Playing Catch-Up

Sorry about the lack of posts the past few days. I haven't done much other than sit in front of the computer and write, which doesn't make for very good blogging material. However, I did manage to watch a couple of movies and read a couple of books, so here are a few comments on them:

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW -- Finally got a chance to watch this on DVD. If I had seen it for the first time when I was twelve years old, I probably would have thought it was the best movie ever made. Seeing it for the first time at fifty-one, I still thought it was pretty good. The complaints I heard about it -- the thin plot, the anachronisms and historical errors, etc. -- are probably true enough, but it was still quite a bit of fun. I didn't care much for Gwyneth Paltrow's performance, but Jude Law was okay and Angelina Jolie looked great for the five or ten minutes she was on-screen. I thought that for a first try, which is basically what it was for writer/director Kerry Conran, it was successful enough to be encouraging about what he might do in the future. I'm not surprised that it didn't make a lot of money, though, since the target audience seemed to be males of the geezer persuasion.

WITHOUT A PADDLE -- Silly, crude, and predictable, but I laughed a bunch of times and didn't doze off once. I like Seth Green and have ever since he started out in movies playing Woody Allen as a child.

THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT by Jack Higgins -- Bill Crider read this early novel by Higgins a while back and really liked it. I liked it, too. Since it's one of those books in which all the action takes place over a short time, in this case one night, I think I would have rated it even higher if I'd been able to read it in a sitting or two, instead of in bits and pieces over four days. Good tough writing and a plot twist or two I didn't see coming. I have a bunch of other early Higgins books I need to read, including several featuring his series character Paul Chavasse.

LOVE ADDICT by Don Elliott (Robert Silverberg) -- After reading Silverberg's essay in SIN-A-RAMA and realizing that I owned this book, I decided to go ahead and read it. A lot of the Nightstand books by Block, Westlake, and others are really crime novels masquerading as soft-core, early Sixties porn. Although there are some drug pushers in it, LOVE ADDICT doesn't really qualify as a crime novel. It's more of a noir-tinged romance, as nice guy hero Jim Holman, who is being divorced by his shrew of a wife, falls for nightclub singer Helene Raymond. Helene was hooked on heroin by her musician ex-boyfriend, but Jim thinks he can save her from her addiction. Not much actually happens in this book, but it races by anyway thanks to Silverberg's clean, polished prose and his evocative portrayal of New York City as both glittering metropolis and squalid hellhole. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and intend to dig out more of the Nightstand books that I own.

I also watched the first chapter of ZORRO'S FIGHTING LEGION (thanks, Bill) but haven't had a chance to get back to it. I've seen this serial before, at least parts of it, because I remember the goofy costume worn by the bad guy, Don del Oro. The cast strikes me as second-rate (Reed Hadley and Sheila Gray as the hero and heroine, instead of, say, Clayton Moore and Linda Stirling), but the rest of the talent is top-notch, especially the directing team of William Witney and John English. I've never seen a Witney/English serial that wasn't visually exciting. And Republic's production values are generally pretty good. I hope I get to watch this one at a fairly quick pace.