Recuperation Review: Equilibrium (2002)

Lots of napping these days! In between, I'm catching up with some health-inducing bits of Hollywood wizardry...


NEXT UP: Equilibrium (2002)


Directed by Kurt Wimmer


OVERVIEW: Christian Bale (yes really!) plays a policeman-of-the-future who begins to have doubts about the totalitarian regime he is supporting when he forgets to take his mood-stabilizing drugs. His doubts are thrown into extreme focus when he is forced to neutralize his partner-turned-bad, Ned Stark (yes really!)


WHAT HAPPENS: So, Christian Bale begins to wonder whether it's okay to feel things after all. because, y'know, the government has outlawed it.


WTF MOMENT: You just read the bit about the government outlawing feelings, right? There you go.


WHO EVER KNEW NED STARK WAS SUCH A SUCKER FOR POETRY: Yes, Sean Bean is in this as the cop-gone-south. He's done in by a book of Yeats. Who knew? Poor guy never catches a break.


HOW YOU KNOW THIS IS THE FUTURE: Well, we're told as much right off the bat. Also, World War III has come and gone, so that's a tipoff. The way to avoid WW IV, apparently, is to avoid feeling things, since feelings lead to war. Or something. So there you go: everybody takes drugs, and everyone who doesn't gets re-educated, and all the things that cause feelings, like artwork and pets, gets the torch. Hilarity ensues.


GOSH, DAVE, THIS SOUNDS LIKE A HALF-BAKED MISHMASH OF FAHRENHEIT 451 AND 1984, AMONG OTHER THINGS. Well, yes. But visually it's quite stylish, and the cast are committed to the silliness, which helps. Plus there's this sort of cool "gun fu" which makes the fight scenes entertaining, and best of all, the fight scenes don't go on forever, as with (for example) Michael Bay movies. So there's plenty of good stuff here, if you can get over the inherent absurdity of the premise.


DO WE GET A HAPPY ENDING? [Spoilers!] Depends how much you like 'splosions.


GRADE: B

Recuperation Review: The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)

So, my recuperation continues apace, aided and abetted by numerous film "classics."


Next up: Curse of the Werewolf (1961)


Directed by Terence Fisher, responsible for numerous other Hammer Films greats, including Horror of Dracula (1958), Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Mummy (1959), etc.


Biggest drawback: Peter Cushing, my favorite actor of all time, is not in this one.


Almost made up for by: the presence of the lovely and bodacious Yvonne Romain. Va-va-voom.


OVERVIEW: This one starts slowly but is kind of creepily engaging in a can't-take-my-eyes-off-it kind of way. There's a lot of background as to where the werewolf comes from, and it's interesting that it's nothing supernatural or occult... Though it is quite nasty and mean.


WHAT HAPPENS: Basically, this guy turns into a werewolf. He doesn't really get going till the second half, but once he does, look out. The body count is pretty significant. Then he gets chased by a mob with torches, and he takes to the rooftops, and everything goes to hell.


WHAT'S AMAZING IS: I sort of dozed off during this one too. But I woke up for the riveting climactic scenes of mayhem. And what the hell, I'm still recuperating.


WTF MOMENT: There actually weren't too many once the werewolf showed up. Early on though, when the nasty Marquis is making the poor beggar dude dance for his table scraps? Yeah, things were pretty weird for a while there...


HOW WE KNOW WE'RE IN SPAIN: Well, the big caption that says "SPAIN at the start of the movie was a tipoff. Also, everybody is Don this and Marquessa that. And I guess the big churches with the tile roofs fit. Apart from that, though, most everybody sounds pretty Brit--especially your colorful working-class types--so it can get a little disorienting.


WEIRDEST SYNCHORONICITY WITH THE PREVIOUS RECUPERATION REVIEW: Spanish (sort of) hottie Yvonne Romain can't talk in this movie, just like Awesome Future Girl Hottie couldn't talk in the last movie. Okay this is weird, and it's not like I'm trying to only watch movies where the women can't say anything. it just sort of worked out that way. I'm sort of dreading what will happen in the next Recuperation Review, which stars Christian Bale and Sean Bean. Will there be a deaf-mute hottie from the dystopian future? Stay tuned.


DOES OUR HERO ESCAPE THE HELLISH CANINE DAMNATION TO WHICH HE HAS BEEN ACCURSED? [Spoilers!] Nope.


Cue Music. Roll credits.


GRADE: B

Recuperation Review: Beyond the Time Barrier (1960)

So, the reason I haven't been doing much on this blog lately is that I’ve had some medical troubles, which are happily all resolved now. (Shhhh! Don’t tell my mom.) But, even as I’m on the road to recovery, I still find myself flat on my back much of the time, which raises the question of how to entertain myself.

The answer, of course, is through a series of cheesy horror and sci-fi movies from the ’50s, ’60s and ’90s.

First up: Beyond the Time Barrier (1960)

Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, who also made The Black Cat (which some people quite like) and The Amazing Transparent Man (which I quite like), among other things.

OVERVIEW: Okay, this was sort of dull. How dull? Well, I fell asleep watching it the first time through. However, that was probably due to my mysterious “condition” (see above) as much as anything else. (Shhhh! Don’t tell my mom.)  The second time through, I stayed awake right until the end, so how bad could it be?

WHAT HAPPENS: An air Force test pilot (played by Robert Clarke, who also starred in The Hideous Sun Demon and The Man From Planet X) flies his jet plane really really fast, really really high up in the atmosphere. As a result, he gets projected 64 years into the future.

WTF MOMENT: See “What Happens,” above.

HOW WE KNOW WE’RE IN THE FUTURE: People live underground mostly. There are two classes of people: the normal-looking ones who take our hero captive – until he makes friends with Awesome Future Girl Hottie – and the evil subterranean mutants who live, well, subterraneanly. Also, the dominant architectural feature is the triangle. Which is sort of cool actually. Triangular doors, windows, columns. Even the clothes are kind of triangle-influenced.

YES, BUT ARE THERE MONSTERS? Sort of. Those subterranean “mutants” are essentially normal-looking people with skinhead wigs and crummy attitudes. They’re the victims of the plague that hit the earth in the distant future of 1970. Everybody has it, by the way – the mutants just have it worse than everyone else.

DOES THE AWESOME FUTURE GIRL HOTTIE TALK? No.

WAIT, REALLY? Really. Our Air Force buddy makes friends with the one still-fertile fox in the future – she’s telepathic so can read his mind and knows what he wants, but can’t talk about it. She’s the greatest gal ever! I’ll leave all you feminist-theory PhD students to write up your dissertations.

DOES OUR HERO ESCAPE THIS HELLISH FUTURE THAT HE NEVER MADE? Well, yes and no. [Spoilers!] He gets to his plane but pretty much everybody dies helping him do it, including Silent Sally, which is too bad. Then he flies back at the same super-speed and winds up back in 1960, charged with changing mankind’s reckless behavior (you know, the ones that brought on the cosmic plague in the first place). He might not get much of an audience, but then again he might… especially since he aged 64 years during his return trip!!!

Don’t think about it too much, it makes no sense whatever.

Cue music. Roll credits.

GRADE: C

Best of 2013

Here's my not-very-scientific acknowledgment of some stuff I enjoyed a lot (or didn't) in 2013. Definitive? Hell no.

Best book I read this year (fiction): Probably was Susan Steinberg's Spectacle, an odd assortment of short stories that are quite unconventional, in a good way (I think). I reviewed it for PopMatters so here you go. Sometimes I think the stories are mighty thin, sometimes I think they're brilliant. Probably a bit of both.

Most thought-provoking foreign films on DVD: It's a tie this year, with Germany's neo-Nazi drama Combat Girls going neck-and-neck with the film adaptation of Yasmina Khadra's terrific novel The Attack. There were some pretty major changes made to that book in its translation to film, but it's still a fairly riveting experience to watch. Meanwhile, Combat Girls is a very tough, very powerful movie that deserves a large audience IMO.



Album most likely to rekindle your faith in human nature: Brushy One-String's Destiny is filled with powerful performances from this husky-voiced Jamaican singer. Sure, his guitar's only got one string, but this ain't no gimmick. Brushy's the real deal, kids.



Most effective Afro-Western collaboration: Last year we had The Toure-Raichel Collective's Tel Aviv Sessions; this year we have the JuJu album In Trance. Smoking-hot guitar work plays off of tradition djembe (African violin) with a rock-solid percussion section keeping everything lively. If this doesn't make you jump up and down, there's not much I can do for you.



Best film documentary: I have to go with 20 Feet From Stardom, the movie about backup singers (mostly black women) who make the music superstars they work for (mostly white men) sound so much better. With performances by Merry Clayton, Darlene Love, Judith Hill and Tata Vega, among others, there's just too much awesomeness, not to mention joy, to resist here. BUT, a big shout-out also goes to the scathing documentary Blackfish, which pretty much blows the lid off of Sea World's systemic exploitation and abuse of not only orcas but also the human trainers who work with them. Both these movies are well worth catching on DVD if you haven't seen them already.

Guiltiest pleasure, DVD division: DaVinci's Demons, a Starz TV show that just takes the loony and runs with it. Leonardo as a sort of Renaissance-Man secret agent fighting against the Pope and vampires? Sure, why not? Runner-up: Spartacus: War of the Damned.



Most effective use of guitar distortion: Bardo Pond's Peace on Venus is pretty much what I want my imaginary band, The Non-Dairy Creamers, to sound like. Imagine Crazy Horse after a couple bottles of cough syrup.



Lamest post-apocalyptic movie of the summer: After Earth. I had high hopes going into this one, but it was just... lame. I don't mean to pick on Will Smith's kid, who starred in it, but he is a sorta charisma vacuum. Also, the monsters sucked.

Best TV show: Game of Thrones, OF COURSE.

(WARNING: Season 3 spoilers below, sort of)

No, I haven't been abducted by aliens.

I've been absent from this blog for something like a month and a half, due to a perfect storm of external circumstances, including hectic-ness at work, the teaching semester coming to a close, the holidays, my forty-tenth birthday (gulp), and various other factors too mundane to mention here. Happily, much of the craziness is now in my rearview mirror, meaning that I will perhaps have a bit more time to tend to this rather desolate-of-late blog address.

On the upside, here's a bit of vacuous-but-fun tuneage to take your mind off the wintry snowscape outside your window:

Thinner Than Skin nominated for DSC Prize

Hey, this is a fairly huge deal.

The lovely an talented Uzma Aslam Khan has had her latest novel, Thinner Than Skin, nominated for the India-based DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. The Prize is affiliated in some way with Germany's Geothe-Institut (I'm not sure exactly how) and it awards a hefty sum to the winner. Just as importantly, though, it's nice to see Uzee's fine fine book getting more of the attention it deserves.

It's also nice to see it up there with books by big shots like Nilinjana Roy, Nadeem Aslam and Mohsin Hamid. It's a great book. I recommend it.

RIP Lou

I know it's a cliche

...but what the hell, it's a true cliché. To wit: fall sure is beautiful in New England. I took these pictures while walking a few days ago.

I'm glad I'm from here.

Clearly this was rigged

So, a few days ago I went to the Greenfield Blues and BBQ Festival, an annual event up in Greenfield, Mass that hosts numerous good bands, plenty of tasty food (or so I suppose, being a non-meat-eater and therefore sort of out of it when it comes to BBQ) and--who knew?--a mustache contest. That's right, a mustache contest. I had no idea, but when they made the announcement, I felt the need to step up. Many are called, but few are et cetera. So I made my way to the clearing in front of the stage and there I met me competition. To wit:

So, I figured I had a shot. There were three categories: Best In Show, Best Curl and Most Disturbing. I figured the guy holding the puppy would get Best In Show, and so he did. Seriously, a puppy? Why not just hold up a big sign that says "I'm a starving orphan with no legs, please be nice to me"? But a puppy is what he had, and he won, so there's nothing more to be said.

The guy in the blue shirt to my right (your left) won for Best Curl, and that was fine, as my mustache doesn't Curl so much as Droop. But I definitely thought I was in with a sniff as far as most Disturbing went, so imagine my bitterness when that prize went to the twerp two guys to my right (your left) in the blue T-shirt and goatee. Despite the fact that the rules clearly state "no beards" (yes, there were rules, and yes, they said this), this guy shows up with a beard-mustache combo which is hardly disturbing at all and walks away with the rather snazzy gift package. Which included: a T-shirt, pint glass, hat and metal bucket (not sure what the bucket is for, but whatever). So you can understand why I'm bitter.

Fortunately, this mustache of mine isn't going anywhere. And there's always next year.

My "Would You Rather" interview over at TNBBC

The ever-lively Lori over at The Next Best Book Club blog has been running a series of author interviews called "Would You Rather," which feature questions like:  "Would you rather write an entire book with your feet or with your tongue?" and "Would you rather be forced to listen to Ayn Rand bloviate for an hour or be hit on by an angry Dylan Thomas?"

As you can see, Lori isn't interested in asking the same old questions, which is all good. I did my best to answer them honestly but entertainingly, which wasn't always easy.

Next up: Lori asks us writers to donate a recipe for the coming fall/winter. I ought to be able to come up with something... stay tuned.

Don'T Open That Door! #55: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman

The latest installment of my ongoing column for PopMatters.com, Don't Open That Door!, is up and running. This weeks it's the 1959 kitsch-fest Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, starring Allison Hayes and Yvette Vickers.

For those of you unfamiliar with the plot: Allison Hayes plays a woman who grows to fifty feet tall. That's about it, although there's a good deal of other melodrama worked in around the fringes of this basic plot. It's all kind of hilarious, in certain moods.

Better late than never

So there we were, sitting in the Foundry coffee shop in Northampton following our blowout anniversary dinner on Sunday, when this kickass instrumental tune came on over the radio (Radio Paradise from Canada, in case anyone's wondering). I did some digging around, and found it: the song was called "La Femme d'Argent" and it's by a French band called Air. It came out in 1998, hence the title of this post. But in my defense, in 1998 I was living in Morocco and Pakistan, and wasn't totally up to date with the latest developments in the French ambient music scene.

Anyway, I love the song, and the video too, so, happy September 17:

It was twenty years ago today...

There were no cell phones, no computers in every home, no flatscreen TVs. CDs were still kind of new. Bill Clinton had been President for almost a year, Facebook didn't exist, Amazon was just a river. The hottest show on TV was Seinfeld, and nobody had heard of--or probably even thought of--The Sopranos, Lost, Mad Men or Breaking Bad. John Paul II was Pope. No one in the USA knew who the Taliban were except a few people who paid attention to such things. The biggest rock bands in the world were Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and Kurt Cobain was still alive.

Uzee and I were living in Tucson, AZ, and on September 15, 1993, we got married.

This was our civil ceremony. In 1994 we would get married two more times, once in Pakistan and once in the US. This one was legally binding, though, so it counts. We trundled down to the city courthouse in the early afternoon, signed some papers, swore before the judge that we weren't cousins--I'm not even kidding, folks--and bam! We were hitched. A couple friends took pictures. We split a wine cooler instead of champagne and some kind of whole-grain cookie in place of wedding cake, and there you go. We both wore vests, and Uzee wore a thin red leather tie that had been my father's. I wore his hat.

The rest, as they say, is history.

I start teaching at Smith College on Tuesday

And I'm stoked!

That is all.

Another Romanian interview/review for Trespassing

Uzma Aslam Khan's Romanian edition of Trespassing has engendered yet another Romanian-language interview, which I once again fail to understand whatsoever. it's probably pretty nice, right?

Here is the sum total of things I know about Romania:

1. Nadia Comenici (not sure if I spelled that right)

That's it. Still, if I'm going to know only one thing about your country, it might as well be an astonishing gymnast who scored perfect 10s at the Olympics.

More new neighbors; or, the thing I possibly missed the most while living overseas all those years

Maybe not the most obvious thing, but there it is. I love hummingbirds. As in, loooove them. The affair started in Tucson, AZ, where Uzee and I put out a feeder and had tons feeding there (and saw tons more at other places besides our front porch). All kinds too: purple-beaked and ivory-bileld and whatnot. Hummingbirds migrate, and most species go hang out in South America during our winter, then come up to Texas and the southwest when it gets warm again. 

Since leaving Arizona in (gulp) 1995, we've had to rely on memories, as there are no hummingbirds outside of the Americas, and we were in Morocco, Pakistan and Hawaii. (There were sunbirds, which are very cool and are a relative to hummingbirds; they're small,  colorful, creepery things with long curved bills that slurp nectar out of flowers. but they're not quite the same.) Now, however, we're back, and having moved to our terrific new house with horses in the back yard and bunnies scampering across the lawn, we dusted off our feeder, hung it out, and presto! More hummingbirds than you can believe.

We don't get the variety here in MA that we got in the southwest; the only species that makes it this far north is the ruby-throat. But still, that's cooler than words can adequately describe, so there you go. For some reason we seem to get about 10 females to every male, but whatever.

Of course, they can be tricky to photograph, as they tend to move pretty quick. Personally, I like this action shot the best:

And for those of you NOT prone to motion sickness, here's a little video I took out the window of my study, which appears to have been captured in the midst of an earthquake although it was not. This is a multi-bird melee that was going on one afternoon on our back stoop. I was twitchy because I was trying to film everywhere at once, and because, well, I'm kind of twitchy. But if you can get through it, it gives a pretty good idea of the kind of hummingbird mayhem we're experiencing here.

Don't Open That Door! is back...

After a brief hiatus of a couple weeks, wherein I recharged my batteries and generally took a break from certain things, my PopMatters column Don't Open That Door! is back with installment #51. This week we're focusing on 1951's The Thing From Another World, aka one of the best movies of the decade, no kidding.

Kenneth Tobey and James Arness lead the way, but really this is an ensemble piece that crackles with great dialogue, moody lighting and atmospheric sets. John Carpenter would remake it in 1986 with a lot more blood and gore; it's an okay attempt but lacks the charm of the original.

So take a peek at the column, and do me a favor and Tweet about it, Like it on Facebook and so forth. If people say they like it, I'll be able to do more and more, which is what I'm hoping for...

Attention, Romanian speakers!

The lovely and talented Uzma Aslam Khan was recently interviewed for a Romanian web site site in honor of the recent release of the Romanian edition of her terrific book, Trespassing. (Her 15th edition? 16th? I can't keep up.)

Here's the cover of the new edition, which is pretty sweet, featuring as it does silkworm butterflies in the act of mating.

If you read the book, you'll see that both concepts -- silkworms, and mating in its various forms -- are both crucial to the storyline as well as the bigger themes. So, the cover designer was pretty clever here.

Here's an extract from the interview:

Aşteptarea virează către cititor, căutăm ce nu cunoaştem şi încercăm să ne punem în locul celuilalt. Încă o diferenţă se referă la faptul că în imaginarul vestic există adeseori preconcepţii, generate de media, despre cum ar trebui să arate Orientul, în special cu referire la femei, care, de cele mai multe ori sînt văzute ca nişte fiinţe ascunse, fără voce, obligate să se mărite.

Okay, no idea what's going on in that first sentence. The second has words like "diferenta" and "imaginarul" that are temptingly close to words that I do know, along with the nifty phrase "preconceptii, generate de media." Plus I'm willing to go to bat that I know what "Orientul" is getting at. So okay, I think we're doing all right, as long as that first sentence isn't saying something like, "Milk sure has gotten expensive these days, but at least you can freeze it!"

Interesting blog review of An Age of Madness

Okay so it's not a rave by any means, although the reviewer does say some nice things along the lines of

"I was worried about a male author writing a convincing female lead, and I think Mr. Maine has done a great job with that"

as well as

"while I normally don't like unreliable narrators, I understand why he did it, and I think he pulled it off very well"

But she also has some reservations about the tone of the book -- ie, it's too depressing -- as well as the back cover copy, which she feels misrepresents the story. As far as tone goes, yeah, this is probably my most depressing book. Guilty as charged. It's a pretty dark story about some pretty dark stuff, and once I went there, I wasn't about to get out of it too easily. So okay, if that's not your thing, then I can understand that.

I actually find her criticism of the cover copy more interesting, as she makes the claim that

"unlike the back cover copy, I am not going to intentionally mislead you in order to not give away a spoiler. Don't read that copy. It's bad in that you will think you're about to read a very different kind of book"

I find this interesting because I helped to write the copy (most writers do, I think), and thought I did an okay job. Apart from a series of questions that sketch out the basic parameters of the main character, Regina, the copy pretty much consists of one sentence: "An Age of Madness peels back the layers of Regina's psyche in a voice that is brash, bitter, and blackly humorous, laying bare her vulnerabilities while drawing the reader unnervingly close to this memorable heroine."

I can understand the reservation someone might have about the word "heroine;" Regina is many things but she is probably nobody's idea of a heroine. But she is the novel's main character and narrator, so it seems fair enough to characterize her in this way. Someone else might say the book is too grim to be considered "humorous," even if it's "blackly humorous." But I don't think so; there any number of passages that make me giggle, or even laugh out loud, and I've given enough readings to know that audiences tend to respond the same way.

This brings us to the blurbs from other writers -- Stuart Archer Cohen, Natalie Danford and Jincy Willett, all of whom were kind enough to read the manuscript and commit their praise to print. Everybody says very kind things and they say them memorably. Maybe Stuart's final comment, that the novel is "intriguing and uplifting," would throw some people. I do think there's a good deal of resolution and forward movement by the end of the story, but I can understand why some readers would not find the book "uplifting." It's a pretty sad story, I'll cop to that, and I do my best to avoid pat answers and by-the-numbers "redemption," which has been a buzzword for years now that basically indicates a happy ending.

Anyway I find the blogger's comments interesting, because they raise all kinds of questions about our expectations of a book, and of the description of the book that -- like it or not -- most of us still use in determining whether or not we're going to read something. This is the first time a reviewer has ever commented on the jacket copy of one of my stories, and it makes me wonder about books that I've read that perhaps didn't mesh with the expectations that I had. Were my expectations fed by the jacket description? Quite likely.

No great conclusions here, just food for thought.

Meet the new neighbors

And I do mean "Neigh"-bors...

Sorry. Really, really sorry. I just can't help myself sometimes.

So then, Jasper and Sundance. Two horses who live in the barn behind our new house and whose paddock is more or less our back yard. The landlord who rents the house also rents the barn and yard, so these guys are our neighbors for the duration, which is fine with us.

Jasper is on the left, Sundance on the right with the white blotch and blond mane. I admit, I never knew much about horses--they actually kind of freak me out--but these guys are real characters, very playful and curious and unthreatening. They're also very responsive to both me and Uzee, which is sweet, as they come trotting over whenever we're in the vicinity in order to see what's going on:

So, we already pretty much love them.

Those things on their faces are fly guards, by the way. They look opaque but they're not, they just keep the bugs out of their eyes, which keeps the fellas happy.