I do some of my best thinking in the shower. Yesterday morning, while I was washing my hair, I came up with about four good concepts for the story I’m working on, things that will add depth and breadth to the tale. I’d already written the first 1500 words or so, and I knew where the story was headed, but all of a sudden I had the big picture, which was even bigger than I had in mind when I started out. Love it when that happens. I scrawled about two pages of notes on the left-hand pages of the notebook I’m using to write the story as soon as I got out of the shower. I didn’t want to forget any of it.
Wednesday was my first trip into Houston since Harvey. I was supposed to go on Tuesday evening to a press screening for It, but that got moved to Wednesday morning. Probably something to do with the curfew. I had heard traffic was bad in the city, and I was going in during morning rush hour, so I allowed two hours to get there, for a trip that normally would have taken 45 minutes, tops. I passed one neighborhood near the airport where the yards across from the houses contained piles of household belongings waiting to be picked up by the city. It looks like they lost just about everything, on the ground floor, at least.
I didn’t run into any major backups until I got to the 610 loop (the innermost loop around the city). I only had to go about 10 miles on that loop, but it took the better part of half an hour. Once I got off on I-10, it was clear sailing, and the trip only took about an hour and a quarter total. Some of the other reviewers who were coming from different parts of town had a much worse time of it than I did. One guy set out at 7 am and was late arriving for the 10 am showtime.
This was the first time I ever attended a press screening. Many of the people there seemed to recognize each other. They weren’t a chatty bunch, really. I figured we’d ask who we were reviewing for or something, but that conversation never got started. There were maybe 25 of us in total. The multiplex wasn’t yet open for business, so we had the place all to ourselves. The concessions weren’t open, though, so no popcorn! The projectionist popped into the theater and joked: For $50 I’ll project it on the IMAX screen. I would have taken him up on that!
It was a digital print being shown from a computer. The title card on the screen said, “You’ll float, too.” One of the reviewers near me joked, “That’s better than the alternative, really, given recent events.” Before the movie started, there was a brief video message from Stephen King, which ended on one of his menacing notes that scared the reviewer next to me as much as anything in the film! The movie kicked off (you can find my review here), and once it was over we all filed out past the Sony media rep, who asked us for our impressions, but she didn’t seem to want to much detail. Just whether or not we liked it. She handed out a couple of promo items: a red balloon-shaped inflatable beach ball and a cute little balloon pin. The drive back north was comparatively quick, and I didn’t encounter any of the backups that plague people in other parts of the city. Guess I was lucky.
When Tobe Hooper died, I realized I’d never seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I don’t know how I missed it: it would certainly have been something we would have rented during my first few years in college after VHS tapes made movies generally available. So I decided to queue it up last night from iTunes. I guess you’d have to have seen it in context. It was massively controversial at the time, banned in a lot of places, given an X rating before a few cuts, but it’s relatively mild by modern standards. I’ve seen worse on cable TV programs lately. There was hardly any gore or blood, and most of the murders were one-and-done episodes. Blink and you’d miss them.
I really enjoyed season 3 of Narcos on Netflix. The season moves on beyond Pablo Escobar to the Cali Cartel, and it ditches the main character from the previous two seasons. Can’t say I missed him at all: Javier Pena was by far the more interesting of the two, and bringing him to the forefront elevated the series. There were some great characters among the bad guys: Chepe was a hoot and Pacho was someone you wouldn’t want to mess with. Jorge Salcedo was the most fascinating: someone who still considered himself a good guy despite the fact that he was up to his eyeballs with the cartel and he put his familiy in terrible danger. He ended up in witsec (but apparently he still gives interviews!), but I feared for his life for most of the episodes.
And what is there to say about Twin Peaks but, wow. What was that? I’ve been reading think pieces about the series and the two-part finale over the past several days, and I think I get it. There is a lot to process, though, and I wish I had an eighteen-hour chunk of time where I could binge through the whole thing beginning to end now that I know how it’s going to turn out. I think there would be a lot from the early episodes that would make much more sense now. It was certainly an experience, and I hope more people get to see it once it’s out on DVD.
