I finished most of what I set out to do this weekend. The one thing I didn’t do was go see Cowboys & Aliens. I was going to do a doubleheader with Rise of the Planet of the Apes but I decided that one movie was enough for Saturday afternoon.
We’re under mandatory water conservation restrictions at the moment, thanks to our ongoing drought. For us that means mainly that we can only water the lawn twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays. So I dutifully watered the lawn yesterday morning. Yesterday afternoon we had our first rainstorm of August, a good soaking gusher that lasted at least half an hour. Figures.
The Mothman Files, edited by Michael Knost for Woodland Press, is now available for pre-order. The anthology contains my story “Blue Plume,” along with stories by Brian J. Hatcher, Lisa Morton, Joseph Nassise and many others.
I finished my essay for Screem #23, wrote my Storytellers Unplugged essay, which goes up on Wednesday, caught up on Torchwood (see below) and read about 100 pages of 11/22/63. Did an editing pass through a 5500-word story and will go through it one more time before I send it out to a new market. All in all a productive weekend.
Got a kick out of the bank notice this morning that my wife withdrew money from the ATM in Roswell, New Mexico. She and our daughter are on an expedition to the Grand Canyon with various detours along the way.
I’ve been looking forward to Rise of the Planet of the Apes ever since I first learned about it, and the more I saw the better it looked. I went to a mid-afternoon showing on Saturday and the theater was packed. I think my expectations were so high that nothing could quite have met them, but this came close. My complaints are quibbles. I would have like Caesar to be more conversant, like his analog was in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. The sign language was a good substitute, but it was fun watching Roddy McDowall talk. What exactly did Will Rodman do for the pharmaceutical company during the years when he raised Caesar to justify them keeping him on? Seems to me any company like that would have fired his ass long ago. Also, it would have been easy to hand-wave away the chimp that went berserk. They didn’t need to say that she had been given the drug. Apes are dangerous, and if one got lose it could easily run amok like that. Finally, Will’s girlfriend seemed smart enough, so why did it come as a surprise to her that Caesar wasn’t just a super (super, super) smart chimp? After all, she must have known what Will did for a living by that point. Little quibbles, but they were things that needed to be addressed, I thought.
I liked the opening section, which was an inverted version of the opening scene in Planet of the Apes, with humans hunting down and capturing chimps instead of vice versa. Loved all the shout-outs to the old series, including the “get your paws off me” bit, Charlton Heston showing up in an old movie on a TV, a chimp named Cornelia and an orangutan named Maurice (Maurice Evans played Dr. Zaius in the first two films), as well as other character names that were direct or indirect references to the series. The plot is an imaginative recreation of the concept behind Conquest. Serkis does a great job as Caesar and I got a kick out of the former circus orangutan and the developing dynamics between the apes in the ape shelter. Lithgow was excellent, too. All in all, not bad, but not ready to enter the pantheon of the other films quite yet.
I read today that Breaking Bad has been renewed for a fifth and final season. Given the wacky things that have been going on at AMC lately, I’m not surprised by this development. Also, given the fundamental premise of a guy with cancer trying to make money to look after his family after he’s gone, you have to figure that at some point he’s going to, well, go. Otherwise he’s just a bad guy making money illegally, year in and year out.
Last season, we had those lethal, silent killers from Mexico. This season, it is the equally taciturn Gus and Mike. When Mike takes Jesse for a ride, everyone is expecting bad things to happen (“If the plan is to bore me to death, mission accomplished,” Jesse says after a few hours), but Gus actually had a different plan in mind. Poor Mike has to put up with Jesse and his endless jabbering all day while he runs around the state picking up sacks of cash from dead drops. At first I thought he was retrieving his personal stash from various hidey-holes as a prelude to bugging out, but it was just routine business. Jesse thinks he’s along as a body guard. “I’m your guy,” he tells Mike. “You’re not the guy. You’re not capable of being the guy. I had a guy but I don’t have one any more. You are not the guy,” Mike says. But, in fact, the whole daylong schtick was a way of turning Jesse back into a guy, making him a hero and plucking him from the doldrums he’s been in lately. All Gus’s plan, and it worked like a charm. “Any questions?” Gus asks when Mike reports on the scheme’s success. “More than a few, but I know better than to ask,” Mike answers. Another lesson learned: you don’t mess with Mike’s radio.
On the home front, Walt and Skyler are back together again. The message Walt left on her answering machine proclaiming his love (he thought it might be the last message he ever left since he was going to confront Gus, once again) had the unintended effect of seducing Skyler. They close on the car wash and have a dinner party to celebrate. Hank has just told his colleague at work that he’s done with the Gale file. He’s dead (the love child of Scarface and Mr. Rogers), so there’s not much point in continuing. However, Walt gets really drunk at dinner and is offended when Hank calls Gale a genius. Not a meth cook, a meth chef. Walt says that the guy’s file indicate a rote copycat and “this genius of yours” might still be out there. He should’a kept his mouth shut because, at the end, Hank is once more back on the Heisenberg trail.
More interesting developments in Torchwood: Miracle Day over the past couple of weeks.
Colin’s bad day doesn’t end there. Rex is in the camp, too, pretending to be a Class 1 patient so he can get inside the module and Esther has inserted herself into his staff, too. The pressure mounts and Colin starts acting increasingly erratically. He captures Rex and tortures him in the most gruesome way imaginable: by sticking his pen in Rex’s persistent chest wound. Geez that was hard to watch. And then Esther shows up on the scene and he attacks her, too, except it turns out that Esther has some surprises up her sleeves. She gets the better of Colin and throttles him in a scene that demonstrates just how hard it is to strangle someone. “It’s been a very long day,” he complains. “I just want to go home.”
Jack has been trying to sway Oswald over to his side by promising to find a way for him to die by ending the miracle. Miss Kitzinger, though, is doing a very good job (as a shady guy tells her) and when push comes to shove, Oswald goes off both scripts, proclaiming everyone on earth to now be angels, and then ends his speech with the code word Kitzinger supplied: Revelation. Jack is trying to find out who’s behind Phi Corp, but he’s not getting very far. Under duress, their chief operating officer indicates that something has been going on as far back as the 1980s, but all he has is a word: blessing.
Jack is still unique among people on earth: Category Jack, according to Esther. The only one who can die—really die. That doesn’t stop people from trying. There’s a new group, the 45 Club, that consists of people so desperate to kill themselves that they jump from the 45th floor of buildings (or higher) to lose consciousness.
Meanwhile Gwen and Rhys are trying to save her father from one of the camps and all they manage to do is send him from a marginal category 1/2 patient straight into #1 territory by giving him a heart attack during their escape. Gwen uses her magic contact lenses to record an exposé of what’s going on in these camps before blowing the one in Wales to smithereens. However, when she gets back to the US, someone hijacks her lenses to send her a message: we have your mother, husband and child. Bring us Jack.
