The Truth about Triangles

Obviously, I read to my kids all the time. Just as obviously, I do not review the hundreds of picture books and board books, nor still the dozens of chapter books that I have read. But once, almost exactly a year ago, I read Malcolm a real book, and that time has come around once more.

This time, he chose The Truth about Triangles. I wasn’t at the library when he picked it, so I don’t know if it was on one of the monthly themed displays or how he found it, but I assume he liked the picture of the pizza slice on the cover. The last one was probably 50ish pages shorter but aged identically, 12 going on 13. That said, it was a noticeably younger book than the one I’ve read this past month. And I have to say, I don’t know if Malcolm was entirely ready for this one?

In part I say this because he took quite a while to get into the groove, consistently wanting me to read something else.[1] But mostly I say it because this 12 year old is dealing with much older situations than the last batch were. Luca Salvatore has to contend with a junior high crush on the new kid in school, and with his parents’ eroding marriage, and with their eroding family pizza business, and with his overblown sense of responsibility to resolve these issues by himself and without affecting his best friendship.

Luckily, he’s a really good pizza maker, and he has an idea about getting on a reality show and winning over his celebrity crush who hosts the show, as a method of solving nearly all of these problems. But will he be able to keep everyone together and solve all of their many problems, even with such a great plan up his sleeve?

Kid book that nobody who sees this will read so: mostly, yeah. If you accept the premise that he was always going to get on the show, the book shines for dealing with the other problems in mostly thoughtful and realistic ways. Luca has to learn how to not solve everyone’s problems and just be a kid, but since pizza is his passion, he’s allowed to nevertheless solve the biggest one that way. Everything in his personal life is solved through a judicious helping of telling the truth instead of lying about how he’s fine in order to keep other people from feeling more stressed out. And the divorce…. isn’t fixed. He learns that, no, that’s not how life works. Kids cannot fix adult relationship problems, nor be responsible for them.

And so on the one hand, that was a lot of stress for Malcolm to wade through, and I get why he was so unwilling to listen to the earlier parts of the book where it’s all a quagmire of tween angst. But I’m glad to have him be matter of factly exposed to gay kids, and the idea that some parents don’t make it and the kids are not and cannot be responsible for that, and hell, even the idea that sometimes with enough passion and perseverance, problems can be magically solved. It doesn’t happen much, but it doesn’t happen never, y’know? But mostly the prior things more than that last one.

Oh, and also: the triangle as slice of pizza but also as visual metaphor for many, many three-sided relationships? It comes up a lot. Which makes it the most literary book I’ve ever read to a child. Hooray!

[1] I’m not a monster, after the first few chapters I offered for him to not finish reading it and take it back to the library. But he always vociferously refused, and he did basically devour the second half.

Jurassic World: Dominion

I am really ambivalent about Jurassic World: Dominion, now that I’ve finally seen it[1]. If you are unaware, it’s the follow on to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, in which dinosaurs are now a worldwide phenomenon after the events of that movie saw them rescued from Isla Nublar and then let loose. My ambivalence is as follows: on the one hand, it was a perfectly serviceable dinosaur action movie, with thrilling set pieces and characters that we have collectively cared about for decades, all getting a deserved swan song.

But on the other hand, after 24 hours to think about it… it was obligatory without being hardly anything else. Here’s the thrilling velociraptor chase through the streets of Malta, because there was a bad guy with tech from the last movie! But really all it does is make it harder for our heroes to board a plane out of town. Here’s the ice lake dinosaur in the southern Alps keeping our heroes from reaching a door on the far side of the lake. And it’s like, obviously I want thrilling dinosaur chases and dangerous stalking dinosaurs, but… I guess it’s that for most of these set pieces, there were no believable stakes or sense of danger. And Chekov’s knife fight remains, as of this writing, unfought on the mantel, about which I am personally offended.

In the end, I’m not saying it was bad. I had legitimate fun, and it was nice catching up with old friends and seeing a vision of a fundamentally altered world. But I am saying that I’m glad this story is over. It seems like they’re moving on to a new story next year, and I’m good with that, because I like the world they’ve made. But yeah. It’s good to let stories end.

[1] Full disclosure: the only reason this movie bubbled to the top of the list is that we both want to see the new season of Camp Cretaceous on Netflix, which is set near or after the events of this movie, and certainly was released years after. (That said, it was pretty cool seeing technology from the original show referenced in Dominion, as though it really is all one giant continuity. I like those, and am annoyed when it’s not a two-way street between movies and streaming.)

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Some years back, there was a real time release version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, by which I mean the person who ran it looked at all the dates of the diary entries and and letters and whatnot, and emails followed with the information from those dates, on those dates. I missed that, but it sounded pretty cool, and later when our group of friends did a similar re-read of Freedom and Necessity, I liked that enough that I took the plunge on yet another guy’s read of Moby Dick. That one is less explicitly dated in most places, so I think he more or less made up the schedule as he went along, but still, Ishmael’s journey does cover a goodly span of time; if two years sounds right to you, then hooray!

A thing I forgot to mention but which is perhaps obvious from context clues is, I’ve never read this book. I was scared off of it at a young age by people telling me there’s hardly any interactions with the eponymous whale, and that instead most of the book is Melville explaining the whaling industry. More on that later, but I can say that this book is oddly paced, and not because it took me nearly two years to read it.

In the first act (let’s say), Ishmael[1] was bored and listless in Nantucket and looking for a job on a whaling ship. This part is surprisingly heartfelt, and snarkily hilarious, in part because… here I will just admit I’m not going to worry about spoilers for a 175 year old book, so consider yourself warned. In large part, I was saying, because he’s clearly unqualified for the job. But he meets and instantly forms a bond (see heartfelt above) with Queequeg, who is a Pacific Islander of some extraction or other[2], and Queequeg is a harpooner of substantial skill, with the results being that Ishmael rides his coattails onto the Pequod, a boat captained by one Ahab, about whom we spend the rest of act one hearing various dark portents and omens and foreshadowings.

In the second act, Ishmael introduces us to the three captain’s mates and the two or three other harpooners (all alike noble savages, because the thing about sports existed even then I guess) and life on the boat, I suppose because he’s experiencing it as we are. Here we also learn that Ahab’s missing leg is due to a fight with an albino sperm whale who is famous enough to have acquired a name among the whaling brotherhood, and that Ahab is less interested in bringing home as much sperm oil as possible[3] and more interested in finding that particular whale, and, you know, winning round two. If you’re thinking that Rocky II should never have been made and this has the same energy, well, you’re half right.

In the third act, which is the meat of the book (no pun), the ship sails into the Pacific to hunt some whales. Here, Melville gives up all pretense that Ishmael is not actually him, and sets to describing the American sperm whaling industry in exhaustive and gory detail, including the differences from other nations and other whale types. He describes a hunt and a cleaning and a disposal from beginning to end, including an almost but not quite slapstick scene in which someone falls into a whale whilst it is hung to be processed. He waxes rhapsodic about his plans to categorize all whales amongst the other fish of the sea, and bemoans his inability to truly explain the fearsome, awesome scope of what a whale truly is, up close and personal, neither alive nor dead.

All this is interspersed with various stories of the sea, both his own experiences and what he hears from others along the way, I suppose to show passage of time and remind people that this is in fact a narrative. The odd thing is, yes, I said it was an exhaustive survey of the whaling industry, but what it never is, is exhausting. I would not have expected to find anything of interest in a historical oddity that is abhorrent to anyone who has seen Star Trek IV or who cares in any other way about other highly intelligent species. Nevertheless, it was engrossing. I think this may be a sign that I’m old?

In the fourth and final act, the action picks up for nearly the first time since Ishmael set foot on the boat. The odd part is, after having talked to the reader about all his grandiose plans to correctly taxonomize the various whales and of his struggles to convey the truth of them, he all but disappears into the woodwork as the story nears its climax. Now everything is about the crew slowly being stretched tauter and tauter by Ahab’s monomania, plus more signs and portents about the inevitable conclusion. His return to the narrative in the denouement is written as an offhanded afterthought.

So, going back to my point above: seriously weird pacing, not just from a narrative perspective, but from the perspective of Melville’s intentionality about what the book should actually be. I  still liked it, so I suppose I cannot say he failed despite my bewilderment on this point; and having actually read the book definitely does elevate Star Trek II above even what that scene meant without the full context, which I would not have expected, honestly.

In the scope of 19th century American literature, you could do a lot worse! I’m still surprised by just how funny the book was.

[1] Rebecca Black’s inspiration
[2] It is clear throughout the book that Melville is enlightened on the subject of race, as compared with his 1851 American peers in general, but he is nevertheless a white dude from 1851, and concerns himself little with such niceties as whether people from different places are in fact much different from one another.
[3] I wonder as to Ayn Rand’s opinion on Ahab’s anti-capitalist sensibilities.

The Dark and the Wicked

So imagine your mom and dad live on a secluded farm, and also your dad is wasting away of some kind of unspecified illness that has him bedbound, on oxygen, and never particularly awake, while also not apparently being in a coma or whatever. So you and your sibling show up, over your mother’s objections, to help.

The Dark and the Wicked is that movie, and it is split up as follows: 10% day to day logistics, 50% long lingering shots of people in the midst of misery, and 40% absolute mindfuckery where it is never possible to tell what is real or unreal. I do not believe I ever knew why anything was happening, but boy howdy did things keep happening. From vegetable chopping mishaps to livestock mishaps to constant prank phone calls to uncomfortable parental sexuality, and honestly that’s barely scratching the surface.

In conclusion, the movie never made a lick of sense, but boy does it know how to set a mood.

2 Fast 2 Furious

As you may but plausibly may not be aware, I laid out an intention to watch the Fast and/or Furious series. Said intention was laid out seven years ago, so I cannot really say I’m nailing it here. I started to watch the second one between 3 and 5 years ago, but something interrupted me like a third of the way through, I guess? Anyway, last night I came back for a second attempt, which was victorious!

In a way, this is exactly the same movie: blond guy, cars, crime. Paul Walker has been burned by the events of the prior movie and moved to Miami, where he is still a street racer. But due to his actions in the first movie, he finds himself beholden by Eva Mendez to do runs for a local cartel drug lord guy who likes to heats metals buckets so the rat inside will chew through the person the bucket is shoved up against. Because[1], you know, he’s good at driving now. Thanks, Vin Diesel!

The main things I get out of watching this movie are a simultaneous confusion that it will eventually turn into a juggernaut franchise and complete understanding of why the next movie has only new characters, on the other side of the world. It’s not that 2 Fast 2 Furious[2] is bad, exactly. It’s aggressively mid in most ways, excepting fun stunt driving to watch. There was a line by the secondary main character[3], and I heard it, and immediately knew that not only had it been used in the previews (which I later confirmed) but that it almost certainly was written to be a line in a preview. It’s just… how do I watch the two I’ve seen so far, and then a third one with no existing characters, and then somehow those three movies convince people to launch this successful franchise that I know for a fact now exists? It’s weird.

I wish they had made more movies about Suki and Tej, though. Them, I could have watched all day.

[1] Er, that is, he’s doing runs because he’s a good driver, not the drug lord guy is doing the bucket rat thing for that reason. That would be insane!
[2] I mean, except the title. Wow.
[3] “Guns, murderers, and crooked cops? I was made for this, bruh.”

The Fall Guy (2024)

Here is 100% of what I remember about the ’80s TV show named The Fall Guy: it starred Lee Majors as a stuntman who I’m pretty sure did something besides movie stunts; best guess is, solved mysteries, for some reason? And also Heather Locklear or Thomas. And I had a lunchbox of that show in elementary school, which implies that I liked it quite a bit when I was like 6 or 7,

So when they made a movie of it earlier this year, I was not what you would call entirely sold on the idea of that movie. And yet here we are a few months later, and I saw it on the ‘Cock, and I thought, hey, why not? I haven’t watched a generic action movie in a while[1], right? But here’s the kicker: I really liked it!

So Ryan Gosling plays Colt Seaver, the kind of name you’d expect a college quarterback to have, and he’s a stunt guy best known for having a pretty enormous fall[2], such that he broke his back and got out of the game. But, in a grand tradition going back to Michael Corleone, or Obi-Wan Kenobi, or arguably even Brutus, someone pulled him back in. So now he’s trying to save the movie, solve the mystery, and get the girl, and if you stop there? Yes, it’s a generic action movie. But what I didn’t count on is that Gosling has a bonkers funny dry delivery, and that he and Emily Blunt have some pretty solid chemistry, and also that the stunts would in fact be pretty cool.

I’m not saying to see it on its own merits; it is not high art nor probably will it be a necessary pop culture touchstone. But I am saying to see it if you find yourself in the situation I was in, wanting to see some generic action movie because why not? It will absolutely exceed those expectations! Which sounds like not much until you remember how many of them don’t.

[1] No regrets, but in retrospect I should have watched 2 Fast 2 Furious, if I wanted a generic action movie. Kinda forgot those are on my list.
[2] Get it?

Alien: Romulus

Did you know there’s a new Alien movie out? And that it’s not about anyone exploring the lore or mythology of the xenomorphs nor whoever the giant people in the crashed ship that the Nostromo found some 45 years ago in the movie-goer’s timeline were?

Ah, I have your attention now, I think. No, Romulus is a research station in a decaying orbit around one of Weyland-Yutani’s colony planets[1], and a handful of teens intend to get up there and take advantage of the opportunity before anyone else does. Too bad, of course, about what Romulus-the-station is researching…

I’m not going to get into the plot of the movie. If you’ve seen an Alien movie, you know what the plot is and you know what the story beats are going to be, to at least a first approximation. This is one of those, for better or for worse[2]. I do want to call out one thing especially, though. As you know, a key aspect of these movies is body horror. From the moment John Hurt got that funny look on his face in the middle of lunch (or, honestly, from the moment they tried to pull the thing off his face and it… refused), that sense of impending dread, that your fleshbag is not entirely yours to control, is easily a third of what these movies are about. Anyway, the body horror in this movie is amped up pretty high even by my jaded standards.

Bravo.

[1] Yes, I am going to just sit here and assume you know what that means. And if you don’t, then this movie is for you the first episode in a reboot of the franchise rather than the latest episode in the franchise itself, and watching the movie would be a good way to find out. The accumulated lore surrounding that particular company is such that they didn’t have to waste any time hinting at things that have been slowly revealed over five decades and six or eight prior movies. Subtext has become text, and in 40 point font a that.
[2] And mostly for better, I would argue; both the formula and this implementation of it, to be clear.

Sorority Babes in the Dance-A-Thon of Death

A very long time ago, in the summer of 1994 I expect, I watched Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama. I rented it from Hastings, and I watched it with my roommates, and my girlfriend, and my girlfriend’s father, the latter of which you’ll realize was awkward if you’ve ever seen the movie yourself.

I believe that I knew about Sorority Babes in the Dance-A-Thon of Death before the internet was functionally searchable (and way before it lost that capability). But how did I know? Word of mouth: from whom? Usenet: I guess maybe, but I have never been a horror community guy, I suppose because I found my people somewhere else first. Hastings again: well that would make sense, except that I never saw the movie, which I definitely would have if it had been available. Because, like, how do I turn down a sequel to that aforementioned august masterpiece of film?

The most likely answer, I suppose, is that I’m wrong about how long I knew this second movie existed. Because, honestly, any of those other reasons would not have found me almost exactly 30 years later and only now learning that the two movies are entirely unrelated, except by naked opportunism[1]. Which is ironic, since this one had no nudity. (Nor did it have actors, or a script, except in the most literal of senses. It didn’t even have the charm of Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell to make up for having been shot on low quality video with a sufficiently washed out color palette that black and white would have looked a lot better.)

So, you know, I freely admit that it’s unreasonable of me to believe I have a better technical eye, to know when a scene has overstayed its welcome by multiple seconds, and a better ear for dialogue, to know that I would need a much better story reason to send my characters to “the abandoned college on the hill” than the payoff I received, in order to ever even consider using that line seriously, and a better eye for talent, when I’m not constraining myself to only actresses who’ll film nude scenes[2], to end up with at least one or two people who could have sold that wretched line in the first place. …although come to think of it, that particular actress may have been the best of the bunch, ie she may have actually sold it. I was saying, though, it’s unfair of me to believe all those things of myself when the last movie I made was a ten minute short adapting Fahrenheit 451, in junior high. But that said, I’m pretty sure it was better than this. (I wonder if the video cassette still exists for me to check against.)

Still, though, they mentioned Joe Bob Briggs in their “Thanks” section of the credits, and that has endeared them to me somewhat.

[1] That is to say, the box mentions a “from the creators of” line, and I flat out do not believe this is true. (Just like I don’t believe anything else it says besides the title.)
[2] That sounds like I’m denigrating the ability of actors who shoot nude scenes, but I’m not. I’m just saying when you have fewer options to choose from, especially if your talent pool is already restricted by “can commute to Kansas City”, you get what you pay for. And I’m especially saying that these people did not constrain themselves thusly, and have no excuse whatsoever.

A Nightmare Wakes

This was a weird one, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. See, Mary not quite Shelley and Percy Shelley and Mary’s sister (I think) and Lord Byron are all hanging out at Byron’s place, just like we saw in a recentish episode of Doctor Who. And they made a bet to write a scary story, which as we all know was the genesis of a certain Modern Prometheus. Fine so far.

Only Mary also had a miscarriage, and started getting obsessed with this idea she had for a book, and Percy is getting more and more grossed out by her whole vibe, and meanwhile she’s got Victor Frankenstein (who is just Percy except dressed in black and nobody else can see him) stalking and/or courting her, and basically the whole movie is this obsession she has with her book, or maybe the book is haunting her? I was at first really unhappy because it seemed like they were saying she was being externally haunted and the book was being given to her, which is kind of a bullshit take. But I’m pretty sure it’s the obsession or maybe haunted by the book as she goes[1] but at least she’s really the one writing it angle instead, and that’s alright.

I did a shallow dive into the history of a handful of characters afterward, and while they are certainly taking some liberties here, the movie was in the end at least a reasonable fiction of how it might have happened. (But it definitely did not happen this way, all the same. Also, not for nothing, Percy Shelley, good poet though he might be, was kind of crap at being a man.)

[1] A Nightmare Wakes kind of implies the latter haunted version, but only kind of.

Pánico en el Transiberiano

I have learned about a new streaming service funded by libraries. My local does not offer Kanopy, but apparently they offer Hoopla. Which is nice, because the last two movies [that I haven’t seen] presented by my horror movie podcast were both available on said network. Thanks, Carrollton Public Library!

Anyway, the randomness this time was Hammer Studios[1] crossed with aliens, which is a hard sell since Hammer makes mostly movies with draculas. In fact, I’m being informed that this is not a Hammer Studios production, and my podcast people done screwed up. But in their defense, the movie stars both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, so the only thing missing (aside from a dracula and/or some of its brides) was a couple of gallons of just enormously bright red paint. I can understand, when you’re desperate for a match, overlooking a little thing like not technically made by Hammer, if almost everything else lines up, y’know? They were in a real fix.

So, Christopher Lee is a paleontologist I guess, and he’s just dug up a maybe missing link in China, and now he’s on a train back to civilization with his find. But Peter Cushing wants to see inside Lee’s comically overprotected trunk in the storage compartment, which sets off an unlikely chain of events when the thing in the trunk is not as dead as previously believed, and is furthermore[2] a visitor from the depths of space and not the missing link at all! …sort of.

Soon undead alien apes and countesses and Rasputins and Hammer Studios talents and Tellys Savalas are running up and down the train, trying to solve the mystery without getting their eyes boiled out of their heads and/or without being caught and exposed as the alien. If Horror Express were wildly popular, one could easily imagine a hidden roles boardgame being developed from the IP. But my point is, hijinx ensue as they necessarily must have, until there is eventually a final showdown for the fate of humanity. (I mean, probably? It was after all just the one alien.)

Still, good times. I especially liked the sci-fi backstory,

[1] out of London, although the movie was made in Spain, and furthermore my brief research indicates this was not in fact a Hammer Studios production at all, and great, now I have to talk about this outside the footnote.
[2] I would consider this a spoiler, but as an alien was necessary to this being the movie I watched, the cat was kind of already out of the bag.