The Literary Rock Star

looking down

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Thu, 19 May 2011 13:19:00 +0000

"Come over here, tell me what you see," she said, clutching at the railing and staring down into the void on the other side. Wind pulled at her dress, a wind that made Hiroki uneasy even standing firmly a dozen feet away from the rail.

"I'd ... really rather not."

"I don't pay you to say that you'd rather not," she said. "Now get over here and do what you're told."

Hiroki inched his way over to the railing she was standing against, the wind pulling heavily at his coat. This high up it was cold and gusting, dangerous to even be out on the roof much less against the edge like she was, a metal railing waist-high all that was keeping her from plummeting dozens of stories to the street below.

Hiroki came over to the edge and clung to the rail like a drowning man. He did dumb things as a matter of course, but this was stupid and pointless, and the carelessness with which she took everything made him uneasy.

He looked down, as instructed, and watched as the maw of the city opened up before him. From up here it seemed to go on for miles, the canyon between the buildings an endless row of mirrored windows like obsidian teeth, the street below pulsing with a heartbeat of its own. He felt dizzy just looking at it, silently adjusting his fee upward in his head as he cursed himself for following along with every whim his clients had.

"So, what do you think?"

"I think that I already told you I don't like heights, and this is more than a little high. So ... why don't you tell me why you pulled me all the way up here before I black out and fall to my death."

The woman at his side just smiled, shaking her head. "No reason, really. I like being up here, just to talk and think. I clear my head. I find it relaxing."

Hiroki looked away, staring up at the sky, the low wisps of cloud that looked like skid marks across the orange sky of a fast-approaching night. "So tell me what you see when you look down there."

She was leaning, arms folded, on the railing. The wind and the height seemed to not bother her in the slightest as she peered down at the city below, composing her thoughts. Hiroki felt ill just looking at her heedless of the precipice.

"From up here everyone is the same," she said. "Rich, poor, old, young, they're all just ants moving across the street. I could reach out my finger," she said, her thumb extended in front of her face, "and suddenly dozens of them are gone. Effortless. It makes all of them seem unimportant. A wave of my hand and I could brush them all away."

Hiroki looked over at her, now leaning over the rail with a hand extended, slowly blotting out sections of the street. He felt like he should intervene, pull her back before she slipped. Instead he turned away from the edge and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket. "Want one?"

She made a face and waved him off. He shrugged and tapped out a cigarette and lit it, taking a long draw and blowing smoke up at the retreating sun. "You know, some people might say-"

"Some people?" She did look over at him now with a small, lopsided smile.

"Yeah, nosier people than me, of course," Hiroki said. "But some people might say that you come up here and pretend to crush all the people because you feel powerless in your normal day-to-day life."

She laughed, a surprisingly loud sound even in all the wind. Hiroki smiled behind his cigarette and took another long drag.

"You're a silly man," she said as she moved from the railing to turn to face him. "You know, I didn't hire you to step out of line and talk about me to my face. Especially lies."

"I was just thinking aloud," Hiroki answered, not looking at her still. The sun was at one side and he knew that he was nothing more than a shadow in front of her. He liked to imagine how that looked, a trench coat and a cigarette against the haze of the city sunset. "I wouldn't presume to try to put my employer in such a neat little box."

"Good," she said. "Remember who signs your paychecks."

"For now," Hiroki said, now turning towards her with an open smile.

"Yeah, well, when its over you can call me whatever you want. For now, you're going to stand up here when I ask and act as much a gentleman as you can muster about it."

"Yes ma'am," Hiroki said, flicking ash down over the edge of the building. "So where were we?"

"Rubbing people off of the world without a thought."

"Yes," Hiroki said. "You know that's not my job, right?"

"Of course I know," the woman said. "I'm not an idiot. You think I couldn't find people who could do that if that's what I needed?"

"I'm sure you could find whoever you set your mind to," Hiroki said, hands in his pockets, edging as far away from the railing as he dared.

"Which is why I hired you."

"To find someone?"

She nodded. "The person that's trying to blot me out. Me! Of all the people they could have gone after, they go after the one that isn't powerless."

"Powerless until you track them down," Hiroki offered with a faint shrug.

She glared at him. "Well that's why I hired you, gumshoe. You find them, I'll take care of them. Maybe I'll bring them up here and show them how nice the city can look. Especially at night, when nobody's noticing."

"You should be more careful," Hiroki said. "Lots of people are afraid of heights. Especially when its this high. Your next guest might not be so appreciative of your hospitality."

She smiled and stepped away from the railing, taking a hold of Hiroki's arm and pulling him towards the stairs that led down from the roof. "Silly man, what do you think I'm counting on?"

visit and exchange: ignore the cold

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 04:01:00 +0000

Just some random writing I did on a whim. No real story here, no deeper meaning. So ... y'know. Fair warning.

"Now, when we go in here, you need to be cool, you got it?"

We were jammed in together on the landing of narrow stairs that spiralled down a half dozen floors below us. The hallway, dimly lit and poorly kept, meandered down to corridors that made me uneasy to have hovering at my periphery. But we would go no further into this labyrinth. We had arrived.

"Yeah, man, I'm cool. C'mon, when have you known me not to be cool?"

My friend Ross shook his head at me from underneath his hoody, the only part of him that moved. It didn't make me feel any better. "Look, Quills, the last time I took you to a place where a guy lit up a joint you danced around like you expected to have the door kicked in all night."

"Well, we were in a public place!"

"And at my Christmas party when that girl showed up with the keg."

"She was seventeen," I answered, knowing full well that I'd get the same speech I got before we left. I just hung my head and tried to look regretful that I had ever been so lame and let him talk.

"So what, man? Half the people there were seventeen. Nobody cares. Just like nobody cares that we're going to walk in now and talk to a guy who has something I want and I'm going to buy it. You understand? And you said you were going to be cool but I'm going to tell you, this guy smells uncool like you had a dead cat down your pants and he is not going to be cool with you being uncool."

"Right. Be cool and all will be cool."

"Exactly," Ross said, clapping me on the shoulder. "You're learning, you prissy bastard. You're learning."

Ross knocked twice on the door and we were lead in. The apartment was as dim as the hallway, perhaps even dimmer. We were in some sort of foyer, with a woman greeting us and offering us a drink if we wanted it. I heard Ross answer no for both of us as I tried to see my way ahead.

Ross walked into the room beyond and I followed. It was obviously once a living room, but it had been converted into some sort of meeting place, with chairs and couches and large pillows everywhere. There would be room for three dozen people if they didn't mind getting close.

Tonight, however, it was just a man sitting in a large, worn down armchair near the open window. In February the open window let in a blast of cold air, cutting through the stuffy smells of cooking and living that we left behind in the hallway. It was like breathing alertness, though I was already cold in my jacket.

The man in the chair was tall and thin and obviously unbothered by the cold despite wearing only a white dress shirt and a hat struck at a jaunty corner on his head. He was reading by city glow and moonlight, a cigarette in one hand and a book in the other, shafts of light brushing by the smoke heading out the window.

"Hey man," Ross said, stepping forward. He reached out his hand and the man in the chair stuck his cigarette between his lips to shake Ross' hand. "It's been a while."

"I'm here anytime," the other man said. He glanced over at me and even in the gloom I could see he was a good looking guy, maybe not even thirty, though he certainly looked more intense than anyone I had ever seen Ross hanging around.

"Oh, yeah, this is Quills. Quills, this is my man Justin. Quills is green to all this, so don't go too hard on him, a'ight?"

Justin leaned forward and extended his hand. I shook it, though it was as cold as the winter air coming in from the window. I didn't know how he wasn't shivering sitting there like that. "It's nice to meet you," I said, returning the handshake even though his grip and the cold combined into the splash of pain in extreme temperatures where your mind is still trying to sort out if you've been burnt or frozen.

"Quills, that's an interesting name."

"Ah, just a nickname," I said, suddenly self conscious. His eyes danced across a shadowed face like they were picking up the moonlight, though with it framing him I wrote it off as a trick of my nerves. Trying to be cool was so hard.

"I see. Well, Quills, why don't you have a seat wherever you like and let me and Ross get down to business. You seem a bit uncomfortable."

"No, I'm fine," I said a little too quickly and a little too loudly. I laughed nervously. Ross just rolled his eyes at me, which only made me feel more panicked. I didn't want to mess this up. I had begged Ross to bring me along, to prove that I could live his lifestyle without any trouble.

Justin laughed. "If you say so. You sure you won't have a drink? I'm sure Cheryl will be happy to get you whatever you want."

"Um, some ... water? Or coffee, if you have it." I realized even as I said it that that wasn't the drinks a place like this would offer, but what was said was said and I could only stand there looking dumb, mouth agape, trying to think of a drink that would immediately show that I wasn't as terrible at this as Ross assumed I was.

"Let's split the difference, then," he said. "Cheryl!" His voice was loud and resonant in the empty room and the woman came from behind the door. "Get this poor boy an Americano before he runs out of here screaming."

Cheryl looked over at me with a smile that normally would make me nervous for a whole other set of reasons. But in a place like this, it was the normal smile of a pretty girl and it was real and relatable and I felt instantly calmer. As she retreated into the kitchen I found myself settling into the nearest seat, the middle of a long low couch that stretched across most of one wall.

“Anyway,” Ross started, “I know I haven’t been by in a while but things have been pretty crazy. I hope there aren’t any hard feelings about that?”

“Of course not,” Justin answered, taking a long drag on the cigarette that had been idling between his lips. It flared back to life, the one spot of warmth in the room. “I understand how it is. Times are tough all around. You don’t exactly see this place as lively as it used to be.”

“Yeah, I hear you keep it going on from time to time.”

“What can I say, I like having friends over,” Justin said with a smile. Ross handed him an envelope which he barely bothered to look at. I knew Ross was saving up to buy something from him, drugs of some kind, but I didn’t know and I really didn’t want to ask. Ross was a friend but sometimes it was good to know the boundaries. I couldn’t try to be cool for everything.

Justin set the envelope beside him in the chair and then gestured for Ross to take a seat. When Cheryl came out, it was with a large, steaming mug of coffee for me. I wrapped my hands around it, glad to have some warmth flowing through my otherwise icy fingers. It was soothing. I couldn’t imagine staying in here for any length of time comfortably, especially if all I was doing was reading. The idle thought crossed my mind that Justin was some kind of vampire. I laughed quietly to myself over the coffee.

“Something funny?”

I shot a look at Ross but he just shrugged so I answered Justin, telling him about the cold between careful sips of the drink in my hands. It was like heaven, a warm blanket wrapping around me from the inside.

Justin laughed in return, louder than mine. “Vampire? Man, you kids these days and your vampires. No, no, I’m perfectly normal, more or less. I don’t really feel cold.” He handed Cheryl the envelope, and she disappeared into the room she came from.

Ross chimed in. “It’s true, we all thought it was just some macho bullshit until we dared him one time to do that polar bear challenge thing where guys go swimming in ice water? And he totally did it. There were these guys who had been there for decades who said he was unreal.”

“They wanted to take me to a doctor and see if there was something wrong with me,” Justin said. “I refused, of course. I’ve lived this long with it, haven’t died of hypothermia yet, why start worrying about it now? But I’ll admit sometimes it makes guests uncomfortable. Tonight I’m not entertaining so I just let the air in. I find it refreshing. Reminds me of the mountains.”

Cheryl walked back out and handed Ross a small envelope. I glanced at it curiously but didn’t ask. It seemed small if it was drugs, smaller than the envelope he handed over would have justified. Cheryl turned to me. “If it’s too cold out here, you can come into the kitchen, keep me company. I’ve got a heater in there and everything.”

Justin shook his head. “Don’t go throwing out the welcome wagon just yet. He’s green and likely to startle.”

I shook my head. “I’m not startled. Some warmth sounds nice,” I said up to her, going to stand up.

“Be careful, tiger, she’s a man-eater,” Justin said with a grin.

I looked up at Cheryl, who just shrugged. “You can’t believe everything you hear.”

Ross laughed. “Yeah, but that works both ways. C’mon, you can work your charms if he gets up the nerve to come back. We have a party to go to, thanks to you.” He tipped the envelope against his forehead in a salute, which Justin returned with a tug of the brim of his hat.

I looked down at my warm coffee, and up at Cheryl looking suddenly put out at being shut down by both men. Now that we were here without incident, and I was warming up, and there was the offer of an even warmer place and a friendly face, I found my earlier nervousness dissolving in the smoke and the moonlight.

“Aw, c’mon Russ, do we have to?”

“Quills, you try me.”

“What are friends for?”

Keep on Keepin' On

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:00:00 +0000

So I know I've been a big ol' bastard when it comes to updating this blog. I know it, you know it. It's the elephant in the room and I just want to say that it's probably here to stay. At least for a little while. I know you don't want to hear that, but that's the way it is. Trust me, the elephant ain't no fan of it either. The couch barely seats two normal folk, much less a giant malevolent pachyderm.

Through a whole mess of reasons, including illness, apathy, depression, and being busy with other stuff, this blog's totally fallen by the wayside. In part that's by design. I went out and got myself a nice movie blog I write stuff in with the always-fabulous Elizabeth Ditty. If you're interested in hearing mostly about movies then you can find it here.

But other than that, I've been struggling through a novel, and that doesn't engender itself to a whole lot of other writing, especially anything that isn't so heavy with ennui and self-pity that I wouldn't be mortified to post it. How long that'll be the case is anyone's guess. So until then, as always I tweet too much but that's where I always am if you really want to hear me talk about the inane stuff. And I'll be back when I have a finished book, or I get in a mood to write a short story, or any other of a hundred other possibilities.

It's really quite exciting, when you think about it.

Keeping the Promise: Season of the Witch

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 19:31:00 +0000

A commitment to excellence. That’s one of the things that as a moviegoer I completely and utterly lack. So when Screened.com’s freelance writer Eric Pope started going on about the Nic Cage Promise, a goal to see every Nic Cage movie on the weekend it was released, I was intrigued. Nic Cage is a man of considerable talents, among them looking wild-eyed, chewing scenery, and generally being fucking bananas. It is at least compelling to watch, more often than not. What could be the harm? I signed aboard this misguided ship for the 2011 season.

Which is how I found myself at 10:00 AM sitting in my local AMC with a surprising number of other damned souls about to be treated to the cinematic equivalent of a dimly lit waiting room full of sighs and old magazines.

For those of you who have been exercising good taste, Season of the Witch is a story of Nic Cage and Ron Perlman as two knights taking a leave of conscience from the crusades, fleeing to a town where they’re caught as deserters and made to escort a woman who is supposedly a witch to some monastery where she will undergo a trial (and probably execution, because hey, what else are you going to do with witches?).

The film opens with a montage of Cage and Perlman killing various ethnic peoples to religious dogma being shouted at them, both of them clearly too old or too bored to be swinging around a sword and make it look dramatic, and finally they flee the evil Church’s grasp to head back to Europe, suddenly in the grasp of the plague of rubbery prosthetics, something that’s rendered the location shooting empty of extras and the cramped city sets full of bodies but bereft of speaking roles outside of our leads.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t do anyone any favors, as Nic Cage seems to think he’s in a serious movie, looking ponderously grave (or maybe he’s just that serious about getting his paycheck). Ron Perlman, on the other hand, seems to be convinced he’s in a buddy movie, biting off his limited lines like the Hellboy we’ve come to know and love. Here, however, they seem to go noticed by nobody. He might as well be playing against the flat grey stone walls.

The characters get a bunch of other, more disposable people around them when they pick up the ‘witch.’ There’s a priest who we’re lead to believe is evil because evil priests are almost a given in a story about witchcraft. There’s a prisoner who serves as the guide but mainly serves as the source of a jarring Chicago accent until he dies by the worst CGI wolves since The Day After Tomorrow. There’s also some other people, but the script doesn’t seem to give much of a shit about them so why should I?

This merry band travels from one painfully obvious set to another, back walls obscured by heavy fog so they wouldn’t have to pay for CG extensions. No, all the CG is saved for the very end of the movie, where after toying with the idea that the movie would be about whether or not the girl who serves as the plot device is or isn’t a witch (by the way, she spends most of the movie looking creepy and exhibiting super strength, but still everyone seems more than willing to give her the benefit of the doubt about maybe not actually being a witch) the plot is suddenly tossed aside in favor of turning her into a really really awful CG monster.

No, I mean bad. Like it makes the bat-Dracula from Van Helsing look like The Thing kind of good. So our heroes fight the CG to the best of their sleepy, halfhearted ability, and then everyone you even remotely cared about dies and we’re left with a message of hope or something. It doesn’t really matter, because none of it is given any sort of gravitas. The big reveal of the plot, that all of their journey has been a trick to get them into revealing the location of a sacred book to a demon, is tossed haphazardly aside in the middle of an assault of zombie monks. Yeah, there are zombie monks, looking frightfully boring with their rubbery makeup and PG-13 trickles of fake blood.

If this sounds like a mess, that’s because it is. The movie is a clash of really terrible ideas, put together in such a way as to make it all seem dreadfully boring. There was, surreally enough, a blind woman sitting several seats down the row from me, and the quiet narration of her husband explaining the parts she couldn’t get from audio context were far more entertaining than the movie itself.

There is such a thing as a fun bad movie, something Cage has traded in through a lot of his career, but this movie isn’t that kind of film. If Season of the Witch is guilty of anything, it’s taking a can’t-miss cult premise and squandering it by taking it all far too seriously. You weren’t going to see this anyway, because most of you aren’t insane, but take this as further evidence that this movie was dumped out to die in January for good reason.

The things I will do for Nic Cage. I hope he’s happy.

Reel Thoughts: “Land of Silence and Darkness”

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 09:54:00 +0000

Werner Herzog’s 1971 documentary about Fini Straubinger, a German deaf-blind woman, is notable at first for being very un-Herzogian. It is presented as a medical story, the likes of which we used to see plastered all over TLC back when it was The Learning Channel, stories of hope and struggle in the face of various afflictions of being. Herzog’s oft-parodied narrative voice is nearly absent, and when it does interject it is crisp and short and unlike the mad profundity of modern Herzog.

One might easily dismiss the opening story of Ms. Straubinger as the film begins to unfold, a tale of early childhood and a loss of her senses, as the beginning of inspirational pulp. Good inspirational pulp, to be sure, but rarely are such things worth more than the run-times’ worth of emotional indulgence.

But far be it for her to bemoan her fate. Fini Straubinger, after 30 years spent trapped in her own body, was ‘awoken’ to the world of communication again and made it her crusade to help others who are similarly afflicted with deaf-blindness.

Shortly into the film, we’re introduced to a gathering of her friends, many blind-deaf, accompanied by translators who turn speech into the dot-dash shorthand of tactile sign language. It’s a jumble of communication, people speaking in two languages, half the party otherwise unaware of their surroundings. People are asked for who are standing just beside the shot, questions repeated in a loop between interpreters and speakers when misunderstandings occur.

It’s a mess, but it’s the first glimpse into the film’s real aim, to try to communicate the vast gulf of difference between the life of those of us who are sighted and hearing and those who no longer have either of those most paramount of senses. These are people who live in the memories of their senses, who treasure the experiences of the tactile. An early plane ride becomes a moment of wonder as Fini marvels at the sensations of flight. A visit to a botanical garden is like watching people discover a whole dimension to the universe that they previously did not know.

The story turns, as it inevitably would, to those who are born blind and deaf. Fini remembers her days seeing and hearing, time at school, the ability to read and take in the world. But we quickly realize that there are those for whom something as easy as describing a childhood memory might forever be impossible, humans trapped in their own body, deprived of organized input, slow to learn concepts most of us mastered before we were in school.

There is one scene of a boy who is being slowly introduced to swimming. The boy’s reaction to the shower before the pool is one of shock and wonder, and it becomes impressed upon us that even something as obvious as a shower, or water, becomes something frightening and unknown and only dimly understood when you have little language and less frame of reference. Yet even those fearful interactions with the world are hopeful results compared to others, trapped so long in silence that it seems they’ll never be reached, doomed to voiceless existence.

One is struck in watching these people struggle to integrate into the world we know that a film about their ailments is in part a patent absurdity. What would a deaf-blind person have to do with a film? Indeed, for those who were born that way, the very idea seems as alien as trying to describe living in the fifth dimension would be to us. Sight and sound conveying abstract concepts? If all you know is the feel of a tree, water falling on your face, the surprising touch of other beings trying to communicate things you can barely understand, then the whole affair becomes irrelevant to the point that it might not as well exist.

And it seems like Herzog is aware of that. His camera is fond of lingering, but the subjects he shoots are utterly incapable of playing to the camera. They tell their stories or not, act in ways they wish or not, no frame for how it will appear on film. It is without artifice, wholly honest, and utterly compelling. For how little the concept of film might mean to the blind-deaf, it is through that medium that we, in all our good fortune, are brought closer to understanding the ‘other,’ both with empathy and intellectual understanding.

And Here We Go Again–2011 Preemptive Movie Boner List

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 15:00:00 +0000

Looking forward to 2011 is a little like staring down the barrel of a gun. 2010 was a pretty great year, as I already went on about at length, but the new year always seems full of possibilities and looking at it from this beginning point its impossible to know the lay of the land. Hell, by summer we could be suffering nuclear winter! A comforting thought, in these troubled times, because to be perfectly honest I’m sick of Transformers movies.

But in reality, it looks like there’s a surprisingly strong lineup of movies coming in 2011, if the early lists I was working off of are any indication. Certainly things will show up that surprise the hell out of everyone, as they always do. But it doesn’t hurt to have things you’re actively excited for, too, to keep your spirits up during the stretches where its one bad romcom after another lame superhero movie.

That said, there are a few other goals I have set for myself in movie watching this year. I’m going to join the growing legions who take the Nic Cage Promise, a sacred oath to see any Nic Cage movie on opening weekend. Which will certainly be a source of entertainment. For those who listen to me lament my decision or for me actually watching the movies remains to be seen.

And that’s it. No more talk, time for some fucking movies! 2011, don’t let me down.

Source Code

Mind fuck or soft sci-fi thriller? Who knows! Can’t wait either way.

directed by      Duncan Jones
starring            Jake Gyllenhaal
                          Vera Farmiga
                          Michelle Monaghan
                          Jeffrey Wright
release date    April 15

Duncan Jones is the director of 2009’s Moon, one of my favorite movies of that year and one of the best modern sci-fi movies. So obviously I’m going to be excited about his next thing. But when his next thing looks to be a crazy time-bending trip through alternate realities in order to solve crimes? Well, I’m totally on board. The trailer seems to set up most of the plot, though its hard to tell where it goes from there. It could be Déjà Vu, it could be 12 Monkeys. Either way, I’m excited to see how it all pans out.

Fast Five

And above all else we don’t ever, ever let them get into cars!

directed by        Justin Lin
starring             Vin Diesel
                            Paul Walker
                            Jordana Brewster
                            Dwayne Johnson
                            Sung Kang
release date      April 29

I have both an ironic and utterly genuine love for the Fast and the Furious movies. I don’t really think the series is ever going to top the amazing The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift for ridiculous-shit-per-minute, but this movie looks like its going to give it its damnedest try. Of note is the addition of Dwayne Johnson, who is so perfect for this franchise that its criminal that its taken five movies to get him involved. There are few things as compelling, in a popcorn movie kind of way, as cars going fast and blowing stuff up real good. Guilty pleasure of the year? Easily. But I’ve never not enjoyed the silly machismo riff of Vin Diesel’s wheelhouse.

Hanna

Your annual quota of Young Girl Murdering Dudes.

directed by       Joe Wright
starring             Saoirse Ronan
                            Cate Blanchett
                            Eric Bana
release date      April 8

This movie popped up on my radar nearly out of the blue with the release of the trailer. Part The American and part incredibly badass action movie, Hanna looks to be a cross between Jason Borne and a heartwarming coming of age tale. With lots of gunfire and broken necks for good measure. The pairing of Bana and Blanchett is a great one, as both actors at the type that can sell limited screen time to put in compelling performances. I love the look of this movie, bleak and cold. So long as it doesn’t stray too far into dumb action, it should be a marvel to see.

X-Men: First Class
directed by             Matthew Vaughn
starring                   James McAvoy
                                 Michael Fassbender
                                  Kevin Bacon
                                 Jennifer Lawrence
release date            June 3

I’ll be the first to admit the X-Men movies are in a sorry state. X-Men 3 was bloated and lame. Origins: Wolverine was a steaming pile of shit. But before that, the X-Men movies were something greater, superhero movies with scope and social message, films that were smarter than the cookie cutter origin stories that came in the wake of Spider-Man. And by taking X-Men back to its roots in a period piece about mutants in the 60s, I feel like First Class has a good chance of recapturing that sense of purpose the series lost. Matthew Vaughn won me over with Kick-Ass, and working off of more restrained material here might make this film something truly special.

Hugo Cabret
directed by              Martin Scorsese
starring                    Ben Kingsley
                                  Sacha Baron Cohen
                                  Chloë Moretz
                                  Jude Law
release date            December 9

Scorsese was never really a guy on my radar, despite his high profile as a director, until 2010’s Shutter Island, which very nearly made it into my top movies of 2010 list. That said, I became incredibly curious when his next project was announced as a family adventure movie about an orphan who lives in a 1930s Paris train station and gets wrapped up in a mystery involving his late father’s work with an automaton. With the talent attached, I’m hoping for an amalgam of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Hayao Miyazaki, but regardless of what it turns out to be, I’m incredibly excited to see what Scorsese’s talents create when bent to younger fare.

A Dangerous Method
directed by            David Cronenberg
starring                  Viggo Mortensen
                                 Michael Fassbender
                                 Keira Knightley
                                 Vincent Cassel
release date           TBA 2011

The two previous Cronenberg/Mortensen collaborations, 2005s A History of Violence and 2007s Eastern Promises were both fantastic movies. Its hard to believe that Cronenberg’s next, a biopic about the early days of psychology, will be any different. Mortensen plays Sigmund Freud against Fassbender’s Carl Jung, two colleagues who are torn apart by a rivalry over how to approach the fledgling science of psychotherapy and the troubled young woman, played by Knightley, who comes between them. I love this part of history, I love the actors and director, I can’t imagine how this movie will be anything less than lush and intense and amazing.

Midnight in Paris
directed by             Woody Allen
starring                   Rachel McAdams
                                 Adrien Brody
                                 Owen Wilson
                                 Marion Cotillard
release date           May 2011

So far little is known about Woody Allen’s latest project, a story of a family traveling to Paris for business. The plot hinges around a young married couple forced to deal with the idea that a life different than there’s isn’t necessarily better. It seems right in Allen’s wheelhouse, but I feel that his movies live and die by the cast. Owen Wilson is a personal favorite of mine, an actor I feel who is wildly misused and underappreciated outside of Wes Anderson films. Woody Allen is always kind of hit or miss with me, but I’m always game for the newest comedy he puts out.

Drive
directed by             Nicolas Winding Refn
starring                   Ryan Gosling
                                  Carey Mulligan
                                  Christina Hendricks
                                  Ron Perlman
release date            September 16

Nicolas Winding Refn is the director of 2009s flawed but violently beautiful Bronson, a movie I loved despite all of its issues. His newest movie takes him into action/drama territory, a story of a Hollywood stunt performer by day/wheelman by night played by Gosling. When a hit is put out on him after a botched job, he ends up on the run with an ex-con’s girlfriend (played by Mulligan) in his car. No idea at this point how action versus crime drama this movie is going to be, but knowing Refn its going to be intense and saddening and probably brutal. I can’t wait. Gosling always does good work, even if most of it flies under the radar, and he’s the perfect fit for a tortured criminal type.

Immortals
directed by               Tarsem Singh
starring                    Henry Cavill
                                   Freida Pinto
                                   Mickey Rourke
release date             November 11

Tarsem Singh is the tragically non-prolific director of such movies as The Cell and The Fall, movies that are arguably more style than substance, but present such a well constructed, hauntingly beautiful vision that I can’t find it in myself to care whether or not they’re deep stories. His next movie deals with the Greek warrior Theseus (played by Cavill) who leads his army into battle with the Greek Gods against the Titans, lead by King Hyperion (played by Mickey Rourke in what I can only imagine will be a great scenery chewing roll). It sounds like Clash of the Titans, to be sure, but I’d love to see a riff on that mythology by someone with an eye for making movies that aren’t ass-fugly (see 2010’s nightmare remake of Clash of the Titans for a good lesson in how to fuck this up). This far out, there’s little to go on, but I’m sold by the pedigree of fantasy vision Singh brings to a movie alone.

The Ides of March
directed by               George Clooney
starring                     Philip Seymour Hoffman
                                    Paul Giamatti
                                   Evan Rachel Wood
                                   Marisa Tomei
                                   Ryan Gosling
release date             December 2011

You tell me George Clooney is making a political drama and I hearken back to the amazing Good Night, And Good Luck. This is cause for celebration, because the world needs movies as smart as that one. You tell me that it’s based vaguely on the 2004 Democratic Primary of Howard Dean, starring Ryan Gosling as a young press spokesman who falls prey to backroom politics, and you’ve got my attention. I love a smart political drama, something immediate and personal, and Clooney’s proved he knows how to make that film. The movie’s set for limited release in December of 2011, so it seems like Sony Pictures is already early in positioning it as an awards movie. Awards or not, I can’t wait to see what Clooney does with the material.

Top Movies of 2010 — the list

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 22:56:00 +0000

Well here we are, folks, the final list of my top movies of 2010. As I said in last week’s post, I’ve seen a hell of a lot of movies this year, and plenty of them were pretty good. For all the disappointment I felt this summer brought, come fall it seemed one great thing was coming out after another. As overwhelmed as I kind of felt during the worst of it, it seems to have shaken out more or less, and I feel comfortable with the number of things I’ve seen this year.

If you feel like checking my work, you can feel free to look through my list of movies I saw in 2010, but I don’t really think there’s any noticeable absences that would have made their way onto this list. I already spilled well past the borders of ten movies anyway, with many that I had fully intended to write about hitting the cutting room floor once I got serious about trimming the list down. As it is, I don’t think I could cut any of these picks without feeling as if I’ve betrayed my experience of this year. I love all of these movies fully.

The movies aren’t sorted in any particular order, and I have no intention of claiming one is better than the other. I found a surprising correlation between my picks and most of the major critics of note this year, which makes me think I need to either A) see weirder stuff or B) start charging to talk about these movies. Hell, if my list can so closely mirror people who do this for a living, why am I doing it for free?

Of course, all of that aside, great movies are great movies, no matter who calls them so. These are some great movies. I hope you find the list worth your time. If something sounds interesting, go out and watch it! None of these movies are secret traps of so-bad-its-good. And feel free to share your list in the comments, or tell me how wrong I am, or maybe even agree with me. I mean, that last one isn’t as interesting, but I don’t mind being right.

All right. No more preamble! Here comes

My Top Not-10 Movies of 2010

Scott Pilgrim vs The World
directed by Edgar Wright

There are a lot of things I could write about Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. It’s a dense film, and it touches upon many things that I feel very passionately about beyond the scope of the store of the film itself. It’s a monumental stride in integrating a subculture I’ve long been a part of into the greater mainstream of movies and art. And despite it’s initially disappointing impact at the box office, it seems to have found its audience on home video.

But what Scott Pilgrim really is is a love letter to visual storytelling. It’s a movie that lives to mesh images with words and dialogue and sounds to create something new and exciting. In adapting the original graphic novel Edgar Wright has gone far beyond the most abstracted examples (Ang Lee’s version of Hulk, Sin City) to mesh conceits of that storytelling style into a filmic space. Sound effects aren’t just given special notice, but they permeate the film. Scenes slide into frame like panels, with aggressive use of split screen and jump cuts to create the feeling of the original graphic novel without relying on the actual animation of said panels to overstate the point. Speed and sound lines drip off of everything. It’s lush with effects, creating a world that’s part cartoon and part comic book but still feeling complete and grounded in its own strange reality.

Scott Pilgrim is an ambitious film, in parts incredible action film, broad coming-of-age comedy, and off-beat romance. But what its eccentric cast represents is the broken individuals of my generation, people too self-aware to not realize that they’re a mess of cliché but unable to do anything about it but laugh at themselves. Nobody is wholly good, and the heroes are often as petty as the villains, but when isn’t that the case? For all its unreality, Scott Pilgrim presents a more colorful version of the life I think most people live out every day.

Of all the movies on this list, I feel Scott Pilgrim is the most fun, the most creative, and potentially the most flawed. But it is amazing for all the things it reaches for, even if it doesn’t quite capture them. It’s a film full of magic, insightful and clever even when it’s being stupid and awkward. For all its unrealities, it is about the truth of all of our dreams, the life we live within our imagination.

The Ghost Writer
directed by Roman Polanski

The story of an author thrown in over his head, Polanski’s The Ghost Writer involves Ewan McGregor being hired on to write the memoirs of Pierce Brosnan playing a very Blair-esque British former Prime Minister recently accused of war crimes. What begins as an uncomfortable story of ethics quickly evolves into something much more sinister as McGregor’s character begins digging up information on his client and those around him.

The best thing about The Ghost Writer is how muted it is as a thriller. It’s laid out from the outset that whatever secrets are here have caused the likely death of one person already, but at the same time the story is about an author doing research for a biography. The ticking clock so paramount to the genre is almost non-existent, with only the hazy idea of a deadline for the book keeping McGregor’s writer moving at times when he’d happily rather just not push deeper into the labyrinth of the plot.

And it’s that easy pace that really makes The Ghost Writer surprising. Things unfold almost casually but end up in dark places, with conspiracies and paranoia blossoming naturally in the environment of political intrigue we find ourselves. It’s obvious that nobody is entirely trustworthy but it’s not clear whether it’s because of some dark secret or because that is simply the reality of modern politics.

Special note should be given to Brosnan, who turns in perhaps his best performance as the beleaguered Adam Lang, a man who is little more than a pretty face in a nice suit to figurehead the motivations of others. It’s a subtle performance, a man deluded into thinking he has a legacy, slave to the policies set out by his betters. But Brosnan sells his helplessness with incredible charisma and empathy. When he arrives on scene, you want to believe he is what he claims to be, despite all evidence to the contrary.

It’s a film that’s slow to unwind, but when it does get to its tension points it does so with an understated brutality that feels all the more real for doing so. In many ways I was reminded of Michael Clayton, another thriller with a similarly muted sense of tension. And like Michael Clayton, it lives by its inspired cast. Also like Michael Clayton, it’s a fantastic film.

The American
directed by Anton Corbijn

The American isn’t especially original. It’s the story of a suave assassin played by Clooney who is doing One Last Job because he is Too Old For This Shit, and also probably Weary Of The Killing. Yeah, I know, you’ve seen all of those things before. Thankfully, a movie doesn’t have to be conceptually unique to provide a unique experience.

The American is a quiet, understated film, a modern spin on French new wave cinema. As such, for a film about assassins and for the brutally violent opening, most of the run time of The American is muted and incredibly understated. Clooney’s unnamed assassin finds himself in a beautiful Italian village building a custom rifle for another assassin. At the same time, forces seem to be gathering against him, enemies hidden around every turn.

It’s a film content to be still, about the paranoia of a quiet morning spent contemplating the obvious oncoming fate, the presence of an actor inhabiting a role so comfortably that there’s little need for exposition or even dialogue. Instead it is devoted to a unique visual beauty—a fog drenched Italian city, beautiful women lit dimly in questionable places, the stark grace of Clooney assembling his instruments of death. The American is the most European of movies on this list, with sensibilities that run counter to most of modern cinema.

Which is what makes it so compelling to watch. The movie is intense and remote, an internal monologue that the audience is never let in on, relationships that are hinted at but rarely explored, and all driven by Clooney as a man of deep emotion and few words trying to keep alive and morally intact. It is a movie wrapped around the gravity of a single performance, that of Clooney reaffirming the argument that he’s the biggest star of his generation.

Mother
directed by Bong Joon-ho

Mother is the perfect example of why South Korean movies continue to be some of the most refreshing, compelling foreign cinema out there. The story starts simple enough. Do-joon is a mentally disabled young man who works at his mother’s medicinal herb shop. The titular, unnamed mother dotes on Do-joon, henpecking the lowlifes he hangs out with and trying to keep her son out of trouble.

This all comes crashing down when a high school girl turns up dead and circumstantial evidence places Do-joon near the scene of the crime. The police, incompetent and bowing to intense public pressure (see Lady Vengeance for another example of appalling South Korean police work, which makes me wonder if there isn’t some truth to it) railroad Do-joon into custody, slapping him with an ineffectual attorney and tricking him into signing a confession.

This begins a quest by the Mother to prove Do-joon’s innocence, a trek that takes her throughout the town, uncovering the seedy truths of the world around her, finding her working with people she previously despised, as the truth slowly begins to reveal itself to her.

The trappings are straight out of the best noir, but where Mother excels is in how quickly it transcends them. What begins as one story slowly morphs into another, as events take wild left turns that shock and horrify, but never seem out of place. It is an amazing character study, a deep exploration of just how far a parent’s love can go, and the dark places to which it leads. It is in many ways a genre mashup, a close-to-the-vest thriller, a strangely touching character piece, all wrapped in an amateur detective story. But it remains incredibly compelling, powerfully acted and beautifully shot, even as it strays down the darkest of alleys.

I’m Still Here
directed by Casey Affleck

This is undoubtedly going to be the most controversial movie on this list, but I’m okay with that. From the beginning, I’m Still Here set out to be controversial, to spark discussion. In light of the truth of the film finally coming out shortly after its release, it was clear that all along the movie existed as a piece to engage the viewer to debate the things it was putting forth. The question of quality, then, rested entirely on how well it expressed those topics and how subtle or not subtle those questions were.

I’m Still Here is first and foremost an uncomfortable film. Even knowing that Joaquin’s performance as an unraveling version of himself is indeed a performance, it’s painful to watch. He’s erratic, moody, his body and thoughts seeming to disintegrate in tandem from the figure audiences had come to know from his movies. That it’s captured with all the graceless mess of a seemingly home movie makes it all the more jarring. It is a party that has long since ceased to be fun, yet everyone is still there going at it just the same.

It’s obvious even from the beginning that his aspirations at a music career are little more than a pipe dream. He’s actively terrible, clueless as to how to begin and pushy and oblivious when people start trying to call him on the fact that he’s no musician. Yet, for all of this, the people closest to him and the people fartherst away, the celebrity watchers, do nothing. And that’s where the most troubling aspects of the movie come in. Despite his obviously unwell state, nobody stops it. Nobody from the outside steps in and tries to intervene. The celebrity gossip machine marches forth, jokes aplenty, steamrolling over what could have been the last gasp of a very troubled man. But who cares, right? Everyone is far too self-invested or too skeptical to genuinely be concerned.

It’s a good thing the performance was just that, because otherwise everyone on that film would have been an accomplice to something awful, obviously neglecting a person in need of serious help. And it’s that neglect that is most obvious in the film. This idea of stardom, of expectation, comes with it an easy disregard when people don’t live up to those images we project of them. Joaquin puts himself forward as a sacrifice to this machine of parody and spite, turning the lens more on it than himself. It is not a perfect film, but it’s a movie that dares to turn our fascination with celebrity back on us and ask whether or not we truly care or are just looking for the next scandal, the next tabloid explosion.

I Am Love
directed by Luca Guadagnino

I Am Love is the hardest movie in this list for me to talk about, because so much of what makes it special is completely intangible. It’s a movie about beauty, about the juxtaposition of image and sound, about the use of color and the lining up of the perfect shot. It simply defies proper encapsulation with words. And yet I’m going to give it a try anyway.

I Am Love is a movie about the wealthy Recchi family, Italian textile manufacturers. Tancredi, recent heir to the family business, is left in co-ownership with his recalcitrant son Edoardo. Tancredi’s wife, Emma, played by Swinton, is a native-Russian who in this period of familial turmoil begins to grow disaffected with the formal matriarchal status that has been thrust upon her, and begins to explore the idea of an affair with her son’s best friend, a chef named Antonio.

Which doesn’t begin to touch the magic of this movie. The reality of I Am Love is one of a passionate spirit, long fettered by responsibility, beginning to shake that repression and rediscover a more sensual side of life. And it is expressed to perfection by the etherial Swinton, who carries the entire film, selling the fact she speaks Italian and Russian and not a lick of English, incredibly empathetic as a woman who is exploring new frontiers in her life.

I could go on at length about I Am Love, but trying to write about texture and sense is a fool’s errand and that is the main focus of the film, from the sterile open to the operatic and overwhelming ending. I will include here the trailer, which is in itself a work of art in how it uses its music and images. The film isn’t quite as kinetic as this, but the same care is taken with the texture of the film at large, care that is hard to find and much appreciated when it is done as well as this.

The Social Network
directed by David Fincher

The Social Network is the easiest choice for this list. It’s on just about every critic of note’s end of year list, it has universally positive reviews, and is on a very very short list of Best Picture frontrunners. Put simply, The Social Network is the safe bet. That said, I’m not going to be some movie hipster and ignore what is one of the most tightly wound, well-paced, entertaining semi-true movies to come out this year.

Love him or hate him, Zuckerberg is a presence in the world. But Fincher and Sorkin’s triumph is dragging what is a very insular, introverted personality out onto the screen, to be analyzed and critiqued and finally made relatable. For all the buzz about how negative the portrayal of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is in this movie, Jessie Eisenberg’s portrayal is, from the first moment, of a fragile man uncomfortable with everything in life but the inside of his own head.

It’s easy to melt down the film into the broad strokes of what did or didn’t happen, but what’s great about The Social Network is how little that reality matters. The movie isn’t about telling us a true story, it’s about showing the perils of genius, the tenuousness of friendship in the face of ambition, and the ephemeral nature of all of our relationships in the modern era. Enemies, rivals, friends, business partners, it’s all relative and fluid and changing at the speed of light. The Social Network is a frame of interaction in the era of the internet, both seen from the outside and living in that moment. It is the first great comment of many on the aughts, reflective without nostalgia, critical without anger or ignorance.

127 Hours
directed by Danny Boyle

127 Hours is a pretty well-known quantity. The true story of Aaron Ralston, the hiker who got his arm pinned by a rock and then was stuck for the titular 127 hours before he cut his own arm off and escaped alive. I would be remiss if I didn’t admit that going into it I was idly interested only due to the names attached. An uplifting survivalist story really isn’t my thing.

Except that’s not really what 127 Hours is about. Yes, Franco as Ralston gets trapped under a rock. And yes, it has a similarly gruesomely triumphant ending, but the reality of the film is vastly different than the abstraction.

First off is Danny Boyle’s typically hyperkinetic style. It creates an amazing juxtaposition here between the modern life and internal monologue of Ralston and the incredible, monolithic static position he finds himself in. It’s a film that balances perfectly between the concrete and the subjective. It’s a delicate line, but it is expressed with incredible compassion for the subject matter.

But the real key is the story that’s hung upon the facts of the situation. Ralston’s story is one of survival, but in Boyle’s hands its transformed into an ode to the human spirit. It is about the need for others, the struggle of the individual versus the social realities of today, a flawed hero discovering truths through suffering that would never have otherwise occurred to him.

It all runs a huge risk of being saccharine and preachy, but the film is neither of those things. It’s swift and beautiful and shocking, but never does it rely too heavily on sentiment. There isn’t enough lucidity in Ralston’s experience, and too much bravery in Franco’s performance, for anything so easy.

Exit Through the Gift Shop
directed by Banksy

Exit Through the Gift Shop got a lot of buzz earlier this year on account of many of the people who saw it being convinced that the story wasn’t true, that the documentary about the world of underground art was, in itself, a subversive art piece. What most people failed to realize is that there is nothing preventing the truth to be just as much a work of art as a work of fiction. Semantics be damned, Exit Through the Gift Shop is a compelling piece of art about art, no matter where the reality of the situation ends up.

Initially the story of Thierry Guetta, a French immigrant in Los Angeles who becomes obsessed with street art. Taking a camera and heading out into the night, he begins assembling the largest collection of first hand footage of the subject ever assembled, charting much of the emergence of the movement. However, after an encounter with the enigmatic Banksy, it is revealed that for the thousands of hours of footage Guetta has filmed, he has no motivation or ability to put it together into the documentary he’s so fervently talked up. Banksy offers to take custodianship of the footage in order to piece together something coherent from the madness and sends Guetta off to practice the street art he’s been so fascinated with.

What happens next is part farce and part scathing critique of the art community, but it never feels untrue and never descends to outright parody. Exit Through the Gift Shop is amazing in how fine a line it walks, exploring the pretentions of the art world without openly criticizing them or where they come from, encouraging people to explore their own artistic talents by interviews with the most passionate, devoted street artists of the medium. But it’s also a cautionary tale, a story of too little talent and too much ambition, the power of hype, the dangers of association.

It is the perfect companion piece to a movement as controversial and divisive as modern street art, a loving tribute and a bitter critique, all wrapped up in an otherwise straightforward attempt to chronicle the history of the form. The film is a work of art, Banksy’s insightful commentary on a medium he rose to the top of, a fable about dreams and where they can get you. Truth or not, it is honest and incredibly compelling.

Tangled
directed by Nathan Greno, Byron Howard

Tangled is the real surprise of this list, because I honestly went into the movie convinced that I was going to hate it. Not because I’m inherently opposed to animated movies—far from it—but because I felt (and feel) that every single ad for the movie was singularly terrible. It looked incredibly derivative, straight out of the Dreamworks playbook of overly self-aware, utterly lifeless gags broadly defined as ‘comedy’.

Thankfully, the ads were simply terrible, and the movie was not. In fact, it was great. Tangled is easily the best thing Disney’s produced since Lilo & Stitch, and might belong to some of the best of their work from the mid-90s. From the incredibly expressive, painted art style of the CG to the smart updates of the ‘Princess’ mythologies of Disney’s greater works, Tangled is a pretty remarkable achievement from a studio that’s been turning out work that ranged from meh to downright bad for years.

The real triumph of Tangled is in its characters. Rapunzel balances the enthusiasm of a young woman just learning to explore the greater world with the sadness and neurosis of someone who has been so reliant upon their (abusive) caretaker all their life. The male lead, Flynn Rider, is a great subversive send up of the typical bravado-driven male leads in animated features in the past two decades without falling into easy parody.

But the really amazing thing here is how the villain Mother Gothel, the woman who kidnapped and raised Rapunzel for her magical hair, relates to Rapunzel. It’s an amazingly subtle dynamic, a parent who keeps her child under her thumb by instilling self-doubt and poor self-image through infuriating and all-too-relatable passive-aggressive jabs. It’s a smart piece of work, and speaks to a more realistic way people relate to people, and parents sometimes relate to children, than you see in almost any animated feature that isn’t by Miyazaki.

It’s a surprising movie, on all fronts. There’s a maturity of story-telling, without relying on pop culture references or jokes that only play to adults or kids, that is hard to resist. There was a time when Disney produced some of the greatest movies, not just of animation but of the medium of film. Tangled is a great attempt to once again reach towards something greater than the narrow, disappointing box most children’s animation has been in in the modern era.

True Grit
directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

The Coen Brothers initially seemed like a strange choice for a Western, as their brand of film usually involves the deeply eccentric and the intensely personal. That said, No Country for Old Men proved they could shoot a beautiful film when given the canvas to work with, and upon reflection True Grit is the perfect personal story for them to work with.

True Grit is, at its core, a coming of age story. One girl with one task, set out in a world of uncertainty and danger, trying to find her way. Which seems almost too simple, but in the Coen Brothers hands becomes something pretty magical. What purports to be a morality tale about the triumph of good over evil becomes an awakening to the villain in all people, the goodness and honor that even murderers carry. From the first scene, where young Mattie Ross stands stoically as condemned men speak their last words before being hanged, to the end where she is negotiating with outlaws, it is a morality tale set in an amoral time, a piece that makes no moral judgments. The men Mattie hires are as good and as evil as the man she seeks to capture.

It’s amazing that a film hinges so heavily on an unknown actress, but Hailee Steinfield stands up to Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon giving pitch-perfect performances and not only holds her own but steals many of the scenes she’s in. Special mention needs to be given to Damon, however, who is at his unlikable best as a boastful, slimy Texas Ranger who hits all the right notes of being an utter ass but who is, in many ways, the only real hero of the story. It’s an impressive, surprising piece of character work, up there with Damon’s perfect performance in The Informant.

For all of its intimacy, though, True Grit plays out with the epic scope befitting a Western. The Coen Brothers shoot a beautiful film, a dirty revisionist take on the Western that sometimes ascends to the abstract without feeling jarring. It is the desolate landscape writ large, made immediate and evocative, the perfect existential setting for the characters to inhabit. And they take to it perfectly, with some of the best dialogue in any movie this year, and one of the most compelling small character pieces. For all the buzz Winter’s Bone got this year, I feel this is the movie that best reflects a young woman navigating through a space where the world of black and white becomes a world of greys.

Black Swan
directed by Darren Aronofsky

There was a moment, halfway through the movie, that I was convinced I was going to hate Black Swan. The weird tension between Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman’s rival ballerinas had changed into something resembling friendship, and after a night on the town the two of them headed back to Natalie Portman’s depressing, sterile hell of an apartment that she shares with her possibly psychotic, definitely controlling mother. It’s a scene that could ruin the movie, an obvious bit of misdirection that seems built for the trailer more than to be believable in context.

Yet for all of the precarious wire-work the film does in moments like these, when the erotic thriller moments dictate the plot beats, Black Swan is a film to be marveled at. Because as dangerously close to camp as Black Swan veers, it does so within the context of its story, one of madness and unreality, the artifice of art and the all too real impacts it has upon those who pursue illusive ideas like ‘perfection’. Black Swan is a movie almost beguilingly without a twist, the ending presented to you within the first ten minutes of the movie yet so perfectly pitched that even when you know how it will (how it must) end, you find yourself wishing for a different result.

And that is the genius of the film. As Natalie Portman’s character Nina descends deeper and deeper down into a place of devotion to craft that we know will exact a high price, we are torn between wishing it didn’t have to be this way and breathlessly hoping to see what emerges once she passes that metaphorical line in the sand. And Portman doesn’t disappoint. Her performance is the best she’s ever done, easily the best acting I have seen this year (and many others), until the finale, when the curtain falls and we’re left with an inevitable end that still manages to touch and move with an immediacy and passion that belies its ancient roots.

Black Swan is more than a great movie, it is also a great dark fairy tale, a mood piece on art and personality, about the warring sides within all of us, and about the eternal chase for the impossibility of perfection and the power of humanity to realize artistic dreams at any cost.

HMS Dichotomy

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 17:17:00 +0000

Let me present to this royal court
the tale of the HMS Dichotomy,
brought before you all this day
as its crew needs a lobotomy.

For all the logic of seaward men
The Dicohomy openly flaunts
and the pow’r of God’s own physics
this damned ship sneers at and taunts.

She was built of timber in savage lands
curses laid upon the planks of her deck
a dark power that seized her wrights
until they all found escape by the neck.

The ship is seaworthy enough, tis a shock,
despite its non-Euclidean geometry.
It carries its conscripted souls safe and far,
that is, those souls that resist the urge to flee.

The masts were built on the underside,
sails replaced with the scales of a beast,
infernal machines that toil below.
She moves a fast clip, at the least.

The ships berth is no constant thing
unnatural rhythm of the hull’s breath,
until the men are kept up till late hours
contemplating the hell of this living death.

I beseech you, lords of the court, to find
in your deliberations the compassion
to scuttle this evil ship to the depths,
and never its like attempt to fashion.

And if you will not destroy it thus,
send it hence to the service of our foe,
for all the might of our royal navy
would ever cause them such depth of woe.

written on christmas eve, 2010, to commemorate a dinner with old friends

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 07:03:00 +0000

We raise a toast to celebrate those that are here on this night. It doesn’t matter that it pains us all, so late and so cold, to venture from our families and out into the wild. The slick-song whisper of a snowy winter night beckoning us all to warmth and light and company.

We raise a toast because that’s what we’ve always done. We fondly remember those who could not be here, even when we don’t fondly remember those who are absent. It is a night for putting those things out of ones mind, at least sitting round the table with old friends such as these.

Roads taken. Roads forsaken. We are the results of our choices, sundered by the seas of time and distance and occupation. At times one looks upon those gathered and thinks that there but for the grace of god go I, other times a man heart swells with a dark jealousy for the fortune of friends, unspeakable longing for half-remembered futures and hastily constructed pasts.

Years might have past. Days. Hours. Old jokes spring forth, easy informality a warm blanket against the season, laughter pours forth to smooth over the gaps in knowledge, the vast unmentionable spans of time between moments such as these. We gather not to remember that lack, but to celebrate the riches we have now. The memories. The stories. New stories or old, the stories are what bind us. We share and we grow closer.

Yes, we toast to all of this. To shared experience and experience shared. To those who left us, and those who could stay. And when we leave this table, we know not when we’ll sit here again. On this night, this yearly tradition, we come together more by fate than the calendar’s sway. And someday, in some distant future we can only barely dream about, perhaps we shall do it again. Yet if we only have this moment, this one cold evening where we came together in true friendship, then that will warm us on many more nights such as these where there is no fellowship to comfort us.

We part, one by one, leaving as they came. Each back to their own heads, their own hearts, their own homes. Connections broken, destinies sundered. Alone. But with the ghost of togetherness, that ephemeral spark of company and happiness, to validate all the other, all the blackness and wondering and loneliness and nostalgia oh nostalgia that bitter drink of spoiled dreams and chased after moments. You sat at our table too, you ruiner, and marveled at us.

We thank you too for your silence, however brief it might have been.

Prelude to the End: 2010s Random Movie Awards

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 11:30:00 +0000

Three hundred and forty. That’s how many movie’s I’ve seen in 2010 as of the time of writing this. Don’t believe me? Don’t worry, I keep a list. That’s not quite a movie a day, but it’s awfully close and if you want to get real serious about it, nearly a dozen of those entries are TV seasons and should maybe count more than once. Needless to say, I’ve spent a lot of time in 2010 watching movies.

I can’t even begin to sum up what kind of an experience that’s been. Movies are my passion, the thing that I enjoy doing more than anything else. Like any good passion, sometimes I let myself get carried away with it, but I really never regret it. We all have something in life, and this is my thing, and I’ll follow that cinematic rabbit hole as far as I have to.

Of course, that turns the movie awards at the end of the year into something of a mess. Yeah, I have picks for the top 10 movies that came out in 2010, but I also have innumerable other things I want to talk about. Movies that were great, moments that I felt like sharing, bad experiences I feel like others should suffer along with me. Movies are, at heart, a social medium. They were conceived to view with others, and even when we don’t do that so much anymore, they’re there to tell us our stories and encourage us to share with others.

So let’s talk some movies. Not the top movies, because that’s for next week after I’ve seen the last of the movies that are going to come out in theaters here before 2011 rolls up on my doorstep and starts demanding I retrain my fingers to type the year again. No, this is instead more of a hodgepodge collection of things I feel like talking about. Random would be the best word to describe it, though that isn’t to imply that I didn’t give these awards a lot of thought.

So feel free to let me know what you think about any of this stuff. This is just the first course, a nice soup or salad to get you started. The main dish is coming next week, once I finally finish tying it all up with a neat bow (and hopefully cutting it down to 10, though I can promise NOTHING). Until then, enjoy…

THE 2010 RANDOM MOVIE AWARDS

The Avatar Award – 2010s best argument for 3D
Step Up 3D

Look, I agree with everyone, 3D movies have a big problem. For all the hype coming into this year, with Avatar blowing most people away with its spectacle (and even the haters have to admit, it was a spectacle) and bringing 3D to the masses, 2010 has been a piss poor showing for the fledgling display format. For whatever reason—be it the difficulty in shooting in 3D, the length of production meaning movies in 2010 were already shot when Avatar made its impact, or just because everyone’s not sure how to approach what is supposedly a hard format to wrap one’s head around.

But some movies are definitely trying, and they come from the strangest places. Which leads us to Step Up 3D, the third film in the dance/coming-of-age franchise. Full disclosure, I’ve not seen the other films in this franchise as of the writing, but I doubt it’s going to be necessary. Step Up 3D isn’t going to win any awards with its story, with its simple rival dance teams/star-crossed lovers storyline. But the part where it’s a dance movie is where it justifies not only itself, but the format it’s shot in.

There’s a sense of shape and form to dance that really lends itself to 3D, with spaces being well defined and the intricacies of people performing a physical art well pops off the screen and is given a surprising energy through the layering of 3D. It’s an enthralling thing to see, full of energy and a great sense of fun. It’s a movie where the thing you came to see is most suited to the format, that increases the immersion and impact of the actions, and that’s what I feel 3D does best.

2010s best movie of 2009
House of the Devil

Classic horror is a hard thing ti pin down. The genre has had some pretty extreme evolutions in its time, and many of the fond memories people have for old horror movies don’t hold up. This is especially true for many of the low budget slasher films of the 70s and 80s. So it is a great relief that a movie like House of the Devil exists, which is not only steeped in the history of horror, but validates a whole genre of movies that might not have ages particularly well by crafting a great modern entry into it.

On the surface a tale of Satanic cults and of a girl being stalked for a sacrifice, House of the Devil sets itself apart from the seedier aspects of the genre by the incredible pacing choices, especially in the middle act. The main girl, left in charge of an empty house and to watch over an old woman we have never seen sleeping in a top floor room, is a pitch-perfect 20 minutes of the most agonizing shots of her exploring this structure.

Any horror fan knows the shots to look for, the scenes staged in a doorway or at a high angle, where the camera sees more than the heroine, where the shot lingers a second too long and we expect a killer to appear in a hallway or mirror. House of the Devil knows all these tricks, and extends the foreplay of the drawn out reveal until it becomes torture for the audience. The girl in peril goes about her business with an almost infuriating innocence, but for those of us who know what’s coming and can read the signs we’re being given, it had me squirming in my chair, wishing the tension would finally stop. It is that pitch perfect tone, that balance between the slow build and the film cue combination assault that make House of the Devil stand out as one of the best horror movies in years.

Film Unjustly Thrown Under a Bus By All You Assholes Award
Let Me In

I could say a lot of things about Let Me In. But instead I just want to take a moment of silence to lament how poorly this movie did in the face of audience apathy and the most misplaced cinematic activism I have ever seen. Oh, Let Me In, we hardly knew ye.

…

Now, let me tell you a bit about Let Me In. It is both a remake of the Sweedish film Let The Right One In and the novel of the same name. Most people probably know the story by now, troubled boy meets mysterious girl who turns out to be a vampire. But what most people don’t know is that Let Me In is as good of a movie as the original, in some ways an even better one. For one, the casting is stronger, with the boy played by Kodi Smit-McPhee offering a much more compelling main character than in the Swedish original. Chloe Moretz, hot off of Kick-Ass, is amazing as a creature that is both beguilingly vulnerable and incredibly dangerous, a delicate balance between nostalgic longing and cruel brutality that the entire film is based in. There are decisions made in this movie, from its 80s setting to the construction of specific shots, that give it a tone all its own, a tone that grounds the source material in our culture without destroying what it was.

Yet for all its effort the movie has been largely ignored. It’s a shame, as most of the people who refused to see it would probably very much enjoy it. In a world with terrible remakes and adaptations, one must never forget that a good reworking of material, if it brings something new to the table, can be as effective as an original film. Only the most foolish and short-sighted would forget that the history of cinema is littered with quality remakes. Only the most stubborn, wrong-minded movie fan would ignore Let Me In.

Bucket List Award for Best Film Experience of 2010
the restored Metropolis

The best movie moment for me this year is a no brainer. Earlier in the year, Kino Films released a restored version of Metropolis, the 1927 sci-fi epic. The story of Metropolis’ various versions is almost as incredible as the movie itself, but needless to say that the version they were putting out was vastly more complete and in better shape than the previous ‘definitive’ version which I had seen two years prior.

In touring the country with the film, I had the opportunity to see it with a live performance of the soundtrack by the Alloy Orchestra, a three piece ensemble that performs a version of the original score to the film as it’s playing. And if you have never seen a silent film with live music, it is a real treat, a mixture of the energy of a concert with the enjoyment of a great film, a mashup of mediums that is incredibly powerful in a way that’s hard to define.

It doesn’t hurt that the restored version of Metropolis is a thing of beauty. Now that the film is out on DVD and Blu-Ray, any fan of cinema needs to see it. I consider it one of, if not the, most influential film ever made. It’s incredibly ambitious, effective even in the modern era, with a story that still resonates because it has been so often readapted in our time. The new version is likely as complete a film as will ever exist, with only a few minutes now missing, and the picture it paints is sweeping and beautiful. If you care at all about movies, you need to see Metropolis.

Next Week’s Top 10’s Most Notable Absence
Inception

Of all the movies that I expected to make it into my top movies of 2010 list, Inception was the most obvious. Christopher Nolan has always been a favorite director of mine, with many of his films ranking as my favorites of that year and Memento easily in my top 5 movies ever.

So how wouldn’t I like Inception? It’s a complex, well-made, intricately structured puzzle box of a movie, a movie with great actors doing crazy things, a movie for people who like their movies both epic and intelligent. I can’t deny any of those things. Inception is a great movie, to be sure. But it still didn’t make the cut onto my top 10 list, and I feel like I should explain why.

The problem with Inception isn’t a lack of skill but a lack of heart. For all of its bombast (and it’s got that in spades) and intricate layering of plot (that too!) Inception is a very cold movie. For the first half of the movie characters are laying out the groundwork of this universe in such painstaking detail that character moments are breezy and limited, and in the second half the action and scope expand too far for all but the most cursory emotional beats. It’s only at the end that Nolan remembers to engage the heartstrings, at which point it starts to feel too late. There is too much world building and not enough character building to make those emotional moments pay off in any real way.

The problem is that in many ways Inception isn’t a great story. It is an amazing clock, a framework of gears that are laid out for us neatly and tick inevitably towards the conclusion. But clocks are inherently dispassionate and in deciding to be a clockmaker over a filmmaker, Nolan turns Inception into something remote, just out of the ability to fully empathize with. Which means, for all its greatness, it becomes a movie to be respected rather than a movie to be loved. As such, I couldn’t justify putting it on my list, when there are so many things I DO love that have come out this year.

The Badass Award for New Achievements in Ridiculousness
The Good The Bad and The Weird

Korean cinema is a strange beast. I’ve normally been more exposed to Japanese cinema, with its traditional history and modern descent into weird, fanboy-exploitation nonsense. It’s fun, it’s weird, but it’s all kind of easily pegged as ‘crazy Japanese movie’. I’m simplifying, of course, but that’s certainly true of most of the things that make it to our shores. Korean movies, on the other hand, seem to come from a place where there are no rules. Genre doesn’t seem to really matter. Comedy and drama walk hand in hand without feeling pandering. A horror movie can be touching. A noir movie can be horrifying, or hilarious, or absurd.

The Good, The Bad, and The Weird is, on paper, a reinterpretation of Sergio Leone’s masterpiece The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. It’s about three gunslingers of questionable morality going after a McGuffin that carries them all across the countryside as their paths continue to cross. But instead of the American southwest, this movie takes place in China, and instead of Leone’s carefully paced, methodical epic of a film, this movie goes at a hundred miles an hour.

Part action movie, part revenge drama, part absurdist comedy, The Good The Bad and The Weird is at times hilarious and at times depressing, but it is always awesome. Whether people are swinging across vast sets shooting six-shooters like they were automatic rifles, or horses and jeeps get involved car chases better paced than most modern car chase movies, or with wild music selections that elaborate on many of the absurd Spaghetti Western choices Tarantino made for the Kill Bill movies, The Good The Bad and The Weird is relentless in its quest to be badass. And it succeeds admirably, making it all look effortless and cool and exhilarating. It takes a lot of balls to try to so blatantly riff on an undeniable classic like Leone’s masterpiece, but this movie’s got balls to spare.

The Back Catalogue Award (best movie pre-2009 I saw in 2010)
Double Indemnity

This was the hardest award to peg down, simply because I’ve seen so many great movies in 2010. But of them all, only one or two jumped out at me as possible contenders for this award, and it was easy to pick the winner out of that list. Double Indemnity is not only one of the best examples of film noir, but it’s one fo the best movies ever made.

It’s not just the weaving plot, which has its twists and turns, danger and dames, murder and intrigue, but it’s the incredible dialogue, the characters that exude a deadly charm, the incredible cinematography, all shadows and framing.

Just look at this piece of dialogue when the two leads, played by Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, meet for the first time:

Phyllis: I hope I've got my face on straight.
Neff: Perfect for my money.
Phyllis: Neff is the name, isn't it?
Neff: Yeah, two 'Fs,' like in Philadelphia, if you know the story.
Phyllis: What story?
Neff: The Philadelphia Story.

There is something about Double Indemnity, the pace at which it moves, the inevitability of violence and its fallout, the lack of any truly noble character, that makes it a marvel to watch. It’s not that they don’t make movies like that anymore, it’s that they never did. Double Indemnity is one of a kind.

Best Direct to DVD Movie
Batman: Under the Red Hood

Batman: Under the Red Hood is the 2nd best Batman movie of all time, right behind Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. Yeah, I’l let you think about that for a second. But it shouldn’t be any real surprise. Batman has always worked better in his animated outings than he has in his live-action ones, and as much as I like the Nolan adaptation of the character, nothing has quite felt as genuinely Batman since Batman: The Animated Series went off the air. Kevin Conroy’s portrayal of the Caped Crusader will always be the Batman I hear in my head..

That said, the adaptation of the darker, more violent “Death in the Family” and “Under the Hood” comic story arcs collected here in one movie serves as one of the more honest appraisals of Batman ever committed to film. Batman is a man driven, and in his quest to achieve his goals often he strays far over the line of what constitutes heroic behavior.

This movie is probably the darkest Batman story on film, a story of death and betrayal, of the potential for good intentions to go horribly awry, the struggle of a man devoted to stopping evil struggling not to cross over the line to become evil himself. It feels very devoted to telling a Batman universe story without compromise, a story of the human responses (both inspirational and disheartening) to the dark side of life.

2010’s Most Disappointing Movie
The Expendables

The Expendables is not the worst movie of 2010, but it is decidedly the most disappointing. The initial reports about what the movie was going to be about seemed like a movie buff’s wet dream—gather together every famous and not-exactly-famous action star from the last 20 years and throw them into one giant, ridiculous homage to the action films of yore. This movie was, before production had kicked off, one of my most anticipated movies of this year. How could you fuck that up?

It turns out, it’s not actually all that difficult. First off, right out of the gate, Stallone had to compromise on the cast. Names that should have been on this movie were approached and turned it down: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Wesley Snipes, Steven Seagal, Kurt Russell. Instead we get wrestlers and NFL stars. Second, for an homage to the lost action movies of yore, The Expendables suffers by emulating the worst part of the modern entries in the genre.

CG is all over the movie. I’m not sure there’s a single actual squib going off in the entire movie, as each bullet hit is a mess of crazy, cartoonishly dumb CG blood. Guns are incredibly over exaggerated, shotguns blowing people limb from limb at range. It’s a ridiculousness borne out of modern Asian action films, but with none of the sense of play. Instead, The Expendables is oppressively self-serious. What should have been a riff of actors hamming it up and causing chaos turns into a story about a mercenary team liberating an oppressed people and oh yeah they have family issues at home, too. It is a tumor of misspent machismo, a world where people call each other “brother” unironically. For all of its promise, it’s a sagging, unfortunate reminder that the classic action movie is dead, never to return.

A Podcast is Born!

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 03:55:00 +0000

So, ever since I started listening to the damn things, I’ve wanted to do a podcast. There are a number of reasons, chief among them being I Like to Talk, and I Have A Lot Of Opinions. Those seem like good reasons to do anything, so I’ve been hunting for the right topics, the right venue, and the right cohost.

Well, I’m still looking. (But seriously folks) in the meantime I decided to go ahead and make one with the ever engaging Elizabeth Ditty, who is my partner in crime when it comes to talking way too much about movies. But instead of allowing it to become a petty back and forth in an IM window, we’ve burst our discussion out onto the greater internet for you all to enjoy!

That’s right, we have a movie podcast up RIGHT NOW. Here’s the link: YO CLICK ME BITCHES! Also see the handy embedded player below. The hosting solution probably isn’t permanent, but it’ll do while we find our feet.

The topics covered in our first amazing episode include such delights as:

Why 3D movies are ruining theaters.
The whole mess of movies coming out this holiday seasons.
127 Hours
Black Swan
Some Netflix whoring and recommendations for movies to watch that aren’t in a theater.

We’re planning to do another one of these next month, but between now and then we need your feedback. Among other things, we have no title for our little Christmas miracle of a show, and are offering a CASH PRIZE (well, as close as an amazon gift card gets to a cash prize) for the person who offers up the perfect name.

So have a listen, comment either here on this blog post or on Elizabeth’s, and you can always hit either of us up on twitter for a more immediate sense of communication in this bleak, lonely world (I am @litrock and she is @ditty1013, and you should definitely be following her if you are me!). Enjoy the podcast, have a great Christmas and New Years, and stay tuned this week for more movie-themed madness as I go in depth about my favorite stuff this year.

deep down tasty

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 15:42:00 +0000

“In the afternoon, the sun often heats the city up into the triple digits, especially in the early afternoon before the rain comes,” Carolyn read from the guide book.

“Great,” her husband huffed beside her. “I already feel like I’m drowning just from breathing the air. How can it get any hotter?”

“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” she said. “Look at all the people going about their business like nothing is strange.”

“Yeah, but they live here,” Tyler said, taking another deep breath and grimacing. His hair, carefully styled to impress as they left the hotel this morning, was matted down onto his forehead with sweat. He continually pulled it back, trying to wring the moisture out of it, but there was no way to escape what it was doing to him. He felt deflated.

"Well, we don’t want to stand out, do we?” She seemed to be holding up to the heat a lot better. Her hair was naturally thin and pulled back in a pony-tail that hadn’t moved since she tied it back. The heat just gave her skin a beautiful glow. Tyler was envious, even as he realized how stupid that was.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s keep moving. Maybe one of these huts has an AC.”

Carolyn rolled her eyes. “They’re huts! Most of them don’t look like they have electricity. But I’ll tell you what, you humor me while I find something crazy at one of these stalls, and we’ll head over to the restaurant street and get some lunch. Or at least some water. They all looked like proper buildings. At least they’d be inside.”

“It’s your day to pick,” Tyler said. Yesterday he had picked a hike up to the mountains that loomed above them to the north. It had been fun, to see this dense jungle give way to the kinds of trees he recognized. It had been refreshing to feel the air get cooler. In fact, their hike had taken them high up to where there were still lingering patches of snow.

The memory of snow made him suddenly feel wrung out and dehydrated. What he wouldn’t give for a sno-cone right about now.

Carolyn lead the way to a variety of stalls, looking for souvenirs to take back. This was their big shopping day, the one he had agreed to, so he couldn’t complain too loudly. That didn’t stop Carolyn from doing the same, however. Many of the stalls sold the same cheap trinkets they had seen and refused to buy on the cruise ship.

“I don’t understand how hard it is to find a good shop,” she said. “I just want something interesting. A piece of art, a small statue or something, maybe a homemade fabric.”

“It doesn’t look like anyone here is wearing homemade fabric,” Tyler said. “They’re wearing the same stuff anyone does. I think I saw an Ed Hardy shirt on that guy who was selling the beaded necklaces.”

“Ugh,” Carolyn, totally disgusted, stormed down to the end of the street, checking every stall with a glance. Then she marched back up to Tyler and grabbed him by the arm. “There’s nothing here. Come on, let’s go get something to eat. We’ll ask one of the locals while we’re eating. Maybe they can point us in the right direction.”

“No arguments here,” Tyler said, taking the lead and making their way up the street towards the road that lead to all of the town’s restaurants. They were all clustered together, a menagerie of signs, people drifting in an out at a steady pace. It was shortly past the lunch rush, more people leaving than were coming.

“Where do you want to eat?” Tyler asked her.

Carolyn looked around. There were multiple restaurants that seemed to be themed, colorful decorations of pirates or voodoo or whatever else they thought people wanted to see. Tyler could practically hear her sneer beside him as she looked at those.

Beside those were the ones catering to the unadventurous, places that offered ‘down home American food’. Tyler was baffled by that. Why come all this way to get a cheeseburger? He could stay on the boat and get that garbage. This did not bode well for finding a nice, quiet, authentic place to eat.

“What about that one?” Carolyn pointed, and Tyler looked down the street to a small little place near the far end of the street. It looked incredibly small, tucked between two of the larger establishments. And the front of the restaurant was incredibly modest, the window a large painted sign that said On Shoals: the edibles is deep down tasty.

“They can’t even use proper English on the sign,” Tyler said with a sigh.

“Exactly. Obviously they’re not concerned with marketing themselves. They must be a bunch of locals. Probably generations of people who worked there. Come on, let’s go.”

“I guess,” Tyler said. “I don’t know if I’d trust seafood from a place that can’t even write a sign.”

“Oh, stop being so stuck up. You wanted an adventure, this’ll be one. Think of it as gastronomical hiking.”

“Right,” Tyler said, but decided to play along. The two of them went into the small restaurant, blinded by the darkness of the interior compared to the bright sunshine outside. It was, at least, mercifully cool inside. It felt almost like a cellar, a vaguely damp sort of darkness that Tyler remembered from the basement of the house he grew up in.

“Can I help you?” A voice called out from the darkness. It was heavy with the accent of the island, but Tyler had a hard time locating it at first. Carolyn, who was obviously adjusting to the dark better than him, took the initiative.

“Yes, we’d like a table for two, please.”

“Of course,” the figure said, and Tyler felt he could make out the flash of white teeth in a broad smile, but that was all he could see. Carolyn pulled him along as they made their way further into the restaurant, where there were dim lamps illuminating each of the alcoves where a booth was. In the darkness, it was impossible to tell which booths were full and which were empty. There was no natural light, the one window of the building painted over for that unfortunate sign.

They sat down and Tyler could now make out the face of their server, a strikingly tall, thin woman. She had much darker skin than most of the people on the island, which made her broad smile stand out all the more. It was nearly dazzling. Tyler wondered, for a second, whether or not he had some sort of heatstroke. The cool air made him feel completely detached from what was going on.

“What can I get you two to drink?” she asked, her voice lyrical. Tyler blinked, and hesitated.

“Iced tea for the two of us,” Carolyn said. The woman nodded and disappeared into the darkness again.

“See?” she said once the woman had left. “This is nice,” she said. “Quiet, romantic, perfect.”

Tyler looked around, his eyes starting to adjust. The restaurant was certainly dark, though not nearly as much as he had thought upon first walking in. The booths were very isolated, lined up along one side of the narrow building, the other side taken up by a large, ornate bar.

“Yeah, it’s nice,” he said.

The girl quickly came back with their drinks and handed them menus. Carolyn spoke up, though. “What do you suggest we get?” she asked the woman. “We’re feeling adventurous.”

The woman smiled again, all teeth and grinning eyes. “Of course, ma’am. I might suggest the house soup. The chef makes it himself, it’s an old family recipe. Fills you up, but doesn’t make you feel sleepy or too heavy to go back out into the sun. And, we just cooked up a new batch, completely fresh.”

“Perfect,” Carolyn said. “We’ll have two.”

“Escellent choice,” she said, taking the menus and disappearing quickly once again. Tyler watched her go, and then took a long drink of his tea.

“You know…” he started. “Maybe I didn’t want the soup, did you ever think that?”

“Oh, c’mon,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’ve ordered for you before.”

“Mhm, right,” Tyler said, but with an obvious grin. Carolyn lightly kicked him under the table, and the two of them broke out in quiet laughter.

Their soup was brought out to them pretty quickly, two large bowls. The ingredients weren’t immediately apparent but the soup smelled incredible. Tyler suddenly felt his stomach, which had been fine, growl impatiently. His hunger was immediate and vast. “Oh man, this looks great,” he said aloud as he reached for his spoon.

“Glad you think so,” the woman said. “Go ahead, take a taste, see how it suits you.”

They both lowered their spoons and took a taste of the soup, some sort of meat and vegetable stew. It was rich and spicy but refreshing in ways that Tyler couldn’t immediately identify. He eagerly scooped up another spoonful, downing it even quicker than the first.

Carolyn talked around the spoon in her mouth, “This is good,” she said. She quickly followed with her second spoonful. “No, scratch that, this is fantastic.”

“I’m glad you think so,” their smiling server said to them. “I’ll be happy to tell the cook.” She then turned and disappeared into the back room once again, leaving them to their meal.

The next ten minutes were spent in relative silence, punctuated only by the quiet scrape of spoons against bowls and the slurping of soup being happily eaten. Neither of them seemed to get enough of their meal, one spoonful after another, until they were both drinking the last of the broth out of the bowls. They both leaned back, almost in unison, and groaned their satisfaction.

“That was … oh man,” Tyler said.

“Tell me about it.” Carolyn took a deep breath, adjusting on her bench. “I hope I didn’t overdo it.”

“We can always go take a nap if that’s the case,” he said. He turned to look for their server, who didn’t seem to be out in the main dining room. “I have to talk to the chef, find out what’s in that soup.”

“If it’s a family recipe, he probably won’t tell you,” she said. “You know, cooks guarding their secrets and all.”

“Doesn’t hurt to ask,” he said, standing up. He stretched and sighed happily. “That was super satisfying. Come on, let’s find the cook. I at least have to let him know that he deserves the huge tip he’s getting.”

“All right,” Carolyn said, climbing out of her side of the booth. The two of them looked down the rest of the restaurant, where there were two doors, one swinging door that seemed to lead to the kitchen and another, proper door with a handle.

“Probably that one,” Carolyn said, gesturing to the swinging door.

As they walked towards it, Tyler took a look around the room. It was surprisingly quiet, and Tyler noticed that all the booths but theirs seemed to be empty. He had a moment of disquiet, but shrugged it off as it being the down time and this being kind of an out of the way place. He headed towards the kitchen door and began pushing it open.

“NO DON’T YOU DARE DO THAT!”

The voice behind him was startling, but it was too late. Tyler pushed the swinging door to the kitchen open even as he looked behind him to see their server come out of the other room, her face contorting with horror, her mouth a silent O of outrage, her teeth still large and bright. He also felt Carolyn freeze up next to him, a kind of sudden rigid jolt that was so sudden it pulled his attention towards her.

“What’s wrong?”he said, addressing both their server and Carolyn at the same time. The server was running up to them, but when Tyler turned to look at Carolyn, he noticed her looking ahead, stock still, her skin suddenly incredibly pale, her hand which had reached out for the door trembling in the air, frozen.

“What’s going on?” Tyler turned, even as he saw their server rushing towards him, her teeth bright, her mouth wide, her features distorted in the darkness and how quickly he looked into the kitchen. When he saw what was in the kitchen, his concerns about their server were forgotten compared to what he saw in here.

In the middle of the room was a spit, a long slab of meat roasting over a heating element, turning automatically. It made Tyler think about rotisserie chicken, but it was obvious whatever the meat came from was much larger than a chicken. Then he spotted the bones, the long white bones and the rounded skull, as familiar as any anatomy textbook or police procedural on TV, sitting on the table, haphazardly scraped of all meat.

And then he saw the thing that Carolyn had seen, the thing that caused her to go completely rigid. The large pot of soup, more of a barrel than a pot, and the monstrous thing stirring the pot. It was large, with a blue-black shell that reminded Tyler of a beetle, but it moved more like a squid, long black tentacles spreading throughout the kitchen, mixing sauces and grabbing spices, bringing it all to the cauldron where the stew was simmering.

The creature seemed to look up at the noise and intrusion, its face a mass of white jellied things that must have been eyes, though they were unlike anything Tyler had ever seen. It had a long mouth, a snout of sorts that was almost like another tentacle, though on it was a thick beak like that of the parrots he had seen just this morning perched on the island.

The beak opened, squawking at him in sounds that made his teeth ache. He tried to move, but found he couldn’t, watching this thing’s many arms set down the various tools it was using and reach out towards him, a mass of tentacles that slowly slithered along the floors and walls, up the door, reaching for him and Carolyn’s extended limbs.

As the first one touched his skin, cold and wet and exuding some viscous slime he couldn’t begin to name, he turned and saw their server push between them. No, not push. She was slithering, her slender body distended, her neck seemingly as long as his arm, her wide mouth now permanently an O, the white teeth a ring of teeth around that gaping maw as it clamped down on his arm. He felt the teeth moving, seemingly hundreds of them, and felt a searing pain even as the first tentacle pulled him forward.

He didn’t even have time to properly scream.

Nighttime. The lights strung up all over town were lit up, fires burning on torches, the whole city awash with a bright glow. An older couple, silver-haired asians, walked into the small restaurant. They were shown a table, talking cheerfully between themselves.

“What is best?” the husband asked in broken English.

“The soup,” the server said, a tall, slender girl with bright eyes and an even brighter smile. She intimidated the man, but he said nothing. He did not see people who looked like her very often, and he was old and unused to the wider world. But his wife had been so happy to finally go on this trip now that he had retired.

“What kind soup?”

The woman’s smile widened, if that was possible. “Chef’s secret recipe. But it’s very good. Been passed down for generations. And just special this evening, we have a fresh batch of it. New ingredients passed through that very same door you did not four hours ago.”

His wife smiled enthusiastically, her eyes wide. They had been eating at Pirate Pete’s the past two days, and their food had been stale and terrible and overpriced. This, at least, seemed like the real thing. He nodded his agreement.

“Two fresh soups.”

“Gladly, sir.”

Piece of Cake

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 13:47:00 +0000

“And don’t forget to pick up my cake!”

Helen’s voice was shrill even from a floor away. Renold sighed and walked out to his truck, trying to keep the list of things he had to get in his head. Not only did he have to stop and pick up a variety of parts to fix the leaking sink, he also had to pick up some groceries and medicine.

And now she wanted her cake on top of it?

Renold gingerly climbed into the truck. At nearing eighty years on this earth, he found going out and running errands took more and more effort each time. His hips ached and feet and hands were cold no matter how many layers he seemed to wear.

Renold drove through the snowy streets down to the hardware store in town to pick up some drain cleaner, a few lengths of pipe, some washers and bolts. Next door was the grocers, where he picked up the fixings for a big pot of ham bone soup and his next batch of insulin.

Then was the long trek to the bakery to pick up Helen’s blasted cake. She wouldn’t settle for just any cake, store bought or made at home. No, he had to go to a small, ornate bakery twenty minutes away on the other side of town. He wasn’t sure who was the bigger fool: her for thinking the trip was worth it or him for making it despite knowing better.

Ah, the joys of marriage.

He pulled up to the bakery and entered. Just like they did every week, the young girls on staff welcomed him in. He had been coming here like clockwork for over a decade now.

“Good morning, Mr. Irving,” the girl at the register said as he came in. He couldn’t remember if her name was Naomi or Kelly, his glasses too fogged up from coming in from the cold to fake it and make out her nametag.

“It’s certainly been a morning. Nobody knows how to drive in this weather.”

“Well me about it,” she said. “I had someone take off my mirror the other day trying to change lanes into me.”

Renold did a good job feigning alarm. “I hope you’re okay.”

“Yeah, thankfully they were quick about getting back into their own lane, and I was quick about noting their license plate. But once there’s snow on the streets you better believe everyone’s going to lose their minds.”

“Anyway, can I get a piece of your cheesecake, to go?”

“Certainly,” she said, heading over to the glass display case and pulling out the cake. “You sure you don’t want anything for yourself?’

“I can’t,” Renold said. “With the diabetus and all.” He pronounced it with all the Brimley-esque nobility he could, mostly because he knew the young girls here thought it was funny when he did so. He was rewarded with a smile and a small laugh for his trouble.”

“We have sugar free stuff, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” he said. “But you wouldn’t sit a starving man in front of a banquet and tell him he can have a saltine, would you?”

“Of course not, but … oh,” she said, his comparison dawning on her. She shook her head. “I can only imagine. Why come in here, then?”

“The missus insists this is the best in town, and heaven knows that after fifty years I’m pretty sure it’s just the liberal application of baked goods that really keeps a marriage together.”

The girl cut off a slice and boxed it up like they did every week. “Well, your wife at least has good taste,” she said, giving him a big grin. He had the good taste to look a little embarrassed.

“Thanks,” he said, paying for the slice of cake. “Have a good day.”

“You too,” she called after him. “See you next week.”

* * *

Renold sat all the bags he had brought on the kitchen table. From the floor above him, Helen’s voice called down. “You got my cake?”

“Of course,” Renold said loudly, trying not to let the frown on his face show in his voice.

“Bring it up!”

“I will,” he said, looking at the bags before him. “Give me a second. I have to put this stuff away.”

“Don’t take too long,” she said, her voice drifting off. Renold got to work putting all the tools out for when he’d need them later. Then he got out his syringe and gave himself his scheduled dose of insulin. Once he was done, however, he didn’t immediately pack up his stuff. Instead, he looked at the things spread out on the table. And he popped open the lid to the drain cleaner and dipped the needle into the liquid, pulling up the plunger and with it some of the noxious looking blue liquid.

He turned and opened up the box with the cake. The needle slid in, so tiny it wouldn’t leave a mark. Renold depressed the plunger in a few spots, little drops of the cleaner that quickly diffused into the cake. He had been doing this long enough that he knew just which type to buy that it didn’t taste funny. She certainly hadn’t noticed by now, and he expected she was far too gone to at this point.

That done, he tossed the needle in his hazard bin and washed the syringe well. It wouldn’t do to have traces of that cleaner in the syringe when he used it. That stuff was dangerous!

His medical supplies safely put away, he grabbed a fork and took the box containing the cake up to Helen’s bedroom. Soon she would be happily eating her weekly treat, then she’d lay back down feeling ill and he could have piece for a few hours longer.

Cake really was the glue that held a marriage together.

Departure

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 15:37:00 +0000

The final convoy was ready. A thousand souls in a number of trucks and busses, all set to begin their trek to the East. The previous convoy had left several days ago and with it a sense of accomplishment had fallen over this group. They had done it. The hard part, in many ways, was over.

“Governor,” the driver of the main bus spoke up, “we’re ready to depart at your word.”

Ramirez nodded. He had a hard time thinking of himself as the governor who had been sworn in years before, back when his biggest worry had been providing jobs for the booming population of his state. That seemed like a trivial concern, now. There wasn’t a state left, his population dead or fled or worse. But everyone still insisted on calling him governor. If that’s what they needed to feel better, who was he to dissuade them?

“Give me a second,” Ramirez said. “I’d like to say a final word to the Major and his men.”

The driver nodded and Ramirez climbed down from the bus. He looked at the convoy stretching behind them, a wide fairground that was jammed full of every variety of passenger and cargo vehicles. It could have been a state fair or big music festival. Ramirez wondered if people would ever have something like that again. Instead the razor-wire fences and sentry scaffolds gave it the grim look of a prison camp.

Major Hayes stepped forward as Ramirez approached. “Governor. Is anything wrong?”

“No, no, nothing wrong,” he said with a thin smile. “We’re just about ready to go. I just wanted to take a moment and talk to you and your men before we leave, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure thing,” Hayes said. He turned to the speaker system panel and pressed a button. The PA system they had set up all over the compound crackled to life. “Hayes here. I have the Governor here on the line, he wants to say a few words before the last train pulls out of the station.”

Several of the other soldiers who were nearby gathered around Ramirez. They had been here for weeks now, gathering resources and preparing the convoys. Each departure had been painful for this young circumstantial family, but this one had affected both sides most of all.

“I just wanted to say a small piece,” Ramirez began, “since nobody knows if any of us will ever meet again in this world. In the past few weeks we’ve all been through hell and back, seeing the worst nightmares of our society come true. It is enough to try a man’s soul.

“We all grew up watching movies about these exact situations, every time following the same tired clichés. People turning to madness. Paranoia. Scientists being evil or lynched by panicked mobs. And a military that can’t be trusted. Soldiers turning on citizens.”

The soldiers all shifted uncomfortably. The integration of thousands of civilians and a bunch of on-edge soldiers had initially been rough. Ramirez knew it, the soldiers knew it. But it had been an unspoken tension until now.

“But we all know, despite the events of the past few weeks, that real life isn’t fiction. We’ve been organized and efficient. We’ve acted like people, not animals. And despite all of the trouble the remnants of California have caused all of you, each and every one of you has acted in the most honorable way.

“When we leave, you’ll have nothing left but your own self-reliance. But I don’t doubt that it will carry you. You have been a shining example of the best we have to offer, of the power of humanity in the face of these monsters.

“You are all heroes. You are all the good guys. Never forget that. Without you, none of us would be here right now. There are no words for the gratitude I feel. In many ways, you all have become the saviors of humanity, or at least this small sliver of it.

“There’s no telling what’s out there. But hopefully, someday, we’ll meet up again. Good luck, and godspeed.”

The soldiers nearby all snapped off a salute as Ramirez turned off the PA. Major Hayes turned to face Ramirez, extending his hand. “Good luck to you and yours, Governor. Remember what I told you about firing a weapon.”

“I hope it won’t come to that.”

“So do I,” Hayes said. “Let’s hope your road is clear.”

“If it isn’t, we’ll find a way. That’s all we have left to do,” Ramirez said. He motioned towards the lead bus, the heavy plow that had been welded to the front of it. With a smile, he nodded to the saluting soldiers, turned on his heel, and went back to the bus. With a blast of the horn, the motor started up, and soon the entire convoy was the deep rumble of dozens of engines.

Major Hayes watched as the convoy slowly began to roll out, though the whole thing would take hours. He instead turned and headed back into the main compound. Even left alone, there were still the mass of things coming out of the woods. There was still the pile of bodies they had to burn, thousands of mangled human forms, each with a gruesome rifle shot in the head.

There was no time to be nostalgic for the people who had gone. Even during the end of the world, there was plenty of work to be done.

English Class, 2598 CE

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:38:00 +0000

The students all filed into the Grade 6 Pan-American Literature class. The timer on the front screen counted down to the beginning of class, the numbers duplicated on each station. The students talked softly amongst themselves, but as they sat down their talking ceased as they switched back over to the text communications they’d been having in the last class.

As the numbers ticked down to zero the instruction unit came to life, its dimly illuminated face taking on the vague appearance of a human face and animating. Its arms came up, and it made an electric noise not entirely unlike clearing its throat. The students all quieted.

“Good afternoon, children,” the instruction unit said.

“Good afternoon, teacher,” the children repeated back out of habit. None of the teaching units had names because none of them were distinct outside of what class they were teaching at any given time. But the social ritual had to be upheld all the same. It developed good manners for the units out in the world that were distinct.

“Today’s lesson is brought to you by Amazon,” the unit began, “with over twenty billion locations on Earth and Luna, Amazon is the galaxy’s largest known retailer. Expand your horizons, take an adventure, all from the comfort of your own computer. Amazon.”

The students perfunctorily listened as they continued to type on their workstations. They had heard this advertisement a thousand times before. Amazon was the only company that bothered advertising text-novels anymore.

“Now then,” the unit began as the ad ended, “this weekend’s reading assignment was the last part of book two. Today we’re going to have a discussion about the implications of this book before we head into book three tomorrow.”

There was some groaning from the students, especially the male students. This was to be expected. This was a gender-biased literature choice, though within acceptable parameters.

“Who would like to open discussion?”

One of the boys, a more aggressive type who sat near the front, spoke up first. “This book sucked worse than the last one.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Nobody acts like that. She’s just moping around the whole book. It’s stupid.“

“Now, now,” the unit said. “It’s not stupid. You have to remember, this took place in an era where emotional adjustment was done naturally, and often with near-disasterous results.”

“Naturally?” Another student chimed up, this one of the more curious girls. The teaching unit turned to address her point.

“Before we began to account for the mood swings of human beings by more harmonious chemical alterations to environment and diet, people were left to deal with their emotional states on their own. This proved dangerous, especially among adolescents. There are reports from that time of children not unlike yourselves or unlike the characters in this book indulging in self-mutilation or even suicide.”

The children seemed disturbed by that. The teaching unit made a note of that, though a certain level of emotional disquiet was to be expected. The intensity of feeling was one of the reasons this unit was only taught to students once they had reached a certain level of emotional maturity.

“I like the book,” one of the other students said.

“Of course you do,” the first boy said. “You’re a girl. Lovey dovey stuff is what you do.”

“Now, now,” the teaching unit said. “We’re not about to indulge in gender stereotyping. Certainly there are those among your number, Stephen, who would also claim to enjoy the book.”

The boys all looked around for a moment, waiting to see who would step forward and claim to enjoy their material. Finally one of them spoke up. “I enjoyed the book,” Daniel said.

“See?” The teaching unit went on. “One must remember that such themes as unrequited love are universal. We could go all the way back to Shakespeare if you wanted to get particularly ancient. A thousand years ago people were writing the same stories we read and respond to today.”

“But this would never happen,” one of the other girls said. “I’d never jump off of a cliff for a boy.”

“You say that now,” the teaching unit said, “but who can tell what will happen? People do very peculiar things when their infatuations aren’t indulged in. If you’d like more information, I suggest you watch the film adaptation of the material.”

The students universally rolled their eyes. The one thing they hated more than ancient Pan-American literature was ancient Pan-American films. Getting them to sit still for two hours for a non-interactive, flat visual presentation was nearly impossible. The teaching units had given up even trying to show films to students before their Sophomore year of high school, once the less-intellectual students had moved to more vocation-centered schools.

“Don’t discount it so readily,” the teaching unit said. “The films were well-received by fans in their time. They were considered by many to be one of the more successful literary adaptations of the new millennium. And they can also be seen through your Amazon media subscriptions, free of charge.”

The students shrugged in indifference. The teacher paid it of no mind. It was required to work the sponsor in at least three times during the lesson. How well received the marketing message was was for consumer sociologists to decide.

“Either way,” the teaching unit continued, “never doubt the impact of romance in human interaction. It remains a cornerstone of modern media. This book isn’t that different than Xenthia and The Man With No Body.”

Many of the students nodded. Stephen, still obviously not engaged in the lesson, spoke up. “Yeah, but this doesn’t have any space battles.”

“There were no space battles back then, idiot,” one of the girls said.

“Hey, at least I’m not gaga over a bunch of make believe,” Stephen retorted.

“Children,” the unit said, its volume increasing to get their attention. “Do not argue. We will discuss this in a civil manner or you will both be sent to the administrator for behavioral reprimand. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” the students said.

“Good,” the unit replied, turning on its wheels and gesturing to the screen where it pulled up the relevant pages of the document. “Now, if you’ll look at the files on your workstations, we’ll begin with the first part of your assignment for this weekend. Let’s start with the miscommunication between Bella and Edward, shall we?”

The students listened as attentively as could be expected. Classical literature was a low-investment class for many. The teaching unit did its job admirably anyway. This was education that had to be done to instill culture into young minds, it didn’t mean they had to like it.

The class continued.

Waterdrops

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:43:00 +0000

The faucet continued to leak, despite his best efforts to the contrary. He had tightened both knobs as much as he could to no effect. He had under tightened them, to the moment before they would start producing water. That didn’t help either. Instead the only sound in the bathroom was the steady drip drip drip as the faucet contributed its percussive commentary in the otherwise silent bathroom.

He watched the drip from between his knees, the only part of him other than his face that broke the surface of the tub. Under the water, the sound of the faucet was all-encompassing, the heartbeat of the water, a pounding rhythm that served as the counterpoint to his own inaction. For every drip, he’d take a breath, until the faucet seemed to be dictating the rhythms of his life more than his own heartbeat.

At first he was so fixated on this constant reality, narrowed to a single sound and motion, that he couldn’t begin to process anything else. But over time, as the sound grew more insistent, he heard the knocking that came from outside, the alien sounds from the great beyond, a sharp erratic rat-a-tat of someone insistently knocking on the bathroom door.

He rose above the water slightly, ears exposed to the air, cold and bereft of the womb-like comfort of the bath. And indeed, here in the open space, the door sounded loud and shrill. He longed to sink back into the water, but knew that he couldn’t fully retreat. No, the invasion would continue until he finally relented. Better to face it.

“What do you want?”

“You’ve been in there forever. I need to use the bathroom.”

“Then use the bathroom,” he said. “I don’t care.”

The door opened and with it came a blast of cold air from the outside. He instinctively sank into the warm, inviting water. “Shut the door,” he snapped. She shut the door behind her.

“How can you stay in there so long? Doesn’t your water get cold?”

He didn’t answer her. She was questioning him just to nag, not out of any sense of genuine curiosity. He had done this enough that she was well familiar with his ritual of slowly draining off the water and refilling it with fresh, hot water when needed.

He heard her move over to the toilet and sit down. He didn’t bother opening his eyes. There was nothing new to see here. He did keep his head above water enough to clearly hear her, should she speak. He felt that was enough consideration.

“How long are you going to be in there?”

“No idea,” he said softly, a monotone murmur as he tried to focus on the drip of the faucet. Hard when she was speaking, when he could feel her pointedly looking at him. He wasn’t ashamed of his nakedness, that would be silly at this point, but the focused attention disrupted the calm watery dissolution of self he was seeking. “As long as it takes.”

“As long as it takes for what?”

He couldn’t begin to put what he was seeking into words. So for a long while, he didn’t answer her. She didn’t seem too interested in hearing an answer anyway. But finally he spoke up, raising a hand to gesture to the faucet.

“The faucet leaks.”

“Well, you should probably fix it,” she said.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said, trying to compose his thoughts. “I lie here and I can hear the dripping of the faucet, but each drop doesn’t really amount to anything. I can’t tell that the faucet’s dripping. It’s never enough to make the tub overflow. Each drop is singular, eventful, but in the end it amounts to nothing.”

“What are you even talking about?"

“You asked what I was waiting for,” he said. “That’s my answer.”

There was a pregnant pause. Silence. The sound of the faucet dripping began to fill his thoughts again, a small, insignificant plok plok here above the water. He opened one eye, squinting against the light, looking over at her sitting on the toilet looking at him and through him, lost in her own thought.

“Haven’t you gone yet?” he asked her.

“I’m getting there,” she said. “You make me nervous.”

“I know,” he said.

“I’m not talking about nervous about using the toilet in front of you, either.”

“I know,” he said again.

He could almost hear her mentally grasping for a response. He let her writhe on that answer, closing his eyes again. He hesitated a moment, seeing if she’d say anything else, but then slid back down into the water again.

The numbness, the warmth, as welcoming as his oldest friend.

The drops of water, loud again, the steady tick of the clock of the universe.

15 Fictional Character – A List

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 07:54:00 +0000

So there’s this list going around about the 15 fictional characters that most struck a chord with you. One is supposed to make the list off the top of your head, but man, I’m really bad at that. It did take me less than fifteen minutes, but I agonized over a few of the choices here.

It’s a solid list, though perhaps some people would question how a list could contain both Hannibal Lecter AND Winnie the Pooh. Or debate with me that Miyamoto Musashi and Hunter S Thompson were both technically real people. I approached both through fiction about them, so I feel it valid to include them here.

The 15 Fictional Characters List
in no particular order

Captain Jean-Luc Picard – Star Trek: The Next Generation
Laguna Loire – Final Fantasy VIII
Hunter S Thompson – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Leonard Shelby – Memento
Winnie the Pooh – The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
Randall Flagg – The Stand
Cyrano de Bergerac – Cyrano de Bergerac
Batman – Batman: The Animated Series (and other representations)
Usagi Tsukino – Sailor Moon
Hannibal Lecter – Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal (books especially)
Calvin and Hobbes – Calvin and Hobbes
Odysseus – The Odyssey
Miyamoto Musashi – Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa
Charlotte – Lost in Translation
Daffy Duck – Looney Tunes

Feel free to reply with your own list, or link me to your list in the comments. Would love to see what other people have down for this.

Split Screen: The Bicycle Thief

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

This is the first in what will likely be multiple articles from me and Elizabeth Ditty. We both watch a lot of movies, and often we find that we disagree on certain vital points in movies. So instead of just agreeing to disagree, we've decided to make it a learning opportunity and explore our opinions in writing. Spoilers for the film in question follow, of course. Also, be sure to check out her companion article here on her blog.

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“The Bicycle Thief.” Few titles so easily conjure up foggy ideas about what classic foreign cinema is and represents. It is the mystery behind the curtain, an ancient tome that is daunting and remote in the weight that has been given to it. Those who approach it, almost always believers in the power of cinema as art, do so with a sort of hesitant respect reserved for these sacred cows and the old testament notion of ‘fearing God.’

This is compounded all the more by the implication that these classic films are somehow different than the films we see in our day to day life, not just that they are particularly well shot or well acted but that they have some other, intangible quality that keeps them on the best of lists and quick on the lips of well-studied critics and cinephiles.

Unfortunately, this is perhaps the worst way to approach “The Bicycle Thief.”

The story of an impoverished man and his son seeking work in post-war Italy, “The Bicycle Thief” is a film about simple people with a narrow, minimalist scope. There is little subtext, a deliberate avoidance of much of the possible social commentary, and a single-minded devotion to the modest plot. “The Bicycle Thief” is, at its heart, more parable than modern narrative.

The anchor of the film are the two main leads, Lamberto Maggiorani as the father, Antonio Ricci, and Enzo Staiola as his son, Bruno. The director, Vittorio De Sica, believed that every person was able to play one role well, and that was to naturally be themselves. As such, both performers were not professional actors. But instead of hindering the film, their honest and graceless performances lend weight to the film that it wouldn’t otherwise have. The father looks as though he worked his entire life because he had. The son is not precocious and clever in the typical cinematic way, but feels wiser than most movie children because he is an actual child who lived a normal life.

Which is why it’s so crushing to see both characters wrapped up in the tide of the plot. The titular bicycle is Antonio’s only chance of getting a job, putting up posters with his son in order to buy food to feed his family. But the inevitable happens and the bicycle is stolen, leading to a slow spiral of despair as father and son search Rome for the one hope of their salvation.

It is that desperate search that takes up most of the film, with the two characters descending deeper into desperation as the chance of finding the bicycle slips through their fingers. Yet in doing so, we are brought closer together to them. They are a perfect father son pair, a father painfully aware of his son’s opinion of him and of the necessity to provide and be that figure of support. The son trying to live up to the desires of his father, even when those desires are impossible for either of them to meet.

It is the genius of the film, then, that their is never any resolution to their task. The bicycle is forever out of reach. In the final scenes of the film, the father attempts to steal his own bicycle, continuing this cycle of deprivation and suffering. But it is the one redeeming point in the father's life that he fails to steal it. He is, to the end, a good man. And sometimes the worst things happen to good people. It isn't satisfying, but it is life, and that is what The Bicycle Thief captures so perfectly on film.

Transmutation

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 01:55:00 +0000

The girl winced as the old man tightened a screw. “Ow!”

“Well, if you would stop cringing so much, maybe I could do my job the right way.”

“I’m holding as still as I can! We’ve been at this for hours.” The girl sighed, trying to stand up as straight as she could. Her legs hurt and her back was fairly screaming in agony. But this was the price one paid. The old man had told her that this would be a long, tiring process.

“How do you think I feel? You stand here, I do all the work,” the old man said in his thick European accent. “This is delicate work.”

“I don’t even understand how you can get that to work,” she said, trying to peer through the mirror at what he was doing. Even with the extreme angles the mirror provided, she had only the dimmest idea of what the old man was doing. She had seen the sketches, vaguely remembered how it all went together.

“It is very complicated, little girl,” the old man said. “Do you know how a clock works?”

“Well, no,” the girl answered, furrowing her brow.

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

She was a girl concerned with things that were beautiful and interesting. Clocks were old and musty and utterly beyond her. “Of course not. So long as they work, I don’t care one whit.”

“Then hush up and let me do my work. I know what I’m doing, and I promised you that when I was done you would have what you wished for, didn’t I?” He tightened a screw, and the sound of intricate metal pieces sliding into place clicked loudly in the quiet workshop. The girl felt a pinch, and took in a sharp breath.

“That’s natural,” the old man said. “Well, as natural as this can be, anyway.”

She just nodded absently, trying to think about something else. They had been here for what seemed like days, her standing in front of the mirrors and under the lights, the old man working behind her. She would have felt unsafe in a dress that exposed so much of her back but the man seemed too ancient to muster any sort of passion. He was as dusty as the old machines he kept.

“Hold this,” he said, handing her a piece of wire. “Be careful you hold onto the leather. The wire will cut you if you let it.”

She nodded and took a hold of the grip he had fashioned. The old man took the other end of the wire and began to work it through the pulleys she knew were back there but could barely see. He was very insistent that she keep out of his work while he did it. But she remembered the armature he had shown her, how the wires would keep the structure together, allow it the freedom of movement she wanted.

“Very good,” the old man said as he took the grip from her hand. He wound the wire around the anchors that they had worked to graft over the past few months, small metal eyelets that had been inserted deep under her skin, screwed directly into the bones until the muscle and skin had grown back over. It had been the worst part, aside from this.

“Everything looks accurate,” the old man said. “Exactly as I had planned.”

“You’re … you’re done?” After all this time, all the pain and the strain on the underdeveloped muscles that had barely been needed in her shoulders and back before, suddenly it was done. It didn’t seem so bad. She had worn dresses more difficult.

“Yes. Would you like to give them a try?” The old man stepped back, looking carefully at his handiwork. If anything was going to give way, he was going to be there to fix it before the whole armature fell apart.

The girl nodded and flexed her shoulders. It was just a graceful roll, as though she were shrugging off a coat, but the anchors held and the wires pulled taut and the pulleys began their task. From behind her on either side unfolded the slender metal structures, all slender spines and a spider web of wires and gears. It looked incredibly fragile, but she knew better. Even a young girl like her could tell when things were built to last.

She continued to shift her shoulders, wincing as her muscles pulled in unusual ways. The anchors, at least, held firm. She barely felt them, they were so integrated into her now. But they pulled where they needed to, and slowly the wings unfolded. They spread out to either side of her, the top of the frame rising up above each shoulder as everything slid into place for the first time.

“Very good,” the old man said softly, barely a whisper. “Everything looks wonderful.”

“Yes, it does,” the girl said more to herself than the man. The mirrors made more sense now, giving her a perfect view of everything opening up now that she was bent forward more and he was out of the way. The clockwork wings were a marvel, more beautiful than anything she had ever seen.

“How do you feel?” The old man seemed a thousand miles away to her. His voice could have been of an ant, crying up to her as she walked by.

She flexed her shoulders again. The wings spanned wide, and then closed with a whisper. She felt the wind, saw the dust kicked up around her, and grinned.

“I feel light. I feel … free.”

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Neglected Medium

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 18:30:00 +0000

My earliest memory is of me and my mother. I am five. I know this because my mother has told me that I’m going to get a younger brother, but she’s not yet obviously pregnant. We are in the basement of the house I lived in from the time I was 18 months old until I was 16.

We are sitting on the large wood-framed couch together and playing Super Mario Bros. I’m less prone to dying than she is, but whenever we get to Bowser’s castle I hand the controller to her because I’m afraid of the stark black and white architecture, the manic music, the fireballs that fly in from off-screen without warning.

I’m young, couldn’t tell you how old. Maybe 7? Memories from so far back are hard to pull up, nebulous. I know I’m not yet 8 because for my 8th birthday I received an SNES and never looked back. But today I’m not concerned with the NES, I’m concerned with waking up early on a Saturday morning. I descend from my bedroom to the basement, my parents both still asleep. It’s freezing in the basement. I don’t care.

I kneel down in front of the TV in my pajamas and start up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’m really bad at the game. I can’t beat the fourth level and rarely even see it. Little do I know I’ll never get further in that game. I’m too young to realize it’s not that the game is hard, it’s that the game is terrible. I lack the capacity to make those judgments still.

Games have formed a pretty important part of my life, as much a part of my childhood as my parents. The problem is, games have always kind of lived in a section of my life walled off from everything else. As a kid, friends would come over and play Mario Kart or whatever. But they never seemed to think of things the same way I did. How many of them burst into tears when their parents gave them A Link to the Past for their 8th birthday but hid the SNES as a surprise gift in the closet? How many of them could hum the music to dozens of games on command? How many of them doodled in their notebooks not in stick figures but in pixels?

But the world didn’t seem to work that way. So my gaming obsessions were never connected to everything else. I enjoy music. I enjoy movies. I enjoy books. And while they’re all connected to each other and feed off each other and form this cultural mélange that allows a person to enjoy all the type of media together. It’s a foundation of culture. It’s a history. But gaming was never a part of that club. And so that part of my life was different. Separate. Alien. The people I would talk to about movies or books were not the same people I could talk to about games. And I thought that was just the way it was.

But Scott Pilgrim has come out, and I feel like something has changed. You see, Scott Pilgrim isn’t based on a video game, and it’s not even really about video games, but it is at its core drawing as heavily on the cultural references of video games as much as it does music or movies or the comic books its based on.

Movies have been getting away with this for years. Blade Runner isn’t overtly referencing Metropolis, but it uses the concepts and images of the previous work to help enrich its world and story. Similarly, Scott Pilgrim references games but doesn’t overtly name them or use them, but it uses the concepts and images to craft this world where games are just as relevant as all the movies one has seen and all the books one has read and all the music one has listened to.

Scott Pilgrim is the justification of the neglected medium. It is, at heart, a love story. But it uses concepts such as boss battles, leveling up, extra lives—things that games have been using for years—not as simple references for laughs, but as concepts that help enrich the world and as storytelling beats, as relevant as the concepts of every other medium. It welcomes the games medium, with its own culture and references, to join the mess of other forms of entertainment that have all been feeding into each other for decades. And in doing so, it not only provides a good film, but it provides a conduit for all the ideas that have been so long separated to spill out, not as nudge-wink references, but as devices used to tell stories, without shame or apology.

Scott Pilgrim is interesting for many reasons, but it’s magical because at its heart, the movie speaks to the child in me who remembers living a life that was ruled by how many lives I had, what level I was on, the final boss leering at me in the distance, my desire to explore these digital worlds and have these experiences of numbers and pixels and mechanics laid out before me as important and immediate to me as any other world I could experience.

That child would look at something like Scott Pilgrim and say “Of course that’s what the world is like” but the adult in me can only sit back and marvel that what I felt could never happen has already come to pass, that the two countries I thought forever separated in my life could be brought together in ways I had never considered, that someone could decide that all of these things that had been so long ignored were important.

And if that’s true, and the mediums are compatible, if games and every other form of culture and entertainment are on equal footing, who knows what incredible and interesting ways they can interact now and in the future?

An Explanation RE: My Actions

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 02:14:00 +0000

Five times in my life I've shot a man, and not once did I think it was the wrong thing to do. And I'm not the kind of person who doesn't believe in regrets. I regret that I never had a chance to say goodbye to my Ma before she died, and I regret that I didn't kiss Heather Woods in the 10th grade that time we went to the homecoming dance.

So sure, I regret things.

But the people who I shot ... those seven bastards deserved what they got. Every one of them was a bad person. And I can't feel sorry for doing what needed to be done.

The first was a mistake, a bad twist of fate. Some punk trying to steal enough to score picked the wrong guy. One dark alley, one threat, and I warned him too. But when he pulled the knife and advanced on me I did what any red-blooded American properly armed would do. I put two in that fucker's chest and left him there drowning in his own blood.

Okay, so maybe that's not the proper way. My Grandfather took me out to his farm back when I was a kid, to see the fresh air and learn about God's land in thorn and claw, as he said. One day one of the farm dogs got caught underneath the wheel of a tractor. It was all broken, limp as a wet dishrag, and my Grandpa had told me then that you never let an animal suffer when you could put it out of its misery.

So leaving that sorry fucker there in the alley to suffocate on his own tainted blood was bad form on my part. I made up for it. I went to Grandpa's grave and told him that I had done it wrong and learned my lesson and if--and God forbid that it come to pass--I had another chance to do the right thing, I'd make sure that I never left a broken living being behind me.

The 2nd and 3rd were another bit of bad luck. I seem to be one of the unluckiest men alive. But that's okay. Common sense and preparation can make up for a whole mess of bad luck, I've found. And I do my best to wield both. So when the two bums came in through my kitchen window looking to do Heaven knows what, I tagged them both. The police might have been suspicious at how neatly I had done it, one of them hit once in the chest and once in the throat and the other one neatly betwen the eyes.

I couldn't really tell them that the 2nd one, upon seeing his comrade fall, had gotten down on his knees and begged me to let him go, that he had made a mistake. But he was so helpless. I couldn't just let him run back out into the world. It was a hard winter that year, and he looked half-frozen as it was. I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy. So I did the decent thing and put him down proper.

Thank god he had booze in his system and his friend had a cheap old gun on him. I was acquitted without delay. Nobody condemns a man for minding his own house. Not even in these awful times.

The fourth time was a good work. Driving through the seedy side of town, as I did from time to time, I spotted a pimp beating up on his hooker. Or maybe it was just a husband who had gone too far laying hands on his wife. I'm not sure which it was, to be honest. You can't tell one from the other with those kinds of people. But the woman was screaming for help and nobody walking the streets in that part of town lifted a finger, scurrying into hiding and onto stoops where they could deny they saw a damned thing.

I was not as cowardly. I didn't even have to stop the car. And all those people who were looking the other way obviously saw nothing. Nobody looks too hard for people who kill those types of monsters. The woman was simply grateful. No harm done. My good deed for the day achieved.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, because the last time I shot a man was probably the last time I'll ever get away with it. I don't regret it, per se, but I understand that there are some things people don't look kindly upon. Like how my friend Chris from work didn’t look kindly upon my confession that I had shot four men while we were sharing a few 12 packs of beer.

You should have heard the things he accused me of when I detailed what I laid down before you here. He called me all sorts of names. Monster. Psychopath. They were unfair things. I’m just a man who protects what’s mine. It’s a carefully honed skill, the ability to defend. I am especially good at it. So when he threatened me, intimated that he would call the cops, I defended the thing most important to me without thinking.

So poor Chris is dead now. But he was always a bit of a pompous ass. So … there we go. I regret nothing, but I can’t exactly hide this one. I can’t think of an excuse that the police are going to like. So I’m simply going to tell them the truth, in as calm and composed a manner as I can. Which is why I write this. Five men, a drop in the bucket. Tyrants and patriots kill exponentially more every day.

I only did what was necessary.

The Mob Lawyer (part 6)

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Hiroki was squaring away the data he had collected when Camen returned to the office with Mrs. Wallace in tow. Hiroki wasn’t sure where Camen had stashed her after the events of the other night, but she looked diminished outside of her palatial home, scared and insubstantial.

Camen let Hiroki do all the talking on this one. Hiroki appreciated it, well in his element working with numbers and data. This was one of the main reasons Camen had brought him on board, and he had the decency to know when to let him take the reigns.

“Mrs. Wallace,” Hiroki said. “I assume Benjamin told you that we recovered some information from your husband’s office yesterday.”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “You’re doing better than the police. They’re still having trouble getting a warrant.”

“Well, we beat them to the punch,” Camen said. “And we’re not exactly following proper procedure.”

"Anyway,” Hiroki said, “the data we found was pretty unimportant on the whole. However, of note is that your husband kept his personal budget and finances on that computer. And there were plenty of interesting things in there.”

Mrs. Wallace sat forward in her chair, her eyes wide. “Interesting how?”

“Well, to start with, you were aware that he was giving money to Victoria Falchi?”

“I … no.” She shook her head, her brow furrowing. “I mean, I figured he might. A man like Sam doesn’t keep a woman like that through personality alone. But he never told me the specifics.”

“Well, there’s money here that is earmarked for Miss Falchi. What’s more interesting, though, is that there’s another amount of the exact same amount that is going to someone else.”

“Someone else?”

Camen spoke up. “Are you aware of any other people that your husband might have been paying under the table? Blackmailer? Drug dealer? … another woman, maybe?”

“Another woman?" Mrs. Wallace looked bewildered. “Why would he keep another woman?”

“Two might not be enough,” Hiroki helpfully chimed in. Camen shot him a look, and he withered in his chair.

“We don’t know for sure what’s going on, but the only clue we’ve got is that he was paying someone a pretty decent amount for something.” Camen moved closer to her, kneeling down by her chair. “Look, if you know something about what that might be, I need to know now. We’re getting to the point where the police are going to sweep in and all the clues are going to disappear.”

Mrs. Wallace’s eyes went wide, but she shook her head slowly. “I’m sorry, I don’t know anything. He never mentioned paying that much to anybody else. I’m afraid I can’t be much help.”

Camen sighed but nodded. “All right. We’ll keep looking, but without some hint as to where your husband’s disappeared to or who this mysterious person is, we’re kind of stuck. We’ll keep you updated, but in the meantime I hope you’ll agree to stay out of sight.”

“Of course,” she said. “The last thing I want is to end up like poor Miss Falchi.”

Camen escorted her out, taking her home while he left Hiroki in the office. Hiroki was fine with that, with some more time to think and work he could potentially dig through the information they had gathered. There had to be a clue somewhere, there just had to be. Without some direction to who they were looking for, this whole case could end up a wash. A missing man, a dead body, and the police already starting to poke around. A recipe for disaster.

Hiroki was lost in his work when the door opened. He didn’t even look up, just kept digging. “She’s no help, Ben,” Hiroki said. “I think we might be at a dead end.”

“I certainly hope that isn’t the case,” an unknown voice said.

Hiroki looked up, eyes wide. In the doorway were three people. They were all dressed in nice suits but none of them particularly looked business-like. There were two in the back, a mountain of a man and a short, thin man, who looked dangerously thuggish. In front of them was the man who was obviously in charge.

“Can I … help you?” Hiroki eyed them nervously. Sometimes Camen had some shady characters show up, but these guys looked more serious than the usual person who came through that door.

“You’re Ben Camen’s tech boy, aren’t you?” The man in front stepped forward. “You can certainly help me, then. You see, I’m looking for information about where Samuel Wallace has got to, and I hear you might have some idea.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hiroki said. “But Mr. Camen will be here before too long, and he can sort this out.” Hiroki moved to stand up, suddenly wanting nothing more than to step outside and call Ben and get him there as soon as possible.

The two men who were standing at the door stepped forward. The big one shifted just a little, expertly flashing the holster under his suit jacket. “I’m sure you can help me,” the man said as he sat down in the chair across from the desk. “So sit tight, kid.”

Hiroki sat back down, staring at the two men. They were on either side of the chair, immobile but obviously standing in the way of Hiroki and the door. There was no easy way out of this one. He only hoped Benjamin came back quickly.

“That’s right,” the man said when Hiroki settled in, defeated, into his seat. “Now, you’re going to tell me everything you two have found out so far.”

“Or what?”

The man laughed. “Or what? Come on kid, this isn’t the movies. You’re going to tell us. We can just do it slow or you can just volunteer the information and save us all a whole lot of work. Now, why don’t you show us all that information on that computer of yours.”

Hiroki stared at the screen, the information they had stolen from Wallace’s computer right there on the screen. There wasn’t time to get rid of it before they’d stop him. There wasn’t room to run. Hiroki hesitated a moment, unsure.

The two men behind the chair advancing on Hiroki sitting at the desk.

The Mob Lawyer (part 5)

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Hiroki held open the heavy wooden door to the law offices of Barston & Chase for Camen, following behind him and trying to look as official and adult as he could. The two of them were woefully out of place in these stolid, somber surroundings. But Camen was an old hand at handling these situations, introducing himself with all the gruff competence of a beat cop.

The receptionist gave way to a suit, who approached them and shook Camen’s hand. He seemed rather embarrassed to have them there, looking around them to the door. “Good morning, gentlemen. If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to handle this privately,” the suit said as he motioned them down the hallway to the offices.

“I’d like to see Samuel Wallace’s office, if you don’t mind,” Camen said, not taking the invitation to go immediately.

“Um … yes, but first I’d like to talk to you in mine,” the suit said, glancing towards the door as if he expected someone to walk in at any moment. “Just follow me.”

He led them into a big, imposing office, all big leather chairs and monolithic mahogany desks. “You’ll have to excuse my insistence on doing this in private,” the suit began. “Our clients are very protective of their privacy, and it wouldn’t do to have them see an investigator here. Bad for business.”

“Just what sort of business is that?” Camen asked.

“We deal with the legal and financial affairs of many of the most prominent citizens and corporations in Colston City. This law firm has been here since the 1800s, Barston and Chase were lawyers turned prospectors who rushed out here. Thankfully, when the rush turned out to be largely hot air, they had skills to fall back on and plenty of people who regularly got in trouble.”

“You sound pretty proud of that,” Camen pointed out, looking around the room now, obviously uninterested. Hiroki wondered how long they’d have to talk to this guy before they’d be allowed to search the room proper.

“It’s an impressive heritage, one we strive to live up to. People depend on us to be there. Unfortunately, when one of our own goes missing, it looks bad. We’ve been shouldering his load, claiming that Sam is laid low with an illness, but we want to know where he is as bad as you do.”

“So you have no idea?”

“I’m afraid not,” the man said. “We’ve made some inquiries on our own, informal and discreet of course, but so far there’s been nothing. But things have changed, and we have to act.”

“So now that there’s a dead body and Sam’s got police attention, you’re going to cooperate, is that what you’re saying?”

“More or less,” the suit admitted with a shrug. “Go ahead, Wallace’s offices are down the hall. I just beg you to be discreet.”

Camen nodded and the two of them exited the office and made their way down to the large door with Samuel Wallace’s name on it. When they entered, they were in an antechamber the size of the office they had just come from, this one brighter due to the wall of windows along one side.

“Hello, gentlemen,” the assistant, a woman in severe business attire said from behind the desk as she stood up. She seemed overly composed, a well-practiced neutral expression on her face. “I was told to expect you.”

“Benjamin Camen, ma’am,” he said, shaking her hand. “This is my assistant, Hiroki Sugoi. Don’t mind him, he’s mostly just here to observe. He’s in training.”

“My name is Brittany Hughes. What can I do for you today?” She seemed to ignore Hiroki entirely, writing him off as irrelevant. Hiroki didn’t go out of his way to change her mind.

“We’re investigating the disappearance of your boss, Samuel Wallace. We were hoping for the opportunity to search his office.”

She sighed and shook her head. “I’ve been told to give you as much access as I’m comfortable with, but I’m afraid I’m not very comfortable with you poking around in his office unsupervised. There are hundreds of files in his office, all of them privileged, and the last thing I want is finding out after you’re gone that while you were here you decided to indulge in some profitable espionage.”

Camen didn’t seem very surprised by this. He stood his ground and shrugged his shoulders. “I need to look for some idea of where Mr. Wallace went. A woman is dead. Either I come in and poke around or the police come in and do it. Your choice.”

Miss Hughes stared at Camen for a long moment and then nodded. “Very well. Come with me. I’ll let you look around, but I want you to do it under my strict supervision.”

The three of them walked passed her desk to the closed door, opening to another, larger room. This was as plush and richly furnished as the first office they were shown, but much bigger. Hiroki scanned the room. There were several large file cabinets in the corner, and along the wall opposite the window was a wall of case files and ledgers and books. Hiroki’s eyes were drawn to the computer, a dark screen sitting off to one side of the desk.

“Your assistant can sit at the desk,” Miss Hughes said by way of explanation. “Mr. Wallace’s computer is protected, and so far the systems guys haven’t been able to reset the password or anything like that, so I’m afraid it won’t be much help.” Hiroki noticed that she didn’t actually sound all that sad about that, but Camen nodded for him to sit in the large leather chair and Hiroki was glad to oblige.

As Camen began to head towards the wall of files and books, Hiroki discreetly pulled two pieces of equipment out of his bag. One was a small, low profile hard drive. The second was a small USB key. He kept them both under the table, where the watchful eye of Miss Hughes couldn’t see. Thankfully, Miss Hughes looked pretty occupied as Camen began to pull the ledgers and notebooks from the wall and flip through them.

“Mr. Camen, you can’t just start going through things like that. What if there’s sensitive information? I said I would help you, but you need to let me know what you want to see and then I’ll determine whether or not that’s an appropriate course of action.”

“I want to see all the things he wrote down. Not the case files, not yet anyway, but the books he kept. His home office was suspiciously devoid of information. If there’s any clue to where he’s gone or why, it has to be here.”

“Well, let’s start one at a time,” she said, taking down the first ledger, glancing at the first page where there was a quickly jotted inventory of what was inside. While she was looking, Hiroki plugged the hard drive and USB key into the computer as discreetly as possible.

Camen flipped through the notebook for a moment, and then handed it back to her. “No good. Give me another one.” As she looked through it, he turned to Hiroki. “I hope you brought something to keep yourself busy.”

Hiroki shrugged his shoulders. “I brought my computer. Thought that maybe I could do some school work. If that’s all right.”

“Miss Hughes, is that all right?” Camen said, pulling out the files on the wall halfway to look at what was written on them. Miss Hughes looked up and situated herself in between Camen and the files as she handed him another notebook.

“I guess that’s all right,” she said absently. “We don’t have wifi here, hopefully you’ll keep yourself busy without the internet.”

“It’s fine, I can use my phone to tether,” Hiroki said, pulling out his laptop and setting it up on the desk. As she was looking away to keep Camen from pulling down more files, he reached over and pressed the power button on both the laptop and the desktop at the same time. The sound of the powering computers was loud, but could easily be accounted for by Hiroki’s laptop looking a little too big to be all that quiet.

Hiroki pulled up the utility on the USB key, connecting to Wallace’s desktop. The program he had installed interrupted the boot sequence, loading a program of his own instead of the original OS. He worked quickly and efficiently, trying to be as unassuming as possible. Thankfully, that’s what he was good at. He quickly set up the program to clone the hard drive off of the desktop onto the one he brought with him.

Once that was set up and running, he tabbed over to the word processor and began to work on one of the papers he had to write for his finals. He didn’t really have to pay much attention to Camen anymore. He would make a lot of noise, maybe find something out despite Miss Hughes’ obvious smokescreen, but the real work was done. He felt proud of himself. Without him, Camen’s job would be a lot harder. It just proved to him how much the detective needed him in his life.

He titled his paper with his name and with the class he was taking, and began to write. There was a murder to solve and a missing man to find, a mystery all around them, but for now all he could do was wait for the platters of data at his feet to spin and for Camen’s act to hold up.

Hiroki could think of worse jobs.

Block #fridayflash

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Fri, 21 May 2010 01:54:00 +0000

Ryan was shown into the Coordinator’s office, a small space that bore more in common with a closet than it did a room. The two chairs faced each other over a fold-down desk, the Coordinator already seated in his, tapping away at the computer in his hand.

Ryan slid in next to the Coordinator, waiting for the older man to speak. The Coordinator was a man who operated at his own leisure. Not that Ryan was all that excited to hear what he had to say once he was done. Nothing felt good about this meeting.

“We have a problem,” the Coordinator said as he tapped the screen on his computer one last time, setting the small device down on the table.

“I’m not surprised you’d think that,” Ryan said.

The Coordinator looked at him expectantly. It was hard to meet the Coordinator’s gaze. His one good eye was bright and piercing, intimidating enough, but the replacement for his other eye was the flat black lens of the video implant. It’d be easier if it was just an old fashioned glass eye, not this technological monstrosity.

“You don’t have an excuse to offer me for your poor performance?” The Coordinator spread his hands helplessly. “I’m running out of options here. You were brought on board for a very specific purpose. An obligation you’ve failed to fulfill for nearly five years, now. You understand how that’s unacceptable, given the circumstances.”

“You can’t rush this type of work,” Ryan said. “I’m doing the best I can. It’s not as if I haven’t tried. But sometimes these things just work and sometimes they just don’t. It’s not as if I haven’t provided years of good material previously.”

“That’s half the problem,” the Coordinator said. “There are certain expectations you set by how prolific you were, both before and after Gathering Day. The people here relied upon you to provide for them on a set schedule. And you exceeded their wildest dreams. We were all very impressed. But now … nothing.”

“I don’t have an answer for you,” Ryan said. “I’m doing the best I can.”

The Coordinator shifted uncomfortably, his eye lowering as a sign that he didn’t want to say what he was about to say. “There’s been a proposal from the archivist that she be given permission to produce a series of stories set in a pre-Gathering Day world. I spoke to the morale officer, and he seemed to think it would be a good idea to pursue that.”

“A … but .. the archivist?” Ryan sat up straighter in his chair. “She’s not capable of providing for all of us. She’s a librarian.”

“She’s already submitted a writing sample, some ideas for stories, the outlines of five novels.” The Coordinator pressed a few buttons on his computer and then slid it over to Ryan. He picked it up and quickly scanned the writing. It was amateurish, but it had promise. He perused the outlines. They were solid stories. Shit.

“She already has a role, though. One person, one job. Remember? That’s how the community is being run.”

“Ideally, yes,” the Coordinator said. “Unfortunately, we didn’t forsee that the archivist would have diminishing responsibilities as other communities went silent and our affairs settled into a routine. She notes the personal highlights of the community, helps people organize their private logs, but in reality there isn’t much left for her to do. We think expanding her role to envelop yours is an efficient use of resources.”

Ryan’s face went white. He felt bile rising in his throat. He couldn’t be suggesting… “So what happens to me?”

“The community doesn’t need two storytellers,” the Coordinator said. “Especially not when one of them hasn’t told a story in years.”

“So … what … you can’t just let me go! Let her go! I was one of the first choices for this community. I can learn her job.”

“She’s a mother of four. As hesitant as I am to bring it up, your partner did pass on some years ago. No children to worry about. And much like will happen with you, her job was assumed by the community over time without too much trouble.”

“So you’re just going to get rid of anyone who’s redundant? How is that any way to run a community? You’re supposed to be protecting us, not kicking us out when we don’t meet your standards!”

“I’m not in the position to be swayed by pleas to my emotions,” the Coordinator answered. “And unfortunately for you, there is no ‘we.’ Everyone else is fulfilling their assigned roles. You are the sole exception. And it’s come to the point where keeping you here is one more child I can’t authorize people to have. You do realize we’re about to become a third-generation community? I’m sorry, but my decision stands. You are hereby stripped of the title of this community’s Writer, and asked to leave.”

* * *

Ryan walked down the narrow corridor leading to the entrance to the community. This was a rarely-used part of the structure, sealed and forgotten for years. There were storage containers lined against one wall, so narrow that the small farewell party that accompanied him had to go single file past them.

“Please, I beg you to reconsider,” Ryan said to the Coordinator. “You know what it’s like out there. You know I’m not equipped for this.”

“You have been given plenty of tools with which to survive,” the Coordinator said. “I’m not heartless. But I have to make decisions for the good of the whole, not the individual.”

“We will not forget you,” the new Writer, Deborah, said. She seemed genuinely distressed by this turn of events, bless her. “I will write of you, and your sacrifices. The community will revere you by the time I’m done. I know it’s a small comfort, but it’s all I can do.”

The security director, a thick ex-military man, was the first to the door. “When you get out there, you need to find shelter before nightfall. We don’t know what’s out there, but the last thing you want is to be stuck in the dark, unprepared.”

“What time is it out there?” Ryan shouldered the heavy pack he wore. It was full of tools, each carefully explained to him, though he was sure that he had forgotten all of it already. It didn’t matter. They had provided him two other tools, the old but well-maintained pistol from the armory that was heavy and alien in its holster, and the single pill in the locket around his neck if he decided that he couldn’t take this new reality.

The door of the community opened for the first time in over a decade. This was the first door, leading to a small decontamination chamber that had been built in case there had actually been traffic from the outside. In all the years of the community’s existence, that had never happened.

Ryan stepped through the first door, which closed behind him. He could see the three of them, crowding at the window, watching him. The second door unsealed itself, dust blowing in from the outside, quickly sucked up by the vents in the room. The community was not to be contaminated.

Ryan stepped up to the door to the Outside. The community had been sunk into the side of a mountain, the path hewn into the rock. The tunnel was dark and cool, various debris from animals or travelers or god knows what littering the floor. Ryan stepped out into the cave, and the door shut behind him.

Slowly, carefully, Ryan made his way out to the mouth of the tunnel where it emerged into the open air. It was full daylight, but the sun only lit the sky a dull, tumultuous grey. He knew that there was no clear sky anymore, but he had hoped to see some of the great blue dome stretching up forever. After ten years with low ceilings and cramped spaces, though, even this low cloud that had been the doom of so many people looked impossibly high. It gave him a sense of vertigo to look up.

Instead he looked out. The land was blighted, an endless expanse of rocks and dust and hard-packed dirt that was slowly being eroded into desert. There were buildings, many of them still standing, but he saw nothing moving. That fit with the reports the community had. Whatever was left out here in the Outside, it was scarce.

As he adjusted his pack and began to climb down the slope of the mountain to the flat ground below, a thought crossed his mind. A thought so powerful that he felt his spirit break under the weight of it. He wanted to cry, but instead he grinned fiercely, laughing softly to himself. Of course, it was so obvious!

This, he thought to himself, would make for a great story!

The Mob Lawyer (part 4)

noreply@blogger.com (litrock) — Wed, 19 May 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Hiroki shifted uncomfortably in the heavy silence that had fallen over the study. Patricia Wallace was sitting in the massive leather chair behind the desk, her knees pulled up under her chin. She looked ill at easy, though he supposed that if he had lost a spouse and was potentially connected to a murder that he’d be upset, too. In the large chair she looked like a girl, awoken by a bad dream and taking comfort in a parent’s things.

“So … what do we do now?” She asked the room.

Hiroki had no answer. He was still in the chair he had been shown to when they arrived, feeling completely unable to contribute to this situation. Camen was standing off to one side, smoking a cigarette, smoke rising in a cloud above him as he seemed to be browsing the leather bound books on the shelf.

“The most likely thing,” Camen said, “is that the police will come and question you. It might be prudent to cut them off at the pass, go to them and tell them your husband is missing. They’ll question you about the murder, I’m sure, but I don’t doubt that you’ll quickly rise above suspicion.”

“You’re so sure of that?” She looked over at Camen. “What if I, in a fit of passion, went over there and murdered her? Why wouldn’t they believe that?”

“I can’t tell you the specifics of the case, otherwise they might believe that. I’m just going to say that I find it unlikely you’re that capable. It is more likely, though, that they’ll suspect your husband. Especially after you tell them that he’s missing.”

The horrified look on her face prompted Hiroki to speak up before she got really riled and made things difficult. “If they suspect your husband, they’re going to look for him. They have more resources than we do. It’s not a bad thing.”

“I told you I didn’t want this made public,” she said.

“Right now, it won’t be,” Camen said. “The last thing they want to do is publicly name your husband if he’s not the killer. No sense going out and begging for a lawsuit. They’ll keep it quiet enough. And if he’s not guilty as I assume, then he has nothing to worry about.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I’m afraid you don’t have much choice,” Camen said. “Your husband’s mistress turns up dead, there’s enough information to point them towards mob involvement. It wouldn’t take much searching to figure out that she was spending her free time with a lawyer with mob involvement. If you don’t go to them, they’re going to come to you. And they’ll be a lot less nicer about it at that point.”

There was a protracted moment of silence after that, as their client digested this new data. Hiroki shifted in his chair. It was late, he was going to be in trouble as it was, and now here they were telling someone to go see their biggest competitor. This wasn’t exactly the glamorous detective life he envisioned.

Camen finished his cigarette, putting it out in the small ashtray that Mrs. Wallace had given him. He turned around and began to speak. “If you like, we can take you down there ourselves, I can talk to the detective in charge. It’ll make things nice and smooth, they can question you and you can be back home in a few hours.”

“Right now? It’s the middle of the night.”

“If we take her down there now, we’re going to be sitting around for hours,” Hiroki said. “Better to wait until morning.”

Camen shrugged. “If you insist. That’s not quite as pre-emptive as I would like, but I suppose it’ll-“

He was interrupted by the chime of the doorbell. There was a moment’s hesitation, the sound so foreign that nobody moved. Patricia was the first one to speak. “I … how did someone get past the gate?”

“It closed behind us when we came in,” Hiroki said.

“Maybe it’s the police?” Patricia was already standing up, walking towards the door of the study. As she reached for the knob, Camen reached out and put a hand on her arm.

“You wait here. In case it isn’t the police. Stay here with Hiroki, I’ll go check it out.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a small gun from the underarm holster that Hiroki knew he had. He turned towards Hiroki, nodding. “Watch her. If you hear anything go bad, get her out of here and get to the police.”

“You think it’s that serious?” Hiroki asked, heart pounding. He stood up, a sudden rush of energy making him jumpy, heading towards the door.

“I’m not planning on taking any chances,” he said, before he retreated down the darkened hallway towards the foyer, the bell still ringing.

Hiroki closed the door after Camen had left, turning towards Patricia. She was pale and nearly trembling. Hiroki motioned to the chair. “Come on, sit down. It’s fine. He’s paranoid because that’s part of the job. But he’s good at what he does. We’ll be just fine here.”

“But what if we’re not?” she asked. “What if it’s some sort of burglar?”

“Then they wouldn’t be ringing the bell, would they?” Hiroki said. '”Like I said, just sit down and relax.” Once she was sitting down, seemingly a little more under control, Hiroki made his way over to the door. There wasn’t any sound now, just the sound of the two of them breathing in this room.

“Mrs. Wallace, I’m going to turn off the lights. Don’t be alarmed.” Hiroki reached up and flipped the switch, plunging them into darkness. Then he cracked open the door and peered out into the darkness of the hall. The hallway was empty, and Hiroki couldn’t see any motion out in the small part of the foyer he could see from here. The house felt suddenly like a tomb, large and still and indifferent.

Suddenly there was the sound of two heavy impacts, one accompanied with a low grunt. Hiroki was ready to bolt if need be, but in the gloom of the hallway he saw Camen coming down the hall. Of course, he was coming down the hall at a full run, his gun out. “Hiroki, come on!”

Hiroki turned towards Patricia. “We need to go, now!” To her credit, she was up in a flash, the two of them both making their way out of the study and into the hall. Camen caught up with them, handing Hiroki the keys to the car. “What’s going on?” Hiroki asked.

“There’s someone here. I tackled them, but they’re still here. I don’t know if they’re armed or not.” The three of them raced out into the foyer, Camen at the lead, gun out and scanning the darkness for sign of the assailant. Hiroki led Patricia to the open door, Camen right behind. Out in the yard, they were nearly completely exposed if someone wanted to take a shot at them, but Hiroki knew the drill on safely getting to the car and ran at a half crouch to the vehicle.

He put Patricia in the back, telling her to get down and stay down. Then he made his way over to the driver’s side of the car, Camen right behind him, gun out and sweeping the yard. Out here it seemed much brighter than inside, but the shadows made it hard to tell what was trees moving in the wind and what was the intruder.

Hiroki started the engine even as Camen was climbing into the passenger seat, peeling out of the parking lot and towards the gate. The headlights revealed that the gate was open, the sliding mechanism smoking faintly. Hiroki kept his eyes on the road, though, getting them out of the there.

“What happened?” Patricia asked.

Camen settled into his seat. “I opened the door but there wasn’t anybody out there. I felt like someone was watching me, though, and got out of the doorway so I wasn’t such an obvious target. Just in case this was the same person who killed Ms. Falchi.”

“I heard a struggle,” Hiroki said.

“While I was hiding, someone rushed in through the door. I grabbed them, but they were ready for me and there was a fight. I ended up landing a punch that knocked them to the ground, though. Then I went to get you. I’m not sure where they went, but it seems we’ve lost them.”

“What do we do now?” Patricia asked.

“Well, you can’t go back,” Camen said. “But apparently whoever killed Falchi is after you.”

“You’re sure they’re related.”

“No…” Camen shook his head, pausing. “We need to learn more about this case. And quickly. But until we get a grasp on what’s happening, we need to get you to safety.”

“What did you have in mind?”

Camen shook his head. “I don’t know. I need time to think. Hiroki, I need to get you home. I’ll take over, and I’ll pick you up tomorrow afternoon.”

Hiroki’s jaw tensed. The last thing he wanted was to be dropped off and sent back to the safety of his apartment and his mother right when things were getting interesting. This was an adventure! This was exactly the kind of thing he had signed up for when he insisted on being Camen’s assistant. But it was always ‘get Hiroki out of the way’ first and ‘have awesome experiences’ second.

***

Hiroki trudged into the apartment to find his mother sleeping in the recliner in the living room. He set down his bag and gently shook her awake. “Hey mom, I’m home.”

“Oh, Hiroki,” she said, yawning and stretching. “What time is it?”

“A little bit after three,” Hiroki said. “Sorry it took so long. Ben’s server was invaded, had to fight off the intruder and secure the data.”

His mother nodded, glazing over at the first mention of the technology he was ostensibly hired to do. She climbed to her feet and began to head towards bed. “I worry about you staying out so late. You can’t be running around at all hours at your age, it’s unnatural.”

“Mom, everyone my age is running around at all hours,” Hiroki said. “The difference is that I’m getting paid for it and building up a resume. Don’t worry, I take care of myself. And Ben looks out for me.”

She scoffed. “That man doesn’t look like he can take care of himself, much less anyone else. I don’t trust him. He’s shifty.”

Hiroki rolled his eyes. “Whatever you say.” When his mother went to bed Hiroki sank into the living room couch. He sighed, turning on the TV for some noise and light but not really paying attention to it. At this rate, he wasn’t sure he would ever fall asleep, anxious about what Camen was doing right now, fleeing a would-be intruder—maybe a murderer!---and leaving him here to wait for information.

Thinking about the case, and the adventures that he could be going on if only he wasn’t stuck here, Hiroki fell asleep on the couch, accompanied by the muted light of the TV.