movies

Saturday

I don’t quite know how it happened, but somehow I convinced myself that I’d had my car inspected back in April. That’s when it was supposed to be inspected, which means that for the past three months I’m just lucky I never got a ticket. My mistake was revealed last week when I tried to renew my car’s registration with the state of New York and discovered they didn’t have a yearly inspection on file. I’m not sure what it says about me — or this weblog — to admit that I combed through my blog’s archives to see if I’d made any mention of having the inspection done in April, or that I was prepared to send the New York DMV photographic proof of what in retrospect was an expired sticker. But I found no mention in the archives, and the sticker was expired, so I realized I’d have to bring the car in a few months late.

Which I did this morning. I got up around 7, which is kind of the last thing I want to do on a Saturday if I can help it, and drove to the auto-body shop in Mineola. It used to be you could get a train back from Mineola right after that, the station just a block’s short walk from the shop, but a couple of years ago the LIRR changed the schedule just enough to make that all but impossible. So I had to wait around for about half an hour, and then get a train to the station one stop after mine and walk home. (That’s just how the stations are set up: Mineola’s maybe an hour-plus walk away from my station, but the next station after that’s only about a twenty-minute walk away.)

It’s okay. The rain the other day really did cool things down, and it wasn’t an unpleasant morning walk. I knew I’d have to do it, so I had my iPod along with me.

When I got home, I called the air conditioner repair service to get a window on when they’d be returning the AC they took with them on Tuesday. Between 9:30 and 11:30, I was told, which basically gave me enough time to take a shower, have breakfast, and pull out all the plastic and plywood I’d used to cover up the big gaping hole in the living room wall. I did my best on Tuesday to disguise the hole, and make it exceptionally difficult for the dog to get out through it, or for burglars to poke their heads in. I even slid some furniture in front of it, but I have to admit I was glad to be getting rid of it finally.

Putting the air conditioner back in the hole took all of fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. And immediately you could tell that it was working. I paid and tipped the two guys, and they went on their way.

Then I went and picked up my car. I had to take the train back to Mineola, but luckily the LIRR makes a few other options available during the day. (Like one train every hour.) I got the car, after its inspection and oil change, and then I went grocery shopping.

Then I came home, napped a little, read some comics, and watched an episode of Touching Evil. (I was familiar with the US remake, which was well received but canceled right away, but I’d never seen the original British version. Apparently it’s now on Netflix.)

This evening, I watched Underworld: Evolution. Which was not very good. I was surprised back in January by how much I kind of liked the first movie in the series, but this was definitely a case of diminishing returns. And, pretty as Kate Beckinsale may be, I’m not sure I can bring myself to watch the next two.

So, anyway, that was my Saturday.

Saturday

It was a quiet day, spent mostly hanging around the house. I went food shopping in the morning, then over lunch somehow wandered into the genuinely terrible movie Larry Crowne on cable. It’s actually a remarkable movie in a way; despite being genuinely bad on most every level, there’s still something pleasant and watchable about it. A friend over Twitter described it, quite rightly, as a sort of “banal coma,” and Keith Phipps of the AV Club writes:

Above all, the film offers a neat lesson in the pros and cons of movie stars, whose presence can elevate even the slimmest material with sheer charisma, then drag it back down when that charisma gets overtaxed. Hanks and co-star Julia Roberts are born stars—or at least extremely practiced ones—which serves them well here until it becomes apparent that the film has little going for it beyond their personal appeal.

Later in the day, though, I watched the considerably better — the surprisingly better, actually — Fright Night remake. It’s not brilliant or anything, but then again, neither was the original. This one’s probably scarier, all around, and definitely less campy. Like I said, it’s surprisingly not at all bad.

Then again, I’m a guy who willingly watched more than half of Larry Crowne, so what do I know?

Great power with a side of great responsibility

So it’s Sunday again, and that means the crossword puzzle, the writing group, and a movie afterward. The crossword wasn’t anything special, although the movie was better than I expected. The new Spider-Man isn’t exactly what I’d call amazing — and it’s usually best in those rarer moments when it’s not treading all too familiar ground — but I found a lot to enjoy about it (particularly Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield). I’m not convinced we needed a Spider-Man reboot, much less a brand new origin story, much less that this brings enough new to the table. But you know, for an afternoon’s entertainment, it wasn’t half bad.

Oh, and the thing I wrote. Here it is:

When the plane landed, the doctor was afraid, and the Magus levitated the orbs.

“Why didn’t you try doing that to the plane?” the doctor asked with a weary laugh. “You could have saved us from all that awful turbulence.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” the Magus said, with the heavy sigh of a man all too accustomed to explaining himself. The twin crystal orbs swirled slowly an inch above the man’s outstretched hand, then fell with a soft plop into his lap as he turned his wrist to read his watch. “Anyway, we made pretty good time.”

“What do you mean it doesn’t work like that?” the doctor asked. “If I had the power to levitate objects, I wouldn’t be wasting my time with a pair of cheap plastic balls.”

“They’re crystal, actually,” said the Magus. “Quite valuable.” He held one up to overhead light, catching its gleam, then polished the orb with the end of his dark velvet robes. Satisfied, he pocketed them both. “And strictly speaking, it’s not levitation. I just…well, let’s just say I help the orbs forget a little bit about gravity for a short while.”

“I don’t understand,” said the doctor.

“Of course not,” said the Magus. “You’re a man of science. And besides, you’re pre-occupied by thoughts of your impending grisly death.” He stared down the aisle toward the front of the plane. “Do you think they’ve put away the drinks cart already?”

“What do you mean?” asked the doctor.

“I mean if it’s going to take this long to taxi to the gate, I wouldn’t mind another ginger ale.”

“No! About my death! Can you — can you see the future?”

“That’s a pretty fancy way of putting what I’m able to do,” said the Magus. He thumbed absently through the in-flight magazine. “I’m mostly just good at reading body language. And you have the bearing of a man about to die a not wholly unexpected violent death.”

“Did somebody send you?” the doctor asked. He was pinned between the Magus and the window, with no escape. Not for the first time, he regretted having passed on the seat next to the emergency exit. “Did Kendrick send you? I didn’t take his money, I promise. I told the FBI nothing!”

“Look,” said the Magus, “it’s not me you have to worry about. I’m just a guy in a velvet cloak with a long white beard and a couple of floating orbs in his pocket. Do I really look like I work for the Chicago mob?”

“Then what are you doing here?” asked the doctor.

“Saving your sorry life, I guess,” said the Magus. “Although until ten minutes ago I was just going on vacation.” He sighed. “Seriously, who do you have to kill around here to get another ginger ale?”

“Oh, sorry,” he told the doctor. “Poor choice of words.”

These weekend things go by way too quickly, don’t they?

Saturday

I ran a few errands this morning, including getting a much-needed haircut. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as putting together a to-do list and then, one by one, crossing the items off.

I spent the afternoon reading a few Kaleidotrope submissions on the back deck and going for a short walk around town. And this evening, I watched Mean Streets. The movie is a little shapeless at times, a little rough around the edges, and maybe more of a proving ground for Martin Scorcese’s later films, but it still has a lot to recommend it.

On paper, Saturday wasn’t anything remarkable, but it was a nice day nonetheless.

Facehugger-mugger

Today was a pretty regular Sunday. I woke up, did the crossword puzzle, watched some more Would I Lie to You?, and went to the local Home Depot to get a new propane tank. I had to clean off an old empty one, which had been sitting alongside the garage for the better part of a year, which upset to no end the worms and crawly things that had made a home for themselves in the dirt that had caked to the underside of the empty tank.

Speaking of worms and crawly things — which might be a spoiler, although I think a relatively small one — I also saw Prometheus today. And while I hate saying this about a movie that looks this good, that has so many genuinely good moments and touches, and that offers some potentially interesting questions…but I was really quite disappointed in it overall. My thoughts are largely the same as MaryAnn Johanson, who writes:

It had me at hello, Prometheus did, and for a fair while, and I’m still in awe of it visually, for moments like this one: Scott draws out the sequence in which the ship Prometheus approaches the planet it has been aiming at in a way that’s like cinematic lovemaking, one that lets our eyes and our minds luxuriate in the notion that this is a whole ’nother planet, the ship deorbiting unhurriedly from the huge emptiness of black space into a brand new sky and descending into a new world that is so totally amazing in and of itself, just by its sheer existence and the fact that we’re there, that it barely matters what else might be found there.

And then Prometheus lost me quickly after that, and never won me back again. Even if we had no thought that this might be connected to Alien, it ends up feeling like an Alien retread, as if it feels it must hit the same general notes…

I’ll leave out what those notes are, since that’s venturing much more deeply into spoiler territory. But do understand this: if you go in expecting an Alien prequel, you are going to be disappointed, and yet the film is so very much an Alien prequel, in spirit if not deed, that it almost can’t help but disappoint. The DNA of Ridley Scott’s earlier film (and a fair bit of James Cameron’s follow-up) is all over every frame of this new movie. Some of it just feels reminiscent of Alien, but a whole lot of the movie feels like Scott actively stealing from his younger self, and to considerably lesser effect. If I had somehow wandered into the theater, knowing nothing about the production, or about how the story for Prometheus had developed — if I hadn’t even known that Ridley Scott was directing — my one thought, at the end of the movie, would have been: “Wow, what a gorgeous but empty rip-off of Alien.”

Oh, it’s also kind of disgusting and shockingly violent in places. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — quite the opposite if done well — and heaven knows I managed to find some redeeming value even in The Human Centipede of all things. But there was a stretch of Prometheus that felt like Solaris directed by early David Cronenberg, and I’m not sure it was used to much better effect than making the audience squirm.

All that said, the movie does look incredible, and I think it had me completely, the same way it had Johanson, until at least halfway through. A lot of the actors are underused, but they’re quite good in their limited scenes, particularly Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, and Charlize Theron. (I’m not really sold on Noomi Rapace, though, to be honest.) It’s the fact that there is so much, at least initially, to recommend Prometheus that ultimately makes it so disappointing.

Right before the movie, as part of my weekly free-writing group — the same friends I saw the movie with — I wrote this:

Jack isn’t dead, not exactly, but he might as well be for all the good he’s done us lately. He just sits in the corner of the room, almost never says anything, just stares off into space. I swear sometimes it’s like you can see right through him, like he’s just floating there, half-invisible, or like we’re all the way invisible to him. Tara says we shouldn’t blame him — Jack’s been through a lot lately, more than any of the rest of us — but Tara’s been saying a lot ever since the accident, won’t shut up really, and it’s all too tempting just to tune her out most of the time. Kendall just grumbles a lot, says something about there being no honor among thieves, which I guess is his way of suggesting we should maybe leave Jack behind — every man for himself, or something like that. But I think each of us remember what happened too well to do anything like that. We’re too scared to split up, even if that’s what we would have done if the accident had never happened, and even if deep down we’re just as equally scared of each other. We don’t owe each other anything. But we were all there when those control room doors slammed shut, and the lights went out, and we heard that thing that called itself the Master of Puppets snake its voice into our heads and tell us that we had been chosen to serve it or face death.

Maybe that’s Jack’s problem: maybe he couldn’t decide, and he stared too deep into death before staggering back.

Tara says we shouldn’t have come here, and yeah, sure, but what good is that kind of hindsight going to do us now? When the lights first shot back on, she was convinced it was a joke, some bad-taste prank Kendall or I had decided to play on her. Like it hadn’t been Tara who suggested we break into the old abandoned missile silo in the first place. Like it hadn’t been Tara who’d showed up at Kendall’s dorm complete with maps of the area she’d swiped from her Air Force commander father. Like it hadn’t been Tara who insisted we all get high before hiking out. It’s all well and good to regret all of that now, but regret isn’t going to get us out of the bargain we all struck just to stay alive.

Because, sure, it’s tempting to think it’s some kind of prank, or the drugs, or some kind of shared delusion. I get that, believe me, I do.

But nobody who actually heard that evil son of a bitch talk to them would ever imagine it was anything except powerful and dangerous and infinite.

I’m not really satisfied with all of it. Elements like the “Master of Puppets” and abandoned missile silo are owed to the writing prompts, and I’d probably excise them completely or rework them considerably in any rewrite. But there’s something here, in my head if not on the page, that I think I’d like to revisit.

The same way I’ll probably revisit Prometheus when it comes out on DVD. I think a director and/or screenwriter commentary could be really quite interesting in this case.