Brrrrr

I know I won’t get much sympathy from folks up north, but the last two days have been cold, rainy and miserable around here. By “cold” I mean about 40 degrees. There’s been a more-or-less constant drizzle since yesterday morning, which makes it perfect weather for staying inside and eating turkey soup.

Our turkey leftovers are multiplying like mad. I made turkey pie on Friday, so now we have leftovers of that, and turkey soup yesterday—ditto. It’s a veritable turkey hydra. Every time I touch the leftovers, we end up with more in the fridge.

I went to see The Mist on Friday morning ($5 matinee—yippee!). It’s difficult for me to be objective about this film. I read the script nearly a year ago, so I knew Darabont’s new ending, and I visited the set during filming, so I spent a lot of time looking around for things that I remembered from my trip to Shreveport. My experience was compounded by the fact I had a slight headache when I went into the theater and the trailers for Cloverfield and another film that is supposedly created from home videos of a serial killer made things worse. It took a while to adjust to the handheld footage at the beginning of The Mist, but after a while I stopped noticing that. About 2/3 of the way through the movie, someone in the back of the theater had some sort of seizure, which disrupted things for everyone—not the least of whom the poor guy having the seizure.

Some of these things went by so fast you may not have noticed them: A character wearing one of Glenn Chadbourne’s Doug Graves t-shirts for WZON; “Serving Castle Rock since 1967” painted on one wall of the store; the name of the pharmacy: King’s Sundries; the paperback book rack that was knocked over by the burning man had only Stephen King novels on it; the painting Thomas Jane was working on at the beginning was for a Dark Tower movie.

I liked the movie well enough. The tentacle effects weren’t all that good, but the other critters were awesome. The performances were good. Laurie Holden was a surprise, and Frances Sternhagen was precious. Marcia Gay Harden’s zeal was infectious during filming and I’m glad to see that it came off well on the screen, too. In the spectrum of King films, where Shawshank Redemption is the gold standard with a solid A, I’d say this was a B+. However, it’s a film I look forward to seeing again, maybe a few times.

Yesterday morning, I went to see No Country for Old Men. For some reason, the matinee price was $6.50 instead of $5. Oh, well—at least I was in out of the rain and not hazarding the malls with all those insane Christmas shoppers. I read the McCarthy novel earlier this year and loved it. I’m also a big fan of Tommy Lee Jones and I’m familiar with the setting: I’ve been to that part of West Texas twice. The first time was in the early 90s when a friend and I drove from Houston to Albuquerque for a scientific convention. We passed Del Rio and stopped the first night in Sanderson, which is where Tommy Lee and Llewellyn’s characters lived. It looked more prosperous in the movie. When we were there, the motel we stayed in looked slightly dingier than the Bates Motel. I returned to Sanderson/Marathon/Alpine a year ago to research a novel I set over there. It’s beautiful, desolate country, well captured at the beginning of the movie.

A lot of people have been raving about this movie. I’m not going to rave about it. I liked it, but I wasn’t blown away by it—perhaps because I was familiar with the story going into it. The cinematography was terrific, Tommy Lee Jones was stellar, the villain was suitable creepy. I thought Woody Harrelson was miscast—his untrustworthy smile didn’t work for me. The violence was shocking without being gratuitous.

I thought, however, that the filmmakers ducked a little by not showing us Llewellyn’s fate directly. We were with this guy throughout the movie, so to only give us the aftermath seemed unfair to me. The multiple endings—the fates of the sheriff and Llewellyn and Anton—which worked well for me in the novel, didn’t do as well on the screen, for reasons I don’t know that I can explain. It all became rather existential all of a sudden. I’m glad I saw it, but I was hoping for more.