movies

Sunday

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and am I wrong that I’m glad it falls on a weekend this year so that I won’t have to push past throngs of green-clad drunks during my evening commute?

It’s been an unremarkable couple of days. It snowed all of yesterday, although you wouldn’t know it, except for strange bits that accumulated some odd places (like around my parents’ car’s license plate frame) and didn’t melt. Otherwise, there was not accumulation.

Last night, I watched two very different movies, Absentia, a very low-budget but fairly decent horror movie, and Wreck-It Ralph, which richly imagines an alternate world in which children still play in video arcades. (The last one I used to visit, Playland in State College, closed down several years ago.) Still, it was cute and sweet.

And today I wrote this, which is neither of those things:

They called her the Bird Woman of Alcatraz, which was kind of dumb, since she’d never even been to Alcatraz, not even as a tourist, and couldn’t have been as an inmate. But nicknames aren’t exactly the most logical of things, so after a while I guess that’s just who she was. It had stuck. That’s how everyone knew her when I first moved to town, at any rate.

She had been imprisoned several times, that much was true — starting with her extradition from France in 1978, after which she was held in federal custody for seven years, for what turned out to be her own kidnapping. That must have been embarrassing, and there’s a wealth of newspaper stories about the bungled case, the supposed evidence of the supposed crime, even in this little town’s underfunded library. If I’d been interested in any of that, I could have spent a weekend digging through microfiche, or combing the archives of court records online. I could have made a dozen phone calls, discovered if I still have any friends left at my old job. But I wasn’t interested in any of that. Those stories had been written already, that well had run dry, and time, as they say, was ticking. It was just dumb luck that I’d been exiled here, and I needed to act before anybody else caught wind of what had happened. A scoop like this could put me back on top, but only if I got to her first.

I could see the headline now: “Bird Woman Kills Superhero.” Or maybe, if something more grisly was needed to sell: “Mr. Impenetrable Eaten Alive.”

It was a work in progress. Obviously he hadn’t been eaten alive. I didn’t have a clue what a post-mortem would show; Impenetrable was reportedly from the planet Klaxos, had fallen to Earth when his home planet was destroyed in a fiery coup, and was reportedly the only one of his kind. (That point was still debatable.) We’d never even seen a blood sample, much less the bloody scene that the Bird Woman had left behind her. But everything I’d been told — a few well-placed dollars in the county sherrif’s pockets — said that Mr. Impenetrable had been eaten.

Was it cannibalism if he was an alien?

Yeah, sometimes forty minutes and three writing prompts can produce gold. And sometimes there’s this.

A different class of Monday

I met my parents in the city for dinner this evening. Which is good, because my work computer decided to install nine updates right when I was shutting down for the evening, and if I hadn’t stayed in Manhattan, I would have missed my train anyway.

We just met for a quick bite at a diner not too far from my office. My mother is taking a course for a few weeks, so it’s altogether possible I’ll meet up with her for dinner regularly while that’s going on.

My father and I thought we’d maybe spend the hour-plus at the nearby Harry Potter Exhibit in Times Square, but it seemed really over-priced for what it is — a very crowded, not terribly informative, tour past a bunch of replicas. I’m a fan of the books and the movies, for the most part, but even if every single one was a real, honest-to-goodness, held-by-Daniel-Radcliffe prop, that’s not really the sort of thing that’s every really much interested me. I just caught a slightly later train home.

I wish I could say I spent the evening much more productively, but I mostly just stumbled into re-watching Seven (or Se7en, I suppose) on cable. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s elevated so far above what it probably ought to have been by some very good acting, direction, and cinematography. I’m not suggesting that Andrew Kevin Walker’s doesn’t deserve some of the credit…even if the rest of his short resume so far isn’t hugely impressive. But it’s so easy to see how this movie could have gone differently if it hadn’t been so well cast and so well shot. Again, it’s not perfect, and sometimes I think it’s grisly just for the sake of being shocking. (But, then again, it’s maybe also a little more visceral and alive than some of David Fincher’s more recent work. Maybe.) But it does so much so well, and none of it should really work, that you just realize that some movies are just a weird kind of alchemy.

So that plus work, lots and lots of work, was pretty much my Monday. I also finally finished reading The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, which was a lot of fun. Yep, that was a Monday.

But I still don’t like Daylight Savings Time

I’ve been having some issues with WordPress lately, which I thought that I (or maybe just magic elves) had resolved, but which returned again this weekend. That meant the blog, this blog, was difficult to update or even read, with 30-second lags between every new page or refresh. Thirty seconds is a long time in Internetese.

But I contacted my hosting provider (Dreamhost) about it this morning, and they resolved the problem by this evening. Everything seems to be working much faster now, which is good.

I wish I could tell you that I spent the weekend doing something worth writing about here, but that would be a lie. It was an okay weekend, but I mostly just did some cleaning yesterday, which made me a little miserable allergy-wise overnight, and reading of Kaleidotrope submissions. I also watched Safety Not Guaranteed, and while I’m not 100% sure about the ending, I liked the movie in general.

My weekly writing group didn’t happen this week, so that’s about it, really.

Cover story

I spent some of the day cleaning, some of it watching television, some of it reading Kaleidotrope submissions, some it unexpectedly napping, and this evening watching Argo.

I thought I would be more impressed with it than I was. It’s a decent movie, well made and acted, with some moments of greatness. But I don’t think it’s a great movie, or even necessarily Ben Affleck’s best as director. It keeps juggling tones, and doesn’t always do it successfully, and I don’t think the film is really engaging until the second half, once Affleck’s character actually travels to Iran. And then the film is almost undone again by one Hollywood contrivance after another, manufactured tension that can make everyone involved look silly. And that’s leaving aside the possible historical inaccuracies and other criticisms that have followed the film.

I mean, I liked it, but I did not in any way love it. I can’t speak to its being last year’s “best picture,” though it did win that award. I only saw two of the other movies nominated in that category — Django Unchained and Beasts of the Southern Wild — and I don’t know if either were necessarily better than this. Certainly more daring, more personal. But I did like it, for the most part.

Also? Sepegal

Last week, I watch Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo, recently named by the British Film Institute and Sight and Sound‘s critics poll as the greatest movie of all time.

This week, I watched Mongolian Death Worm, which amazingly isn’t anywhere on their list.

What can I say? I watched it with friends over Twitter, they’re Canadian, and apparently there’s slim pickings on the Canadian version of Netflix.

In all honesty, it was a lot of fun. It’s a pretty terrible movie, as you might expect, just from the title. I think it aired on the SyFy Channel here at some point, which is pretty much a guarantee of it’s being bad. But it’s bad in some odd ways. There are what might almost be clever lines muddled by bad acting, and there’s bad writing delivered with what might almost be good acting. Also, they say the name of the village, Sepegal, a lot.

It’s a little like Tremors, except not very good. Under the right kind of circumstances, I’d definitely recommend it.

And that was Friday. There was a lot of other work-related stuff, mostly one long report I’m almost finished with, but honestly, the death worms were the highlight of my day.