movies

Today was my regular free-writing group. This is what a few writing prompts and forty minutes netted me:

“I don’t want to alarm you,” says One, “but I think the planet is talking to us.”

“It’s not a planet,” says Two. He adjusts a flashing green knob, then another, on the small console in front of them both, then flips a series of switches in what might be carefully timed precision or might be random (and meaningless) choice. He stares up at the screen pinned to the wall above them, gray and crackling with static, then throws One the sort of look usually reserved for the village idiot.

“It’s a moon,” he says. “That’s what Three has always been. We’re on a moon, in orbit of the planet below, not the other way around.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that it’s talking to us,” says One. “A talking moon isn’t any less strange than a talking planet, you know.”

Two stares at him again, although this time his anger is tempered with might be concern or compassion, or maybe just mild surprise. In the dim light of the control room, One has trouble reading the other man’s face. Two flips another series of switches — the console is a jumble of levers and switches and gauges, none of which make the least bit of sense to One — then whacks the side of the console with the back of his hand. He throws his whole weight behind him as he pushes against a heavy dial that doesn’t budge, and One has the sudden image of a man trying to paddle off from shore, his boat run aground in the rocks of the riverbed, all his efforts wasted and exhausting just to watch. The screen on the wall is still nothing but static, but One thinks there might be a shape underneath all that gray hiss, some kind of image trying to resolve itself, come into focus; but he also thinks Two is likely to collapse from exertion before either of them have any clue what that shape is supposed to be.

“You’re saying you really don’t remember?” says Two. There’s sweat on his brow, and he mops at it with the back of one hand. “You don’t remember coming here a year ago, or anything that’s happened since? You don’t remember when I got here, or when Three downloaded himself into the moon?”

One just stares.

“No,” he says. “Am I supposed to remember that? As far as I know, I just got here.”

Now Two is obviously worried, and seems about to say something, but suddenly the dial spins around madly, a bank of lights starts flashing on the console, and the shape on the screen becomes a large and grinning face.

And there’s no time to explore any of the things One is curious about.

Yeah, I don’t know either.

This evening, I watched Carrie, which I’ve been meaning to watch for a good long while. It’s a strange movie to be watching in 2012, almost forty years after it was first made. There’s no getting around the fact that it’s a little dated, occasionally silly, and frequently way over the top, Brian De Palma style. Or that it’s so entered the lexicon of film, particularly of horror, that it’s all but impossible to be surprised by anything that happens in the movie. Its most indelible scenes and images — the opening in the girls’ locker room, the prom, the ending — are so familiar even to those of us who’ve never seen the film, that sometimes, watching it, it can feel like we’re just filling in a few of the lesser missing pieces. And yet…there’s no denying that some of those images are incredible, or that Sissy Spacek is really great as Carrie White. (She and Piper Laurie were both nominated that year, for this film, for Academy Awards.) The film is far from perfect, and I think the decades since have maybe only helped to underline those imperfections, to turn it into a few effective clips rather than a full-length movie. But it’s still, maybe surprisingly, worth watching.

And that was my Sunday. Is it really the Sunday before Christmas already?

Oh, and the dog is obviously feeling much better. He’s maybe a little put out by the fact that my sister’s dog is suddenly here — will apparently be here for Christmas, of all things — but he’s otherwise back to his old self.