movies

“Very well, I’ll pause for thirty seconds while you cook up your alibis.”

I had a pretty nice day. I spent a good deal of it reading, finishing both Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, a couple of recent graphic novels I picked up at the local library this morning. I enjoyed them both, although I think I’m perhaps a little glad that Spiegelman’s (nevertheless wonderfully drawn) book about fall of the Twin Towers feels just slightly dated. And I did some writing — or maybe I should more accurately call it transcribing, piecing together a story I found in an old notebook, which I’d given up, at least temporarily, for lost. I’m not sure exactly why it stalled out on me the first time — my natural proclivity to let stories stall out on me, perhaps — but I like it, and I think I’d like to see where it’s headed.

After dinner this evening, I watched Green for Danger, a delightful British murder mystery from 1946 set in a World War II hospital. Honestly, how can you not like a movie with exchanges like this?

Barnes: I gave nitrous oxide at first, to get him under.

Cockrill: Oh yes, stuff the dentist gives you, hmmm — commonly known as “laughing gas.”

Barnes: Used to be — actually the impurities cause the laughs.

Cockrill: Oh, just the same as in our music halls.

Thursday various

  • I don’t know why I find this particularly interesting, but I do:

    The post office ignores the return address for Netflix DVDs and sorts them separately for a Netflix truck to pick them up early in the morning for processing.

    Discs are shipped back to the nearest processing facility, regardless of the address on the return envelope; that address is there just for legal reasons, apparently. This seems like something I maybe sort of already knew, but it’s a reminder of the volume they (and by extension the post office) have to process.

  • John Seavey’s Open Letter to Zombie Story Writers:

    In essence, the human body is a machine, like an automobile. You are trying to describe the ways this machine can malfunction to produce a specific effect, and that’s good, but please stop explaining to me how it keeps going without wheels, gasoline, or a functioning engine.

    He raises some interesting points, although I don’t think they apply to the “zombies” in films like 28 Days Later, as he seems to. At least from my recollection — and I re-watched the movie pretty recently — the infected population there a) don’t act at all like George Romeroesque zombies (i.e., no human flesh, no brains), and b) don’t continue acting beyond physically believable limits. Beyond normal pain tolerances, sure — there’s the one guy who keeps running even though he’s literally on fire — but into the realm of sheer impossibility.

  • “What is, come with me if you want to live, Alex?” So you may have heard: a computer has won at Jeopardy. (There goes that Weird Al remix idea!) I’m still looking forward to the televised rematch next month, though perhaps not so much to the subsequent robot apocalypse.
  • It’s worth it for Goodnight Dune alone: Five Sci-Fi Children’s Books. [via]
  • And finally, Jeff VanderMeer on Everything You Need to Know to be a Fiction Writer.

Weekend, part 3 of 3

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day — his birthday was Saturday — which means that my office was closed for the day.

I spent it not doing an awful lot. I finished reading The Best American Comics 2010, which I quite enjoyed, but which has now left me with a longer list of additional comics I want to check out. I watched a movie, Sleeping Dogs Lie, which is a decent, if not altogether perfect, dark comedy about secrets and relationships, and which is surprisingly funny and sweet for a film that starts — be forewarned — with a woman performing oral sex on a dog. (Entirely off-screen, and not particularly graphic, but dear god what kind of search requests am I inviting with this?) Then this evening, I watched The Social Network. It’s this tiny independent movie — you’ve probably never heard of it — but I think it has an outsider’s chance of winning a couple of awards this season. (In all seriousness, it’s really quite good.)

And that’s really it. It’s back to work tomorrow. Unless, you know, it snows too much or something. But I’m not really expecting that to happen.

Monday various

  • Roger Ebert on The Green Hornet:

    Casting about for something to praise, I recalled that I heard a strange and unique sound for the first time, a high-pitched whooshing scream, but I don’t think Gondry can claim it, because it came from the hand dryers in the nearby men’s room.

  • At first I thought it was like that urban legend about the ghost on the set of Three Men and a Baby, but apparently this one’s true: Han Solo does appear in many, if not all, episodes of Firefly.

    If you’re wondering, Mal shot first.

  • Alex Beam of the Boston Globe wonders — or maybe wondered back in November when I first saw this link — are new translations necessary? It’s an interesting question, but there’s no mention of instances when newer translations get things right, or make necessary corrections, or significantly change our understanding of a text. Proust’s famous novel is better translated as In Search of Lost Time, for instance, and newer translations of Camus’ The Stranger have called into question earlier readings of its famous opening lines.

    So, short answer? Yeah, I think they’re still necessary. [via]

  • Speaking of translations, the surprisingly intriguing story of why Uncle Scrooge McDuck is called “Dagobert” in Germany. [via]
  • And finally….

    The Justice League, re-imagined as a 1977 punk rock movie, based on an art challenge posed by Warren Ellis and by the exceptionally talented Annie Wu.

Weekend, part 2 of 3

You know the nicest thing about a three-day weekend? Not having to go to work tomorrow, that’s what.

Today was mostly just a typical Sunday, spent working on the New York Times crossword, doing a little reading, and joining my weekly writing group. Afterward, we went to see the new version of True Grit. But, before I talk about that, here’s what I wrote today in our forty-minute free-writing exercise:

If she knew who had killed her, and the ruby wasn’t expensive, she could ask the old conjuring woman to cast one of the old book’s divination spells, to locate the bastard precisely, and then extract what Badger would have laughingly called her revenge.

But the truth was, Maria didn’t know; to her constant embarrassment she didn’t even know for certain that she was dead, not just stuck between realms, caught in this half-formed kind of limbo, and she certainly didn’t have enough in her pockets to buy the ruby the old woman said she was going to need.

And the woman wasn’t going to help her without payment. Maria could see, even now, the woman wanted her out of the conjurer’s shop. There was a glimmer of fear in her eyes, a frightened look Maria had grown all too accustomed to seeing in her recent travels, and she knew she would have to run if the old woman reached for the wireless or threatened to notify the local constable. Half-dead or not, Maria didn’t need trouble with the law.

Badger would have told her to make the most of her predicament, use the woman’s fear to her advantage.

If you’re going to look like a ghost, why not act like a ghost? That would have been John Badger’s philosophy. If they’re going to be frightened of you anyway, why not put that fear to good use? There wasn’t much benefit to being dead otherwise.

And after two hundred years at it, Badger should know.

Yet Maria couldn’t bring herself to act like that, precisely because, as she would have reminded him, Badger refused to act like that either. He talked a big game, and had even pointed at the council of wraiths they’d encountered in Toledo with a degree of admiration, respect. But she knew he clung to his humanity as fiercely as she clung to hers. The wraiths exploited fear, became fear, and, it was true, reaped huge rewards for it. They wouldn’t have needed the ruby, or the conjuring woman, and they wouldn’t have feared the local law enforcement. In Toledo, they were the law. But Maria also knew they were little else; they had sacrificed their humanity in ways that she — and even the two-century-old Badger — wasn’t ready to yet.

Even if it would have helped her find her murderer.

“I can get you the ruby by sundown,” she lied. “You just get the spell ready — cast your bones, whatever it is you do — and I’ll be back before dark.”

The woman sighed, but then nodded. She turned to walk to the back of the shop, with the understanding that this was Maria’s time to leave.

“If you return without it, half-thing,” the old woman said, not turning around, “know that I will finish you.”

I definitely think there’s a story there. I didn’t develop it any further this afternoon, but, in my head at least, Maria and Badger are interesting characters.

As to True Grit, it’s also full of interesting characters. (See how merciless I am with that segue?) And, while I really enjoyed the original, this one is more realistic and maybe overall the better acted of the two films. The exception, maybe, being Jeff Bridges; he’s terrific, as is everybody else, but John Wayne is a very hard act to follow. Hailee Steinfeld is the real standout in the movie, especially given her young age. (Kim Darby, in the original, was in her early 20s when she played the part.) I’m not so sure I love the ending, although it is similar to how the previous version ended, and I gather it’s the ending from the original novel, which the Coen Brothers were determined to adhere to. I think they deserve a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination, if nothing else, and each of the three leads, including Bridges and Steinfeld, deserve acting nods.

And yet, I think I’d still give the slight edge to the original movie, if only because the new one doesn’t include this wonderful exchange of dialogue:

“When’s the last time you saw Ned Pepper?”
“I don’t remember any Ned Pepper.”
“Short feisty fella, nervous and quick, got a messed-up lower lip.”
“That don’t bring nobody to mind. A funny lip?”
“Wasn’t always like that, I shot him in it.”
“In the lower lip? What was you aiming at?”
“His upper lip.”