A gorram rutting shame

Welcome to 2006. I haven’t been spending much time around the computer for the past week or two, so my LJ updates have been sparse if any. But now it’s back to life as per usual.

I did write a few little things over the last two weeks. A short story to submit to the current Hellnotes contest. An essay that I submitted to a travel book. A couple of book reviews. I have a deadline fast approaching for my next Cemetery Dance column, so that will be my main focus this week. Then it’s back to Missing Persons to see if I can put that puppy to bed for a while.

Watched a few movies over the holidays. A funny German film called Shultze Gets the Blues about a miner whose forcibly retired. He plays the accordion and discovers zydeco music, which changes his life. He’s sent to New Braunfels, Texas for a music festival and decides to tour Louisiana instead. Interesting in many ways. The most notable was the stationary camera technique—the camera hardly moved at all and in many scenes characters wander out of frame for a moment so we can only hear them, or else they enter the frame from one side and proceed across its entire width. Not an original style, of course, but one seldom used in American cinema these days. It was very calming.

Rented Million Dollar Baby, which I’ve been wanting to see since it came out. A solid movie, but not as involving for me as some Eastwood films. Also a little British flick called The Lavender Ladies starring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith about two older sisters whose lives are upheaved when a young Polish man is shipwrecked on the beach outside their cottage. Dench and Smith are wonderful. Here’s an article about it.

Finally, my daughter got the Firefly TV series on DVD, along with the movie Serenity, so we spent a few nights working through the adventures of Malcolm (Mal) Reynolds and his ragtag team. It’s a bit of The Gunslinger crossed with the Millennium Falcon. Reynolds is Roland Deschain’s handsome step brother, cold and deadly, a former revolutionary who fought on the losing side. Among the many interesting features of this series (beyond some exceptional characterization) is the fact that it’s a space opera without aliens, the megalithic Alliance isn’t deliberately evil (that’s just a side effect of them being megalithic!), the soundtrack (which sounds like it could be by Snuffy Walden), and the dialog is littered with faux curse words (as in the ones in the subject line above), many of which are in Chinese. Not just isolated words, either. They occasionally go off on tirades, spouting things like, “Tai-kong suo-yo de xing-chiou do sai-jin wu di pi-gu.” (Which reportedly means, “Stuff all the planets in the universe up my ass.”)

Serenity is a Firefly class ship that’s held together with gum and baling wire and the skills of eternally cheery engineer Kaylee. Mal is a brigand who smuggles and otherwise commits felonious acts to keep his team together, but he has lines he won’t cross. His morality is clear only to himself. Complicating matters is the fact that he has two passengers who are hiding from the Alliance, and one of his crew is a mercenary whose loyalty he purchased while staring down the snout of the man’s gun (his name is Jayne, played with relish by Adam Baldwin and he’s one of my favorite characters).

Unlike other sci-fi series, the characters are not previously established. We all know what Spock, Kirk, Picard, Janeway, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker would do in a given situation. The Firefly characters keep you guessing. Just when you think you have ’em figured out, they mess with your expectations. Highly recommended. Alas, the movie Serenity didn’t do boffo box office, so we may not see any more of their antics, which is a gorram rutting shame.

For books: I finished Twisted Branch by “Chris Blaine” (in this instance, Elizabeth Massie), the first of three books in the Abbadon Inn series, Cell, Stephen King’s forthcoming novel, and finally found the courage to pick up Don Quixote in a new translation, a book I should have read long ago but never got around to.