I usually try to watch the Grammy Awards, if for no other reason than to catch up on new artists I’m not familiar with, but also to see some of the Great Old Ones show that they still have it. AC/DC got things off to a rip-roaring start. It’s always great to see Jeff Lynne and his current incarnation of ELO, and Ed Sheeran teamed up with him well. Annie Lennox showed everyone how it’s done. That Hozier dude was pretty good, too; I’d never even heard of him before. My wife says he sounds like Elton John, and I can see that. Miranda Lambert’s performance was kind of bland, but Pharrell Williams was lively and entertaining.
We watched Fury with Brad Pitt on Saturday night. When I was a kid, I was mad for tanks. I made models and drew them time and time again. The movie is about one tank squad in WWII, led by Pitt, who’ve been together since North Africa. They’ve been through France and Belgium. Now they’re in Germany in the war’s final weeks, helping to make sure that the Germans don’t escape from the net that’s enclosing them. As the movie opens, they’ve just endured the loss of a team member and have been saddled with a newbie who’s probably never fired a rifle before. They’re sent on a few demanding missions that test their mettle and force the greenhorn to face up to the realities of war. It’s gritty and brutal, unflinching and devastating. Memorable, in the final analysis. It closes with a crane shot that tells a story in a way that none of the men in the tank ever could have.
I’ve almost given up on The Walking Dead a number of times, but this week’s episode was pretty good. It was directed by Greg Nicotero, the special effects guru who I got to spend some time with in his creature workshop while he was working on The Mist. It was a stylistically interesting episode, with both intriguing camera angles/shots and an artistic narrative structure. Some of the character-based episodes have been trite or boring, but I liked this one a lot. Plus, the episode left open a bunch of questions about that compound that may or may not ever be answered. What happened to all those houses? They looked like they’d been on the wrong end of a Sherman tank. And who severed some zombies and de-limbed others? I’d be fine with not ever knowing, because there are things you encounter in the apocalypse that defy explanation.
I hit the 25,000-word mark on my novella this weekend. I still know what comes next; each night my mind seems to come up with the next thousand words or so without too much conscious effort on my part. This morning, though, I spent my normal writing time dictating in another chunk of text from the written draft. I still have quite a bit more to read to my iPad before I’m caught up, and there will be a few days of reckoning somewhere down the line when I have to fix up all the mistakes the dictation software is making (and they are legion and, by times, hilarious). But it’s all part of the process.
