movies

Sunday

I tried to watch some of the Perseid meteor shower late last night, but cloud cover — and what was probably not the best vantage point anyway — meant I didn’t see anything. (Beyond, y’know, clouds.) It’s okay, but I keep hearing such wonderful things about them and yet don’t think I’ve ever seen them for myself.

I didn’t sleep terrifically after that, for whatever reason, and it took a little while this morning to get Sunday firmly under my feet.

The crossword puzzle wasn’t much of a challenge this week, though clever enough. After lunch, I joined my weekly writing group and came up with this:

“Why are you so afraid?” the woman in the mirror asked.

The old witch stared back, anger coiling in her throat. She choked back what she was tempted to say, held back the rage knotting in her fists. Fury would not serve her well here, and she would not be goaded by this bothersome spirit.

“I am not afraid,” she said after a moment. “And you would do well to remember your place, djinn, lest you wish to gather dust in the tower for another thousand years.”

“I meant no disrespect, my queen,” said the golden-haired face hovering in the glass. Her face, reflecting all the beauty she had lost, showing none of the age and wear that ran like dusty rivers across the visage she now wore. The spirit dared mock her with this image.

“Then show your true form,” she spat, “and tell me why the girl yet lives. She ate of the poisoned apple, and you said — ”

“Which formula did you use?” the djinn asked.

A swirl of mist clouded the mirror, grayed it over like thin frost on a windowpane, then was just as quickly gone. The face was no longer the witch in her stolen youth, but was now the featureless, stony blank of the djinn’s true form — or what it had claimed was its true form. It had claimed many things, hadn’t it? Told her secrets of the dark crafts, spoken of prophecy and revelation, shown her the key to that meddlesome girl’s downfall. And yet where had it gotten her? The girl had not died, and she, the queen, was now a hag, hunched-back and broken, caught in this glamour, in no way the fairest of them all. She should have left the mirror where she found it, listened to the servants’ warnings rather than the riddles and rhymes so favored by the mirror’s sole inhabitant.

But the girl… It was bad enough that she should vie with the queen for her father’s attention, but that her beauty should be said (in some corners) to rival the queen’s own? No, that was intolerable. And that stupid huntsman had done nothing, had spared the girl’s life, bloodied his axe on a stoat or wolf rather than the girl’s slender neck. And the girl — her step-daughter, she thought with some revulsion — had escaped into the woods. And she lived. If the djinn could promise to undo all that, then what other choice did the queen have?

“What formula?” she asked. “The very one you spoke of, in the old books. I spoke the ancient spell, and she ate from the apple, but all she does is sleep.”

“Ah,” said the djinn. “Just another lesson learned.”

The ending doesn’t quite work — I was rushed trying to squeeze in that final sentence prompt — but I had fun with it.

Afterward, we went to see The Bourne Legacy…whose ending also doesn’t quite work, and which doesn’t do anything too remarkably. But what it does, it does intelligently, and I think it’s a solid B-minus.

“I bet you told her all your trees are sequoias.”

Another unpleasantly hot and humid day. Even at seven o’clock this morning, when I drove with my father to Mineola so he could get his car inspected (and could, unlike me last month, get a ride back home), it was muggy and the sun was beating down.

That kept up pretty much all day, but it wasn’t all bad. I kept to the house, read, and watched some of the Olympics. I’d forgotten that trampoline was a sport, despite having had a fitness instructor in college who had been a trampolinist at one point. She said the sport had taken a hit in the 1970s, after one too many accidents and injuries because of unsupervised children on backyard trampolines. Which I guess is why stumbling across it in the online coverage was a little like discovering that Hula Hooping was a sport. But it remains an actual thing, and, from what I saw of the women’s finals, takes a fair amount of gymnastic athleticism.

Then this evening I watched the lovely To Catch a Thief, with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. It’s maybe not overly suspenseful by Hitchcockian standards, but it was thoroughly enjoyable.

And that was Saturday.

“I love you but you have no idea what you are talking about.”


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I went to see Moonrise Kingdom. It’s almost a parody of Wes Anderson movies, or, maybe more forgivingly, the apotheosis of them, but I quite enjoyed it, for all its quirks and affectations.

After, I came home, and joined my parents next door, for a barbecue in our neighbor’s backyard. It was nice. I met someone I went to junior high with, now the girlfriend of another neighbor, who I also went to junior high with. I don’t know what was weirder: realizing that junior high school was twenty-plus years ago, or realizing at the same time that it feels like at least twice that.

Sunday. It gets away from me a little at the end.

I did the crossword puzzle today, went to the movies with friends, and wrote this:

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The movie I saw was The Dark Knight Rises. I won’t deny there was a little part of me eying the exits, on the lookout for suspicious behavior, a little extra-jumpy at the (not infrequent) sound of gunfire on the screen. I’m really angry and sad that the conversation about the film, which I thought was very good, has to accommodate the terrible tragedy that happened earlier this week in Colorado. That our enjoyment of the movie had to be so horribly undermined by a murderous asshole with a gun.

At the same time, of course I recognize that that’s the very least of the tragedy. And by calling the gunman a murderous asshole, I’m neither trying to make light of his terrible crime nor suggesting that I don’t have some small amount of…well, not exactly sympathy, but maybe empathy, or understanding, for the very real mental problems he might have, which led him to this horrible act.

But I also don’t want to make him out to be something that he’s not, something that fits into the narrative of the Batman films. Because that’s just feeding into his delusion, and I can’t help but feel that when the media does it — and have they ever — they are in no small degree complicit, or at the very least encouraging to other deranged and violent souls. If your goal is to prevent this sort of thing from happening again, you don’t call the gunman “the Dark Knight Killer.” Better, I think, that you call him a murderous asshole.

Those who are truly complicit, of course, are the gun manufacturers and the NRA and the lobbyists, and moreover the state and federal representatives who have failed to protect anything but the interests of the former three. It’s important to remember that the gunman in Colorado purchased his guns legally, and yet I’m hard-pressed to think of any legal reason why a private citizen would need, or should be allowed, a semi-automatic weapon.

I’m not wholly, across-the-board anti-gun. I’ve fired one myself all of once, on a firing range when I was a Boy Scout, and I’ve never really seen the appeal. But I understand, to some extent, their use for hunting and for self-defense. But a weapon like the one that did most of the killing in Colorado has one purpose — to kill — and because of that we need more, not less, safeguards against it falling into the wrong hands.

I feel like this post has gotten away from me a little bit, more half-formed thoughts than anything else. (Hey, there were some silly superheroes up above!) But it really was impossible to talk about The Dark Knight Rises without talking about what happened in Aurora. In many ways, the film is an indictment of those who would use violence and terror to achieve their ends. It’s a fitting conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy — and that, quite frankly, is the conversation I want to be having.