How the (Dominic) West Was Won

Posted on December 29, 2014 by Bev Vincent

We’ve been mostly staying indoors, cooking, eating and watching movies and videos for the past several days. Yesterday was a good one to stay in—it rained solidly all day long. No complaints; we can always use more rain around here.

We watched a film called Pride the other night. It’s based on the true story of a small Gay & Lesbian group from London that decided to show their support for the striking coal miners in 1984. One of their group was Welsh (Andrew Scott, who played Moriarty on Sherlock), so they picked at random a Welsh town. Naturally, the rural coal miners don’t know what to make of this busload of flamboyant supporters, and there is conflict about accepting their support, even though they’re raising both awareness and a significant amount of money. A small faction of the townspeople rise to the challenge. It’s a delightful film, reminiscent of Billy Elliot. One of the standout performances is from Dominic West (The Affair, The Wire) who plays a bleached-blond gay man who misses the disco days and takes an opportunity to strut his stuff at a hall filled with miners. It’s an amazing departure from his usual serious roles. The older women in the community are hilarious, and the finale jerks tears and heartstrings.

My wife has never seen The Wire, so I bought the boxed set and we’ve been binge-ing our way through it since Friday. Almost to the end of the first season. I’m getting a lot more out of it watching it this way. Making connections that I’d missed earlier. I’m delighted to discover that my wife, a very hard sell on most TV, is loving the show. I was amused to note that the actor who plays Major Rawls, the guy who wants McNulty’s badge for making him look bad before the Deputy of Operations, is the same one who plays Noah’s father-in-law on The Affair. So that’s twice, at least, where John Doman plays antagonist to Dominic West.

We also binged our way through the latest season of Downton Abbey, which breaks little new ground, but continues to amuse us, mostly because of Maggie Smith, whose dry wit and sarcasm enlivens the show. Poor Bates and Anna: I hope they resolve that storyline soon and allow them some modicum of happiness. And I also think it’s time they allow Barrows to redeem himself and find a happy course in life, though we thought it amusing that Lady Mary used his darker tendencies to wage war against a rude butler.

I watched the Christmas Doctor Who yesterday. At times it seemed to border on ludicrous, but once the truth of everything became apparent, I appreciated it more. I liked the guy who played Santa, and the battle of wits between him and the Doctor. I’m in the pro-Clara camp: I think she’s delightful. The “Aliens” humor was funny, and the character of Shona was worth the price of admission alone. Her dance through the hospital ward was hilarious, and her accent a delight.

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Serial killer

Posted on December 23, 2014 by Bev Vincent

Over the course of the past week or so, I’ve listened to all 12 segments in the Serial podcast from the creators of This American Life. They range between half an hour to a full hour in length and, over the course of three months, reveal the outcome of a year-long investigation by Sarah Koenig and her team into a fifteen-year-old Baltimore murder case. A high school student was convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend on very little physical evidence.

She had full access to the convict, serving a life sentence, via telephone (I don’t think she ever met him face-to-face), but the victim’s family refused to cooperate, so the picture is a little one-sided. The defense attorney has since died. The first trial ended in a mistrial. Stories changed. New evidence appeared. Koenig and her team are dogged in the pursuit of information without apparent agenda: they aren’t trying to get the convicted killer off, but they agree that there probably wasn’t enough evidence to find him guilty. It’s quite fascinating, the way a cold case is investigated journalistically. Was there a pay phone at the Best Buy, as a friend of the convict claims? It seems like a minor point, but it’s part of a house of cards that could come toppling down if there isn’t.

After listening to it all, I can’t say I’m convinced of his guilt or innocence, but there were two damning details. First, someone confessed to helping the convicted killer dispose of the body. He knew where her car was (which supports this claim), and he knew a lot of other “facts” of the case. Now, it’s possible that this guy was the killer and he used his friend as a patsy. The other detail was the fact that the man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend did not attempt to call her or page her once after she disappeared, even though they had remained close following the break-up. A few weeks elapsed between the last time anyone saw her and the discovery of her body (an event that has its own mysterious aspects to it), but he never once tried to find out where she was by simply calling her. To me, that says he knew she was already dead, so why bother. He hemmed and hawed and offered a weak explanation for this behavior to Koenig, but I didn’t buy it. He had an aggressive way of bulldozing through certain details, and he’s had fifteen years to learn how to deal with his situation. That failure to call, like the dog who didn’t bark in the night, speaks volumes to me. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but there you have it.

There’s also the matter of his being unable to account for much of his time on the day in question. The girl’s new boyfriend, when called by the police to see if he knew where she was, made a point of figuring out all the details of his movement on that day because he knew he’d be a suspect if she were dead. The convicted killer did not, and he was very wishy-washy about the day. He claims he lent his car and his cell phone to the friend who would ultimately blame him for the crime, and it all seems a little dodgy.

If you’re interested in true crime reportage, give it a whirl. I quite enjoyed it.

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In Xanadu did Kubla(i) Khan

Posted on December 22, 2014 by Bev Vincent

I’m sure there are movies that have a greater disparity between the critics’ score and the audience score, but I haven’t heard of one. Netflix’ Marco Polo, a 10-part drama about the explorer’s first years in Mongolia as a “guest” of the great Kublai Khan, scores a mere 27% among critics, based on 26 reviews, and a whopping 93% average from nearly 400 viewers.

We binged our way through the 10 hours this past weekend and we really enjoyed it—my wife liked it even more than I did, and she’s a very hard sell when it comes to television. Though Polo is the title character, the show is really more about Khan, who wants to be emperor of the world. He’s not a bad man, though, for the most part. The name summons thoughts of Attila the Hun (at least in my mind), but he was a very open, accepting and thoughtful leader. He rarely acted on impulse, but thought through all of the consequences of his actions. He accepted all religions, his court was filled with foreigners whose opinions he valued, and he invited scrutiny of his decisions, both before they were implemented and after. He gave his most trusted men the opportunity to say “I told you so” when things went wrong. How accurate is this to reality? Who knows what a man who lived over 700 years ago was like, but Marco Polo liked him and his court enough to stick around for nearly two decades.

Polo himself is mostly a viewpoint character. True, his life is put on the line a few times, and he isn’t exactly a passive participant in things, but Khan is in the driver’s seat and everything revolves around him. There are spies and intrigue, the obligatory blind kung-fu master (and praying mantises rather than grasshoppers), plenty of naked women, some great sword fights and an assault on a walled city reminiscent of Lord of the Rings. No expense was spared in this production and I have no idea why the critics hated it so. One thought it was so tedious that it was binge-proof, but that wasn’t our experience at all. B.D. Wong was especially good as Khan, with Joan Chen as his empress-wife. The villain is the Chancellor of the Song dynasty, a man who has risen from poverty to a position of great power whose status is threatened when the emperor dies, leaving behind only a 5-year-old heir. From a historical perspective, we found it fascinating, because this is a part of history that we knew little about. At one point, Khan was the ruler of 1/5 of the populated world in the late 13th century.

Despite critical panning, the show has been renewed for a second season. Yay!

If The Affair hadn’t been renewed for a second season, I would be seriously pissed right now. What were they thinking? Were they so confident in the show that they knew it would be picked up? I can’t think of any other reason why they’d end the tenth hour the way they did. Holy moly.

One of the show’s most intriguing aspects, beyond awesome performances by the four leads, is the he said/she said disparity. Some of it is trivial, but some things are blazingly different. The biggest so far is the difference between Noah’s memory of what happened at the end of the trip to pick up their daughter and Allison’s version of that story. Totally, totally different. The characters were dressed differently and just about everything that happened was different. Both dramatic, but not even in the same ballpark. Fascinating, for sure. It’s going to be a long wait until next season.

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A byte out of the apple

Posted on December 17, 2014 by Bev Vincent

I am very pleased by Obama’s decision to normalize relations with Cuba. The embargo is as old as I am, and I think time tells us that it hasn’t worked. It impoverished the target nation, but it did virtually nothing to alter its political course. A one-nation embargo, in particular, doesn’t work very well. Growing up in Canada, Cuba was a popular tourist destination. I look forward to a day in the very near future when I can travel there on my US passport. I hear it’s nice. Like many Caribbean nations, there is an ugly underbelly juxtaposed against the part the tourists see, but I think an influx of cash and the possibility that the American tourist industry will be able to invest in Cuban destinations will have more good sides than bad.

I finished and turned in my latest writing project, which hasn’t been announced yet, but it’s good fun. I’ve done this a couple of times before, and it’s always different.

Last night we watched Codebreaker on Netflix, the 2011 documentary about Alan Turing, the father of modern computing. Turing is the subject of a couple of recent movies, including The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. His is a tragic story of a man whose contribution to the war effort saved countless lives and may have shortened the war since cracking the Enigma code allowed D-Day to happen when it did. And yet his personal life made him an outcast — he was chemically castrated as part of a plea bargain that kept him out of jail. The movie is a combination of documentary that features people who knew him from the Bletchley Park days, as well as friends and relatives, and dramatic re-enactment of his sessions with a psychotherapist wherein he struggles over what he can reveal, since much of his life is covered by the Official Secrets Act. One thing I didn’t know: the documentary claims that the Apple logo comes from the fact that Turing committed suicide by taking a bite out of a poisoned apple, the remains of which was found next to his body. (The logo designer considers this origin story an urban legend, however. Turing did eat a cyanide-laced apple, but there’s no indication Apple was inspired by this incident.)

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The Wild Trail

Posted on December 15, 2014 by Bev Vincent

We saw a couple of good movies this weekend. First was Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon. It’s about a young woman who went a little nuts after her single mother dies of cancer who decides to purge herself and get life back on track by walking the Pacific Crest Trail, which goes from the Mexican border the full length of California and into Oregon, at least. It’s based on a memoir, so there’s a lot of truth in it, but some movie simplifications, too. (For example, in the real life the character has two siblings, but only one in the film.) I was reminded a bit of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, where he tried to do the Appalachian Trail, though with less angst and hardship. A woman by herself has some unique potential dangers to face. The support cast is excellent, too, including the guy who played Dan Dority on Deadwood, the guy who played Skinny Pete on Breaking Bad and the guy who played the minister on Gracepoint. And a fox, who plays her spirit guide, I guess. But the movie rests mostly on Witherspoon’s shoulders, and she pulls it off.

Last night we watched Nebraska on Netflix. It’s about an old geezer (Bruce Dern) who thinks he’s won a million dollars in a Publisher’s Clearinghouse-type sweepstakes and is bound and determined he’s going to Lincoln, Nebraska (from Billings, Montana) to pick up his windfall because he won’t trust the post office with all that money. And if no one will take him, dammit, he’s going to walk. So his son agrees to take him, even though everyone knows there’s no money. Bob Odenkirk (Saul from Breaking Bad) plays the other son, and Stacy Keach shows up as an old “friend” of Dern’s. The trip takes them back to Dern’s hometown. Once the story gets out that he’s a millionaire in the making, all manner of people from his past crawl out of the woodwork with hands out. It’s a poignant story and funny as hell, too, especially the scene where the two brothers decide to reclaim an air compressor that was loaned out decades ago. I don’t identify with the dysfunctional family in the least, but I understood them. It’s a road movie, and the two main characters learn a lot about each other along the way (although it’s the son whose eyes are opened the most.)

I started reading The Witches of Echo Park by Amber Benson this weekend. I had the pleasure of meeting Ms Benson at Necon last summer. When I heard she was a guest of honor, I expected her to be somewhat standoffish, a real celebrity amongst us regular folks, but she turned out to be very accessible and friendly. Had a good talk with her about foreign crime TV shows in the courtyard one night. I’m really enjoying this novel, which is set in the real world, where there are witches. A lot of the material she uses reminds me of a novel I wrote a few years ago where a character gets involved in Wicca and Tarot as a way of coping with a loss. The cover makes it look like a YA novel, but it isn’t.

Only one more episode left of The Affair, which stars Ruth Wilson (Luther) and Dominic West (The Wire, The Hour). I swear this show gets under my nerves more than many horror films. My mother used to hate scenes in shows like Matlock or Murder She Wrote where the good guy is creeping around in the bad guy’s house, searching an office by flashlight, because she was sure the good guy would get caught. This show is something like that, except it’s a couple of philanderers who aren’t exactly all that discreet. It’s also a mystery series, because there’s a murder, and the identity of the victim is kept secret for a long time, let alone the identity of the killer. It has an interesting he said/she said structure that is revealing in the way that it reflects how Noah and Allison remember certain events. What was said, what they wore, what they did. There’s a lot to wrap up in one more hour.

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Willard

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Bev Vincent

I’ve had a fairly productive writing period these past few weeks. Can’t remember the last time when I’ve had so many firm commitments, along with the usual on-spec writing. I turned in a four-story mini-collection of reprints that will appear sometime in 2015. Also my X-files story to Jonathan Maberry. Then, finally, a story for the Book 38 horror anthology.

About the latter: I was invited to pick from a list of the world’s most abandoned and haunted places and submit a 2500-story. I chose the Willard Asylum in upstate NY and wrote a story featuring a brother-sister duo who’ve featured in a few of my previous tales. After my research, including watching a few videos taken by urban explorers, it took a while to get the story in sequence, even though I always had a fairly good idea of how it was going to go. I pulled it apart and put it back together again several times, but I finally got there in the end, and I turned that story in over the weekend. 2500 words is quite brief, but I find the exercise in winnowing a 3200 word first draft down to the cut-off refreshing. Everything must go! My writing becomes much more direct and entire sentences and paragraphs that don’t contribute to the story get lopped.

Book 38 launched an Indiegogo fundraising campaign this week. As these things go, there are a number of rewards if you help fund the project, which already has a commitment from a publisher, as I understand it, and will be released be released in trade paperback and eBook format on May 1st, 2015. Among the other authors in the anthology are the following names, some of which you’ll probably recognize: Craig Spector, Rich Chizmar, Tim Waggoner, John Urbancik, Gary McMahon, Charles Day, and a host of others.

I’ve done a bunch of book review recently. Can’t remember when I last posted a list:

I have one more to do this week, then it’s on to the next project, which is a continuation of a story that was begun by someone else and will be completed by two others. I also got a couple of stories back into circulation over the weekend, something I’ve been lax about of late. I think I have about 10 out there in the submission-sphere at the moment.

Tonight is the end for Sons of Anarchy. Always a sad moment when a series ends after so many years, and I’ve been following it since near the beginning. It’s had an interesting arc. At first, the fascination was with Jax because he appeared to be a good man trying to do the right thing in a culture that made that kind of behavior difficult. He despised some of the things his step-father did and tried to get a compass bearing on what his father wanted for the motorcycle club. He failed, and in doing so he turned into everything he hated about Clay Morrow. Worse, though, he was betrayed by his mother, who has sent him on a collision course with Mayhem. She’s never been a terribly good influence, but her rash act at the end of the previous season, and the lies she and Juice told to cover that up, sent SAMCRO and Jax on a mission of vengeance for all the wrong reasons against all the wrong people. It’s not Shakespearean so much as Greek mythological. Patricides, matricides and just about every other “icide” you can imagine.

Season 5 (or 5a, if you insist) of Haven came to an end last week, too. They shot 26 episodes back to back (to back…), but are splitting the output into two batches of 13. Apparently there are contractual benefits to calling it a single season. For example, the actors can’t renegotiate a better deal in the middle! It’s been a wild ride, with a significant expansion of the mythology, and just when it seemed like there might be a calm moment for the troubled community, Duke let loose an epidemic of new Troubles and Vince & Dave stumbled onto something in the woods. William Shatner will be on four episodes in 2015. My theory is that he will play Mara’s father.

Looks like CBS got the use of a prison set and decided to make the most of it on Sunday night. First, The Mentalist had its “Orange is the New Lisbon” episode (my name for it, not theirs), and then the CSI team investigated a body found in a prison laundry. And then an interesting development at the end of Castle. Looks like Rick will have to strike out on his own in 2015, at least from an investigative point of view.

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Tan Friday

Posted on December 2, 2014 by Bev Vincent

We don’t do Black Friday. And for Cyber Monday, the only things I bought were eBooks for myself! Instead of engaging in hand-to-hand combat with other shoppers over flat screen TVs at Costco, this is what we did (see photo). For the whole weekend, in fact. We went down to Surfside Beach, about 90 miles from where we live, on Wednesday evening and stayed there until late on Sunday.

The previous two weekends were abysmal. Temperatures in the forties, grey and rainy. However, luck was with us. All four days were in the seventies, with partly cloudy skies. It got a little cool when the sun went down, but that wasn’t a problem: our rental property had a good heating system (once we got the vents cleared of dust that set off the smoke detector the first time we turned the heat on). It was a non-traditional Thanksgiving, in most ways. We did have family visitors one afternoon, but other than that it was as off the grid as you can get. We did some reading, soaked up the rays (I’m a little pink, thank you for asking), playing games, cooking meals and relaxing. We only left the place once, and that was to get more wine!

While we were away, I heard about PD James’s death. It was fun hearing Ian Rankin tell some brief tales about her on Twitter. I’ve been reading her books for decades, and always enjoyed them. She and I were nominated in the same category for an Edgar Award a few years ago. I was sure I was doomed, being up against her, but I went to the banquet in part hoping to get the chance to meet her. Alas, she didn’t make the trip over to NY for the ceremony. And neither of us won the award.

One of the books I read last week was 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman by Adam Plantinga. Crime writers like George Pelecanos and Lee Child had commented on it favorably and the cover blurb is by Joseph Wambaugh. Plantinga is a 13-year veteran of two different police departments, now a sergeant. The book is 400 anecdotes and observations, bundled into rough groupings (What Cops Know About Juveniles, What Cops Know About Hookers and Johns…) that give readers some insight into a cop’s life. I imagine most cops could put together something similar, except Plantinga can write really well. The anecdote format doesn’t give him a lot of opportunity to show off his writing chops, but it shines through. It’s droll, witty, amusing, sardonic, resigned, introspective and sharp. I enjoyed the heck out of it, and read many of the passages to my wife after they made me chuckle. If you’re writing about cops, this is a great reference book.

One of the things I worked on while on vacation last week was the short story I’m writing for Jonathan Maberry’s series of X-Files anthologies. The first, X-Files: Trust No One, comes out in March, with stories from Brian Keene, Tim Lebbon, and others. My story, “Phase Shift,” is slated for the second book in the series. It’s a lot of fun playing in someone else’s sandbox. I got to do it before, with Doctor Who: Destination Prague. For research and prep work, I binged through the first two seasons. My story is set in the midst of the second season. I wanted to familiarize myself primarily with the technology. Did they use cell phones (yes, but big suckers with retracting antennas), email (yes, but on Windows 3.1 computers), or the Internet in general (yes). Video conferences cost $150 an hour, by Mulder’s estimate. Only 20 years ago, but my how things have changed.

I can’t remember when I first encountered Rocky Wood, or even when I first met him face to face. I do recall, however, a series of “last meetings.” The first was at the World Horror Convention in Austin in 2011. Rocky had been diagnosed with ALS the previous year, but he was still in pretty good shape. However, he thought that his doctors wouldn’t allow him to travel outside the country by the end of that year. We said goodbye, thinking we’d never see each other again. Happily, that proved not to be the case, and he got to go on a series of adventures and trips after that, and continue his work on books and as president of the HWA. I saw him again in 2012 at the world premiere of Ghost Brothers of Darkland County in Atlanta, and then at World Horror in New Orleans last year. His most recent publication was the 2014 update to Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished, just out from Overlook Connection Press. In fact, I received my copy from Dave Hinchberger on Sunday evening, just hours before Rocky succumbed to complications from ALS. To the outside world, at least, he never seemed to let the disease slow him down. He had a plan early on to raise money for the devices he would need as it progressed, and he kept on going. It was an honor to know him.

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Stormy weather

Posted on November 21, 2014 by Bev Vincent

It’s been a crazy week, weatherwise. Down below freezing in the early days, then back up to almost 80° and now we’re facing a fairly severe storm tomorrow afternoon that threatens to bring hail and, perhaps, tornadoes. Of course, this is nothing like getting 6-8 feet of snow over the course of a couple of days, but still. Good weather to “hunker down,” stay indoors and work.

Because I have no shortage of work to do. I honestly can’t remember when I’ve had so many things on the go at the same time, all of them destined for publication. I have a story due at the end of December that’s finished in first draft. I have to trim a thousand words from it, so there’s that. Another is due in mid-December. I’ve been working on that one for a couple of weeks, but I think I finally have a handle on its structure. This morning, I wrote nearly a thousand words at the beginning that launches it much better than before. I put my next Stephen King Revisited essay on the dashboard for when Rich is ready to tackle The Shining. I have a couple of other projects in the works that I can’t even talk about that much.

So I’m taking all of next week off from the day job to make sure I’m on top of these obligations. By the end of November, I’d like to have most of these well in hand so I can focus on the project Brian Keene and I are doing together during December. Time just keeps on slipping by so fast, though. It seems like just a few days ago we were handing out treats, but that was 3 weeks ago.

Very interesting to hear that William Shatner will be appearing on four episodes of Haven this season. I’m looking. Forward. To that.

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A Capitol Weekend

Posted on November 17, 2014 by Bev Vincent

My second contribution to Stephen King Revisited went live today: Second Coming, my historical essay about ‘Salem’s Lot.

We had a getaway weekend in Austin. The weather wasn’t great, so we didn’t get out and about all that much, but we stayed downtown and had a fine dinner at the original Eddie V’s.

We’ve seen a batch of movies over the past week or so, too. First, we saw A Walk Among the Tombstones, starring Liam Neeson and based upon the Matt Scudder novel by Lawrence Block. It’s a decent adaptation, though of course Scudder has been amped up a little. Not quite into superhero mode, but a cut above the ordinary human being Scudder is in the books. It was an interesting choice to step into the series so late in the game. In the early books, Scudder is still drinking. Eventually he quits and attends AA meetings regularly. This movie introduces his Irregular companion, TJ, though he came into the book series sooner, and ignores Scudder’s companion Elaine and his long-time underworld friend, Mick Ballou. Some decently threatening antagonists.

Then we saw Rudderless, which is one of those films that you should not read about very much before you see it. It stars Billy Crudup as a man who lost his son and later reconnects with him when his ex-wife delivers a box of demo CDs of songs the son had written and recorded on his computer. He teaches himself a song or two and decides to present them at an open mike night, where he encounters another young man (Anton Yelchin from Hearts in Atlantis) who shoe-horns his way into Crudup’s life, convincing him to form a band with him and a couple of friends. This is William H. Macy’s directorial debut, and it also stars Macy’s wife (Felicity Huffman) and Laurence Fishburne, with Selena Gomez in a small part that could have been played by just about anyone. We were surprised by the reaction some reviewers had to the film. It delivers a hell of a wallop 3/4 of the way through that changes everything. It definitely provides food for thought, but I won’t say anything more about it than that.

We saw White Girl in a Blizzard, the story of a teenage girl whose bored and restless mother (played by Eva Green) vanishes one day. Christopher Meloni plays the father. The story jumps around in time, with the daughter (Shailene Woodley) coming of age and going off to college, only to have the past stirred up for her again each time she comes home to visit. She gets involved with the investigating officer (Thomas Jane) and gets naked a lot. I’m not quite sure what the movie was really supposed to be about. The ending comes as no big surprise (well, maybe a small surprise that shakes up expectations) and then it just sort of dribbles off into nothing. It has a bit of that Gone Girl vibe, but only a smidgen.

Finally we saw Magic in the Moonlight in which Colin Firth plays a pompous magician who also debunks shysters and frauds in the roaring twenties. A friend challenges him to find out how a supposed psychic played by Emma Stone is doing what she’s doing, so he travels to the Côte d’Azur to spend some time observing her communicate with the dead. It’s a Woody Allen film, perhaps one of the few of his that I’ve enjoyed, although it did have its slow moments. It’s amusing that Firth’s character is totally baffled by Stone’s shenanigans and even comes to believe that his worldview is totally wrong. The solution to the mystery is fun, but the ending is pretty much a foregone conclusion from the moment Firth and Stone’s characters meet up. An amusing distraction for a rainy afternoon.

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The truth is out there

Posted on November 11, 2014 by Bev Vincent

One of the rules I’ve learned in the writing biz is that he who hesitates might miss out on opportunities. I heard last week about an editor who had a couple of open slots in a themed anthology. He was looking for proposals. Rather than dithering around, I contacted him within hours of the announcement. I found out this weekend that my proposal was accepted. So now all I have to do is write the story. It’s interesting in that I know better how it ends than how it starts. That never happens.

Winter is coming, or so they say. Current forecasts have us below freezing for 6-8 hours on Friday morning. So long as there’s no precipitation, that shouldn’t be a problem. But if it rains…

The accompanying photo is of the Sai Wan cemetery in Hong Kong where Commonwealth soldiers who died there during WWII are buried, along with a memorial wall (the building at the top) for all those whose remains were never identified. One of my uncles falls into that latter category. My grandmother had several sons involved in that war. One landed on the beaches of Normandy, one spent the war afloat and a few of them went to Hong Kong, two of them ending up as POWs in Japan. My father tried to enlist, but he was too young and his faked ID apparently didn’t fool anyone.

Yesterday was my 19th wedding anniversary. We had a nice dinner with our daughter and her boyfriend. The day before, my wife and I went to the “downtown” section of our suburb and saw two movies and had lunch on a patio (probably won’t be doing that this weekend). First we saw The Judge with Robert Downey, Jr. and Robert Duvall, plus Vera Farmiga and Vincent D’Onofrio. A decent family drama about an insufferable lawyer long on the outs with his father who returns home for his mother’s funeral and ends up having to defend his father. There is a lot of family and local history to unravel. The movie’s a tad on the long side, but we liked it. Then we saw Interstellar, which is even longer. It wears its 2001 influence on its sleeve, without that earlier film’s obsession with itself. It has some Doctor Who wishy-washy timey-wimey stuff near the end, but it’s a decent thriller with some fascinating set pieces and a moderately strong emotional core. Some of the science is as solid as a film can get and some of it will wrap your head in knots trying to rationalize it. Fun, and definitely one for the big screen.

 

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