Monthly Archives: June 2014

Steven Millhauser – Thirteen Wives

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I sent this to my Kindle some time ago and forgot about it, but this morning, I accidentally tapped the icon.  Since I had just written about Millhauser’s Eisenheim the Illusionist, I decided to see what this one was about.

It starts out simply enough with a narrator saying, “I have 13 wives.”  OK, simple in sentence structure, but not so much in implications.  Anyone who has read Millhauser knows this is not going to be a story about Mormons.   You know to expect a detailed description of life with each, and to not expect much of an arc to the characters or story.  And that is fine — nobody expects show-tunes out of Dylan.

He continues on to very briefly describe their collective living and dining arrangements in a one-paragraph introduction.  There are a few sentences that leave the story open to interpretation.

Even though I married my wives one after the other, over a period of nine years, I never did so with the thought that I was replacing one wife with a better one, or abolishing my former wives by starting over. Never have I considered myself to be a man with thirteen marriages but, rather, a man with a single marriage, composed of thirteen wives.

Millhauser then begins a numbered list.  I don’t remember him ever doing that even though his style certainly lends itself to that format.

Rather than recap the 13 essays of his wives — and there is no wrap-up following #13 — I will just say that each wife is lovingly and fully rendered; much more than some deserve.  But this is not a schmaltzy, romantic ode to Big Love or the individual women.  There are eccentricities and quirks to be found, preternatural empathy, and some defying of the laws of physics.  But the latter instances are grounded by being mixed in with more traditional relationships.

There seems to be a lot of speculation online as to whether he is describing one woman over a period of time, the multiple facets of one woman at one point in time, or actually 13 distinct wives as advertised.

There seems to be more evidence to support the 13 wives theory, but ultimately I don’t think it matters.  As usual, Millhauser puts his universe on the table and you can dig in or not.  There is enough to go around.

I rate this 11 wives.

At least as of today, it is available online here.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

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Conedgeoftomcover01s: Got to the Theater 8 minutes late, anticipating the usual 17 minutes of previews. Miraculously, the movie had already started.  OK, I can’t blame the film for that, but I’m grasping for straws because the movie itself was very good.

Tom Cruise is caught in a time loop similar to Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, except some chick is shooting him in the head in most of the iterations.

Also, he is waking to each reset day with a sergeant screaming “On your feet maggot!” rather than hearing “I Got You Babe” on the radio.  Although around the 20th time, I’m not sure which would be worse.

It gets off to an interesting start — at least at the point where I where I strolled in — as Tom Cruise is not playing his usual confident, infallible, smirking superman. Here he is Don Draper, or more accurately Pete Campbell, a weaselly military ad man who finds himself on the front lines of a war with aliens.  He does his best to talk, spin, and blackmail his way out of being sent into the real war, but to no avail

He is busted to private and assigned to a combat unit commanded by Bill Paxton, who is great in this role despite being possibly the worst actor to ever make a fine living working full-time in movies; he is frequently a great character, but that is not the same.  The irony is that among the grunts he commands there is not a single character as interesting as Hudson in Aliens.  OK, I guess the indistinguishable soldiers are the real “con” of the movie.

Once in combat, he is pretty quickly killed.  But not before killing one of the aliens. Not just a regular alien, but a 1 in 6 million alien that possesses time-travel capabilities.  You’d think the aliens would protect such a rare, valuable resource, but no.  After blasting the alien, Cruise gets a blood, guts & goo facial. This is enough to transfer the time-travel abilities to him.  When he is killed, he resets / awakens the previous morning.

Eventually, Cruise becomes the superhuman killing machine that we expect him to be.  The difference here is that it is earned.  We see him repeatedly fail, die, and learn from his mistakes.  For him, Nietzsche was wrong — What DOES kill him makes him stronger.  There are no participation trophies.  Cruise gets a rare chance to develop a character — from smug ad man, to scared toy-soldier, to born-again hard — and completely pulls it off.

Emily Blunt plays a war hero aka The Angel of Verdun aka Full Metal Bitch who had earlier been stuck in a time-loop.  Understanding Cruise’s potential as a weapon, she becomes his trainer and partner.  If there was one thing I didn’t care for in the movie, it was her.  The character is OK, but the actress just brought nothing special to the role.  OK, forget the indistinguishable soldiers, they were just bit players and ultimately cannon-fodder — the miscasting of Emily Blunt would be the only “con” I could come up with.

Toward the end, there were several things I didn’t understand.  For example:

  1. Cruise seemed to indicate he was teaching himself to fly the helicopter at the farmhouse, but then told Blunt that an alien would hear the noise and attack it if were even started (which she proved to be true).
  2. Before attacking the Louvre, Cruise says not to kill any of the Alpha aliens because that would alert the Omega alien who would would then reset the day.  But they do go in guns a-blazing, killing scores of aliens.
  3. And, of course, the whole ending.

Mostly likely all of these are explainable by a) dialogue I missed, or b) the fact that the theater now serves beer.

Except the ending.

So, maybe the real “con” is the ending; in more ways than one.  Certainly that seems to be creating a lot of online chatter.  But then most chatterers are praising Emily Blunt, too.  I can construct a scenario in which it makes sense to me, even if it is not airtight.  This ain’t Algebra; both sides of the equation don’t have to balance to be entertaining.

Rating: I’d rather sit through a time-loop viewing this movie than have to sit through Godzilla one more time.

Post-Post Leftovers:

  • Great movie, but terrible title — sounds like a soap opera.
  • Why the European setting?  Callback to D-Day?  Tired of destroying Washington and New York?  Got news for you, people love seeing Washington destroyed. Maybe it is not PC during this administration.
  • I can’t figure out what the giant paddle is that she is carrying.
  • The shadow of Aliens looms large, and not just for Paxton and the cargo-loaders.  When told they could not shoot the aliens at the Louvre, I really wanted to hear, “What the hell are we supposed to use, man?  Harsh language?“
  • As usual, I regret going 3D.  It was fine, but pointless, in the static shots; but many of the action scenes were a mess.  Also, it darkens the screen so much that I never was able to make out the last word of Full Metal Bitch on the poster, and didn’t recognize Emily Blunt as being the woman pictured.  Possibly due to sitting at a sharp angle to the screen.
  • Seventeen minutes does seem to be the average for previews.  However, the new X-Men ran longer, and the Evil Dead reboot last year had a record-breaking 25 minutes.  I wouldn’t care if they lasted an hour — if we knew they would last an hour.  Here’s a way to start — no advertising for movies that won’t be in the theater for 2 years.
  • There really is a Science Hill, KY but I can’t figure out why they would have made it Paxton’s character’s hometown.  Bill Paxton was born in Fort Worth, TX.  He was photographed waving to JFK leaving his hotel the morning he was killed, and later attended Lee Harvey Oswald’s old high school.  John Denver also attended the same high school, but there is no photographic evidence linking Paxton to his death.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Mink (S1E36)

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More komedy from Alfred Hitchcock, this time explaining that he has given up on his diet and is trying sports.

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Actual Closed Caption

That hilarity comes at the end of the episode, but it is kind of a slog to get there.  Woman buys fur on the cheap.  She is later busted as it had been stolen.  She pleads her innocence, but the conspirators deny ever having met her.  As always on AHP, justice prevails.  For a complicated episode, it is pretty easy to summarize.

Normally I like these kinds of mysteries where someone just seems to have disappeared and only one person remembers them.  Hitchcock did this earlier and better in his film, The Lady Vanishes; and in an earlier AHP episode, Into Thin Air.

ahminkdawn01But on to more important matters.  The women in this episode were annoying and er, not attractive to men.  With the exception of Eugenia Paul.

Holy crap, this woman must be a time traveler.  She does not look like anyone else I’ve seen in this series so far.

She has a few credits every year in the mid to late 1950’s then nothing.  According to IMDb, she married the heir to the Pep Boys Auto Shops fortune.  I find that hilarious, but I’m not sure why.

She is also in an episode in Season 2, so I have that to look forward to.

Aside from Eugenia, I rate this episode wet dog fur.

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Post-Post Leftovers:

  • Watching this episode, something made me think, “every one of these people is dead.”  I checked IMDb and sure enough every actor, actress, the writers, the director — all dead.
  • And that wasn’t necessarily the case.  Gone With the Wind is almost 20 years older and the last performer just died this year.
  • Sadly, that includes Eugenia Paul who was only 20 in this episode.

 

Devil’s Due (2014)

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devilsduecover01There sure is a lot of hate for a pretty good movie.  Maybe I am just too forgiving.  Of course, it has its flaws, but it also has some great scenes, things I had never seen before, and even it gave me a legitimate chill at one point.  What more can you ask from a movie?

The biggest gripe seems to be with the found-footage format, and it is sometimes pretty goofy.  Mostly it is being shot by husband Zach McCall, but there are also inserts from a police station camera, a supermarket security camera, rogue cameras installed by Satan worshipers, and the craziest — a trio of teenagers who also just happen to film everything.  There is no pretense that this footage was ever actually found and edited into what we are watching.  This is not found-footage, this is unfound-footage.  You can bitch about the presentation, or you can roll with it.  Ich bin ein roller.

In brief scenes of the wedding and the night before we meet Zach and the very cute Samantha McCall (Allison Miller).  If there is anything important here, I missed it.  We do briefly see a preacher — Bernard from Lost — who shows up later, and get the couple’s names, but otherwise, not much.  Minutes later, they are winging it to the Dominican Republic for the honeymoon.

devilsduesam02Sam has her palm read, and it goes about as well as it goes in every movie.  The reader tells her she’s had hard times, but now is happy — oh, that’s sweet; that she has no family, no past — that’s, er, harsh but factual; and, oh yeah, she is born from death!  This last bit is literally true as her pregnant mother was killed in a car crash, and Sam was cut out of her belly.  The palm reader flips out, repeating, “They’ve been waiting”, prompting the McCalls to run from the shop.

They immediately become lost after dark in the Dominican Republic which is basis enough for a horror movie.  They flag down a taxi and the driver offers to take them to a club for a drink.  Despite flying out the next morning, being tired, lost, nervous about their surroundings and freaked out by the palm reader — sure, let’s have a drink!  He takes them to a place is pretty sketchy, down dark corridors decorated in the Hostel / Saw motif.  Shockingly, they actually do emerge from this filthy trek a) alive and b) into a swingin’ club.

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Just another gratuitous shot

We get footage of them drinking, dancing,having a good time there before the picture becomes choppy and we get just brief glimpses of them being carried out of the club.  then a satanic ritual is performed on a flaming Quake II logo (because what other kind of ritual is there?).  Nixonian gap in the tape / they are back in the hotel with no memory of how they got there.  Seconds later they are back home in the US.

Either 5 minutes or 7 weeks later, Sam announces that she is pregnant.  Not sure what this guy Zach does for a living, but at about 25 he’s got a McMansion, unlimited free time, a hot wife, and no financial worries about an unplanned child.  Guy Woodhouse had to sell his soul for this kind of life.

After Sam’s first ultrasound, we start getting indications that all might not be well with her pregnancy.  In a bit reminiscent of Paranormal Activity we get a night vision shot of Sam violently grabbing Zach’s wrist as she continues to sleep.  Things get progressively weirder from here.

Part of the weirdness is in the POV.  For the first time, except briefly in the film’s opening shot, we are viewing the action from a non-McCall POV.  Now, we get several shots from security cameras of Sam shopping in the market before pausing in front of the meat case.  She pauses, takes a package and begins eating the raw meat.  Say, that is crazy — she’s is a vegetarian!

There is more weirdness, best left unspoiled.

Thank God, the cult installs hidden cameras in the McCall house to eliminate the need for Zach to be filming everything.  Coincidentally, this happens at just the moment Zach stops filming everything.  My favorite, and least practical, is the Arbogast-cam that mimics the POV when Martin Balsam gets stabbed n Psycho.

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Arbogast-Cam

When Sam and Zach attend a communion service, ya just knows there is going to be a problem.  Sure enough, Pastor Bernard starts sputtering, and bleeding from the nose onto his nice clean frock or tunic or vestment or whatever it is that they wear.  He is staring at Sam, knowing that she is somehow responsible for this and will damn well pay the cleaning bill.  There is a nice blink-and-you-miss-it moment as the camera pans past Sam’s profile and she is sporting some cool red devil eyes.

devilsduesam01Later, Zach is reviewing tapes and spots the taxi driver from the Dominican Republic in the church during the pastor’s seizure.  He was not detected as being a communion-crasher at the service, which is shocking because 1) he is not the sort of Dominican they are used to seeing in the pews, and 2) not the kind of Republican either, for that matter.

He also finally sees the few frames that show him and Sam being hauled out of the club, and the flaming Quake II satanic ritual.

Zach goes to see Pastor Bernard, and shows him the symbols that appeared on the tape.  Whoops, it turns out they are not the logo for Quake II, but religious symbols heralding the return of the anti-Christs — plural.   That seems a little unfair — it should be one anti per Christ.  He tells Zach to get the hell out of his room.

Now we come to the scene that is worth the price of admission.  We cut to 3 teenagers who also have a fetish for filming.  What happens next is exhilarating.  And that’s all I have to say about that.

Actually, probably best not to even document the rest.  From this point on, the pace and chills really accelerate.

The last scene is another honeymooning American couple, this time in Paris.  They are approached by the same taxi driver.  Being another dopey camera-wielding couple, at this point, I feel they deserve whatever they get.

I rate it a 600 out of 666.

Post-Post Leftovers:

  • From the directors of the “10/31/98” episode of V/H/S, which was also pretty good.  Strangely, I don’t remember much about it except that it was good.  Maybe it just seemed good right next to the God-awful wraparound.
  • According to IMDb, there is an uncredited actor in this named Spencer Tracey.  Why would you even attempt a movie career with that name?  Can it possibly help you?  Edward Norton had the good sense not to go by “Ed“.  Might I suggest “Spence”, at the very least?
  • Just discovered that on The Honeymooners, Ed Norton’s middle name was Lillywhite.  Hate to think what it might have been in the 2005 version with Cedric the Entertainer.
  • Why does the anti-Christ have to be American?  Oh yeah — Hollywood.
  • Pregnant women are smug.

Tales from the Crypt – Only Sin Deep (S1E4)

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Amazonian shrunken head — check, African tribal mask — check, dorky white guy — check.  Wait, what?  These things don’t go together.

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Lea Thompson plays hooker Sylvia Vane.  She is tired of hanging out with her pimp and her hooker friend who is even more obnoxious than the pimp.  Across the street, she sees a successful man getting out of a limo — Goodwin from Lost — and decides it is time to make some changes.

To get some quick cash, she pulls out pistol, pwns her pimp, pawns his jewelry.  In the pawn shop, she sees an veiled crone barge in and take a swing at the pawnbroker.

Before

Before

The pawnbroker suspects the jewelry is stolen, but makes her another offer.  He will give her $10,000 cash to make a mold of her face, or “beauty” as he says.  Like any item left in his shop, she has 4 months to reclaim it.  She agrees, and he begins ladling goo on her face to create a plaster mask.

Oh, and he keeps a casket in the backroom with his dead, withered husk of a wife.  But Lea didn’t see that, so no reason for her to be at all suspicious of this Randy Quaid lookalike offering her big money to put goo on her face.  Probably not a first for her; not even that day.

Lea de-tarts herself, washing off the make-up, getting a new-doo, removing that thing on her cheek, spitting out the gum, toning down the lipstick, and dumping the hookerwear.  She then goes on a shopping spree for new clothes which are far sexier than her hooker uniform.  I don’t understand why hookers don’t get how unsexy their clothes are.  And how they never have correct change.  Sadly, she does not change the single most repulsive thing about her — that god-awful accent.

After

After

Lea crashes Goodwin’s party and introduces herself as “Sylvia Vane, as in weather vane.”  He introduces himself as “Ronnie Price, as in everyone has theirs.”  This is a little jarring because they were clearly going for symmetry here, but completely missed the target; maybe twice.  OK, she’s vain, we get it.  Why bring up a weather vane?  He is presumed to be shallow and greedy, thus the “price” comment.  So his name is fitting, whereas hers is just a homonym.  Plus, I don’t see any real signs that he’s a bad guy, and it isn’t necessary for the story.  In fact, in this kind of story, he should be a good guy to make her sins even worse.

Title card, predictably:  “4 months later”.

Taking a bubble bath, she notices some lines on her face in the mirror.  I couldn’t really detect anything hideous viewing the DVD.  I’m not sure how visible it was on an RCA set 25 years ago.

The next morning, it is more detectable, although it really just looks like she is wearing no make-up.  Presumably later the same day, she goes to a dermatologist.  The condition is now very prominent as lines on her face, and she has started wearing a black veil.  Maybe the subtle onset gave her condition more credibility.  The ramp-up, combined with subtly of the make-up make this aged face much more effective than the older Lorraine McFly.

The doctor jogs her memory about the deal she made 4 months ago, and she returns to the pawnshop.  She confronts the pawnbroker, but it has been 4 months and 1 day.  However, he can make an exception for a mere $100,000.

She loots Goodwin’s apartment.  He catches her, but her condition has worsened so much that he does not recognize her.  He calls the police to report a burglar, and she goes all Ana Lucia on him.  I understand she is a little on edge, but she puts 12 slugs in him?  What did he do wrong?

Lea manages to scrape together $100k of cash and jewels and high-tails it back to the pawnshop.  It is locked, but she is in no mood for that.  She breaks in and sees the pawnbroker’s wife.

The pawnbroker says he can give her beauty back if that is what she reallllly wants. But he produces a newspaper with the headline, “Playboy Iced by Gold Digger” and her picture, which was published quicker than the Oswald story in New Zealand.

Way After

Way After

A cop comes in, and she overhears him telling the pawnbroker they found the murder weapon with fingerprints matching a set they already had on file for soliciting.  There is no going back to that identity.  Lea steals the plaster model of her face, although what she can do with it is not clear.

In a city of 10 million, her former obnoxious hooker friend (former friend, still obnoxious) rudely bumps into her, knocking the mask from her hands.  Then we get a very out-of-place crane shot of the four corners of this intersection, and a LOT of extras.  It really looks like maybe this location was set up for a movie and HBO just asked if they could borrow it for a minute.

As the camera rises from Lea picking up the fractured shards of her beauty, we cut back to the Cryptkeeper, who actually looks kind of hot relative to the disgusting women in this episode.

I rate this girl a 7.

Post-Post Leftovers:

  • Written by Fred Dekker who also wrote And All through the House.
  • Lea Thompson got off to a great start in movies.  Back to the Future was her 5th movie, coming after Jaws 3D, All the Right Moves, Red Dawn and The Wild Life.  She strategically leveraged this career momentum to score the non-titular lead in Howard the Duck.
  • Not that there’s anything wrong with Lea Thompson, but she really wasn’t pretty enough to believably seduce Goodwin from across the room.  The uncredited blonde he was talking to when Lea crashed the party was much hotter.  And certainly when Goodwin heard Lea’s accent, that should have sent him running back to [uncredited blonde].
  • OK, I know why they never have correct change.