Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials

Leave a reply

Some time ago, before October 2018 in fact, I saw The Maze Runner, which is a movie (and also prior to that a book) about some teens in the middle of a maze, who are tasked with solving that maze, because… well, it’s a secret. To them, at least.

The problem with that movie is, it’s often on streaming, but its sequels never are. (And I don’t own the other books.) The result of this fact is I’ve seen the first movie three times now, but, good news citizens! I accidentally discovered The Scorch Trials were on Max until the end of November. So, I was all ready to watch it, until Mary says hey, I don’t remember the first movie. (I was pretty sure she’d seen it, but either I’m wrong or she wasn’t paying attention, which is why I’ve seen it thrice instead of twice.)

That still left us with enough time to watch the second movie before it got delisted, whew. I will say straight up, this is not as good as the first movie, for the simple fact that nobody is running in any mazes. (Not 100% true facts, okay, but it’s true that nobody is running in any mazes that were specifically purposed as mazes.) See, our escapees are rescued by some other group let by the always eminently trustworthy Petyr Baelish, and they along with a lot of other kids from a lot of other mazes[1] are all gathered together and being processed by batches out to safety.

Unless, you know, it’s just another trapped cage to be escaped.

In the end, there’s a lot more running, a lot more fighting, a lot more rage zombies, a lot fewer cyborg monstrosities, and a metric fuckton of sand covering at least two post-apocalyptic hellholes that used to be cities with skyscrapers. Oh, and Alan Tudyk, who is as ever a delight.

At the end of the movie, I’m once again excited to watch the next chapter. (This time without waiting 6+ years and multiple viewings in between, though.) I am left with one question that I have no idea if it was answered by either this book or the previous one, but that I’m pretty sure was not answered by the movie: how can we tell which kids are immune to the Blaze virus[2], and which ones are not? Or why? Because I’m highly confident that some of the boys in the glade were not immune, which indicates that escaping the maze doesn’t prove everyone is immune, even if it proves someone was (and I’m not so sure whether that was proven either).

[1] One of which was all girls and one boy, resulting in my apology for back when I said we’d never learn why this maze was all boys. Apparently they just tried a bunch of different combinations.
[2] Not a spoiler for this movie per se. It’s what the cyborg Grievers were injecting people with in part one, which the kids called “getting stung”.

The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy

Leave a reply

I’m gonna read some books to the boy that aren’t these, for the next little while.

That said, yes, I still like the Three Investigators, while recognizing that the first one was quite a bit better than the next couple have been. The good news is, that doesn’t mean The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy was bad.

You can really tell it’s a different time: the mystery hinges around a mummy found 25 years earlier, which the professor who found him is considered the owner of(!), and he’s been graciously loaning the mummy to a local museum in Cairo. But when he decided to bring the mummy home to southern California for further study, that’s just a thing he can do, since he found it in a tomb back in the day. Like, there are modern rewritten editions of these books and how I wonder did they rewrite the central premise of the story to explain away that this is not the way archaeology works anymore?

Nevertheless, that premise settled, the story itself is pretty good, what with a plausible curse, a mummy who seems to be talking (but only to one man), villains who are sufficiently threatening, scary car chases, and also Anubis, because how are you supposed to mention ancient Egypt and just leave out Anubis?

Creep (2014)

Leave a reply

Shudder just started a new series called (I want to say) The Creep Tapes, that I decided to take a look at, because why not. And then I learned it was based on a movie from ten years ago, called Creep. The show was good enough for me to say (again), why not, and here we are.

So this guy named Aaron has been hired via Craigslist by this guy named Josef, for the princely sum of one thousand dollars, to be his videographer for a day. Josef explains that he is dying of an inoperable brain tumor, and has an unborn or very young child[1] that he wants to leave a remembrance for. And that’s it, that’s the whole set up.

The only thing worth knowing from here forward is that Josef is incredibly awkward. His sense of humor is almost but not quite mean-spirited, his sense of boundaries is non-existent, he gets way too emotional with a complete stranger way too fast… it’s more or less one of those embarrassment / shame / The Office (British) style of scenarios.

….or is it?

I have a feeling this is more worth watching if you’re not spoiled, and I also have a feeling that the TV show might actually be better than the movie in some ways, mostly relating to improvement via shortened run time. All that to say: both are pretty good, if you’re okay with the premise.

[1] I forget, for the justifiable reason that these are the only two characters in the movie. Hmmm. I guess there are two and a half, but the half also isn’t the aforementioned child, so.

The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot revisited

Leave a reply

Anyway, the boy really likes the Three Investigators. The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot is about how the teens with the junkyard secret base set out to find a missing parrot who only quotes Hamlet, but with a stutter[1], and end up embroiled in the sinister world of European art theft.

So, this book was written in the mid ’60s, and is very clearly of its time in some ways. The last book had some pretty glaring stereotypes, even if they were perpetrated by notional bad guys, and the next book, which I’m already reading, just casually indicated that rich women get involved in charities because they do not have enough housework to keep them busy, which, wow. Some things I’ve lightly edited on the fly as I read, others, i’m not sure where to begin.

All of that to say, this particular book has a Mexican boy named Carlos, and his uncle, usually a flower peddler but most recently a parrot peddler. They are poor immigrants, but it was honestly astounding to see them written so positively given the publication date. Nobody thought any ill of them just for being on this side of the border, and in fact at one point plans are made for the uncle to go home to Mexico to convalesce after an illness, and then probably just come back and resume his flower business, just as though we have more or less open borders and share freely with our neighbors.

It’s hard to remember, and I mean this in both the knowledge gap sense and the emotional gut punch sense, that some things about the past are better than we’d expect today and in fact maybe even better than they are, today.

Anyway, that Rolls Royce is still pretty cool. Also, like with all such series, I’m really loving the strong continuity. They’re kid books, yes, but they’re certainly better than the modern chapter books I’ve been reading to him[2]. Hooray!

[1] “To to to be, or not to to to be. That is the question.” Honestly, the payoff on that line was pretty good and has stuck with me all this time, even if almost none of the rest of the book had.
[2] I’m not not reading them to the girl, but she is not nearly as patient to sit and be read to as he was at the same age, and certainly she’s not taking much in right now, as pertains to the plot and its twists and turns.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

Leave a reply

I really do not understand how this movie got made. It’s just so so so implausible.

In the third Fast but also let us not forget Furious movie, a young drifter moves to Tokyo, only to discover that the title was actually a pun. See, he’s a drifter because he keeps getting into trouble for doing dumb high school racing things, and got sent to live with his father in Japan as a last ditch effort to keep him out of jail for driving through a house under construction and being assaulted by another high school car guy. None of which is how any of that would work, as far as I can tell?

Anyway, he drifts into Tokyo, I was saying, only to learn that it’s also called drifting if you left the back of your car skid ahead of you as a way to make 0 point turns instead of 3 point turns. Did drifting really not exist outside Japan before this movie popularized it? No clue, though it seems unlikely somehow. But so anyway, this kid gets mixed up in drift racing and the Yakuza, because of course he does, and that’s the rest of the movie. (Also, there’s a girl.)

Except for a brief cameo in which a previous character says he used to hang out with the only character in the whole movie who was worth the time of day, there’s nothing that would make you think this should have been tagged as part of the series. In fact, if I were to make a gamble on today of all days when my gambles in general are not going so well as I’d prefer, I’d bet that the secret cameo actor heard about this movie and thought, hey, if I can tie it into my series, maybe I’ll still have a series and get to make a third, no wait, it would be fourth now, wouldn’t it? movie.

That does not help me understand how such a gamble paid off, to be clear. Tokyo Drift isn’t a bad movie, but it is extremely paint by numbers, and I am once again left scratching my head as to how these three (now) movies could have resulted in a powerhouse franchise.

But, as I intimated already, tons of things I don’t understand today, aren’t there?

Il racconto dei racconti – Tale of Tales

Leave a reply

They are still making fairy tales, you know. There’s The Princess Bride, of course. And Moana. And my personal favorite at the time, Stardust[1]. But thanks to my horror podcast, I have learned about another one: Tale of Tales[2].

Man is this hard to talk about without spoilers, though, so I will stick to brevity. See, there are these three neighboring kingdoms. In the first one, Salma Hayek wants a kid, and goes to rather extreme lengths to get one. But then she is not perfectly happy with either the cost nor (especially) the secondary results. This story features an enormous sort-of axolotl, which is how the podcast settled on this movie as a gothic story with an aquatic monster. Other than by volume, this was a fair assessment of meeting the stated requirements.

In the second kingdom, a horny king and a youth-obsessed woman run afoul of each other, with results that are extremely predictable, right up until they aren’t, and then boy howdy do they keep not being. And in the third kingdom, a princess in want of a husband becomes the prize of a pretty implausible marriage contest, albeit with, again, predictable results. Until they, also again, aren’t.

This movie, if all goes well, will win my personal 2024 awards for worst father, worst mother, and worst sister. Also, it’s at least a middle of the pack contender for both best brother and best husband. But did it need to be three stories, if they barely at all intersect with one another? I guess the answer is this: while two hours and fifteen minutes is a little long for a movie so focused on being slow and dreamlike and cinematic, three movies of forty-five minutes each would have been just ridiculous. So.

[1] No idea if it holds up. I just know I was the only one who thought it might be its generation’s Princess Bride.
[2] Apparently these are pulled from a 17th century Italian fairy tale collection, and thus do not I suppose count as “still making”, in the strictest sense. Goes a long way toward explaining why the “skin of a flea” story seemed familiar, though.

You Like It Darker: Stories

Leave a reply

In and around comics, as usual, I’ve been reading a short story collection, which is I suppose rather less usual. Honestly[1], it happens within a rounding error of once per published Stephen King short story collection. Which, in this case, was You Like It Darker.

The belle of the ball was the novella length story about the guy who dreamed of where a dead body was located, found it, and then (to his lasting regret) reported it. Several of the others washed right over me and have since receded, while there was only one miss, the one about the weird kid who has an unhealthy relationship with his dying grandfather.

Most of the rest[2] are King writing his way through aging and death. (Well, death via aging, I mean. Obviously he’s never had a problem writing about death. Really, now.) But where he used to write about young and then middle-aged protagonists, he is now clearly reaching a stage where his focus is a bit further down the road. Which is both meaningful to me, since I’m at an age where the people a generation above me are all long retired, and have started to die, but also distressing, since I’m not ready for a world without next year’s King novel.[3]

All the same, that year is coming.

[1] At least, counting after college
[2] Rattlesnakes, The Answer Man, Laurie, and to be fair Willie the Weirdo qualifies here as well. As do some of the ones that washed over me and already receded.
[3] This is not not a metaphor for the many other things that I’m not ready to happen. But it’s definitely not just a metaphor for that, either.

I Spit on Your Grave III: Vengeance Is Mine

Leave a reply

I did not care for the sequel to the remake of I Spit on Your Grave, which to be clear is an outstanding movie, and I will not be taking any questions on the topic. So anyway, there was a 3, and I’ve known there was a 3 this whole time, but after how down I was on 2, I never bothered. Until earlier this week, when I just bit the bullet and went for it. And you know what? It’s an actual sequel to the remake, not just another story about a different woman taking different revenge.[1]

I Spit on Your Grave III finds our heroine some years later, with a new identity and haunted by both what she went through and maybe a little by what she did. She joins a rape survivors support group thing, and makes friends with one of the other members, who is tough and brash and has some ideas about how to get justice. Then, when something goes wrong, the main character finds herself going deeper and deeper down the “justice” rabbit hole.

I said the last movie was a cross between the original and one of those European torture porn movies. This was more like a cross between the original and Death Wish. Which, both being movies from the ’70s, is clearly the better fit. The main thing I cannot figure out is if we’re supposed to root for the murders despite several lines of dialogue being way, way over the top, or if we’re supposed to think she’s gone too far and that’s why the dialogue is quite as silly as it is. Either way: man, that’s some rough dialogue.

But if she wanted to make more rape-revenge features, I’d probably get around to watching them.

[1] Also, it appears there may be a sequel to the original as well?! I’ll need to look into that.

The Secret of Terror Castle revisited

1 Reply

Long, long ago, in the 1980s, I spent some brief amount of time obsessed with the Three Investigators books, as introduced by Alfred Hitchcock. It wasn’t that they solved mysteries; Joe and Frank and Nancy already had that covered.  It’s that they had a secret clubhouse in a junkyard and drove around in an old model Rolls Royce. The whole idea was so enchanting, plus they got to solve mysteries on top of that? Let me in!

I’ve now read The Secret of Terror Castle to my son, and I have adult thoughts about this childhood love. In no particular order, they are these:

  1. I am not sure how old the boys are supposed to be, 14 maybe? In any case, this book might be too old for the boy, even though he liked it. He definitely found it scary in addition to liking it, maybe just a little too scary?
  2. The probably OCR scan I read was of the 1978 edition paperback I once and long ago read from the library, and there were just enough errors to be distracting, without being a bad scan at all. Whereas apparently the brand new Kindle version no longer has Alfred Hitchcock in it?? I am extremely offended. I also wonder what other changes they made,
  3. There were definitely positive changes that could have been made. I have a hard time accepting the old name for Romani as a slur, since I’ve never seen or heard it used as one, but I nevertheless try not to use it, and certainly wouldn’t when describing a real person as opposed to a character. What bothered me in this book was not that usage nor the old fashioned usage for someone from eastern Asia, it was how hard into certain stereotypes that the story leaned into, even if there was an in plot reason for that to happen. I’m just not ready for the boy to grapple with casual stereotypes, because I’m not ready to have conversations about why they are a problem and would not be accepted in a book written today on the same topics. So I made some on the fly edits.
  4. So yeah, I really wonder how much of the book has been edited for audiences that are sixty years more enlightened.
  5. Also, the scan was of a British version of the book? Because everyone was carrying around torches instead of flashlights, even though they were in L.A. It was pretty dang weird.
  6. On the whole, it’s fine. Certainly not as good as I remember the gestalt of the series being, but at the same time not so bad that I regret having read it. The boy was really excited by there being a hook into a new story at the end of this one. He thought maybe the book would never end, so I suppose at some point I’ll need to rustle up a copy of the second book. Plus, you know, they might improve as they go. Who’s to say?

Anyway, though, the story: there are these three friends on what would have to be summer vacation in southern California. One has a recent leg injury and works in the library, so he doesn’t do much adventuring, but is definitely the research guy. One is tall and athletic, you know, the muscle. And one is a bit fat, extremely clever, won the use of a fancy car for “thirty days of exactly 24 hours each” by guessing right calculating best in a “how many jelly beans are in this jar?” contest hosted by a local car rental company, and has a secret clubhouse in his uncle’s junkyard. That last one, Jupiter Jones, also has the idea to form a detective business with his friends Bob (research) and Pete (muscle), the first case of which will be to prove a local abandoned house once owned by a silent film era star is in fact haunted, so Alfred Hitchcock can use it for authenticity in his next movie,

I guess my point is even if in practice the writing is workmanlike and the mystery is at least a little predictable, you simply cannot convince me that’s anything less than a spectacular premise, rife with future possibilities,

The Truth about Triangles

Leave a reply

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.