The Trooth about...

The movies I watch and the books I read. Casual reviews and thoughts.

[the-trooth]

Movie: Chappie (2015)

Spoiler warning: Low

I had a lot of reasons that I COULD have been skeptical about this movie... It seemed like it had a lot going against it... but weirdly, I was kind of optimistic going into it. I mean it's Neill Blomkamp, a guy who consistently produces great sci-fi action movies with incredibly ham-fisted social commentary. I knew it had a couple of well-known musicians appearing in it as well, playing characters whose names are the same as their real stage names, probably just promoting themselves... It didn't look like it had a lot going for it out the gate, but I was pleasantly surprised.

The biggest deviation this movie has from District 9 and Elysium is that it ISN'T completely ham-fisted. And to me, that alone is an enormous step in the right direction. I found myself wondering periodically during the movie if it was trying to make a certain moral statement or social commentary, but it kind of shuffles back and forth between a lot of possible extremes, never fully realizing any of them. I've heard this brought up as a point of complaint, saying that it makes the movie seem unfocused or otherwise just pointless, but I'm fine with that. It touches on several different thematic ideas, but doesn't speed toward anything like a bullet train the way Blomkamp's other two movies did. Even the characters shift around different levels of likability. To me, there's nothing wrong with any of this. It's just a nice sci-fi action comedy movie about a robot developing sentience, trying to figure out right and wrong. For once, Blomkamp is not trying to hammer in some clumsy message about how health care needs to be free or whatever, and I'm kind of disappointed that so many critics have negative things to say as a result. Sure, it's no District 9, but it's not a bad movie.

It didn't even occur to me until about halfway through the movie, but a lot of the special effects in this movie are really spectacular. I eventually found myself trying to figure out if Chappie was all CGI, or some kind of animatronic prop, or a puppet, or one of those weird green-screen-suit deals in any given scene, and it was really difficult to discern for a lot of the time. For that first half of the movie, I'd actually forgotten that Chappie had to be some kind of effects-heavy creation, and that there wasn't literally a robot on the screen.

As for the real-world musicians appearing in the movie, I was really wary of that bit of news. I knew that was something with the potential to be a disaster. I thought maybe they also do the whole soundtrack for the movie, and they play aspiring musicians, and have a performance sequence at least once. But really, their presence in the movie went about as well as anyone could expect. To any outside observer who knew nothing about this little piece of trivia, they would have looked like any other random actors. They just play criminals in the movie, with nothing at all connecting them to music or the music industry. Nothing to indicate self-promotion or break the fourth wall with their prior careers.

It might not be as much of an action movie as Blomkamp's last two, but I think it still deserves a place alongside them. I think he does comedy almost as well as action, and this movie strikes a balance between the two fairly well. While it might not be as groundbreaking or amazing as District 9, it's got its own respectable thing going. Rating: 8/10

[the-trooth]

Movie: John Wick (2014)

Spoiler warning: Moderate (also spoilers for The Equalizer)

Remember The Equalizer? It's pretty much that movie. Well, I guess not entirely. I'm gonna compare the shit out of them now, so I hope you've seen both movies.

The Equalizer had a slightly more interesting main character. He at least has character traits established, like being well-read and having a desire to help people. John Wick, on the other hand, doesn't really have any interests. He's just Retired Hitman Guy living in his house and driving his car.

John Wick's plot made a bit more sense, I think. Well, it was more restrained, anyway. It was about a big mafia crime ring, but to its credit, it's all contained within a single city. It's a little more conceivable for John Wick to hunt down and kill all the people he does. The Equalizer, on the other hand, is a little ridiculous, having this one character kill the ENTIRE Russian mafia, and even traveling all the way to Russia to make sure ABSOLUTELY NOBODY was left.

I would also say that John Wick's motivation made more sense, at least in terms of proportionality to what he does. Russian gangsters kill the dog that was left to him by his dead wife, his last attachment to the one person he loved in life, so he kills those gangsters and anyone who gets in his way. But in The Equalizer, Russian gangsters beat up a girl that he was kind of friends with, so he kills the ENTIRE mafia.

I guess this is kind of a trend in movies now. Middle-aged male actor plays retired high-profile professional badass, gets dragged into ONE LAST JOB to prove that he can still kill gangsters, kills gangsters, everyone is happier because of it. There's not that much to give this one a flair over movies like Taken or The Equalizer or whatever else. The action scenes are good. Not mind-blowingly good, but still well executed. It's not INCREDIBLY violent or otherwise noteworthy. Just a standard kinda good-guy-kills-bad-guys movie. Not too ambitious. Adequate. Rating: 5/10

[the-trooth]

Movie: A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014)

Spoiler warning: Low

I think we all watched Family Guy at some point. It's been running so long now, everyone's probably caught it at least once or twice. But I know that I, and lots of other people besides, have drifted away from that kind of humor, and from Seth MacFarlane in general. I can't speak for everyone else, but for me, I got really sick of referential humor in general. For me this came about partly due to oversaturation of internet memes, and eventually extended into shows like Family Guy. The humor there comes much less often from clever writing and jokes, and more from "I recognize this celebrity/movie/other point of reference." It can be funny for a while, but it's not a real substantial kind of humor.

So how about this new movie, which is almost completely unrelated to Family Guy? Well, it's a bit less referential, that's for sure. In fact, I'm surprised it wasn't used as a springboard into millions of references to other western movies. No Sergio Leone references, no John Wayne, no nothing. I would almost call it a point of praise for the movie to be that restrained and "original" but it's not completely free of pointless references. For example, Django Unchained is briefly referenced in a pointless manner, and Back to the Future as well. I guess old habits die hard.

Through carefully studying the movie (in one viewing) I think I located the tiny spark of creativity that gave birth to this movie. What I think is that sometime, perhaps many many years ago, Seth MacFarlane came up with a stand-up routine about how often people died in the pioneer days of the American west. That medicine and hygiene were so poor, and accidents so likely, and all the hostility from the natives, and other deadly elements. He probably wrote up a bit where he plays a representative of the old west who talks about how abundant death is in his Old Western town, and how generally ridiculous it is. That's where the title of this movie would come from, of course... But there's also a scene fairly early in the movie where he just sits down with a couple of other characters and explains all these facts to them, as if they don't already know these things, and as if they have a modern frame of reference to understand that this kind of life is unusual.

I think that's a big part of what makes the movie not work. So many of the jokes and other commentary rely on the characters having a modern frame of reference to observe their lives. Like pointing out the fact that people never smile in photographs, as if that's an unusual thing to observe when it's the established norm. The first few times these things get pointed out, it's kind of cute, and you assume it's done with plenty of self-awareness. But over time, you come to assume... not that the jokes AREN'T self-aware, but that they don't care about breaking the period or breaking the fourth wall. And to me, it's that sense of detachment from the setting that makes me think the movie started out as a stand-up routine or some other kind of short act. That the intention was to mock the old west through demonstration, rather than to actually set a story in that location and period.

There are just a few ideas in the movie that I think work in an odd way... Or rather, elements that I think COULD work in a more competent script. Like the idea of a character whose girlfriend is a prostitute, and he's perfectly happy with that, but the two of them don't want to have sex until they're married. Or the idea of an old-western shop dedicated entirely to mustache maintenance products. Little factors like those are decent respectable comedy elements. But they're kind of wasted on a movie where most of the jokes boil down to poop and farts and sex. Rating: 3/10

[the-trooth]

Movie: Lucy (2014)

Spoiler warning: High

I'll go full disclosure on this one and say that I had no interest in seeing it whatsoever. This one was entirely a recommendation of someone else, and I just kinda went along for the ride of seeing it. Honestly, when I saw the whole "humans only use 10% of their brains" line in the trailer, my expectations were immediately smashed through the floor. This idea has been pretty widely known as a myth now, so I didn't know what they were going for in making it the basis of a movie. Surely SOMEone down the line, during the creation process, would have spoken up and gone "Uh... You guys know that '10% of your brain' thing isn't true, right?" Surely SOMEone knew that.

I heard an argument against my skepticism, that "If it's a good action movie, what difference does it make if it's based on a dumb concept?" But I guess I just can't get past it if the concept is too laughable. It'd be like if somebody made this heavy, serious, heart-wrenching drama story about a main character with cancer... but the way they get cancer is by eating food that was cooked in a microwave. You know, all the human interest and all the serious themes might be beautifully executed, but the fact that they're rooted in such a blatant misconception makes them impossible to take seriously.

When I told friends about the movie, even those who weren't totally opposed to the 10% fallacy had to call the plot ridiculous at some point. For example, the movie states that with 20% control of your brain, you gain full conscious control over your every bodily function. Then, at 30%, you gain control of OTHER people. Then at 40%, you can manipulate all matter. You know, an advanced brain gaining increased control over bodily regulation at least makes a LITTLE sense, but there's no way to bridge the gap from self-control to control of others without venturing into fantasy. What I find even worse is that the movie has Morgan Freeman delivering this lecture on everything that would happen if a person were to achieve these "percentages" of brain usage, but there is absolutely no logical basis for his conjecture, because none of it has ever happened before. It was clearly just made up, and the movie brushes this issue aside by having a student ask "How do you know all this?" to which he responds "Well, technically, this is still a theory." But you know, generally a scientific theory will have some kind of fact or evidence to support it, whereas the whole theory in this movie is just made-up bullshit with no basis. Especially since it's a projection of an already false idea.

But the thing I find weirdest is that people who believe the whole 10% line will never listen to any amount of EXTREMELY obvious evidence to the fact that we use more than 10% of our brains already. Like the fact that a brain injury, even a VERY small one, will often result in serious permanent damage. You never hear about someone who gets a skull injury and goes "Oh don't worry, only the 90% of my brain that I don't use was harmed. It's really nothing." These people won't listen to the idea that one part of your brain handles inhaling, while another part handles exhaling, so trying to use even those two parts simultaneously would be impossible and would probably make you suffocate. If you suddenly used 100% of your brain simultaneously, your heart would seize up, you'd probably go through some kind of weird brief spasm, and you'd almost immediately die of overstimulation.

But not LUCY of course! In this fantasy world where people are 90% braindead, she just slowly becomes Neo, but with the real world. She's able to learn the entire Chinese language, for example, just by overhearing three phone conversations for a few seconds, and looking at a couple of Chinese signs. Never mind the fact that there's no way to establish a mental link between spoken words and written symbols without some kind of comparison, but she's so smart that she can look at a sign and just KNOW what spoken words it represents. And what a vocabulary she developed from hearing five seconds of spoken Chinese.

She soon develops powers like mind-reading and telekinesis and other fantasy super powers. So, you know how Neo would use his telekinesis (or I guess you'd call it manipulation of "reality") to leap across buildings and fly through the air and shit? Well Lucy doesn't waste her time with FLYING. No, she drives a CAR through city streets. But don't worry, she does use her telekinetic powers to cause other cars to crash, and otherwise fail to pursue her in high-budget blockbuster ways. There's even a confrontation near the end of the movie JUST like the hallway confrontation at the end of The Matrix. But I think someone caught on to the similarity, so they don't have her stop the bullets when they shoot at her. Instead they just have her telekinetically lift the guns and the guys into the air so they can't shoot her.

So, according to this movie, once a person achieves 100% brain usage, they basically become God. Lucy becomes omnipotent when she hits 100%. And what does she do with her newfound godhood? Well, she manifests as a text message in her guy friend's phone saying "I am everywhere." And she leaves behind something like a miniature version of the monolith from 2001... with a convenient USB attachment. So the scientists like Morgan Freeman can inherit her knowledge I guess? But that seems kinda pointless when she's already omnipotent. She could just manually implant people with the right knowledge or something, but... Anyway, movie's over after that. She hit 100% and that's all that matters.

You know, I got to thinking... Even if this movie WASN'T rooted in a straight-up false scientific idea... it still wouldn't be that great. I mean yeah it is full of b-movie-grade techno-babble, but even the action scenes aren't especially... special. I spent so much time thinking about how derivative the movie was of The Matrix, and other more iconic action movies. A plot about a character becoming hyper-intelligent or even omnipotent could be a really compelling sci-fi story, but... suggesting that the potential already exists in the human mind, and using it as the springboard of a generic action movie is not the way to make it compelling. Furthermore, ending the story when she DOES become omnipotent, and wasting all this hyper-intelligence on a simplistic "race against the clock" plot, just sucks away any merit this kind of story could have. Rating: 2/10

[the-trooth]

Book progress: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (ch. 41-48)

Spoiler warning: High

I'm starting to wonder if I should start reading longer segments of this book. About 50 pages a section seems like it should give me plenty to talk about each time, but it doesn't seem like a whole lot happened in this one that's worth talking about.

Kvothe continues to fuck about at the university. He has to be publicly whipped for his "lesson" from my last reading segment. He eats some kinda special root to dull the pain and stop him from bleeding beforehand, and this apparently earns him the nickname "Kvothe the bloodless." But this also fucks up his head when it starts to wear off, so he gets tricked into taking a candle into the archives. A big no-no which gets him banned from it. But before he got thrown out and banned, he managed to notice some huge enormous ominous probably-important door deep inside, and now he's just GOTTA know what's in there. But I guess being banned from the building is gonna make that a little difficult.

The other big event is that he's apparently gotta choose some professor to mentor under. So he tries to pursue this one crazy fella named Elodin, who just kinda mysteriously wanders the campus and nobody knows exactly what he's doing there. But he knows the name of the wind! So Kvothe is after him. He follows Elodin around the campus for a while, and Elodin takes him to a sort of on-campus insane asylum for arcanists who went a little too far in their research, I guess. He tries to quiz Kvothe on why the university would accommodate these men so well, and keep them so close, but he can't manage to figure it out. Kvothe asks him what he has to do to become Elodin's student, and the response is that he has to jump off the roof of that asylum. Kvothe is like "he knows the name of the wind, he'll rescue me, I got nothing to worry about." Aaaaaand he hits the ground and breaks several bones. So fuck Elodin, he's looking for a new mentor.

There's a little break in the action at the end here where we go back to Kvothe and Bast and Chronicler in the inn, and Kvothe is all choked up about what's gonna be coming in the next segment. The next big event is his encounter with.... A GRIL! I'm sure this'll be fun and not emotional.

[the-trooth]

Book progress: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (ch. 34-40)

Spoiler warning: High

Kvothe has finally made it to this renowned University now, so it looks like a new chapter of his life is beginning. I mean... It's SEVERAL chapters of this book, but it looks like this is a fairly big turning point. There's the "livin' with the troupe, studying with Ben" saga, the "livin' as a bum on the streets" saga, and now the "livin' less like a bum in the University" saga.

The book has definitely gotten a lot more interesting since he got his shit together and decided to stop being a bum. He's putting a lot of his performance experience to work, tricking people and manipulating people and stuff. I like how much his origin plays into the rest of the story so much. It's like he's got a natural 18 in charisma and intelligence. Or maybe that's wisdom. I dunno.

He shows up at the University on application day, when it was almost over, and convinced them to admit him for NEGATIVE tuition. He just lets them know how much he was able to learn from Ben, and what an upstart he is, and they are just thrilled to have him. All those chancellors and headmasters and whatever they are, governing each subject, they're all just SMITTEN with him.

Unfortunately I decided to read the little summary on the back of the book right in the middle of the segment, so I guess now I know he's going to get expelled from the University really soon. He almost got expelled in one of these chapters, for doing a Sympathy demonstration on one of the professors, basically giving him a hot foot. But he manages to talk his way out of this expulsion by letting the High Council of Chancellors and Admissions know that the professor TOLD him to make this demonstration. So he has to take a few lashes for it, but that's it.

[the-trooth]

Movie: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

Spoiler warning: Moderate

Ok, so... Whose bright idea was it to make DAWN of the planet of the apes come after RISE of the planet of the apes? Here I thought I was getting myself into the first movie in this two-part series, but instead it turned out to be the second. Oh well, I watched it anyway.

I've seen the ORIGINAL planet of the apes once. The one with Charlton Heston. And if nothing else, I gotta express how baffled I am that the twist ending of that movie has become so ubiquitous. It's a pretty massive spoiler, and it changes everything about the rest of the movie up to that point, but nobody bats an eye at spoiling it. Even when I watched it on TV, the channel that was airing it had a little "We no return to Planet of the Apes" bumper after the final commercial break where they SHOWED the twist ending shot before that had even appeared in the movie itself! What's more, I hear DVD artwork of the movie even shows that shot right on the front. The very last shot of the movie, that huge turning point, is right there on the cover. Because if you haven't seen it before, then FUCK you.

And I think it's weird how people get that attitude about spoilers in general. There are lots of REALLY great movies with REALLY great twists, but once they get repeated enough, suddenly nobody cares if anybody has the experience ruined for them. Everybody knows the big reveal in Citizen Kane before they even see it, everybody knows the big reveal at the end of Empire Strikes Back, and since SO MANY people know those things, then WHO CARes about the feelings of the one or two people who don't? But if your friend starts reading Game of Thrones or something, you are a terrible evil person if you spoil a book that they haven't gotten to yet. People get really weird about that shit.

But now, the mere existence of these two recent movies, and even the existence of those older Planet of the Apes sequels, spoils the original that gave birth to such a big franchise. These movies are counting on you having the knowledge that the story is working up to an earth dominated by apes. There's no pretention of dealing with space travel or alien planets or anything, just "Remember that movie from the 60s that you've definitely seen? What, you haven't seen it? Well it ends like this. This is what our movies are building up to now."

I have to say I was always idly curious about how apes would have managed to take over the world. It's been so long since I saw the original movie, I can't remember if it even touches that subject at all. It seemed a little silly to me that a bunch of apes, who are far outnumbered and outgunned by the human race, would manage to kill them all off just by becoming ABOUT as intelligent as them. I'm sure the previous movie touches on this a lot more, but what I gather from this movie is that there is a "simian flu" that has been killing off the human race, and that's pretty well doing all the work for the apes. It's basically a kind of plague.

The first trailer I saw for this, I wasn't sure if it was some kind of a joke or if it was really supposed to be a real movie. It was just a scene from the movie where two guys are sitting around with guns and booze, and this chimp comes wandering up to them, playing around and shit. They start joking around too, laughing at the chimp, and after a minute it wants to try their booze. It spits it out, but then after rolling around and acting like an ass some more, it picks up one of their guns. The guys freak out for a second, but it seems pretty much ok. Then, just out of nowhere, the chimp LIGHTS THEM BOTH UP and has this evil grin on his face. Now, I had no idea this was even a movie trailer when I first saw it. I can't even remember where it was that I was watching it. I sure as hell wasn't assuming it was a Planet of the Apes sequel. With no context at all, it was just the strangest thing. It wasn't quite funny, but it kinda seemed like it was supposed to be funny... But it also seemed like it was supposed to be scary and shocking. But just the idea of a chimp picking up an assault rifle, suddenly turning out to be evil, and gunning down two guys is too absurd to be genuinely frightening.

So anyway... This movie is mostly about a community of apes and a community of humans who live fairly close to one another. The humans want to make use of a hydroelectric dam near the ape settlement, but tensions from both sides make it difficult. Neither side wants to trust the other, and there are disputes among both sides' leaderships, and it all threatens to spark an all-out war.

It's neat that the apes mostly communicate through sign language, but start speaking more and more English as the movie goes on. And it's kind of funny how they have such a complex society and government, but it's all played so straight that it never really comes across as schlocky. It would have been really easy for this movie to be really stupid, but they made it work pretty well in spite of all these scenes of apes riding horses, driving vehicles, firing machine guns, and getting blown up and flung all over the place. I'm sure there are PLENTY of scenes you can take out of context that would play hilariously, but if you really stay focused in the movie, and never force yourself to take a step back, it never plays comically. Just a perfectly straight-faced movie about humans and apes on the verge of war, with some amazing visual effects. Rating: 8/10

[the-trooth]

Finished book: Bag of Bones by Stephen King

Spoiler warning: High

All right, so FINALLY at the end of the book, there is some serious focus and resolution on the ghost story subplot. As it turns out, Sara Tidwell was gang-raped in the woods near Mike's house by ancestors of people like Mike and Max Devore. When her son saw it happening, the guys drowned him in the lake. Now, basically, her vengeful spirit is haunting the area around the lake and possessing all these descendants to kill their children.

After the shooting, Mike carries Kyra back to his lake house, and even he starts to get possessed with these random ideas of killing her. He fills the bathtub up and starts planning how he's going to drown her in there and then cut his wrists and so forth, but he has to keep fighting back these urges. It's around this time that he walks outside to his wife's studio, and finds all her research into Sara Tidwell and all this other stuff. Meanwhile, there's a poltergeist duel between his wife and Sara, the storm of the century is raging outside (kind of like the end of It) and Mike starts having all these psychic visions about what happened to Sara all those years ago.

Eventually he finds the place where Sara was buried out near his house, and sets out to destroy her bones with some lye. Meanwhile shit is just going nuts all around him. Like a tree comes to life, possessed by Sara, and Mike's dead wife is still trying to fight her off, and at some point Sara is referred to as an "Outsider" or some other spooky name, but it turns out that destroying the bones does put a stop to everything.

But the trouble is not over yet, because Rogette, Max's assistant and daughter I think? sneaks into the cabin and snatches Kyra up and takes off through the woods with her. I bet it's implied that Max and Rogette are also possessed by the vengeful spirit of Sara, and that if they had won the custody case, they would have ended up killing her too. So, long story short, the three of them end up confronting each other on a wooden pier and Rogette gets fukn killed when the storm tears that pier up.

I kinda feel like that whole elaborate custody case was only so much fluff to just distract everyone from the REAL story about ghosts and murder and shit. The end of the book leaves Mike still battling to get full custody of Kyra, but I can't believe it took so long for the ghost story to take a front seat on the action. Every chapter would pretty much end with "oh by the way, the refrigerator magnets were arranged into a cryptic message again." Like, shit Mike, we can't get you to care about this shit at all until the girl you want to bang is DEAD. I think we'd all be better off if everyone had brushed up on their Scooby-Doo before getting involved in this story. Nobody ever died in Scooby-Doo. People just solved mysteries. Because it was the right thing to do.

[the-trooth]

Book progress: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (ch. 24-33)

Spoiler warning: High

Things pick up as Kid Kvothe is on the road again. He spends a little more time in Tarbean, the city he chose to live in as a professional street urchin. He finds the hideout of the kid who broke his father's lute on the first day in town, and sets all his shit on fire. He also spends some time in a bar learning stories from an old dude named Skarpi.

The biggest story happened to be about this ancient hero named Lanre. The same hero who was going to be the subject of Kvothe's father's song. He was a great hero who fought so many battles, and once the love of his wife even brought him back from the dead. But his wife died and disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and this made Lanre go nuts and stop caring about the world at all, and he raised an army to raze all the world's great cities. In the end, a king and his former friend, Selitos, cursed him to always live in shadows, and his new name under this curse would be Haliax. Same as the guy who attacked Kvothe's caravan, right?

Well, the local preists don't take kindly to Skarpi's storytelling, so they haul him off one day. Shortly after this, Kvothe makes his decision to leave town for The University. Something he always wanted to do since he met his old arcanist tutor. He sells the only book Ben had left him (making out a receipt that would get it back even cheaper if he ever asked for it back) and bought himself some new clothes and a seat on a caravan headed out of town. There was a pretty funny scene of him getting the new clothes, where he pretended to be the bratty son of some noble, granting him the finest personal service and discounted prices, of course. He's still on the caravan as of the end of my reading, and he just met a QT fellow traveler named Denna, and they are enjoying each other's company ever so much.

[the-trooth]

Movie: Gone Girl (2014)

Spoiler warning: High

Well I HAD to see this one sooner or later, with all the buzz it's getting. Everyone read the book but me, and now everyone is seeing the movie but me. With spoilers popping up left and right in conversation, I opted to see it sooner rather than later. Ideally I would have read the book first, but I just couldn't make time for it among my already-massive reading queue.

David Fincher generally makes good movies, and here's another one to add to the pile. It's another case like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, where it was based on an immensely popular book, and barring some case of total incompetence, there's no way a movie adaptation would fail at the box office.

The thing I hear from most people who read the book or saw the movie is that the story is really great for the most part, but they hate pretty much every character and/or they hate the ending. I can understand a lot of that, but this movie is another case where I don't feel like hating the characters necessarily makes the movie bad. It's like another movie I saw recently, Proxy. People tend to hate all the characters in that movie too. And I can totally see why, they're all terrible people. But like Proxy, Gone Girl was a case where I wanted to see what kind of crazy would win out in the end.

As it turns out though, the Girl who is Gone, Amy, is pretty much the craziest of the crazies in the cast. The male lead is not much of a crazy guy. His biggest problems are just that he's kind of a piece of shit husband who cheats on his wife. You kind of want to see him win out in the end toward the beginning, but when you learn all this stuff about him, you kinda don't care who the "winner" is in the end.

But I've gotta say, I thought the ending was kinda weak. For a Contest of Crazies movie, I thought Proxy handled things a lot better. Maybe even that it was a better movie overall. You start to realize in Proxy that there's no way for things to end other than in some kind of enormous cataclysm, and as the movie goes on, you want to see some kind of a cataclysm happen, and the actual turns of events are not disappointing. But with Gone Girl, the ending was just kinda like... "I'm gonna continue lying to everyone and manipulating your life forever and ever, so deal with it." It's set up several times that Amy's huge frame job and masterful scheme grew sloppy over time, and was full of holes for anyone who cared to look, but there was no payoff for any of her sloppiness. There's just one detective who notices all the blatant flaws in her story, but all her perfectly valid questions get brushed aside with a quick "I'm sorry, I just went through a traumatic experience, how dare you ask me anything" and that drops that whole aspect of the plot. And everyone else in the world just goes "Well, we have AN answer now, who even cares if it's the right one?"

[the-trooth]

Book progress: Bag of Bones by Stephen King (ch. 18-25)

Spoiler warning: High

Ok, things definitely took some surprising turns in this segment. The body count just skyrocketed from 0 to 2. First, Max Devore sent Mike a letter saying that he'd drop the custody case if Mike would also agree to leave it alone. He agrees, but senses this must be a trap. Then, as soon as word gets back to Max, he kills himself. So now everything is just fine with the recently-evaporated custody case, right?

Well, there's still some spooky mysteries. Like all the ghostly happenings. Kyra brings up the refrigerator people, because in her house, messages appear in the fridge magnets as well. But somehow Mike never feels the need to tell Mattie that the same thing is happening at his house. I guess because he doesn't want her to freak out or something? But really, why hold that back? It might actually help you solve this fucking ghost mystery, man. I swear, if you were in the Scooby Squad, you'd be kicked out after your first day. He does find out that similar messages were written in his magnets and hers. One said something like "go down 19" and the other said "go down 92." My first thought was that these might be highway numbers or something. Mike thought they were crossword puzzle solutions. Then, somehow, he decided they must be page numbers in the phone book. When he looks here, he starts to notice an unusually high number of K names. Just like he was going to name his daughter Kia, and Mattie named her daughter Kyra, and Sara Tidwell's son was named Kito, all the weirdly-significant children in this story have K names, due to some kind of subtle implied haunting after whatever happened to Kito Tidwell.

There was also a point where Mike and Kyra have some kind of shared dream-that-is-not-a-dream. They're at a turn-of-the-century fair together, where they see Sara Tidwell performing, wearing one of Mattie's dresses, and lots of the townsfolks' ancestors are there as well. They try to steal Kyra away from Mike, but the two of them run through the fair's haunted house to escape. At the end of this unnaturally-large haunted house, they find three doors, one with a typewriter to indicate Mike, one with a tricycle to indicate Kyra, and one to indicate Max Devore. Maybe his had a sled on it? There was this big story that keeps recurring about how he stole a sled when he was a kid. And this didn't occur to me until just now, but people say this book has Dark Tower connections, so I wonder if those doors are supposed to be similar to the doors in the second book? They don't seem to work exactly the same, but maybe it's a similar idea.

At the end, Mike goes over to Mattie's along with his lawyer, her lawyer, and a detective one of them had hired, and they have themselves a barbecue to celebrate the end of the custody case. And Stephen King seems to just fuckin' love writing a barbecue scene where everyone is happy and goofing around and drinking a couple beers and dancing and having good clean fun. This was similar to a part from Salem's Lot, and just really flirting with corniness in the same way. Then, out of nowhere, when Mike is inside, a gang of locals drive by Mattie's house and shoot everybody the fuck up! The other two guys are hit, Mattie is killed, and only Mike and Kyra were totally safe. No word on how the other guys are going to end up, or whether the culprits will get caught. If there's any bright side to this, maybe there will finally be some focus on the ghost story plot and other way-more-interesting shit.

Oh yeah, and the guy that Mike's wife went to a softball game with was just her brother. So no big deal there I guess.

[the-trooth]

Movie: Nashville (1975)

Spoiler warning: Low

Little more progress on that AFI top 100 today. I'm chipping away at that list, almost there now. All I knew about this one beforehand was that it was also in the Criterion collection, so maybe that counts for something?

This was a really unusual kind of movie. It has a huge cast, several big stars, and the really neat thing about it is that it doesn't exactly have a "main character" or even a single unifying plot for this wide cast. So really, I guess there isn't even a lead actor, just a big collection of supporting actors. A lot of the characters meet up with each other, split apart, and sometimes reunite in different ways. It'd take me too long to go into detail about every single person in this story, but the one unifying factor among all of them is that their lives for the course of this movie revolve around Nashville, and often around country music. Some of them have huge singing careers, some of them are aspiring singers, and some of them have nothing to do with any of that.

The movie is better if you like country music, but I'd say it's not critical. An interesting thing about it is that several of the actors in the movie wrote and performed their own original songs. I was surprised to see Shelley Duvall in the role of a famous country singer, but she played it well.

It's hard to describe the feel of this movie. I guess in a sense, it reminds me of Do the Right Thing, coincidentally another movie on this list. It's just a series of scenes of lots of different people interacting with each other over the course of a few days, and they all have different things going on, and they've all got their own little goals and stories and ideas. The only difference is that Nashville doesn't aim for such charged social statements as Do the Right Thing, at least not from my perspective. That's not to say that Nashville has nothing to say, it's just about a wider range of human experiences and feels a little more meandering. Maybe a little less focused? But not in a bad way.

Nashville's occasionally funny, usually not in an overt way. But it runs the range of emotions pretty well. There are plenty of silly characters, but also some serious moments, heated arguments, and so on. At times, it can play like a caricature of Nashville and the kinds of people who live there or love the area. Almost everyone in the movie is really bubbly and boisterous, always with something to talk about. I don't know what kind of person would especially love it or especially hate it (maybe some of those fervent country-music-haters) but it was an interesting experience. Rating: 7/10

[the-trooth]

Movie: Nightbreed (1990)

Spoiler warning: Moderate

This one was a total impulse-watch. I was cruising around Netflix, thought it looked and sounded cool, saw that it was directed by Clive Barker, and decided to give it a go. Usually I have kind of mixed feelings about Clive Barker. I mean, I love Hellraiser, but everything else of his that I've seen or read has just been kind of average to me. Will Nightbreed be any different?!

It's got a weird plot, but I guess that isn't saying much, given the director. There's this underground city of demons, or demon-like people... let's just call them monsters. They live under a cemetery in a place called Midian. The main character has a lot of dreams and nightmares about this place, and... I guess his psychiatrist (played by David Cronenberg) tricks him into thinking he's killed a bunch of people so that the police will eventually kill him, allowing him to be reborn as one of the night breed monsters who live in Midian, because it's his mission to find Midian and destroy it. Somehow this sounds a lot more convoluted than it came across in the movie.

Anyway, this whole plot of the psychiatrist killing people and framing the main character for the murders, and using him to get into Midian... eventually this culminates in a massive showdown between lots of heavily-armed police officers and all the monsters who live in Midian. There's some shit that happens in between, but this is what it was all leading toward.

There is some drama in between about the main character's girlfriend trying to figure out what happened to him after he "died." And he gets caught by the police again at some point before that final showdown. And it takes some time before the other monsters in Midian will accept him as one of them. It's actually kind of interesting. He was only able to become a "nightbreed" because one of the other nightbreeds bit him on the shoulder shortly before he was killed by the police. Later on, this monster guy is showing somebody a prophetic wall painting they have in Midian's underground city, and it shows a monster who looks very similar to him biting a human who looks very similar to the main character right in the shoulder. This is what leads to the creation of a "chosen one" in their culture. It kinda makes me wonder if that guy saw that painting a long time ago, and made it a habit to bite any humans he encountered on the shoulder, in the hopes that it would create the chosen one.

Easily the biggest draw of this movie is the makeup effects. This movie just came out shortly after Hellraiser, so I guess Clive Barker was riding that wave of success, got a decent budget, and poured a ton of it into the production of crazy monster makeup and cool sets in Midian. There's a point where the main character's girlfriend first finds the underground city, and she's walking through all these huge caverns and tunnels and rooms that are just full of all manner of freaky monsters. It's like a zoo of creative makeup effects. In the big final battle, a lot of those makeup effects will be noticeably less intricate, as they have lots of extras running around taking up space as monsters. But I was really impressed with what they did, even with some of those monsters who got very little screen time.

I'm surprised I never heard of this movie at all. That my first encounter with it came from randomly browsing Netflix. It might not be as good as Hellraiser, but it's a worthy successor. Certainly better than most of the sequels that came out in that franchise. If you're looking for a great spectacle of pre-CG monster effects, some crazy monsters and gruesome deaths, you can't go wrong here. I'm gonna talk about the ending now, so stop reading if you wanna see this movie.

Although Midian gets pretty well destroyed in that final battle, a lot of the monsters live on. And it's up to our hero, known by his new name of Cabal, to lead them to a new promised land. Coulda been a cool sequel if they were ever planning on doing that. But his girlfriend is there at the end too, and she wants to become a nightbreed like him and go with him. But he's like "no, this is no life for you, I won't turn you into a monster like me." So she STABS HERSELF, and the only way he can stop her from dying is to give her the nightbreed bite. It might be kind of a romantic situation if she had just gotten mortally wounded in the battle, so he's forced to save her that way... but this way? That was a pretty fuckin' manipulative thing for her to do. Maybe he was trying to think up a way to break up with her from the beginning of the movie. Maybe their relationship wasn't that great and he was looking for a way to end it, but couldn't really come up with a decent excuse. Becoming a nightbreed, well, how can she possibly want to stay with a demonic undead monster? That should pretty well cut things off. But NO, she wants desperately to be with him anyway. But then Midian gets destroyed, and he has to live up to his prophetic destiny and travel with the monsters to a new promised land. THAT's a pretty convenient launching pad for ending the relationship, right? Surely she wouldn't want to be dragged along for all that boring business, and you know that long-distance shit doesn't work out, especially in 1990. But NO, she puts him in a "We're gonna be together or I'm gonna KILL MYSELF" situation. So I guess there's pretty much no way he'll ever get to break up with her. Rating: 8/10

[the-trooth]

Book progress: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (ch. 15-23)

Spoiler warning: High

So... This segment was basically about how life shat all over Kvothe. His teacher found a nice woman and abandoned the troupe, then everyone but Kvothe was killed, presumably by this group of demons called the Chandrian, because his father had been writing a song about them. One was named Cinder, and the "leader" called himself Haliax. Kvothe met them briefly but they spared him, for whatever reason.

He hung around in the wilderness playing his father's lute for a long time, then when the strings broke, he made tracks for a nearby city where he took up life as a street urchin. His lute got smashed on the very first day in town, and he learned to take constant beatings from pretty much anyone, especially people on the rich side of town. First time he tried begging there, somebody gave him a silver coin (a fortune basically) but a guard chased him down and beat him half to death for even being there. He lost the coin in the snow, but fortunately, some other random person happened along and gave him yet another one. After livin' it up on meat and wine and blankets that night, he wakes up with a fever and stumbles to the basement of this local old dude who takes care of sick children.

In this sick-people basement, we get to hear the story of Tehlu, this book's God, and how he came to a virgin woman in her sleep one night, and how she gave birth to his son who was also him. Sounds like kind of a familiar religious idea, somehow... Anyway, this incarnation of Tehlu travels the world offering people his new teachings, and asking them to repent from their wicked ways and join him. But everywhere he goes, he's confounded by Encanis, who I guess is some kind of devil. Finally Tehlu catches him, binds him to an iron wheel, then throws him in a huge fire pit. He still pleads with Encanis to repent, but he won't. So Tehlu holds him down in the fire, sacrificing his life for the good of his followers. Anyone else find the story a little familiar? Just me?

[the-trooth]

Movie: Shane (1953)

Spoiler warning: Low

I felt like checking out some of AFI's top 100 movies (or whatever that list is). There are only about 7 or 8 that I haven't seen, so I figure I might give some of those a watch when I get around to them. This time around, it's Shane, an old western. Something I hadn't seen in a long time.

Shane is a Mysterious Gunslinger who shows up on a farm near the local small town one day. He becomes quick friends with the man, wife, and kid who live there. They let him stay there, he helps out with the work. Good times.

But all the times are NOT good. Turns out there's this gang of Bad Guys harassing all these local farmers, trying to get them to abandon their land or some other preposterous shit. It's up to Shane to reconcile the two sides into peace. Or to kill all the bad guys. Yeah, kill all the bad guys.

Leading up to the big final confrontation, there's one really great bar fight scene. Shane gets in a fistfight with one of the local bad guys, and eventually other bad guys start ganging up on him, and the farmer joins in to help, and they just wreck this bar to hell. Things get thrown, bottles get smashed, all the furniture gets broken. It's amazing. This fun doesn't last long though, as the farmers soon have to band together to stop the local bullies once and for all (or pack up and leave) and the local bullies get more aggressive, letting people's cattle loose and burning farms and shit.

Easily the worst thing about this movie is the little boy who idolizes Shane. It's always super risky for a movie to include a kid prominently. At LEAST half the time, it'll ruin the movie. And this kid is no better. He exists mostly to ask questions about the plot and to scream "SHAAAAAANE" repeatedly in every other scene. Right up to the end of the movie this goes on. They really wanna make sure you remember the title, I guess.

I guess there are some vibes in this movie similar to Once Upon a Time in the West. Mostly in the sense of land disputes and mysterious strangers. But those aren't uncommon to the western genre in general, I'm finding. The villains are somewhat memorable though, and the bar fight scene is great. Other than that, I think I'd prefer to watch some ridiculous spaghetti western. Rating: 6/10

[the-trooth]

Book progress: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (ch. 8-14)

Spoiler warning: Moderate

Looks like I was right. This whole section has transformed into a first-person narrative of Kvothe's whole life. It starts all the way back when he's 11 years old, traveling the country with his parents as part of a troupe of renowned performers.

One night in some shitty town, he meets an arcanist named Ben. He does a little magic but mostly he is some kind of scholar and scientist who just knows a whole lot about a whole lot, and Kvothe wants to learn everything about everything, so he asks Ben to teach him. Here we learn that Kvothe is just a master of learning, and he picks up every subject super quickly. This was touched on a little in the beginning too, when he picks up Chronicler's shorthand system in a matter of seconds.

Another thing that was touched on in the beginning that I never really mentioned was what "the name of the wind" means. What it looks like to me is that if you know the "name" of a thing in the world, you can say its name and command it to do things. Like if you know the name of stone, you can make a stone wall crumble. If you know the name of the wind, you can summon up gusts and other things like that. I don't know a lot of the details, but that's my basic understanding of it. Ben knows the name of the wind, and Kvothe wants to learn it, but there's no word yet on whether he'll get to. Ben doesn't want to teach it to him, because it could be too much power for him to have before he knows how to use it. He already nearly suffocated himself trying to magically make a gust of wind.

I guess the "magic" in this universe is called "sympathy" and I'm still not super clear on how it works. It involves somehow binding two separate things together, and then they can be moved or otherwise affected in similar ways. But the connections are easier to make if the two items are similar. Like two pieces of iron, or a stick broken in half. I'm sure it'll make more sense than that as it goes on.

It's also revealed in this chunk of chapters that (back in the inn) Bast is actually some kind of 150-year-old demon or other mythical creature that somehow casts an illusion on everyone to make him look human. In reality he has hooves for feet and weird eyes and shit. When Chronicler realizes it, they prepare to kung-fu fight, but Kvothe doesn't let them. He will have none of that shit in his bar. That was the first "interlude" since the story began, just one chapter long, and now Bast is joining in to listen to the recitation of the story. And I assume this is still fairly early in the first day.

[the-trooth]

Book progress: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (ch. 1-7)

Spoiler warning: Low

This book was given to me as a gift. I had never heard of it, never heard of the author, never really had any interest in it, but what the hell, I'll give it a read. Free book.

I was at least able to figure out it's a fantasy book before I started reading it, but that's about all I knew. Nobody I know has read this, so it's pretty much entirely a blind read for me, if that holds any significance. For the most part, it seems like a lot of your typical fantasy fare. Swords. Demons. Whispers of magic. Small town. Unassuming townsfolk. Inns.

The only things I've seen so far that give this book its own unique flair are references to God (as a name) and demons, and people actually use swear words. Well, occasionally. That at least is something foreign to all the Wheel of Time I've been reading, where (and I've commented on this) the only swear words are words that exist in reality but are not considered swear words in reality. Like "blood and ashes." It's kind of a refreshing aspect, because I'd been wondering lately if there was any precedent for fantasy authors using real-world swear words in their writing, or just giving their characters a "modern" style of speaking, devoid of any indeeds or verilies or milords or forsooths. That's something I'd like to see.

So far this story mostly revolves around Unassuming Innkeeper who lives in Unassuming Town. BUT Unassuming Innkeeper has a dark and mysterious past! He's from out of town! Nobody knows that he is secretly a huge badass! He's introduced as Kote, but we quickly learn his real name is Kvothe, and thankfully the book explains fairly soon that that name is just pronounced like "Quoth" because some consecutive consonants like KV are hell on the mental pronunciation.

Kvothe also has this... Student? Manservant? Ward? named Bast, and Bast calls him Reshi. It's not too clear what their relationship is. Maybe Bast is the Robin to his Batman. But, importantly, the author made sure to give Bast a case of The Notgays in his first appearance, where he says something about chasing girls, or something like that. You need a scene like that because these guys seem to live together and spend a lot of time together and having nicknames for each other and all kinds of shit. Couldn't have people getting the wrong idea about this flamboyant Bast guy.

One night, a cart driver (named Carter) is attacked by a spider the size of a cart wheel, with knives for feet. He kills it and takes it into the inn, where everyone oohs and ahhs over it. They figure out it's some kind of demon by pressing iron against it, which makes part of it dissolve. They also call it a Scrael. So maybe it's both of those things. But Kvothe knows the things never travel alone, so one night he camps out on the outskirts of town to kill the last of them with an iron bar.

Around the campfire, he has to save this wandering chronicler (named Chronicler) from the rest of the Scraels. Chronicler knows that Kvothe is really Kvothe and not Kote, and he wants to write down the guy's life story. Kvothe says it's going to take three days, and THAT IS JUST PREPOSTEROUS but that's the only way he'll do it. So I think the rest of the book (or a big chunk of it) is setting out to be the telling of that story. Or, since I think this is a trilogy or some other kind of series, maybe this book will just be the first day of the storytelling, and the other books will be the other days in the story.