I finished Capote's In Cold Blood. It got fairly boring for me at the end. I'm not big into courtroom stuff, especially when I know the outcome. Perhaps it would have better if it wasn't a true story, so there would be a question. I also think Capote just handled the chase much better than the capture and trial. I think he was more interested in that aspect than the bringing of justice.
I listened to Half-Moon Street by Paul Theroux. It is actually two novellas in one book. The titular first one just annoyed me. The main character was a PhD candidate, and also a whore. She wasn't a very good student. She ended up giving a paper presentation on "research" she did while having sex with Middle Eastern men, because she was too lazy to do any actual research. Her pompous pseudo-intellectual banter was annoying. She looked down on the other whores for how stupid they were, but she was only educated, not smart. She made a point of memorizing her men's license plates in case something happened. And then? What good is that knowledge going to do you if you are locked in a closet or dead. She thought she was being smart and protecting herself. That is just one instance of her utter stupidity. She thinks she is being empowered by turning these powerful men into goo. She also fucks anything else that moves. It isn't about gaining power over powerful men, as she says, it's about fucking. She sucks off the plumber as payment for fixing her pipes. She has sex with a cabbie instead of paying him a couple pound fair. At the end, she almost died. She apparently was sleeping with a person involved in nefarious doings. The apartment had been bugged and she got more information out of the guy that they had ever hoped to get. I kind of hoped she would die. She reminded me of many of the grad students I knew from U of M.
The next novella was actually pretty good. It was the story of two twins. They had a splitting of ways and had not seen each other for 30 years. The twin of the main character shows up at his house unannounced one day. The main character goes off for the weekend, telling his brother that he better be gone by the time he gets home. He comes back to find his brother dead. He buries his brother in the town dump, and tires to find out if the man was really his brother, or some imposter sent by his brother. The reader gets a sense that there really is no way it was not his brother, but it helps to set up the main character's mental state. The guy finds out his brother was a doctor, and then that he was really a quack. This was actually an interesting story with a pretty good ending, so I won't ruin that for you.
I also read Updike's Trust Me. It is vintage Updike. A personal style makes the stories interesting. I do find his subject matter gets a little stale. That is one reason I like spec-fic. I like something strange to happen in an otherwise normal setting. Too much of post-Joyce fiction is trying to prove that any life/situation can be interesting if very well-written. This isn't always the case. No matter how well written, it will still read like a chapter about whales (Melville), or a chapter about 1,147 ships, who was on them, and what their grandparents did (Homer).
My novel is coming along now. I'm revamping Huelen's back story, which I only decided to do at the deadline. I really need to start thinking of these major plot issues before the deadline hits. I seem to get my best ideas right at the deadline. Perhaps if I trick myself that the deadline is a week or two earlier, I could get that kind of stuff done ahead of time for the submission. Even with the rewrites, the first draft should be done for the June residency. I will be glad when that's done, but I know because of the way I wrote it, I will have extensive revisions. I would really like to have those done by July, so I can have some other people read and critique it. It has been a long, painful process. I thought it wouldn't be much more difficult than my screenplay, but I was wrong.
Ok, I finally hunted down a copy of the movie "Manitou." I remembered seeing it at one of the video stores I used to go to. I found it at the store in Ypsilanti where I lived two years ago.
From the opening with pseudo-drumming music and masks of various tribes, I knew it was going to be fairly cheesy. The photographer and director did do some cool set-ups. The opening on the X-rays was cool, but most of the cuts and shots were standard old Hollywood stuff, nothing really remarkable in the cinematography. There were some things that were used to condense the plot that didn't flow smoothly. The poster of a fetus on the doctor's wall provided an easy segue, but it's not something that would be on the wall of a non-gynecologist. There were many little homages to Hitchcock, like how we are introduced to Harry (a'la the opening of "Rear Window"). The costumer did have Harry ditch the hat. The way it was described in the book, it would have come off looking too farcical. We are led to question Harry's sexuality a little more in the movie since you don't get his inner thoughts. We see him drinking Pilsner out of a wine glass, with little finger raised. His grooves to disco music, tweaked my gay-dar. This led to a lessoning of the sexual tension that I felt in the book between Harry and Karen. But then their walking around was accompanied by some of the most sappy pseudo-love melodies I have ever heard. At times it almost drowns out the dialogue. Perhaps that is the fault of the transfer to video, but that seems like bush-league stuff to fix.
It got cornier from there. The doctor cutting himself seemed forced, the book made it seem much more realistic. The falling down the stairs was just funny. Slow-mo on an old lady hitting pre-cut banisters loses any shock value, its like soap-opera melodrama. These are just some of the instances that show the director as a standard Hollywood hack. The line "We've created a monster!" was actually uttered. The flying frozen head was equally as funny. This was defiantly not the work of an auteur. Add that to the leaps of logic that have no basis in the movie plot, and this movie is barely watchable. If I hadn't read the book, I would have been lost on much of the backstory that wasn't explained. It seems like there were scenes that were cut that explained things in the movie.
Misquimacus was a disappointment. Karen's screams were unintelligible, and were pretty much played as such. In the book, they are the crux of how Harry finds out what the lump is. The leap they make in the movie is not logical as they have to skip many of the steps Harry went through in the book with researching ships and such. Because Misquimacus wasn't established very well, total world devastation just seems like one of those stupid movie things. From what the movie actually shows, it appears that only the hospital is in danger. They didn't explain very well how they were going to defeat him with the computer. They also didn't even have the huge IBM computer. That was actually brought up in the book, that a bunch of little things wouldn't do it. You needed one big entity like the police computer to defeat the Great Old One. The director must have missed the allusion to Cthulhu in the Great Old One. I understand it was cheaply made, but perhaps it shouldn't have been. It was a best-selling book, with fairly big named stars. They should have used better effects. The whole camera crew thing capturing the beasts that couldn't be seen is gone. Without the general chaos, the viewer doesn't get a sense that this threat is all that big. The blue-screen and stars was hokey.
This was not a stupid tittie movie, but they we get Karen's breasts bared at the end, for no good reason. It detracts from what is going on, and ruins the ending. The ending really strays from the book, and so makes little sense. Why did they have to have Karen focus the energies of the various electrical manitous? Besides the obvious fact that we aren't using one Manitou anymore, so we would need something to focus that energy. Then they tacked on a sappy PC ending that really doesn't fit with the movie. I don't think the director realized that this was supposed to be a horror movie, or he just didn't know what that means. It was like they stuck someone used to making the movie of the week on a horror movie. I recommend you read the book, but forget the movie. The original "Prophecy" was a much better movie on this topic.
I also got "Huntress: Spirit of the Night," as it looked fairly interesting. This was an interesting premise, done poorly. It had allusions to "Wolf-Man", "The Undying Monster", and "Cat People". The director may have gone to the same school as Neil Jordan. Many of the shots were trying for that same sense of surrealism that Jordan achieves in his films. Her it seemed a little forced. The lighting effects seemed too manufactured for effect, and it robbed the scenes of that intended effect. It also owed much to the Hammer films.
It was kind of a tittie movie, but with too much plot. Too much focus on sex to be a horror movie, but there wasn't enough to make it true soft-core porn.