so very untrue to the original cartoon, if only because the original cartoon was so often untrue to itself. (It’s not exactly a spoiler to say none of the episodes are directly connected…or even that Aeon dies in a lot of them.)

Today, I went to see Man of Steel with friends. It’s an entertaining summer movie…and apparently it has something to do with Superman? In all serious, I enjoyed it. (And a whole lot more than that other summer blockbuster that pretended to be the thing in its title.)

In between all that, I wrote this from a couple of prompts:

When they found it, when Jacobs split the final stone with his pickaxe and pulled the artifact from the rubble, none of the others knew that this would be the thing that made each of them famous. They were concerned just with trying to survive the discovery.

“Do you feel that?” asked Jacobs, who would not be so lucky. He held the object up to the light so that there could be no mistake. He was just as shocked as all the others to see this impossible thing. But none of the others, and perhaps not even Jacobs himself, noticed that his hands were shaking or that the impossible thing he held in them was starting to glow. “It’s kind of a hum, you know, kind of low-level. I think maybe it’s — “

But they never learned what Jacobs thought. The artifact, which should have been destroyed — if not by the cave-in that had trapped them there, or by the pressure that had trapped it for centuries inside of rock, then certainly by the clumsy swing of Jacob’s axe as he’d tried to force his way out and back to the surface. It was an impossible thing, ridiculous even, and Jacob had been an idiot to go picking it up.

He had no one to blame but himself when it exploded.

At least, that’s what they would tell themselves in the days and weeks to follow. Murdock, who’d been close enough to Jacobs that she was knocked backward by the blast, then knocked unconcious when her head thudded against the cave wall, would blame Jacobs most of all, even if she knew in her heart that she probably would have done exactly the same thing.

“It was a lightbulb,” she said. “It was a goddamn lightbulb hidden inside the stone. Buried for a thousand years, how did a lightbulb even get down there?”

None of them could say; none of them even would say for sure if that was the thing they had seen in Jacobs’ hands. It was too ridiculous, and whatever it had been, the artifact was now gone. The explosion had taken care of that. Dawson had his theories — he was the one who’d started calling it the artifact, and who would later popularize the term when the media started calling, when their powers were revealed. But his theories were only guesses — born out by a little research, he would say, even if he seemed unwilling to share that research with the others.

For the time being, they had their powers, and if it had been an ancient artifact, or the energy expelled in its explosion, or dark matter, or time travel, or even mad experiments from the future gone horribly wrong — again, Dawson and his theories — what did it matter? They couldn’t go back to what they had been. Even Murdock, with her fangs, wouldn’t have wanted that.

The blast hadn’t just killed Jacobs, or tossed Murdock against the wall, it had cleared the way for them to escape. That’s what they told her, when she regained conciousness in the woods outside the cave, and she saw bo reason for any of them — Dawson, Phillips, or van Houten — to lie to her. They’d never found their way back inside, of course, even when she suggested there might be some value in investigating the scene, even after their powers had started to emerge and they had good reason to investigate. She knew she was quicker to distrust — sometimes it took all her strength to just not tear them literally apart — so she decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. If they were lying…

I don’t know either.

Anyway, um…happy Father’s Day!

Time off is over

I go back to work tomorrow, although luckily not yet back to the office. I’ll be working from home on Mondays starting this week, and also starting summer hours. So that should be interesting.

The weekend was okay. I watched Die Hard again on Friday night for some reason, not that anyone really needs a reason to watch Die Hard. On Saturday, I watched Greenberg, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that. I’ve also been watching episodes of Better Off Ted, Orphan Black, and The Fall. It’s amazing that I actually also got some reading done — Under the Dome and World War Z, in preparation for both their adaptations — or writing. But I did:

I wasn’t born on Mars, not like my brother, who nearly died when the borders were closed — he says — and the space ports stopped letting refugees like our parents escape off the planet. They made it as far as Phobos, thanks to a pair of forged visas, my asthmatic brother in tow, and that’s where I was born, in this half-built lunar colony that was never supposed to be anything but a staging ground for the red planet below. If the government of Mars even knows we’re still here, they haven’t publicly acknowledged that fact in fifteen years, just like they’ve said nothing about the military listening posts that are supposed to be someplace on the far side of Deimos, either on the moon’s surface or in near orbit, radioing back to Earth. I don’t know how you can be afraid of someone who’ll keep their head in the red sand like that for so long, but my brother says we’re lucky they don’t turn their attention towards us.

“You weren’t there at the fall, Mary,” David says. “You don’t know what it was like. When they wrested control, it was bloody and brutal and — ”

To be honest, I sometimes just tune him out. David has a flair for the dramatic; and while sometimes that’s fun — it’s maybe the only flair this old abandoned moon base has going for it — it can get a little tiresome. He’s too cautious, which I guess I understand. He’s not wrong, I wasn’t there, and I didn’t see what the new regime did to dissenters less lucky than my parents. Whole villages reduced to dust, like reverse terraforming, the tools of the original Martian settlers turned into weapons by Kendall and his followers. We still have some of the footage, and David’s right about the bloody and brutal part. Kendall was a maniac, vicious and power-hungry, and he forced good people like my parents to flee to this ramshackle little moon.

But is he even still alive?

That was the weekend.

And this is my monthly music mix for May:

  1. “Q.U.E.E.N.” by Janelle Monáe (feat. Erykah Badu)
  2. “Dayton, Ohio – 1903” by Randy Newman
  3. “The Rains of Castamere” by the National
  4. “Buildings & Mountains” by the Republic Tigers
  5. “The Dark End of the Street” by James Carr
  6. “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” by Milan & Phonenix
  7. “Mr. Spock” by Nerf Herder
  8. “Au Revoir (Adios)” by the Front Bottoms
  9. “Dead Against Smoking” by Admiral Fallow
  10. “Always Alright” by Alabama Shakes
  11. “My Love Took Me Down to the River to Silence Me” by Little Green Cars
  12. “Dougou Badia” by Amadou & Mariam (feat. Santagold)

Wednesday

It was a little weird yesterday, working from home, in between a three-day weekend and a five-day vacation. I can’t claim that I got a lot done — I spent most of the day researching instructors teaching a particular course — but it beat going into the office.

Today, I read a bunch of Kaleidotrope stories, getting the number of submissions still waiting on a reply down into the single digits. I should be able to get to the rest of them before the end of the week, if not tomorrow, which is good.

I’ll need to turn my attention, then, to editing stories for the next issue, in July, but at least I won’t have to contend with more submissions until January. That will help a little with my being full-up — everything I accept now goes into 2015 if not later — but also just with my sanity. The truth is, I don’t necessarily read every story front to back. I try to give each a fair shake, but if I can tell it’s not working for me, why would I assume it would be any better for a reader? (And why am I even doing this if these aren’t stories I want to read?) But even with the stories where you can tell right away it’s just not working, or isn’t what you’re looking for, that still leaves dozens if not hundreds of stories I need to give a closer look.

I topped off the evening by watching Rounders, which is well acted if a little dull.

Saturday and Sunday

Yesterday, I read a bunch of Kaleidotrope submissions, and I finished playing the very enjoyable Bioshock Infinite. Then I capped the day off with a couple of movies: Silver Linings Playbook, which I liked a whole lot, and John Dies at the End, which…well, it wasn’t terrible. (Although I do think Noel Murray is right in that it’s “meant to appeal to people who are either chemically altered or sleep-deprived.”)

Today I did the crossword puzzle and wrote this with my weekly writing group:

“Because he was angry,” Bill said.

“What does that have to do with anything?” asked Jake. “He’s always angry. Every time I see him, I think he ought to be wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Hulk Smash.’”

“Is that some kind of pop-culture reference I’m supposed to get?” asked Bill.

“Well it’s not fashion advice, grandpa” said Jake. “I just think you should have told him. He’s going to find out eventually.”

“That’s if the Medusa Project even keeps running. Oversight has been asking difficult questions, and at this point, all the other funding is almost dried up.”

“When the hell were you going to tell me this?”

“When ‘almost’ turned into ‘all but.’ Don’t worry, you’re still more in the loop than Anderson.”

“I should hope so. He just has to get injected with the stuff, I’m the one who has to manufacture it. Which we can’t do without money, by the way.”

“I know. I’m not shutting you down.”

“Just shutting us out. Keeping secrets. First you don’t tell Anderson that his wife has died, because it might make him angry, and now you’re telling me the purse is all but empty.”

“Almost. It’s a subtle difference.”

“We’re not working with tuning forks and salad shooters down there, you know. If Medusa is going to work — ”

“You need money, I know. You need equipment and staff — ”

“And more of the compound.”

“Well there I can help you. There’s been another outbreak. And this time we’ve taken some of them live.”

“What? And you waited this long to tell me? When? How many?!”

“Seven. They’re en route, and will be here before nightfall. Apparently the outbreak happened someplace in Romania.”

“Well that’s hardly surprising. That’s not far from where we think Patient Zero was — wait, seven? And they let themselves be captured?”

“We sent in a strike team.”

“You mean you sent in Anderson. Damn it, Bill, the man’s a lot of things, but he is not field-tested yet.”

“The man’s a Marine.”

“Was a Marine. That’s before we started sticking needles in him, giving him a taste for the compound. We haven’t even moved him into the second phase of Medusa yet.”

“As of 1800 hours yesterday, you have. Frank Wilder administered the injection.”

“Whoa, whoa, Wilder? Tell me you did not let that quack into my lab while I was out. We don’t have any idea what phase two injections could mean long-term. You think Anderson is angry now? What happens if he goes full-on bloodsucker?”

“Wilder — and for that matter, your notes — suggest there’s only a small possibility of that. I didn’t make this decision lightly.”

“So it was your decision.”

“We’re running out of time, not just money. Besides Romania, we’re seeing scattered cases in Madrid, Beirut…Omaha. God, Jake, do you really think we’re going to be able to keep quiet on this much longer if we don’t start using our secret weapon?”

“And that’s why you didn’t tell Anderson anout his wife. Because he’s a weapon you don’t want going off in your face.”

“You didn’t see the footage from Romania. We’ll tell him — I’ll tell him — when we’re sure he’s stable. And if Medusa does get shut down…”

“He won’t be that easy to kill,” said Jake. “Not anymore. Even if he’s stable, he still might be a threat.”

“Well, we’ll decomission that bridge when we come to it.”

And that was the weekend. Well, except for the tomorrow part of it, anyway.