Meeting an Idol

I'd like to start off by saying that I am really, really sick right now, and was last night when this momentous event happened. I can possibly attribute the tears to feeling like I was going to die, but probably not. I'm sure I would have cried anyway.

Regardless, last night I went to the Rosamond Gifford Lecture Series talk in Syracuse. Every year a handful of authors are invited to speak about their books, writing in general, and their lives to an audience of interested readers. Last night the guest speaker was none other than Laurie R. King, mystery writer and personal godess to yours truly. Her books about Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, has long been my favorite series, which I have spoken about before.

Last fall, when the 11th book in the series came out, she had an illustration contest for a microstory to accompany the book. Though I did not win, mine was the first submission sent, and in returen I got an awesome poster. I was determined to get the thing signed, so I carried it around in my car for months so as not to forget it.

Naturally, on Monday morning I woke up feeling like death, and only got sicker throughout the day. By the time my mom was ready to leave, I was actually contemplating not going, a true sign of how sick I was. I have worshiped this woman for at least a decade, I have a tattoo in tribute to her, and I was considering not going to see her talk. That was a low point in my life, I can tell you.

Fortunately, my mom convinced me to get off my butt, take some painkillers and go. I'm so very glad I did.

The woman dresses like Marilla Cuthbert in her promo photos, and doesn't change a bit in real life. She walked out on stage and spoke the first sentence from The Beekeeper's Apprentice and I began to cry.

"I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him."

Never mind that I was myself fifteen when I first read the book, and madly in love with all things Sherlock Holmes (still am, for that matter), but King has been one of my great writing influences since then as well. Hearing her recite the first words of one of my favorite, and certainly my most read, books of all time was quite moving. As I'm sure you inferred from the whole weeping thing.

Anyway, the rest of her talk was great, made better by the fact that the painkillers kicked in halfway through and I felt human again. She talked about her own practices when writing, the new projects she has in mind and answered questions from the audience, including mine. Once the talk was over my mom and I quickly exited the theater, attempting to find out where she would be signing books, having been informed by her Facebook page that she would be. We were then told by an usher that all of the signings had happened earlier in the day.

This was the second time that evening I was moved to tears, and this time it wasn't in a good way. My mother, bless her, doesn't take no for an answer and, in a move worthy of Holmes himself, figured out where the reception must be located by checking every door we came to.

I think we were technically crashing a party, but I don't care, since it was here that I actually got to meet Ms. King. I almost cried again, but I was able to hold it together enough to gush like a teenager at a Backstreet Boy's concert (or another, more relevant group). She is a lovely person, and seemed to genuinely appreciate the fawning, or at least had the grace to not be visibly appalled. It was quite a moment for me, and I only wish I hadn't been so damn sick, so maybe I could have formulated an intelligent argument for why she should let me write a screenplay of one of her books. Oh well.

At least I got my poster signed.

Chronicle - Movie Review

*****/5

Chronicle was the first movie I have seen in theaters in months, and I was extremely pleased to discover that I had not wasted my money on it. When I first saw the trailer I thought it was going to be a lame X-Men knockoff, and while I did love Push, I do not tend to like repeated versions of the same idea. Chronicle is, essentially, what X-Men would be if it were just based around the kids, with no Professor X or Magneto. There are no "good guys" and "bad guys", merely three teenagers who are suddenly endowed with incredible and unexplained gifts. What makes this movie truly extraordinary is that it is honestly realistic. No, I don't believe in telekinesis, but if a group of 17 year old boys were suddenly able to do so, this is how it would turn out.

Without giving too much of the plot away, the boys, Andrew, Matt and Steve, all acquire these powers and spend some months playing with them, becoming stronger, and learning how powerful and dangerous they can be. Then one of them goes crazy and starts killing people. If this were to happen in real life, that is just about how it would play out. They wouldn't suddenly become super heros and start rescuing orphans and kittens, they would mess with their neighbors until they realized they could do a lot and get away with it. And then they would do it. I thought the acting was really phenomenal, Dane DeHaan (Andrew) in particular. He looks and acts like a young Leonardo DiCaprio and he portrayed an emotionally unstable teenager with enormous talent. I look forward to seeing more of him in the future.

My only major problem with the movie was the cinematography. I am a fan of the handheld camera style and I think it has been done well a number of times. Chronicle was not nauseating like Cloverfield, and the quality was better than The Blair Witch Project. I would have been entirely on board with it if new cameras were not added. We are introduced with Andrew's camera and told that he will be taking it everywhere with him - he is the narrator and we are seeing his movie. Then we begin to receive footage from other camera: another student, security cameras and police cameras. Suddenly, the intimate feel of a handheld camera is lost. What makes that style so special is that it feels real - like an unedited documentary that only you are seeing. When new cameras are added, this point is defeated. You become aware that at least an editor was needed to collect and compile all the footage, and there goes the intimacy. Dave and I had a long conversation about this, and while his point is correct - there was not really a way to show all of this via one camera, when the cameraman goes insane - I wonder why the filmmakers decided to go the handheld route to begin with.

Halloween Storm, 2011

I’m back in the office now, with actual lights and power enough to type this. Let me tell you about the last few days.

On Friday morning, the radio informed me that the area (Eastern PA) would be getting 4-6 inches of snow. By the afternoon, a co-worker was saying 6-8. When I got home, my mother-in-law said 8-10. I was simply hoping that it would get me out of my Saturday morning cat dissection. No such luck.

At 7:30am Saturday, when I left the house, it was cold, windy and pouring rain. By the time I left class at 11am, it looked like this:This is not normal October snow. I’m from Syracuse, and snow on Halloween is more common than not. But that is usually a powdery dusting. This was wet, heavy, icy shit. January snow. And lots of it. At one point, it was coming down at an inch an hour, easily.

I got home safely - barely - and was eating lunch with my fiance and his mother when that stupid Miley Cyrus song about hiking came on the radio. I said, “When I hear this at the office, I turn the radio off”, and the power went out. It hasn’t come back on yet.

Saturday was nice: Dave and I took a nap in our still-warm room, we went out for Chinese food, watched the Usual Suspects and drank Black Russians. We walked by candlelight and it was more an adventure than anything. Throughout the night we could hear loud cracks from outside as branches broke under the strain of such heavy snow.

We awoke Sunday to blazing sun and half a tree across the porch. Also, no heat. We took a shower with what little hot water remained in the tank and enjoyed watching our bodies steam in the rapidly cooling house. We cleared the debris and ran errands all day in the hopes that we would get power back soon. When we heard from a neighbor that Tuesday is the earliest that the grocery store down the road will get power, we checked into a hotel. By now every hotel in the city is booked full, as over 115,000 homes in the area are without power.

As fun as staying in a hotel can be, this sucks. It means I have to get up even earlier for work, Dave is back doing his rotations so I have a room alone, and this morning it was so foggy I could barely see to drive. I’m beginning to think that Harold Camping may have been right.

And yet, we are the lucky ones. We can afford a hotel room, and we had enough foresight to book it while there were still some left. There are still hundreds of thousands, I’ve heard up to 2.1 million in total in the Northeast, without power. If you can find a way to help, please do. This is America, we should be above having our citizens freeze to death, though I’m sure it is already happening.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes - Movie Review

****/5

When I first saw the trailer for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I was not expecting great things. I have only seen parts of the version with Mark Whalberg, which, despite having a great cast (other than Marky Mark), is utter rubbish. The whole idea struck me as rather silly, but with good graphics. The second trailer cast a new element onto the idea, suggesting that there might be an actual story in the thing. Since it was either that or Final Destination 5 as the second movie at Becky's, it wasn't a difficult choice. I was pleasantly surprised with the result.

The film opens with a scene reminiscent of Mighty Joe Young, a movie that apparently scarred me far more than I realized as a child. Chimpanzees are hunted through the jungle by men with trucks and guns, to be captured and caged in boxes barely large enough to fit their body. This strikes a cord with me for a number of reasons, the largest being my disgust at the use of apes in testing. These are creatures so like us they can learn to communicate with us. When I was young I had a book about Koko the Gorilla, and one part talks about Michael, the male gorilla she lived with. He was mean to her and she signed "Toilet Head" in response. I don't think I have thought of apes as animals since then. How can we do medical testing on creatures only one tiny genetic code away from us?

Unlike what I have seen or heard about all the other movies (seven in all, as well as two TV shows), not only is this movie the only one that documents the start of the rebellion (hence Rise of), this is the only movie that casts all of the apes, not just a handful, in a good light. The apes are lab animals, used to test a new, radical medication that has the potential to reverse Alzheimer's and various other neurological diseases. It creates new pathways in the brain in order to repair damage - in an undamaged brain, it enhances natural intelligence. The result is a group of apes with the intelligence and reasoning power of a brilliant human, but still with the body and instincts of a chimp (or gorilla or orangutan). Rather than simply registering fear and hate at their captivity, the apes see injustice and a desire to escape, and have the mental capacity to do so.

This post has gone in quite a different direction than what I was intending. I was planning on a simple movie review, but in a way, the movie itself is to blame for that. There are human characters in the movie, but the acting is so stiff and uninteresting that you can pretty easily forget that they are there. James Franco, a star for reasons I fail to understand, is the extremely awkward narrator - providing entirely unnecessary voice over and at one point ending a thought so strangely that it made an otherwise serious moment hilarious. His character, Will, is the head scientist behind the drug, and naturally has a father (John Lithgow) slowly dying of Alzheimer's. Freida Pinto, so fantastic in Slumdog Millionaire, was just sort of boring as the zoo vet (who questions not at all the fact that Will has a pet chimp) turned girlfriend who is bothered-ish by the treatment of the apes, but not enough to actually do anything. Brian Cox is typically evil as the head of an 'ape santuary' and Tom Felton is god awful as his psychotic son. I'd need to watch it again to tell if I hated him because of the character (who is positively vile) or because of the acting, but every time he came on screen, I cringed.

That's all OK though, since the real star of the movie - who bizarrely has almost last billing on IMDb (after "guy with newspaper", for crying out loud) - is Andy Serkis, as the chimp Caesar. If that name sounds familiar, it's because he did the motion capture and voice work for Gollum in the Lord of the Rings. He has made a name for himself doing incredibly difficult motion capture work - as well as Gollum he was King Kong in the most recent movie, and he is to be Captain Haddock in the new Tin Tin movies. As Caesar, the leader of the revolution, he is astounding - not only does he make a chimp a totally sympathetic character, he does so while being absolutely convincing as a chimp. The effects and his skill are such that for the most part, you forget that they are effects. There are some moments that look odd, but they are easy to overlook. The scene where Caesar stands up to Tom Felton's character (I don't want to give any more away) is chilling. I'm honestly getting goosebumps now, it's that powerful.

So, yea. The acting from the humans is pretty crap, but it's a great movie anyway. Go see it.

Conan the Barbarian - Movie Review

**/5

Saturday morning was my first class of the school year. Yea, Saturday morning. At 8am. That means getting up at 6:30. On Saturday. Kill me. Also, the class is Anatomy and Physiology lab. We will be dissecting a cat. On Saturday mornings. Is this real life? Anyway, since the morning sucked so hard, a friend and I went to Becky's Drive In. They had an epic double feature option of Conan the Barbarian and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and that was way too good to pass up. I saw the original Conan the Barbarian my freshman year of high school. It supposedly fit into the course curriculum but all I remember is my English teacher attempting to censor the sex scenes by putting a piece of paper in front of the projector. This might have worked if she had turned the sound down as well, and held the paper against the projector lens. As it was, we were able to hear perfectly well the horrid Schwarzenegger sex noises, and the paper thing only created a smaller screen. For a 14 year old, it was hilarious.

For a 24 year old with a love of insane bloodbaths, Conan the Barbarian (the new one) was just OK. Unlike other movies of it's ilk - The Scorpion King comes to mind - none of the characters were particularly memorable. I take that back, almost none. Ron Perlman, as Conan's father, was rather delightful. This is a man who got his start playing a caveman without makeup. I still can't decide if he is fiercely unattractive or very sexy. And he's downright awesome in Sons of Anarchy. But yea, other than him, nothing really spectacular from any of the actors. Jason Momoa, as Conan, was big and growly with an admirable rear but the actor who played the younger version, Leo Howard, had more guts. Rose McGowan, some witch chick, was her normal, disturbing self with along with a decidedly not normal forehead. I'm amazed, every time I see her in a movie, that people keep paying her to 'act'. She's truly awful.

Speaking of terrible actresses, Rachel Nichols (as TaMARa, not TAmara, just so she is a bit more exotic) is utterly devoid of emotion other than 'vaguely irritated but still trying to look sexy'. In one scene she - along with a group of large men who really do the work - defeat an enemy and she looks about her with such an idiotic expression that I wanted to stab her with the sword she could barely lift. The bad guy, Khalar Zym, portrayed by Stephen Lang (also known as 'Ohhh, THAT guy!) was utterly forgettable other than that horrible spider-mask thing. He kind of fights, but his daughter (Rose McGowan) does most of the work and he mostly just glares and makes snarky comments.

Alright, so the acting was shit, but who expected more? The movie wasn't even as epic as it could have been. There were a number of times I thought "I would have done this" or "This would have been better", which makes me wonder why no one in Hollywood has hired me yet! So many opportunities were lost - no close ups of angry elephants, no hilarious side kick, no Dwayne Johnson... What we did get was an overabundance of implied incest (never a good thing), a really obnoxious sidekick that was obviously a failed take-off of Arpid in The Scorpion King and a really lame sea monster. On the other hand, we did get tomahawk wielding crazies who scream like velociraptors from Jurassic Park, but we didn't get to see a whole lot of them. The first 40 minutes was entertaining, then it just got old.

All in all, mildly entertaining, but only because I was able to laugh and comment loudly (in the car), only paid $4 for it (or rather, nothing, since my friend paid for me), and was going to see a better movie right after. Save your money on this one.

A New Ending to a Problematic Story

Last year when Dave and I lived in Maine I worked in the home care field. While there were horrible days (the day I cleaned blood off a bathroom floor will go down in history as Yucky Day #1), there were some great moments. I worked for a 99 year old guy who would tell me stories about life in Maine almost a century ago - he will get his own post someday. There was a 27 year old with a spinal cord injury who became more of a friend than a patient. And there was another older man, 95, who was an absolute sweetheart and a total physical mess. Mostly blind, no sense of balance, no muscle tone, lots of memory loss - much of him had deteriorated except his love of books and music. I went to see him three to five times a week and every day I would put on a record, make him some food, and read.

He didn't have any books in his apartment that really lent themselves to being read aloud - non-fiction on herbal remedies and trolley cars. I had to think for a while about what book to read to him - nothing with too much violent or sex or swearing obviously, but I wanted something that might interest an older man. Anything by Neil Gaiman was out - too much of all of those no-nos - none of my many heroine fueled fantasy novels, and no murder mysteries. It gave me some consternation to discover that I don't own many books suitable for all audiences when I found my savior. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman, has been one of my favorite book for over a decade, and my paperback copy is worn to fuzzyness. I have read it more times than I can count but it was only with this reading, done aloud with many repetitions of chapters (that's what happens when you read to someone with memory loss), when I noticed a problem with the story. Maybe it isn't a problem with the story itself, but it certainly created a problem for me, so much so that I will never read it the same way again. I could explain it to you, but I think what I would rather do is address it in the form of a short epilogue to the story. That said, I give you Buttercup's Epiphany.

Buttercup's Epiphany

Ten years after Westley relapsed again and Buttercup's horse threw a shoe, they lived in a small house on the Florinese coast. Buttercup was no longer the most beautiful woman in the world, not even in the top fifty, but she still turned heads at market. Westley was no longer as strong as he had been - the death had taken a lot out of him - and he had developed a gut that no amount of wood chopping could banish. They had two golden haired children, a boy and a girl, who were both beautiful, though not particularly intelligent.

Buttercup was washing up after dinner when she paused, suds making her hands prune in a way that dropped her another few levels.

"Westley."

"Darling?"

"You were the Dread Pirate Roberts."

Westley looked up from his paper. He stared at his wife for a long moment. "Darling, now I know that you have never been the brightest, but..."

"Don't make fun of me, Westley. I'm having a revelation. It only just occurred to me. You were the Dread Pirate Roberts. For years, you told me."

"Yes." He returned to his paper.

"Westley."

He carefully folded his hands and looked up. "Yes?"

"The Dread Pirate Roberts never leaves survivors."

Westley stared. "Well, yes."

"So you never left survivors. In all those years."

Westley said nothing.

"Westley. You killed people for money. For years."

Still he said nothing.

Buttercup turned back to the sink and looked out the window. The boy and girl played outside.

"Get out. You are not my farm boy. He died on that ship."

Westley got up from the table and went into the bedroom. Buttercup was finishing scrubbing the stew pot when he came back out, a bag over his shoulder.

"Out. Don't ever come back."

"As you wish."

All characters belong to William Goldman. There is no copyright infringement intended.

The Pirate King, and Some Tootage of My Own Horn

Ever since I read The Beekeeper's Apprentice a number of years ago, Laurie R King has been one of my favorite authors. I have read almost everything she has ever written (I was happy to discover just now that there are two books I have yet to read, more for me!) and she has an incredible talent for being poignant, funny and perfectly descriptive of human emotions. Her novel Folly is the best assessment of deep depression I have ever encountered, and anyone going into the psychological or medical field should read it. A bit sidetracked, sorry.

Her series of novels about Sherlock Holmes and his apprentice Mary Russell, beginning with The Beekeeper's Apprentice, is soon to have an eleventh installment. The last two books were quite dark and this one, The Pirate King, is to be more humorous - combining the world of Sherlock Holmes with another of my favorite things, The Pirates of Penzance. The book even takes its name from the opera, as shown below.

P.S. Don't be scared off by the word "opera"; Kevin Klein is in it.

As part of the promotion for the new book, hitting stores September 6th, Ms. King is conducting a number of contests, on of which I entered. One of the characters in The Pirate King is a scarlet macaw, and she wrote a flash fiction about him, fittingly titled Parrot King. The story is free to download from her website, with the request that you return it with a picture. I was at work when Ms. King put this up online, so I promptly printed it and used what office supplies I could find (pen and highlighters) to illustrate the thing.

The link to the Parrot King page is here. Submissions are being taken through September 5th, after which you can vote for your favorite. There are a number of really good drawings, and they are worth checking out. As mine was the first submission Ms. King was nice enough to send me a movie style poster for the book, absolutely fitting for me. I'm really looking forward to the next book in a series I love so much I got a tattoo of it. Yea, beat that.